Mapping Nostalgia

Velódromo de invierno and Sepharad

In the Andalusian city of Seville, as in any widely visited city today, tourists often choose to get acquainted with the most important sites on double-decker buses that provide headsets so that visitors can listen to prerecorded historical and cultural information in a variety of languages. As they pass near the Barrio de Santa Cruz, the old Jewish quarter, visitors will hear about a "wonderful time of coexistence and tolerance" and about the "melodic Spanish" that only Seville's Jews used to speak. According to the tour script, in those times, before 1492, these same Jews already expressed their "yearning for Sepharad" in that melodious Spanish.

Needless to say, one can hardly expect a detailed description of the complexity of Jewish life in Seville before 1492 in sound bites that accompany affordable bus tours designed for tourists. And yet, beyond the idealization of convivencia in this characterization, it is worth noting its irony: the "Spanish" that only Jews spoke attained its melodic quality only after Sephardic Jews had been exiled and the language that endured in different Ladino-speaking communities became marked by its difference. The notion that Andalusian Jews longed for Sepharad before the 1492 diaspora sounds absurd: how could they express nostalgia for a homeland from which they had not (yet) been expelled? Nevertheless, within the context of the tour the reference to the yearning Sephardim adds to the Barrio de Santa Cruz's appeal.

Like a siren's song, nostalgia is both seductive and treacherous. The idealized and inaccurate picture of the Sephardic experience that comes across on the bus tour is not an isolated incident in contemporary Spain. Indeed, a homogenizing and anachronistic vision of Sephardic Jews remains widespread (see Díaz-Mas, Sephardim, 168). This mythicized version of the past also shapes narratives of Jewish exile in Spain during World War II that appear, even if fleetingly, in the Spanish literary world.

In memoirs (as will be shown in Chapter 2) and in literary texts the representation of complex historical circumstances that allowed for deliverance from the Holocaust in Spain is interwoven with invocations of the remote past. This does not mean, however, that what happened in 1391 or 1492 directly explains what happened in 1942, as tempting as it might be to link these dates. My exploration of Juana Salabert's Velódromo de invierno and Antonio Muñoz Molina's Sepharad aims to show that the two novels in many ways take place in what David Nirenberg has called a "persecutory landscape" (Communities of Violence, 5). The nostalgic invocation of Sepharad that appears in both novels further reveals that the texts engage with the historical contradictions and ambiguities that made deliverance from the Holocaust in Spain possible. At the same time, and notwithstanding the complexity of the novels, they do reflect the same kind of teleological fallacy that Nirenberg addresses in his book, as noted in the Introduction.

This does not, however, mean (as Erich Hackl argues in a somewhat cursory critique of Muñoz Molina's novel) that the Sephardim who appear in Sepharad as well as in Salabert's Velódromo de invierno are necessarily noble characters—or noble victims. The novels share more than their publication date (2001), more than their representation of deliverance from the Holocaust in Spain, and far more than the portrayal of their Sephardic central characters, Sebastián Miranda and Isaac Salama. The novels also reflect on what a nostalgic invocation of Sepharad means in relation to both the current debate on "historical memory" in Spain and literary representations of Holocaust survival. Nostalgia is a blessing and a curse in both novels, which reenact a mythical (and failed) return to Sepharad, the ancestral homeland that serves as a means to bridge the past and the present. The characters, however, end up lost, found, and then lost again in their nostalgia for what may be the ultimate lieu de mémoire, Sepharad, trapped within the grasp of history and the impossibility of a return to a home that no longer exists.

Although, strictly speaking, these texts are not historical novels, they certainly engage with history: Salabert's novel centers on the Vélodrome d'hiver round-up in Paris in July 1942, which was the first step in the deportation of more than 13,000 Jews, initially to a concentration camp in Drancy and later to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Salabert's novel also includes a small number of footnotes that provide historical information, as well as a photograph of the location. In Muñoz Molina's novel biographical sketches of historical figures intersect with the author's own biography. In addition, in both novels the characters themselves are seduced by nostalgia for Sepharad, despite but also because of the ambiguous relationship of nostalgia with history and memory.

In Salabert's novel, young Ilse Landermann is able to escape the Vel d'hiv, where both her mother and young brother, along with more than 13,000 other Parisian Jews, have been confined. Although Ilse's mother and brother perish in the Holocaust, Ilse survives and eventually makes her way to Puerto Rico. An organization named Sefarad, coordinated by Sebastián Miranda, makes Ilse's deliverance possible. My analysis of Muñoz Molina's Sepharad will center on one of the tales, "Oh You, Who Knew So Well," but will also consider the larger "frametale"—or "novel of novels," as its subtitle calls it. In "Oh You, Who Knew So Well," Isaac Salama, a young Hungarian Jew, is able to escape deportation to a concentration camp thanks to the efforts of a Spanish diplomat in Budapest. Together with his father, Salama finds exile in Tangier, Morocco, while his mother and sister, like Ilse's family members, die in Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe. When Salama is ready to begin his studies in Madrid, he finally feels free of his burdensome inheritance of loss, which in many ways is embodied by his perpetually mourning father. But the mythical return to Sepharad becomes a failure for young Salama: he suffers a traffic accident that leaves him disabled. Isaac returns to Tangier, where he will spend the rest of his days working as a forgotten cultural ambassador in the derelict Spanish Athenaeum.

Salabert's and Muñoz Molina's novels situate twentieth-century Spanish history in relation to the trauma of World War II, thereby sharing the understanding of witnessing and trauma that Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub develop in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History....