One
Mapping Nostalgia
VelĂłdromo 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 âwonderful time of coexistence and toleranceâ and about the âmelodic Spanishâ that only Sevilleâs Jews used to speak. According to the tour script, in those times, before 1492, these same Jews already expressed their âyearning for Sepharadâ 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 âSpanishâ 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.1 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 Cruzâs appeal.
Like a sirenâs 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 DĂaz-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.2 My exploration of Juana Salabertâs VelĂłdromo de invierno and Antonio Muñoz Molinaâs Sepharad aims to show that the two novels in many ways take place in what David Nirenberg has called a âpersecutory landscapeâ (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 Molinaâs novel) that the Sephardim who appear in Sepharad as well as in Salabertâs VelĂłdromo de invierno are necessarily noble charactersâor noble victims.3 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, SebastiĂĄn Miranda and Isaac Salama. The novels also reflect on what a nostalgic invocation of Sepharad means in relation to both the current debate on âhistorical memoryâ 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 mĂ©moire, 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: Salabertâs novel centers on the VĂ©lodrome dâhiver 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. Salabertâs novel also includes a small number of footnotes that provide historical information, as well as a photograph of the location. In Muñoz Molinaâs novel biographical sketches of historical figures intersect with the authorâs 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 Salabertâs novel, young Ilse Landermann is able to escape the Vel dâhiv, where both her mother and young brother, along with more than 13,000 other Parisian Jews, have been confined. Although Ilseâs mother and brother perish in the Holocaust, Ilse survives and eventually makes her way to Puerto Rico. An organization named Sefarad, coordinated by SebastiĂĄn Miranda, makes Ilseâs deliverance possible. My analysis of Muñoz Molinaâs Sepharad will center on one of the tales, âOh You, Who Knew So Well,â but will also consider the larger âframetaleââor ânovel of novels,â as its subtitle calls it.4 In âOh You, Who Knew So Well,â 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.5 Together with his father, Salama finds exile in Tangier, Morocco, while his mother and sister, like Ilseâs 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.
Salabertâs and Muñoz Molinaâs 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. The authors base their analysis on a notion of a history that is âessentially not over, a history whose repercussions are not simply omnipresent (whether consciously or not) in all our cultural activities, but whose traumatic consequences are still actively evolving . . . in todayâs political, historical, cultural and artistic sceneâ (xiv). Both novels engage with broader debates on literary representations of the Holocaust and, more specifically, with the historical contingencies in Spain: the Civil War, its repressive aftermath, and, more important, the debates on the âhistorical memoryâ of these events.
Both novels represent the experience of traumatic loss, although in different manners. Trauma studies tend to converge in three observations: first, the effects of trauma occur in an expanded time frame, and its symptoms are potentially somatic, âdisguised or symbolic in their manifestationsâ (Douglass and Vogler, Witness and Memory, 10). Second, the effects and symptoms of trauma reach beyond the person who actually experienced it, passing on to family members and younger generations. Third, the connections between an actual event and trauma are often indirect and blurred: no single event has the same traumatic effect on all subjects; sometimes, as Douglass and Vogler point out, trauma appears to be completely disconnected from an actual event (11). Its effects invariably alter the processes of the mind and, as a result, the language in which devastating events are narrated. In the particular context of the Holocaust, history needs to be examined in conjunction with the ways in which the events themselves structured the possibilities (or the impossibility) of representation. Post-Holocaust history, explains Michael Rothberg, âhas a traumatic structureâit is repetitive, discontinuous, and characterized by obsessive returns to the past and the troubling of simple chronologyâ (Traumatic Realism, 19). Rothbergâs notion of âtraumatic structureâ also poignantly describes the composition of both Salabertâs and Muñoz Molinaâs novels. These are complex and circular texts that illuminate the ways in which trauma structures memory and language as well as the cultural and discursive relationships among very different moments in the past, echoing what Rothberg has called the multidirectionality of memory.
Rothbergâs Multidirectional Memory addresses the intersections of decolonization and Holocaust memory, centering on public discourse and cultural production in France in the early 1960s, when the Eichmann trial coincided with public debate on the Algerian War. The book also is relevant to a discussion of the theoretical relation between the memory of the Spanish Civil War and the trauma of the Holocaust. Rothberg argues that âfar from blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive struggle for recognition, the emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other historiesâsome of them predating the Nazi genocide, such as slavery, and others taking place later, such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954â62) or the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990sâ (6).
Discourse about Holocaust remembrance has also influenced the memory of the Spanish Civil War; its most deliberate but also its most polemic manifestations are possibly the title and subtitle of Paul Prestonâs The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (2012). Rather than attempting to compare or equate these two events, I will focus, following Rothberg, on the ways in which the discourses on memory and trauma of the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust (depicted in both novels) pose new questions in relation to the debate on the ârecovery of historical memoryâ that has been central to the cultural, academic, and even the legal realm in Spain since the mid-1990s.
Along with countless novels, successful films, such as Fernando Truebaâs Soldiers of Salamis (2002), Guillermo del Toroâs The Devilâs Backbone (2001), and Emilio MartĂnez-LĂĄzaroâs 13 Roses (2007), and historiographies and works of cultural analysis have contributed to the still expanding bibliography on the Spanish Civil War and its violent aftermath.6 A key player in the public debate on historical memory is the âAsociaciĂłn para la recuperaciĂłn de la memoria histĂłricaâ (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory), which was founded in 2000 with the explicit aim of unearthing mass graves in which the remains of Republican victims had been thrown. The ARMH has grown into an umbrella organization that has also lobbied for the Ley de Memoria HistĂłrica (Law of Historical Memory), which the Spanish Congress approved in 2007. The law dictates that the victims of the war and the repression should be recognized as such; it provides funds for further investigation of mass graves and enforces the removal of Francoist and Falangist symbols in public venues. Undoubtedly, the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath still affect Spanish political life in a way that the Holocaust and its consequences do not. Nevertheless, Salabertâs and Muñoz Molinaâs novels reveal that the memory debate may not have reached its point of exhaustion quite yet.
âDoes the remembrance of one history erase others from view?â asks Rothberg in the opening pages of Multidirectional Memory. His model of multidirectional memory suggests the oppositeâthat is, that âpursuing memoryâs multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstructionâ (5). The âmultidirectionalâ model (as opposed to a competitive model) allows for an understanding of the relations between the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War and the memory of the Holocaust without bracketing them together and eliding the radical differences between the two. In a critique of the debate that has accompanied the âmemory boomââthe phenomenally large number of publications centering on memory in SpainâJo Labanyi considers these differences. The âboom,â she argues, âhas not been translated into an increased interest in the workings of memory but into an assumption that the past can be unproblematically recoveredâ (âMemory and Modernity in Democratic Spain,â 106). Labanyi adds that âwhat is tending to become lost with the current memory boom is a sense of the difficulty of articulating the traumatic impact of past violenceâ (106). This traumatic past has often been narrated in the form of ghost stories, such as del Toroâs film The Devilâs Backbone, which Labanyi discusses.
Trauma theory, as it has been articulated in relation to the Holocaust, would then provide a path not so much to exorcise the ghosts of the past as to learn to live with them. Paying attention to the spectral presences and their meaning in contemporary Spanish culture is crucial for Labanyi. She argues that âit is only by capturing the resistances to narrativization that representations of the past can convey something of the emotional charge which the past continues to hold today for those for whom it remains unfinished businessâ (107). Such âresistances to narrativizationâ are also part of narratives and testimonies of Holocaust survivors, although in the context of Francoist Spain these resistances have a different cause. Noting that âin the case of the Francoist repression, the resistances to narrativization have clear political causes,â Labanyi continues:
These aesthetics coalesce in Salabertâs and Muñoz Molinaâs novels, both of which span the early history of Francoism, including the political repression that took place in Spain in the 1940s, and the history of the Holocaust. The two novels represent singular instances of overcoming the resistance to narrativization that Labanyi locates as a side effect of Francoist repression. In a later essay, Labanyi reads the term âhistorical memoryâ in relation to âthose forms of memory work that take place in transitional justice contexts,â citing Stephanie Golob, for whom the transition to democracy in Spain was a âtransition without transitional justiceâ (âThe Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain,â 122). A concern for justice is undoubtedly a crucial component of the debates that center on the memory of the Holocaust. As Rothberg argues, public awareness of the Eichmann trial in the 1960s in many ways shaped discourse on Holocaust memory. I would suggest that VelĂłdromo de invierno and Sepharad also emphasize matters that are relevant to but also go beyond a concern for justiceâsurviving a massive extermination, the burden of memory for future generations, exile and displacementâthereby revealing the multiple layers of post-transitional justice in Spain.
The characters in these novels survive the Holocaust partly because specific circumstances in Francoist Spain made this possible. Ilse Landermann and Isaac Salama survive both because and in spite of the consequences of the Spanish Civil War; thus, their stories fall somewhere between Spainâs âmemory boomâ and the articulation of the trauma of the Holocaust. Neverthless, neither the âthe aesthetics of hauntingâ nor the âaesthetics of ruptureâ suffices to locate fully their significance. Indeed, an ambivalent nostalgia for Sepharad ultimately lies at the heart of both novels.
More than ghostly voices that address the unresolved past, places become ghostly in both texts; this is also why nostalgia is so crucial for these two novels. Although the nostalgically invoked home may have an actual location or even a geographic reference, the return to that home is usually more intricate than a line that can be traced on a map. VelĂłdromo de invierno and Sepharad enact but also question the mythical return to Sepharad: a remainder, a place that in the novels becomes spectral, unreachable, and yet undeniably present. Thus, although both novels evoke the nostalgia of an impossible return, they are also about irrecoverable losses and constant attempts (always doomed to fail) to recover what is gone: Ilse abandons her mother and her little brother at the Winter Velodrome in Paris; Isaac leaves behind his mother and his sisters in occupied Budapest. In both cases the protagonists obsessively return to the brief moment in the past that would change their lives forever, tragically aware that neither recovery nor return is possible.
The irreversible losses in both novels also suggest that these texts are not just about nostalgia but about the melancholia, as Muñoz Molina writes in the last sentence of Sepharad, âof an endless exile.â Melancholia and nostalgia are by no means equivalent, and yet both afflictions share a number of traits. Both are, after all, the consequence of a loss that cannot be overcome. Although melancholia is by definition open-ended, a âreflectiveâ nostalgia dwells instead in the realm of what could have been and what was believed to have been.
Drawing from Robert Burtonâs understanding of melancholia in the seventeenth century, Boym notes that, âunlike melancholia, which was regarded as an ailment of monks and philosophers, nostalgia was a more âdemocraticâ disease that threatened to affect soldiers and sailors displaced far from home as well as many country people who began to move to the citiesâ (The Future of Nostalgia, 5). While melancholia, according to Boym, âconfines itself to the planes of individual consciousness,â nostalgia is âabout the relationships between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, bet...