In my film, I tell all that.ĪJ: Right, I think of myself as not of this earth. I had nothing to hang on to, either in the matter of nationality or in terms of belief. But he also deprived me of any metaphysics to fall back on. You die, and you rot, and that’s that.” He was violently against religion and everything else. He always said he was Russian.ĪJ: He would say, “God does not exist. And then there was my father, who hid the fact that he was Jewish. So there was a difference, one I’m thankful for.
When we took showers, they would measure penises, and that’s when they started to make fun of me. From when I was a little boy, because I was light-skinned and circumcised and the other boys weren’t. And there were genetic differences which I saw right away. They called Arabs Turks, and Hebrews were Jews. People would call me that behind my back I found out later.ĪJ: For them Jews were like Turks. And in Chile no one thought of me as Chilean. Because right from the start I rejected the idea of having any worldly property. IS: Alejandro, do you think this status of yours, that of belonging to no nation, of being a universal citizen, of being beyond age, culture, and geography has something to do with your being Jewish?ĪJ: It must. It’s the literature of a specific nation within universal literature. After that, the Talmud and that other group, the ones who get married seated in a chair.ĪJ: But all that interested me in the same way Japanese or Chinese literature interested me. Then I got into the Torah, the Five Volumes with rabbinical commentary. For me, the tarot was an optical language, and when I delved into magic, into Eliphas Levi and related subjects, I found Kabbalah experts who initiated me. I’m adept when it comes to the tarot, but not for telling the future. IS: When did you get involved with Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah?ĪJ: When I was in Paris I began studying the tarot. I had to study rabbinical thought so that I could create a character who was a rabbi. And when I couldn’t find out things from the family, I turned to history-what happened, for instance, when the Jews left Spain? What happened to the Jews expelled from Russia? All that I had to study. I had to do research on my family because they hated one another and cut off all communication. It took me-I can’t say for sure-four or five years to write Where the Bird Sings Best. IS: Some reviewers have said that they see you as a writer in a Jewish tradition.ĪJ: Quite right. But I did read Jewish literature, and at one time it really interested me. All I know actually are some words that tumbled out during the fights between my father and mother. IS: Those authors, did you read them in Spanish or in Yiddish?ĪJ: In Spanish, because I didn’t have the patience to read in Yiddish. Sholem Asch’s Motke the Thief, for example. Everything in its proper place.ĪJ: I liked many Jewish books. And Arabian, and books about magic, and philosophy. Well, I also have Chinese and Japanese books.
If you were to look around here, you’d see I have a Jewish library. But what about your connection to Jewish literature? Just now you said you had no interest in folklore, but what about Jewish secular writing and Jewish rabbinical writing? What effect did that have on you?ĪJ: It’s mine. IS: So they spoke Yiddish so you wouldn’t understand them. Things like “The dog doesn’t bite words” or “The map is not the place.” For me, language is different from being. I’ve worked a lot in semantics, especially Korzybski’s non-Aristotelian semantics. Not in the religious sense, but in the sense that I work with that unnamable entity we call God.ĪJ: Maybe it comes to me from the heritage of the ancient rabbis, I don’t know. I got involved with therapy, psychoanalysis. IS: But there’s more to you than language.ĪJ: I’ve opened lots of doors: the door between consciousness and the unconscious, for instance. But my ego is made of Spanish, and since my ego is alive, so is my language. Well, the soul of the ego because our essential being has no language. Lots of dictionaries and the sense that my soul is alive. And over here on my right is a shelf of dictionaries. I work on a poem the way an abstract painter works on a picture.