An Argentine With Literary Roots in Singer and Roth
As a child, Marcelo Birmajer went each summer with his parents to Miramar, a beach resort that is for the Jews of Argentina what the Catskills once were for the Jews of New York. There, his father would tell stories about the people who paraded by as the family sat on the sand or, as dusk fell each day, relate the plot of whatever novel he happened to be reading.
Today, Mr. Birmajer (pronounced BEER-mocker) is one of Argentina's most prolific and praised young writers of fiction. But he traces both the birth of his vocation and his desire to portray his country's Jewish community, at about 300,000 the largest in Latin America, back to those summer days and the simple fact that 'my father, an accountant for the state gas company, was a great storyteller.'
At 38, Mr. Birmajer has already written more than 20 books, many focusing on life here in the Jewish barrio, known as El Once. The grandson of Romanian, Polish, Lithuanian and Syrian immigrants, he grew up in the neighborhood, which he describes as a fascinating blend of Ashkenazic and Sephardic traditions, with Jews rich and poor, religious and secular, living side by side.
'Not only was I born in Once, but the studio where I still write is there,' he said in Spanish during an interview last month at the studio. 'It's a place that I prefer not just for reasons of class, but for metaphysical or mythical reasons as well. I like to just walk around and see the ebullience of commerce, the money changing hands, to eat in the Sephardic restaurants. It's the place that has the vitamins that allow me to write.'
In one of his most recent depictions of Once and its inhabitants, Mr. Birmajer collaborated on the script for the movie 'Lost Embrace.' [It opened in New York on Jan. 28.] A bittersweet comedy directed by Daniel Burman, the film won awards at festivals in Spain and Cuba for its script even before shooting began. At the Berlin International Film Festival last year, 'Lost Embrace' won the Silver Bear for best film and its star, Daniel Hendler, was named best actor.
Mr. Hendler plays Ariel Makaroff, who finds himself simultaneously dissatisfied with Argentina's ceaseless economic crises, his own love life and his job running a lingerie shop with his mother in a small mall. He seeks to emigrate, not to Israel, but to Europe, hoping to use the Polish passport to which he is entitled through his grandmother, who fled the Holocaust.
'Marcelo was a childhood friend of my older brother,' said Mr. Burman, the film's director, who wrote the screenplay with Mr. Birmajer, 'and though I hadn't seen him in a long time, I had read his books and knew that we shared the same artistic universe. We are both fascinated with everyday life and believe that inside even the most ordinary-appearing person is an interesting story just waiting to be told.'
A recurring character in Mr. Birmajer's fiction is Javier Mossen, a sexually voracious and sometimes repugnant journalist whom some regard as Mr. Birmajer's alter ego. In three acclaimed short story collections, together known as 'Stories of Married Men,' Mossen manages to transform nearly every contact with a woman into an erotically charged encounter.
In stories like 'An Interview With Kissinger,' Mr. Birmajer also uses Mossen to comment humorously or satirically on the worlds of politics and journalism. Mr. Birmajer is 'one of several younger writers who have really moved in a nonconfrontational manner away from the baroque style of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes,' the translator Edith Grossman said. 'His is a more straightforward kind of narrative, something entirely different from the older generation.'
In a country whose modern literary tradition is based largely on fabulists and experimentalists like Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, critics do not seem to know quite what to make of Mr. Birmajer. So he often finds himself being compared to writers who are Jewish and American, 'a sort of Woody Allen of the Pampas' and 'David Mamet in Spanish,' as he has been described. And though Mr. Birmajer admits the importance of American Jewish writers and comedians like Bernard Malamud and Jerry Seinfeld in molding his work, he cites others as primary influences, including Philip Roth but especially Isaac Bashevis Singer.
'Even though by time and circumstance I am closer to Roth, if I had to choose a single master, without a doubt it would be Singer,' he said. 'I am absolutely devoted to him, have all of his books and have translated some into Spanish. He is a disenchanted mystic and a seer, the son and grandson of rabbis who knows the Torah by heart but is won over by the profane, not the sacred.'
Some of Mr. Birmajer's short stories and novels, including 'Being Human and Other Misfortunes' and 'Not So Different,' have recently been translated into German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch. Thus far, though, none of his work has appeared in Hebrew, and only one of his short stories, titled 'A Christmas Carol,' has been translated into English.
In the story, Mossen, a nonobservant Jew, drifts from one Christmas Eve party to another here, hoping to find and seduce Raquel, a woman he has long lusted after. On the street, he rescues his Uncle Boris from a group of skinhead punks, only to have his Orthodox uncle reproach him for not practicing their faith.
'It's really a knockout, with that poignant, bittersweet quality you find in Yiddish writing,' said Ms. Grossman, who did the translation, 'and brilliant in the way he finds a link between a failed love affair and what is going on in the streets.'
Besides screenplays, Mr. Birmajer has also tried his hand at novels, children's books, essays, comic books, erotica, literary criticism and journalism. But he says his favorite literary form is the short story.
'What I like the most, is to sit around the fire, so to speak, and tell a story, like my father did when I was a kid,' said Mr. Birmajer, who is married and has two children. 'The story of Solomon, of David, of Pesach, the Torah itself, all are stories with a beginning, middle and end. So all this stuff of postmodernism and literary experimentation and vanguards aren't worth a shekel to me. I never experiment with structure.'
Though Mr. Birmajer has also written a pamphlet on 'Being Jewish in the 21st Century,' he has never referred directly -- by design, he said -- to the 1994 bombing attack on a Jewish community center here, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in the world since World War II.
Yet, he said, 'it is always present, in the form of an atmosphere in which something can always happen.'
'It is a theme that seems to me, like the Shoah, that you end up bastardizing if you take away its sacrosanct nature and use it as a theme for fiction,' he said.
As an Argentine who is Jewish, 'I have felt anti-Semitism all my life,' Mr. Birmajer continued. 'But to the extent that I have been successful, Judaism has been one of the foundations of my career. It's a paradoxical situation: anti-Semitism exists here, but at the same time, this country is livable and quite sweet.'