There is a story that author and scriptwriter Marcelo Birmajer loves to tell: "When I was studying at a Jewish high school in Argentina, I forgot to study for a Jewish history exam. One of the questions was: "What does it mean to be a Jew", and I decided to answer the question with a question. In fact, with exactly the same question that appeared on the exam: "What does it mean to be a Jew?" My teacher was very pleased with the answer, he called it 'a witty inspiration,' claimed that it indicated a profound understanding of Jewish history, which is all about casting doubt, and gave me 100 in the exam.
"For several days I was the class genius. The problems began with the next exam, in geography, when I was asked to name 10 rivers in Europe. I was carried away by my success in the previous test, and again replied with the question, exactly the same question: "What does it mean to be a Jew?"
"In the physics exam, when asked to explain gravity, I stuck to my guns and replied with my perpetual question: 'What does it mean to be a Jew?' And in chemistry I replied with the question 'What does it mean to be a Jew?' when asked to write about the periodic table.
"
 |
Advertisement |
|
Needless to say, within a few days, instead of being the class genius I became the school idiot. Years later someone drew my attention to the fact that most of the stories, books and scripts that I write ask exactly the same question: 'What does it mean to be a Jew?' - but over the years I have learned that one sentence is not enough, otherwise the readers, or the viewers, are liable to feel cheated. Since then, my life has to some extent been devoted to an expansion of that same question, but never to finding one definite answer to it. Anyone with answers should write essays or run in elections. Anyone who has questions, doubts and fears, writes books."
"Someone else's dream"
Birmajer, 41, who was in Israel as a guest of the Cervantes Institute for Spanish and Latin American culture, tells his story enthusiastically in Spanish, with a fluency that is almost unstoppable. At the end, he stops to check its effect on the present listener and on the people sitting nearby in the Tel Aviv cafe where the interview is being held. Only then, with the smile of a boy who has succeeded in putting one over on an adult interlocutor, he admits that he made up the story, and has even included it in one of his short story collections.
"I was a much more ordinary student, and I don't have stories worth dwelling on from my school days," he says. "But perhaps just for that reason I decided to tell stories about other characters, some of them similar to me and some totally different. That is the great power and the great consolation of writers. There is a wonderful story by Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Circular Ruins,' in which the hero discovers that he can walk through fire without being harmed. That's how he understands that he's not a real person, but rather an imaginary creature, someone else's dream. I also put my literary figures through a fire in which I myself would be burned. They do what I don't succeed in doing."
Reality and imagination, truth and exaggeration, follow one another closely in 'Three Musketeers,' the first of Birmajer's books to be translated into Hebrew (from the Spanish, by Yaarit Tauber Ben-Yaakov, published by Ivrit). A descendant of immigrants who arrived in Argentina before World War II from Romania, Poland, Lithuania and Syria, he has been fortunate to have several of his books already translated into Romanian and Lithuanian, in addition to English, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and Korean, but he swears that the translation into Hebrew excited him much more.
"Somehow I believe that this is my real language," he says. "Although I've lived in Argentina all my life, I still don't feel that Spanish is really my language. I have a much more profound and ancient connection to Hebrew. My only problem with Hebrew, he adds with a smile, is that I don't speak it."
'Three Musketeers' offers an updated version of the thin and sinewy detective fiction of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, in which the hero, usually querulous, armed and a lover of alcohol and of short pithy dialogues, is almost always swept up against his will into an affair full of dark intrigues and mystery. But although he likes to drink whiskey, Javier Mossen, the hero of Birmajer's book (and of several of his other books as well) is not a tortured private detective. Rather, he is an unambitious journalist who succeeds in slinking quietly through the corridors of the editorial offices without being given any assignments. Until Elias Traum, a former Argentinean and present-day Israeli, bursts into his life when he returns to Buenos Aires after a 20-year absence to tie up some loose ends from his past.
Gradually, the detective story gives way to an entirely different tale: The ruins of an impossible love quartet between the three musketeers and a familiar figure on the Argentine political landscape. That is the juicy journalistic scoop that Birmajer unravels before the readers' eyes, the same story that Mossen, a wise but conscientious journalist, will never write.
Mossen, who spends most of his time dealing with sexual fantasies and instinctive fears of the 'murderers' who lie in wait for the Jewish people, from the siege of Masada to Nazi Europe, examines his life and the story he hears from Traum with the tools typical of the portenos (the residents of Buenos Aires, people of the port, as they are admiringly or contemptuously called): guile, streets smarts and a lot of cynicism. He also resorts to a great deal of Jewish humor, a kind of motif running through most of Birmajer's works, which are influenced by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Phillip Roth and Jerry Seinfeld. Somehow, they all manage to crowd into one book, without Birmajer losing his unique voice.
After the international success of the Argentine film 'Lost Embrace,' which was directed by Daniel Burman to a script by Birmajer (about a young Jewish man who works with his mother in a lingerie store in Buenos Aires and tries to get a Polish passport to emigrate to Europe and meet his lost father, after years of separation), the beginning scriptwriter was nicknamed 'the Woody Allen of the Pampas,' but the truth is that Birmajer's heroes rarely leave Buenos Aires.
In effect, the main plot of 'Three Musketeers,' like that of 'Lost Embrace,' takes place in the city's El Once neighborhood, where Birmajer himself was born and grew up. He continues to go there every morning to write in his office, even after moving to a nicer suburb of the city. "The streets of El Once are full of tiny businesses belonging to Jewish and Korean immigrants, beautiful and ugly houses, neighborhood pizzerias and dusty bars they are the arteries and the veins that cause the heart of Buenos Aires to beat," says Birmajer.
"When I was a child I used to sit with my father on the beach at Mar Del Plata, the town where we spent our summer vacations, and there he used to make up various and sundry stories for me about the people passing by," he continues. "My father was an accountant at the national gas company, but he was a very talented storyteller, much more so than I. Even then I knew that that was what I wanted to do, to make up stories, and fortunately, that's what actually happened."
?Messiah complex?
Birmajer is a busy writer who publishes at a feverish pace and tries his hand at almost every possible genre: He began his career as a writer of texts for humorous comic strips in children?s newspapers, went on to write stories in installments in youth magazines ?(detective stories, adventures and thrillers?), edited several magazines for youth, wrote in the satirical column of the Argentinean newspaper Pagina 12 under the pseudonym Berni Danguto, which he still uses today in all his satirical and comics texts. He wrote scripts for children?s programs, worked as a researcher for various television shows, wrote plays for children and youth, was a radio broadcaster, wrote the script for the TV drama ?One Day With Angela,? based on a Truman Capote story, wrote the dialogue for the film ?Night Sun? and the script for ?Lost Embrace,? which won a special prize from the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, and has published articles and essays in many newspapers in Argentina, Chile and Spain.
In addition, he has written and published over 20 novels and short-story collections. Now two of his scripts are in stages of production: a comedy about an Argentine family that immigrates to Israel, and a drama about the mysterious life and death of Argentine heavyweight boxing champion Ringo Bonavena.
?I write a lot,? he confirms. ?Detective stories, children?s books, stupid and funny comic strips ?(for example, a strip about a man who tries to murder his wife with crazy and impossible intrigues and each time fails, and in effect pushes his wife into the arms of other men?). I like to take many paths, not only the central and ?serious? one. The fact that I have been forced to make a living from my writing for the past 20 years has taught me a great deal. The work on comic strips, for example, prepared me for work with film and television directors. That?s the only advice I have for beginning writers, just to write, and a lot.?
In Birmajer?s written world, the present and the past are intertwined to the point where it is sometimes impossible to separate them. The story-behind-the-story that is revealed in ?Three Musketeers,? for example, is that of Argentine Jews who participated in the activity of guerrilla organizations in the country in the 1970s. The three musketaires, as they are called in a heavy Polish accent by a member of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, are three Jewish friends, brilliant young men, who joined the Montoneros, a leftist guerrilla organization that fought for the return to power of General Juan Domingo Peron and the institution of ?national socialism? in Argentina.
The organization carried out many terror attacks, kidnappings and robberies, and at the beginning was supported by Peron. But beginning in 1974, after Peron returned to the Rose House ?(presidential residence?), the security forces and the right-wing faction of the Peronist movement began to persecute the Montoneros. After Peron?s death his widow Isabel, who replaced him, ordered the ?elimination of terrorism?: Most of the leaders of the organization were executed or exiled. In 1976, when the military junta came to power, it declared an open war against the organization and its hangmen kidnapped and murdered thousands of Montoneros and in 1979 destroyed the organization altogether.
At 8 P.M. at the Cervantes Institute, in front of a small, sleepy and elderly audience, most of them natives of Argentina and Uruguay, Birmajer tells about his source of inspiration for the book: ?I met several such people, Jews who were Montoneros, when I visited Israel at the age of 16 on the Jewish Agency?s Tapuz program. They were staying at a hotel in Kfar Hamaccabiah at the time, after escaping to Israel at the last moment and being saved from certain death. It was an amazing experience to meet them. Then, as now, I didn?t understand how young Jews could be members of such a violent and crazy organization. How could Jewish children, who always come from a ?good home,? find themselves with weapons in hand, fighting for the freedom of non-Jews, most of whom hate them to death, or simply despise them and laugh at them behind their backs?
?Years later I understood that the only answer could be that many Jews have messiah complexes. We think that it?s our job to save the world, to show everyone what?s wrong. This attitude, this obsession, can bring people to absurd situations. Recently, for example, I read the book ?The Victory Train? by an Argentine Jewish writer, Cristina Zucker, in which she tells about her brother Ricardo, who joined the Montoneros. As part of his training, Ricardo even trained in a PLO ?(Palestine Liberation Organization?) camp in Lebanon, where he was forced to hide his Jewishness so that his Palestinian mentors, his brothers-in-arms, wouldn?t kill him. Instead, he was murdered in 1979 by policemen in Argentina, and his body was never discovered. His father, who died three years ago, admitted that what he wanted more than anything else was to recite the Kaddish over his the grave of his son, the atheist revolutionary.?
Two dead Jews
Another historical story that finds echoes in the pages of Birmajer?s book, and that is discussed at length in ?Dying of Love,? by Argentine journalist Jorge Lanata, is the story of the Jewish members of the People?s Guerrilla Army, an underground group that operated in Argentina in the 1960s, inspired by the Cuban revolution. The organization was founded by Jorge Masetti, the first journalist to interview Fidel Castro and Ernesto ?Che? Guevara in the Sierra Maestra mountains in the 1950s.
In 1962 Guevara sent Masetti to establish an underground cell in Argentina that would operate against the military dictatorship that ruled the country. Masetti recruited 30 guerrilla fighters and concentrated them in the hills near the city of Salta, in northern Argentina. Guevara was supposed to join them after they had settled into the area, but in the wake of a significant change in the political conditions in Argentina, which made democratic elections possible, he changed his mind and stayed in Cuba. Masetti and his men remained in the hills, with no support and without a serious plan of action. They robbed several storage facilities in order to gather food and were persecuted by the military forces.
?Among these guerrilla fighters were two Jewish boys: Pupi Rotblat, an art student from Buenos Aires, and Bernardo Groswald, a bank clerk from Cordoba,? explains Birmajer. ?And surprisingly, the only two people ever executed by the People?s Guerrilla Army were these two Jewish fighters. Both, it was claimed, delayed the escape of the other members: Rotblat suffered from asthma and flat feet, whereas Groswald had attacks of depression, and according to one version he refused to wash, cried a lot and masturbated obsessively. Both were shot to death by their friends, who continued to flee until they were caught by the army and sent to prison. Is it a coincidence that the two Jews were the ones who were murdered? It?s possible, I have no answers to that, but the question marks are what intrigue me.?
Two of the missing heroes in Birmajer?s book, the two Jewish Montoneros, Guido and Benjamin, also die a violent death. One of them is killed in an armed clash in Patricios Park, the green lung of Buenos Aires; the second is kidnapped from his home by army men and executed. These two metaphorical bodies arrive one day at the threshold of the journalist Mossen: As opposed to ordinary detectives, he doesn?t have to discover who killed them, he knows that already at the beginning of the story; he has to discover, to understand, why they decided to die in the way they did.
However, Birmajer?s book does not dwell too much on their underground activity or their violent death, which could fill several fascinating thrillers. Instead, he prefers to deal with Mossen?s traumatic separation from his wife, with the father-son relationship that he develops with Traum, and with the great love story of ?Three Musketeers.? The great political drama of 1970s Argentina stalks the novel like a stubborn shadow, but does not fill its pages.
?I thought that it could steal too much attention from the emotional core of the book,? says Birmajer. ?I was far more interested in the story of love and pain in this novel. Politics and war pass, but human emotion love, death, betrayal is eternal. It is quite possible that I was too hasty in this matter. I think that today I would write a longer book about the Jews who were active in the Montoneros. But apparently that story will have to wait patiently for another writer, just as it waited for me before. I invested everything I had in it. I would definitely be happy to write a script about it, there are materials here for an outstanding film, but I think it would be difficult to find a production company that would invest money in it. I think that the audience in Argentina is a little tired of stories about the years of the dirty war and the dictatorship.?
Temporary Israeli
The character of Traum, the third musketeer, who returned to Argentina to recite the Kaddish over his friends, reveals in his conversations with Mossen a secret that he has been hiding all these years: his betrayal of his friends; the fact that he was sent by the Israeli security services to supervise the activity of the young Jews in the Montoneros. Birmajer is careful not to write the word ?Mossad?; he says ?although it?s clear to anyone who reads the book that that is exactly what is being referred to. There are two main reasons for that: one is literary, not to turn the book into a spy story, which is only part of the whole idea in the book. The moment the word ?Mossad? or ?CIA? appears, the book is immediately cataloged as a thriller, with spies, detectives, and I wanted to avoid that.
?The second reason is more basic. I didn?t want to harm Israel?s image. I would never think of presenting Israel in a negative light, even if it were to serve my book, and thereby my success. I didn?t want anyone to read the book, point to a ?Mossad agent? and say: ?Here, look, there?s a Jew here who writes that the Mossad was responsible for underground political activity in Argentina, here is proof that the Jews are interfering in our business.? On the other hand, I didn?t want people to say that the Mossad collaborated with the generals of the military junta, and therefore I preferred not to write the exact word − which is also something in accordance with Jewish tradition, isn?t it??
Birmajer?s Jewish tradition preoccupies him a great deal. Sometimes it is only a matter of uncompromising love for the State of Israel. At night, in a Tel Aviv pub filled with smoke, alcohol and noise, he says that if he were to leave Argentina, he would be capable of living only in Tel Aviv. ?In fact, I?ve already been here, for three months. That was the longest period of time I lived outside Buenos Aires. When I was four years old my parents divorced and my mother brought me and my brother here, to Tel Aviv. Three months, at the age of four, is too short a time to develop sentiments for another country, but when I walk in the street here I feel at home. Maybe because of that, I feel obligated to defend Israel at every opportunity. Within democracy there?s room for differences of opinion, for debates, for quarrels; that?s the most basic right of citizens. But outside Israel, anyone who identifies with Israel has to defend it.?
And Birmajer regularly publishes articles sympathetic to Israel in leading Argentine media outlets, such as the newspapers La Nacion, and Pagina 12, Web sites such as Libertad Digital and in publications of the Jewish community.
?In general, I don?t like to be a ?token Jew? who makes a career out of his brit mila [circumcision],? says Birmajer. ?Mossen, for example, says in the book that he doesn?t want to be a Star of David decorating the newspaper or investigating the kosher meat scandal, or writing a personal column and responding to the journalist who said that there is no such thing as ?Jewish cuisine.? But when it comes to defending Israel, I have no problem forgetting all these principles of mine. There are more important things than principles.?
Discovering a new place
In the middle of the night, when the streets are already quiet and empty, Birmajer tells another story, taken from the book ?Three Musketeers,? which also appears in the film ?Lost Embrace?: ?When I was a child during the summer vacation in Mar Del Plata, I started walking along the beach and wandered far away from my parents. They searched for me for hours, all along the beach and in the ocean. My mother already said: ?At least I want to see his body. For the ocean to return him to me.? When my parents returned to the hotel and my mother saw me − I had reached another beach and the lifeguard had brought me back to the hotel − she let out a scream that split the sky. I have never heard such a scream again. It was a biblical scream ... Mother hugged me and Grandfather kissed the floor in gratitude.
?The next day, on the beach, I said to my grandfather: ?Everyone says I got lost, but I didn?t get lost, I discovered a new place.? Grandfather looked at me and said: ?You didn?t discover a new place, you got lost.? And I asked: ?And what?s the difference between getting lost and finding a new place?? ?Knowing how to return,? replied my grandfather, who arrived in Argentina in 1939 and lost his first family in Poland in the Holocaust.
?I didn?t make up that story,? sums up Birmajer. ?It?s impossible to make up such stories. That story really happened.
|
