Metamorphoses of 1968: Latin America and the Israel-Palestine Question in Tomás Abraham’s La dificultad (2015)

“Latin America(N)” as a Category in 1968

The emergence of “Latin America” as a political category can be traced to the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. ⁶ As Diana Sorensen (2007: 1) argues in A Turbulent Decade Remembered, “only [in the 1960s] did a transnational cultural identity become rooted in the hemispheric imagination.” Indeed, in the course of the 1960s, “Latin America” came to crystallize as a political category that was fortified by the global editorial success of the Latin American boom and the increasing revolutionary fervor throughout the region, which often transcended national boundaries in favor of a regional “Latin American” solidarity. Sorensen goes on to posit, apropos of the 1968 student movements (6–7),

Mythical visions of young rebels like James Dean, Marlon Brando, or Che Guevara could be made to incarnate romantic aspirations for Messianism that decried a world seen as dehumanized and that longed for the purifying force of revolution. And in the midst of such redemptive longings, a different sense of community to come was being imagined. This mood was often expressed in sympathy and support for Algeria, Congo, Vietnam, and Palestine.

In Sorensen’s estimation, sympathy and support for Palestine came to be understood as the manifestation of the spirit of Latin America’s revolutionary groups. What is more, 1968 led to the emergence of “a different sense of community,” akin to the “metamorphosis” that Abraham’s narrator would undergo. These differences can be seen both in the tropes and mechanisms of communitarian practices and in the shifting alliances among individuals purportedly aligned with one group or another whose identifications were called into question by the changes in global political communities resulting from the 1968 movements.

It is difficult to overstate the cultural weight of revolutionary fervor in the late 1960s in Latin America. As the historian Jeffrey Gould (2009: 348) notes, “Only the Wars of Independence and the strike wave of 1919 rival the dimensions and simultaneity of the 1968 protests.” While the timing of the Tlatelolco protests (in October 1968) might suggest that the events that took place in Paris in May served as the impetus for protests and social movements in other parts of the world, in fact movements that had previously gained traction in Latin America served to inspire the student protesters in Paris. Gould cites a student quoted in June 1968 as saying, “The French students were inspired by Che Guevara and I don’t know if you are aware that Che was a Latin American” (352). This assertion emphasizes Latin American regional solidarity as an integral component of the Paris 1968 movements.

In addition to what is happening on a global or regional scale, local events in Argentina also shape Abraham’s narrator’s political worldview, even though he is thousands of miles away in Paris. The 1969 workers’ protests in Córdoba, Argentina, which came to be termed the “Cordobazo,” exhibited fervor and energy similar to that of the previous year’s Paris protests. ⁷ Indeed, from exile Juan Perón would draw parallels between these events. ⁸ However, while the student movements in Paris had ideological affinities with events in Argentina, many Argentines eschewed such comparisons. The historian Valeria Manzano (2014: 160) points out that “as protagonists of the interwoven popular revolts in Corrientes, Rosario, and Córdoba, many youths saw theirs as incomparable to the French events. In the Argentine May of 1969, young people tried to erase markers of youthfulness, chiefly their student condition, in order to merge with ‘the people.’” Differing sensibilities regarding identification with the popular classes as an act of solidarity thus constitute a point of divergence between the Paris student movements and Latin American liberation politics. Paris 1968 made individuals such as Abraham and his narrator—Jews who grew up in Argentina with parents born in Eastern Europe—more acutely aware of their own identities as Latin American.

La dificultad’s narrator, Nicolás, experiences his Latin Americanness from Paris, recalling the insistence of the student quoted above on the importance of Latin American political actors for the thoughts and movements that characterized this watershed moment of political participation in France. At the same time, however, we may also interpret this position as similar to Manzano’s point regarding the differences that Argentines perceived between the plight of the Paris students and their own social movements. For Argentines in Paris, the May student protests sparked solidarity with student groups there but also fostered Argentine nationalism and solidarity in terms of anti-imperialist categories, partially in opposition to what was going on in Europe at the time. Thus, for Nicolás, being in Europe immediately following the 1968 student movements serves to forge an awareness of a Latin American identity by marking him as different from the non–Latin American members of his own family. For many, May 1968 was a moment that indelibly marked individuals as new types of political subjects. Moreover, the events of May 1968 helped to consolidate the global new left and brought into sharper relief some of the tensions among global leftist groups. ⁹ As Abraham suggests, one of these tensions was the Jewish left’s responsibilities with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a central factor in Jewish political discussions since the previous year’s Six-Day War.

1968 and the Global Jewish Community

For Jews, Latin America in the late 1960s was a particularly tumultuous place. Jewish youth found themselves not only influenced by revolutionary fervor but simultaneously confronting complicated challenges to their global community. Similar to Sorensen, with her model of regional solidarity, the historians Brodsky, Gurwitz, and Kranson (2015: 1–2) consider global networks of political affinity in the case of Jewish youth at the time:

It has become clear that many young Jews of the period, whether they came of age in South America, North America, Israel, Western Europe, or Eastern Europe, found themselves influenced by common events and considerations. They grappled with particularly Jewish issues, such as the repercussions of the Holocaust, the status of Zionism among diasporic Jews, and the effects of the Six-Day War. At the same time, they also engaged in the cultural and political rebellions that animated so many others of their age group, joining in struggles against racism, the Vietnam War, sexism and imperialism, and the flouting of accepted tastes and conventions of the older generation.

Jewish youth worldwide found themselves in a moment of reckoning due to these “particularly Jewish issues,” which, coupled with the spirit of youth activism worldwide, necessitated discerning one’s primary ideological affiliations, whether to national, regional, and global social movements or to religious identification.

We thus see that the events of May 1968 had a particular effect on both global Jewish youth and Latin America’s youth and were therefore doubly complex for young Latin American Jews. In the case of Latin American Jews in Paris in the wake of the 1968 movements, we may observe the particular manifestations of ideological affinities vis-à-vis the opposing forces of center and periphery. The experience of being Jewish Latin Americans in Europe served to reinforce solidarity with Latin America and global decolonization movements.

Abraham on “Post-Judaism,” Zionism, and Israel

While La dificultad is his fiction debut, Tomás Abraham has written elsewhere about the complexities of Argentine-Jewish identities in twenty-first-century culture. In 2007 he participated in the publication of a two-volume project titled Posjudaismo: Debates sobre lo judío en el siglo XXI (Abraham et al., 2007). Throughout these conversations, Abraham’s notions of what it means to be Jewish and/or to be Argentine are almost always articulated through their inverse. He remarks, for example, “I do not doubt that I am Jewish because I would be ashamed not to be” (Abraham and Bleichmar, 2007: 47). He asserts that he feels more Jewish than Argentine because he was naturalized as an Argentine; he is Jewish for historical reasons and Argentine by adoption. He thus opens up a provocative consideration of Jewish identities among Jewish Argentines who immigrated to the country, a significant component of the country’s Jewish population. Moreover, he posits that, in addition to having Argentine nationality only by adoption, no Jew can ever fully belong only to the nationality of the country in which he was born. He goes on to point out that a great deal of Argentina’s twentieth-century history was based on Catholic nationalism, further complicating his self-identification as Jewish and Argentine and again marking his identification as negation more than affirmation.

In La dificultad as in Posjudaísmo, Abraham repeatedly seeks to complicate understandings of Argentine Jewish identities. Abraham states in Posjudaísmo, “The Jews I like are the dissident ones. I love that rebellious Judaism that has no place, the Judaism of the wandering Jew” (Abraham and Bleichmar, 2007: 38). The novel depicts a Jew who travels the globe—going to Paris and later to Tokyo—and in the process grapples with his identity as Latin American, Argentine, Hungarian, and Jewish. ¹⁰ We may liken this notion of dissidence to a questioning of one’s beliefs and one’s self-identification as Jewish.

Abraham, however, never ceases to describe himself as Jewish. Moreover, he is able to articulate practical delineations between espousing Zionism and supporting the State of Israel. He says in his article in Posjudaísmo that he appreciates the State of Israel because without it there would be no mechanism for ensuring that Jews around the world were not mistreated—an idea that he attributes to the Argentine musician and composer Daniel Barenboim, a citizen of both Israel and Palestine (in addition to Spain and Argentina). He later states, however, that there is a difference between supporting the State of Israel and espousing Zionism, which he describes as an ideology completely distinct from what it had been originally. One of his major arguments against Zionism is that Israel knows that Jews living outside of Israel are just as important for Israel as those who live within it. He goes on to say that the problem in contemporary Israel is not “the Jewish question” but “the Palestinian question.” ¹¹ These notions help to contextualize Nicolás’s solidarity with Palestine, which, as far as he informs the reader of La dificultad, never directly contravenes his identification with Judaism or with Jewish culture.

Nicolás’s “Metamorphosis”

Indeed, the narrator refers to himself as “Argentine” for the first time while in Paris. Describing his time there, Nicolás says, “I was Argentine despite not having the documents saying so because I was not naturalized” (2015: 169). Europe serves as a space that allows him to identify wholly with Argentina. Moreover, his solidarity with Latin American and other liberation movements causes a rift between him and his European family members with respect to Zionism. Nicolás recalls thinking as he was about to leave Paris, “Fortunately my cousins were good-humored and agreed on the most important issues—being Jewish—before, as a cause of the metamorphoses produced by May 1968 they got mad at me because, in addition to writing checks I could not cash before leaving the City of Light for good . . . I gave in to an event for the liberation of Palestine in solidarity with the Cordobazo” (2015: 211–212). He comes to understand himself as different from his cousins, who are not Latin American and are therefore unfazed by the events in Córdoba that produce his solidarity with Palestine. His mention that his cousins are in agreement on what is most important—being Jewish—evokes León Rozitchner’s (1967: 15) assertion “We must sacrifice the Jewish parts of us that are opposed to revolution.” Taken with the rest of Rozitchner’s essay, Ser judío, the assertion raises the question whether one really needs to sacrifice “being Jewish” and if so what parts of it. Rozitchner goes on to ask, “What is Jewish about me in the face of the current Arab-Israeli conflict?” The question of what makes a Jew a Jew is particularly important for a progressive Jew who finds himself ideologically aligned with liberation movements. Abraham’s novel thus reintroduces the debate that Rozitchner addressed more than 50 years ago. As Bruno Bosteels (2012: 72–81) has noted, Rozitchner’s Ser judío is worth revisiting for what it contributes not only to discussions of Jewish communities but also to rethinking the effective legacy of Marx and Marxism in Latin America. Where Rozitchner directly considers the effects of the Six-Day War, Abraham takes into account the ripple effect of the Israel-Palestine conflict within his own extended family. Nicolás’s having irked his cousins with his attendance at a Palestinian liberation event in solidarity with the Cordobazo in Paris as a result of his “metamorphosis” condenses many of the main preoccupations of Jewish culture vis-à-vis Zionism and Palestine within 1960s revolutionary and liberatory practice.

In particular, we see a rift within a Jewish family over issues of Palestine/Zionism along lines of solidarity with activism in Argentina and the radicalization that resulted from May 1968. Crucially, the cousins to whom the narrator is referring here grew up in France. Argentine Jews’ experiences in Europe in the wake of May 1968 served to make explicit the categories of countries that were seeking to be liberated from their colonial pasts, forging an alliance of solidarity along lines of shared identification. While Nicolás identifies as Jewish, he forges a solidarity with Palestine, whereas his cousins do not because they are not from a formerly colonized country and their national identity is unaffected by an event such as the Cordobazo.

While Nicolás does not mention the Tricontinental Congress, his articulation of solidarity with Palestine and the schism that he suggests within his Jewish family recall the challenge posed to Jewish revolutionaries by the Tricontinental’s position. In the closing remarks to the congress, Fidel Castro (1966) said, “The peoples and the liberation movements of Africa . . . received the warm support of the conference, as did the people of Yemen and the people of Palestine,” thus making support of Palestine one of its defining aspects. While Argentina’s delegation did not ratify the resolution in support of Palestine and against Zionism (and Argentina’s delegation to the UN had not ratified the creation of the State of Israel in 1948), this position had strong repercussions among Argentine Jews who supported liberation movements. The historian Andrés Kilstein (2011: 4) notes, “The declaration in Havana presented a great dilemma to progressive Jewish intellectuals, who were called to disparage their own condition to understand the historical reality as well as to let go of any fraternal solidarity with Jews in the Middle East.” For his part, Rozitchner (1967: 21) would remark, “The Israeli cannot be an Israeli revolutionary, . . . and for the mere fact of being Israeli he remains excluded from the process, as the Tricontinental signaled.” Here and elsewhere in his essay he questions the basic assumptions of Jewish geopolitics and political participation and describes one of the most significant fault lines of Jewish political subjectivity: the notion that, in terms of the Tricontinental’s resolution, an Israeli by definition could not be a revolutionary. Of course, as Rozitchner shows, this notion is only partly true, but it signals the challenge presented to progressive Jews and particularly Zionists aligned with revolutionary causes.

We may understand Nicolás’s moment of reckoning with Jewish identification, Argentine national (revolutionary) politics, and Palestinian liberation as a climactic moment in his political and philosophical formation. Throughout the novel, Abraham explores what it means to be Jewish and to be a political subject. By eliding more than 30 years of Argentine history, the narrative suggests that the salient moments for the narrator’s formation as a philosopher, an Argentine citizen, a Latin American, and a Jew had to do with the tension between Jewishness and Zionism. Abraham creates an exploration of political subjectivity and Jewish self-identification from the vantage point of the twentieth century that has its roots in the Peronist years.

Hegemony and Jewish Assimilation in Nicolás’s Childhood in Argentina

As a way of broaching these subjects in fictional terms, Abraham’s novel chronicles its narrator’s childhood in Buenos Aires, a challenging time for a stuttering Jewish immigrant. When he was an adolescent in Buenos Aires, Nicolás says, “Nobody talked of Perón. Politics did not exist, only bullshit ideas” (2015: 131). This seemingly apolitical climate was, more accurately, an apparent lack of overt political consciousness produced by the almost overdetermined presence of Peronist consciousness in the country. Like many children growing up during Argentina’s Peronist years, however, the protagonist seems to have been keenly aware of certain impulses to assimilate into what we may term Argentina’s cultural hegemony. Antonio Gramsci (1971: 12) defines cultural hegemony as “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.” Apropos of hegemony and Peronism in 1950s Argentina, Jon Beasley-Murray (2010: 51), quoting Ernesto Laclau, asserts:

The working class becomes hegemonic by also being populist. Populism, precisely because it is hegemony itself, is no distraction or deviation from socialism. Far from it: “A ‘socialist populism’ is not the most backward form of working-class ideology but the most advanced—the moment when the working class has succeeded in condensing the ensemble of democratic ideology in a determinate social formation within its own ideology.”

As Beasley-Murray and Laclau suggest, Peronist Argentina facilitated a socialist populist climate of sorts; this was the hegemony into which Nicolás would become assimilated.

Despite the pervasiveness of Peronist hegemony, the narrator’s accounts of his childhood include differences between himself and others. As he says of his childhood ski trips to Bariloche, which was notorious for welcoming Nazi war criminals, “Between Nazis and victims of World War II was the country of silence, amnesty land. Nothing was known, everything was forgotten, and that was how people coexisted in the hospitable Argentina of those years” (2015: 57). The lack of upheaval in post–World War II Argentina is revealed to be a result of deliberate silences created by both Nazis and Jewish immigrants. Nicolás’s coming-of-age includes friendships and a romantic relationship with non-Jews, including his first kiss at the age of 11 with a Gentile girl whom he finds attractive partly because she is not Jewish or Hungarian like his family. He describes, “Fortunately she was not the daughter of Hungarian Jews. . . . Hungarian was the police language. Furthermore she was not Jewish. I knew Catholics like my neighbors in Flores, but I had never kissed a Catholic girl. Actually, I had not kissed any girl” (2015: 47). Tellingly, this courtship takes place in the seaside town of Mar del Plata, away from the rigidity of social categories and norms (suggested by his calling Hungarian “the police language”). The narrator clarifies that it does not take place in a club or a camp—both of which are conventional, almost stereotypical, spaces for Argentina’s Jewish communities—but in nature and outside such conventions.

Abraham depicts his high school years and his assimilation into a strong national project as gray and contrasts them with later years that were in color (2015: 93):

That’s why the march to Ezeiza to receive the General remains a vivid, multicolored memory and the death of Evita became materialized as an opaque gray day. High school was gray. Not even white. Saturdays when I played ball shone a little more. High school teachers wore gray suits, sometimes striped, shoes with worn-out soles, briefcases with fake ironwork and faded leather, shirts with the seaming unstitched, anti-Peronist middle-class with dandruff on their deflated shoulder pads.

Abraham uses grayscale here to describe a moment that served as a hegemonizing force throughout the country, interpellating Jewish immigrants as part of this national project. Moreover, the contrast that the novel presents between Evita’s funeral and the events at Ezeiza as black-and-white and in color, respectively, serves to highlight the distinction between a moment broadly perceived as apolitical and one that was overtly political.

Despite these mentions of gray hegemony and assimilation, however, Nicolás observes the wilful forgetting of personal and familial origins that was necessary to become assimilated and live in a new land of opportunity, Argentina. Nicolás’s father is in charge of a sock factory in Buenos Aires, and Abraham includes an ethnographic account of the people and the work of this factory that, as he points out, may one day be his inheritance. ¹² Nicolás reflects on a visit to the factory, “Everyone tried to forget. Some because they had lost the war and wanted to erase the traces of their past actions and beliefs. Others, like the Jews, erased the traces of their pain or their humiliations because they found themselves in a new land with opportunities that they must not compromise with nostalgias” (2015: 396). Abraham thus suggests the sacrifices made by Jewish immigrants in order to become assimilated into the hegemonic cultural practices that characterized this new land of opportunity in which they found themselves, questioning the utopian thinking that often accompanied Peronist Argentina’s so-called mito de crisol (myth of the melting pot).

Elsewhere, Nicolás more overtly indemnifies the push toward assimilation for Eastern European Jews in Peronist Argentina: “Adapt? To the contrary, doing what one does not want to do is not adapting. Submission is not adaptation. The marranos who converted to Christianity and secretly prayed the Torah knew it. Never freer than during the Inquisition. Never freer than during the Occupation, Sartre might say” (2015: 403). ¹³ Nicolás’s comparison of adaptation to the Inquisition evinces the latent violence and threat of persecution that often underwrite assimilation and suggests the subtle resistance that is necessary to maintain one’s personal heritage and cultural practices. Particularly, Jewish assimilation into Argentine hegemony under the country’s Peronist leadership was fraught, since assimilation necessarily incorporated a certain degree of acceptance of anti-Semitism through the Peronist project’s openness toward Nazis (for more on this, see Goñi, 2002).

As a university student in Buenos Aires, Nicolás also comes into contact with the Abram Leon group: “Abram Leon’s group’s leftist Zionism allowed me to learn a definition of Marxist history in which the oppressed Jewish people in the diaspora would only achieve their emancipation in Israel through a socialist revolution” (2015: 168). Indeed, Leon (1970) posits in The Jewish Question that Zionism is a function of capitalism and the only way to resolve the Jewish question is through the destruction of capitalism. Zionist socialist groups were common throughout Argentina’s twentieth century but came under increasing scrutiny in the course of the 1960s as individuals such as Nicolás aligned themselves with Palestinian causes. Nicolás’s early contacts with politics, however, after a seemingly apolitical childhood, do not present him with the crises of conscience and conflicting identifications that he will encounter in Paris.

Religion and Revolution in Paris

Nicolás’s time as a university student in Buenos Aires is very brief, for it is truncated by the Night of the Long Batons, the infamous act of police brutality on the university’s math and science campus in 1966. Afterward he explains his decision to travel to France: “To stop wandering like a nationless militant that the new Argentine Revolution could exile because of residency laws . . . to be a worthy inheritor of [my father’s] company, for all those reasons I was in conditions to travel and to search for a new place, the France I had dreamed of” (2015: 179). France offers an immigrant a more favorable environment than Argentina under Onganía (a result of the “Argentine revolution” to which the narrator refers here). Here Abraham suggests the xenophobia and discriminatory immigration policies that characterized the authoritarian governments of Argentina in the 1960s.

As part of his experiences in Paris, we see Nicolás exposed to key figures of Argentina’s revolutionary movements, part of the zeitgeist of both Paris 1968 and revolutionary culture in Argentina. These references to popular culture and revolutionary icons remind us of the spirit of the moment that will produce in him what he terms a “metamorphosis.” These moments are often narrated irreverently. Describing an acid trip with a friend, Nicolás says, “Then we went to pray with Padre Mugica in a private mass in Paris . . . and I was present in the sacrifice of the man crucified by his love for the poor” (2015: 289). Here Nicolás references Catholicism’s preferential treatment of the poor that would characterize both liberation theology as a movement and the legacy of Padre Mugica in particular. Here, in Paris, an Argentine Jew imagines attending a mass with a Catholic Argentine leader, and in this we see the complex relations between the global and the local, Jewish and Catholic, within a self-identification as Argentine, Jewish, and revolutionary.

A Novel of Philosophical Formation

As previously mentioned, La dificultad has many elements of a novel of ideas, representing a subgenre to which Abraham’s idol Jean-Paul Sartre belongs. It recalls fellow Argentine Ernesto Sabato’s 1948 masterpiece, El túnel, whose protagonist’s name, Juan Pablo, is understood to be a reference to Sartre. While he never mentions explicitly the connections between Sartre and Sabato, Nicolás references Sartre and shortly thereafter recalls hearing Sabato speak in Buenos Aires: “He seduced me with his voice, a manifestation of porteña professorial elegance presented in a rustic, sober, impeccable, somewhat discolored way” (2015: 238). Abraham’s novel, like Sabato’s, consists primarily not of plot but of an attempt to string together the pieces of the narrator’s life in a way that makes sense. It is an homage to the existentialist literature that influenced Abraham in his youth but that he outgrew in Paris. Existentialism is revealed to have been anachronistic in the Paris of the late 1960s. Sorensen (2007: 205) writes of the protagonist of Cortázar’s Rayuela: “Horacio Oliveira, faults and all, is a model of humanity that was being worked out in the wake of existentialism, of course. But perhaps we need more than Sartre to understand Oliveira’s function in the boom’s imaginary. . . . Indeed, Oliveira is like a Che Guevara who cannot embrace action.” Similarly, Abraham’s novel reckons with an obsolete model of social thought—Sartre’s existentialism—as Nicolás seeks reconciliation with an emerging world order and new directions in critical thought.

Abraham’s consideration of philosophy also has compelling points of contact with questions of religion. Judaism is present more as an ethnic and/or cultural category than as a religious category or identification. Nicolás says of Sartre, “The father of existentialism was an atheist, existentialism was a humanism, and religion was the opium of the masses” (2015: 168). He charts a shift from Sartre to Althusser among his intellectual circle in 1960s Paris “But where was Sartre? Within a few weeks of arriving I knew that French philosophy had forgotten him” (2015: 237). Indeed, his fellow philosophy students are speaking not of Sartre but of Althusser, whose 1970 “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” according to the philosopher Bernard Gendron (2013: 39), “provided what seemed to be the definitive Marxist response to the events of May–June 1968.” Thus, Althusser becomes the landmark figure for the philosophical and political discussions in which Nicolás participates in Paris, again underscoring his immersion in this watershed moment of political and social activism. Nicolás is frustrated with these conversations: “A work environment in keeping with the paradigm created by Crosby, Stills, Nash, Althusser, and Young was still a kind of silly project” (2015: 412). This tongue-in-cheek reference is one of many popular-culture references alongside references to theorists and philosophers as guideposts to the voices of revolutionary culture that formed the zeitgeist of 1968.

Back in Argentina in 1978, Nicolás is invited to give a lecture series on Foucault, a task that he accepts and presents to the reader as a moment that marks his overcoming his stuttering—the “difficulty” from which the novel’s title is taken. ¹⁴ That he should be asked to speak on Foucault is significant given the role of the events of 1968 in Foucault’s emergence as an important voice in critical thought. At the same time that Nicolás emerged from the “metamorphosis” produced in him by having experienced Paris in May 1968, Foucault was undergoing a pivotal moment in the trajectory of his thought and political action. For Abraham and for his alter ego Nicolás, Foucault was intimately linked to Paris 1968. As Gendron (2013: 37) notes, “Foucault was giving May 1968 credit for creating the conditions for the flowering of Foucauldian studies of power.” Abraham’s trajectory in a sense mirrored that of Foucault as the two shifted to a framework of disciplinarity in the course of the early 1970s. ¹⁵ While Nicolás briefly mentions later moments of the dictatorship and the novel resists a straightforward chronological order, this moment in 1978 is presented as the culmination of Nicolás’s overcoming his difficulty in speaking and his development as a philosopher and a political subject.

Conclusions

Throughout Abraham’s novel of ideas, the place of Judaism is revealed to be central to Nicolás’s understandings of revolutionary politics, philosophy, and his own identity. Moreover, life experiences and politics are inseparable, as we observe through Nicolás’s affinity with Palestinian causes as a form of anti-imperialist solidarity and as opposed to his European cousins’ rejection of the cause and loyalty to Zionism. The novel’s many references to the zeitgeist of revolutionary culture remind us of the pervasiveness of utopian thinking in the 1960s and its persistent confounding of the legacy of revolutionary culture vis-à-vis politics and Jewish culture in Argentina. Publishing more than 30 years after the period in which his story ends, Abraham gives little indication of how these issues have developed over the intervening years. However, that he should have chosen to focus this autobiographical novel on the years marked by revolutionary movements and challenges to the global Jewish community suggests that these issues continue to affect his identity as a Jew, an Argentine, and a philosopher.