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

• Date: 01 May 2019
• Author: Stephanie M. Pridgeon
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19828757
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19828757

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 226, Vol. 46 No. 3, May 2019, 55–70

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19828757

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

55

Metamorphoses of 1968

Latin America and the Israel-Palestine Question in

Tomás Abraham’s La dificultad (2015)

by

Stephanie M. Pridgeon

Throughout Tomás Abraham’s novel of ideas La dificultad, Judaism is revealed to be

central to the protagonist’s understandings of revolutionary politics, philosophy, and his

own identity. As is apparent in his affinity with Palestinian causes as a form of anti-

imperialist solidarity, life experiences and politics are inseparable. That Abraham should

have chosen to focus this autobiographical novel on the Hungarian-Argentine Jewish

narrator’s experiences with the Paris student movements of 1968 suggests that revolu-

tionary movements and the challenges to the global Jewish community continue to affect

his identity as a Jew, an Argentine, and a philosopher.

A lo largo de la novela de ideas de Tomás Abraham La dificultad, se revela el rol central

del judaísmo en como el protagonista entiende la política revolucionaria, la filosofía y su

propia identidad. Como es evidente en su afinidad con las causas palestinas como una

forma de solidaridad antiimperialista, las experiencias de vida y la política son insepara-

bles. El hecho de que Abraham eligió enfocar esta novela autobiográfica en las experiencias

del narrador judío húngaro-argentino con los movimientos estudiantiles de París de 1968

sugiere que los movimientos revolucionarios y los desafíos a la comunidad judía global

continúan afectando su identidad como judío, argentino y filósofo.

Keywords: Zionism, Argentina, May 1968, Philosophy, Judaism

Before Che Guevara, Argentines didn’t feel like they were Latin Americans. Now,

however, they believe they are the only Latin Americans.

—Gabriel García Márquez

For political actors around the world, May 1968 constituted a crucial moment

in the crystallization of political affinities and subjectivities. The Argentine phi-

losopher Tomás Abraham considers the role of May 1968 in his political and

intellectual formation in his recent novel La dificultad (2015). As this largely

autobiographical novel emphasizes, the experiences of May 1968 constituted a

watershed moment for individuals—particularly youth—forced into a moment

Stephanie M. Pridgeon is a visiting assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at

Bates College. Her current research focuses on Jewish political participation throughout the twen-

tieth century as depicted in recent Latin American fiction and film.

828757LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19828757Latin American PerspectivesPridgeon / Israel And Palestine In Abraham’s La Dicultad

research-article2019

56 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

of reckoning with their global, national, and/or religious identifications in the

broader context of shifting geopolitics that marked global liberation move-

ments, particularly in the case of Jews vis-à-vis anti-imperialist movements’

pro-Palestinian stance. Writing in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, his fellow

Jewish Argentine León Rozitchner (1967: 95) anticipated some of the tensions

that Abraham would experience in Paris and write about decades later: “Our

confronting the Israeli problem is simply a means of putting off our own con-

frontation with the Argentine national reality.”1 For his part, Abraham

(Abraham and Bleichmar, 2007) would posit that for Argentine Jews the prob-

lem is not the Israel question but the Palestine question. Here he expresses the

solidarity with Palestine instilled in him by his experiences with the May 1968

protests. My analysis of his novel focuses on its treatment of the tensions

between Argentine nationalism, global liberation movements, and the Israel-

Palestine question that remain unresolved to this day.

In the cultural imaginary surrounding 1968 in Latin America, points of over-

lap between identification with the global movements of the time and identifi-

cation as Latin American are often shown to be in flux. In this context, there are

often tensions not only between being Argentine and being Jewish but also

between being Latin American and being Jewish. Specifically, they arise

between being Latin American and aligned with Latin American liberation

movements—which evinced solidarity with Palestinian causes—and being

Jewish in the wake of the Six-Day War and in the years leading up to the Yom

Kippur War, moments that called for a reckoning with one’s relation to Israel.

In 1966, the Tricontinental Congress adopted a pro-Palestinian stance.2 La difi-

cultad traces its narrator’s coming-of-age as a political subject and philosopher,

a process that culminates in an understanding of himself as Latin American

that he reaches only after his experiences in Paris in 1968 and through solidarity

with the student movements. This self-understanding necessarily challenges

his Jewish and Zionist upbringing, galvanizing him into a moment of reckon-

ing in the wake of what he terms a “metamorphosis” produced by the zeitgeist

of May 1968.

My analysis of Abraham’s novel begins with a consideration of the emer-

gence of Latin American solidarity movements vis-à-vis Jewish Latin America.

From there I go on to consider Abraham’s notions in his 2007 book Posjudaísmo

of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a determining factor in both political affilia-

tions and Jewish identities. I then focus on what his novel may offer to a critical

reconsideration of the points of contact between Jewish cultural practices and

revolutionary political affinities. In particular, I point to the novel’s depiction

of assimilation and hegemony in Argentina and political and philosophical

revolutions in Paris. Ultimately, I contend that Abraham’s novel redefines what

it meant to be Latin American, Jewish, and revolutionary in the late 1960s.

Much more than a nostalgic retrospective, La dificultad contributes to continu-

ing conversations about political participation and religious identities in Latin

America today. Abraham’s focus on Paris 1968 can be seen as a return to ground

zero for the formation of the new left; in this way he is both rewriting the his-

tory of the left since that time and creating a justificatory narrative of his own

intellectual and political positions.3 Debates surrounding the Israel-Palestine

conflict in the late 1960s remain relevant today.4