Clueless Clarice: Inspecting Lispector’s ‘Jewish Mysticism’
By Benjamin Ivry May 6, 2010
Last year “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector” (Oxford University Press) appeared to qualified praise. Readers and critics alike took issue with the biographer’s otiose portrait of Lispector as a Jewish mystic, even one of the tzaddikim, “bearers of that irrational something.”
Lispector, originally named Chaya, was born to Pinkhas and Mania Krimgold Lispector in Chechelnyk, a shtetl in what is today Ukraine. When she was one year old, Chaya’s family fled Ukraine’s pogroms and resettled in Brazil where Lispector remained, never revisiting the old country in body or spirit. An invaluable collection of Lispector’s letters, newly translated into French as “Le seul moyen de vivre: Lettres,” (Bibliothèque Rivages) reveals the full extent of her divorce from heritage and history.
Leading a cosmopolitan expatriate life in Europe during the war, Lispector writes home to Brazil in May, 1945, describing how she busily posed for a portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico, adding that in another letter penned that very morning, she forgot to mention the incidental news that World War II had ended. Lispector adds that in Rome that day, “there were no celebrations…in a certain sense, Italy was defeated.” In a certain sense (!)
Lispector’s cluelessness continues as she moves to Paris, where in 1947 she writes home again, complaining pettishly that she went to hear the French soprano Madeleine Grey in recital: “I don’t know if she was ill, but she sang horribly badly.” Madeleine Grey, born Grumberg, an exemplary performer of music by Ravel and Canteloube, was born Jewish, and her wartime was not as cushy and pleasant as Lispector’s.
Lispector’s obliviousness to anything going on around her extends to the theater, where in 1951 she attended a Brazilian performance of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” to which her only reaction is that the play’s star is “very good, the other actors less so.” In 1954, writing from Washington, D.C., she reports that her 6-year-old son quoted a line of verse which she was sure came from the Bible; it turns out to be from a poem by 19th century author Charles Kingsley. Mystics may come in all forms, but one who cannot tell the Bible from the author of “The Water Babies” does not really qualify for any such distinction.
Watch Clarice Lispector interviewed on Brazilian TV in 1977:
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
