Victor Pereira: Writing as Search for Kinship

• In Event: Genealogies in Jewish Latin American Culture

Abstract

The writing of Victor Pereira (Guatemala-U.S., 1934-2003) can be read as a search for kinship. This feature is most evident in his 1995 The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey, a hybrid text that combines memoir, genealogies, and journalism. The Cross and the Pear Tree begins with Victor Pereira’s effort to trace his distinguished Sephardic family’s ancestors and relatives in the genetic sense. Here he employs such relatively standard means as archives, telephone books, various historical documents, gravestones, and interviews to discover ancestors or suspected ancestors, many of whom are notable figures whose accomplishments are well documented. As the book progresses, the concept of kinship that drives Pereira’s journey undergoes a slow transformation. The author moves away from a focus on the Sephardic elite to which his highly educated forebears belonged; he also relies less on research and more on personal encounters and the feelings of identification that they elicit. He first broadens his inquiry to impoverished Sephardic and Mizrahi Israelis, with whose experience of marginality he identifies despite class differences. In the West Bank, he seeks to know Palestinian Arabs; he connects with them more on the basis of a mystical identification than the rational possibility of common genes. The genetic criterion of kinship is abandoned in favor of an experiential one as Pereira develops and describes his connection not only with the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel but also the Lacandon Maya of his native Guatemala.

Author

• Naomi E Lindstrom, University of Texas/Austin