Writing the Absent Face: "Jewishness" and the Limits of Representation in Borges, Piglia, and Chejfec

From the ailing eponymous heroine of Jorge Isaacs's "foundational fiction" María (1867), to the stereotypically money-obsessed speculator Filiberto Mackser in Julián Martel's anti-Semitic "classic" La bolsa (1890), to the persecuted New Christian Branca Dias in Dias Gomes's allegorical play O Santo Inquérito (1966), figurative "Jews" participate in the codification of social and ideological preoccupations as varied as race in post-abolition Colombia, immigration and cosmopolitanism in turn-of-the-century Argentina, and military repression in 1960s Brazil. Written just after the Nuremberg Trials, the story is narrated from the perspective of Otto Dietrich zur Linde, the Assistant Director of a concentration camp, and seems, at first glance, to validate the ideology or at the very least to empathize with the experiences of this murderous figure.