It hardly seems likely that Israel, surrounded by hostile Arab nations and in a virtual state of siege for a generation and more, could give any thought to things Hispanic and Latin American in its educational institutions. Yet the present work suggests a vigorous pursuit of such studies, not only in the Hebrew University at Jerusalem, but also in the University of Tel Aviv and in Bar Ilan University. Proof of this active interest is evident in the melange of twelve articles in this collection of sound and authoritative research and critical competence, which is published as a festschrift honoring the seventh birthday of Israel’s only Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Hebrew University. So disparate is the nature of the contributions and so various are the disciplines represented that a review inevitably tends to enumerate rather than evaluate its contents. Half of the dozen research and critical articles are in the field of history; the other half in literature. All, except two, deal with twentieth-century manifestations. The contributors are both resident and visiting scholars in Israel; seven contributions appear in English, four in Spanish, and one in Portuguese.
The opening article “Latin American Studies Today” by Martin H. Sable provides a useful summary and guide to interdisciplinary studies in that field, chiefly in the United States, but also in other countries. The earliest in time and the greatest in length is the well documented “Peruvian Arbitristas Under Viceroy Chinchón, 1629-1639” by Fred Bronner. Enoch Resnick’s brief discussion of the reign of Ferdinand VII follows. The three remaining historical articles deal with Brazil’s Tenentes; the Mexican Student-Government confrontation in 1968; and guerrillas’ and students’ protests in Latin America since 1960, each contributed respectively by Ilan Rahum, Yoram Shapira, and Edy Kaufman.
Miscellaneous in subject matter are the six literary articles. They include Joel I. Feldman’s perceptive “First-person Narrative Technique in the Picaresque Novel” of the seventeenth century; the five others are concerned with twentieth-century aspects of literature. Highly technical is Eli Rozik’s “Structural Approach to Lorca’s Metaphorics in the Romancero Gitano,” while Bella Josef has an interesting essay on the ‘New Novel’; Nahum Megged suggests the historical sources and literary significance of El papa verde by the Nobel Prize winning Guatemalan novelist, Miguel A. Asturias. Myrna Solotorevsky dwells on the attitudes toward life and death of the Spanish poet, García Lorca, and the famous Nobel Prize winning poet of Chile, Pablo Neruda. And last is Sara Fishmen’s discussion of humor in the poetry of the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
This collection, taken as a whole, is more likely to impress the reader with the seriousness of Spanish and Latin American research in Israel’s seats of learning than to appeal to the interest of anyone but the highly specialized student.
