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The Shoah permanently marked Jews and their descendants. Their stories crossed rivers and oceans and were also present in Brazilian literature. Giselda Leirner tells in Nas águas do mesmo rio, published in 2005, a story at various levels, with the impacting stories of three women marked by the catastrophe. Images from a traumatic past are thus revisited in a troubled present, and the fate of these characters invites the reader to reflect on transformations, desired and possible.

This present article discusses in its first section the issue of the inevitability of metaphysical evil. With no pretension to make an in-depth analysis of the vast bibliographical production on the subject, the second part of this article states the insufficiency of reason to decipher the enigma of evil, which allows an openness to the God of faith that is examined on the basis of Biblical tradition, particularly from The Book of Job. In conclusion, the compatibility between The Book of Job and the philosophical concept of metaphysical evil is defended. Assuming that the essence of evil lies in the finite condition of reality, both enunciate the folly and meaninglessness of the question whether God could have created a world without evil.

In Noemi Jaffe’s novel Írisz: as orquídeas, published in 2015, a Hungarian immigrant moves to Brazil, abandoning, in this movement, her homeland, mother and partner. In São Paulo, at Jardim Botânico neighborhood, the narrator voice is dedicated to the study of orchids, flowers that will be a metaphor for this floating and exiled character, whose aerial and parasitic roots characterize her erratic character. Furthermore, together with the mutability of the protagonist, who avoids taking roots, her study of orchids translates into an analysis of the language, a trait that seems to mark Írisz's narrative. Thus, this communication will analyze, from orchids, the fictionalization of a family history and the elaboration of fragmented, dispersed and undecipherable memories.

According to Ricardo Piglia, the short story contains two stories, one underlying the other. The hidden one would be fragmentary and elliptical, and the short story writer would be successful if being able to structure this feat. Cíntia Moscovich, as a skillful storyteller, when narrating these common stories in Essa coisa brilhante que é a chuva, published in 2012, highlights the beauty hidden in the story that, apparently, can go unnoticed. The present article intends to demonstrate how Moscovich sews the plots underlying the nine stories in the collection, by means of surprises, epiphanies, visions, showing a line of tension and double effect, revealing them only in the surprising endings.

In the first half of the 20th century, Brazil received immigrants from the most varied countries, which undoubtedly marked the development of its society and culture. At first, the immigrant, and their cultural baggage, still preserved their customs, trying, at the same time, to adapt to the new society. Among the immigrants who arrived in Brazil, there are Jews from Europe and the Middle East. Immigration is often synonymous with displacement, leaving a place and not belonging anywhere. This feeling is expressed in A guerra no Bom Fim, 1972, by Moacyr Scliar, and A hora da estrela, published in 1977, by Clarice Lispector. This communication will study this immigration condition in the two novels, considering that the immigration process includes stages of adaptation, integration, and assimilation.

In Guerra em surdina: histórias do Brasil na Segunda Guerra Mundial, published in 1964, Boris Schnaiderman is what we could call an interpreter of himself and of more than 20,000 men of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB) who, like him, were summoned in 1944 to fight, in the conflict, on the side of the allies. Based on what he experienced as a small square in a destroyed Italy, the writer builds a narrative between factual and fictional accounts.

The Portuguese-Brazilian playwright Antônio José da Silva, better known by his nickname, the Jew (o Judeu), took to the stage in Lisbon eight comic plays, classified as jocose-serious operas. In them, he dialogues in a parodic way, sometimes with Greek mythology, as, for example, in Amphitrion or Jupiter and Alcmene, The Charms of Medea and Labyrinth of Crete; sometimes with canonical narratives from Western Literature, as one reads in El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Victim of the Portuguese Inquisition in the 18th century, the Jew, through symbologies and metaphors, recorded in his texts the excesses of monarchic and ecclesiastical power, during the reign of the Tribunal of the Holy Office.

From Sagração do alfabeto, 2009, by Leonor Scliar-Cabral, to A verdadeira história do alfabeto e alguns verbetes de um dicionário, 2012, by Noemi Jaffe, the letter constitutes a collection of poetic and narrative possibilities. By conceiving the letter as a minimal unit of meaning, the writers are inscribed in a tradition of authors who see in the micro, the magnitudes of the multiple. Scliar-Cabral extracts from the Hebrew alphabet numerous lyrical reverberations, transforming letters into poetry, eclipsing the sense of the unique by expanding the connotations of the letters. Jaffe, in turn, in prose, redefines the meaning of the notion of history by proposing an unusual linearity for each letter of the Latin alphabet. This communication will analyze these two literary paths of Brazilian Literature in the context of contemporary Jewish texts.

Judaism never appears explicitly in Clarice Lispector's literature. However, as shown by Gilda Szklo (1989), Nelson Vieira (1989) and Berta Waldman (2011; 2014), the Jewish influence can be perceived in different ways in Clarice's writing. In this work, we will analyze the presence of midrashim in the representation of Christmas in the chronicles “Anunciação”, “A virgem em todas as mulheres”, “Ele seria alegre” e “A humildade de São José”.

Judaism and Jewish tradition, the historical review, the discourse of science, the Scripture, the memory, and Latin American identity are some of the thematic lines that make up the plot and skein of Moacyr Scliar's multifaceted work. The integration of all these discourses in the infinite play of fiction reveals the sophisticated literary web woven by the writer. It would be no different when the author deals with such a nuanced myth like the Golem. This communication will analyze the retaking of this myth, explicitly, in two books by Scliar, literally in the novel Cenas da vida minúscula, published in 2003, and, obliquely, in Manual da paixão solitária, from 2008.

Leila Danziger, with her works on the Navio de emigrantes in the exhibition Navio de Emigrantes, reuses remains, inscriptions, narrating from the rubble of 20th century catastrophes. Paradoxically, as in the works of Lasar Segall, the artist honored by the artist in this exhibition, we see an uneasy calm emanating after the catastrophe. From this perspective, this article reflects on migrations and their relationship with memory and trauma based on the art of Segall and Danziger.

This article analyzes the presence/absence of bodies in narratives related to the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship, taking as reference the novels of Bernardo Kucinski and Julian Fuks. The non-visibility of the body, or the denial of the right to the body, in the texts of Kucinski and Fuks affirm the potency of literature and art, also evidencing the narrative text as a space of radical hospitality, which Jacques Derrida defends.

The novel K. – Relato de uma busca, by Bernardo Kucinski, published in 2014, begins with letters received by the narrator directed to his sister who disappeared during the dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. This episode rescues and highlights a painful memory of loss and irreparable damage. The disappearance, debited by the narrator to the action of police agents linked to the State, assumes, from the beginning, the tragic tone of a crime not redeemed by the action of Justice, while it articulates the present of the narrative to the recent history of Brazil. This communication analyzes the capacity of fiction to rewrite, to some extent, history, in addition, I hope to assess the connection of the writer's biography with the novel's narrator.

Halina Grynberg, in the novel Mameloshn: memória em carne viva, 2004, deals with the pain imposed by memories and traumas that cross generations, certainly passing through food. In this account, the narrative transports the reader to affective memories that are rather disturbing than comforting. Similarly, in O padeiro polonês, 2005, the writer articulates the suffered memory of the preparation of challah or braided bread, made by the narrator's father. It is noticed that the food, in these two autobiographical novels, has a language flavored with tears and multiple meanings.

Based on the analysis of Samuel Rawet's novel Viagens de Ahasverus à terra alheia em busca de um passado que não existe porque é futuro e de um futuro que já passou porque sonhado, published in 1970, this communication will address the way in which the writer – in the words of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who coined the expression “minor literature” – represents, in their writings, the hegemonic population. In other words, how the minority is represented in Rawet's work. In this way, I try to understand the radicality of the estrangement experienced by minority groups, in their literary expression.

It is attested, historically, that in the first centuries of the Common Era, Enochian literature was widely used among Christians, mainly the book of I Enoch, but also, in a more discreet way, the writings of II Enoch and III Enoch (this the least exercised influence). The official position in Western Christianity, which decoded I Enoch's writing from the list of useful literature to Christian religiosity, was given at the Council of Laodicea (4th century) which stated that the only names of angels recognized as sacred would be that of Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, removing I Enoque (who quotes several names of angels) from the West Christian exegetical scenario for centuries. Among the Jews literature was quite influential until the end of the first century Council of Jamnia, which considered only as sacred writings for religion those produced on the borders of the Holy Land in the Hebrew language, marginalizing I Enoque originally written in Aramaic. However, the same did not happen in some regions of the East where Christianity continued to use the book of I Enoque. Starting from the prism that Islam is a monotheistic religion that in its birth exchanged intensely with Judeo-Christian literatures, the article points to a plausible influence of the book of I Enoque in the construction of the Islamic apocalyptic taking as comparative basis the book The Scale of Mohammed. The article is bibliographic in nature and is structured on the comparative method, aiming to present narratological confluences between the writings.

Games, toys and games form an important part of our individual and collective identities, just as they have always been part of all cultures at all times. But what do ways of playing say about a society? In the last century, Walter Benjamin, living in Germany in dark times that witnessed the advance towards the seizure of power and destruction by Nazism, was one of the thinkers who left revealing writings on the practice of games and on allegorical ways of playing. The reflections of Benjamin and other thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, provide the backdrop for contemporary studies on the historiography and ideology of ways of playing, with emphasis on the collection put together by André Postert in “Kinderspiel, Glücksspiel, Kriegsspiel: Große Geschichte in kleinen Dingen 1900-1945” (Children's game, game of chance, war game: Great History in small things 1900-1945).

Through analyzing the collection of the more the centenary Yiddish Scholem Aleichem Library in Rio de Janeiro, the text aims at identifying the contents that traveled inside this migrant books together with a generation of readers that fought for the convergence between social struggle and linguistic struggle.

Os luzeiros

A memória e a Torá