Angelina Muñiz-Huberman
Los esperandos: piratas judeoportugueses . . . y yo

Madrid: Sefarad Editores, 2017. ISBN 9788487765490

Reviewed by Sandra Messinger Cypess^*

The thought of sailing along the Caribbean on a cruise with a skilled kosher cook is quite inviting, and thus, the novel by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Los esperandos, is a welcome respite from today’s reality.¹ She is recognized as the first in Mexico to write a new historical novel (Morada interior of 1972), according to the definition established by Seymour Menton. She is also known for her seudomemorias, or rewriting her childhood memories, and for including a number of different genres in one text, as she did in previous narratives such as La burladora de Toledo (2008) and En el jardin de la cábala (2008) and now in Los esperandos.²

The title in Spanish presents a rupture of normative grammar, since “esperando” is a gerund, and here it is made into a noun, and in the plural! The title announces the disruptive techniques and themes of the novel, since the main characters are Portuguese-Jewish pirates who aid the British in attacking Spanish ships along the Caribbean. The pirates are driven by vengeance since they are exiles from Spain and Portugal fleeing from the Inquisition, placing one of many threads of the story in the Golden Age of Iberian culture. The narrator, the cook on board ship, writes in his diary/chronicle/disquisition that he is purposely leaving blank pages so that another writer will add to his work in the future. That co-collaborator is announced in the subtitle: Piratas judeoportugueses… y yo. By the nature of the intercalations/memoirs of the “yo,” we readers understand that this future writer is Muñiz-Huberman herself.

The cook is named Oseas, -- the Spanish equivalent for the name of the Hebrew prophet Hosea. It should be noted that in Hebrew “Hosea” means “he who saves or helps.” That description is a fitting reference to the narrator’s role as someone who attacks the enemies of the Jews at the same time that he also acts as a prophet, for he anticipates a writer who will add to his story of the “esperandos,” thus transmitting his memories for future readers. Oseas explains the identity of the “esperandos” (“the waiting ones” or “those who wait,” the more grammatically acceptable English translation).

¿Quiénes son los esperandos? Aquellos judíos de Sefarad, conversos forzados, que escapamos la persecución del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición y que hallamos nuevas fuentes de trabajo en las tierras recién descubiertas. Creamos las principales vías comerciales entre las nuevas tierras y Europa. Desarrollamos los cultivos de la caña de azúcar, del café, del cacao, del tabaco, del maíz, de la papa, y la explotación minería. (14)

As Oseas notes, his fellow travelers are multi-talented and his narrative is more than a travelogue with elements of the picaresque. He also offers philosophical disquisitions, as in the chapters on melancholy; historical data, as in the chapter on the year 1391; literary theory, as in the references to Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Robert Burton; and tales of magic and mystery, as in the description of the creation of a golem by the ancestor of Oseas. It also contains those “seudomemorias” of the childhood of Angelina Munoz-Huberman, and personal photos of her and her family. In imitation of the books on the lives of saints, Oseas describes the lives of the Jews after being expelled from Spain as they experience their wanderings to many different countries.

The text is definitely not a typical adventure story that one might imagine given that the main character is a pirate.³ Both Oseas and his collaborator discuss the psychological and emotional effects on the esperandos who were exiled--those of 1492 and then of 1939, when Angelina’s family and all those who supported the Republic were forced to flee as Franco began his persecution of his enemies. In his travels, Oseas recounts what life was like for the Jews in each of the lands that welcomed them--Holland, Brazil, Morocco, New Amsterdam, among other locales. Each place offers him an opportunity to make references to the great figures of that region, Fernando de Rojas, Cervantes, Rembrandt, Spinoza, Albrecht Durer, Oliver Cromwell, Robert Burton of Anatomy of Melancholy, as well as those ignored by official histories. Without any sense of humility, Oseas admits as “fact” that in his dialogues with these notable figures, he would give them advice, which then would appear in their books. For her part, in one of her early intercalations Muñiz mentions the names of many Jews of the 20th century, especially pointing out those who were treated by the Nazis in the same “aberrante manera inquisitorial de los siglos 16 y 17. Podrían contarse muchas historias de las vicisitudes de las familias Wittgenstein, Warburg, Freud, Kafka, Zweig, Broch, Celan, Benjamin, Ullmann, Arendt, Weil, entre otros” (24). Thus, both Oseas and his later collaborator draw connections between different legacies of trauma and loss, and inscribe the names for posterity of some of the many Jews who were wrested from their homes, persecuted for their religious identity to become “castaways” during centuries.

Throughout the novel, Oseas offers us poetic and allegorical explanations of what it means to be a “cook”—and how it relates to his being a writer, passages which I found to be both a creative and intriguing exploration of the relationship between cooking and writing. Oseas remarks that “el arte culinario es el de disfrazar los crudos alimentos, cambiarles el sabor, el color, el olor, el aspecto. Quitarles sus características y convertirlos en otras cosas” (63). This observation, which makes the reader think of how the raw materials –words--are transformed by the writer into something new, is followed by a chapter entitled “¿Por qué soy cocinero-confeccionador de historias?” (65-72). Oseas asks us “¿Cómo se confeccionan las historias?”—and then answers his question using culinary vocabulary in a creative riff that shows Muñiz’s poetic talents in exploring the many nuances of language. He then compares other professions with that of writer, only to conclude: “que todas las profesiones se reducen a una: la de relator” (66). The theme of la escritura returns often, and in “Inverosimilitudes,” one of the short chapters that comprise the narrative, Oseas asks the reader a number of his many rhetorical questions: “¿Es una rutina cocinar? ¿Es una rutina comer? ¿Es una rutina escribir? Qui le sait?” (227).

My response is that in this novel, writing for Muñiz is not a routine or predictable activity. She adds to the ruminations of Oseas about his role as a cook-writer navigating the Caribbean by bringing up her own navigations on the internet. Navigating via computer erases time and geography in the same way her writing in this text has erased barriers of time. Just as her title transgresses normative grammatical rules, her novelistic structure breaks down boundaries between time periods, so that divisions between past and present seem an illusion. Her characters appear to engage in dialogues across centuries, and suffer the same grievances of intolerance and repression, exile and wanderings – constants that characterize the lives of Muniz’s protagonists in any period in which they live. Her characters, too, move between her many texts – not only her alter ego, whose memories permeate different novels, but a character like Elena de Cespedes, née Amba, the heroine of La Burladora de Toledo (2008), who reappears in Los esperandos as Elena/Eleno, a hermaphrodite pirate whose life story repeats the details of the earlier novel. Los esperandos also seems to be a novelistic elaboration of Muñiz’s complex view of exile found in her essay, El canto del peregrino (1999).

Muñiz’s style is lyrical at times, but also playful and rich with puns and many proverbs reminiscent of those recounted by Cervantes’ Sancho Panza. Some are traditional proverbs – “No hay mal que por bien no venga”; in one particularly evocative series, Oseas recounts that he learned from his fellow-pirates, exiled Jews, that one can be high up one day, down the next, one day in the crow’s nest, next in the bilge, adding examples that show how unpredictable and capricious is the wheel of fortune (338)—a very Jewish concept that we find not only in the Torah’s account of Joseph and his brothers, but in the narrative of the Maccabees’ victory over the Greeks (as detailed in the Amidah). Los esperandos offers a compelling and complex examination of exile and persecution, individual and collective memory, transmitted in poetic prose, exhibiting an imagination that knows no boundaries. Reading this novel is an entertaining experience, despite the traumatic histories it relates. Angelina Muñiz-Huberman is able to create an intertextual dialogue with literary and historical characters that enriches our reading experience. Additionally, in her final words to close the text of Los esperandos, Muñiz indicates that she and Oseas will continue to collaborate. We readers are now part of those who wait--for the next installment of her creative talents.

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^* Sandra M. Cypess is professor emerita of Spanish studies, University of Maryland at College Park, the author of Uncivil Wars: Octavio Paz and Elena Garra, and a well known expert on Mexican literature.

¹ The novel was read and is being reviewed during the pandemic of 2020-21.

² David Navarro reviews A Mystical Journey, the English translation of Tierra adentro (1977), translated by Seymour Menton, In Volume 4, issue 1 (Winter 2014), of Sephardic Horizons.

³ Robert Nussenblatt reviews Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean by Edward Kritzler, in Volume 1, Issue 1 (Fall 2010) of Sephardic Horizons.