Ackerman Chronicle

Dr. Valente concentrated on the first story of Hackl’s Three Tearless Histories, entitled “The Klagsbrunn Family: A Story Coming to Light,” which traces the multigenerational history of a Jewish family from the Holocaust to the present. She called attention to the novel’s structure as a characteristically Brazilian style of storytelling, in which nonfiction utilizes a combination of documentary works and testimonial literature to tell the story.

The grandson, Victor Klagsbrunn, is the protagonist of the novel, and it is the way in which he pieces together these different episodes of persecution through various documents and photographs inherited by his uncle that drives the narrative. His efforts to reconstruct his family’s history enable the reader to make connections between Holocaust memory and dictatorship memory.

Dr. Valente emphasized the chronological significance of the political system of Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s as an integral part of the story. She drew parallels between the unfolding national and political landscape of the country when the Klagsbrunn family arrived in Rio in 1939, before the start of WWII, as similar to the military dictatorships in later decades.

In Brazil, as in other countries all over the world during this time, experienced an atmosphere of heightened nationalism and latent antisemitism that manifested itself in a series of repressive legislative measures enacted by the regime to maintain social control at the hands of the institutionalized power structures of the state. Consequently, the creation of multiple clandestine organizations for monitoring the activities of so-called subversive elements led to massive arrests, imprisonment, and torture by state-sponsored authorities commenced.

Victor, along with his wife Martha and seven others were arrested by the police, accused of involvement in an underground revolutionary group plotting to overthrow the government and were blindfolded, forced into their undergarments, and taken by force to an undisclosed location where they endured torture during interrogations. In a stroke of luck, Martha’s father was able to bribe officials to have them released, and afterward, the couple embarked on a long journey of continuous exile and flight from dictatorships across various Latin American countries until they were able to escape to Europe.

Eventually, Victor and Martha were able to return to Brazil in 1986 where he began work on reconstructing his family’s history in which persecution and exile emerged as a dominant theme. It was through this work that he was able to make connections between his own experiences of state-sponsored violence to other members of his family.

Dr. Valente highlighted K (2015) by Bernardo Kucinski as a second novel that exemplifies the work of Jewish authors in Brazil. The book tells the story of a Jewish father searching for his daughter who had been disappeared by the state. In K, the author employs real-life facts, such as the disappearances of Brazilian citizens to not only tell the story but as well to inform readers about such events.

The agony of the father drives the narrative, and it is through the recollection of traumatic memories from his youth that were previously lost to time that re-emerges during the search for his beloved missing daughter that he connects the past with the future. The use of foreshadowing throughout the novel uniquely blends the past and the present, allowing the father as well as the reader to draw parallels between past historical traumas and the reality of the present. He explicitly states that the current situation is a continuation of the Holocaust for him, and in this way, he utilizes the history and the memory of the Holocaust to understand and process the disappearance of his daughter and eventually come to the realization that what happened to his little girl will likely remain unknown and that similar to his experiences during the Holocaust, that he will likely never know and never have closure.