Teresa Porzecanski illustrates well here how this sense of exile is central to both Jewish and Afro-American identity. Angela is also transported back to her ancestral homeland; she sees images, hears voices, feels the presence of wild animals

Teresa Porzecanski, Sun Inventions and Perfumes of Carthage: Two Novellas, Trans. by Johnny Payne and Phyllis Silverstein, University of New Mexico Press, 2000.      


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Teresa Porzecanski brings a fresh new voice to the Jewish Latin America series. She writes from Uruguay about the multicultural experience of Jewish immigrants in Montevideo. Her exotic characters from Europe, Africa, and the New World bring together and struggle with the mixture of Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Latin American cultures. Porzecanski is herself the daughter of immigrants who came to Montevideo in 1926 from the Baltics and Syria. Sun Inventions, her first novel, published in 1982, is a semiautobiographical story of an immigrant family from the multifaceted perspective of a woman who is an academic, a mother, a writer searching for meaning in the universe. Perfumes of Carthage (1994) tells the stories of Lunita Mualdeb and her Sephardic family and Angela Tejera [Weaver], whose name was given to her African grandfather by a Brazilian slave owner.


Uruguayan writer Teresa Porzecanski embodies a lesser-known facet of the Latin American experience: the Jewish immigrant living amidst the continent's staunch Catholicism and Indo-African cultures. Raised in Montevideo the daughter of both Ashkenazim and Sephardim parents, she grew up in a polyglot world of Spanish, Yiddish, Arabic and German.
A teacher in Sun Inventions (1982) struggles to get her students to ask, "What elements are necessary to elaborate the interior structure of a thing?" But the author's own unsure strategies for pursuing this investigation leave the text uneven. The story meanders from straightforward prose to magic realism, where objects have a life or essence of their own, to a Sollers-like style of long run-on sentences:

. . . always be concise clear and simple, clear simple and concise, that is, never any ambiguous answers don't admit contradictions or opposition the third caveat is the key to locking up the Universe and shutting up yourself inside of that which you know with all assurance of begin able to explain the elements by the simple movement of shifting your position inside the established scheme of things very important don't forget schemes never be vague reduce the complex to the simple . . .

The next sentence after this muddle says "everything else is word play." And that's the weakness here. As Henry James might say, Porzecanski tells us, she doesn't show us, in her words "the symbol of other worlds fallen from an ancestral and already exiled paradise."
Perfumes of Carthage (1994) relates the lives of the Mualdebs, a Sephardim family living in Uruguay during the 1930s, and that of their servant Angela Tejara, a descendent of African slaves. Characters live between reality and myth, but always in the diaspora. Traveling back and forth over time, the matriarch Nazira sees herself in ancient Ur walking through "forbidden gardens . . . laid to waste by the expulsion of all humanity." One of her daughters will envision the voyage to the Americas over the seas that seemed "the waters of an ancient flood, still-turbulent waters bearing memories of the first global destruction."
Porzecanski illustrates well here how this sense of exile is central to both Jewish and Afro-American identity. Angela is also transported back to her ancestral homeland; she sees images, hears voices, feels the presence of wild animals. The din grows louder until she is caught up in the whirl of dancers who invoke the tribe's spirits, "attempting to reincarnate them, bring them back to life."
This story comes closer to finding that "place where everything had already been said." - Jay Miskowiec
https://www.raintaxi.com/sun-inventions-and-perfumes-of-carthage-two-novellas/



Teresa Porzecanski, Sun Inventions, 2103.


PORZECANSKI, TERESA (1945– ), Uruguayan anthropologist, poet, and writer of Ashkenazi and Syrian descent. Her professional works includes nine books on anthropology and social sciences, among them Historias de vida de inmigrantes judíos al Uruguay ("Life Stories of Jewish Immigrants to Uruguay," 1986), based on oral history. Porzecanski is lecturer and researcher in social sciences at the Universidad de la República, Montevideo. Her novels and short stories frequently deal with small, unimportant people in their desperate struggle for happiness and sense in life, which is frequently related to mythic motifs and impulses deeply rooted in the human soul. Her Jewish characters (Ashkenazi and Sephardi, following her own roots) show the transformations of traditions and beliefs in a modern and often alien environment, and the forging of a new, Latin American Jewish identity. Her main books are Construcciones ("Constructions," 1979); La invención de los soles (1982; Sun Inventions and Perfumes of Carthage, Two Novellas, 2000); La respiraciónes una fragua ("Breath Is a Forge," 1989); Mesías en Montevideo ("Messiah in Montevideo," 1989); Perfumes de Cartago (1994); Una novela erótica ("An Erotic Novel," 1986); La piel del alma ("The Soul's Skin," 1996); Nupcias en familia y otros cuentos ("Marriage in the Family and Other Stories," 1998); and Felicidades Fugaces ("Shooting Happiness," 2002). She has received many national and international awards, including the Fulbright and Guggenheim scholarships. Her works have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, and Dutch, and included in anthologies of Uruguayan, Jewish, and women's writing.