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A Journey from Guns to Books
Gabriel Sanders
When the Mexican-American author Ilan Stavans started writing seriously, in his early 20s, he had an epiphany, one he describes in his latest book. "Yes," he thought, "literature was the answer � my Promised Land, an authentic home."
A home indeed: A regular contributor to outlets such as The Nation and the Forward, the editor of a quarterly cultural review of his own, a professor of Latin American letters at Amherst College and the author or editor of some 17 titles, Stavans is among the most prolific literary critics in America today. What's more, he turned 40 only this year, and, even more impressively, started writing in English seriously only about a decade ago.
Ilan Stavchansky Slomianski is a native of Mexico City, where he was born to a middle-class family of Polish and Ukrainian extraction. The son of a well-known actor (Stavans was his stage name), Ilan went to Yiddish schools and, as a teenager, was active in a Jewish vigilante group called Bitakhon (Hebrew for "security"). After completing his college studies in Mexico, he came to New York to study medieval Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1985. From there he moved to Columbia University, where, in 1990, he earned a PhD in Latin American literature. His Amherst appointment came in 1993, and his most widely taught book, "The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America," appeared two years later. Last year Routledge issued a collection of essays and short stories titled "The Essential Ilan Sta-vans," a remarkable achievement for any writer, to say nothing of one still in his 30s.
But Stavans's road to prominence hasn't been entirely smooth. Some American scholars of Latino culture � particularly those from the generation before his, the generation that started the discipline from scratch � have at times been uneasy with Stavans's meteoric rise. "We were out there banging on the doors of the M.L.A. [the Modern Language Association] to let us in," Nicolas Kanellos, a professor at the University of Houston, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Ilan Stavans comes in, and suddenly he's everywhere."
Such criticism began in earnest in 1997 when W.W. Norton, the foremost publisher of literary canons, selected Stavans, then 36, to edit a major anthology of Latino writing. As a middle-class Mexican and not an American-born Chicano, detractors saw him as an interloper, an inauthentic spokes-man for the Latino experience. "He doesn't come from within the culture," said Tey Diana Rebolledo, a professor at the University of New Mexico, to The New York Times.
In such criticisms one can often hear echoes of the scorn to which the first American-Jewish professors of English were subjected, 60 years ago. But beyond questions of age, class and Jewishness, the most likely explanation for the hostility aroused by Stavans is simple envy. For one thing, the quality of his work aside, he writes more than the rest. "If people complain, then they should sit down and produce," said Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, a professor of English at the University of Texas, to The New York Times. Stavans, meanwhile, has tried not to let his critics deter him. "Some people attack me because I wasn't born in the barrio," he has said. "I've been attacked for not being dark-skinned and for being young. If you paid attention to all this, you would need to live in a permanent state of apology."
With the exception of those ruffled by the mere fact that he has penned yet another book, Stavans's usual critics are unlikely to object to his latest, "On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language." Less an examination of the larger themes of Hispanic life and more a probing of his own private journey, the book is too personal, too inward-looking, too much concerned with Judaism, to warrant attacks on the usual grounds.
At its core, the book is a story of conversion. In it Stavans moves from a Latin American brand of Jewishness, with its focus on security and self-preservation, to a North American variety, one that provides space for exploring Judaism from within. "I wanted to be a Jewish writer," Stavans tells me by phone from his home in Amherst, "and there was just no room for that in Mexico."
Stavans's Mexico is a place for fear, el miedo. The narrative repeatedly returns to an image of a pistol his father kept tucked away in a safe inside his closet. Guns figure prominently throughout the book's Mexi-can sections. "I had seen them in neighbors' houses," he writes, "for sale in stores. More significant even, as a Jew I had heard discussion about their use in acts of self-defense against anti-Semites. The gun became symbolic of my entire Mexican upbringing."
Its place, in Stavans's adulthood, was taken
by books. His latest opens with the adult Stavans boxing up his library in preparation for his move from New York to Amherst. While packing he ruminates on how both he and his library have changed during his first eight years in the U.S. "We began modestly and now we hardly recognize each other," he writes. By the time of the move he not only owns 60 cartons' worth of books, he's already written a couple of titles of his own.
THE CHRONICLE OF A SEARCH for a writer's voice, "On Borrowed Words" is a book of many voices. Not linear or unified, it skips back and forth through time, often revisiting significant images from different perspectives. "My book is not really a memoir in the traditional sense, but a series of snapshots," Stavans writes. It is "a disjointed picture, the way life really is � incongruous."
The book unfolds in six chapters, each a sort of dance with a key figure from his life: his Yiddish-speaking grandmother, his actor father, his stuttering brother, the Mexican-American writer Richard Rodr�g-uez � as well as earlier incarnations of the author himself. Stavans synchronizes his steps to the rhythms of his partners � speaks to them in their language � and, in return, they lift a mirror so as to let the author better see himself.
Although written in English, with a sprinkling of Spanish, the book is infused with the spirit of many languages. "To succeed," Stavans writes, his memoir "ought to read as if already in translation � a translation without an original." The book Stavans would have liked to have written, his memoir's Platonic ideal, he says, is "a book of music � a multilingual symphony."
Music and along with it the concept of performing for an audience are among Stavans's overriding preoccupations. In sharp contrast with the work he does, in isolation, some of which will be seen one day, most of which will not, he marvels over the immediacy that communing with an audience can offer. While his brother, Dari�n, lacks Ilan's way with words, he is nevertheless endowed with the gift of music: He is a brilliant pianist � a gift Ilan envies. He similarly admires and resents his actor father, Abraham, whose happiest moments come not from his family but from being on the stage. Perhaps the defining experience of Stavans's upbringing was the difficulty he had in pleasing a man whose purpose in life was the pleasing of others.
"On Borrowed Words" is a book about searching. It is, specifically, the story of a search for a mentor, a great teacher. Stavans's father had just such a figure in his life, a Japanese actor who found a home in Mexico and whom Abraham idolized. But Stavans's own life, as told in his book, offers no corresponding figure. When asked about this point, Stavans is pleased � indeed, as a teacher is when asked an unexpected question � but he is nevertheless prepared with a quick answer. To whom does one turn when the search for a master is unsatisfied? "To God," he replies.
Among the book's surprises is that, unlike most mainstream literary critics, Stavans writes the word "God" not with an "o" but, the way pious Jews often do, with a hyphen: G-d. "It's a form of reverence," he says. Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe � two of Stavans's heroes � would never have written the word this way. But Stavans, although he calls himself a "skeptical" one, is a believer. In a completely different context, Stavans has written about "living in the hyphen" between Latin and American. What his new book shows is that he, in his own unique way, also lives in the hyphen between "G" and "d."
"I would say that my quest to become a writer and my search for God go hand in hand," Stavans tells me. "Literature is in some ways a form of prayer. Whenever I sit and write, God is there somewhere. Every time." Gabriel Sanders is a writer in New York. (September 24, 2001)
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