In 1938, a young Hungarian couple, Nathan and Mathilde Laita, arrived in Recife. They were registered as visitors ‘in transit’, but would stay in Brazil for the rest of their lives. Sixty years on, their Brazilian-born granddaughter, Sandra Kogut, requests a Hungarian passport in order to gain access to the European Union. Her long journey across countries and embassies to obtain the necessary documents is described in Um Passaporte Húngaro (A Hungarian Passport), which Sandra Kogut directed herself in 2001.
As a documentary, this film illustrates the more general phenomenon of ‘reversed migration’: the return by the descendants of immigrants to their countries of origin. Accelerated by the economic crisis that hit Latin America in the late 1990s, reversed migration in many cases assumes the pragmatic form described in Um Passaporte Húngaro: the request of a passport enables the applicant to gain access to the European Union, but does not necessarily imply his or her actual return to the country of origin. In the case of Sandra Kogut, for instance, her commitment to a future life in Hungary remains unclear as she resided in France at the moment of application. Whichever the case, passport requests involve questions of transnationality, as they rely on the figure of border crossing. At the same time, they tend to raise issues of memory as well, as the (actual or potential) return to the country of origin is generally paralleled by another kind of return: to an often forgotten past, which survives in family archives and a handful of personal memories.
This article confronts two stories about the request of a European passport by a Latin American citizen: the first is the documentary mentioned above, Um Passaporte Húngaro; the second, El abrazo partido (Lost Embrace), is a film made in 2003 by Argentine director Daniel Burman about a young man living in Buenos Aires who requests a Polish passport. Both films are set against the background of the economic crisis of the late 1990s, and both represent the figure of the grandmother as the only surviving witness of the original journey of emigration. What is more, both films deal with Jewish-Latin American migration within the context of the Holocaust, and gear this problematic towards other, more contemporary stories of displacement. They are, then, interesting material for reflection upon ‘multidirectional memory’, a concept developed by Michael Rothberg to refer to the dynamic interaction between memories belonging to different times, places and groups.Reference Rothberg1 However, as I will argue, the two films show different ways in which this concept operates on the question of transnationality: whereas Um Passaporte Húngaro puts multidirectional memory at work in order to critique and deconstruct the nation, El abrazo partido uses it to opposite ends: to reaffirm and rebuild it.
Um Passaporte Húngaro
The critical view of nationality that emerges in Um Passaporte Húngaro is suggested from the start. In the opening scene, Sandra Kogut makes a phone call to two different Hungarian Embassies and asks them the same question: ‘Can a person of Brazilian nationality, whose grandfather is Hungarian, become Hungarian?’ In the first case, the answer is ‘no’. In the second, the answer is ‘yes’. Similar contradictions mark the official discourse on nationality throughout: some officials believe obtaining a Hungarian passport implies renouncing the original (Brazilian) one, whilst others argue that you can keep it; some say the procedure takes a matter of days, others believe it to last years; some claim that it depends upon proven command of the Hungarian language, others trivialise the language exam as a mere formality. The journey Sandra undertakes to obtain the necessary credentials for her application is then also an administrative and bureaucratic expedition, leading through a plethora of embassies, consulates and registration services, and at times acquiring proportions that are nothing short of Kafkaesque.
Contributing to this Kafkaesque dimension are the many erasures, omissions and contradictions that mark the official records of the past. Time and again, these palimpsest-like documents need the helping hand of the original witnesses in order to yield their secrets. In this context, the documentary sets up a dynamic interplay between oral testimonies and written documents as ‘media of memory’, a term referring to the means by which ‘mnemonic contents […] travel through media history: from orality, to writing to print, film and the Internet’.Reference Erll2 Whereas the written documents appear as faulty and obfuscating, the oral witnesses stand out for their accuracy and intelligence. Sandra Kogut’s grandmother – and to a lesser degree her great great uncle in Budapest – appears as the prime keeper of memory, the provider of missing pieces in the puzzle. Significantly, the documentary is dedicated to her.
Sandra’s bureaucratic journey, which implies a search for the necessary documents in Hungary and Brazil, is also a journey into the past. Through multiple interviews and encounters, her grandparents’ emigration to Brazil gradually appears as a complex and multi-layered3 experience. The most important common denominator between these layers, which refer not only to the Hungary of the 1930s, but also to other periods, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or communism, is the history of anti-Semitism. This history speaks through various elements: the letter ‘k’ imprinted on Nathan and Mathilde Laita’s Hungarian passports, preventing them from ever returning; the comment ‘one dirty Jew less’, which accompanied the handing over of the visa in Budapest; the difficulty in proving Sandra’s Hungarian origins because no trace is left of her grandfather’s birth and home address in Budapest; the name changes her family underwent under political pressures (Laita>Löwinger>Leviathas). These elements show the memory of European–Latin American migration to be entangled in various ways with the history of Jewish diaspora and grant this documentary about the search for a passport an almost detective-like quality.
Besides the multi-layered aspect of this memory, the documentary underscores the transnational dimension of the experience of anti-Semitism. When the Hungarian couple finally arrived in Recife in 1938, they were originally denied access because of a secret, anti-Semitic circular issued by the Brazilian government. Once they did eventually set foot on shore, they came up against new forms of discrimination, probably due to the rise of Brazilian nationalism, which May Bletz situates in the same decade.Reference Bletz4 As Hungarian immigrants, they were considered to be ‘the lowest of the low’, and taught always to look upwards in awe when pronouncing the word ‘Brazil’. The memory of Jewish–Latin American migration then intersects with the history of Brazilian nation-building, showing it from one of its less appealing sides. But it also expands, in multidirectional fashion, into other stories of displacement, set in contemporary times. Sandra’s wanderings through the embassies give way to fortuitous encounters with other people requesting passports. There is the testimony of a young Hungarian man, married to a Romanian wife, who tells Sandra that their ancestors lived in Transylvania, a region once connecting Hungary to Romania and now posing numerous issues of conflicting or multiple nationalities; or the one of the Russian man she meets during the final ceremony, whose nationality has changed four times in the past ten years under the pressure of continuous re-territorialisations. Lacking any reference to Jewish identity, these flashes of other displaced lives inject into the main narrative an element of ‘disparity’, which justifies the use of the term ‘multidirectional memory’, defined by Michael Rothberg as ‘the productive interplay of disparate acts of remembrance’.Reference Rothberg5
The productive dimension of multidirectional memory has been aptly summarised as ‘one memory (operating) as prism for another’Reference Assman6 and this shows in the documentary in two ways. On the one hand, multidirectional memory partly deprives the Jewish–Latin American family narrative of its historical specificity by inserting it, according to a logic of equation,Reference Rothberg7 into a general narrative of displacement, with universal dimensions. On the other hand, the association of contemporary stories of displacement with this particular family story, so heavily burdened by anti-Semitic memories, opens up its potential for a political reading, directly affecting the concept of nationality. Instead of subsuming under its general heading the different forms of identity to which a community can adhere (ethnic, religious, cultural…), the concept of nationality is shown to cut across, rather than bind together, different expressions of collective identity, and deploys, through the association with the Jewish family narrative, its repressive and pernicious potential.8
The multidirectional quality of Um Passaporte Húngaro is also traceable in the use of different languages (Portuguese, French, Hungarian, Hebrew) and the insertion of Hungarian intertitles which, rather than providing information about what is to come, evoke the irreducible otherness of the community of which Sandra tries to become a part. Looking at the film from this perspective, and keeping in mind Rothberg’s ‘axis of comparison’ for multidirectional memories, the documentary aptly navigates between the aforementioned logic of equation (through the idea of displacement) and a logic of differentiation (through its multilingual quality).Reference Rothberg9 Multidirectionality – as a spatially dynamic metaphor10 – is also related to the documentary’s remarkable foregrounding of movement, a strategy that underscores the intrinsically dynamic quality of the act of remembrance (Ref. Reference Erll2, p. 12). Moreover, the figure of movement presents specific features in the documentary that contribute to the overall impression of a world with many cross-roads, but no centres.
The foregrounding first of all relates to the motif of the journey which, in Um Passaporte Húngaro, does not follow a clear pattern, but rather zigzags along. Its point of departure is unclear, although we might suppose it to be France. In a parallel manner, the centre of enunciation – Sandra Kogut – is consistently kept out of focus, and any personal question concerning her motives to become Hungarian is left unanswered. It is as though the centre of this narrative were left blank, allowing the inscription of other personal stories, or suggestively pointing to the absence of a centre in the world at large. A second form of foregrounding is achieved through the abundant use of travelling shots. Whereas they normally relate to a movement forward, the travelling shots in this documentary are filmed backwards, as though we were leaving the country we are visiting, instead of entering it. In combination with the aging, yellowish look given to several shots, and the melancholic Jewish-Hungarian background music, the travelling shots seem to conflate the perspective of the person entering Hungary – Sandra Kogut in 2000 – with the one of the original emigrants leaving – Nathan and Mathilde Laita in 1938 – which amounts to a deliberate blurring of temporal perspectives. Furthermore, travelling shots normally convey the sensation of the person (or vehicle) moving through the world, whereas the ones in Um Passaporte Húngaro project this kinetic sensation onto the world itself: it is not us who are moving, it is the world itself which moves. This idea is rendered explicit in a scene in which Sandra’s grandmother comments on the many changes her world suddenly experienced in the 1930s: ‘You cannot imagine what it was like to have your life established, with a job and a family, and then suddenly, from one moment to another, everything changes’. Through multidirectional resonance, this idea of historical change also expands to the contemporary period, in which once again everybody seems to be ‘on the move’ (as the crowded embassies indicate), albeit now under the effect of accelerated globalisation.
Movement also marks the final scene, with Sandra Kogut sitting in a train, the destination of which is not indicated. A few moments before, we had seen her being granted a Hungarian passport in an official ceremony, although the document turns out to be valid for only a year. The final scene, with the moving train, is then symbolic in terms of the open ending of this documentary: Sandra’s journey has not ended, but then again neither is it certain that she will pursue it any further.
El abrazo partido
Whereas Jewish identity is a theme that only gradually comes to the fore in Um Passaporte Húngaro, El abrazo partido connects the main character, Ariel Makaroff, to Jewish traditions and customs right from the start. He is the son of Sonia Makaroff, who – after her divorce – is the sole keeper of an underwear shop called Creaciones Elías, after her former husband. Sonia Makaroff’s personal speciality is baking Lekach, a honey cake typical of Azkhenazi Jews, which she generously shares with her friends and acquaintances in the galería, many of whom have Jewish names. The galería (a commercial shopping arcade) is situated near the synagogue, where the rabbi wed and divorced Ariel’s parents and oversaw Ariel’s circumcision as a baby. Moreover, Ariel’s mother attends a course in Hebrew dancing. While Sonia Makaroff seems quite at ease with her Jewish–Argentine life, Ariel, on the contrary, is portrayed as a young man in his 20s who continuously seems dissatisfied with life and tries to escape from it. This is the reason why he requests a Polish passport, and pays a visit to his grandmother – the only surviving witness of the original journey that brought his family from Poland to Argentina in 1939.
Compared with Mathilde Laita, Ariel’s grandmother is a very reluctant oral witness of the past. Traumatised by her experiences in the Warsaw ghetto, she consistently avoids the topic and even attempts to burn her Polish passport in the kitchen. Add to this the protagonist’s own lack of genuine interest in his Polish past, and one might argue, upon initial inspection, that memory plays a much smaller part in this film than in the previous one. However, the grandmother unmistakably shares in the collective memory of Jewish–European emigration through a specific talent she has: singing. Her Yiddish songs present memory as a living and celebratory practice, turned to the present rather than to the past, and entailing not only the possibility of bridging distances in time and space, but also between fiction and reality: the closing song is performed by Rosita Londner, a well-known Jewish-Argentine singer who plays the role of the grandmother. The singing, together with the customs of other characters (dancing, cake baking, circumcising babies) underscores the importance in this film of what Astrid Erll has called the ‘carriers of memory’: a category applied to ‘individuals who share in collective images and narratives of the past, who practice mnemonic rituals, display an inherited habitus, and can draw on repertoires of explicit and implicit knowledge’ (Ref. Reference Erll2, p. 12). Memory does play an important role in this film then, but it does so in a different way than in Um Passaporte Húngaro: through practices and rituals, rather than through testimonies and searches.
The main character Ariel does not, however, particularly identify with these practices. He generally assumes the position of ‘onlooker’, whether he watches his mother dance, his grandmother sing, or himself being circumcised as a baby on a video-recording. His uneasiness with life – symbolically expressed by his inability to smile – also accounts for a characteristic this film shares with Um Passaporte Húngaro: the foregrounding of movement. Ariel is constantly on the move, walking hurriedly between the galería and his house, or simply roaming the streets of Buenos Aires. Whereas in the previous film it was the world that was moving, here the camera remains fixed upon a character who himself is on the move in a world that appears relatively static, except for some references to the economic crisis. At times, the restlessness of the character is transferred onto the camera itself, as demonstrated in various scenes filmed with a nervous, constantly mobile hand-held camera. This focus on a character moving and this use of a mobile camera express the essence of Ariel’s being: a character adrift. He is unable to settle down with the love of his life (Estela), unable to study his true vocation (architecture), and he takes the decision to start an emigration procedure for Poland.
The foregrounding of movement also activates the figure of the journey, but contrary to Um Passaporte Húngaro, in which a journey was actually undertaken in the context of the passport application, El abrazo partido incorporates the journey as the prospect of emigration. Another difference is that the journey is not circuitous, as in the previous case, but articulated according to a straight line, with a negative point of departure. This is expressed through the emphasis placed on the idea of running in this film. Apart from the fact that it is the central activity of a yearly event organised by the galería, we see Ariel running three times in a reaction of panic and fear. The first time, he leaves his house in a rush after having bumped into his mother’s new boyfriend, Marcos, and while running he murmurs to himself that he now urgently has to go to Poland, which explicitly links emigration to running away. The second and third times we see him running while he tries to avoid his father, who has recently and quite unexpectedly returned to Buenos Aires from abroad. Rather than a positive desire for Europe, it is this negative relationship with Buenos Aires, and with his father in particular, that explains his emigration plans.
As running away implies a clear (and negative) point of departure, but no clear point of destination, it is only logical that Ariel’s emigration plans remain vague. In fact, he hardly knows anything about Poland, and when asked by the Polish consul for his reason for going there, he just recites some clichés found on the internet. Neither is he interested in accepting his father’s repeated invitations to come and live with him in Israel – the country to which his father emigrated after participating in the Yom Kippur War. Once again, several historical experiences are briefly revisited through the common denominator of Jewish experience (the Holocaust, Polish emigration and Israeli nation-building) and start interacting in a multidirectional way. In particular, a critique on ‘patriotism’ is performed through the figure of the father, whose heroic deed as a volunteer in the battle of the Yom Kippur turns out to have been inspired by a rather banal problem in the couple: his inability to cope with his wife’s short affair with another shopkeeper in the galería. The productive dimension of this anecdote, as a multidirectional memory, resides in the fact that it suggestively also undermines possible readings that glorify the Holocaust-emigration: if there are no real heroes, there are no real victims either.
Rather than depriving him of an illusion, Ariel’s discovery that his father is not a hero but a human being draws him nearer to him. He now understands that his father was, in a way, trying to do something similar to him: run away in disgust from a difficult situation, by emigrating. Consequently, he drops his request for a Polish passport, and decides to stay in Buenos Aires, to which his father – tired of waiting for his son to visit him in Israel – has also returned with the intention of staying. The figure of the character fleeing is then replaced by the one returning, and the reconciliation between father and son is sealed by their mutual embrace – an embrace which, besides completing the father physically (as he had lost his left arm) – also symbolises the closed, happy ending of this film.
The newfound union coincides with the reunion of the family and takes place in the galería, indicating its pivotal role. This brings us back to the beginning of the film, when Ariel takes us, in a documentary-style, around the shops in the galería. What is striking in this initial sequence is the fact that all of the shops are run by immigrants; besides people of Jewish-European descent, there are also Italians, Koreans and Lithuanians. In a fashion similar to that of Um Passaporte Húngaro, a particular family narrative on Jewish-Latin American migration gives way to other narratives of displacement, allowing once again for a multidirectional reading of memory. However, if Um Passaporte Húngaro confronted us with a world without a centre, El abrazo partido emphasises the idea of a centre, either as the negative point from which one runs away, or the positive point one eventually chooses as home.
Moreover, in a metonymical way, the galería activates one of the basic images of Argentine nationhood, as a country of immigrants (Ref. Reference Bletz4, p. 1). Rather than invoking the image of a ‘pure’ culture with clear ‘roots’, the galería – as a ‘diasporic space of internal difference’Reference Andermann11 – allows for hybrid constructions of nationhood that integrate, rather than exclude, experiences of otherness. In this multicultural environment Jewish customs and traditions live on, perhaps in a more authentic way than in the supposed and artificially reclaimed home country Israel. As Ariel clearly states to the Polish consul, who asks if his family is ‘Israeli’: ‘No, certainly not. We are all Jewish people, but we are not all Israelis’. Rather than through positive definitions, community and nationhood in this film are suggestively associated with negative definitions (‘not to be Polish’, ‘not being Israeli’), and avoid any affirmative language that might turn exclusionist. Accommodating people marked by difference, who carry with them their unhealable wounds from the past, the galería operates as a metonym for a nation that is a country of immigrants, of people who have all, at one moment or another, felt the need to run away from a certain place, but who have succeeded in integrating this into traditions of their own, as is symbolically expressed in the yearly running contest that unites them all. However, as the double meaning of the title expresses so well, their embrace not only unites them, but also reminds them of their essential incompleteness; El abrazo partido evoking the shared character of their embrace (‘partido’ for ‘compartido’), as well as its dividing character (‘partido’ for ‘divided’).
Conclusion
In the past few years, the field of memory studies has witnessed two important challenges under the influence of globalisation. One is the acknowledgement of the potentially productive encounter of several, disparate memories, referred to as ‘multidirectional memory’ (Michael Rothberg); the other is the recognition of the intrinsically mobile character of any act of remembrance, summarised in the definition of memory as movement (Astrid Erll). This essay demonstrates the compatibility of the two approaches by relating the multidirectional aspect of remembrance in two particular films to a poetics of mobility. This is not to assert that the two approaches are identical, only to suggest that an attention to figurations of movement proves a helpful tool for tracking and understanding multidirectional memory, a concept that has sometimes been accused of analytical elusiveness.12
Most importantly, this essay has analysed how multidirectional memory concretely impacts upon images of nationhood in artistic works. Um Passaporte Húngaro and El abrazo partido both tell a story about the request for a passport. But whereas passports normally enable a journey that follows receipt of the passport, these films centre on the travels and movement that the application for the passport entails. In both cases, the desire to emigrate works as a trigger for memories of the past to surface and attracts other stories of displacement, that articulate themselves around the central narrative of European-Jewish-Latin-American emigration in an associative, multidirectional way. This multidirectionality is diegetically expressed by the emphasis on the motif of the journey (as search or flight) and cinematographically by the use of travelling shots and moving cameras.
Both films use multidirectional memory in opposite ways to dwell on transnationality. In Um Passaporte Húngaro, memory is disruptive of any idea of nationality, showing its inner contradictions, temporary and flexible character and its potentially repressive effects regarding claims of other communities (ethnic/cultural/religious). This disruptive character is at one with the transnational poetics deployed in this film, which have no centre of enunciation, no fixed point of departure, and no unified language. In El abrazo partido, transnationality is appropriated to opposing ends: to reaffirm the idea of a home, the galería functioning metonymically as a symbol of Argentina as a nation of immigrants, who almost all end up speaking the same language, even if they keep their own traditions. This reaffirmation of the nation as home is diegetically expressed through the importance of the family: the return of the father from abroad; the fact that the main character renounces his foreign passport; the transformation of the initial emigrational movement as running into a yearly festive activity, during which neighbours run alongside one another, in the same direction and towards a symbolic point of destination: the finish.
A comparison between these films shows, therefore, that multidirectional memory can be at work in two ways. In Um Passaporte Húngaro, multidirectional memory is centrifugal, always avoiding a stable point of location, and therefore leaving the centre of enunciation also out of focus. In El abrazo partido, the concept works in the opposite way, helping to rebuild a notion of community in a centripetal manner that presents the nation as home. However, the analysis also indicates that both films converge in their rejection of a closed conception of the nation, conceived in terms of purity and based on the idea of roots. Herein resides their shared multidirectional quality.
Nadia Lie is Professor of Latin American literature and film at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where she directs the European project TRANSIT (http://projecttransit.eu). She is the author of a book on Cuban cultural politics (Transición y transacción, Hispamérica (Maryland), 1996) and (co-) editor of several volumes in the field of comparative literature and cultural studies (e.g. El juego con los estereotipos: la redefinición de la identidad hispánica en la era postnacional, Peter Lang, 2012). She is currently working on the figure of mobility in Spanish and Latin American film.
