A teshuvá em cabelos de fogo de Marcos Serruya: o Shaday herdado e o retorno á cultura judaica na Amazônia paraense

Abstract

The novel shows the saga of Ana Julia, Polish Jewish girl deceived and forced into prostitution in the Amazon. Ionathan searches in the past history of Ana, his great-grandmother, any document connecting her to the Jewish culture in the hope of proving himself a Jew. Prostitution will keep her distanced from the Sephardic Jewish community, but Ionathan, conscious of his origins, and holding the inherited Shadai, searches for his and Ana’s teshuvah, as in atonement. The book shows signs of deletion and cultural hybridity experienced by Jews in the Amazon, since the first immigration. Escaped from the ethno-religious persecution in the Iberian Peninsula, many Jews eradicated in Morocco, immigrating to Brazil, afterwards. The memory of a Lusitanian past gained strength and fervour fostered by the Jewish Sephardic imaginary. The sense of being Jewish sought by Ionathan reflects what many ancestors try to preserve. These echoes of Jewishness in the Amazon – either as preservation or cultural return movement – are the main focus of this article based on the story of Ana and Ionathan’s investigations. For that purpose, we rely on theoretical and historical documents by Reginaldo Jonas Heller, Henrique Veltman, Samuel Benchimol, Moacyr Scliar, Paul Johnson among others.