that this tribute no longer refers to an out-of-print book. To recuperate On a Clear April Morning for the Brazilian public, the Marc Chagall Institute provides our culture with an invaluable service, and one that also supports well the goals of the Institute itself. But more than this, it pays tribute to the memory of this unforgettable figure, the Jewish-Brazilian writer Marcos Iolovitch.
Translator’s Preface
Marcos Iolovitch, author of On a Clear April Morning, was an avid student of the great philosophers. But he believed that to reach “true wisdom” we need to open our windows and observe the “subtle shades of reality that envelope” us.1 In this autobiographical novel, in which a young man seeks to find a righteous and fulfilling path, we watch this charming and caring protagonist discover his own wisdom through the realities that envelop him, the realities of Jewish immigrants in southern Brazil during the first decades of the twentieth century.
As the readers of On a Clear April Morning will learn, this story of immigration to Brazil began as a dream for Marcos Iolovitch’s father, Yossef, in Zagradowka, a small village one hundred and seventy miles northeast of Odessa in the southern Ukrainian province of Kherson. The publication of this work in English is the fulfillment of a dream that began for me nearly thirty years ago, in Porto Alegre, a small city in Southern Brazil (pop. 1.5 million), five hundred miles south of São Paulo. Porto Alegre, where I served as the public affairs officer in the US Consulate, is the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, home of those that are affectionately called Gaúchos (Gau-oo-chos).
Rio Grande is strongly tied to its European roots as revealed in the faces, surnames, and cuisine alike.2 A land of immigrants, Germans, Jews, Arabs, Italians, Poles, Portuguese, Rio Grande “has created a . . . peaceful marriage of cultures.”3 It is a place where, as Iolovitch relates, a youngster from a Yiddish speaking family could have as his best friend a son of German immigrants, a place where education could begin in a Jewish “cheder” and later be influenced by Jesuit teachers.
Here you won’t find any of Brazil’s famed beaches. But you will find, perched on hilltops with breathtaking sunsets over the Guaiba River, a city where civic life, education, and intellectual pursuits matter.
In Porto Alegre, political engagement is a highly held value. It is the capital of a state with only seven percent of the national population, but a state that has given Brazil over twenty percent of its presidents.
Porto Alegre is home to two of Brazil’s finest universities, both noted for their teaching and the quantity and excellence of their humanistic and scientific research: the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), rated the best private university in the country.4
This translation of On a Clear April Morning is the result of the work of another Gaucho center of intellectual inquiry, The Marc Chagall Cultural Institute.5 Founded in 1985 by Jewish intellectuals and business people, many descendants of immigrants who followed the same path as the Iolovitch family, Instituto Cultural Marc Chagall seeks to preserve and disseminate all aspects of Jewish culture and history. In 1991 the Institute published Caminhos da esperanca/Pathways of Hope,6 a bilingual history of Jews in Rio Grande do Sul. It was written by the critically acclaimed Brazilian Jewish author, Moacyr Scliar, who the New York Times described as “one of Brazil’s most celebrated novelists and short-story writers”.7 Moacyr asked me to edit the English text. He also gave me the chance to share his love for Iolovitch’s novel, which had inspired his own body of work.
Caminhos da esperanca begins its historical essay with the beautiful opening lines of this novel, “On a clear April morning in the year 19— when the steppes had begun to turn green again upon the joyful entrance of Spring, there appeared scattered about in Zagradowka, a small and cheerful Russian village in the province of Kherson, beautiful brochures with colored illustrations describing the excellent climate, the fertile land, the rich and varied fauna, and the beautiful and exuberant flora, of a vast and faraway country of America, named—BRASIL.” And throughout Caminhos da esperanca Iolovitch’s descriptive prose is cited.
I read On a Clear April Morning at one sitting. Delighted by the mixture of lyricism and history that Iolovitch gives us, I wanted the world to have this book. I promised myself that someday I would translate it and obtain its publication in English. That day has finally come.
On a Clear April Morning, first published in 1940, has been recognized by many as the first literary work to draw on the experiences of Russian Jewish immigrants in Brazil. But in the history of Brazilian literature it has an even more important place. As Regina Igel, Coordinator of the Portuguese Program at the University of Maryland, who has spent her life studying the Jewish component in Brazilian literature explains, On a Clear April Morning was “the first [Jewish] needle to penetrate the Brazilian literary fabric . . . [and] was apparently the first novel in Portuguese that draws its subject matter from the Brazilian Jewish community.”8
As “an inaugural landmark in the [Brazilian] Jewish literary panorama,”9 and as an historical document depicting the trajectory of early twentieth-century Jewish immigrants to Brazil, On a Clear April Morning is indeed worthy of respect. But it is Iolovitch’s lyricism, his ability to paint a picture of the emotions and scenes he describes that makes readers fall in love with this book.
Iolovitch’s enchanting opening lines that so captivated Scliar have been quoted time and again by those describing Brazilian Jewish or regional literature. But these are only the beginning. On a Clear April Morning is full of poetry and often the poetry has musical allusions. Just to cite a few instances: upon departing their Ukrainian village after all the goodbyes, Iolovitch’s father’s wagon moved down a lonely road as Marcos describes “Chimneys unfolded slow plumes of smoke in the chilly morning air. In concert, the cadence of a distant engine and the rhythmic fall of a hammer upon an anvil accompanied the slow ascent of the day. . . . ”
Or when he fell in love, Marcos laments the object of his heart that is many miles away: “Her image never left me, not for a second. I saw her in everything and everywhere. She was on the page of the book that I opened, on the blank sheets of paper that I touched, in the paleness of the moon, and in the brilliance of the stars.”
Or when his poverty forces him to live in a leaky newspaper-lined shed, he communes with the “drops of water [that] began to beat to the rhythm of the rain. . . .
Little droplet, little droplet, I murmured, how sad is your muffled tempo. . . , your sad cadence. . . . ”
On a Clear April Morning is full of poetry and musical cadences and tempos because Marcos Iolovitch was both a musician and a poet. He supported himself by teaching the violin for several years. And poetry was his real literary love. On a Clear April Morning is Iolovitch’s only full-length narrative work. His two other books Eu e Tu (I and Thou) published in 1932 and Preces Profanas (Secular Prayers) published in 1949 are collections of poems and poetical aphorisms.
As do so many young poets, this sensitive young man used his pen to understand humanity and the meaning of life. As he describes, the first years in Brazil did not fulfill his father’s dream. Instead they were full of hunger, tragic deaths, economic failures, anti-Semitism, and his father’s alcoholic response. “Why and for what do we live?” Iolovitch asks. Why does God “distribute rewards and punishments without even the most basic concern for equality and justice”?
He seeks his answers in the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers, in the realm of the intellect where one of his favorite philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, noted, “ pain has no power.”10 Iolovitch dedicates a whole chapter of On a Clear April Morning to Schopenhauer. And he most likely took the title of his first book, I and Thou from the best-known treatise of the great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. In I and Thou, Iolovitch reflects the concept that Buber develops in his I and Thou that “man becomes whole not in relation to himself but only through relation to another self”.11
In Buber the true I-Thou relationship is that “in which two persons face and accept each other as truly human.”12 This acceptance of each person