Female Divinities and Story-Telling in the Work of Tamara Kamenszain

Tamara Kamenszain (b. Argentina, 1947), in her creative writing and her essays, brings together two concerns. One is her examination of concepts of woman and femininity. She specializes in mythical and archetypal representations of woman. Her texts present such figures as the great mother and forest nymphs. On many occasions, she evokes a past in which female divinities were respected, even in the Judaic tradition that is frequently Kamenszain's frame of reference. The other current that stands out in Kamenszain's writing is her interest in Jewish traditions of informal narrative. In her texts, folk narrative displaces learned and canonical narrative. Her concern is not only with stories about magic, but also with tale-telling as a magic practice. Kamenszain's writing often makes the point that magic, and particularly feminine magic, has succumbed to modernization. Setting her own writing in opposition to this tendency, Kamenszain brings back feminine magic forces and endows biblical heroines with the talents of sorceresses, priestesses, or goddesses. Her narratives also suggest that women have a special way of reading, learning, and storytelling. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol20/iss1/11 Female Divinities and Story-Telling in the Work of Tamara Kamenszain Naomi Lindstrom University of Texas at Austin In the writing of Tamara Kamenszain (Argentina, 1947), both her imaginative work and her essays, two preoccupations are of particular interest for this discussion. One is her examination of concepts of woman and femininity. She lays special emphasis on metaphorical, mythical, and archetypal representations of woman rather than on realistic accounts of women characters. She elaborates such concepts as the great mother and female divinities or feminine forces in nature. Her writing explores the theme that, famously examined by Raphael Patai in his much-cited The Hebrew Goddess (3rd. rev. ed. 1990), has proven attractive to a women's-studies audience as well as to a public concerned with Jewish themes: the history of Jewish thought includes more feminine entities than the officially honored biblical heroines and the concept of a female divine presence, the Shekhina or Matronit. One may also find traces left by contact with religious cultures featuring goddess worship or an animistic understanding of the world. Here are reminders of the Canaanite nature cult whose goddesses attracted the Hebrew people for some six centuries (Patai 34). One of Kamenszain's specialties is the lyricized, nostalgic evocation of a time in which there was widespread belief in maternal forces, divine or at least mythic, at work in the natural world. In De este lado del Mediterraneo (From this side of the Mediterranean), her 1973 collection of poetic prose, she expresses regret for the passing of lunar divinities: "En la epoca en que el arroz y la palabra eran lo mismo, los 1 Lindstrom: Female Divinities and Story-Telling in the Work of Tamara Kamensz Published by New Prairie Press 222 STCL, Volume 20, No. 1 (Winter, 1996) hombres flacos se arrodillaban ante una Luna femenina pero indeterminada que recorria tranquila su camino de galaxias. Que seco esti hoy ese camino que lleva de la tierra a la luna . . ." `In the time when rice and the word were one, thin men knelt before a moon that was feminine but indeterminate, which calmly traversed its route of galaxies. How dried-up it is today, that route that leads from the earth to the moon .. (De este lado 22). Glimpses of this lost world, charged with magical significance, surface amid cold, routinized modernity. Commuters on a streetcar are lovestruck by an entrancing woman of the forest, who seems to be the apotheosis of an earth goddess. Her "trenzas rubias" 'blond braids' (61) suggest an origin in the pre-Christian North of Europe, where a number of important goddesses enjoyed general recognition. Witnesses to the nature goddess's anachronistic apparition long to abandon modernity and live in her sylvan setting "para que la palabra naturaleza no sea mas una palabra" 'so the word nature will no longer be a word' (61). In Kamenszain's work, a culture's recognition of female divine forces appears as a boon to women living in that civilization, a point to which feminist scholars have often returned.' The other current to be singled out in Kamenszain's writing is her interest in Jewish traditions of informal, extraofficial narrative. She takes as her raw material folk-level story-telling in preference to more learned and prestigious types of narrative. Her concern is often not only with narratives containing magic elements, but also with tale-telling itself as a way of practicing magic and casting spells. For example, she expresses a nostalgic longing for the lost art of telling stories by casting shadows with the hands, an entertainment that strikes its youthful audience as bordering on magic (De este lado 12). In her selection of material from Jewish tradition, she includes a high proportion of elements that have been elaborated in great part as magic lore, going well beyond canonical sources. She favors beliefs about the Prophet Elijah; the Angel of Death and other angels; holy sites, cities, and lands; consecrated and defiled objects; God's folkloric attributes, such as a long beard and a cane; and entities that are visible only to the eyes of the initiated. 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 20, Iss. 1 [1996], Art. 11 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol20/iss1/11 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1387