Goodbye, Evil Eye (review)
- Goodbye, Evil Eye
Goodbye, Evil Eye is a reflective and witty collection of stories by the second-generation Sephardi-American writer, Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer. Kirchheimer’s stance is ironic and her humor dry in these stories of contradiction and accommodation, of individual freedom against a backdrop of family tension and cultural displacement. Set primarily in post-ethnic-enclave New York, the collection gives a literary voice to Ladino-speaking Jews, thus revising standard literary and immigration studies of the American Jewish population, which all but neglect Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews.
In the United States, where definitions of Jewishness are dominated by Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, the Sephardim confront a disorienting invisibility. In defensive response, they cling tenaciously to memories of an illustrious past, repeating the Ladino words “de los muestros” (one of us) as a challenge to isolation. Their words evoke the rich amalgam of languages, music, myths, and memories that constitute their tiny group’s identity, but they also unwittingly expose the fragility of cultural continuity.
Kirchheimer’s focus on the clash between traditional and modern cultures will be familiar to readers of American immigrant fiction. What gives Goodbye, Evil Eye special appeal is its authentic portraits of Sephardi family life, replete with communication quirks and exotic rituals.
Kirchheimer uses immigrant characters ready to embrace selective Americanization to tackle the assimilation issue. Conscientious, deferent strivers after the American dream, they are true-believing devotees of the free enterprise system. Yet their deeply ingrained patriarchal code fathers a topsy-turvy world in which a son “incapable of conducting the business of life . . . [is] prized far above the two daughters,” both far more competent than their brother. Contrariness of a somewhat different type appears in the story “Traffic Manager,” as a daughter captures her father’s nearly unfathomable contradictions:
a fervent believer, with tears in his eyes, in The American Way. All through my childhood, conclaves were held to discuss problems democratically: Should we go to Nova Scotia or the Grand Canyon on vacation? Do we want a green living room rug or a blue one? But, ‘You will not keep company with that person. Not over my dead body.’
So much for the immigrants’ easy adaptation to American ideals!
On matters familial and personal, Kirchheimer’s characters seize control of their new world in any way they can, without the hindrance of behavioral restraint. Reverting to Old World patterns, they give their emotions free reign; the results are anything but predictable: a father impersonates his son, a child is pressed into service in an evil-eye exorcism.
Kirchheimer is at her humorous best as she captures the intricate tonality of Sephardi life. Devoted to innuendo, if not outright fabrication, these immigrants can [End Page 132] seem impossibly irascible. Rather than ask a daughter to close a window, they will hand her a sweater. Rather than report accurately on a friend’s health, they will recount the delays on the bus trip to the hospital.
How exasperating all this is to the second generation in Kirchheimer’s stories! Yet her thematic emphasis lies elsewhere. Her second-generation narrators combine dismay over alien parental behavior with sympathetic understanding. Kirchheimer’s irony in juxtaposing the paradoxical duality in these Sephardi lives underscores a compassionate appreciation for the immigrants’ courageous leap into a world so vastly different from the one they left behind.
Years ago, when I first started studying Sephardi communities in the United States, I was interested in exploring whether religion or national background played a more significant role in shaping the immigrant experience in America. A colleague told me not to waste my time; “religion” was the obvious answer to my question. Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer’s charming collection tells us otherwise. For the Sephardi immigrants, the language and rituals of everyday use resonate with a distinctly Ottoman blend of superstition and reason, of deference and determination. These characters are remarkably flexible, too. They achieve an American-style success and adapt, even learning to celebrate Hanukkah with their German Jewish in-laws. Theyalso remind us that if intergenerational and intercultural tension is real...
