A hundred years form a Möbius strip that surrounds the Argentine language like an asteroid belt to an unknown planet. A certain mystery appears on one side, which is referred to elsewhere on the front. The image seems exaggerated, but it is the literary form with which Miodosky addresses the constitution of his social being, i.e. the real origin of all this Argentinianness, which for us is exaggerated and is in danger of being forgotten. Because no one is Argentinian alone.
But for this to happen, there is a sacrifice that means survival, a great effort to save one’s own blood, one’s own language and the history of another country. This explains the topology of the story: grandparents, parents, go beyond exile; These are not vegetable transplants without irrigation. The Clandestine Mandate cycle honors the will of those Jewish immigrants from rural Poland who found their homeland in the face of the impending storm of the Holocaust.
Because they neither escaped nor hid, especially (in the face of injustice), there was an ethic, even if the thought of it seems simplistic idealism, the fate of the characters has both introspective respect and recognition for the identities of others. Something that the racism of this country knows how to deny with obsessive intensity. Italians, Spaniards, Syrians, Lithuanians, the long list of nationalities forms a canvas of silent stories. Avoid the carnage of wars, the brutality of tyranny and social characteristics that belong to Argentina.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
No internal political accident or terror could silence the search for history. If fate involves coincidences and luck, what is real is the formation of a will despite all difficulties. The Tropinskys are one of the family sagas, one of hundreds of thousands, in which courage in the face of the unknown highlights this incomprehensible uniqueness. In San Juan, they slowly build a new form of existence to save every fenced-in family member in the Polish countryside. Because social advancement is just a fantasy for the exile.
Fear, torment, the ghosts that consciousness creates from afar are the central concern of this novel. Because immigrants in Argentina become internal migrants who are banished to Neuquén. A journey that is by no means casual. If the drought of the Andes finds a dimension of horror upon arrival, it is in Patagonia, where loneliness and the immeasurable dilute any future and render it meaningless. This is the real risk that Miodosky points out as the unprecedented Stone of the Past takes shape and claims the Blood Pact without mention. That of true inheritance.
And there the ethics returns, at the decisive moment. In this case, all of the narrator’s erudition, all of his memory (his, ours) marks a difference from the brutality of the plain. This novel expresses, in a Borgesian way, the essence: we are Argentinians with every fraction of those who came and those who never left.
Secret mandate
Author: Fernando Miodosky
Genre: novel
Publisher: Dunken, $26,000
About The Author
