Clarice Lispector and the Invention of Judeity

Bernardo Fuks, Betty. Clarice Lispector and the Invention of Judeity. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2025. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2025/09/25/clarice-lispector-and-the-invention-of-judeity/. Acesso em: 05 December 2025.

Benjamin Moser, one of the most significant biographers of Clarice Lispector, said in an interview that one of his goals in writing Why This World, published in the United States and translated into Portuguese as Clarice, uma biografia, was to make space for a theme rarely explored by literary critics, commentators, and biographers: the writer’s “Judeity.”¹ Most tend to limit themselves to reflecting on her “Brazilianness,” “as if one had to choose between being Jewish and being Brazilian.” Moser argues that the absence of overt Jewish identity in Lispector’s writing is itself a profound expression of Jewishness, since “the great Jewish writers usually do not speak openly, or only rarely, about Judaism.” ² To illustrate, he points to the works of two writers of Jewish origin: Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.

What makes the Jewish presence stand out in literature written in non-Jewish languages? Bertha Waldman poses this question in “Por linhas tortas: o judaísmo em Clarice Lispector” [Through crooked lines: Judaism in Clarice Lispector]. To address this question, the author draws on the ideas of German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig:

A Jewish book is not one that deals with “Jewish things,” because if that were the case, Protestants who refer to the Old Testament would be writing Jewish books […]. For the Jewish writer, the old Jewish words return to say something new, for they carry an eternal youth and are capable of renewing the world, provided that a window of opportunity is made for them. ³

In other words, the utterance of a writer of Jewish origin must be tied to the work of drawing from collective memory a singular statement capable of overriding what has been said. Waldman also notes, like Moser, that readers of Franz Kafka do not find Jewish themes in his works. And referring to a passage taken from one of the diaries of the Czech writer who wrote in German, the author points out that no Jewish code — religious foundations and signs, clothing, or ritualistic scenes — would, on its own, have the capacity to bring Judaism to the fore in the work of a Jewish author. For Kafka, “it would be necessary to extract the internal elements [of the text] to bring out a bundle of meanings that point to a question that is not manifest in the work but that somehow imposes itself on the reader.” ⁴

The questions posed by Moser and Waldman are particularly useful to the aim of this essay: to search, in the margins, in the silences, and between the lines of Clarice Lispector’s writing, for the ways in which she invented her Judeity and how that invention shaped a singular literary voice emerging from multiple cultural coordinates.

Before moving forward, I would like to introduce the distinction established by Albert Memmi in his book Dominated Man between the terms “Judaism” (the set of cultural and religious traditions), “Jewishness” (the set of Jewish people scattered throughout the world), and “Judeity” (the way in which a Jew subjectively and objectively views the fact of being Jewish). ⁵ According to this distinction, I understand Judeity to be a project that goes beyond the simple observance of Jewish religious precepts, escapes the contingencies of mere birth, and determines the subject’s insertion into the future. In this sense, I also draw on Jacques Derrida’s definition of the term Judeity: an expression that establishes the act of becoming another. It is a category that cannot be enclosed without hindering its future. Rodrigo Ielpo, reflecting on the way novelists Georges Perec and Patrick Modiano invent their Judeity, rightly points out that in Derrida, “Judeity” has a creative character. “The future that will constitute its network of meanings will depend on an experience of invention that is both prophetic, insofar as it is not knowable as such, and poetic.” ⁶

This statement echoes the text “Abraham, the Other,” in which Derrida revisits the work Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) and deconstructs Sartre’s simplistic logic in determining the profile of what would become the “authentic” Jew and the “inauthentic” Jew in the following terms: “Me, I am jew […] in knowing and meaning what one appears to be saying.” ⁷ For Derrida, such a solution is, in principle, completely mistaken, given that in the absence of an essence from which to derive the term “being Jewish,” the act itself precedes any knowledge. Derrida does not limit himself to deconstructing Sartrean logic and, for the sake of the memory of a people in exile, allows himself to say, “I am Jewish, but I don’t want to know what that means.” The emotional movement underlying this testimony is radical: to say one is Jewish is to accept a vertigo, an undecidability, the risk of a denomination beyond any identity. This would be the inventive principle of “Judeity.”

A year before her death, Clariced Lispector wrote in an article for O Globo: “I am Jewish, you know. But I don’t believe in this nonsense about the Jewish people being God’s chosen people […]. After all, I am Brazilian, and that is that.” This twofold belonging was not an easy task for the defiant author of “Belonging.” “I am certain that right from the cradle my first desire was to belong. For reasons of no importance here, I must have  somehow felt that I did not belong to anything or anyone.”⁸ Being Jewish and being Brazilian, and at the same time carrying, from birth, the feeling of also being outside of any community. How can this paradox be interpreted?

Let’s see. In a letter to her two sisters, Elisa and Tânia, shortly after confessing the boredom she felt in the quiet Swiss capital of Bern, Lispector writes, “It’s funny that, when you think about it, there is no real place to live. Everything is someone else’s land, where others are happy. It’s so strange to be in Bern, and this Sunday is so boring. It’s like Sunday in São Cristóvão [Rio de Janeiro].”⁹ A feeling of foreignness pulsed within her and was recorded countless times when the terms “strange”, “foreigner”, and “foreignness” appear in her short stories and novels.¹⁰ Antônio Callado once made a perceptive comment, based on his close contact with his friend, about the unsettling strangeness (Unheimlich) that Lispector’s texts produced in the reader. “Clarice was a stranger on earth. She gave the impression of walking through the world as if she had arrived late at night in an unfamiliar city where there was a general transport strike.”¹¹ Carlos Drumond de Andrade, in turn, poetized the mystery of her foreignness on the day of his great friend’s death:

Clarice

issued from some mystery and departed for another.

We cannot fathom its essence.

The mystery was not essential,

it was Clarice travelling inside.¹²

Elisa Lispector, Clarice’s older sister, recounts how the family fled the pogroms that took place in Russia in 1917 and came to northeastern Brazil in her autobiographical novel No Exílio: Romance (In Exile: Romance). Elisa’s work, according to Moser’s observation, echoes the refrain “Fun vonen is a yid?” (Where does the Jew come from?), a particular way Jews have of asking a fellow Jew about their origins in Yiddish. A fusion language, a Hebrewized Romance language from Lorraine, Middle High German, as well as several Slavic languages, the extremely hybrid nature of Yiddish is evident in the following example proposed by Max Weinreich: “Nokkn bentshn hot der zeyde gekoyfte a seyfer” is a phrase in Yiddish that means, “After the blessing that followed the meal, the grandfather bought a religious book.” In this simple sentence, the word “seyfer” comes from Hebrew, the word “bentshn” comes from Romance, the words “nokkn,” “hot,” “der,” and “gekoyft” are of Germanic origin, and finally, “zeyde” is a Slavic word.¹³ “Yiddish was widely spoken in the ‘small towns’ (shtetlakh, in Yiddish), generally inhabited by Jews living in poverty and oppression, settled in rural areas in the East.

The Lispector sisters’ paternal grandparents lived in one of these villages, and their maternal grandparents in a nearby town. They communicated with their children and members of the community in Yiddish, speaking little Russian. When Lispector’s parents arrived in Brazil, they carried on the tradition of speaking Yiddish among themselves. On this subject, there is an important piece of information reported personally by Elisa Lispector to Claire Varin, one of the best-known scholars of Clarice’s work. As a child, her sister understood the Yiddish spoken by her parents at home and heard both Yiddish and Portuguese at once.“I live ‘by ear’; I live by having heard it spoken” is what caught Varin’s attention in a Clarice manuscript she found among other documents. It is interesting to stress her conclusion regarding this phrase: Lispector had a “hidden bilingualism,” the result of her auditory experiences from childhood. Yiddish was the decisive mother tongue in her mastery of the countless languages she spoke.¹⁴ In addition to hearing the language spoken among her family members, parents, and uncles, Lispector studied at the Colégio Hebreu Ídiche (Recife) ¹⁵, where she probably took classes in Yiddish, and perhaps even Hebrew, since schools in the Jewish community at that time were, at the very least, bilingual. However, it is in the language of the Brazilian diaspora, Portuguese, that Lispector finds the place for her language: writing.

The case of Jews as a minority apart from a society of equals dates back to their exile over several millennia—Babylonian in the sixth century BC, Roman, and finally post-Roman—which threw Jews into the experience of the Diaspora, a word of Greek origin meaning “to be scattered among peoples,” “to be outside of,” or rather, “not to belong to.”¹⁶ A word that contains the idea of rupture, which touches on the foundations of the Jewish people’s existence. In “The Indestructible,” Maurice Blanchot insists: “‘What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?’ […] it exists so the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak.”¹⁷

I was […] born to write. The written word helps me to dominate the world. […] I started writing at the age of seven in the hope that one day I should be able to master language. Yet each time I raise my pen it is as if I were about to write for the first time. Each book I write is a tortuous yet blissful debut. This ability to renew myself as time passes is what I would call living and writing.¹⁸

Curse and blessing alike, writing keeps Lispector alive.

To Blanchot’s insistence that the Jew exists so that one may learn to speak, one must add Derrida’s insistence that, from the perspective of a certain Judaism, the act of learning to write reveals itself as both birth and passion for writing, the love and suffering of the Letter. As he observes in an essay interpreting the Judeity of Edmond Jabès, the Jewish poet expelled from Egypt and exiled to France, where he started writing in French, “The Jew is split, and split first of all between the two dimensions of the letter: allegory and literality”¹⁹, both unfolding through the language of another place, of the foreigner. Since writing is itself a form of exiling oneself, a journey toward an “inner foreign land”²⁰, it becomes clear why Lispector insists that living and writing are acts of continual self-renewal.

The letter occupies a central place in Judaism, right from the strange and astonishing idea of spelling out the name of God, the tetragrammaton YHWH, a word that cannot be read. A god that is pure letter, who cannot perform the function of likeness in the mirror because of his radical otherness. The prohibition in the second commandment against making any graven image that could represent Him (Exodus 20:4) imposed and continues to impose absence on the human spirit, which never tires of seeking to organize itself in terms of images and figured presence. In this sense, the reading of the graph that marks language, YHWH, caused a retreat in culture from the visible to the legible-audible, forcing the Jewish people to keep turning toward the Unknowable and listen to Silence. Blanchot did not hesitate to say that when one thinks of this unapproachable and transcendental God, distant and utterly foreign, one generally marks only His absolute absence, leaving aside the fact that His revelation is coupled with “the manifestation of the word as the place where men relate to the one who excludes all relation: the infinitely distant (…).” ²¹

​​The words of the Jewish poet Edmond Jabès help to illuminate this proposition.

To His people, God commands, ‘Hear, O Israel.’ But hear what? Hear the words of your God; yet God is absent, and His words, stripped of voice, lie severed from their sounds. Hear the silence, for it is within this silence that God speaks to His creature […]. The primal interdiction bestows upon non-representation its sacred character. The language of God is the language of absence.²²

In fact, listening is one of the senses that occupies a prominent place in Jewish liturgy. The text is read aloud, and what we in the West understand as scripture in the expression “Holy Scriptures” is called “mikra,” or “reading,” in Hebrew. Those who founded the Jewish canon passed on the tradition of reading and writing the Word not as revelation, but as creation of meaning.²³ In the passage from seeing to writing, the reader hears the wandering of letters that combine infinitely before the silence of YHWH.

Lispector’s writing undoubtedly relies on this tradition, but that doesn’t imply a simple submission to the past. The external resolve—listening to Silence—will only be brought to life through the author’s poetic invention. Let us remember the verses of Goethe quoted by Freud in Totem and Taboo: “What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine.”²⁴ The author’s poetic invention reflects the process of inventing her Judeity: she dramatizes her own story as fiction in the present, for instance, in A Breath of Life. And, of course, Angela, the character in this “silent book,” is the protagonist of Lispector’s Judeity.

I invented God—and don’t believe in Him. It’s as if I had written a poem about the nothing and then suddenly found myself face-to-face with the nothing itself. Is God a word? If so then I’m full of Him: thousands of words crammed inside a jar that’s shut and that I sometimes open—and I am dazzled. God-word is dazzling.²⁵

“I am Jewish, you know… After all, I am Brazilian,” she declared, “and that is that.” If, on the one hand, the void at the center of Judaism is the silent and dizzying presence that feeds Lispector’s writing, on the other hand, being Brazilian was a choice that determined, as many of her commentators say, the reinvention of Brazilian literature. Benjamin Moser, her American biographer quoted at the beginning of this essay, recognized that Lispector is the greatest modern writer in Brazil without being, in a sense, a Brazilian writer. A paradox captured by poet Lêdo Ivo: “This borderland prose, of immigrants and emigrants, has nothing to do with any of our illustrious predecessors. … You could say that she, a naturalized Brazilian, naturalized a language.” We will see in greater detail later on that, for Lispector, Judeity and Brazilianness are experiences foreign to her own self. Her writings are living proof of the famous Freudian aphorism, “The ego is not master in its own house.”

It is possible that our author was shaped not only by the weight of anti-Semitic persecution, which drove her family into exile and displacement, but also by the enduring presence of the foreigner in the Old Testament. “But thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee thence: therefore I command thee to do this thing.” (Deuteronomy 24:17). The very Covenant, the pact between the Hebrews and YHWH that secures their identity, already contains within it a sense of estrangement, of the Unheimliche, that unsettling familiarity that blurs and destabilizes its certainty. Structurally, certain narratives in the Hebrew Bible suggest that nomadism, so central to biblical sociology and to the ethics of the Torah, is nothing less than the enduring expression of an identity marked by multiplicity and becoming. What stands out in the book is not merely the precedence of a nomadic experience over a settled one, but more crucially, the continuation of wandering through the desert and the ever-renewed repetition of Exodus. It is this inexhaustible mobility, this deep inscription of nomadism and errancy in the history of the Jewish people that resurfaces in Lispector’s female characters.

Joana, the protagonist of Near to the Wild Heart, initiates, through the journey she undertakes at the end of the novel, the restless search that other characters will embark on, each in their own way. Virginia, the main character of The Chandelier, will leave her place of birth to confront life in the big city. Lucrécia, from The Besieged City, is driven by a desire to abandon the outskirts of São Geraldo. […] Macabéa, from Hour of the Star, is from Alagoas and comes to Rio de Janeiro in search of a better life. This search for a place of belonging is characteristic of both the characters and the author herself.²⁶

Each of these women also enacts Lispector’s permanent exile from herself, which allows her to encounter the unknown in a real lesson in otherness. The invention of Jewishness in Lispector would then be confused with the biblical logic of choosing strangeness—“becoming Jewish”—intrinsic to God’s Covenant with his people. Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch, introduces a notion of exile that is not related to punishment, such as that of Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, or Oedipus, but which is a departure from “being in the face of oneself,” a departure from “someone who, armed with his experience of freedom and opposition, integrates it into something that transcends it. To Abraham, God does not only say ‘Go,’ but ‘Go for yourself’” (Genesis, 12:1).

And Lispector goes! And she goes in the opposite direction to the crowd: “She was a brutal example of the singularity of the human person.” wrote Otto Lara Resende when she died.²⁷

Now, the paternal grandfather of the Lispector girls, Shmuel Lispector, was a great reader and interpreter of the Old Testament and the great sacred books that originated from it—the Midrash and the Talmud. Because of his passion for Scripture, he rose to the status of a wise and holy man. This earned him the admiration of many scholars. Shmuel passed on to his son Pinkhas (Pedro) the custom of reading the Tanakh, the first five books of the Old Testament, every day. It is likely that Clarice and her sisters heard many of the stories that populate these books from their father. Peter left Europe, taking with him, even if only symbolically, the “portable homeland of the Jews,” the Book of books. In general, the relationship of the Jewish people with the God of intolerable absence was structured around the Torah (Pentateuch) or Revelation. This served as a spoken and written code of communication between men and between man and the divine. Over centuries, this book and tradition became both the main axis of the religion, ethics, and politics of the Jewish people, and the space in which Jews developed a unique praxis of interpretation. This interpretive practice proved capable of sustaining the transmission of Judaism and the reconfigurations of emerging “Judeities.”

Nomads, like Hebrew letters clustered on the white of an ancient parchment, doctors of law and commentators of the Text dared to say more than what appeared in the Book, making it, since time immemorial, a territory that welcomed emerging subjectivities. Thus, wandering the world through the centuries and generations, with letters and words overflowing with meaning, the Jewish people knew to make interpretation a practice of leaving it to the letters to be letters and to take advantage of the blank spaces in the text as a reservoir of meaning always available to the reader/interpreter. This constantly renewed mission of reading the letters, multiplying the combinations, and rewriting them in a continuous movement of unique, meaningful constructions on the origin, value, and meaning of life and death ended up—as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan sometimes said—designating the Jew as the one who knows how to read. And if it is true that religion begins where reading ends²⁸, it must be said that there is in Judaism an atheism to be extracted: it requires the interpreter of the Scriptures to commit to desacralizing it, giving it new birth, recreating it, and inventing it as on the day of creation.

It can be said that the Talmudist is, in principle, a “traitor” to any and all immutable “readings,” that is, religious ones, which prevent the elaboration of thoughts. He questions what he reads and, by doing so, extracts different meanings, never the same ones. As Henri Atlan points out, it is a matter of ensuring the second commandment’s anti-idolatrous law and the atheism of scripture. The fight against idolatry prevents the illusion of ownership of meaning. The text is unconquerable and incomprehensible. In other words: “The paradoxes of language and its meanings are such that a discourse on God that is not idolatrous, that refrains from grasping or conquering his Name, is inevitably an atheistic discourse.”²⁹

Does Lispector’s writing contain this atheism that is marked by the absence of meaning?

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it—and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognize. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But—I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.³⁰

In this passage from The Passion According to G.H., Lispector expresses the failure of language in naming the unnameable. A failure that paradoxically reconciles her with life in the word to come, the other who will decide what “Jewish,” “Judaism,” and “Judeity” will mean. Especially because Lispector’s writing comes from the “land of refuge,” in Freud’s words, which one carries inside.³¹

Taking up Rosenzweig’s idea that the presence of Judaism in a writer’s work can be discerned only when ancient Jewish words return to express something new and thereby renew the world, one can recognize in Lispector’s writing the stature of an author who, by reinscribing the traces of an archaic heritage and drawing on Scripture imbued with the memory of a people in exile, was able to transform that legacy into modern fiction. 

In a similar vein, Sigmund Freud, in his return to the Old Testament to write Moses and Monotheism, crafts what can be called a “theoretical fiction”—a narrative that, while bearing the hallmarks of imaginative writing, remains rigorously tethered to the demands of scientific inquiry. Freud, in his reading of the Exodus, proceeds like an old Talmudist, that is, multiplying the combinations between the letters, cutting words and phrases, and searching the margins and blanks of the texts of historians and Egyptologists for signifiers that could illuminate his hypothesis: that Moses was an Egyptian. Through this, Freud champions the notion that the identity of a people comes from the Other, from the foreigner in relation to oneself. Lispector, in Hour of the Star, takes the Books of the Maccabees as a reference and turns the hero, Judas Maccabeus, into a northeastern anti-heroine destined to go unnoticed because “Nobody smiles back because they don’t even look at her.”³² One might argue that, much like Freud, Lispector engages with an ancient mode of textual reading—a unique interpretive approach that seeks not only within the text but also beyond it, venturing outside the written line itself. Unlike exegesis, Talmudic interpretation involves creation and transformation, never deciphering through a symbolic key that replaces a verse with something more intelligible. It is a task akin to what is attributed in psychoanalysis to the “work of the dream”: a process of elaboration where the activity of a thought without qualities is neither thinking nor calculating nor, in general, judging, but solely transforming. A work yet to come, that is, “prophetic […] and poetic,” to paraphrase Derrida, quoted at the beginning of this essay.

Macabéa, the protagonist of Hour of the Star, bears a name rooted in the folkloric tradition of Northeastern cordel literature. The author, however, links her to the Books of the Maccabees, two apocryphal texts of the Hebrew Bible. These books were written in Greek, although the first was likely originally composed in Hebrew. Both works center on themes of resistance to oppression by a dominant power. The first volume recounts the persecution of the Jews by a Greek king in 175 BC. He prohibited Jewish religious practices and the reading of the Torah, imposing worship of the Olympian god Zeus. While some people converted, Mattathias, an elderly priest, and his five sons remained loyal to the law of Moses. After Mattathias’ death, his son Judas Maccabeus led a rebellion against the Greeks. He restored the community’s right to observe the law of Moses and reclaimed the Temple of Jerusalem. Despite this victory, which led to the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah, Judas Maccabeus was later killed in battle. The new king again cast the Jewish people as outsiders and enemies.

The text requires interpretation of implicit elements. Clarice Lispector, influenced by the socio-political urgencies of her era, particularly the severe social injustices experienced by Northeastern populations excluded from Brazilian progress, revisits the ancestral scroll. She engages with the narrative of the Books of the Maccabees, participating in the historicization of Judaism by allowing the past to coexist with the present as a form of virtuality. In this framework, the past emerges as a collection of singularities that lack meaning until a significant interpretive act occurs. Macabéa, a young woman living in extreme poverty, leaves Alagoas in pursuit of improved living conditions in a southeastern metropolis. Like her, other Macabéas suffer misery and abandonment in a foreign land and accept the suffering imposed on them by others, as they know no other possible reality. “On a street in Rio de Janeiro,” reports the narrator, “I glimpsed in the air the feeling of perdition on the face of a northeastern girl. Not to mention that I as a boy grew up in the northeast.” ³³

Nelson Vieira, in “A expressão judaica na obra de Clarice Lispector” [The Jewish Expression in the Work of Clarice Lispector], argues that Macabéa demonstrates a form of resistance analogous to that of the sons of Mattathias by maintaining adherence to the law of Moses. In contrast, her boyfriend, Olímpico de Jesus, whose name alludes to Olympian Zeus, is attracted to the capitalist allure of Rio de Janeiro, whereas Macabéa rejects these influences. She is “firm in her opposition to the falsehood of the world. Her intuitive faith and stubbornness oppose the lost souls she encounters on the streets of Rio.”³⁴ The narrative further introduces Dona Carlota, a fortune teller and prostitute, who deceives Macabéa by predicting a prosperous future involving marriage to Hans, a wealthy foreigner with a German name and owner of a Mercedes, as highlighted by Pedro Gurgel Valente in the afterword to a Brazilian edition of the book. At this juncture, Lispector’s narrative establishes a parallel between the suffering of two marginalized groups, both of whom are familiar with the animosity of an Other that defines itself through sameness. Ultimately, the fate of the unnamed northeastern protagonist is depicted as equally tragic as that of Judas Macabeu. Macabéa, Lispector’s Jewish girl from the northeast, is fatally struck by a yellow car, which is symbolically described as enormous as an ocean liner, as she attempts to cross the street.

Then Macabéa said a phrase that none of the passersby understood. She said clearly and distinctly:

—As for the future.

Would she have longed for the future?

Macabéa died. The Prince of Darkness won.

Two months before her death, Lispector demonstrates the impossibility of dissociating the meanings of Judeity and Brazilianness. Hour of the Star is a tribute to both cultures and, at the same time, a recognition that if the story she writes does not exist, it will come to exist: “This story takes place during a state of emergency and a public calamity.”³⁵ And what can be done?

That’s when I enter into contact with inner powers of mine, I find through myself your God. Why do I write? What do I know? No idea. Yes, it’s true, I sometimes think that I’m not me, I seem to belong to a distant galaxy because I’m so strange to myself. Is this me? I am frightened to encounter myself.³⁶

1. This essay was originally published in the book Lispectator, organized by Marco Antonio Coutinho Jorge and Tarcísio Greggio, and edited by 7 Letras. [↩]
2.  Benjamin Moser, “Aspectos judaicos de Clarice,” Museublog: Arte, Cultura, September 24, 2009, https://museujudaicorj.blogspot.com/2009/10/aspectos-judaicos-de-clarice-lispector.html (retrieved February 14, 2024). [↩]
3.  Berta Waldman, “Por linhas tortas: o judaísmo em Clarice Lispector,” Arquivo Maaravi: Revista Digital de Estudos Judaicos da UFMG 5, no. 8 (March 2011): 1. [↩]
4.  Ibid. [↩]
5.  Albert Memmi, Dominated Man: Notes Toward a Portrait (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). [↩]
6.  Rodrigo Ielpo, “Judeidade e a criação da memória potencial em Georges Perec e Patrick Modiano,” Scripta Uniandrade 16, no. 3 (2018): 326–42. [↩]
7.  Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judeities: Question for Jacques Derrida, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith; Peterborough ((ON: Trent University Library, 2007), 28. [↩]
8.  Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (New York: New Directions, 2022) [↩]
9.  Olga Borelli, Clarice Lispector: esboço para um possível retrato (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1981), 111, letter of May 5, 1944. [↩]
10.  Yudith Rosenbaum, “The Unfamiliar,” Clarice Lispector IMS, Feb. 22, 2024, https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/2024/02/22/o-infamiliar/. [↩]
11.  Nadia B. Gotlib, Clarice Lispector: Uma vida que se Conta (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2009), 52. [↩]
12.  Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Vision of Clarice Lispector”, trans. Giovanni Pontiero, PN Review 60 (March–April 1988). [↩]
13.  Max Weinreich, apud Marc-Alan Ouaknin e Dory Rotnemer, A Bíblia do Humor Judaico (Rio de Janeiro: Editora José Olympio, 2002), 25-26. [↩]
14.  Claire Varin, interview with journalist Ubiratan Brasil, Jornal de Poesias, http://www.jornaldepoesia.jor.br/ubrasil1.html (retrieved Feb. 20, 2024). [↩]
15.  Pedro Gurgel Valente, afterword to A Hora da Estrela (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 2019), 85. [↩]
16.  Susana Rotker, Isaac Chocrón y Elisa Lerner: los transgresores de la literatura venezolana: reflexiones sobre la identidad judía (Caracas: FUNDARTE, 1991), 21. [↩]
17.  Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 82 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 125, “The Indestructible.” [↩]
18.  Clarice Lispector, Discovering the World, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1992), 134, “The Three Experiences”. [↩]
19.  Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Reissue Edition, 2017), Gianni Vattimo. [↩]
20.  As Freud defined the unconscious. [↩]
21.  Maurice Blanchot, op. cit., 187. On the question of “listening to silence” in Judaism, see also chapter IV of my book Freud e a judeidade: a vocação do exílio (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2000), 99–114. [↩]
22.  Edmond Jabès, “Judaïsme et écriture,” in L’écrit du temps, ed. Marie Moscovici and Jean-Michel Rey (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 8. My translation. [↩]
23.  The theme of reading-writing in Judaism is further developed in chapter V, Interpretação: errância e nomadismo da letra, of my book Freud e a judeidade: a vocação do exílio, op. cit., 9. [↩]
24.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Part I, lines 682–683, quoted in Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge, 1999), 158. [↩]
25.  Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life (Pulsations), trans. Johnny Lorenz, ed. Benjamin Moser, preface by Pedro Almodóvar and Benjamin Moser (New York: New Directions, 2012), 127. [↩]
26.  Berta Waldman, “O Estrangeiro em Clarice Lispector.” In Entre passos e rastros, 15–30. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2002. [↩]
27.  Otto Lara Resende, “Mãe, filha, amiga,” O Globo, Dec. 10, 1977, quoted in Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). [↩]
28.  J.-P. Winter, “Transmisión y Talmude,” Bulletin interne de l’EFP, vol. II (June 1979). [↩]
29.  Henri Atlan, “Niveaux de signification et athéisme de l’écriture,” in La Bible au présent: Données et débats. Actes du XXIIᵉ Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, ed. Jean Halpérin and Georges Levitte (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 86. [↩]
30.  Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. Idra Novey, ed. Benjamin Moser, introd. Caetano Veloso (New York: New Directions, 2012). [↩]
31.  Lydia Flem, Freud the Man: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2003). [↩]
32.  Clarice Lispector, Hour of the Star, trans. Benjamin Moser, intro. Colm Tóibín (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014). [↩]
33. Ibid. [↩]
34.  Nelson H. Vieira, “Clarice Lispector,” Remate de Males: Revista do Departamento de Teoria Literária (Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1989), 207–9. [↩]
35.  Clarice Lispector, idem, ibid. [↩]
36.  Idem. [↩]