Today widely regarded as Brazil’s greatest female author, Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Pinkhasova Lispektor in 1920 in the Ukrainian shtetl of Chechelnik. Her family brought her to the Brazilian city of Recife only two years later. In 1973, after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the Rio de Janeiro paper that employed her as a columnist fired her—along with its other Jewish journalists. Julia Kornberg writes:
Lispector never quite denied her Jewish roots, although she more often than not distanced herself from them, and promoted a fanciful non-Jewish etymology for her surname: Lispector, she said, meant “lilies on the breast,” suggesting that “lis” came from “fleur-de-lis” and “pector” from the Latin “pectus.” (Other more plausible origins include the Ashkenazi name Spector, meaning teacher’s assistant, or lis-inspektor, Ukrainian for forest inspector, a common Jewish profession at that time.)
Lispector took up translating as a way to make up for the lost income from the [newspaper] firing. She was heterodox in her choices. In her archives at Casa Rui de Barbosa, in Rio, you can see manuscripts of her translation of Yukio Mishima from the English translation into Portuguese and Hedda Gabler from “the Spanish, English, and French.” But the most important translation project she took on was Bella Chagall’s memoir of her Lubavitcher childhood in Vitebsk, Burning Lights.
Bella Chagall was born during Hanukkah in 1889, and Burning Lights is punctuated lovingly by Jewish holidays. In 1939, on the brink of catastrophe in Europe, her impulse was to return to her roots and her people’s God. Lispector’s decision, amid heightened anti-Semitism, to translate Chagall’s memoir of her Yiddish-speaking childhood into Portuguese seems to have also been a form of return. In 1976, she told an interviewer, “I am Jewish, you know, although I don’t believe that the Jewish people is the people chosen by God. . . . In the end, I am Brazilian, and that’s final, once and for all.”
At the time, Lispector was working on what would be her last book, a beautiful novella, The Hour of the Star. . . . The heroine of the novella, in the sole explicit reference to Jewish history in Lispector’s work, is named Macabéa.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/14738/i-am-an-object-loved-by-god-rereading-clarice-lispector/