CULTURAL CELEBRITY VISITS UT

Margo Glantz, renowned Mexican Jewish writer, addresses students and faculty

By Dr. Naomi Lindstrom

motion, animated film titled Gefilte Fish (2021), in which she depicts herself as an emaciated young woman who morphs into a fish and a bat while discussing the role of silence and silencing in her family.

She continues to add drawings to her series on Ukraine, which she recently transformed into an installation at San Antonio’s Artspace International titled Mother/Land. Lanina is the recipient of a Fulbright, and has shown her work globally. At UT, she teaches courses in drawing, moving image, humor, and storytelling in the School of Design and Creative Technologies

Yuliya Lanina, 2021, Gefilte Fish, Animation still. Music by Sam Lipman. Sponsored by Fulbright Austria.

On November 3, the University of Texas at Austin enjoyed the honor of hosting the writer and critic Margo Glantz, the foremost figure in Jewish Latin American literature and a cultural celebrity in Mexico. Her visit was the result of the combined efforts of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas of the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), with cosponsorship from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her public event in the Benson Latin American Collection attracted an audience of over fifty people, including faculty, students, community members, writers, and translators.

Born in Mexico City in 1930, Margo Glantz is the daughter of the Yiddish poet Yaakov Glantz, known in Mexico as Jacobo Glantz. Her best-known work is Las genealogías (available in English as The Family Tree), first published in 1981. This text, based on Glantz’s interviews with her parents, presents her elegant mother from Odessa and her father from rural Ukraine, their origins and meeting, and their arrival in Mexico in the mid-1920s. It is also a collective portrait of the Ashkenazi community of Mexico City in its formative years. The Family Tree has been through numerous reprintings and translations. Recently the Mexican Secretaría de Educación Pública issued a special commemorative edition of the iconic work that may only be distributed as a gift.

During her one-day visit, Glantz viewed the archive of the seventeenth-century nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the most prized holdings of the Benson Latin American Collection. She was then interviewed before an audience by LLILAS Director Adela Pineda Franco and Naomi Lindstrom, Director of the Gale Collaborative on Jewish Life in the Americas. At the prompting of these two UT faculty members, Glantz held forth on a wide variety of topics ranging from Sor Juana to the Jewish allusions in the nineteenth-century novel María to the latest scandals and turmoil on Twitter, a forum in which she has been an enthusiastic participant. The audience members listened attentively and afterward many of them were thrilled to be able to exchange a few words and pose for photographs with our celebrated visitor.

A recording of the public event, which was conducted in Spanish, is available at: https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZSC qpib8VaQ.