Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

In Monastery and other fictional texts grounded in his own family’s turbulent history, the Guatemalan Jewish author Eduardo Halfon explores ways in which individuals have historically chosen to affiliate with religious communities in the interest of the survival, not just of their own traditions or faith enclaves (as with so-called crypto-Jews), but as a vehicle to their own survival or that of their children. In examples ranging from the adoption of surnames of his own wife’s converso ancestors in La Rioja after Spain’s expulsion of the Jews to the efforts of Holocaust to disappear or change their identity in monasteries, convents, and other religious refuges, Halfon implicitly examines the benefits and dangers of convivencia with religious others across time. Recurring to the themes of travel, errancy and migration in his works, Halfon’s fictions become “traveling texts” in which religious practices are necessarily modified in the interest of survival.