The Misuses of Allegory

Is José Saramago an anti-Semite? The answer might be allegorical. In March 2002, during a visit to Ramallah with seven other delegates of the International Parliament of Writers, Saramago compared the situation of Palestinians in the occupied territories to the extermination of Jews in Auschwitz. Saramago's remarks provoked an uproar, especially in Israel, where he has many admirers. Readers in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other metropolitan areas returned such masterpieces as The Death of Ricardo Reis and Blindness to stores in protest. The controversy spread beyond the Middle East: Saramago's comments were widely condemned in newspapers and magazines in Europe and the Americas.

I, for my part, have been a passionate admirer of Saramago since the early 1990s, when I first reviewed him for The Nation. My initial reaction to his remarks was one of disbelief, followed by dismay. Saramago deserves credit for having gone to Ramallah and borne witness to the suffering of ordinary Palestinians. But the Auschwitz analogy is reckless. While there are disconcerting parallels between the Israeli occupation and the ghettoization of Jews under National Socialism--as numerous Israeli critics, from the late philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz to former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni have pointed out--Israel is not exterminating Palestinians. Ramallah may resemble a prison, but it is far from being a death camp.

A few weeks after the Saramago controversy broke out, I had a public conversation with him at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. In preparation, I spent several days reading recently published interviews and essays in Portuguese, and rereading his novels. I also discussed his politics (Saramago remains a member of Portugal's Communist Party) with colleagues, notably Saramago's friend in Porto Alegre, the Brazilian-Jewish novelist Moacyr Scliar.

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