The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land
The protagonist of Graciela Mochkofsky’s Prophet of the Andes, ably translated by Lisa Dillman, is also a figure of enormous resolve...In 2003, Mochkofsky learned about Segundo Villanueva, 'an indigenous Peruvian' and 'good Catholic' who determined after years of study that Judaism was the one true faith, and who, with his followers, converted and moved from Peru to Israel...Theirs is a story spanning decades, leading from a village in the Peruvian mountains to a Jewish settlement in the West Bank...Segundo Villanueva’s story is remarkable—a sort of inverse of Christ’s narrative, from Catholic carpenter to founder of a Jewish community—and Mochkofsky tells it meticulously and with verve...Perhaps surprisingly, she refrains from commenting on its political implications: that the Bnei Moshe, along with the influx of Soviet and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants in the Eighties and Nineties, proved so useful for zealous proponents of Greater Israel that they were (and are) prepared to break with millennia of antiproselytizing tradition in order to swell the West Bank settlements...The continued conversion of Peruvians and other Latin Americans with no Jewish roots represents a fascinating and radical shift.
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This story is sprawling, multigenerational, the stuff of a Cecil B. DeMille epic; its settings range from dirt roads high in the mountains where the air is too thin to breathe to fecund rainforests to the war-torn West Bank ... Like any epic, it often lacks intimacy; we get to know Villanueva as a student, a teacher and a prophet, but not so much as a father, a husband or a man. Mochkofsky is no doubt aware of this; an endnote laments the 'preponderance of male voices in this book,' a hazard of the decision to focus her narrative on the part of Villanueva’s life and community that largely excluded women. Even more unfortunate is that Villanueva’s voice is not among those featured ... Mochkofsky’s text, originally written in Spanish, seems to have lost lyricism in the sometimes awkward translation ... The most notable exclusion, however, is not a person, but an event: Here is a story of Jewish faith in which the Holocaust plays no part whatsoever ... And yet the narrative of displacement is no less compelling for it.
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Mochkofsky condenses an astonishing sweep of religious and political history from the Spanish conquest to Zionism, connecting it to Segundo’s story with a light touch ... Mochkofsky pointedly avoids telling the reader how to interpret this story. Were the Peruanim exploited by enthusiastic proponents of settlements in Palestine, or did they exploit right-wing nationalism to get what they wanted? Or was it a bit of both?
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