AUTHOR: Julia Rendón Abrahamson
PUBLISHER: De Conatus
GENRE: Fiction
READER’S NAME: Julia Shirek Smith
DATE: August 17th,  2023

THE AUTHOR   Lengua ajena is Ecuadorian Julia Rendón Abrahamson’s first novel. That the author makes immigrant Sara’s story come to life has much to do with her background. Abrahamson has what she terms a “legacy of immigration,” passed down from Jewish maternal grandparents who left Europe to escape the Holocaust. And as a long-time teacher of creative writing who has published two highly praised short story collections, she is at ease with a variety of  narrative techniques..

STORYLINE  Sara has just graduated from a Quito secondary school when she becomes a reluctant migrant. The family economic situation has deteriorated and she is sent to the United States where her knowledge of English will help her find work. She ends up waitressing in New York City where she falls in love with a Catalan investment banker, Adrià, immigrant by choice. Soon a baby is on the way. After Lola is born, the couple separate. Their mutual attraction, based on good looks and similar tastes in movies and music, was just not enough. They agree to share custody of their daughter.

 Sara, now alone, wonders where she and Lola really belong. The crass materialism of American life makes her long for Ecuador’s mountains and verdant countryside. Yet what is there for her in Quito? Might Adrià make it hard to take Lola away? Could she become like her mother and grandmother? Forced migration made both of them cold, sad women. As she goes about her daily life—subway, work, mothering, outings with friends—Sara recycles the family history, filling in blanks with imagined scenarios. Grandmother Hannah, 15 when she arrived in New York from Nazi Vienna, had a baby after a brief fling with a man met at Coney Island. She  abandoned her newborn son, unready to raise a child in a culture and language alien to her. Further dislocation when she married German migrant Ernesto, settling in Ecuador. Then a nasty episode—Hannah took her daughters and ran off to the US in a futile effort to find her son. When Ernesto located his family months later, Leah, the older girl, was allowed to stay and she became an American. Once back in Ecuador, Hannah was kept a virtual prisoner and younger daughter Edna eventually escaped this unhappy family by marrying a gringo, disastrous union.

Now Edna’s daughter, Sara, watches her own child grow up an American. Lola is at ease in the city, refuses to speak Spanish, and relishes weekends at Daddy’s apartment furnished with everything a kid could want. By the time Lola is six, Sara too has been growing and changing thanks to various encounters and revelations. One of many is a friendship with Robert, an American Jew, who introduces Sara and Lola to their Jewish roots with a Sabbath dinner picnic. As Sara looks ahead she is more decisive, more accepting, and realizes she has some control over her own life. She does still think about exploring family history. Yet she is not ready to accept an offer to stay in an apartment in Berlin, from where she could visit Hannah’s Vienna.  But she just might enroll in a German class at the Goethe Institute. She also contemplates searching for Hannah’s son, her uncle. No classic happy ending with all loose ends tied up, but the book does end on a positive note.

NARRATIVE AND STYLE  In the telling, the narrative is not as straightforward  as the summary would  indicate, for Lengua Ajena is an episodic novel.  Its 27 chapters, packed into 160 pages, shift back and forth in time and place, varying in style and structure. Some could stand alone as short stories, others are vignettes; still others slices of life, one example being the vivid description of walking down a particularly unsavory New York street. There is blank verse; there is a catalogue of items in Sara’s storage locker. Most of this is first person, Sara’s voice, but in the chapter “Declarations,” people close to Sara make statements. All these bits and pieces come together, never confusing, thanks to the author’s ability to control her narrative and leave clues that orient the reader.

 ORIGINALITY  The work fulfills the author’s intention to look beyond the stereotyped image of migrants often encountered in fiction and the media and to show how the effects of forced migration can pass from one generation to the next.

APPEAL TO A US AUDIENCE The New York setting and the focus on migration between North and South America would pique the interest of many American readers.

TRANSLATION  An experienced translator would be needed to turn out an English-language version reflecting the style and tone of the original. Special care has to be taken in passages where Sara explores possible scenarios, past and future. And appropriate renderings of foreign words and Latinamericanismos have to be translated carefully to fit the context. They should not be left in the original tongue or be relegated to footnotes.