Cultura judaica, diplomacia cultural e as crônicas de viagem de José Lins do Rego em O Globo (1944-1956)

Abstract

This article focuses on a part of the production of travel essays of José Lins do Rego, published in the newspaper O Globo, aiming to show how these journalistic texts were elevated to the condition of a book in the mid-1950s, in the wake of the writer's visit the newly created State of Israel and the literary prestige won by a novelist recently elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. When circumscribing the field of activity and circulation of literature in printed journals in Rio de Janeiro in the mid-twentieth century, the text initially highlights the writings of Lins do Rego in the 1940s, when he began his collaboration in the newspaper of his friend Roberto Marinho, during the II World War, taking a stand against the horrors of Nazifascism and expressing its solidarity with Jewish people, a position that was repeated in the following years, before the creation of the State of Israel. We then try to provide evidence that these political essays are the basis of the invitation to travel to the new country in 1955, documented on the pages of the same newspaper and transformed into a bilingual book - Portuguese-English - the following year, under the auspices of the Brazil-Israel Cultural Center. Beyond Jose Lins do Rego’s work, we mobilized other examples of Brazilian intellectuals - Silva Melo, Guilherme de Figueiredo, Câmara Cascudo and Érico Veríssimo – to stand the argument that the referred israeli cultural center was the cornerstone of this cultural and diplomatical transit between the two nations, by adopting the strategy, between the 1950s and 1960s, of promoting travel by Brazilian writers to the Middle East, with a view to the projection of Jewish and Israeli culture in the country.