Iolovitch was kind because he cared about others. Even when he was wronged, he saw his aggressors as human beings. Instead of becoming vengeful he tried to understand them. After being attacked by anti-Semitic bullies, for example, he realizes that their anger towards Jews was not an inherent evil. Rather it was the result of some priests who taught their students the most incredible lies about Jews. Instead of bringing to their students the commandment to “love thy neighbor as preached by Christ, they brought the seeds of hate. . . . ”
As a child Iolovitch’s greatest pain came from “the tears of my mother and my two brothers. . . , ” caused by his father’s drinking. But even then, he understood that his father was a “good man [who drank because] it hurt him to see the family reduced to such a deplorable state.” As he grows, Iolovitch’s compassion reaches further. He dedicated On a Clear April Morning to “all those who suffer and dream of a better world.”
In 1940 an interviewer wrote, “Marcos is a great idealist, a passionate dreamer that takes very seriously human existence and he is totally sincere when he says that his wish is for a better world for all humanity.”14 He was inspired by authors that “elevated mankind, that dignified the human species, that ennobled life.”15 And that is what he attempted in On a Clear April Morning. He describes the nobility of his everyday characters, as in his brother’s efforts to build a pushcart so they can peddle fish, or in an older couple’s efforts to enliven the life of a young child from a poor family with trips to an unknown paradise, the movie house.
But after the Second World War and all its horrors Iolovitch becomes a very frustrated idealist. His final book, Preces Profanas (1949), is a protest to the Lord for the suffering of all mankind, “Jews, Catholics, the Muslims, and Buddhists, the believers and nonbelievers, the saints and the sinners.”16
Like most literary works, On a Clear April Morning was not created in an intellectual vacuum. Since the 1890s Rio Grande do Sul had been Brazil’s most literate state and by the 1920s Porto Alegre “already possessed . . . important books stores, cinemas, newspapers and an active intellectual life . . . [with] dozens of published authors.”17 This city of immigrants was enriched by a European concern for ideas and enjoyed European resources. Often Germany was the source.18 Twenty percent of the state was German-born or descendants of German immigrants. Various bookstores sold works in German and German Jesuits were instrumental in supporting the study of philosophy in both Catholic and secular educational institutions, including those that Iolovitch and his friends attended.19
German most likely presented Marcos with few difficulties. Even early on Iolovitch’s family, like probably many of the Jewish immigrants, had found comfort in Rio Grande’s German roots. When a nurse of German descent needed to explain to Marco’s father that the nine-year-old boy had typhoid fever, she had no problem. Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jews, is descended from a medieval German dialect.
But most important for writers, Porto Alegre was the home of one of Brazil’s most dynamic publishing houses, Editora Globo, and its noted literary journal, Revista do Globo.
Editora Globo sought the newest in literature and offered the chance to publish to many young writers. As a result, in the 1930s and 40s Rio Grande do Sul gave Brazil some of its most important authors. Each one “reached out to a different sector of reality seeking to convey it with his own personal vision.” These authors often described “human beings whose living conditions were far from ideal,” and often designed plots that addressed philosophical, political, and social issues.20 They had a cultural conscience. They were concerned with principles, with goodness and sought to balance intellectual and psychological concerns.21 And in some works, the lyricism was extreme.22
Iolovitch fit right in. Of course, he chose his topic from the sector he knew best, the Jewish community. He explored principles and included intellectual and psychological concerns in his work. He filled On a Clear April Morning with discussions on the origins of anti-Semitism, the misguided paths mankind chooses, and the injustices of society but always beautified by his poetry and lightened by the ironies of Jewish humor.
In addition to Schopenhauer and Buber, Iolovitch and his friends read many of the nineteenth-century sages including Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Buchner, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. They were searching for a rational and scientific explanation of the cosmic and societal phenomena that surrounded them. They also read the moderns. Iolovitch listed among his favorites Erich Maria Remarque, Andre Gide, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, and Guillame Apollinaire.23
But it was probably Leo Tolstoy that most influenced On a Clear April Morning. In an interview at the time of this novel’s first publication in 1940, Iolovitch notes that during the previous ten years he had been continually reading Tolstoy’s early autobiographical novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth.24 Iolovitch must have been inspired by Tolstoy’s great powers of detailed pictorial observations that so mirrored his own. He must have felt a warm sense of companionship as he watched Tolstoy’s protagonist, like Iolovitch himself and the protagonist he will create in On a Clear April Morning, struggle with ethical concerns, sexual awakening, and religious doubts.
Like Tolstoy, Iolovitch began his novel with a dateless moment: Iolovitch—“On a clear April morning in the year 19…”; Tolstoy—“On the 12th of August, 18**.”25 Both writers used these vague historical moments because these young authors, although drawing on their own experiences, sought to write universal tales of growing up. They sought to write tales filled with youth’s desire to understand the world, to assess morality, and to find a path for a righteous and valued life. To create this universality, they didn’t write autobiographies but used the autobiographical form that allows insertion of fictional elements and permits the author to choose “experiences which transform and mold a character.”26
Tolstoy of course went on to write many more tales. Unfortunately, especially for those enthralled with On a Clear April Morning’s beautiful prose, Iolovitch did not.
In the 1930s and 40s Iolovitch was a recognized member of the Gaucho literary world. His short stories and poems appeared in the prestigious Revista do Globo. When southern Brazilian literature was discussed, his name was included along with those whose fame still resonates today. He appears in numerous dictionaries of Brazilian and Latin American writers. He was interviewed on the front page of a major newspaper.27 The Brazilian pavilion at the 1939–40 World Fair in New York displayed his books. And Iolovitch formed part of Rio Grande do Sul’s delegation to one of Brazil’s most important cultural events of the twentieth century, the first Brazilian Writers Congress, held in São Paulo in 1945.28 But after the publication of Preces Profanas in 1949, his writing seems to have ceased. Instead, perhaps because of his new responsibilities as a father, he dedicated himself to his legal practice. He never made much money but then he didn’t love the law. He had chosen legal studies because he needed to work his way through school and the law school didn’t require class attendance, just successful final exams.
But just before Iolovitch ceased writing, a ten-year-old boy wrote him a letter extolling the beauty of Iolovitch’s poems in Preces Profanas, “one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.”29 That young boy grew up to be the noted author Moacyr Scliar who arranged for the second edition of Numa Clara Manha de Abril to be published in 1987 and passed the book to me. To Moacyr, the “god-father” of this English edition who I often felt guided its formation from on high (Moacyr passed away prematurely in 2011) I send my deepest gratitude. Because Moacyr believed so much in the inspirational beauty of Iolovitch’s novel, English-language readers will now have their own chance to fall in love with On a Clear April Morning.
Chapter 1
On a clear April morning in the year 19… when the steppes had begun to turn green again upon the joyful entrance of Spring, there appeared scattered about in Zagradowka, a small and cheerful Russian village in the province