poverty forces him to live in a leaky newspaper-lined shed, he communes with the “drops of water [that] began to beat to the rhythm of the rain. . . .
Little droplet, little droplet, I murmured, how sad is your muffled tempo. . . , your sad cadence. . . . ”
On a Clear April Morning is full of poetry and musical cadences and tempos because Marcos Iolovitch was both a musician and a poet. He supported himself by teaching the violin for several years. And poetry was his real literary love. On a Clear April Morning is Iolovitch’s only full-length narrative work. His two other books Eu e Tu (I and Thou) published in 1932 and Preces Profanas (Secular Prayers) published in 1949 are collections of poems and poetical aphorisms.
As do so many young poets, this sensitive young man used his pen to understand humanity and the meaning of life. As he describes, the first years in Brazil did not fulfill his father’s dream. Instead they were full of hunger, tragic deaths, economic failures, anti-Semitism, and his father’s alcoholic response. “Why and for what do we live?” Iolovitch asks. Why does God “distribute rewards and punishments without even the most basic concern for equality and justice”?
He seeks his answers in the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers, in the realm of the intellect where one of his favorite philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, noted, “ pain has no power.”10 Iolovitch dedicates a whole chapter of On a Clear April Morning to Schopenhauer. And he most likely took the title of his first book, I and Thou from the best-known treatise of the great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. In I and Thou, Iolovitch reflects the concept that Buber develops in his I and Thou that “man becomes whole not in relation to himself but only through relation to another self”.11
In Buber the true I-Thou relationship is that “in which two persons face and accept each other as truly human.”12 This acceptance of each person as truly human and the compassion that results is what defined Iolovitch. Moacyr Scliar describes him as “endowed with a charming kindness.”13
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
