abstract
Rawet was born in Poland in 1929 and immigrated to Brazil in 1936. Having lived his early years in a shtetl, his childhood was marked by the omnipresence of a Jewish ambience. The departure from this environment puts him in touch with a mostly non-Jewish population, and develops his immigrant self-awareness, an estrangement that will mark all his work. Rawet departed radically from the Jewish community itself, which he accused in 1977 of minerality. Placed thus in the Kafkaesque situation of not having where to go nor where to return, he was in a unique position to reflect in his fiction about the difficulties of living, manifested in literature as representation: how the Jew represents national subjects and how he sees himself represented by them. In "Christmas without Christ" (Diálogo, 1963), Nehemias, a 30 year old Jew and a professor of history, is invited by a Christian friend for Christmas dinner with his family. It's the perfect occasion to see how, in Rawet's opinion, each family member sees that strange being - the Jew, and how the protagonist assesses the attitude of each one in relation to the Jews.
Keywords:
Samuel Rawet; estrangement; immigrants; anti-Semitism