Cláper

by Alicia Freilich de Segal

Claper is a novel of Venezuelan Jewish life originally published in Spanish in 1987. Narrated by a father, a first-generation emigrant from Eastern Europe, and his daughter, a second-generation Jewish Venezuelan, it tells a classic story of the twentieth-century Jewish experience, of Old World struggles for economic survival and New World struggles for acceptance and independence. The novel's appeal lies in the author's success in rendering two diverse voices convincingly, and in so doing representing a range of immigrant and post immigrant experiences. "Claper" is a transliteration of a Yiddish word for peddler; it is how the father humbly describes himself, or, as a "knower of nothing, a schlepper, a knocker on doors." His determined trudge through life contrasts with the emotional and cultural doubts of his self-assured daughter coming of age during the time of radical excitement that swept through university campuses in the 1960s, making this story not only a familiar one of Jewish