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Cultural (dis)Connections
Memoirs
of a Surrealist Scholar
by
Renée
Hubert
“During
my first year at Sarah Lawrence I rode to Bronxville in the
car of Isabela Garcia Lorca. As we represented two of the
three languages taught at the college we had a lot in common.
It became almost immediately clear to me that Isabela had very
strong family ties. She lived with her aged mother and her
sister who had two children. Her brother, a Barnard professor
of Spanish, lived very close to them. More than anything else
the memory of the poet, victim of the Spanish Revolution and
Franco, held the family together. In the fifties and later in
colleges and museums of the East Coast readings of
Lorca's poetry or performances of his plays repeatedly took
place. The family as a unit not as separate individuals
attended these events. Their expression was solemn as they sat
silently next to each other. The occasion was not a
well-deserved celebration, but an instance of full-fledged
mourning. The family was acquitting itself of a debt
capable of immunizing against their American environment. This
devotion not only characterized the life of the poet's mother
and her three surviving children, but it also distanced them
from their daily life. For a spectator like myself it appeared
that they were enacting the tragic end of a Lorca play such as
The House of Alba. A few years later we met Lorca's
contemporary Jorge Guillen and his daughter Teresa and son
Claudio. They eagerly made friends with people of every origin
and every generation. Their cosmopolitanism had little in
common with the grief of the Lorcas all of whom returned to
Spain long before the death of Franco…”
The
daughter of German Jewish parents, both of them prominent
physicians defending liberal causes, Renée Riese Hubert was
bundled out of Nazi Germany as a young girl to be educated
in Paris. After
receiving her licence she left her family in France one
year before the invasion, spending the war years in England.
Later she joined her parents and her artist sister in Virginia
where they had taken refuge during the war,
She obtained her PhD degree at Columbia University and,
while adapting to her new life in America, taught literature
in various parts of the country. She is presently professor
emerita at the University of California, Irvine. In addition
to 6 books of French poetry and some 175 articles, she
published Surrealism and the Book, Magnifying Mirrors:
Women Surrealism and Partnership, and in collaboration
with Judd D. Hubert, The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists'
Books.
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