For me, being Jewish has been a becoming: a process of recovering a certain cultural affinity, a sense of community made palpable through nomadism and linguistic dislocation. As if a space once filled by traditions had been emptied during the diaspora of our forefathers, but remained inside us, like the resonant box of a musical instrument that reverberates during fortunate encounters, be it with books or with people of the book – like hearing an ancient song for the first time, one that we surprisingly know how to dance to.
Tomás Cohen
Writer, Translator, Berlin
When I first encountered antisemitism as a child in Chile, I didn’t feel fear. It actually made me curious about my roots. What was this ‘Jewishness’ that inspired older kids to tell me, “you shouldn’t be here, this school is not for you, go away”? After hearing those remarks, I started asking my grandfather about the origins of our family. Then I raised my hand in Religion class and told my classmates: “Just to let you know, I’m related to your savior”, which didn’t exactly prevent further bullying. I began to idolize my great-great-grandfather, a polyglot rabbi from Bessarabia who fled the pogroms, going by sea from Odesa to South America.
Tomás Cohen is a Chilean writer and translator. He studied musicology and fine arts in Santiago, Chile, art history in New York and Tibetan translation in Katmandu. He then went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Tibetan philology in Hamburg. Cohen has published the books Redoble del ronroneo (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2016) and Un árbol de luz íntima (Ediciones Bastante, 2019). His poems have been translated into seven languages and published in international journals and anthologies. His work has been awarded scholarships by the Pablo Neruda Foundation and the National Book Fund (Chile), Übersetzerhaus Looren (Switzerland), The Baltic Center for Writers and Translators (Sweden) and the Berliner Senat (Germany). He worked as Editor-at-Large for Asymptote Journal. As a founding member of the writers collective Found in Translation, he co-organizes the Hafenlesung in Hamburg. He lives in Berlin.