Max and the Cats: A Novel     by Moacyr Scliar, Translated by Eloah F. Giacomelli Original title: Max e os felinos Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Ballantine Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 99 pages Not available for ordering

Max and the Cats is perhaps Scliar’s most genial book, written with charm and simplicity, that takes a serious enough subject (forced emigration and making a life in a new continent) but treats it in a surprising, sometimes fantastical way. Max’s cats are all ‘big cats’ and make up quite a strange zoo of creatures; a stuffed tiger that lurks in the store room of his fathers furrier’s shop in 1930s Berlin, a hungry Jaguar he has to share a lifeboat with after a shipwreck when he flees Germany for Porto Alegre, and a wild Onça — a kind of Brazilian panther — who is entirely imaginary but still germane to the story.

Each big cat symbolizes a stage of his life, each stage as threatening and dangerous in its way as a wild cat but which Max nevertheless manages to escape from. Max and the Cats is a real adventure story, as befits a tale of tigers, jaguars and panthers, even though its protagonist is definitely a wimp; when he’s shipwrecked his first reaction is to have a good cry. Perhaps though it is this wimpiness that makes the episode of being adrift on the high seas with the jaguar all the more dramatic and surprising. Surprising too is Max’s subsequent incarnation as a ferocious Nazi-baiter when he takes on a complacent German war criminal who, like many of his compatriots, has found it ‘more convenient’ to live in South America after 1945.

Max and the Cats is in fact a beautiful, often funny, fable about Nazism (!), Jewish redemption, revenge and, finally, peace.

But it was impossible for Max to forget that afternoon in the stockroom. He was always daydreaming about the young woman and would write her passionate letters-which he would promptly destroy — until finally, unable to bear it any longer, he went to see her at her house. Frida, all smiles, received him without rancor, as if nothing had happened. She asked after his father, the store, even the tiger. Then, on an impulse they embraced; they made love on the sofa in the living room, oblivious to the presence of her aunt, a deaf and blind old woman who was sitting in a rocking chair, intoning old Tyrolean songs. 11