Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean literary imagination

Plantation Jews, while a less common focus of slavery literature than port Jews for reasons both historical and political, feature significantly in several works of contemporary fiction and drama. The appearance of Sephardic planters in postslavery writing, and especially in Cynthia McLeod’s novel Hoe duur was de suiker? (The Cost of Sugar, 1987), signals the authors’ awareness of a more territorialized dimension of Jewish experience in the colonial Americas. This literary trend coincides with the increasing attention that is being devoted to Jewish plantation life by historians of the Jewish Atlantic, who have begun to investigate the biographies of plantation Jews alongside those of port Jews and to point to the porousness of these two categories. Generic and thematic shifts in contemporary slavery writing may be read productively in relation to new perspectives on slavery that are emerging in the historical scholarship and, more broadly, to “the overriding impulse of historiography since the 1970s to avoid depicting slavery as a monolith” (Ryan, Calls and Responses 19).¹ At the same time, the Jewish plantation fiction and drama that I discuss here also bears out Elizabeth Russ’s understanding of literary representations of the plantation as “not primarily a physical location but rather an insidious ideological and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told and retold” (3).

As this chapter will show, Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod’s portrayal of plantation Jews diverges from port Jews narratives in both thematic and formal terms. The depictions of port Jews that I discussed in chapter 3 followed a strikingly consistent script in which the Jew functioned as a mechanism of the slave’s emancipation. In each text, we encounter a male Sephardic broker figure whose appearance part way through the narrative changes the course of the slave protagonist’s trajectory by introducing new possibilities for mobility and freedom. The Jew helps to move the narrative forward by effecting changes in the slave’s physical environment and by opening up access to literacy, money, and even romance.² Simultaneously, the destabilizing presence of the Jew unsettles the conventions of the slave narrative and encourages reflection on its discursive status. Yet, with the exception of Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress, these texts appear less self-conscious in ascribing a moral function to the Jew. Whether they present their Jewish protagonists in a sympathetic or more ambivalent light, they tend to identify Jewishness with an ethical principle that alternately exposes the inhumanity of the Christian plantocracy or the Jew’s own hypocrisy. In so doing they echo apologist narratives that attribute a greater moral sensitivity to Jews and interpret any contravening behavior as a deviation from Jewishness itself.

McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? challenges this apologist narrative and the association of Jewishness with ethics that underpins it by eschewing the typological strategy upon which the slavery literature discussed in chapter 3 relied. Instead of presenting an isolated Jewish protagonist whose actions reflect on his people as a whole, Hoe duur was de suiker? portrays a fully fledged eighteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean community that exhibits a wide range of human behaviors and ethical perspectives available within the confines of its time. Moreover, rather than following the conventions of the slave narrative thematized by Condé and Dabydeen, McLeod takes up another influential form in postslavery literature, the plantation family saga. Hoe duur was de suiker? is governed by the trope not of individual testimony but of family history, which one critic identifies as “the thematic and structural sine qua non of postslavery narrative” (Handley, Postslavery Literatures 3). While, in the other slavery fiction that we have considered, the Jew enters the scene relatively late as an outsider who is at odds with his surroundings (I use the masculine pronoun deliberately), in Hoe duur was de suiker? we are from the outset fully immersed in the world of the colonial Jewish family in which the passing of time is marked by Jewish holidays such as Sukkot and rituals such as brit milah and bar mitzvah. With this transition from the isolated figure of the port Jew to the Jewish planter family and community comes an emphasis on female Jewish characters. Jewish women, who remain in the background or are absent from the texts discussed in chapter 3, take center stage in McLeod’s novel in keeping with the conventions of the plantation melodrama.

McLeod’s focus on family history, which reflects the preoccupation of postslavery writing with genealogy, also recalls the “foundational fictions” of nineteenth-century Latin American literature discussed by Doris Sommer in which the family unit stands in for the nation. Yet in McLeod’s novel the nation in question is not only the Surinamese nation but also the Spanish Portuguese Jewish Nation of the Caribbean, a New World diasporic branch of the early modern Iberian Jewish nación of Sephardim and Marranos that dispersed across the Netherlands, Italy, England, and beyond after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. The thematic shift in Hoe duur was de suiker? from port Jew to plantation Jew and the generic shift from neoslave narrative to plantation family saga bespeak the unique historical conditions of Surinamese Jewry, who by the end of the seventeenth century made up one third of the Dutch colony’s European population and in the early eighteenth century owned almost 30 percent of the colony’s plantations (Ben-Ur and Frankel 31, 33). Accordingly, while the port Jews we met in chapter 3 are pariah figures who are perpetually on a quest for home, McLeod’s plantation Jews have achieved a sense of community and belonging in their adoptive Caribbean setting, albeit a tenuous one.

Organized around the tropes of family, romance, and genealogy, McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? is modeled not on the fugitive slave narrative but on Margaret Mitchell’s plantation epic Gone with the Wind (1936). Paradoxically, this more conservative generic choice liberates McLeod from some of the constraints that the neoslave narrative’s testimonial form imposed on the novels considered in chapter 3. McLeod’s depiction of a fully developed Jewish community rather than an isolated Jewish protagonist enables an alternative commentary on Jewishness and its relationship to African slavery to emerge, one that anticipates recent directions in the historiography of the Jewish Atlantic. Moreover, in contrast to the neoslave narratives that we examined, while Hoe duur was de suiker? maintains a dual focus on its Jewish and slave protagonists, in keeping with the plantation epic’s emphasis on the planter’s perspective, the novel’s narrative center is the Sephardic community. As I will suggest, McLeod’s adoption of the plantation epic genre and recentering of the Caribbean narrative of slavery on Jewish rather than Black subjects carry tensions that are thematic of Surinamese Jewish history more broadly.

Although Hoe duur was de suiker? became the best-selling Surinamese novel, was highly successful in the Netherlands (Smith, “Diasporic Slavery Memorials” 84, 91), and has recently been made into a feature film, it has received little attention among anglophone readers and critics. This disparity may reflect not only the novel’s limited availability in English translation but also the difficulty that McLeod suggests a Jewish American readership has in confronting the history of Jewish involvement in slavery, including their participation in the practice of concubinage. In an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, McLeod explains that Jewish plantation owners kept slave mistresses with whom they had children: “There is a responsibility to acknowledge this history of slavery…. American Jews don’t want to speak of this, but [Jews] did [have slaves] in Suriname” (Rovner, “Shake a Family Tree”). McLeod’s observation about Jewish American responses to the history of Jewish slaveholding is borne out by the account of Shai Fierst, a Jewish American Peace Corps worker who was posted to Suriname in 2007. Fierst describes the cognitive dissonance he experienced when he encountered a chapter of Jewish history that contradicted the narrative about Jewishness upon which he was raised: “While still in the States, I did some basic research. Additional surprises greeted me. I found out that many Jews were successful landowners and read conflicting texts about slave labor on Jewish plantations. After I arrived, a lecturer on local Suriname history described the Jews of Suriname as slave owners. I assumed that it was just a few isolated families. The information did not resonate with me. Historically, I was taught that we Jews were the persecuted, not the persecutors” (par. 4). As noted in the introduction, this same sense of unease permeates Jewish American critic Ronnie Scharfman’s description of her unsettling discovery during a trip to the U.S. South that Jews had owned slaves: “I felt ashamed, enraged, and, especially, confused. Coming from such a tradition I subscribe to as one with a passion for social justice dating back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, sympathizing, from the transmitted memory of the Israelite slaves in Egypt, with the wretched of the earth and what I like to think of as the moral high ground of that position, I wanted no part of this symbolic genealogy” (461).

McLeod, a prominent Surinamese writer of mixed descent who herself traces Jewish ancestry, is not the only author considered thus far in this study to introduce the figure of the plantation Jew.³ Late in Hill’s The Book of Negroes, the port Jew briefly merges with the plantation Jew when Solomon reveals at the slave Aminata’s trial that he owns an indigo plantation, a plot detail that would seem to confirm Aminata’s indictment of him by further implicating him in the slavery economy. Yet in McLeod’s novel Jewish plantation life is explored in much more depth, as bespeaks the greater access to land that Jews historically enjoyed in Suriname. While the port Jew is invested in the writing of Walcott and Condé with ethical value as a fellow sufferer, McLeod’s plantation family saga challenges this narrative of Jewish victimhood by drawing attention to the foundational role Sephardic Jews played in the colonial history of Suriname, where they were some of the earliest settlers. The land- and slave-owning Jews portrayed by McLeod illustrate that Sephardic Jewish experience in the colonial Americas was not only one of displacement but also of reterritorialization and rerooting.

Schorsch has observed that, in the Jewish Atlantic context,

Jewish (Sephardic, really) landedness deserves more attention. Unlike many colonists, Sephardim rarely become farmers. They became plantation owners. In the eighteenth century, wealthy Dutch, English and French Sephardim lived off of income from investments, bought estates, often in the American colonies. While one can find Jewish foremen on plantations, I have argued that the Sephardim were attracted to land and slaveowning precisely because of the status it gave them, a status first really available to them in the Americas, not only for economic reasons,…but also because in so much of Europe Jews were by law prohibited from such ownership.

McLeod, who is not only a novelist but also a leading historian of Suriname, brings this landed dimension of Sephardic Caribbean experience into focus in her meticulously researched Jewish plantation epic Hoe duur was de suiker? In McLeod’s historical novel we encounter a more rooted and privileged form of Sephardic Caribbean life than we have seen in other postslavery writing, one that reflects the distinctive conditions of the eighteenth-century Jewish agricultural settlement of Jodensavanne (“the Jews’ savannah”) in Suriname. While few Jews owned plantations in Barbados and Jamaica (two other major centers of Caribbean Jewish life), the majority of elite Surinamese Sephardim were planters, so that at their height in the 1760s, they were the proprietors of 115 of Suriname’s 591 plantations (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 62). Jodensavanne, located on the Suriname River three hours by boat from Paramaribo and founded in the mid-seventeenth century by Sephardic Jews who had migrated both directly from Europe and via other New World colonies including Brazil and Cayenne, was one of the most autonomous and privileged Jewish communities in the Western hemisphere in the eighteenth century.⁵

As early colonists who mixed with the local slave population, Sephardic Jews had a significant impact on the creole language Sranan Tongo in Suriname, much as they did on Papiamentu in Curaçao (Ben-Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter” 167; Rupert 115). The language spoken by the slaves on Surinamese plantations became known as “Dju-tongo” or the Jewish tongue (Davis, “Creole Languages” 4). When slaves escaped the plantations, they carried this Creole with them, which accounts for the usage of the word treef in relation to food taboos in the Saramaka Maroon language. A Jewish influence may also be seen in Maroon clan names that derive from the Jewish plantations from which they escaped (including “Nasís” from Nassy, “Biítus” from Britto, and “Matjáu” from Machado [Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 229]). Together with syncretic practices such as the use of mezuzahs by colored people in Paramaribo (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 229–30), these linguistic traces testify to the intensive contact between slaves and Jewish planters in colonial Suriname and to the participation of Sephardic Jews in the process of Surinamese creolization. Indeed, Aviva Ben-Ur argues that because of the size of its Jewish population and the extent of Black-Jewish contact, in colonial Suriname “creolization meant the fusion of European Jewish and black cultures and peoples” (“A Matriarchal Matter” 168–69).⁶

The unique historical character of the Surinamese Jewish community is perhaps best illustrated by the case of the Mulatto Jews who formed a society called the Path of the Righteous (Darhe Jesarim) in 1759.⁷ In contrast to the practice of Jewish communities elsewhere in the Western hemisphere, some Surinamese Mulatto Jews were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Jodensavanne, so that “among the many Jewish communities in the Americas in which slaves were owned, only in Surinam did some slaves become Jewish enough to merit a burial official enough for scholars to recognize” (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 238). While the Mulatto Jews of Suriname gained an unusual degree of recognition and were admitted into Jewish society as congreganten, a second-tier social class made up of both Eurafrican Jews and full members who had married women of African descent, the congreganten were only allowed to sit on the bench of the mourners in the synagogue and were buried in a separate area of the cemetery.⁸ When the Darhe Jesarim challenged some of these religious restrictions and attempted to gain independence from the Mahamad (Jewish governing body) by petitioning the colonial authorities, the Mahamad tried to shut down the society, and in 1800 the Mulatto Jews’ synagogue was demolished in what according to one historian “was above all a struggle to maintain social control” (Cohen, Jews in Another Environment 172). The story of the Mulatto Jews illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions of Jewish life in the Dutch colony in the eighteenth century that provide the rich materials for McLeod’s Jewish plantation saga.

In Hoe duur was de suiker?, McLeod chooses as a vehicle for her investigation of Jewish Surinamese creolization one of the dominant genres of slavery fiction: the plantation family saga. More specifically, McLeod models her novel on Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which she read at the age of fourteen and which has exerted a profound influence on historical fiction about slavery by Black and white authors alike.⁹ Hoe duur was de suiker? betrays the influence of Mitchell’s plantation melodrama in its multigenerational, epoch-spanning narrative structure and in its thematic emphasis on genealogy and romance. Also in keeping with the plantation epic, McLeod’s historical novel focuses on figures who are neither at the top of the power structure nor at the bottom—in particular the daughters of the planter patriarch and the house slaves who care for them.¹⁰ As I will suggest, the influence of the plantation epic is further evident in the commemorative and elegiac tone of the novel, which honors the forgotten contributions of Jews to the history of the colony. At the same time, Hoe duur was de suiker? deviates significantly from Mitchell’s model by recentering it on Jewish experience, a repositioning of the genre that ultimately also opens it up to an engagement with Black female subjectivity and to a celebration of Maroon resistance.

Set in the 1760s and 1770s, Hoe duur was de suiker? tells the story of two Surinamese step-sisters of Portuguese Jewish descent against the backdrop of the renewed Maroon conflicts that followed the hundred years Maroon War. The seventeen-year-old Elza Fernandez is raised on Hébron Plantation by her widowed father Levi and the slave woman Ashana, Elza’s Gentile mother having died in childbirth. Eventually Levi remarries, this time to a Jewish woman, who comes to live at Hébron with her daughters Sarith, Esther, and Rebecca.¹¹ Elza and Sarith become rivals when they vie for the affections of Rutger Le Chasseur, the recently arrived and highly placed agent of an Amsterdam merchant company. Although Rutger chooses Elza to be his wife, he engages in an extended affair with Sarith that drives a deep wedge between the two sisters. Alongside the stories of these white characters—in contrast to Hill’s Solomon Lindo, McLeod’s Surinamese Jews insist that they are unambiguously white¹²—the novel also addresses the lives of their slaves, in particular those of Ashana, who becomes a mother figure to Elza after Levi is widowed; Ashana’s daughter Maisa, who moves with Elza to Paramaribo when she marries Rutger; Sarith’s slave Mini-mini, who will eventually become the concubine of Sarith’s husband Julius; and Rutger’s slave and receptionist Alex. In addition, two non-Jewish characters, the Dutch mercenary soldier Jan and Sarith’s lover Lieutenant Andersma, are introduced later in the novel, further diversifying its portrait of eighteenth-century Surinamese society and contributing to the theme of Maroon resistance that dominates the novel’s later chapters.

The central device of Hoe duur was de suiker? is the twinning of Elza and Sarith, between whose stories and perspectives the novel alternates. The half-sisters bear little resemblance to one another other. While Elza is homely, modest, and self-sacrificing, Sarith is pretty, arrogant, and self-indulgent and exemplifies the moral corruption and decadence of the colony. The divergent comportment of the two sisters thematizes the doubled positioning of Sephardic Jews in colonial Suriname who participated in the exploitation of the slaves and yet at the same time experienced their own forms of exclusion. Drawing attention to this fundamental ambiguity of Jewish Surinamese history, the novel differentiates Sarith and Elza most markedly with regard to their treatment of their slaves. Sarith “regarded slaves just as creatures who must serve her and always be there for her, never taking into account that they were people, too, and people with feelings” (126). Over the course of the novel, the spiteful Sarith has Ashana whipped to death and sells the pregnant Mini-mini to a lascivious trader. With her abusive behavior toward her slaves and sexual promiscuity, Sarith functions as a foil to the retiring and gentle Elza, who is unfailingly kind to her slaves. Upon first meeting Elza, Rutger notes that “she was a marked exception to the women and girls he had met until then. Not once had she belittled a slave-girl, but to the contrary had said that, apart from her father, brother and stepsister, the two slave-women who had brought her up were the most important people in her life. He had noticed that she never spoke to a slave in a commanding tone of voice, but was always pleasant and friendly” (37). Significantly, while Sarith is a full member of the Jewish community, Elza is an outcast by virtue of her mixed birth, as is underscored by an early scene in which she must wait outside the synagogue while her relatives attend a service. In a second, mirror-image episode, the Jewish guests at Elza’s wedding are not able to attend the Lutheran ceremony. Thus, in contrast to the slavery fiction that I discussed in chapter 3, instead of juxtaposing the behavior of a benevolent Jew with that of an archetypally brutal Christian planter or slaver, McLeod inverts this pattern so that the half-breed Jew Elza exposes the callousness of her fully Jewish stepsister Sarith.

Although Hoe duur was de suiker? uncovers the relationships of dependency and exploitation between the Surinamese Jewish planters and their slaves, it does not do so by harnessing the conventions of the slave narrative. Unlike other works of slavery fiction I have considered, McLeod does not employ the first-person testimonial voice that is a hallmark of the classic slave narrative and is also fundamental to the neoslave narrative as defined by Ashraf Rushdy. Instead, eschewing the first person altogether, McLeod adopts the third-person voice but uses free indirect discourse to focalize the viewpoints of the various protagonists among whom the novel continually moves. The family saga framing initially foregrounds the Jewish planter family’s perspectives and struggles, particularly those of Elza and Sarith, to the exclusion of those of their slaves in a manner that uncomfortably mirrors the suppression of slaves’ voices from the official historical record. As the novel progresses, however, McLeod casts her net wider, interpolating the perspectives of a number of non-Jewish characters who occupy a variety of stations within the colonial power structure, from the newly arrived colonial administrator Rutger to the lowly Dutch soldier Jan who attempts to escape poverty in Holland by enlisting to fight the Maroons. Finally, a little over one hundred pages into the novel, Elza’s slave Maisa is briefly given the narrative focus, followed some pages later by Sarith’s slave Mini-mini and then Rutger’s slave Alex.¹³

This withholding of the slave testimony that is fundamental to the slave narrative genre would appear to reinscribe the excision of slaves’ voices from the colonial archive in keeping with the novel’s conservative generic framing—a feature that may be perturbing to the reader accustomed to slavery literature that works to recover the lost voices of slaves. (Accordingly, the film adaptation of Hoe duur was de suiker?, which premiered in the Netherlands in September 2013, revises this aspect of the novel by making the slavegirl Mini-mini’s perspective the governing one.) Scenes in Hoe duur was de suiker? such as that depicting the slaves’ ritual dance at Elza’s wedding, which are filtered through a white gaze that perceives the slaves not as individuals but as “dark, half-naked bodies” (50), also generate unease. I would argue that this sense of unease is thematic of a larger discomfort with the history of Jewish slaveholding that the novel asks us to confront. The novel gives voice to marginalized Jewish historical subjects, but only at the cost of suppressing the voices of their slaves, echoing a historical pattern in which Jews obtained opportunities in the colonies that were denied to them in Europe, but only by participating in a system that negated the humanity of slaves. Hoe duur was de suiker?’s framing as a plantation saga, a genre that tends to emphasize the ruling class’s experience of slavery over that of its victims, underscores these tensions and contradictions of Sephardic Surinamese history.

If Hoe duur was de suiker? is distinguished from mainstream slavery fiction by an unusually sustained focus on Jewish colonial experience and Jewish Caribbean creolization, it diversifies our perspective on slavery still further by adopting the polyphonic narrative structure that, as I showed in chapters 1 and 2, typifies Caribbean literary sephardism. While the novel opens with a tight focus on the two sisters Elza and Sarith, it increasingly offsets their stories by introducing a variety of other viewpoints including those of the French Hugenot-descended Dutch administrator Rutger Le Chasseur and the African-descended slaves. Situating Elza’s and Sarith’s stories within a broader landscape of contiguous and intersecting experiences, McLeod employs a cinematic technique, tracking across a series of topographical sites that stage a variety of forms of intercultural encounter. These include the Jewish plantations of Hébron and Klein Paradijs, which bring Jews and slaves into intimate contact but where the Jews remain somewhat isolated from the Dutch colonial elite; the self-governing Jewish village of Jodensavanne, “a new Jerusalem on the river,” whose fame spreads across the Jewish diaspora but which is already in decline at the present time of the novel; the town of Paramaribo, where Jews come into more extensive contact with Christians; and finally the jungle that is occupied by the Maroons who are being hunted by the colonial soldiers.

Much as in other examples of Caribbean sephardism, Hoe duur was de suiker?’s multicentered, connective structure allows for resonances and parallels to emerge across racial, cultural, and master/slave divides. The desire to escape from poverty symbolized by the dream of acquiring shoes that is shared by the slave Alex and by the soldier Jan’s sister is depicted as common to both Surinamese slaves and poor Dutch. The misery caused by a lover’s infidelity is suffered by Jewish and Black women alike, and both sectors of the population find themselves spatially confined, their freedom of movement limited.¹⁴ The soldiers suffer abusive behavior that resonates with the maltreatment of slaves, and we learn that the soldiers are pawns of those in power, much like the slaves, so that the soldiers’ deaths, too, make up part of the “cost of sugar”:

Hundreds of innocent soldiers met their death in the jungles of Suriname, and not particularly at the hands of the Maroons. They died from disease, starvation and exhaustion, or from drowning in the swamps. Their fighting wasn’t motivated. They were in fact playthings in the hands of a group of whites who misused them: the planters, the colonial government, the directors of the Society in the Netherlands…. They needed the slaves. Everything must be sacrificed for the production of the things that would bring them a pile of money: cotton, coffee and sugar.¹⁵

Hoe duur was de suiker? challenges plantation fiction’s ideological underpinnings, falsifying its idealized presentation of benign planters and happy slaves by depicting eighteenth-century Surinamese Jews as enjoying a privileged lifestyle that is founded on slave labor and by portraying the Sephardic Caribbean community as exclusionary and conservative in its politics. At the same time, McLeod also nuances this critique by thematizing the anti-Jewish attitudes that impinged upon the Jews’ freedoms and sense of security in colonial Suriname. Despite their wealth and status, McLeod’s Surinamese Jews remain subject to the prejudices of the Dutch elite, as is suggested by a reference early in the novel to the parents of Sarith’s Christian boyfriend who are so horrified by his relationship with a Jewess that they send him to Holland. McLeod’s plantation Jews enjoy only partial acceptance in the colonial society and power structure. Sarith complains that “many well-to-do Christian plantation owners wanted as little as possible to do with Jews, as if they were an inferior type of person. Ridiculous: they were all whites, after all!” (18). Although they were among Suriname’s first settlers, Jews are viewed as “second-rate citizens” (163) of the society and complain that their contributions to the colony go unrecognized by more recent Dutch arrivals. The Jewish Fernandez family is included among the “high and white society” (37) and are “naturally invited” to a ball given by the governor, where a separate kosher meal is provided for the Jewish guests (39). Yet when Elza attends a dinner party at the home of Rutger’s employer, Mr. Van Omhoog, her family is not included in the invitation because, unlike her, they are Jewish. The Dutch theater that opens in Paramaribo in 1775 prohibits Jews from attending and the Jewish community is forced to build its own theater. When economic conditions in the colony worsen, the Jews find they cannot get loans from the banks. Most chilling is the novel’s reference to a scheme that was proposed in the 1760s to enclose the Jews of Suriname in a ghetto in Paramaribo:

McLeod introduces further ambiguity and complexity into her portrait of Surinamese Sephardim by portraying a wide range of relations between Jewish planters and their Black slaves. At one end of the spectrum is the familial-like sense of kinship that develops between Levi and Elza and their house slaves Ashana and Maisa. McLeod also incorporates the story of a white Christian master who buys the freedom of his slave concubine, presaging Julius’s similarly benevolent treatment of Mini-mini and their children toward the end of the novel. At the other end of the spectrum are the horrific instances of sexual abuse and torture endured by the slaves of Jewish and Christian planters alike. Discussing the maltreatment of slaves, for example, Elza recounts that a Susanna Duplessis “has had a child drowned before its mother’s eyes” (45), an incident that recalls a similar story included in Richard Price’s Maroon ethnography involving a plantation owned by the Sephardic Jew Imanuël Machado (Price, Alabi’s World 6). Maroon oral history is invoked in a second scene in the novel in which Alex tells Rutger the story of the half-Jewish Maroon leader Boni. Alex explains that Boni was born to a slave woman who had been raped by a lecherous Jewish planter. When the planter’s cruel wife discovers the pregnancy, she cuts off one of the slave woman’s breasts as well as the genitals of her man-friend. The man dies and the slave woman retreats into the forest, where she gives birth to twin boys who are brown-skinned and have red curly hair, marking their mixed Black-Jewish origins.

The novel’s critique of Jewish plantation society is moderated by its positioning of Hébron as the “good plantation” that stands in opposition to the rampant physical and sexual abuse carried out at Jeremiah’s plantation. Yet the more enlightened perspective of Hébron’s proprietor, Levi Fernandez, appears to be tied to his eccentric positioning within the Jewish community that results from his rebellious first marriage to a non-Jew and his mother’s subsequent repudiation of him. Indeed, Levi’s views on slavery are depicted as atypical of the Jewish (and Gentile) planter society. When the newly arrived Rutger, who fervently believes in improvement, suggests at a Sukkot dinner held in Jodensavanne that slave uprisings could be prevented if the planters treated their slaves better, Levi is alone among the other Jewish guests to agree. Similarly, Elza’s more tolerant and enlightened viewpoint appears to stem from her outsider position with respect to the Jewish community.¹⁷ Moreover, even the benevolent Elza and Levi are shown to exploit the slaves’ labor, on which they are utterly reliant, as Levi comes to recognize only after Ashana’s death:

Could he ever have explained to someone else what this slave had meant to him throughout his life? How she had loved his children, cared for his wife; how she, despite her own sorrow, had consoled him when his wife died; how she had cared for his children with all the love that was within her, and how she was always there for them, from early morning to deep in the night?…Had he ever let her know how much he valued her? No, of course not: she was just a slave! All slave labour was simply taken for granted…. But all that love, that warmth, that consolation, Levi wondered: was that work, too? Was that to be taken for granted?

At the same time as questioning apologist narratives of Jewish colonial history, Hoe duur was de suiker? also challenges the failure of the Dutch to confront their colonial past. Just as Toni Morrison’s Beloved has been credited with sparking interest in slavery memorials, Hoe duur was de suiker? has been identified as “piercing through a profound cultural amnesia in the Netherlands regarding colonialism” (Smith, “Diasporic Slavery Memorials” 83) and as catalysing the creation of the Dutch national slavery monument, which was commemorated in 2002.¹⁸ Indeed, Hoe duur was de suiker? is itself a literary memorial that commemorates Maroon resistance through a detailed recounting of Maroon military tactics while also documenting in an ethnohistorical fashion Maroon and slave rituals and social organization.¹⁹ Alex hears stories of the Maroons from his friend Caesar, who has been forced to join the Zwarte Jagers, the corps of slave soldiers used to suppress the Maroon resistance. Also fighting the Maroons is the Dutch soldier Jan, whose perception of Blacks alters radically after he is injured and brought to a Maroon village where he is nursed back to health: “Were these the dangerous negroes who had to be hunted and shot dead? Were these the people whose food crops had to be destroyed and burnt so that hunger would finally force them to surrender? Why, in fact? Because they had chosen for this life instead of slavery? There were no better or kinder people on earth, of that Jan was now convinced” (213–14). During Jan’s primitivist idyll in the jungle, the Maroons are portrayed as egalitarian and resourceful, their village as a communal paradise. At the same time, in keeping with her complex understanding of the nature of resistance, McLeod also incorporates a critique of the brutality of the Maroons in a scene in which their leader Agosu terrorizes Sarith and her son.²⁰

As we have seen, however, McLeod employs the archival and archaeological strategies of postslavery fiction not only to exhibit slavery and Maroon resistance but also to memorialize the Caribbean Jewish past. While McLeod does not shy away from confronting the more troubling aspects of this chapter of Jewish history, her novel ultimately calls for a recognition of the foundational role that Sephardic Jews played in establishing the colony of Suriname. Hoe duur was de suiker? surveys a series of sites of Sephardic Caribbean memory, generating what Vivian Nun Halloran in her study of Caribbean slavery fiction calls a “museum effect.”²¹ At the novel’s opening, we find the Surinamese Jewish community gathered in Jodensavanne to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the Beracha Ve Shalom Synagogue, which was consecrated in 1685, making it one of the oldest synagogues in the Western hemisphere. Later in the novel, Elza travels once again to Jodensavanne to celebrate the synagogue’s eighty-fifth anniversary. Hoe duur was de suiker? details the layout and design of the village of Jodensavanne and the town of Paramaribo while also mapping the location of various Jewish plantations and incorporating descriptions of the synagogue and other colonial architecture. This attention to architectural and topographical detail constitutes a literary counterpart to current efforts by scholars and by the International Survey of Jewish Monuments to document and preserve Jewish cemeteries in the Caribbean.²²

In another example of the museum effect, in the epilogue Elza’s dying grandmother passes on to her heirlooms, including a set of porcelain and a tapestry, that had traveled with the family from Portugal via Brazil to Suriname.²³ The novel’s exhibiting of these artifacts registers the particular sequence of geographical displacements that produced the Surinamese Jewish community and helps to establish its importance to Suriname’s colonial history: “The whites who had more recently arrived in Suriname appeared not to realize that it was precisely the Jews who had been the driving force behind the blossoming of this colony. They were the first substantial group to come here. They had settled here, mostly in the upper reaches of the rivers. They had started plantations, and with the money earned had paid huge sums to the government to provide for the colony’s upkeep. Now things were going less well for the Jews…” (163). This complaint that the Jews’ contribution to the colony is being forgotten recalls an earlier act of commemorative historiography, the 1788 Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam that was authored by David de Isaac Cohen Nassy and the regents of the Jewish community.²⁴ The Essai historique, which McLeod cites as a source in the novel’s bibliography, seeks to correct the oversights of Dutch historians of the period and in particular their depiction of the Sephardim’s involvement in military activities against the Maroons. In order to contest official narratives of the colony’s history, the authors of the Essai historique harness the Enlightenment language of emancipation and assemble their own archive, documenting both Jewish contributions to the colony and the forms of discrimination that afflicted Surinamese Jewry. The Essai historique begins by emphasizing that the story of Surinamese Jewry is inextricably bound up with that of the colony itself, so much so that one cannot be told without the other. The authors build their case by portraying the Jewish planters as benevolent and as contributing significantly to the war against the Maroons so that they “equal the Christians in courage, in discipline, and in their burning zeal to serve the colony” (66). Couching their argument in the terms of the dominant morality of their time, the authors of the Essai historique malign Blacks and do not question the treatment of the Jewish Mulattos by the Jewish community, instead downplaying the conflict between the Jewish Mulattos and the Mahamad.²⁵

If the Essai historique contested a colonial historiography that neglected the contribution of Surinamese Jews and denied their rights, McLeod continues this project, but does so from a postcolonial perspective that simultaneously emphasizes the Jews’ utter dependency on slavery and their complicity in the plantation system. McLeod’s novel advances a specifically Caribbean perspective on Black-Jewish relations in the colonial Americas, combining these commemorative and critical functions without any sense of contradiction. Hoe duur was de suiker? is neither governed by a U.S.-style tabulation of suffering and competing claims to victimhood, nor does it subscribe to apologist narratives of Jewish Atlantic history. Instead, it is characterized by a matter-of-fact attitude toward the history of Jewish slaveholding and concubinage.

Lopez’s widely produced Civil War drama The Whipping Man, which was first staged in 2006, treats a number of the same themes that I have traced in other works of slavery literature, including the presence of Jews in the colonial economy, resonances between Jewish and African diaspora cultural narratives, and Jewish slaveholding.²⁶ The Whipping Man, which takes place in April 1865 on the plantation of the DeLeon family, explores the themes of bondage and freedom, sin and atonement against the backdrop of the post–Civil War U.S. South. The play’s pared-down cast consists of three men: the former slaves Simon and John and the Confederate captain Caleb DeLeon, the scion of a Richmond, Virginia planter family. At the play’s opening, Caleb, who is plagued by a gangrenous leg, returns home to the family plantation in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to encounter his newly liberated slaves. What lends interest to this otherwise not particularly original dramatic premise is the fact that the DeLeon family is Jewish.

Like the slavery literature examined in chapter 3, in Lopez’s The Whipping Man, a singular Jewish figure stands in for a larger Jewish population—in this case, that of the antebellum South. As in other slavery narratives, this typological approach contributes to an emphasis on the Jew’s moral accountability for his role in the crimes of slavery. Caleb’s gangrenous leg, which is graphically amputated at the end of the first scene, suggests the moral rot engendered by the DeLeons’—and by extension other Southern Jews’—involvement in the slavery system. As Simon proclaims toward the end of the play, Caleb has been psychologically scarred by his participation in the institution of slavery: “How ’bout your leg, there? You’re forever branded, just like a slave. You a slave to your old ideas. How deeply those enslavements have scarred the world!” (68). The dilapidated DeLeon plantation house in which the action of the play unfolds further suggests the ruined character of the Southern Jewish moral landscape.

In The Whipping Man, this association of Jewishness with ethics is advanced through quotations from Jewish liturgy offered by the ex-slaves Simon and John, to whom the DeLeons have imparted their faith, as well as through Simon’s religious devotion. Simon, the most senior and devout of the three men, represents the moral center of the play. Over the course of The Whipping Man, Simon and John, both of whom are well versed in Jewish ritual, recite Shabbat blessings and engage in a debate over whether it is permissible in their malnourished state to eat unkosher horse meat. Both former slaves also chide Caleb for abandoning his faith out of despair at what he has witnessed in battle. Caleb’s failure to join with Simon and John in reciting the blessings constitutes another sign of his moral decline along with the revelation that he has deserted his regiment. Above all, the ethical framing of the drama is advanced through the motif of the Passover seder. Capitalizing on the historical detail that Passover began the day after Lee surrendered at Appomatox, Lopez offers the seder as a neat device for exploring questions of freedom and slavery as well as Jewish and African American modes of memorializing the past.

In keeping with modern interpretations of Passover as an occasion for reflecting on the broader social relevance of the Jewish festival, the impromptu seder that the three men hastily assemble in act 2 becomes a vehicle to explore the relationship between Jewish and African American cultural narratives of slavery and freedom. An illiterate, Simon has memorized the Haggadah given to him by Caleb’s grandfather and prizes it as his sole possession. Simon leads the seder from memory but periodically breaks away from the text of the Haggadah to sing verses of “Go Down Moses.” Lopez’s clever interweaving of the Haggadah with the African American spiritual—his juxtaposition of the two cultures’ rhetorical traditions—highlights resonances between Jewish and African American historical experience and reminds the audience of the inspiration that African Americans drew from the Old Testament in narrating their own traumatic history. Yet this dialogue between Jewish and African American oratory and tradition also generates tensions in the play. Read against the backdrop of the Civil War, the Haggadah’s themes of freedom and slavery take on a new urgency, rendering more immediate the meaning of the Passover ritual. Scrounging for materials to complete the seder plate, Simon substitutes an actual brick for the charoset that traditionally stands in for the bricks and mortar used by the Israelites when they were enslaved in ancient Egypt. In Lopez’s seder the metaphor is returned to its literal origin, while the African American slaves become the rightful inheritors and interpreters of the Chosen People’s ritual traditions.²⁷

The Exodus narrative is invoked in The Whipping Man not only to identify points of connection between Black and Jewish experience but also to call Jews to moral account and to expose their religious hypocrisy. Quoting a passage from Leviticus that prohibits Jews from owning their fellow Jews while allowing the enslavement of heathens, John asks: “Were we Jews or were we slaves?” (42). Lopez explains in an interview that his discovery of the fact of Jewish slaveholding “illustrated for me how pernicious and unavoidable slavery was: that Jews, with their own history of enslavement could own slaves themselves. It seemed to me the most regrettable of hypocrisies and one that might resonate with a modern audience, both Jewish and non-Jewish. We are all the result of the mistakes and the hypocrisies of our American forebears” (“Interview”). Thus in Lopez’s play Jewish religious hypocrisy stands in for a larger American moral failing. At the same time, however, the play draws its dramatic charge from the belief that the Jewish planters’ hypocrisy is more acute than is that of the larger society because of Jews’ historical memory of their own enslavement.

The notion that Jewish slaveholders were more benevolent than their Christian counterparts at first receives some support from Simon, who insists to John: “You know we had it a world better than [other slaves] did. Coming here after your mamma died was the best thing that could have happened to you. You could have been sold to a plantation. You could have been sold to a Christian home” (42). In keeping with other depictions in postslavery writing of female Jewish characters as kindhearted, altruistic figures, Mrs. DeLeon had attempted to teach Simon to read. but had been prevented from continuing in this endeavor by her husband. Simon also reports that Mr. DeLeon has promised him money upon his emancipation. Yet the more cynical John advances a different perspective, one that is intent on unearthing the truth about his Jewish master. When John first appears in act 1, he comes before Caleb in the guise of an executioner, foretelling the disclosure of the DeLeons’ crimes that is to come. The play then proceeds to unfold a series of revelations that build progressively to expose the unsavory truth about the DeLeon family. Beginning with Caleb’s admission that he had whipped John when they were both children, the play subsequently discloses that Mr. DeLeon has sold Simon’s wife Elizabeth and daughter Sarah upon learning that Sarah was pregnant by Caleb. It is later revealed that both Mr. DeLeon and his father had had Simon whipped despite Caleb’s claim to the contrary that his father abhorred the practice. Finally, we learn that Mr. DeLeon, like Caleb, had fathered a child (presumably John) by one of his slaves. The Whipping Man thus centers on a Jewish crime that is unveiled through a series of dramatic revelations, relying, as Charles Isherwood noted in his New York Times review, “on suddenly sprung revelations to stoke its dramatic fires.”

This more absolutist perspective becomes particularly apparent in the play’s presentation of the relationship between Caleb and Simon’s daughter Sarah. At the opening of act 2, Caleb reads a love letter to Sarah composed in the trenches outside Petersburg. Although the letter appears heartfelt, its saccharine rhetoric is deflated by John, who dismisses it as “pretty flowery stuff” (59). Caleb’s references to the slave girl as “my Sarah” suggest the dynamic of ownership that underpins their relationship. Simon later insists that Caleb does not understand the true nature of his bond with Sarah:

The romance plot between a Jewish master and a Black slave girl also features prominently in Cheuse’s novel Song of Slaves in the Desert. So, too, does the Exodus narrative, which, as in Lopez’s play, is ironized in order to highlight Jewish hypocrisy and to condemn Southern Jews’ collusion in the plantation system. Yet, where The Whipping Man favors a kind of hard realism, Song of Slaves indulges in melodrama and exoticism, in keeping with the plantation romance genre that it emulates. Cheuse’s novel centers on the twenty-one-year-old Nate Pereira, the grandson of a Dutch Jew and the son of a Curaçao-born Jew who is involved in import/export. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the Pereira family is split between New York City and Charleston, where Nate is sent by his father to determine whether to invest in his uncle’s Carolina rice plantation. Song of Slaves thus incorporates both the figures of the port Jew and the plantation Jew, here distributed across North and South. The novel tracks the innocent young Yankee’s initiation into the world of Southern Jewry, whose moral degeneracy is embodied in Nate’s uncle’s girth and liberal consumption of spirits. In the South Nate encounters an unfamiliar breed of Jew: “I had never known a Jew who drank like this, or, for a fact, owned a plantation with slaves, either” (64).

Nate’s initiation into the world of the plantation is much like that of Rutger Le Chasseur in Hoe duur was de suiker?, who upon his arrival in Suriname finds himself continually astonished by the indolence of the colonists and by their unenlightened treatment of their slaves. Both novels to some extent follow the conventions of the travel narrative in which the local, Southern scene is viewed through the eyes of a Northern outsider.²⁸ Yet, in contrast to McLeod, Cheuse associates the degeneracy of the plantation society with a betrayal of Jewishness itself. Jewish religious observance in Charleston is more relaxed than is its Northern counterpart. Nathan observes that his Charleston relatives drive on the Sabbath and have abandoned Hebrew so that they have come to “sound like Gentiles” (85). He is surprised to discover that the Charleston congregation, Beth Elohim, has discontinued separate seating for the two sexes, uses English liberally, and is led by an “Officiating Minister” rather than a rabbi. Nate concludes that “these Reformed Jews certainly seemed to me to be further along in the dissolution of our religion than most of us who did nothing but pay lip-service at ceremonies such as this only a few times a year” (162). As these plot details illustrate, Cheuse’s novel is organized around a sharp opposition between North and South, civilization and barbarism, healthy and degenerate Judaism. Nate, a righteous and “a good man” (446), stands in contrast to his Southern cousin Jonathan, who has been so thoroughly corrupted by the ways of the plantation that, after being exposed as a murderer and a rapist, he must be killed off at the end of the novel.

Like Lopez, Cheuse puts forward and then debunks the notion that Jewish planters observe a higher moral standard than their Gentile counterparts. Also echoing The Whipping Man, late in Cheuse’s novel a closely guarded family secret is revealed: the slave Isaac is in fact the son of Nate’s uncle and a cousin to Nate. When Jonathan discovers that his father has named Isaac as an heir in his will, he murders his half-brother. An even darker secret, also revealed toward the end of the novel, is that the slave girl Liza is both Jonathan’s daughter and the victim of his incestuous sexual exploitation. Yet the crime that the novel uncovers is not so much miscegenation or incest as it is the fact of Jewish slaveholding itself. Nonetheless, Cheuse ultimately seeks redemption for his nineteenth-century American Jews. The idealized ending of the novel, in which Ishmael, the son of Liza and Nate, reunites with Nate’s family and is warmly welcomed by them, reaffirms Northern Jews as the “good” Jews and reincorporates the Black line into the Jewish family in what could be read as a reworking of a more recent civil rights past. Somewhat peculiarly, Cheuse employs the trope of the distorted, repressed genealogy of the planter’s family to assert the affiliation of Blacks and Jews whose kinship in the novel is made literal.²⁹

Much like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Lopez’s and Cheuse’ Civil War narratives elaborate a family structure distorted by miscegenation, rape, and incest and hinge on the revelation of impure genealogies whose denial sows the seeds of the planter family’s destruction. In The Whipping Man and Song of Slaves the primary effect of such revelations is to debunk the myth of benevolent Jewish slaveholding. While initially appearing to explore the ambivalences and nuances that surround Jewish plantation life, Lopez and Cheuse ultimately revert to a polarized reading of this historical phenomenon, one that is reinforced by a moral structure that condemns slaveholding as “un-Jewish.” I would suggest that this pattern reflects the extent to which U.S. representations of plantation Jews such as Lopez’s and Cheuse’s are overdetermined by the larger controversy surrounding Jews and the slave trade that unfolded in the early 1990s. Indeed, in an interview with NPR, Cheuse explained that he wrote Song of Slaves in direct response to the assertion made in the 1990s by Len Jeffries, a professor at the City College of New York, that “the Jews had bankrolled the trans-Atlantic slave trade” (Cheuse, “Alan Cheuse”). The difficulty of literary responses such as Cheuse’s to this controversy is that, by centering the slavery novel on the figure of the Jewish planter, they cannot help but make Jewish slaveholding appear disproportionate in its historical significance. Moreover, U.S. Jewish plantation narratives tend to hold the Jewish characters to a higher moral standard and to expose their religious hypocrisy as people who should “know better” because of their own historical memory of slavery. As we saw in chapter 3, Caribbean slavery fiction and drama exhibits the inverse tendency, introducing the Jew’s higher moral perspective to underscore the ethical failings of Christian planters and slave masters. Instead of the divide between good and bad Jews that we see in Cheuse, in Caribbean neoslave narratives we tend more often to encounter good Jews and bad Gentiles.

McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? departs from both models, refusing to read Jewishness in moral terms. McLeod references a different cultural and historical context in which Jewish plantations are a well-known fact of colonial history rather than a scandalous secret to be unearthed. She portrays early modern Caribbean Sephardim as for the most part unquestioningly accepting the norms of the colony. They justify slavery as ordained by God, revile the Maroons, and engage freely in the sexual exploitation of their slaves as well as concubinage or “Suriname-style marriage.”³⁰ As a result, McLeod’s Sephardic Jewish planter families contain within them Black lines of descent. Sarith’s slave Mini-mini, for example, is the daughter of a slave woman and either Sarith’s father Jacob or her brother Ishaak, so that “no-one seeing [Sarith and Mini-mini] together could avoid the impression that there was a striking resemblance in face and figure” (15). In McLeod’s novel, such evidence of Jewish-Black miscegenation is not suppressed and then ultimately exposed as part of a crime story narrative structure. Instead, it is offered in passing early on in the novel as part of a larger portrait of a society in which concubinage between Jewish planters and their Black slave women was considered an accepted part of the social order.³¹

McLeod’s treatment of concubinage and the romance plot contrasts both with the sense of moral condemnation that we find in Lopez and with the exoticism of Cheuse. In Hoe duur was de suiker?, Julius and Mini-mini enter into a Suriname-style marriage after Julius’s discovery of Sarith’s betrayal of him with Lieutenant Andersma. Notably, McLeod portrays the relationship between Julius and Mini-mini as consensual and as transcending the roles of master and slave: “Those were no glances between master and slave, but between two lovers” (255). Julius does not want to abuse his position as master: “It would have been easy for him to have taken her in his desire. He was, after all, her master. But that was something he didn’t want. His feelings for her were too deep, too sincere for him to misuse her in that way…. No, she would have to give herself in love or not at all” (250–51). After rescuing Mini-mini from a slave trader who has raped her, Julius installs her as his concubine and then finally abandons the Klein Paradijs plantation altogether, going to live with Mini-mini in town and telling Sarith that he plans to give Mini-mini’s sons his name—a significant gesture that represents an acknowledgment of the miscegenated character of the Jewish planter’s family line.³²

McLeod’s idealized presentation of the romance between planter and concubine risks mystifying the sexual exploitation of female slaves, raising similar issues to those I considered in chapter 3 in relation to Condé’s Moi, Tituba. However, McLeod militates against this critique by juxtaposing Mini-mini’s and Julius’ courtship with less romanticized examples of concubinage—such as that which produced Mini-mini herself—as well as numerous scenes that illustrate the vulnerability of slave girls to sexual exploitation. Moreover, in Hoe duur was de suiker? the themes of miscegenation and genealogy are not introduced for the purpose of generating the sense of shock on which Lopez’s play and Cheuse’s novel pivot. Instead, while reflecting its generic framing as a plantation melodrama, Hoe duur was de suiker?’s genealogical emphasis is directed toward an interest in tracing the multiethnic lineages of the colony. As we have seen, echoing Latin American foundational fictions in which eroticism is a figure for national reconciliation and consolidation, the crossing of racial, cultural, and class boundaries is advanced in Hoe duur was de suiker? through a series of romance narratives that establish the nation’s creolized origins. The novel’s central marriage and romance plots between the half-Jewish Elza and the French Hugenot Rutger, and between the Jewish planter Julius and the slavegirl Mini-mini, signal the ethnic and religious multiplicity of the Surinamese population. Thus they contribute to a postcolonial nation-building project, as befits a novel written by the daughter of Suriname’s first president after independence.³³

McLeod’s romance plots contrast not only with those of Lopez and Cheuse but also with a nineteenth-century precursor to the genre of Jewish plantation fiction, Jorge Isaacs’s María (1867). Isaacs, the son of a Jamaican Jew who converted to Catholicism, was a Colombian journalist and politician whose only novel is one of the founding works of Latin American literature. In her influential reading of Isaacs’s novel, Sommer argues that the suppressed Jewishness of María and her suitor Efraín, both of whom are descended from Jewish converts, represents both the racially unassimilable Blacks and a declining, enfeebled plantocracy. Accordingly, while other nineteenth-century Latin American novels stage unions between protagonists of different backgrounds in order to effect a reconciliation, María’s relationship with Efraín fails when she dies of a mysterious illness. In Hoe duur was de suiker?, by contrast, both Jews and Blacks are assimilated into the national family. The mixed unions of Elza and Rutger and Mini-mini and Julius stage reconciliations between three of Suriname’s founding peoples, inscribing the African and Jewish as well as Christian European origins of the nation. Through their cross-cultural romances, McLeod’s Surinamese Jews become indigenized, Africanized, and integrated into the history of the colony. At the same time, the Fernandez family tree, with its hybrid and miscegenated structure, becomes a metonym for the colony of Suriname as a whole.

McLeod’s adherence to the plantation saga, a more conservative genre of slavery fiction that prevailed until the 1980s, exerts certain constraints upon her novel. Despite its diversification of perspectives on the slavery past, Hoe duur was de suiker? is not concerned with questions of narrative authority. Instead, the novel’s orderly structure is stabilized by an omniscient consciousness that unifies the various perspectives it interpolates. Hoe duur was de suiker? is both less conscious of slavery as a discursive field than the novels that I examined in chapter 3 and less formally experimental. And yet, paradoxically, this generic conservatism liberates McLeod from the typological strategy that the neoslave narratives discussed in chapter 3 adopted. The neoslave narrative’s emphasis on the slave’s testimonial voice affords little space for a nuanced portrayal of Jewish subjectivity and historical experience. Similarly, the film adaptation of Hoe duur was de suiker? flattens McLeod’s complex portrayal of the ambivalences of Surinamese Jewish history by reframing the narrative as a slave testimony and by recentering it on the relatively marginal character of the slave-girl Mini-mini, who becomes the author and narrator of the story.³⁵ By contrast, alongside and in tandem with the experiences of slaves and Dutch mercenary soldiers, McLeod’s capacious, multicentered novel explores the Surinamese Jews’ struggle to establish a secure homeland in the Caribbean colony and portrays them as exhibiting a broad spectrum of behavior toward their slaves ranging from barbarous cruelty and abuse to benevolence, sympathy, familial affection, and even romantic love. Neither are McLeod’s Jews archetypes or invented figures who have no existence independent of dominant discourses about the Other. Instead of being employed as emblems or devices that advance the slave protagonist’s storyline, in Hoe duur was de suiker? Jews—for better or for worse—become the primary subjects of the slavery narrative.