My grandparents did not accompany us to Cuzco nor on the rest of that trip, because of Misha’s heart condition. There was once a photograph of my grandfather at that spot, but now I can’t find it. I substitute it with another, of the selfsame Misha, but young and in a different locale in Peru. He has in his lap a skull, as if he were Hamlet posing with a pre-Incan Yorick.
Misha Adler at an unidentified archaeological site on the coast of Peru, c. 1929.
To be or not to be indigenous? Or better put, as the great Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade would write at around that same time, “Tupí or not Tupí?” Was this perhaps the question my grandfather was asking? I doubt it. More likely, as the committed Jew and Marxist that he was at that time, he was inclined to see the present reflected in the mirror of Incan glory. Today’s Indians, though subjugated, would once again become great. Though imperiled, the Jews were also once again becoming great. This was the source of his energy and enthusiasm for Hebrew, as well as for his passion for the emancipatory spark that he intuited in indigenous communalism.
My grandfather was not then a wavering prince like Hamlet; rather, he was a man compelled to create a future out of a present that was always precarious, and from a past that was crumbling around him. For him, the idea of a new world was a necessity. His idea of America had less to do with nostalgia for the past than with a reality that needed to be achieved. Our America, the America of my family, was a necessary place that one must inhabit and defend.
Even today we still live in a dangerous world that is constantly asking us to make decisions, yet we can only face our collective dilemmas by way of encrypted personal stories. Because, as Walter Benjamin put it, to tell the past is to take ownership of a memory “just as it glimmers in the instant of a danger.” Thus peril is at once collective and deeply personal. We are no longer governed by tradition, so we can’t simply rely on a collective past. For this reason family history is again relevant. It is no longer an aristocratic incantation of the glories of a lineage, but very simply our precondition: a matrix of past decisions that made us possible. And we stretch back to those decisions in moments of danger, as if we were migratory birds, flying in formation toward the south.
PART ONE
Citizens of the World
CHAPTER ONE
Unstable Affiliations
Provincial cosmopolitanism?
In his notable contribution to the first issue of the journal Repertorio Hebreo, edited in Lima in 1929, José Carlos Mariátegui writes: “Israel is not a race, a nation, a state, a language, a culture; it is the simultaneous transcendence of all of these things through something so modern, so unknown, that it still has no name.”2 What were the qualities or characteristics of this entity that was so modern and so unknown? Where did they come from? How had they been forged?
Mariátegui was well aware of the explosive effect of Jewish thought in modern culture. His own journal, Amauta, was an avant-garde project that was committed to the translation and circulation of texts from all over the world. Several key thinkers of this new globalism were Jewish — Marx, Freud, and Einstein, just to name a few — and there were a few noteworthy trends of the great current of modern Jewish thought that attracted Mariátegui especially: eccentric views, like that of Freud, who managed to adopt a certain irony with respect to the dominant morality and so pave the way for the blossoming of a universal critique.
José Carlos Mariátegui was arguably Latin America’s most prominent radical thinker. His intellectual contributions have been compared — not unreasonably — to those of other Marxist contemporaries such as Antonio Gramsci or Rosa Luxemburg, although, in what is a very good example of the marginalization of Latin American thought from wide global recognition, the first English-language anthology of his work was only published in 2011, eighty-one years after his death.3
Maybe Mariátegui also identified with Jewish attitudes toward displacement. As a young man, he had spent two years in Italy as a political exile (1920–22), yet nothing interested Mariátegui less than devoting his time in Europe to the exhibition of his Peruvianness, either as stigma or as enigma. Frankly, he had bigger fish to fry. Rather than wallowing obsessively in Peru’s singularities, Mariátegui threw himself headlong into European political and intellectual life. He gave testimony to key events during his Italian sojourn, such as the formation of the Communist Party and Mussolini’s March on Rome. He fell in love and married the Italian Anna Chiappe, who would return with him to Lima, and he wrote feverishly for the Lima journal El Tiempo.
Mariátegui’s reports to that paper reflected his conviction that, just as Peru belonged to the world, the world belonged to Peru. So, whereas conservative nationalists joined in the rallying cry of Charles Maurras, the anti-Semitic founder of Action Française, clamoring “All that is national is ours!” Mariátegui’s motto for his program of “Peruvianizing Peru” was “All that is human is ours!” Forging a genuine Peruvian nationality required tilting the lens of Peruvian history away from its colonial traditions and toward the Indians, who constituted four-fifths of the country’s population. This involved uncovering the native past, certainly, but above all it required embracing the future over the past. “Our indigenism,” Mariátegui wrote, “does not dream with utopian restoration. It views the past as root, not as program. Its conception of history is realistic and modern.”4 Turning outward, toward the world, was fully as necessary for socialist emancipation as turning inward, toward the nation.
Mariátegui’s missives to El Tiempo from Italy were detailed accounts of the European order, which he knew was deeply relevant for Peru: discussions of the Soviets’ situation, for instance, and of the tensions around the Adriatic; examinations of Italian politics, Germany’s situation, the Russian famine, the rise of fascism, literature and the cultural scene. All of those things and many more.
A couple of years after his return to Peru in 1923, Mariátegui founded the socialist journal Amauta, a periodical dedicated to understanding Peruvian reality from a universal perspective, which is where he proclaimed, in the opening editorial, that “Everything human belongs to us.” This became the rallying cry of a generation. And yet Mariátegui knew that committing to a universalist program exposed him to charges of perverting national traditions with alien thoughts. He knew about the challenge that comes with thinking globally from the margins, and for this reason especially he found much to admire in the Jews.
Besides, he understood the extreme rarity of the situation faced by Jews. “Upon losing its land,” he wrote, “Judaism earned the right to make Europe and America its home.” At another point in that same essay, he spoke in concrete terms of what he loved about Jewish culture: “[It] speaks neither Hebrew nor Yiddish exclusively; it is polyglot, itinerant, supranational. In an effort to identify itself with all races, it possesses the sentiments, the languages, and the arts of them all.”5
Mariátegui also had a personal engagement with individual Jews, people with whom he interacted on a daily basis. The historian Osmar Gonzales has documented the friendships that Mariátegui had with a number of Jews who attended the “Red Corner,” the discussion group that met during the afternoons in his house on Jirón Washington, in Lima.6 Among these were two young “Romanian” Jews with whom he was especially close, Misha Adler and Noemí Milstein, who were then dating and would later launch the journal Repertorio Hebreo. These were my grandparents. But did these two youngsters really have anything ultramodern about them? Did they not come from the most backward regions of Europe? How, when, and from where was such a cosmopolitan aura generated among people of such provincial origins? What did these two young people have that made them so radically universal?
Borderlanders
Where were my grandparents actually from? At times they referred to the regions from which they came as Bessarabia, at others as Bukovina or Moldavia. Sometimes they came from Russia or the USSR, at others from Ukraine or Romani
a. Until very recently, I had no understanding of this confusion, and I had to study a great deal just to answer one apparently simple question: Where were they from?
Misha (Miguel) Adler Altman was born in 1904, in Nova Sulitza, in the district of Hotin, Bessarabia. His house was on the Russian side of the main street that divided Bessarabia (Russian Empire) from Bukovina (Austro-Hungarian Empire). That is, my grandfather was born in a town that crossed, or was crossed by, an international border.
When my great-grandfather acquired his land, the area was sparsely populated, and he was able to purchase a large parcel. Misha grew up on a small farm, more than a house, on the Russian side of the town. There were trenches separating the main street from the property, and it was necessary to cross a small bridge to enter. At the back, the lot was close to a highway that led to the neighboring town of Hotin, the capital of the district known for its old fortified castle on the shores of the Dniester River.
According to information in the Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Romania, the population of Nova Sulitza was 4,156 in 1898, at the start of a period of economic growth that was triggered by the construction of a rail hub, and that continued unabated until the end of the First World War, when there began an era of prolonged economic decline. In 1930, the town still had a population of roughly seven thousand, 86 percent of which was Jewish.7 Today there are likely no Jews in it at all. At the start of the Second World War, even after decades of emigration that was initially triggered by a series of pogroms, the Jewish population of Bessarabia still hovered around 270,000 people. Today the republic of Moldova, which corresponds to the territory that once made up Bessarabia, is home to only four thousand Jews.
The Jewish population of Bessarabia in 1940, community by community.
Nova Sulitza is at the northwest edge of the map.
The general culture of the Jews of Nova Sulitza was Yiddish and Russian. Indeed, the original name of the town, Novoselitse, means “New Settlement” in Russian, and the term “Nova Sulitza,” which is what I always heard, is a Romanization of that same name, which reflects the fact that the peasants of the region of Bessarabia spoke Romanian.
Diglossia
To get a better sense of what “provincial cosmopolitanism” might have meant for Eastern European Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, I need to discuss the question of language. It is worth reflecting, in particular, on the linguistic hierarchies in place in my grandparents’ home region, and for this, the notion of diglossia is useful. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin proposed this concept over a century ago, to refer to social formations in which there exists a “high” language — lettered and prestigious — and a vernacular “low” language, used primarily in informal contexts. The concept of diglossia thus refers to the relative prestige and the appropriate uses of languages when social hierarchies find themselves expressed in speech.
My grandparents moved between three adjacent regions: Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Ukraine. In 1904, when my grandfather was born, Bessarabia and Ukraine belonged to the Russian Empire, and Bukovina belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For the Jews of Nova Sulitza, which was, as I have mentioned, a town bisected by the Russo-Austrian border, there were at the time two “high” or prestigious languages: Russian and German. Each of these was supported by a powerful state (the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, respectively), a school system, and a national literature that enjoyed great prestige. That is, my grandfather was born into a place in which there were not one but two “high” languages, even if knowledge of Russian was much more common than knowledge of German.
With respect to vernacular or “low” languages, the situation was even more complex. The peasants of the region spoke Moldovan or Romanian (two names for essentially the same thing). In Bessarabia, Moldovan had no support from the state: the Russian Empire did not allow schools to teach in that language, nor were there books printed in it except in neighboring Romania, which looked to annex Bessarabia precisely on the grounds of a shared language. Nevertheless, before Bessarabia became part of Romania (1919), Moldovan was a language of low prestige, and it was essentially only a spoken language.
In the neighboring regions of Ukraine and Bukovina, the peasants usually spoke Ukrainian, a language whose level of prestige was on a par with Moldovan. They were in both cases popular vernaculars that some urban nationalists wished to use to create new states, but that in principle lacked the prestige of Russian and German. There were, besides, other minority languages in these regions, such as Roma (spoken by Gypsies in the region) or Bulgarian.
Finally, there was the peculiar situation of the Jews, whose common vernacular language was Yiddish, which was spoken at home and on the street. A majority of the poorer Jews in the towns and small cities of Bessarabia were practically monolingual in Yiddish. There was also a movement that sought to transform Yiddish into a “national” language, and around the time my grandfather was born, Yiddish existed in print, due to the comparatively elevated level of literacy among the Jewish population. Indeed, there were newspapers in Yiddish, and a literature in that language was taking form. Nevertheless, Yiddish did not have the support of any state, and for this reason it was considered a “dialect.”
Besides Yiddish, Jews had an additional language: Hebrew. This was a “high” language that was supported by religious tradition rather than by the state. It was studied in religious schools, attended almost universally by Jewish males in Russia and Poland, so that they might learn at least the basic prayers. Hebrew literacy also helped buttress modern Yiddish, because Yiddish is written with Hebrew characters, so literacy in one language supported reading in the other, and vice versa.
Thus, Misha came from a region in which a well-educated Jewish person undoubtedly aspired to speak and read Russian, and ideally also German. This person would also know Hebrew sufficiently well to read the Torah and Talmud. Besides this, they would speak at least one “low” language: Yiddish, and frequently also Romanian, which was useful for interacting with the local Christian population. In bourgeois families, a smattering of French was also desirable. In my grandmother’s region, there was a similar logic in place, except the vernacular that was employed besides Yiddish was Ukrainian rather than Romanian. In other words, Eastern European Jewish “provincialism” implied having varying degrees of familiarity with multiple languages. My grandparents each spoke eight languages.
The Pale of Jewish Settlement
After acquiring the region that up to then had been known as “Southern Bukovina” from the Ottoman Empire in 1804, the Russians changed its name and called it Bessarabia, to honor a certain Prince Bessaraab. They then conjoined the entire province to the so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement, where the czars had facilitated the settlement of Jews. The logic that underlay this supposed concession to the Jews was geopolitical.
The Russian Empire expanded enormously during the reign of Catherine the Great (1772–96). Among its new acquisitions were territories pulled from Poland and the Ottoman Empire, from Lithuania in the north to Ukraine in the south. Between them, these annexed regions had the greatest concentration of Jewish communities in Europe, so that the Russian Empire now came to contain the largest Jewish population in the world. The trouble was that Russia had always been averse to Jewish settlement, and the monarchy wished to preserve the kingdom’s religious purity. The solution to this conundrum was to leave the newly annexed Jewish population in the acquired territories on the western fringe of the empire, in the so-called Pale of Settlement, and bar Jews from migrating into old Russia. The empire could thereby hold the largest Jewish population in Europe, while Russia itself remained religiously unblemished. Within the Pale of Jewish Settlement, the czars imposed rigorous conditions on the Jews. The Jews of Bessarabia lived under these conditions from 1804 until the region was annexed by Romania in 1919.
Social conditions in Bessarabia
Bessarabia was a rich
agricultural region, but it was also one of the most underdeveloped provinces in all of Europe. A British study carried out immediately after the First World War offers a concise diagnosis: “Public health is in the same backward condition as in Ukraine, and it is especially poor in the cities. Medical services are very inadequate…”8 The roads were dirt “and they become almost impassable when there is bad weather.”9 Indeed, the autumn and springtime mud is one of the recurrent motifs in writing on Bessarabia. Curzio Malaparte describes Bessarabia’s muddy and rich black soil as dark dough saturated with yeast, swelling and filling the air with the heavy smell of rotten hay.10
The principal crops of the region were corn, wheat, barley, rye, oats, potatoes, and flax, as well as fruits such as plums, apples, pears, cherries, apricots, melons, and squash, which were exported to Russia as well as to Austria and Germany. The Bessarabian countryside was populated by Moldovans, but business in the towns and small cities of the region was in the hands of the Jews and, to a lesser extent, Germans and Greeks.
Yosef Govrin gives an account of Edinitz, a town in Bessarabia near Nova Sulitza and close to the same size, at the beginning of the 1930s. Through his text, one gets a general sense of the towns inhabited by the Jewish population:
small stores, a bit of commerce, agriculture based on antiquated methods, a minor industry of soap and oil production. None of the roads are paved — the entire town is covered in thick mud…Frozen winters, with heat generated by burning sunflower stocks or, in the best of cases, with wood burned in primitive fireplaces embedded in the walls. Latrines. There was no telephone in any house, nor was there running water or drainage. There was electricity only in the late afternoon. There was no public transportation, cinema, or theater (except for one or two annual performances put on by a traveling Jewish group). A very modest hospital and a pharmacy (both run by Jews). Two or three doctors (Jews), two or three attorneys (also Jews).11
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