As late as 1940, there was not even radio in Edinitz. The Jewish population, which made up 80 percent of the town, spoke Yiddish, and only a small educated minority also spoke Russian.
With respect to class structure, the British report adds that more than 43 percent of the land was still in the hands of the nobility, and that 48 percent belonged to Moldovan peasants. In Bessarabia, serfs were emancipated in 1861, but their actual release was delayed for decades. Malaparte speaks of their rustic mentality as late as 1941, when those peasants had become recruits for the Romanian army and formed part of the Nazi-led force that invaded the USSR. “They are peasants that don’t even know what it means to be a peasant…They only know that they are Romanian and Greek Orthodox. They shout, ‘Long Live the King’ and also, ‘Long Live Field-Marshall Antonescu!’ They shout, ‘Down with the USSR!’ But they have no idea what a king is, who Antonescu is, nor what the USSR is.”12
On the other hand, the towns of Bessarabia — it sometimes seems a stretch to call them “cities” — had no manufacturing industry, although these were quite developed in nearby cities such as Odessa, Kiev, and Czernowitz. Those who lived in town ran small businesses or were artisans, exporters of the rich agricultural production of the countryside, moneylenders for the peasants, or cobblers. Even the capital of Bessarabia, Kishinev (“Chisinau” in Romanian), was a bit of an outpost. Indeed, starting in the 1830s, the czarina used that city as a place to banish discontents. For a noble or burgher from St. Petersburg, being exiled to Kishinev was recognized as a form of punishment.
Despite the modesty of Bessarabia’s cities, though, there were nonetheless tensions between the countryside and the towns, because commerce and credit were still concentrated there. These class tensions, characteristic of rural societies, were racialized in Bessarabia, where the countryside was Moldovan while the towns were, to a large extent, Jewish. So while the Jews constituted only 11 percent of the population of the so-called Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, which included Bessarabia, they made up between 25 percent and 90 percent of the urban population.13 Almost half the population of Kishinev was Jewish (46 percent), and many of the towns of the region came to have an astonishing majority of Jews, as was the case in Nova Sulitza. There were rich people among this Jewish population, true, but the majority were poor and lived in squalor due in no small part to the many laws that limited their activity. In fact, an important percentage of the Jewish population of the urban centers of Bessarabia was indigent and relied on the charity of Jewish organizations.
Nova Sulitza
My great-great-grandfather on the Adler side arrived in Nova Sulitza as a purchase agent from a commercial house in Berlin. Sent to do import-export business with Russia, he initially settled on the Austrian side of that border town. According to family lore, he was trained as a buyer and was a trusted figure for the businesses that sent him. He was also familiar with customs offices and international tariffs. His son, my great-grandfather Hershel, belonged to the first generation born in Nova Sulitza, and he joined his father’s business. They were commission, storage, and duty agents.
Storage agents were needed in Nova Sulitza because Russian trains ran on rails of a different gauge than their Austrian counterparts, so it was necessary to transfer the payload, especially grain, from one side to the other. Transfer, purchase, store — that was the family business. Hershel’s father decided at a certain point to move from the Austrian to the Russian side of the town, because it was cheaper and there was more activity there. He bought a large plot which was occupied by five families after the Second World War.
All of this information comes to me from my mother’s and my uncles’ memories, which in turn came to them from my grandfather, Misha. Although they retained a surprising amount of information, there were still too many unknowns, and I was not well placed to shed any light on them, not only because I lacked the language skills for archival work (Yiddish, Romanian, Russian, and German), but also because Jewish Nova Sulitza disappeared after 1941, so I could scarcely go there to interview people who had known that life.
Happily, a Jewish doctor from Nova Sulitza, Naphtoli Rabinovici, took it upon himself to publish a book on his home town, titled Ich und Meine Shtetele (Me and My Shtetl). It was printed in Yiddish and published in Tel Aviv in 1965. Through an Israeli colleague, I contacted a translator, Ms. Elisha Shaul, who provided me with detailed chapter summaries and literal translations of the portions that interested me especially. That material, added to family memories and photos and to a few supplementary sources, gave me a clearer picture of the town that my grandfather had left, and that his parents refused to abandon.
Nova Sulitza’s “golden age” was brought on by the construction of a train line that linked Bukovina with Bessarabia through Nova Sulitza. It made its debut in 1894 and it ended with the First World War, after which the village went into decline. The Ribnitza-Bieltsy-Oknitsa-Novoselitsa railway line connected Nova Sulitza on one side of the city to Czernowitz, in Austrian Bukovina, and on the other to Odessa and Kiev, in Russian Ukraine.14 Agricultural exports passed from Bessarabia to Austria, and from there also to Germany.
Eggs were Nova Sulitza’s most important export product. They were collected on the Russian side and then packed and transported to Austria. Also important was the grain trade, and to a lesser extent that of fruits and vegetables, both fresh and preserved. Since manufactured products were cheaper on the Austrian side than on the Russian side, there was also a fair amount of business in contraband: agricultural exports from Russia to Austria, manufactured goods from Austria to Russia. These were the town’s main sources of revenue during the “glory days” until the end of the First World War, when the map of Eastern Europe was redrawn and Nova Sulitza lost its place in international commerce.
Commerce, both legal and illicit, was a very important activity for the town’s Jews, but it was not the only one. On the Russian side of town, there was a densely populated neighborhood of poor Jews who worked as servants or employees in the export warehouses of eggs and grain. There were also tailors, cobblers, and the like, as well as a constantly swelling number of unemployed. Poverty was severe, and yet the town’s general population continued to grow.
The principal merchants were Jews, and they mostly bought agricultural products from Moldovan traders based in the neighboring towns. Those traders did not live on the international border, so they had no papers that would allow them to cross over. To cross from the Russian to the Austrian side, it was necessary to show papers that were stamped and valid for a period of twenty-eight days. Only the people who lived on the border itself had a right to these transit papers, although they were nonetheless routinely searched in order to “guarantee” that they had no contraband or, more accurately, to guarantee that the Russian soldiers received a portion of the income earned through the contraband trade, in the form of bribes taken to turn a blind eye.
The town’s two most important economic institutions were both on the Austrian side of the border — the agricultural product exchange and the union of buyers of agricultural products. Rabinovici explains that the exchange had a numbered membership, and it was a sanctum sanctorum that only admitted the most important traders. It operated from eight a.m. to noon, and then again for an hour at four p.m. in order to wrap up its business. It also maintained a private library, where members read newspapers from Austria and Russia, as well as the Yiddish press and books in Russian and German. I’m not sure if Hershel Adler belonged to the Nova Sulitza Agricultural Exchange. There is really no way to be sure. Certainly my grandfather Misha belonged to the well-to-do sector of town, but, that said, Rabinovici — who was a prominent doctor himself — does not once mention the Adlers or the Altmans, even though he knew my grandfather personally, which suggests that the Adlers were not among the town’s most prominent families. Rabinovici likewise wrote that there was a status hierarchy at work: the richest families lived in stone ho
uses on the main street; after them came those with wooden houses; and then the families who rented. My great-grandparents owned a wooden house located on the main street; however, it was near the edge of town, so everything suggests that Misha belonged to a family that was economically comfortable but did not figure among the wealthiest of the town.
Romanian annexation
In March 1918, Russia quit the Great War. There was a revolution that took precedence. The following year, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire all ceased to exist. The Treaty of Versailles, which followed the surrender of Germany, redefined the political map of Europe and especially Eastern Europe, where the three defunct empires had intersected. It was at this time that Bessarabia ceased to belong to the Russian Empire and came to form part of Romania, a transfer prompted by the fact that Romania had earned a reward for having sided with the Allies. And the peasants of Bessarabia spoke Romanian and the territory had long been the object of Romanian nationalist claims.
Romania was conceived in 1878 in the Treaty of Berlin, which was signed by the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, France, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the United Kingdom, all under the orchestration of Otto von Bismarck. The monarchy thus created would conjoin two principalities of the Ottoman Empire, Wallachia and Moldovia, that were also known as the Romanian Old Kingdom.
Resting on ethnolinguistic claims, Romanian nationalists also wanted to annex Bessarabia, Bukovina, Transylvania, and the Dobruja, because these provinces had peasant populations that spoke Romanian. This claim, however, was not granted at the Berlin Conference, and it was thus not until 1919, by means of the Treaty of Versailles, that Romania finally gained the territory that its nationalists long felt belonged to them. With the acquisition of these new provinces, the Romanian Republic doubled both its population and its territory.
And yet, it would take no mean effort for these newly annexed provinces to glory in the national spirit. Bessarabia had belonged to the Russian Empire, Bukovina and Transylvania had formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Dobruja had belonged to the Ottomans. Unlike the new national states, each one of these older empires was by tradition and necessity both multilingual and multiethnic. It is true that each empire also privileged a particular nation, but imperial identification with a historic heartland — like Castile for the Spanish Empire, England for the British Empire, Anatolia for the Ottomans, Austria for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or Russia for the Russian Empire — still did not mean that the empire itself was as committed to linguistic and ethnic unity as nation-states were. Thus, the transition from empire to nation-state involved taking proactive measures to gain linguistic unity and national identification.
For this reason, the institutionalization of nationality in the new states tended to involve varying degrees of violence. The Turks carried out the first great genocide of the twentieth century, against the Armenian population, in anticipation of the imminent collapse of the empire and its passage to a national state (Turkey). They would later expel the Greeks and marginalize the Kurds. The formation of the Turkish Republic thus went hand in hand with a state-sponsored policy of ethnic cleansing.
Nationalist paranoia about real or alleged internal enemies also affected the Romanian Republic, especially with the expansion of the country after the First World War. This was so because each of the newly acquired provinces had important non-Romanian minorities: Magyars, Romani, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, and Bulgarians, among others.
Romania had doubled its size with the annexed territories, and this meant that it would have to absorb populations that did not identify themselves as Romanian and in many cases did not speak the Romanian language. Some, like the Jews, Bulgarians, and Magyars, did not even share the Eastern Orthodox religion, the state religion of Romania. On the other hand, the Romanian-speaking populations of the acquired provinces were mostly illiterate, so even their conversion to the national ideal was not automatic.
According to British sources, the centennial celebration of the annexation of Bessarabia by Russia in 1912 “provoked indignation among nationalist circles in Romania, but there is no proof that this indignation found any echo among the population of Bessarabia,”15 which suggests that not even Moldovan peasants fully identified with Romanian nationalism. It was necessary to create a national identity where there had been none, and to elevate the Romanian language and Romanian ethnicity above the languages and identities of the remaining minorities.
The tension between such nationalist impulses and the need to integrate minorities was already a well-known problem in Europe, and in recognition of this complication, the Treaty of Versailles required that the new “Greater Romania” respect the rights of its minorities. These rights were incorporated into the 1923 Romanian constitution and included (finally) a recognition of Jewish citizenship. Romania was thereby the last European country to emancipate Jews and give them full citizenship rights. Curiously, my grandfather Misha celebrated this supposed act of inclusion by emigrating to Peru.
CHAPTER TWO
Why Misha Left
So why exactly did Misha leave Romania? There’s another simple question! But like so many of my questions, this one, too, was hard to answer.
Historians are fond of saying that the past is another country. And that is true enough: traveling in time does imply traveling in space. But in the case of my grandparents, I soon discovered that the past was always not one but two or more “other countries.” This is because Misha and Noemí grew up in a world of crisscrossing languages and traditions, and each of these language communities had its own horizon of references. Each had its expectations and its own peculiar hang-ups. And yet these language communities sometimes overlapped and came together in the lives of the people who spoke or heard them. There is, for this reason, a kind of multifocal quality to my grandparents’ stories — they are both Jewish and Romanian, for instance, or Jewish and Russian, or European and South American — and answering even simple questions to do with motives and motivations always involves looking at things from multiple points of view.
Romanian anti-Semitism
The sudden growth of Romania after the First World War exacerbated the anxieties of its nationalists. They feared that the inhabitants of the newly annexed provinces — Bessarabia, Transylvania, Bukovina — might wish to reattach themselves to their previous overlords. More than anything, though, they lived in dread of the possibility that the Russian revolutionary tide might sweep across Romania. For this reason, Bessarabia became a site of acute concern, since it had been a Russian province for more than one hundred years and so was a likely objective for Soviet expansionism.
These worries increased opportunistic Romanians’ political reliance on anti-Semitism, since Jews could easily become scapegoated for communist agitation. Indeed, communism itself was often cast as an alien notion that was being driven forth by Jewish ambition. Such claims gained some veneer of local credibility because the Russian Revolution had in fact improved the Jews’ situation, and many Jews were revolutionaries, especially in neighboring Ukraine. Some, such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev, played prominent roles. Furthermore, when read through the prism of the best-selling book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a forged document that allegedly furnished incontrovertible proof of Jewish international conspiracy, communism could easily be interpreted as yet another Jewish stratagem in their determined effort to take over the world.
Moreover, the Soviet Union had not been conceived as a national state but rather as a confederation of socialist republics that together safeguarded the rights of each of its “nationalities” (while advancing the collective interests of the proletariat). In theory at least, this also involved protecting the collective rights of the Jews, who were also thought of as a “nationality.” For this reason, the Soviet Union went so far as to recognize Yiddish as a national language, a step that no other country had previ
ously taken. Even the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had conceded full citizenship rights to its Jews as early as 1867, nonetheless had denied them collective rights as a national minority, which might have put them on a par with the empire’s Hungarians, Ukrainians, or Poles.16 Now the multinational Soviet Union had proven more innovative than even the modern Austro-Hungarian Empire in recognizing Jews as a properly national constituency.
As early as 1914, Lenin had argued that Russian Marxists should not shy away from the national question. Russian nationalists, Lenin contended, worked up a froth after the empire’s humiliation in the Russo-Japanese War, and as a result they had adopted an oppressive and bellicose stance toward the minorities that so proliferated in the Russian Empire. Communists, Lenin wrote, should take their stand against Russian colonialism and support all of the empire’s oppressed nations, even while insisting on the primacy of proletarian identification over and above any nationalist sentiment.17
That position was welcomed by many Jews, and especially those who identified both with socialism and with the struggle for the emancipation of their downtrodden community. After all, Russia’s Jews were an obvious example of an oppressed nationality. And, indeed, in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the government openly combated anti-Semitism, a policy that was quietly modified under Stalin, when the Soviet Union reverted to Russification, and to the occasional reliance on Jews as political scapegoats. Even so, it is undeniable that there was an official policy of critique of anti-Semitism in the USSR, a fact that led to a feeling of sympathy toward the Soviet Union among some sectors of Bessarabia’s Jewish population.
Nuestra América Page 4