Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  On the other hand, even the anticommunist Jews of Bessarabia found it difficult to identify enthusiastically with Romania. As in czarist Russia, pogroms had long been used as a tactic of political distraction there. Indeed, even before attaining its independence, the Romanian principalities were notorious for mistreatment of Jews, and pogroms there had risen to the level of international scandal. For example, in 1867, Napoleon III sent a telegram to Prince Charles of Moldavia, in which he made reference to the French opinion with respect to this matter: “I should not fail to make Your Highness aware of the public outcry raised here by the persecution directed against the Jews of Moldavia. I cannot believe that an enlightened government such as that of Your Highness might authorize measures so opposed to humanity and civilization.”18 A couple of years later, President Ulysses S. Grant named a Sephardic Jewish attorney, Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, as the first American representative to the newly founded Romanian Republic. Grant reminded Peixotto that “the suffering of the Hebrews of Romania profoundly touches every sensibility of our nature. It is one long series of outrage and wrong, and even if there be exaggeration in the accounts which have reached us, enough is evident to prove the imperative duty of all civilized nations to extend their moral aid on behalf of a people so unhappy.”19

  Peixotto thus arrived in Romania with the express mission of defending its Jews, and he indeed found them in a downtrodden state. The political class refused to grant them citizenship, and lack of access to education weighed heavily on their shoulders. Within a year of his arrival, there was also a small pogrom. Peixotto soon made inquiries to see whether the Romanian government might be open to authorizing the emigration of Jews to the United States, and to his astonishment, Romanian prime minister Lascăr Catargiu took advantage of the query to declare that the emigration of all Romanian Jews to the United States was a “perfect solution,” adding that he would gladly provide a passport to every Jewish person who was willing to leave.20

  This offer of exit visas for all was especially poignant, because since its foundation Romania had refused to offer nationality to Jews who wished to stay. Under the Treaty of Berlin, Romania had committed to granting Jews citizenship, but it had then passed laws that required them to undergo a cumbersome naturalization process. Romanians persistently represented Jews as foreigners — vagabonds who had encroached on Romanian lands.

  Long-standing legal injunctions that barred Jews from owning agricultural land also made them vulnerable to these charges. Thus, the absence of Jewish farmers was also put to work as alleged proof of their foreignness, an argument that then served to limit Jewish access to the university, white-collar professions, and the government. Not surprisingly, few Jews passed the Romanian naturalization exam — exclusion was, after all, its sole purpose. So, between 1878 and 1912, only four thousand applicants — or roughly 1 to 2 percent of all Jews in Romania — obtained Romanian nationality. And yet now, when given the opportunity to usher them out of the country, the prime minister didn’t flinch at offering them all passports!

  The dream of ethnic cleansing, of eliminating all Jews, thus existed in Romania in an open and official way from the time of its independence, a political impulse that cannot be imputed to Germany at its foundation, for instance, for all of its crimes in the twentieth century: Bismarck never made any move to incentivize the mass emigration of German Jews to America.

  Body matters

  My grandparents dressed modestly. My grandmother scarcely wore necklaces, and she had no fancy jewelry that I can remember. My grandfather wore standard-issue gray pants and a jacket of the sort that in South America might mark him as a teacher, perhaps, or an office employee. They dressed like citizens, I suppose, which sounds completely bland, but in South America the figure of the citizen had long been an unobtainable collective obsession, so that such clothes could be worn with pride.

  In the decades following independence, South America’s much touted national citizens were about as rare as unicorns. So, like unicorns, they were painted and embroidered just about everywhere. How could it be otherwise? Colonial society had been divided into castes. It was a society of masters and slaves, serfs and guilds, clerics and soldiers, Indians, Africans and Spaniards…Political subjects were anything but equal to one another, nor were they part of the same cultural communities. Even the region’s lingua franca — Spanish — was comfortably spoken only by a minority. So that building a citizenry became a national obsession.

  But creating citizens required nothing less than the rise of a new social class: the much pined-for “middle class.” This is because the prototypical citizen could scarcely be culled from the old landed gentry any more than from its native serfs. When would those two ever be “equal”? When would either caste be in a position to represent the national interest as a whole? Never. Nor could the coveted new citizenry emerge from the cities’ swollen “rabble” of half-naked porters and ragged prostitutes, street vendors, pickpockets, and drunks. A citizen had to be capable of holding his own, he had at the very least to look like a man who was independent, though not either like a man who was always surrounded by a throng of lackeys and dependents.

  For these reasons, South American nationalists were confident that they could identify the citizen-unicorn when they saw him: a citizen’s appearance was all-important. The citizen wore clothes, and didn’t walk about half-naked. And he didn’t dress like an Indian, either. In order to speed this process along, President Porfirio Díaz of Mexico even passed laws forcing rural folk to wear trousers whenever they entered a city, under penalty of a hefty fine. Though, then again, neither was the citizen an aristocrat. He had to wear clothes that were commonly available, and that signaled equality as a collective aspiration. So when I say that my grandparents dressed like citizens, it means that they embodied a political aspiration: in their generation, the unicorns had finally materialized!

  Truth be told, though, something funny had already been happening with my grandparents’ bearing even before they came to South America.

  Lisa Noemí Milstein at eighteen years old. Lima, 1929.

  Misha Adler at seventeen years old. Nova Sulitza, c. 1921.

  The earliest image that I have of Misha is a photograph taken in Odessa: a studio portrait, wearing his school uniform. It has a certain martial air that I suppose was common in those times of high militarism: during the First World War, even students dressed like soldiers! The date on the photograph is December 6, 1917, so it was taken during the Russian Revolution. Misha was thirteen years old, and the dedication written on the back of the photo says, in Ukrainian, “A memento of Misha.” The picture was taken to commemorate his bar mitzvah, which in those schools were group events, celebrated on the same day for an entire cohort, and not the sort of lavish extravaganzas that some of us have grown accustomed to.

  Misha Adler in his school uniform, December 6, 1917.

  Odessa is suggested in the marina on the studio backdrop.

  The photograph provides a clue to the rebellion in which my grandfather’s generation participated, for the military uniform counters the image of the Jews that then circulated in Russia. One recurring anti-Semitic theme was that Jews were incapable of serving in the military, and therefore they did not deserve to be citizens. An entire physiognomy was invented to justify this prejudice, featuring flat, pigeon-toed feet, a stooping posture, and an overall sickliness.21

  To be a citizen meant to be able to defend oneself, and it is without a doubt as an answer to the charge of being unfit for citizenship that at the First Zionist Congress (1898), Max Nordau called for the development of a “muscular Judaism.” My grandfather entered adulthood at a moment of intense struggle for full Jewish citizenship, and his first photograph already announces active rejection of the stereotypical physiognomy of “his race.” Although maybe by December 1917 that particular stereotype had already been debunked in revolutionary Russia, whose Red Army was being orga
nized by a Jew (Leon Trotsky).

  The rebellion against prototypical images of the Jewish body also implied a dismissal of the traditional forms of life, dress, and presentation of Eastern European Jews, who had long embraced the intensely segregated life of the shtetl, grounded for the most part around Hasidic religious communities. This was also the case of Nova Sulitza, whose principal religious community belonged to a Hasidic sect, the Sagidura. The town’s basic education, especially that of the poor, was in their hands.

  There was nothing more contrary to the Hasidic sensibility than the socialist ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair, a movement to which my grandparents belonged. Founded in Galicia (Poland) in 1913, the Hashomer Hatzair, which in English means “Youth Guard,” had two components: one rooted in scouting, the other in Zionism. The focus on scouting was part of the spirit of the time. It combined the relatively recently consolidated idea of youth — which is a social category that supposes a break between the past and the future — with the discovery of nature and the consolidation of collective identity, especially national identity.

  One of its first expressions was the Wandervogel movement, founded in Berlin in 1901. Shortly afterward, in 1908, Robert Baden Powell founded the Boy Scouts in Great Britain. In each case, the idea was to bring young people close to nature and thereby to know their own hearts. Scouting was of a piece with the Romantic sensibility, and it went hand in hand with the widespread mood of nationalism that was general at the time, and most especially in Eastern Europe. It cultivated the figure of youth as the foundation of a collective future.

  All of the nationalisms of the period participated in this sensibility. In the United States, for example, the determination to strengthen the virility and health of the nation through nature manifested itself in a thousand ways, from the design of Central Park in New York and ordinances requiring houses to be properly ventilated, to the environmentalist ideas of John Muir, to Teddy Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for founding national parks. Fresh air, exercise, and wide-open spaces were seen as keys to achieving national strength. In such a movement, the overcrowded environment of the Jewish ghetto and even of the shtetl seemed to be the very antithesis of public health, and so cultivating a relationship with “nature” was a poignant issue for Eastern European Jews. It was also for this very reason that to found a Jewish scouting movement implied a radicalism that was very specific, since it subverted the most deeply rooted and pernicious stereotypes regarding “the Jew.”

  Each of my grandparents, separately, joined the Hashomer Hatzair: my grandfather in Nova Sulitza, in the 1910s, and my grandmother in Czernowitz, in the 1920s. Maybe their early choice helps explain the paradox of their physical appearance, which was at once exuberant and austere.

  Movements like the Hashomer Hatzair promoted athleticism, personal assuredness, and resilience, alongside a certain asceticism. For Jews, self-assuredness was itself exuberant, since it involved rejecting racial stigmata: athleticism flew in the face of reigning stereotypes of the Jew as crooked weakling and hysteric. For women, self-assuredness involved the added refusal of their subjection, which in traditional settings was often brutal. On the other hand, like the communist youth movements, the shomrim (members of the Hashomer Hatzair) rejected everything that reeked of “bourgeois vice,” such as smoking or drinking. So it was both spartanism and rebelliousness, rolled into one.

  Here is an early picture of Misha’s scouting group, known in the movement as a kvutzah. Misha is the one in the shirt that was colored with crayons by my uncle. The ten boys, aged roughly fifteen years, wear uniforms inspired by those of the Boy Scouts.

  And here is another photograph of the same kvutzah, with my grandfather a little bit older (about seventeen), at the center of the photo. He was a group leader.

  Misha Adler (second row, third from right) with other members of his kvutzah. Nova Sulitza, c. 1918.

  The madrij Misha Adler (center) with the janjim of his kvutzah, c. 1921 or 1922.

  Boys and girls are together even in their serious gazes, deliberately ignoring the religious norm of segregation between the sexes that was still dominant in Nova Sulitza. They are comrades, and camaraderie went hand in hand with socialism, which was the ideology of the movement, together with the aspiration of national liberation. Jewishness here was being vindicated as a collective identity rather than as a commitment to adhere to religious rules.

  Misha Adler (center) with close friends from his kvutzah, all wearing some sort of political pin. Nova Sulitza, c. 1922.

  And here, finally, is a third image, where the group has developed a touch of dandyism that contrasts with the image of the Jew in the anti-Semitic propaganda that circulated through Romania during this period.

  As in many other cases, dandyism developed in an open rebellion against a society that sought to degrade a racialized minority. Misha was born at a time of intensification of scapegoat politics against Russia’s Jewry, and that was the backdrop against which both dandyism and “muscular Judaism” developed. Indeed, the first Jewish militia in Nova Sulitza formed around the time of Misha’s birth, after the pogroms in Kishinev and Japan’s defeat of the Russian army. Later, around the time of the Russian Revolution, a second local militia formed to protect the community from the pillaging of soldiers who had deserted.22 It is quite possible that young Misha was among them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Emancipation and Emigration

  Education

  Misha was the first of his family to undertake advanced study. His father, Hershel, identified with the values of the Haskallah. This movement was launched in the eighteenth century by Moses Mendelssohn, who argued that enlightenment was not some peculiarly French thing, but rather that it was just a name for scientific and rational knowledge. Ideally, Mendelssohn argued, enlightenment should always go hand in hand with cultivation, that is with moral and practical refinement, but these two did not always advance in tandem. So, for instance, the French had more refinement than enlightenment, while the English and the Prussians had more enlightenment than refinement.23 All nations of the world should strive for both.

  Mendelssohn worked accordingly to bring Judaism into enlightened recognition by way of his translations of portions of the Hebrew Bible into German. More deeply, his work on the philosophy of Maimonides showed the way forward for the enlightened Jews: already in the twelfth century Maimonides had proved that every part of Jewish law serves a rational purpose. Judaism and rationality were thereby wedded in the holy scriptures themselves! Enlightened Jews took this as a cue, and turned their backs to the Hasidic enclosure; they preferred to see themselves as modern heirs to the tradition of Maimonides. Why should they play second fiddle to the Parisian philosophes? Enlightenment, rationality, and science belonged to the world and, as Maimonides had proved long ago, the Jews had long been there, and they’d long done that.

  Jewish rationalism spread quickly during the nineteenth century. Periodicals associated with the Jewish Enlightenment had been arriving in Nova Sulitza even since Hershel’s youth, journals such as Ha-Melitz from Odessa and Ha-Tsefirah from Warsaw. Although the village had no telephone or telegraph office, it was the terminus of one of the three railroad lines that existed in Bessarabia. Thanks to this, newspapers were available.

  Even so, the high level of cultural accomplishment that developed in places like Nova Sulitza still baffles me. There were, after all, no public schools there, nor was there an integrated secular school where Jews and Christians might mingle and learn from one another. There was only a Jewish school (cheder) for boys and a Talmud Torah, which offered religious instruction. If girls wished to gain education, they had to train with private tutors. The policy of the Russian Empire had been to maintain only a small number of educational establishments in Bessarabia, so as to avoid any surge in Moldovan (or Romanian) nationalism. The result was a high rate of illiteracy in the Bessarabian countryside. The urban minoriti
es, for their part — Jews, Germans — relied on privately financed institutions, and they were better educated than the Moldovan population. According to British sources, in 1920 only 17 percent of Moldovan men and roughly 4 percent of women knew how to read, while 65 percent of Jewish men and 41 percent of Jewish women were literate.24

  But educational aspirations often went well beyond mere literacy. Misha’s father, for instance, had a soft spot for scientific education, so that Misha’s schooling was not delivered by Hasids, as was the case for the poorer families of the village, who ended up learning little more than rudimentary Hebrew and error-filled Yiddish.25 People of education and means, like the Adler family, fled from such educational establishments and sent their children away to study.

  Although my grandfather first attended the Tarbut school in Nova Sulitza, he later boarded in a Gymnasium in Odessa, rather than the more usual option in German-speaking Czernowitz. Misha’s first cousin on his mother’s side, the well-known German and Yiddish writer Vera Haquen, was from Odessa, and the appeal of having family there might have been a factor in this decision. In any case, my grandfather came to speak and write Russian better than German, while my grandmother, who went to school in Czernowitz, spoke German better than Russian.

  After the end of the First World War, Misha’s father dispatched him to study engineering at the University of Vienna, but once there, Misha decided to abandon engineering and enrolled instead in the academy of Rabbi Zvi Peretz Chayes, who directed an institute dedicated to Hebrew linguistics and philology. Misha was not attracted to this topic for religious reasons. He was interested in the Bible, the Talmud, and the Mishna as literature, as language, and as an expression of national genius, but his deeper concern was with Hebrew as a feat of collective will.