Nuestra América
Page 6
After all, the rebirth of Hebrew had begun only very recently, and like Esperanto, it too emerged in the old Russian Empire. Its utopian horizon was the rebirth of a Jewish world that might bring together Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic speakers into a single, vibrant, cultural community. So, for instance, the Lithuanian-born Eliezer Ben Yehuda (né Eliezer Perlman, 1854–1922), who authored the first Hebrew dictionary, got the idea of reviving Hebrew not in Lithuania or in Palestine (where he emigrated in 1881), but rather as a student in Paris, where he communicated with a Sephardic friend using the Hebrew that they both shared. Hebrew could thus be a language of unification that brought the potential of the past into the living present, and so opened up a horizon of national emancipation far beyond the old Pale of Settlement.
Zionism, immigration
The most famous rabbis from Nova Sulitza were Rabbi Faso and his son-in-law, Haim Hier. It was the latter’s son-in-law, a rabbi from Radosimel, Ukraine, who began Zionist education in the village. On Friday nights, he gave sermons in Hebrew. He was also the director of the Tarbut school, which had a Zionist orientation. Rabbi Faso had attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel (1897), and he wrote articles in Ha-Tzfira (The Siren), the first Hebrew-language newspaper to be published in Poland. I imagine that the rabbi may well have had an influence on my grandfather, although there would have been other sources from which to absorb Zionist ideology too, given Misha’s involvement in the Hashomer Hatzair.
Around 1910, seven years before the founding of the first Romanian public library in Kishinev (the capital of Bessarabia), a clandestine — or at least somewhat discreet — Jewish public library was founded in Nova Sulitza. Czarist policy ran against such establishments. It had volumes in Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew, hundreds of users, and several reading groups, some of which were oriented toward Jewish nationalism. One of these was called “Lovers of Zion,” and another was “Languages of the Past.”26 I imagine that my grandfather must have belonged to one or both of these groups, perhaps Languages of the Past, since Misha and his friends took to speaking to one another in Hebrew in the village streets, which was an oddity and an affectation at the time.
Why was Misha so attracted to Zionism? Jewish emancipation had a central place in my grandfather’s process of self-fashioning. I’ve already said that. And the ideals of universal emancipation — socialism — were identified with Jewish emancipation. That too. I think that a comparison between Misha and Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, may help round out the picture.
Like my grandfather, Herzl was from a relatively well-to-do family. Also like Misha, he aspired to be an engineer, but soon found his vocation in the humanities instead — in his case, in poetry and theater. Herzl was oriented toward the world rather than religion. He was an atheist, and his interest in Judaism was cultural, historical, and political rather than religious: religion for him mattered more than anything as a cultural accomplishment. In all of this, he resembled my grandfather, although there is admittedly an ocean of distance between Budapest, a metropolis, and Nova Sulitza, a shtetl in a remote and backward region. And also, of course, between Herzl’s great fame and my grandfather’s modest reputation.
Even so, there were parallels between the two men. In both cases, for example, Jewish nationalism took form as a response to the impossibility of genuine citizenship. Thus, the young Herzl had emigrated to Vienna to study law and tried to join a German nationalist group, which he later renounced over the group’s anti-Semitism. Herzl found that he could not be admitted as a full contributor to the Germanic Geist, despite the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s emancipation of Jews. There had been formal political emancipation, yes, but with it came a proliferation of informal expressions of anti-Semitism. The fullness of national identification thus remained frustrated.27
Like Herzl, my grandfather was also sent to study engineering at the University of Vienna, only to discover that his talent was in the humanities — in languages, philosophy, and journalism. Like Herzl, too, his turn toward Hebrew and Judaica was founded in a worldly orientation that had little to do with religion. Religion was for Misha an aspect of Jewish cultural history, but his aspirational aims were primarily oriented toward socialism. His community of reference for political action, though, could hardly be Romania, where anti-Semitism was so powerful.
Indeed, when the new Romanian constitution finally proclaimed Jewish emancipation, in 1923, a militantly anti-Semitic political party emerged, the League of National Christian Defense. It had been launched by Alexandru Cuza, a law professor at the University of Iasi. Four years later, a second organization was formed, the Legion of the Archangel Michael, known also as the Iron Guard, which was a militant group that also had many followers in the universities.
A stamp from the Romanian Republic, 1940, with an image of the founder of the Iron Guard, Corneliu Codreanu.
It is no accident that anti-Semitism flourished in Romanian schools and universities. Jews there made up the most thriving portion of the middle classes, and they tended to do well in school. Romania was mainly an agrarian country, and the middle classes relied heavily on white-collar jobs and government posts. For this reason, nationalists looked to marginalize the participation of Jews in schools and universities, beating them, intimidating them, changing their grades, or blocking them from passing exams.
Little wonder that in Nova Sulitza there was a lot of support for the founding of a Jewish state in the period following the First World War, even though only a few people actually emigrated to Palestine at that time. Those who did were mostly idealists from the middle-class and upper-middle-class sectors of the village — the Herzls, one might say — many of whom ended up returning, due to the difficult material conditions that they often faced there.
The Balfour Declaration (1918) had unlatched Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine. Known as the Third Aliyah, this population movement was provoked by factors that touched Misha’s own life: the Russian Revolution, pogroms, the military draft, economic depression, and increased anti-Semitism after the First World War. Delegates from Hotin — the district in which Nova Sulitza was located — attended a Zionist conference in Brisheni (Bessarabia) in 1918, which generated a buzz in the village, most especially among children from “good families,” like Misha’s. A village history recounts how in those years young men and women from good families rushed to become pioneers:
They left their homes and moved to a barracks called Pioneer House, where they ate and slept. They walked through the village daily, dressed in work clothing, carrying their work tools on their shoulders and performing heavy labor…[F]inally, on August 23, 1921, they made Aliyah [that is, they left for Palestine]. Large numbers of villagers came to the train station to say their goodbyes. They arrived in Haifa on September 24, 1921.28
Some of the pictures of my grandfather with his friends from Hashomer Hatzair were probably taken in the “Pioneer House” to which this history alludes, so they would have been camping in conditions designed to prepare them for kibbutz life, but it is likely that Misha missed the chance that he had been preparing for, because in 1923, the British Empire closed off Jewish immigration to Palestine and so brought the Third Aliyah to an end, though only after some forty thousand Jews had moved to the region. Misha and his cohort at the Hashomer Hatzair could not wait around Nova Sulitza for a second chance to go to Palestine, either, because they were collectively threatened with a military draft that especially targeted the regions recently annexed by the new Greater Romania.
With the Palestine option taken off the table, Misha and his whole kvutzah boarded a ship headed for Peru, a country that was looking for European workers as a eugenics-inspired counterbalance to the large number of Chinese immigrants that it had previously received. In doing so, Misha followed the preferred migration pattern of the overwhelming majority of the village, because as a rule Nova Sulitza’s migrants did better in South America than the
y did in Palestine. Indeed, by the late 1920s there was not a single Nova Sulitzer family that didn’t have at least one relative in South America, with the greatest concentration of them in Lima. Remittances from these migrants effectively saved the village from starvation during the economic depression that struck after the close of the First World War.29
CHAPTER FOUR
Their First America
How they arrived
Misha arrived in Lima when he was nineteen years old. What was it like? What were his impressions? I only know a little about all of this. Misha’s ship left Europe from the port of La Pallice (La Rochelle), France. In those days, passenger liners also transported cargo, so they probably stopped either in Havana or Santo Domingo and Cartagena (Colombia) before crossing the Panama Canal, which had only just been inaugurated nine years before that. The canal was universally admired as an awesome feat of modern engineering as well as a resounding triumph for the new field of tropical medicine, without which it could never have been built. After Panama, Misha’s ship probably stopped in Guayaquil and then went finally on to the port of Callao, just outside Lima, where the vessel either concluded its journey or went on to Valparaíso for a final stop. Peru and Chile were the farthermost destinations for shipping along the South American Pacific, and they were about as far from Nova Sulitza as anywhere on the planet.
The ships docked for a couple of days at each port to load and unload cargo, so my grandfather had received early impressions of the tropics before reaching Peru’s dry coastal plane: the luminous colors of Havana and Cartagena, the cool shade of the jungle canopy in Panama and Colombia, the bustle of vendors peddling tropical fruits, dolphins racing at the bow of the ship…Misha saw black people, possibly for the first time in his life. And Indians, certainly for the first time. He heard the gentle cadence of South American Spanish, so tantalizingly close to Romanian, and yet never quite intelligible either.
My grandfather loved the tropics. In fact, he was still fascinated by Amazonia when I knew him, four decades later. I found some of his reading notes from the early 1960s on John Collier’s The Indians of the Americas (1947), where Misha writes: “Cast into the wilderness and hidden there for generations, hungry, the groups of Indians managed to keep their languages alive, their religion, their cultural systems, symbols, and mental and emotional faculties with regard to their sense of self and the world.” The jungles of South America were a place in which cultures had persisted in ways that had an uncanny resonance — almost like a counterfactual — to the crumbling lifeworld of the shtetl: the Indians “did not remain fossilized, unadapted or enclosed in the past but rather remodeled, assimilated but remaining true to their ancient values, these societies kept their idiosyncrasies.” I still have in my library a few of his old books: vocabularies of the Warao language, La musique des Incas et ces survivances, ethnographic reports on the Indians of the Colombian Amazon, that sort of thing.
I think that Misha had fallen in love with America even before reaching Peru, or navigating the frigid Antarctic current that brings Lima its rich fishing stock and its coastal dryness. I imagine that Lima was a gray city then. In my mind that city has always been gray, though also beautiful in its fashion. It had been built by the conquerors, so all of its people were migrants — descendants of African slaves, of Spaniards, of Indians from the Sierra. A Chinese population was brought in as indentured plantation labor, and also many Japanese migrants, who were sometimes confused with them. Some Italians too. With the First World War a new wave of Europeans came from that continent’s collapsed empires: migrants from Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut, and now, too, from Romania, Hungary, and Poland.
Misha arrived in Lima on November 19, 1924.30 He had been supported in his travel by his father, and with the notion that he would work there for a couple of years, until the danger of the military draft had passed. The idea of going to Peru, specifically, supposedly came from a friend from the Hashomer Hatzair whose last name was Peker, who was already in Lima selling clothing door-to-door. He sent postcards to his friends, bragging about his charm with Lima’s widows, who not only opened up their doors to his wares but were also happy to welcome him into their beds. No doubt the young man added these embellishments to encourage his friends to come.
Jewish emigration from Nova Sulitza to South America began around 1918, owing to the economic depression that was brought on by the Great War. In the case of Nova Sulitza, the crisis was acute, because after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, the town no longer sat on an international border, since it had passed into Romanian hands instead. A goodly portion of Nova Sulitza’s import-export business died as a result. Moreover, the Romanian government raised taxes on Bessarabian Jews. And to complete the picture, there was a drought.31
But they say that when God closes the door, he opens a window, and Nova Sulitza’s economic downturn coincided with the implementation of a new wave of settlement policies in South America. In Peru, the newly instated president Augusto Leguía passed a decree on October 10, 1919, guaranteeing Europeans, with the exception of Gypsies, a free boat ride to Lima for themselves and up to three family members, and thence to cover all transportation costs to the Peruvian interior that they were meant to “colonize.” This offer proved to be attractive to Romanian and Hungarian Jews.32
The Eastern European Jews who arrived in Peru had to operate in a complicated racial hierarchy that was new to them. When I asked Misha what it had been like to land in Peru he said that it was wonderful to arrive to a place where “no one knew what a Jew was.” The nation’s chief polarity had always been between Spaniards and Indians, a division that was expressed in regional terms as animosity between the Coast and the Andes, and most especially between Lima — a walled town built by and for conquistadors — and the Sierra. Indeed, until very recently, the term serrano (native of the Sierra) was used in Lima as a slur that meant “Indian.” This was Peru’s core drama. But there were also other, less salient, racial distinctions that were also relevant for the new Jewish immigrants.
After independence, the Spanish American republics had stagnated. Indeed, that was the period when the distance between the wealth of the United States and that of Latin America became a chasm, and the United States emerged as an empire, while Latin America became its imperial “sphere of influence.” There was a demographic dimension to this story, too, for while the population of the United States almost tripled between 1820 and 1850 — from a little over nine million to over twenty-three million — the population of Mexico, which was Spanish America’s most populous republic, stagnated at around fourteen million. The other Spanish American republics pretty much followed suit.
In response to this prolonged demographic slump, the Argentine statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi famously pronounced the formula gobernar es poblar (to govern is to populate), which became a byword for progressive politics throughout the continent. The guiding idea was to foster “civilized,” that is, European, immigration that might settle (i.e., “colonize”) the countryside, and so substitute a quasi-feudal landscape of semiruined estates, miserable peons, and enormous fallows with productive farms, white-picket fences, and an upright and properly informed citizenry. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the rise of Social Darwinism provided a second, supplementary rationale for fostering European migration, which was to “improve the (national) race.” Some countries, such as Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, attracted massive numbers of European migrants, especially from Southern Europe. However, places like Mexico or Peru, which had an abundant and very poorly paid (indigenous or black) labor force, were less successful.
Peru’s situation was somewhat peculiar, though. Geographically, the country is composed of a coastal desert that, when watered, is propitious for highly productive commercial agriculture; a massive, difficult-to-access Andean region which was once the center of the Inca empire and is the heartland of Peru’s indigenous population; and vast A
mazonian territories east of the Andes. During the colonial period, Peru’s coastal agriculture relied on African slave labor, but after the slave trade came to a close at the start of the nineteenth century, coastal plantation owners turned to southern China for indentured labor. Between 1847 and 1876 Peruvian entrepreneurs imported around 100,000 Chinese “coolies” (indentured servants) to work on the sugar and cotton plantations, build the country’s railroads, and mine guano (bird excrement that was profitably exported to Europe as fertilizer). Nearly half of these workers died of exhaustion, malnutrition, or suicide, in addition to the many thousands who died on the overcrowded ships that traveled to Callao from Hong Kong, an ordeal that is said to have been as deadly as the Middle Passage of the African slave trade.
After the end of the coolie trade, in 1876, the “Chinese race” was still considered inferior, so Peruvian migratory policy tended to discourage Asian immigration and levied all sorts of duties and limitations to the traffic. Moreover, as the Chinese established themselves in Lima, they became occasional political targets. Thus, in May 1909, a rabble of supporters of ousted president Nicolás de Piérola destroyed twenty-four Chinese businesses. Public opinion enthusiastically sided with the rabble, so Lima’s entrepreneurial mayor Guillermo Billinghurst chimed in on the xenophobic spirit with an ordinance to destroy the Callejón Otaiza, an overcrowded tenement, and ousted the five hundred Chinese immigrants who lived there. Sensing a political opportunity, President Augusto Leguía, who was in his first term in office, also endorsed the anti-Chinese mood by suspending admission of all Chinese into the country.33