Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  Peru’s desire to foster European — over Chinese — immigration was thus such that it was willing to embrace migrants from backward Eastern Europe, and did not even care whether those who came were Jews. Its limit, tellingly, was Gypsies, who were excepted from the invitation to colonize the Peruvian interior on account of their transhumance and reputation for thievery. In other words, despite the fact that Misha arrived in a country where Catholicism was the official religion, and that Jews were understood by eugenicists of the period as being a far cry from any optimal race, their situation in the local racial hierarchy was actually pretty good, since they could blend in with the European minority to a considerable degree, and not be confused with Lima’s underclass of Indian, African, and Chinese migrants.

  This did not mean that they had it easy, though. Migrants to Lima were at first almost completely men, and they tended to work as door-to-door salesmen (known in Yiddish as klappers) selling clothes on installments, which was a new sales method back then. The Jewish peddler was thus simultaneously a seller, a credit appraiser, and a payments collector, and his work life was exhausting. The Colombian-Yiddish writer (and former peddler) Salomón Brainski invokes the solitude of these salesmen in a story of a peddler who speaks of missing his only friend “in this far-off land, where one feels at times as alone as a lost dog, barking with a howl in its innards, behind a wall, on a dark night.”34

  Jewish peddlers in the Bogotá press.

  El Tiempo, September 13, 1941.

  right: El Espectador, February 27, 1936.

  Peker’s story about the merry widows of Lima was likely a youthful exaggeration, penned more or less transparently to coax his far-flung friends to come join him. But with no future in Bessarabia and the imminent threat of forced military recruitment, even the improbable promise of Arabian Nights–style erotic encounters may have interested the young men of Misha’s kvutzah: it offered them adventure in the face of the unknown. Besides, they had no better alternative than to migrate; any glimmer of hope or adventure was welcome.

  Indeed, with or without such erotic enticements, my uncle Zuñe (“Alfonso”), Misha’s younger brother, emigrated to South America at roughly the same time as Misha, but to Cumaná (Venezuela) to work as a peddler. His friend Susye (Israel Mailijson) went with him, and ended up marrying one of Misha’s sisters, my aunt Ana. The other sister, Rebeca, later married Sima Vurgait, who arrived in Peru on the same ship as my grandfather. By the mid-1920s long-distance migration was widespread among the male youth of Nova Sulitza, and in many cases these young men ended up marrying each other’s sisters and cousins, and taking them to South America as well.

  Beginnings

  Upon arriving in Peru, Misha didn’t work as a peddler like most of his shipmates. He had a talent for languages. When I met him, he spoke Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German, Romanian, French, English, and Spanish. He had begun to study Spanish on the ship, so that when he arrived in Lima he spoke it well enough that a Sephardic businessman, whose name was Sarfaty, hired him to mediate with the other “Romanians.”

  Lima was growing at the time of Misha’s arrival, but it still only had about 200,000 inhabitants. Around 80 percent of the Peruvian population still lived in the countryside. Indians made up around four-fifths of the national population, and only half of all Peruvians even understood Spanish. Still, the 1920s were a moment of cultural effervescence in Peru. Thus, in his study of the Mariátegui Circle, Oscar Terán notes that between 1918 and 1930 the number of publications tripled, and there was a surge in centers of cultural production in each of the principal cities of the Peruvian provinces.35

  In the middle of this (slow) cultural awakening, there was then arriving in Peru a very modest, but nonetheless consequential, number of Jews. In 1898, there were scarcely forty-three Jews in Peru. Around the time of the First World War, roughly 120 Sephardic immigrants arrived there from the collapsing Ottoman Empire, among whom was Sarfaty. The Sephardim had the advantage of speaking Ladino, which is an old Spanish dialect. Shortly afterward, Ashkenazi Jews began to arrive, mainly from Romania (55 percent) and to a lesser degree from Poland, Russia, and Hungary.36 The majority of these settled in Lima’s Chirimoyo neighborhood, and they founded the Unión Israelita del Perú in 1923, just before Misha’s arrival. The first Peruvian synagogue was established in 1934, but this came after Misha and Noemí had left.

  The Jews of these generations alternated residence between Lima and the provinces. As the majority were traveling salesmen, they tended to establish themselves in commercial centers such as Trujillo, Huancayo, Arequipa, Lambeyeque, and Piura. This was in keeping with President Leguía’s intent, which had been for European migrants to colonize the interior. If they happened to be doctors or dentists, it was also easier to find clients in these provincial towns. In all, and despite continued Jewish migration to Peru during the 1930s, as late as 1948 there were scarcely 2,800 Jews in all of Peru, of which about half (1,200) lived outside of Lima.

  My uncle Sima, for example, traveled extensively through the country. He gave music lessons and established a small studio in Huancayo. It turns out that he also had a flair for entertainment. Misha even worked as his part-time manager at one point, and arranged a few public performances by the “King of the Mandolin and Unicycle.” When I met him, my uncle Sima was old and sedate — a bit depressed, as I remember him. I never suspected that he could play the mandolin while riding on his unicycle! Age can change you, I suppose.

  Isaac Perlman, with the look of an officer in some European army, and his indigenous helpers, carrying merchandise. Cerro de Pasco, Peru, 1920s.

  Isaac Perlman, who would marry the younger sister of my grandmother Noemí, is another example of Jewish migration to the Peruvian provinces. He arrived with all of his family from Hotin, Bessarabia. Perlman had been an officer in the Romanian army, which was an exceptional situation that suggests a high degree of assimilation and wealth. The Perlman family emigrated with some resources, and Isaac was able to set up a business shortly after his arrival, in the mining town of Cerro del Pasco (Peru) and later in Cúcuta, on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. For his part, Misha helped Sarfaty manage his Yiddish-speaking vendors, so he didn’t go to live outside the capital. He negotiated an arrangement with his boss that allowed him time to study at the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos.

  San Marcos

  Founded in 1551, Lima’s Universidad de San Marcos was the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, and yet this noble aura was manifest mainly in the form of a kind of smug conformity. At the start of the twentieth century, Peru’s greatest university was just a provincial backwater. Run by lawyers and petty clerks, it was acutely portrayed by Mariátegui as “a static university; a mediocre center of indolent and priggish bourgeois culture that offers a sampling of dead ideas.”37 Sodom and Gomorra had been lost for want of ten just men; the Universidad de San Marcos, according to Mariátegui, was lost because it did not have a single great teacher.38

  Even so, the university remained a neuralgic point for Peruvian politics. The country had never had a civilian president who had not studied there.39 Given its political centrality, then, one might consider the decline of San Marcos as a symptom of the general decline of Peru. At the time of San Marcos’s founding, in the mid-sixteenth century, Lima was Spain’s viceregal capital for the whole of South America, and it was a commercial hub for the richest silver and gold mining region in the world. But Lima later underwent a process of slow decline, due in part to that city’s cumbersome location. By the eighteenth century silver exports from Upper Peru (today Bolivia) bypassed Lima, and began to be shipped to Europe by way of Buenos Aires, on the Atlantic. By the end of that century, Spain carved out two new South American viceroyalties at Peru’s expense, New Granada and Río de la Plata, with capitals in Bogotá and Buenos Aires.

  Lima’s decline was later exacerbated during the War of the Pacific (1879–84), when Peru l
ost its southernmost province of Tarapacá, and Bolivia lost Antofagasta to the Chileans. The Peruvian war against Chilean imperialism is in some ways reminiscent of the Mexican-American War (1846–48), and it hit Peru very hard indeed. The country was ruined economically and socially upended, and it lost its rich saltpeter mines as well as major copper repositories. Saltpeter was a necessary ingredient for gunpowder and there was a major market for that product, driven by militarism in Europe, the United States, and Asia. Copper, for its part, was about to begin its meteoric rise as an export commodity, owing to Thomas Edison’s development of electric lighting in 1879, and Peru was unable to reap those benefits. In addition, Lima itself was occupied and ravaged by Chilean forces.

  The form of governance that emerged in Peru after this debacle is often referred to as the Aristocratic Republic, an arrangement that lasted from 1895 until the election of Augusto Leguía, in 1919. The period is roughly contemporary with the Belle Epoque in Europe, though it begins later and then runs on through to the end of the First World War. Essentially, the national government was now run by a coterie of businessmen, mostly members of the Partido Civil, and therefore antagonistic to military rule. The principal actors in the reigning coalition were owners of the rich sugar and cotton plantations of the Peruvian coast, bankers, newspaper owners, landowners, and rentiers. This was also a time when the tension between Lima and the Andean region had grown even stronger, because the collapse of the Peruvian army during the Chilean invasion prompted peasant rebellions in the southern Andes that were then quelled from Lima. Indeed, the República Aristocrática developed as an adamantly Lima-centered variant of the positivist-inspired progressivism that was general in Latin America in this period, with its power tied to financial capital, the rentier economy, and commercial agriculture.

  The civilistas (members of the Partido Civil) promoted the virtues of a civilian-led democracy, as against military dictatorship, but theirs was a democracy that excluded Peru’s Indian majority. So, for instance, in 1896 the civilistas passed an electoral law restricting voting rights to citizens who could read and write. It is likely that illiteracy rates hovered around 80 percent in those years. Even in Lima there was considerable illiteracy, especially in the nonwhite population.40

  Civilismo was thus run by a minuscule coterie known, revealingly, as Los Veinticuatro Amigos (The Twenty-Four Friends), a group that met on Fridays at Lima’s Club Nacional, a gentlemen’s club that had been founded in 1855, at the height of Peru’s guano boom, and that was modeled on London’s famous men’s clubs. Top-hat-and-cane-bearing civilians were now running the show, and indeed the sleepy self-congratulatory comfort at the Universidad de San Marcos that Mariátegui decried was very much of a piece with civilismo’s overall social and cultural enclosure. Indeed, all twenty of the university’s permanent professorships were occupied by members of just three civilista families: the Pardos, the Prados, and the Miró Quesadas.41

  Civilista president Manuel Pardo y Lavalle.

  Still, all good things must come to an end, and Peru’s rather anemic counterpart to the Belle Epoque entered a final stage of decline immediately after the First World War. On the social front, the pax civilista had provided some conditions for modest growth and economic improvement, and so new middle sectors emerged in Lima as well as in provincial cities. A new working class also sprung up around textiles, mining, and the sugar industry. Taken together, this change proved sufficient for the emergence of a new kind of government, which was no longer an oligarchy, but a more or less benign populist dictatorship, built on fragile interclass coalitions and a fair modicum of repression.

  At its head was Augusto Leguía, a man who had once been a regular at the Club Nacional. Leguía had made his fortune in the sugar industry, and was later a pioneer in Peruvian insurance sales. He served as secretary of the Treasury under three different civilista presidents, and finally became president in 1908. During his first term, however, Leguía faced down an attempted coup, and left the civilista party. He later self-exiled to the United States, where he worked for the New York Insurance Company and learned American business methods. Leguía returned to Peru and to political life in 1919, won the presidential election against the civilista candidate José Pardo, and then led his own military coup to guarantee that his triumph at the ballot would be respected.

  Leguía built himself up as a Wilsonian figure, and countered the Anglophilia of the civilista party and the Club Nacional by way of an American alliance. Great Britain had been Peru’s imperial tutor for the whole of the nineteenth century; it had financed the railroads and it controlled the guano industry. But now, the Great War was over, and Peru’s key patron was the United States, with its investments in sugar, rubber, mining, and tropical products.

  Augusto Leguía.

  Woodrow Wilson.

  It was in this context that the Universidad de San Marcos began to boil over. By the time of Leguía’s ascent to power, the university’s student body finally included members of the new middle classes, and not just Lima aristocrats. People like firebrand Víctor Haya de la Torre, from Trujillo, who was among the leaders for student reform, and who soon founded the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), often considered Latin America’s first populist political party. Initially supportive of Leguía’s bid for the presidency, that generation exploded the cultural cocoon of civilismo, and looked outward, to Mexico’s Revolution, with its example of agrarian reform and its cultural rennaissance, for instance, or to Russia, and to the cultural ferment in Europe and Latin America. But it also looked inward, and asked one core question: Why was the Indian absent from Peruvian nationality and culture?

  In 1919, San Marcos had its first student movement, which sought to oust a group of especially incompetent professors, and demanded student participation in the selection of new faculty. The students made some gains, but the university remained in civilista control, so that in 1923 there was a second movement, with similar claims. By then, the university had become a site for oppositional politics, which could give voice to a wide range of issues. So, for instance, a few months before Misha’s arrival in Peru, Victor Haya de la Torre led a socialist and secularist protest movement against President Leguía, the students’ erstwhile ally, in protest against his intention to “enshrine the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the patron saint of Peru.” The protests ended with at least one casualty, and with Haya going into exile in Mexico.

  Leguía’s presidency was built on unstable coalitions, and it developed in dynamic tension with key actors. He had sent both Mariátegui and César Falcón into a gentle but compulsory exile (on government scholarship), and shut down their paper, La Razón, Lima’s first left-wing daily. In 1923 Mariátegui returned from exile and was invited to be a teacher at a new institution, the Universidad Obrera Gonzales Prada, a night school for workers that had been founded by Haya de la Torre in 1921 in recognition of the structural limitations of the Universidad de San Marcos. At the Universidad Obrera, Mariátegui gave lectures on topics including the European war, the Russian Revolution, the German revolution, the Peace of Versailles, proletarian agitation in Europe, the crisis of democracy, and the crisis in philosophy. These were all topics unrepresented by the faculty at San Marcos, but that had plenty of interest among its students.

  In this environment of cultural ebullience, Misha began to study philosophy, a subject in which he would receive his doctorate in 1930, with a dissertation on Karl Marx. I haven’t been able to find my grandfather’s thesis, because my grandfather had to leave Peru under complicated circumstances, and my friends in Lima have not yet found it in the university archives. I’ve no idea who in that faculty might have directed it. Maybe it will reappear one day. According to my uncle, it was the first thesis written on Karl Marx in any Peruvian university, which seems very likely to me. Marx would never have been a viable topic for a San Marcos thesis before the student movements of the early 1920s.

&n
bsp; Misha Adler’s doctorate certificate from the Universidad de San Marcos, 1930.

  Undoubtedly, Misha brought his interest in Marx from Europe. He was also at the time a sympathizer of the Russian Revolution, which he had witnessed firsthand while a young student in Odessa, and was himself a committed socialist. It is thus very likely that he would have read at least something by Marx in his youth, even if only the Communist Manifesto. He had very likely read a fair deal more than that.

  Even so, it is likely that Misha decided to specialize in Marxist thought owing to his involvement in José Carlos Mariátegui’s political movement. Jorge del Campo, a communist painter who was part of Mariátegui’s inner circle, laid out the movement’s organizational strategy:

  José Carlos organized the work in such a way that the comrades from petit bourgeois backgrounds, whether university students or young intellectuals, were required to adopt Marxism-Leninism — scientific socialism — in a systematic, theoretical, and practical way. This was not only an individual necessity but a function of the constructive labor that we were developing. It revolved around, as I’ve said, transmitting our theoretical knowledge to the worker groups then in the process of organization, collaborating with them where we might be useful.42

  My grandfather’s commitment to Mariátegui’s course of action implied that, for him, the study of Marx was as much a practical matter of political militancy as a theoretically motivated choice. In any case, it is certain that Misha’s interest in Marx took root in Peru, and in his participation in the group that met in the so-called Red Corner of Mariátegui’s house.