Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  The klapper and national consciousness

  Misha had a number of qualities to bring to the discussions and activities that developed in Mariátegui’s salon: translation, certainly, and formal training in Marx’s thought, which was shared and transmitted in workers’ circles. But there was also a third and more subtle contribution, I think, which was the fresh intensity with which Misha appreciated local reality.

  Misha’s generation embedded itself into Peruvian national society in a peculiar way. Jewish peddlers moved through the poorer neighborhoods and slums of capital cities such as Lima, and also in a far-flung network of provincial towns. Communication was effective in these networks, because the salesmen working in the provinces were connected to those in the capital, since they worked with the same suppliers. Moreover, they were in touch with a broader South American network through connections of family, place of origin, and language: Jews from villages such as Nova Sulitza had acquaintances and relatives in various South American countries.

  This helps us grasp the almost incredible migratory trajectories of many of these migrants. For example, Boris Milstein, my great-grandfather, left Lima for Tuluá (Colombia), without first residing in Bogotá. Such a leap would have been unthinkable without a preexisting ethnic network that stretched from Lima to Bogotá, and from each of these capital cities to the provinces. Similarly, Isaac Perlman, who married my aunt Pupe, moved from Bessarabia to Cerro de Pasco (Peru), and from there to Cúcuta, on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. These places are thousands of miles apart, and they were entirely disconnected from one another. My uncles Zuñe and Susye, for their part, moved first to Cumaná (Venezuela), then returned to Bessarabia, and later moved to Bogotá and Caracas respectively.

  Long-distance communication within the community had its commercial uses, but it was also vital for the social reproduction of the ethnic group, including for the arrangement of marriages, which was challenging for such a minuscule minority. In the case of Peru, door-to-door sales also provided opportunities for political observation and development, and so for leadership. So, for instance, one of the Bessarabian Jews who was close to Mariátegui, Bernardo Regman, was a klapper and then became a cofounder of the Socialist Party of Peru. He later would be the treasurer of the Peruvian Communist Party. Regman probably knew the poorer neighborhoods of Lima better even than Mariátegui, as he had spent years there knocking on every door.

  The depth of knowledge that the small and hardworking community of Ashkenazi peddlers gained of the Peruvian “national reality” was extraordinary, although this knowledge was mostly unreciprocated: people tended to refer to them indiscriminately as “Turks,” “Poles,” “Russians,” or “Germans,” and they were commonly addressed as “Míster” (pronounced meester). Nonetheless, Jewish peddlers acquired close-up knowledge that, exceptionally, even spilled into the literary field. Thus, in his forward to the Spanish translation of a book of stories written by Brainski in Yiddish, the avant-garde Colombian poet Luis Vidales wrote: “I believe that Brainski has not received the attention in Colombia that he deserves…In a good portion of American literature (short stories and novels), the landscape is everything. Humans are only incidental playthings.” For Vidales, this situation contrasted with the stories of Brainski, which emerged “from the daily customs of humble people, in their natural, logical, and realistic practice.”43 The point of view is symptomatic rather than exceptional. Young immigrant merchants and peddlers tended to reflect on the realities that they encountered. They had prejudices of their own, certainly, but at least their impressions were not governed by the preconceptions of the local middle classes.

  So, while one of the reasons for Mariátegui’s attraction to my grandparents had to do with his enthusiasm for Jewish high culture, the depth of their own “discovery of America” was also important, because it enriched everyday experience with a gaze from a remote and deeply cosmopolitan elsewhere. A gaze that came to know the lives of the local poor, but that was not blighted by illiteracy or devoid of cultural aspiration.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lisa Noemí Milstein

  My grandparents met in Lima near the end of 1927, when my grandmother was fifteen years old.

  Lisa Noemí Milstein was born on January 22, 1911, in Mogilev (district of Podolia, Ukraine), a small city on the Dniester River that then marked the border between Ukraine and Bessarabia. Her father, my great-grandfather Boris, was a small-scale industrialist and merchant. He came from a place near Mogilev called Jaruga, which is also on the Dniester, just a bit farther south. Boris had even served for a time as representative of the village. According to my uncle Manuel, “he sometimes had a drink with the goyim (the Christians),” which is a way of saying that he had ties in local spheres of power.

  Boris had two trades that came to him from his father, and maybe also from his grandfather. He made soap, and he ran a sawmill that cut railroad ties according to the very precise specifications required for such work. After his marriage to Tania Greisser, Boris moved from Jaruga to Mogilev, which was the main city of that small region, and he bought a large house that my uncle characterizes as “a mansion.” In Mogilev, Boris built his soap mill.44

  Noemí thus came from a provincial bourgeois family. In her house, they spoke Russian rather than Ukrainian (the latter being the language of the peasants), as well as Yiddish. There are also other signs of the comfort in which she was raised: Boris hired her a private tutor, who gave her lessons in French and piano. What could be more Russian than that?

  When Noemí was six, the Russian Revolution broke out. Her family remained in Mogilev until 1920 or 1921, the period that corresponded to the ongoing civil war between the White Russians and the Bolsheviks. It was also during this time that Ukrainian nationalists organized large-scale pogroms. According to what I’ve been told, the revolution hardened at this time, and the Bolsheviks sent a commissar from Kiev with orders to hang a member of the bourgeoisie in the public square of each town in the region. Boris had been selected for hanging in Mogilev. I’m not sure if this was mainly because of his mansion or also because he was Jewish, but the official making the arrest knew Boris and liked him, since a relative had worked at the soap mill. He advised Boris to take his family and all the money he could gather up and leave Mogilev that same night, without any delay.

  And so it was that Boris, Tania, their three daughters, and Tania’s mother, Revka, left secretly and in a hurry. Their immediate goal was to cross the Dniester, the border between the Soviet Union and Romania, in order to get to the city of Czernowitz, which had become a gathering point for Soviet refugees.

  Shura

  The crossing of the Dniester, in 1921, marked the first devastating loss that my family suffered because of European conflict. It was the loss of Shura, in an episode that has remained engraved in my family’s memory, and one that has had repercussions that reach into my own generation.

  The Dniester River near Mogilev, Ukraine, looking into Bessarabia.

  My grandmother’s family had to flee secretly in a small boat loaded with refugees. The plan was to cross the Dniester clothed in darkness. The Milstein girls — Noemí (ten years old), Shura (born on February 27, 1919, and then only two), and Pupe (born on March 21, 1921, and then a baby in her mother’s arms) — traveled with a group that included their parents, Boris and Tania, and their maternal grandmother, Revka. As they started to cross the river, little Shura, who was scared, began to cry. The boat captain threatened to drown her, so that her cries wouldn’t cause the whole group to be discovered. Revka got out of the boat and saved Shura, while the rest of the family crossed the river.

  According to the version of the story that Shura’s daughter Rita tells, and which undoubtedly comes from Shura herself, Tania had wanted to stay on the Ukrainian side when Shura began to cry, but Boris stopped her. It was too risky. So, in an instant, they left their daughter behind. As the plan was to get both Revka
and Shura across later, the family settled in Czernowitz, not all that far from Mogilev. But the border quickly became uncrossable, and the Milsteins remained in Czernowitz for six years without being able to reunite with their daughter.

  Czernowitz was filled with Ukrainian émigrés at the time. In 1921, the Romanian authorities reported that 100,000 refugees from Ukraine had arrived in their country, many of them Jews.45 A significant percentage had established themselves in Czernowitz, which was natural given that city’s importance and location. The economic situation there was not tenable over the long term, however, and the Romanian authorities exerted pressure so that the migrants might move on as soon as possible. Officially, the presence of Ukrainian refugees was only provisional and merely a stop on the way to another destination, such as the United States, Canada, Palestine, or South America.46 In the end, with resources shrinking, no realistic hope of getting their daughter out of Russia, and no possibility of remaining in Czernowitz either, Boris, Tania, my grandmother Noemí, and her youngest sister, Pupe, embarked for Peru.

  Tania (center), Noemí (right), and Pupe (left), with Shura absent. Lima, 1929.

  Czernowitz

  When Noemí and her parents arrived in Czernowitz, the city no longer belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire but to Romania. The Romanian language was made mandatory in the schools, even though most schoolteachers didn’t know how to speak it.47 Even the town’s name had changed: now it was called Cernauti. From a Jewish perspective, the transfer of Czernowitz to Romania was a step in the wrong direction. Austrian Czernowitz had had a Jewish mayor, and it had sent Jewish representatives to the Reichsrat in Vienna, whereas Romania’s grudging emancipation of its Jews prompted the creation of anti-Semitic political parties. This translated into discrimination in the schools of Cernauti.

  In 1926, for example, there was an incident that became famous: a group of Jewish boys verbally assaulted a Romanian schoolteacher, whose last name was Diaconescu, because he had denied entry to ninety-two of the ninety-four Jewish students who had applied for admission into the Aaron Pumnul school. There was a rowdy political movement that demanded strict quotas on the number of Jews who could study in the schools and universities at that time, and these political groups had significant influence on public opinion but also in the government. So it was that twenty-four of the teacher’s Jewish “attackers” were convicted by Romanian courts. A few weeks later, a fascist student murdered the Jewish students’ ringleader, and the (confessed) murderer was declared innocent in court and treated as a hero in the national press.48 Such events reflect the pronounced reversal of fortune for the Jews of Czernowitz.

  Noemí began her schooling in that place and time. The Gymnasium where she studied must have been private, because she learned very good German there, so she added that language to her advanced proficiency in Russian, French, and Yiddish. Noemí was also an avid reader, and Czernowitz offered much greater intellectual stimulation than Mogilev. On the other hand, the feeling of uncertainty must also have been acute: Noemí was, after all, one of tens of thousands of “temporary” Ukrainian refugees in Czernowitz; moreover, although they had fled the Russian Revolution, Ukrainian Jews were nonetheless suspected of being Soviet agents.

  According to the history of the city authored by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, there was also a Zionist school in Czernowitz that served as a platform for various youth organizations (Hazmonah, Zephira, and Hebronia). It is possible that Noemí studied there, because it was in Czernowitz that she joined Hashomer Hatzair, the organization that brought my grandparents together.

  Noemí Milstein (left) at sixteen, with her friend from Hashomer Hatzair, Bruria Steinmetz.*

  Also Lima

  Before his departure for Peru, Misha Adler had been part of the Hagannah (executive committee) of Hashomer Hatzair. The head of the organization in Romania was Yitzhak Nussenbaum, better known as Yitzhak Ben-Aharon. He would leave Romania for Palestine in 1928 and later become a founding member of the leftist party Mapam and long-standing member of the Israeli Knesset. Ben-Aharon had also gone to school in Czernowitz, and when the Milstein family decided to leave for Peru, he sent a letter by hand to Misha, using Noemí as the messenger and asking him to look after her. That was how the couple first met: in Lima, but introduced from a distance by Ben-Aharon, of Nova Sulitza and Chernowitz. Misha would be the only boyfriend that my grandmother would ever have.

  In Lima, Noemí enrolled in the Rodó girls’ school, where she either completed the high school diploma she had begun in Czernowitz or started from scratch in order to learn Spanish and earned the certification she needed to enter the university, I’m not really sure.

  Noemí Milstein’s exam certificate.

  Inscription document for the Faculty of Economics at the Universidad de San Marcos in Lima, 1930. Noemí would not be able to continue her studies at the university, as she was expelled from Peru that same year.

  Noemí was committed both to her studies and to political struggle. Like Misha, she too would form part of Mariátegui’s Red Corner, and she became a charismatic member of the Socialist Party, which they were putting together. Jorge del Campo speaks frequently of Noemí, starting with an admission that he was secretly in love with her:

  Soon after joining the group, I felt an intense spiritual love for Noemí, who, due to my scruples, surely only came to intuit with gratitude and sympathy what I felt for her without ever admitting it. I loved her as a woman and as a comrade, respecting her conjugal situation and her loyalty to her spouse, who was also one of our esteemed comrades. I think issues of this type occurred with other comrades. We have never spoken about it, and one could certainly find similar facts and others that reflect very clearly the great humanity and morality of the communists trained by Mariátegui.49

  Mariátegui also recognized Noemí’s talents. This was reflected above all in the fact that she formed part of his innermost circle, but in his correspondence, too, he spoke warmly of her as “very intelligent.”50 And she really was. In 1929, my grandmother would work as the managing editor of the journal Repertorio Hebreo, which she founded together with Misha, and as a translator for the journal Amauta, of which I’ll speak in the next chapter.

  * The back of the photo reads, “For the eternal memory of your beloved kvutzah sister, Bruria Steinmetz, with heartfelt greetings. Chazak Veemac [the Hashomer Hatzair salute, meaning ‘Be Strong and Brave’]. Signed in Czernowitz on August 12, 1927.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Amauta

  Blinding lights

  My grandparents knew many famous people in their day, but José Carlos Mariátegui was the person who touched them most deeply. One might think that explaining this influence is made easy by Mariátegui’s reputation. His short life was dazzlingly brilliant, like a bolt of lightning. When my grandfather published his first journal, Repertorio Hebreo, he referred to Mariátegui as “the largest brain and the clearest spirit on the continent,” an opinion that was by no means rare. “The greatest mind in Latin America has ceased forever to work.”51 This is how the journal Amauta announced Mariátegui’s death. In 1994, when Mariátegui’s sons published an invaluable edition of his complete works, they wrote that his book Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality had sold over two million copies, which is unparalleled in Latin America for any serious and conceptually rigorous work of economic, social, and cultural analysis.

  Born in the southern town of Moquegua, José Carlos was a descendant of Francisco Javier Mariátegui, a leader in the Peruvian independence movement and member of that nation’s first constituent assembly. His father abandoned him when José Carlos was very young and his family soon emigrated to Lima. José Carlos was in this regard a typical Latin American déclassé intellectual: born in a distantly grand provincial family, but raised without a father and with meager resources. To top it off, Mariátegui was afflicted with ankylosi
s at age seven, a condition that was not treatable in Peru at the time, and his leg was more or less useless thereafter. José Carlos was forced to abandon school at fourteen for financial reasons, and began working as an errand boy at the well-known Lima newspaper La Prensa. He was soon promoted to reading copy and working with the typesetters. José Carlos took advantage of that position to sneak his first article into publication. It was an urban chronicle, published under the pseudonym of Juan Croniqueur, that turned out to be so promising that in a few months, Alberto Ulloa, La Prensa’s much revered editor, offered “Juan Croniqueur” a regular slot.52

  During his years as Juan Croniqueur, Mariátegui covered Lima’s social and cultural life — horse races, films, urban scenes, personalities. He developed an innovative style and distinctive voice, which he perfected after dropping the Chroniqueur moniker, when he turned his attention squarely to political, social, and cultural analysis. It is fair to say that Mariátegui is one of Latin America’s most remarkable journalists of all time, comparable to — in my opinion, even superior to — figures such as the Cuban José Martí. He is also one of Spanish America’s greatest editors, and his journal Amauta, which I will discuss below, is certainly one of twentieth-century Latin America’s two or three most innovative and influential cultural and political journals. Finally, Mariátegui was a deeply original thinker, comparable in scope and depth to contemporaries such as Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, and Rosa Luxemburg.