Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  The results of his lectures at the Universidad Popular were compiled in Mariátegui’s first book, La escena contemporánea. Published in 1925, it is a densely packed and carefully curated tour of the contemporary world, with concise and sharply analytical essays on its key figures, political processes, and national contexts. Gandhi, Ataturk, Einstein, Tagore, Mussolini, Lloyd George, fascism, the Mexican Revolution, the Third International, Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Zinoviev, Rosa Luxemburg, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the situation in Poland, Hungary, Romania, China, Turkey, India…La escena contemporánea is a remarkable feat both of concretion and synthesis that combines useful information, insight, and political critique in a way that instantiated and performed precisely what the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos lacked: teaching.

  Mariátegui’s diagnostic exploration of the economic, political, and cultural condition of the world in the aftermath of the Great War was his only foray into university education. It was followed by the launching of a new op-ed column, titled “Peruanizar el Perú” (Peruvianizing Peru), that was dedicated to thinking about Peru as a province of the world. The work developed in that series laid the foundations for Mariátegui’s second and final book, the famous Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, which was published in 1929, a year before his death, but the op-ed column also generated parameters for what was to be perhaps Mariátegui’s greatest creation: the cultural, literary, and political journal Amauta.

  Launched in 1926, the journal was originally going to take the name Vanguardia, but it finally adopted a different one, Amauta, which means “teacher” in Quechua.63 Teaching was thus proposed as a collective endeavor, best realized in a journal rather than through any one individual’s efforts. The impulse to rescue and mobilize the past for the present informed this decision, as did Mariátegui’s insistence on the role of reading for an enlightened, universalist understanding of the world and of one’s position in it. More than this, Mariátegui’s view of his own action and creation perhaps retained a dash of the early influence that Gabriele D’Annunzio had on his generation: work was either transformative or it was dead.

  Mariátegui was a Peruvian, and Peru’s people needed to understand how to build a future for themselves in the world. This involved collective exercises of reflection and discussion. People came to recognize and acknowledge all of this, I think, and so they began to refer to Mariátegui himself as “El Amauta”: the teacher.

  Revista Amauta

  Amauta understood itself to be a space of convergence within the cultural field. Despite its political commitment, there was no sectarianism in it, and many of its collaborators weren’t Marxists, even though everyone “contributed to a significant degree to the purpose of the journal, which was to modify substantially the cultural environment in a progressive and transformative sense.”64 What this meant was that the journal respected the trajectory of its collaborators and created a space in which a modernista poet such as José María Eguren, a communist activist such as Ricardo Martínez de la Torre, a translated article on the painting of George Grosz, an essay by Georges Sorel on Lenin, and a reflection on the meaning of dancing the Charleston could all be read together. Mariátegui’s editorial zeal thus echoed his embrace of friendship as a political stance. In such a space, the knowledge that Misha and Noemí brought with them was very welcome, and they both contributed to Amauta as translators.

  Beyond all of this, there was a vivid conviction regarding the importance of the world’s margins for the development of alternative ideas at that moment of universal revolution. Mariátegui also understood this marginality firsthand. The knowledge that Mariátegui had of privation allowed him to envision the culture of the people as a creative force from which Peru might emerge as a vibrant national society, and then contribute something original to the international revolution that was raging since the triumph of the Bolsheviks in Russia. He saw Peru’s redemption figured in the religious life of Peru’s indigenous communities, and he understood that the best thinking emanated from need. “Europe,” he once wrote, “revealed to me the extent to which I belonged to a primitive and chaotic world; and at the same time it made clear to me my responsibility to an American project.”65

  Russia had opened the window to world revolution, but its manifestation in Peru required a deliberate effort of self-recognition and self-expression. Peru had spent centuries turning its back on its native communities. Even Lima’s love affair with its colonial traditions ignored the true, raunchy, and mixed-race city in favor of a fanciful obsession with the cultural lineage of the conquistador.66 For Mariátegui, as for Lenin, universalism required the emancipation of oppressed nations, and this meant that his socialism was expressed in a double movement: it looked “inward” to consider the indigenous world and the political movement in Lima as spaces of innovative cultural creation, and “outward,” to the world, in an effort that required commitment to translation and calling attention to the texts, authors, and discussions that were most relevant for Peru’s radical transformation. As the historian Martin Bergel has pointed out, Mariátegui’s project attached to Goethe’s old idea of living in the era of “world literature” — that is, it derived from the recognition of a radical contemporaneity between what was happening in Peru and in the rest of the world.67 Peru, Mariátegui insisted, was just one of the world’s provinces, and not a unique and incommensurable world unto itself. Thus, Mariátegui writes in the introduction to the first volume of Amauta: “The object of this journal is to address, clarify, and come to know the problems of Peru from a learned and scientific point of view. But we will always consider Peru within the broader panorama of the world…All that is human is ours.”68

  And for Mariátegui, there were no more cosmopolitan social subjects than the Jews. In the first volume of Amauta, there appears a translated essay by Sigmund Freud on resistance to psychoanalysis (translated by my grandfather), in which Freud asks whether it is a coincidence that the inventor of psychoanalysis is Jewish. He concludes: “to make psychoanalysis viable, it was necessary to be fully prepared to accept the isolation to which the opposition condemns one, a fate that is familiar to Jews more than anyone else.”69 This point of view coincides with that of Mariátegui. In an article published in my grandparents’ journal, Repertorio Hebreo, he writes: “the Jewish world I love does not speak Hebrew or Yiddish exclusively; it is polyglot, mobile, transnational. Given its need to identify with all races, it possesses the feelings, the languages, and the arts of all of them.” And later he adds: “internationalism is not, as many obtuse figures on the right and left imagine it to be, the negation of nationalism; rather, it is its transcendence.”70

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jewish Americanism

  Noemí and Misha identified with Mariátegui, in part because they had lived through obverse processes. Europe had revealed Peru’s ideological disjointedness (“I belonged to a primitive and chaotic world” is how Mariátegui described this epiphany), but it had also sharpened his commitment to America. My grandparents, for their part, understood the aporia of the Jewish experience much more fully in Peru, a country where, as my grandfather told me, “they didn’t even know what a Jew was.” Noemí and Misha had moved from a world in which Jews were segregated and marked as a race, to one in which they were ambiguously identified as Europeans. And yet the Indian world that they could therefore sit atop was so deeply segregated and pauperized, but also so very much alive, that the disjuncture was conducive to thinking universally, rather than to exploiting their new superior position to improve their own lot. The American lens would help them visualize emancipation from a genuinely universal perspective.

  Tradition and transformation

  And, indeed, there were areas of confluence between the Jewish conscience and that of Amerindian national emancipation (conceived by socialists of the period as being identical to Peruvian national emancipation). Both the Indians and the Jews were coming out of an era in which they had tried to d
evelop self-contained communities — the Hasidic movement of Eastern Europe was the main symptom of this enclosure — but both groups were also compelled to negotiate with, fight against, or break into the dominant society. For European Jews, there were two main paths to facing discrimination. The first was to try to pass as non-Jewish, a strategy that was not necessarily a first step toward assimilation, given that blending could be a sporadic tactic, mobilized to deal with social impediments of different kinds, without it constituting an attempt to abjure one’s identity.

  The strategy of dissembling was occasionally viable in Peru’s Indo-mestizo world, too. Migration to Lima, in particular, could in some contexts mitigate the hardships that came with being identified as Indian, and in Lima an indigenous person might manage in some instances to blend in with other members of its new but growing working class.71 On the other hand, the possibilities of dissimulation for the indigenous in Peru were limited in ways that recalled those faced by Misha and Noemí in Romania, where violence and even legally sanctioned discrimination was never far from the surface.

  The second Jewish coping strategy was political militancy, in either communist or nationalist movements or both. Militancy involved either the affirmation or the transcendence of one’s identity in the face of discrimination. It could take the form of Jewish labor militancy in organizations such as the Bund, which supported the consolidation and widespread use of Yiddish in its communications while rejecting Zionism, or Poale Zion, a Marxist-Zionist labor movement. And it could take the form of either a liberal or a communist militancy, committed to achieving equality, defined either in terms of equal political rights or as economic equality. There was thus a lot of Jewish energy invested in politics in this period — supporting the Russian Revolution or Zionism or equal rights in various liberal parties. Whether assimilationist or committed to achieving Jewish national sovereignty, though, Jewish militancy involved breaking out of the ghetto or the shtetl and into the broader world of national or universal claims.

  Misha and Noemí found an active space for thinking about such matters in the pages of Amauta, which was devoted to creating a new idea of Peru, and therefore alive with debates on literature and painting, and a persistent search for aesthetic languages that distanced themselves from dominant canons of beauty. Also, the enormity and depth of the indigenous Andean universe was very exciting: Noemí and Misha came from a world in which the traditional culture of the shtetl was in decline or even dissolving, within the Soviet Union, for instance, where collective farms and new modes of work and life were quickly developing. It must have been moving for a proud Jew like my grandfather, who had worked to revive Hebrew as a modern language, to find himself facing an alternative world — very deeply oppressed, without a doubt, but also vital in its native communal forms. How to break the chains of oppressed nations? How to channel the force of tradition into a genuinely modern and revolutionary project? Those were the great questions of the time.

  Woodcut by painter José Sabogal, one of many published in Amauta in its search for Peruvian artistic idioms.

  In Peru, the majority of the population still did not speak Spanish, but rather the language of the Incas. It was a traditional world. Mariátegui distinguished a revolutionary seed in those traditions: “it is not civilization, nor is it the alphabet of whites that raises the soul of the Indian. It is myth, the idea of the socialist revolution.”72 Myth, an element of living, breathing, tradition, could fuse into an entirely modern idea: socialist revolution. Such a dialectic resonated with Eastern European Jews, for whom it had been natural to pass from the messianism of “backward” religious traditions such as Hasidism, to a zeal for redemption in social revolution.

  Another important point of confluence between the Indo-American world and Jewish cultural formations is that both of them predated Christianity, and they had managed to survive its forceful imposition without completely assimilating. This eccentricity could readily morph into irony, that is, into a distance that facilitated a notable cultural flourish in the case of the Jews, but that had yet to erupt into cultural modernism for the Indians. Eccentricity was perhaps more radical for the Indians than for the Jews, since the marginalization of Jews in the Middle Ages had denied them land and turned them into city folk, and therefore into the yeast of the bourgeois revolutions. The Jews were, after all, part of the vanguard of modernity, either as tradesmen, financiers, artisans, or workers, whereas Peru’s Indians were for the most part peasants. Still, there was a point of empathy that Misha felt with the rising Indo-Peruvian nationalism, stemming from disidentification with the dominant Christian and Eurocentric nationalist chauvinisms.

  Beyond the question of a shared penchant for irony, the fact of their anteriority and independence prior to having been brutally (but always only partially) subjugated made it so that Amerindians and their Jewish counterparts could each draw on a cultural repertoire that reached back before Christianity, from which they could imagine a different world. For them, revolution meant recovering a voice that had been lost to the “civilized” world. It was for this reason that the rescue of Hebrew, the rescue of the sacred places of Jewish antiquity, the aesthetic discovery of the indigenous world, the exultation of its languages, and the recovery of its ruins were taken in like fresh air from a new world. It was the breath of a revolution.

  Friendship

  My grandparents collaborated on Amauta as translators but never as authors. There isn’t a single original contribution signed by Misha or Noemí in the thirty-two volumes of the journal that were published between September 1926 and its closure shortly after Mariátegui’s death in 1930. Why not? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe Mariátegui considered Misha and Noemí to be too young and inexperienced. The pages of the journal were usually opened to people who had already made their mark in the cultural world. Misha and Noemí had arrived in Peru too recently to have acquired such accomplishments, and it is possible that Mariátegui hoped for them to take an active authorial role in the future.

  It is also conceivable that Misha lacked the boldness that is needed to be writer; that is, maybe he had more of an editorial eye than a writer’s spirit. This could indeed have been the case, because even though Misha did eventually publish articles, he did not end up being a prolific author, though he did constantly invent and try to launch new journals. Noemí, for her part, was unquestionably too young. She was only fifteen years old when Amauta began its five-year run, and seventeen when she was first introduced to its editor. Besides the question of age, though, it doesn’t seem impossible to me that my grandfather might have wished to monopolize the talents of his young and beautiful girlfriend, having Noemí collaborate as managing editor for Repertorio Hebreo and giving her little time for other creative work, apart from her political activities in Mariátegui’s political party. Once again, I can’t be sure. It is certain, in any case, that Noemí was considered to be a kind of muse and a rising star in Mariátegui’s circle, and that this potential of hers would never be as fully recognized later in her life, after she was exiled from Peru.

  Announcement of the imminent appearance of Repertorio Hebreo, directed by Misha Ben Tzvi Adler.

  Even without their having made formal contributions to the journal (apart from translations), one can ascertain the close friendship that Misha and Noemí had with the members of the editorial group easily enough, and with Mariátegui and his family in particular. For example, when the journal Repertorio Hebreo was first released, Mariátegui announced it on the first page of issue 21 of Amauta, rather than relegating the notice to the back of the volume, as was customary for such announcements. Repertorio Hebreo had a special place for Mariátegui, which he also signaled by contributing an original piece to each published issue of that journal.

  My grandmother, for her part, appears only once in Amauta, in an issue honoring José María Eguren that included some of the poet’s drawings, along with a gallery of photos that he had tak
en of his friends. Noemí is included there, in a company that bespeaks the esteem that she had garnered in the intellectual circles of the time, for they include four famous poets (Juana de Ibarbourou, Blanca Luz Brum, Martín Adán, and the Surrealist poet and painter César Moro), Argentine diva Berta Singerman, and the distinguished Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre.

  Noemí was one of the muses of Mariátegui’s circle, and she was also one of the first women who were active in Peru’s socialist cause. Prado recalls this generation’s particular modus operandi:

  With respect to the role of women in revolutionary and progressive intellectualism, our influence — which was also that of Mariátegui — was channeled through the activity and growing prestige of figures as notable as Carmen Saco and Angela Ramos. However, in reality, these comrades, along with those who participated during the early years — such as Noemí Milstein and my sisters Alicia and Blanca — as well as those who later joined, did not initiate their revolutionary path by means of feminism, such as normally occurs, but rather through their own experience in the fight against social injustice, which became transformed later into proletariat class consciousness in light of a Marxist-Leninist analysis of our reality, carried out by Mariátegui.73

  What remains of a photo taken during one of the trips to the country, with Mariátegui in the car. The woman next to my grandmother is poet Carmen Ramos.