Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  The man in the hat behind Ramos is Jorge del Prado.

  Lima offered Noemí possibilities for herself as a personality in her own right. True, she had already been in the Hashomer Hatzair while in Czernowitz, which was certainly a very different sort of organization on the gender front than, say, the Colegio de Señoritas Rodó in which her parents enrolled her in Lima. In the Hashomer, women and men mixed freely and debated, and they’d long broken with the sort of traditionalism that was still preponderant in the often Catholic girls’ schools in South America. Indeed, there were several Eastern European Jewish women with backgrounds like Noemí’s — including participation in Hashomer Hatzair and then socialist or communist organizations — who went on to have robust careers in politics and literature.

  Nonetheless, Noemí was only fifteen years old when she arrived in Lima, so it was not exclusively in her early involvement in the Hashomer in Czernowitz, but above all in Peruvian cultural and political life that she was first taken seriously as a woman. And this was in fact a great space for that to happen, since Mariátegui’s circle boasted an impressive group of female artists and activists — Carmen Saco, Blanca Luz Brum, Anna Chiappe de Mariátegui, the sisters Alicia and Blanca del Prado, and others. Mariátegui was a loyal friend to these women, and he held them in high esteem, published their work, took an interest in their careers, and supported them informally as well. Del Prado relates as an example how Mariátegui helped his sister Blanca and two young friends when they made the daring decision to move to Santiago de Chile on their own; José Carlos introduced them to his contacts so that they might find work and be introduced in local cultural and political circles. In a letter of introduction for Blanca, which Mariátegui sent to Sara Hubner in Chile, he characterized his young friend as a spiritual representative of Peruvian youth and of its women, and as an ambassador from Amauta to Santiago.74 José Carlos helped his friends so that they might act on their dreams.

  In his classic book Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Mariátegui devotes a chapter to literature, where he focuses particularly on the creative force of women, and there is no condescending or paternalistic attitude in that, either. He says, for instance, that “in Spanish American poetry, two women, Gabriela Mistral and Juana de Ibarbourou, have garnered for some time more attention than any other poet of the period. Delmira Agustini has, in her country and in all America, a long and noble line of descent. Blanca Luz Brum has brought her message to Peru.” And he quickly adds, “and these are not solitary or exceptional cases.”75

  A day in the countryside with Mariátegui.

  Seated to the left are Noemí, Misha, and Anna.

  The Repertorio Hebreo

  The journal Repertorio Hebreo began and ended in 1929. My grandfather, who at that point signed his name as “Miguel Ben Tzvi Adler,” was its director, and my grandmother, Noemí Milstein, served as managing editor. Repertorio Hebreo was published at Minerva, the press that printed Amauta, and which belonged to Mariátegui, although Misha was also a partner with some shares. They were able to publish three issues of the journal before Misha’s sudden arrest and jailing put an end to things.

  Cover of the first issue of Repertorio Hebreo.

  Repertorio Hebreo had many points in common with Amauta: both journals were devoted to the understanding and transformation of a people. In its inaugural issue, my grandfather wrote that Repertorio Hebreo “proposes, above all, to be an exponent of high Jewish culture. It will teach. It will investigate. It will make a fair revision to the supreme values that constitute the basis of our culture, it will be a free tribune, a true laboratory of ideological experimentation: debate, critique, legends, episodes, anecdotes.”76 Misha also pointed out that there did not exist at that time a journal devoted to contemporary Jewish ideas and art in Spanish, and he made it clear that the journal would “group together the most representative elements of the new Jewish spirit: writers and artists, Jews and non-Jews, who support and duly appreciate the Jewish contribution to universal culture.”77

  Just as Amauta sought both to consider Peru from a global vantage point and to examine the world from Peru, Repertorio Hebreo too sought to discuss and critique contemporary Jewish culture seen from any angle, provided that it avoided chauvinism, which was, according to Misha, “the most destructive element of civilization and of human well-being.”78 In the first issue, a small table presents the journal’s collaborators. There are Peruvians, who were mostly contributors to Amauta and almost entirely not Jewish; foreign contributors from the broader Jewish world; and Jewish cultural institutions in Berlin, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, and Moscow, with which the journal had a relation of exchange. Repertorio Hebreo sought to unite and not separate: “to sow love and comprehension in place of customary racial hatred and stupid vengeance.”79 And it would do it by teaching and evaluating new Jewish thought through critique.

  The first issue of the journal opened with Misha’s manifesto, followed by a penetrating article by Mariátegui titled “Israel y Occidente, Israel y el mundo” (Israel and the West, Israel and the World). Always going straight to the heart of things, Mariátegui begins by restating his position from 1925, namely that the modern mission of the Jewish people is “to assist, through its ecumenical and cosmopolitan activity, in the advent of a universal civilization.” He explains that the national claims of the Jewish people do not interest him; rather, his focus is the Jewish contribution to the formation of an international society in which the oppression of national minorities and racial prejudice would be proscribed, given that the Jewish people had suffered more than any other. He finishes: “If Jews can believe that they are destined for something, it must be to act as the yeast in the rise of a new international society.”80

  For Mariátegui, the British policy of reducing the Jewish people to a national state was possibly a form of unconscious persecution, given that it “offers the Jews a new ghetto,” although “since Marx, the last of its prophets, Israel has transcended capitalism, both spiritually and ideologically. Capitalist society declines due to its inability to organize production on an international scale.”81

  At the same time, these conclusions did not lead Mariátegui to turn his back on the nationalist claims of Jews. After all, his internationalism was rooted in oppressed peoples’ struggle for emancipation, and that included national emancipation as well. Nevertheless, “Jewish patriotism cannot resolve itself in nationalism…Israel cannot now deny Christianity nor renounce the West, in order to close itself off sullenly in its native soil and pre-Christian history.”82 Mariátegui recognized in Zionism the secret desire of European anti-Semites to rid themselves of the Jews and their internationalism, to reduce their number, and to rip them from the heart of the West, where they occupied and made up the vanguard. “Upon losing its land, Judaism earned the right to make Europe and America its home,” he wrote, and then concluded his notable essay sounding a Hegelian note: “Jewish ostracism has lasted for so long and has so expanded the Jewish people that they no longer can fit in their land of origin, and since Marx, their last great prophet, their homeland is the world.”83 The work of my grandparents’ journal was launched with these high expectations ringing out, and from distant Lima of all places.

  Networks

  Producing only three issues, Repertorio Hebreo never fully established itself as Amauta had done. Indeed, to understand the journal one must focus on what it had hoped to accomplish. This project would be both a memory and an unfulfilled aspiration that took root in my grandfather and accompanied him throughout his life.

  I have already mentioned the first success of the journal, namely, that Repertorio Hebreo developed out of a collaboration between Peruvian intellectuals and Jewish intellectuals dispersed throughout the world. This already makes the journal interesting. In its second and third issues, Repertorio Hebreo shared some of the letters of congratulations that it had received after the publication of its first issu
e; among these there are some from Peruvian personalities such as Ricardo Martínez de la Torre, Carlos Alberto Izaguirre, Dora Mayer de Zulen, and Humberto Traverso, but there are also letters from European and North American figures such as Sigmund Freud, Waldo Frank, Maurice Parijanine, and the Italian editor Agénore Magno, as well as from South American intellectuals such as Samuel Glusberg and Manuel Ugarte. In their private correspondence, my family also preserved a short note from the Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, which surely would have appeared in the journal’s fourth issue if it had ever come to see the light of day.

  Letter from Sigmund Freud to Misha Adler.*

  The creation of a network was thus an almost immediate result of this journal’s publication. After offering his congratulations, the Argentine socialist leader Manuel Ugarte brought to my grandfather’s attention that “the new spirit that begins to animate the life of each one of our republics rejects selfish prejudices and traditional hatreds; it promises to bring about the broadest reconciliation of all the inhabitants of our America under the sign of justice and solidarity.” Humberto Traverso, for his part, contributes a poem, in which he proposes a parallel and dialogue between the Jews and the indigenous communities of the Americas. The poem is called, “Indian Soul,” and it begins as follows: “Portrait of a martyr / image of genius / the Jew who wanders. / The Jew who suffers, / look at the Indian, / your traveling companion.”

  In a different vein, the Argentine writer and editor Samuel Glusberg shared with Misha his experience as a Jewish editor in Buenos Aires. Glusberg began by confiding that he had received positive reports about Misha and Noemí from their common friend, José Carlos Mariátegui. Given this connection, Glusberg offered the younger Misha some advice, though not before having praised the new publication effusively: “I have no plans ever to restart the publication of Cuadernos de Oriente y Occidente. Your Repertorio makes it pointless.” He went on, however, to share some less auspicious information: “I frankly believe the Jews of Buenos Aires are not yet prepared to sustain an undertaking of this sort and much less an Argentinian Institute of Jewish Culture, in the style of the French, Italian, English, German, and North American cultural institutes that now exist in the city.”84 He later explained how his own Jewish journal, Cuadernos de Oriente y Occidente, had been very well received in Argentine and South American literary circles, but had been “berated in the Jewish newspapers and journals.”

  Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find the reviews that Glusberg was referring to, but his editorial idea for Cuadernos de Oriente y Occidente had much in common with those of my grandfather. Both published literary works from Spanish American writers, next to works by European and US Jews, for instance. I’m not sure whether Buenos Aires’s Jewish journals objected to the high level of integration between Jewish and non-Jewish writers (i.e., that they sought a journal that was less open to South America’s literary currents), or that they disliked its communist leanings. I think that there was something unsettling about the mode of integration between Judaism and South America that might have irritated a few Jewish critics.

  This is all speculation, of course, but Glusberg later made an intriguing personal decision that I believe provides a clue in this regard. He changed his name to Enrique Espinoza. Superficially, the change appears as a denial of his Jewish roots, and a conversion to America. The identifiably Jewish Samuel Glusberg becomes the inconspicuous (presumably Catholic) South American Enrique Espinoza. Maybe there is an element of conversion in the case; however, Glusberg renamed himself after his two favorite authors, Heinrich (“Enrique”) Heine and Baruch Spinoza (Espinoza), both of them Jews. I believe that both my grandfather and Glusberg were involved in a transformative dialogue between Jewish and Spanish American culture. The most explicit statement that I found of this is from a 1965 notebook of Misha’s, where he jotted down the following phrase: “Americanism and Judaica, Zionism and Americanism have ended up harmonizing and fusing into one another in my intimate thoughts and feelings, to such a degree that they have been reduced to one and the same thing.”85 My intuition is that Glusberg, who by the way was also from Bessarabia, was undergoing a parallel process, and that there were segments of the Jewish community that saw it as an (undesirable) symptom of assimilation.

  However that may be, Glusberg decided to shut down his journal with an unpublished issue of the journal all prepared, which contained poems by prominent Argentine writers including Horacio Quiroga, Lugones, and Fernández Moreno, as well as an essay by Martínez Estrada. He sent Misha the materials for them to appear in Repertorio Hebreo instead. Sadly, these valuable materials were lost in the shuffle of the years, and have never been recovered.

  It is interesting to speculate on whether the fact that Buenos Aires’s Jewish community was so much larger than Lima’s might have ended up being a disadvantage for Glusberg’s magazine and an advantage for Repertorio Hebreo. We will never know whether Lima might not have been more hospitable grounds for this kind of publication. What is clear is that both Repertorio Hebreo and Cuadernos de Oriente y Occidente managed to forge a network that connected the continent’s intelligentsia to Jewish intellectuals and journals in Europe and the United States.

  In that context, the brief exchange between Misha and Freud is also meaningful, I think. Unlike the correspondence that Misha maintained with Spanish American authors, which was more or less natural, or even with Waldo Frank, a New York intellectual who was deeply connected to the Latin American left, writing to Freud was a brazen act of chutzpah. True, Misha had translated a text by Freud for Amauta, but in 1929 the Viennese doctor was already at the height of his fame, and he had translators all over the world. Freud had revolutionized the field of psychology in a way that paralleled Einstein’s revolution in physics or Darwin’s in biology, and yet Misha presumed to ask him to contribute writings to a very modest Jewish journal that was being published out of Lima.

  Beyond the chutzpah factor, though (and I do think that Misha had it), my grandfather’s Viennese foray was in a deep way not at all impertinent. Even from eleven thousand miles away — and Peru was pretty much the end of the world then, like Australia or New Zealand — Misha recognized that he and Freud had the world in common. In fact, it was precisely this feature of recognition that Mariátegui most admired about the Jewish people: their radically global contemporaneity, which transcended national enclosures with their self-serving and pompous traditions. It is interesting that Freud too seems to have understood this connection, answering with a brief note of recognition and a signed photograph, which my family has unfortunately lost. In 1929, Austrian Jews were facing Nazism not just across their northern border, in Germany, but also within their own country. A cultural journal devoted to Jewish topics coming out of Lima, where at the time there were no more than a thousand Jews, was a fact that deserved some recognition, even if only through a brief note.

  Misha

  What were Misha and Noemí hoping to accomplish with Repertorio Hebreo? It has taken me some time to get an adequate understanding of this editorial adventure, which was as short-lived in reality as it was lasting as an ideal.

  There was, in the first place, a need for collective self-recognition. There was undoubtedly a revolution then taking place in the Jewish world, but there was also in place a rich, centuries-old tradition. For my grandfather, it was necessary to explore both, come to know them, and discuss them. For this reason, Repertorio Hebreo was eclectic in spirit and scope. In all of this Misha was a faithful mariateguista.

  The journal’s first issue begins with pronouncements by Einstein, Freud, and Tagore celebrating the foundation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There are also texts by poets such as Gabriela Mistral and José María Eguren, contemplating Jewish culture from an American vantage point, and an essay on modern Jewish musicians that begins by reminding readers that Jews are not only good interpreters of other people’s music but also original composers (i
t then mentions as examples Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Gustav Mahler, and Ernest Bloch). There are presentations of painters who were still unknown in Lima, such as Georg Ehrlich, and critiques of racism by Jewish artists. There are discussions of the cultural transformation taking place in the United States thanks to Jewish immigrants, and of the new Jewish theater in the Soviet Union. Finally, there are reviews of new literature in Yiddish…All of that.

  Together with this, there was marked interest in pursuing the dialogue with the group from Amauta, only now in a space focused on Jewish, rather than Peruvian, culture. There was at least one article or commentary by Mariátegui in each issue, of course, but Repertorio Hebreo also published poems and drawings by Eguren, poems by Angela Ramos and Blanca Luz Brum, and essays by Waldo Frank, Maria Wiesse, and Dora Mayer de Zulen. Repertorio Hebreo thus presented an opportunity to which South American intellectuals perhaps did not usually have that much access, namely, to comment on subjects related to the Jewish phenomenon in a space that proclaimed itself Jewish and looked to explore Jewish culture in a reflexive manner.

  Jewish theater in the Soviet Union.

  With the exception of some of the texts by Mariátegui, the majority of these contributions on Jewish culture were often not so very robust; still, the exercise must have had some meaning, if only with respect to the collective effort to live, reflect upon, and take charge of the world’s radical contemporaneity. For in the end, many of the intellectuals who had first understood the phenomenon of global contemporaneity were Jews. To give an example, one essay published in Repertorio Hebreo discussed Ludwik Zamenhof, the Judeo-Polish philologist who invented Esperanto. It affirms that “our century marches toward internationalization: the material means of communication are extraordinarily developed; there is no reason to prolong Babel.”86