Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  The sculptor Jacob Epstein next to his bust of Paul Robeson.

  Noemí, then eighteen years old, was in charge of the books and notices section that capped each issue. Her job was to select articles from the Yiddish, German, Russian, or French press (and sometimes the North American press), and translate interesting reviews. She did good work, and I think that had she continued, she eventually would have acquired her own voice and authority, either as a writer or as an editor. This unfortunately did not happen.

  The third aspect of Misha’s editorial work had to do with his support for Zionism. This is a complex subject for the period during which the journal was published — before the Holocaust but already at a time when powerful anti-Semitic currents were gaining ground in much of Europe, and also with all the promise of universal emancipation brought on by the Russian Revolution. Misha’s ideological work concentrated on supporting the Soviet policy with respect to its constituent nationalities (such as the Jews) and arguing for the creation of a Jewish republic in Palestine, founded on the Soviet model.

  The first issue of the journal is ambiguous with respect to the theme of Jewish nationalism. While it prints Einstein’s, Freud’s, and Tagore’s praise for the creation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, there is also the aforementioned article by Mariátegui, in which he makes it clear that while he is not against the foundation of a Jewish state, the people of Israel should not be reduced to a national state, neither in Palestine nor anywhere else.

  Mariátegui had already laid out the general parameters of his position on this subject in his 1925 book La escena contemporánea. To him, Zionism was only one of a number of currents of the exciting Jewish resurgence that followed the Great War, and, though justifiable, it was not its highest form, because it represented a nationalist reaction that was symmetrical to the rise of nationalism in Europe, while the Jewish experience in Europe had already transcended those nationalisms in practice. Moreover, Mariátegui believed that Zionism was to a large degree a British project, and that it had an anti-Semitic undertow, in that its aim was to remove the Jews from Europe, where they were a formidable force for transformation. On the other hand, he conceded that, especially in the cases of Romania and Poland, anti-Semitism had become so fierce that the Jews were now unassimilable there, and so a Jewish homeland was needed as an alternative. He also believed that the Jews were a modernizing force in Palestine, and that this was in itself very positive. But he also felt that Jews, who at the time constituted only 10 percent of the population in Palestine, were destined to remain a minority there, because outside of Poland and Romania, the vast majority of the Jewish population preferred to live in Europe or in the Americas.

  And there was another thing. For Mariátegui the Jewish renaissance “is not the rebirth of a nationality. It is also not the renaissance of a religion. It is, rather, the rebirth of the Jewish genius, spirit, and sentiment.”87 The reconstruction of a Jewish homeland was but an episode of this flourishing. Humanity owed the Jewish renaissance a debt of gratitude, not for its nationalism, which was perhaps not that different from other nationalisms, but rather for the spiritual and intellectual work of its humanists, scientists, and artists, and the work of its great revolutionaries and social reformers.

  The systematic discrimination of Jews had made it possible for them to transcend the national formula and make themselves into the vanguard of internationalism. This didn’t mean that the subject of nationalism should not be explored — on the contrary, Mariátegui felt that universal emancipation passed through the liberation of all oppressed peoples, including Jews. He simply believed that Zionism was not the greatest Jewish value, and that it should not be the cultural mission of a periodical such as Repertorio Hebreo.

  The second issue of that journal opens with an article by Misha on the situation of the Jews in Russia. It criticizes those who had made much of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union with no recognition of the enormous progress that had been achieved with respect to the Jewish question since the fall of the czars. Misha carefully enumerates the relevant changes: official support for publications in Yiddish; the creation of political autonomy for Jews; the translation into Yiddish of children’s books and scientific publications; official financing for a Yiddish encyclopedia; the formation of professorships in Yiddish at some universities; and support for two Jewish theaters (Habima and Granovsky). All of this had taken place since 1917, alongside the distribution of agricultural land to Jews, a move that had been anathema for centuries.

  None of this fully eradicated anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and Misha declares himself cognizant of this fact. Nevertheless, he reminds his readers that in the time of the czars, Russia had been the country with the greatest level of anti-Semitism and the worst conditions for Jewish people in the entire world, while now, in the Soviet Union, the situation for Jews was better than in most of Europe. As he puts it: “It is now time to recognize that the October Revolution has performed a true miracle with respect to the Jewish problem.”88

  The third issue of Repertorio Hebreo was published shortly after a massacre of Jewish colonists in Palestine, an episode referred to in Hebrew as Meora’ot Tarpat and in Arabic as the Buraq uprising. During the violence, Palestinians killed more than 130 Jews, and British authorities killed roughly the same number of Palestinians in their attempt to put down the rebellion. The murder of Jewish colonists and the destruction of their property reminded Misha of the pogroms he had witnessed in Russia and Romania, so he published a written protest. In this, he was supported by the principal actors of the Amauta group, with Mariátegui front and center. The protest also prompted Misha to solidify his position with respect to the foundation of a Jewish state in Palestine:

  The creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine — a single country in which all Jewish expatriates, dispersed throughout the world, have inalienable rights “in a territory historically their own” and under the auspices of a socialist regime — founded on the principles in force, and with great success, with respect to Jewish colonization in the union of the new Soviet republics, would indisputably be an event of great historical transcendence…Zionism and communism are not mutually exclusive. And as the learned Einstein has said: “A Jew who strives to impregnate his spirit with humanitarian ideals can call himself a Zionist without contradiction.”89

  I’d like to comment on two or three of the points made here. First, the claim for a Jewish land in Palestine takes place through two channels. The first is historical, as Palestine was originally Jewish land, and the second is pragmatic, in that it is the only territory in the world to which expatriated Jews have any sort of claim. That is, what is dominant here is not a religious argument but rather a legal one — that Jews had a historical claim to that territory — and a more pragmatic and urgent one — that Jews were being expelled from Europe, where they being denied even the most basic rights. The best solution, from Misha’s point of view, would be to imitate the Soviet Union, but now for the persecuted Jewish population that was outside of the USSR: the creation of a Jewish soviet in Palestine.

  Misha insists that Zionism and communism are not mutually exclusive, and he supports the establishment of a communist Jewish homeland. His solution bears some resemblance to Mariátegui’s ideas on political reform in Peru, spelled out in his extraordinary Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. Mariátegui had only just published that book, and it was being enthusiastically promoted in the pages of Repertorio Hebreo. In short, the communist revolution would necessarily imply the emancipation of oppressed nations, and the Jewish people had been expelled and excluded, persecuted and discriminated against across all of Eastern Europe. They had nowhere to go, nor could they develop their national identity without some territory to call their own. That was his reasoning.

  Misha’s arguments nonetheless reveal a degree of tension with Mariátegui’s ideas. For the latter, the Jewish people had more fully earne
d the right to be European and American than any other, and their transnational culture was much closer to that of New York, London, Berlin, or Lima than that of the rural Palestinians or the semi-nomadic Bedouins. For Mariátegui, it would likewise be an error to reduce Jewish culture to the internal traditions of Judaism (the use of Hebrew and Yiddish, the religion of Abraham, the Talmud, etc.). As he saw it, the Jews had achieved a genuinely universal value, and their mission was now humanity itself, with Marx as their prophet, and not nationalism.

  Misha agreed with this, but he likely saw the formation of a Jewish state as a pressing practical matter. This sense of urgency undoubtedly came from his experience in Romania, a country that had by then become one of the worst for Jews in all of Europe — a competition that was not so easy to “win.” Misha knew that the conditions for Jews were deplorable in the region that stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic Sea in the south. He had seen these conditions firsthand. This prompted him to promote a Jewish state, but he did so without abandoning the internationalist messianism he and Mariátegui both associated with Marx.

  * The letter reads: “My dear Sir: As a Jew, I wish your cultural enterprise the greatest success among our coreligionists in Latin America. Due to my age (73 years) and the interruption of my production, you should not count on my direct participation. I shall send a photograph through my editor. Yours truly, Freud.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Expulsion

  Prison

  I read a number of entertaining period pieces while conducting research on the Lima of my grandparents, but one that really stands out is the pamphlet “I: Tyrant and Thief” (Yo tirano, yo ladrón), written by the at-that-point recently ousted president Augusto Leguía from his jail cell. It is a minor classic in the very Latin American genre of political self-tribute. Inevitably, it opens with a flourish: “He who speaks to you through this poorly conceived book (filled, nonetheless, with sincere truths), is a prisoner on the brink of settling his accounts before God’s Divine Tribunal, a figure insulted and vilified by public opinion, the same public that so recently expressed to him its unmeasured adulation.”90 The tone intimates both the pathetic and the picaresque sides of Peruvian politics, which have been a recurrent subject for imperialist lampooning of Latin America and its “banana republics.”

  Augusto Leguía’s pompous apology and self-defense before his Maker seem almost to justify the taunting that Time magazine was fond of, in its oh-so-superior style of commentary on Peruvian political chicanery. Today, we’re no longer used to reading mainstream journalists write quite so derisively (or so frankly) about their subjects, but even bearing that in mind, the degree to which the magazine reveled in the insignificance of Peruvian politics is striking.

  The first note was published in 1925, and its lead sentence delighted in Leguía’s light weight no fewer than three times: “Last week came tidings of that benevolent dictator, that bantam Mussolini, the diminutive yet lion-hearted President Augusto B. Leguía y Salcedo of Peru, who ‘tips the scales at 98 pounds of dynamite and determination.’ ”91 Time’s second note, published five years later, just a few months before Leguía’s fall, again leads with the diminutive: “Once employed by New York Life Insurance Co., courageous little Señor Augusto B. Leguía (‘The Bantam Roosevelt of Peru’) is now in his fourth term as president.”92

  Unfamiliar as I was with the term “bantam” (Time characterized Leguía first as a bantam Mussolini and later as a bantam Teddy Roosevelt), I looked it up, and found that it means “a chicken of a small breed, the male of which is noted for its aggression.” I don’t entirely disagree with Time’s disdainful characterization, but still, it means something that Time was so confidently derisive with regard to South America that it felt that it did not require much more than a few maliciously crafted paragraphs to cover Peruvian politics over Leguía’s entire eleven-year reign.

  Peru, in American eyes, was quaint and exotic, fascinating and ridiculous. The country could not be taken seriously, at least not in its own terms. What it needed was a new generation of benign but firm captains of industry and politics (US, or at least US-trained), who might recognize Peru’s true potential in a way that the descendants of conquistador Francisco Pizarro could not.

  After the Inca empire fell to the Spaniards in 1532, Lima became the capital of a viceroyalty that encompassed the whole of Spanish South America, and Limeño society became the nervous center of a sprawling quasi-feudal system, with the Indians playing the part of the serfs. Its Counter-Reformation political order was militantly conservative, and its social life pivoted on religiously inflected rituals and on the daily performance of fine-grained status distinctions. In other words, Peru was a society of manners, where deference and the exercise of authority were practically an art form. For early twentieth-century US observers, Peruvian obsession with form, status, and family needed to be replaced with pragmatism, entrepreneurial acumen, and rational discovery.

  Still, American coolheaded rationality was not so easily attained in the face of an “unknown continent” that still shimmered with legends of gold. Indeed, gold was firmly tied to the national imaginary in the lands of the Incas; even today, both Lima and Bogotá proudly house major archaeological collections in museums called Museo del Oro — Gold Museum. The image of precious discoveries overwhelms everything: pre-Columbian cultures have their golden aura, but they are also reduced to gold, because Peruvian gold and silver transformed everything. It created and destroyed everything.

  When Spanish conquistador (and Jewish converso) Pedro Cieza de León published the first volume of his famous chronicles of the conquest of Peru in 1553, he introduced his work with a remark on the astounding size of Peruvian treasure: “[W]here have men seen what they see today, fleets entering loaded with gold and silver as if it were iron? Or where was it known or read that so much wealth could come from one kingdom?”93 And the conquistador immediately goes on to say that Peruvian gold transformed the status hierarchy in Spain’s cities, which were now all full of rich peruleros (Spaniards who had returned from Peru) whose conspicuous expenditures had so inflated local prices that it was no longer clear how normal people would get by. Peruvian treasure had impoverished Spain’s poor, but it had also made princes out of swineherds. And neither was the impact of Inca gold and silver confined to Spain alone; rather it held sway in all of Europe and, Cieza continued, it had proved providential for the True Faith, since Emperor Charles V was able to wage war against the Lutherans in Germany thanks only to Peruvian treasure.

  Although twentieth-century Americans fancied themselves as the enlightened discoverers of a kingdom that had been lost to reason by the closed-minded heirs of the Spanish conquest, they were still no less seduced by tales of Peruvian gold. American author and famed explorer Richard Halliburton offers a colorful example of this. In his 1929 book on his South American travels, he introduced Peru with precisely such an image of a golden discovery. After dwelling first on the well-known story of the Inca Atahualpa’s ransom and of Inca sunworshippers holding their rituals in a court of shimmering gold — and then on the sterile futility of Pizarro’s cruel looting — Halliburton turns to his first adventure in the Peruvian jungle.

  He had wandered away from the trail, and suddenly found himself alone in a golden glade. “I rubbed my eyes. Perhaps I was bewitched…I was as rich as Atahualpa…Into the sea of gold I plunged…Magic! But the treasure, each countless coin, suddenly came to life, leaped from the earth in a blinding cloud, blotted out the scene, hid the sun, rose and fell and buried me in flame. And then I knew. I had not found the Inca gold at all. I had found the butterflies.”94

  Americans were eager to discover South America’s true wonders, and these were, at times, every bit as awe-inspiring as legend. But they existed in a different plane, for inherited images had to give way to lived experience, as gold had given way to butterflies in Halliburton’s story. For the new American con
quistador, Peruvian vanity and self-infatuation stood in the way of the spirit of exploration, but this made Peruvians naturally submissive in the face of any power that was capable of transforming raw material into value, through investment, industry, and commerce. Thus they had kowtowed to the British after independence was gained from Spain, and the British had dominated Peruvian finance through the whole of the nineteenth century and until the First World War. This allowed them to profit from new mining discoveries. They had made millions from guano fertilizer mining in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, and had again reaped the profits of the saltpeter nitrate boom, until the richest mines were annexed by Chile, in its 1879–84 war with Peru and Bolivia. The British also financed the first railway concerns.

  Now, with the decline of Britain’s influence in the Western Hemisphere, it was the Americans who held sway over Peru’s finances and export economy. In US narratives on early twentieth-century Peru, the Americans’ unimpeachable rationality is cast in sharp relief with Peruvian idiosyncrasies, which generally oscillate between the quaintly charming and the outdated, a treatment that extended to everything from courting to politics and scientific curiosity to common daily routines.

  American observations tended to divorce the Peruvian mentalities that so fascinated them from their material context. If Lima’s middle and upper sectors embraced their somewhat decrepit glories, this was due in large part to the long-standing embattled relationship that existed between the nation’s coastal elites and the Andes. The coastal plane was a mixed-race society, composed principally of Afro-Peruvians, Chinese, and Peruvian-born Europeans (“Creoles”), while the Andes were the Indian heartland of the country, where indigenous communities were harshly dominated by Creole landowning overlords, known as gamonales.