But then again, there wasn’t much that was so very original in this part of the script either. The use of the stereotypical Jew as a player in one political opera buffa or another went hand in hand with the extortion of actual real-live Jews in Europe as well as in America. In this case, Jews like Noemí’s father, Boris, who had nothing to do either with communism or with politics, were nonetheless rounded up in order to prove the physical existence of alleged conspirators. Without their actual material presence, the farce would be incomplete, but since rounding them up meant making them vulnerable, extortion came as a welcome secondary benefit. And while the story of a Jewish Red Scare was just a hoax authored by an unscrupulous president, its effects, in the end, were real enough.
Of nationalities and passports
Misha was released from prison with an agreement, brokered by the local Jewish community, that he and Noemí would leave the country. But the Leguía government was unstable by then, and teetering on the brink, so Misha and Noemí found ways to delay their departure. Except that before going on with that story, I need to discuss the question of my grandparents’ nationality.
Misha’s and Noemí’s Peruvian expulsion papers (November 1930) identified them as Romanian. However, as Mariátegui had told Glusberg, neither could expect any protection from that government, because there was no Romanian legation in Peru.106 But the truth was that even if there had been an embassy, Romanian policy toward its Jews was not oriented to providing them with protection but rather to stimulating their permanent emigration. My grandmother’s Romanian identity was, if anything, even more problematic than my grandfather’s, because she had been born in Ukraine, and the attitude of the Romanian government toward Jewish refugees who had arrived from Russia after the revolution was that they could only stay temporarily. For this reason, and in exchange (as always) for money, the government expedited passports only with the expressed goal of ushering them out of the country.
What all this means is that my grandparents may not have had renewable Romanian passports that might have permitted them to move about the world freely, and it is in this context that they figure as having applied for Peruvian citizenship.
Even so, there are a number of murky points in the case. My uncle Manuel remembers that Misha had a valid Peruvian passport when he and Noemí traveled to Peru on a visit, in the early 1960s. This was the visit that is engraved in my childhood memory of Misha with the archaeologist in ruins on the outskirts of Lima. So how do we explain the fact that he was denied Peruvian nationality, and then years later used a Peruvian passport?
I can think of only two possibilities. The first is that Misha and Noemí bribed somebody to get either a Peruvian passport or a Peruvian birth certificate that might years later have been used to gain a passport. The second is that Peru might have given both Misha and Noemí Peruvian nationality upon their arrival from Europe, because the spirit of Peru’s policy of European colonization was precisely that these immigrants would eventually become Peruvians. It was also the case, though, that Peruvian officials had only agreed to release Misha from prison on the condition that he be expelled from the country. Except that you can’t legally expel a citizen from his or her own country.
My hypothesis is, then, that government officials ignored a previous nationalization, if it existed, treated Noemí and Misha as Romanian foreigners who were applying for citizenship, proceeded to deny their application on account of their communism and their subversive political activities, and so immediately moved to deport them. By the time all of this happened, Leguía had already been toppled and General Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro was president. Being, as he was, a fascist sympathizer, Sánchez Cerro was much more earnestly anticommunist than his predecessor, so his government definitely wanted them out. Misha and Noemí probably then held on to their Peruvian (at this point, illegal) passports in order to be admitted to Colombia, and may have renewed those passports decades later, when Sánchez Cerro was long gone. End of my lengthy, but necessary, parenthesis on my grandparents’ nationality.
The death of Mariátegui
Starting around 1928, Mariátegui’s standing with the government got progressively worse, and Lima was becoming unlivable for him. The Mariáteguis and my grandparents seem to have nurtured a fantasy that they would all go to live in Switzerland. More realistically, though, plans were being made to leave Peru for Buenos Aires. In July 1929, a few months before Leguía’s razzia, Mariátegui had sent Misha to Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay as a representative of Amauta (probably with a Peruvian passport?).107 It is possible that during that trip Misha toyed with the idea of moving with Noemí and the Mariáteguis to Buenos Aires. What we know for sure is that by February 1930, with Samuel Glusberg’s help, Mariátegui had already made the necessary arrangements to leave Lima.
A letter from José Carlos Mariátegui to Misha Adler, July 13, 1929.
In March of that same year, though, Mariátegui had a relapse of the mysterious illness that had afflicted him from childhood, and that had already forced the amputation of his leg. He was hospitalized in the Villarán Clinic. My grandparents were by his side during his final weeks and at the moment of his death on April 16, 1930. My uncle Manuel shared with me the following version of the events leading up to Mariátegui’s death, which my grandmother had told him:
When José Carlos was on his deathbed, a group of relatives and friends gathered around him. At one point, Anita, who was propping up José Carlos’s head, asked Noemí to take her place while she took a saucepan off the stove. When my mother took her place, José Carlos said to her, “Noemí, let’s go to Switzerland; let’s go to Switzerland.” Seeing that he was getting worse, Noemí sent someone to tell Anita to come quickly. As soon as she arrived and took Noemí’s place, José Carlos entered his final moments of life…Told by my mother to me. End of story.108
I’d like to share photographs from my family’s collection of the death of the great Peruvian intellectual.
José Carlos Mariátegui on his deathbed.
Villarán Clinic, April 1930.
Misha Adler next to the bed where Mariátegui lies dying.
Noemí Milstein is standing on the left; kneeling beside Mariátegui is probably his wife, Anna Chiappe.
And to complement these pictures of the final days and death of the Amauta with a photo of Mariátegui’s funeral taken from Prado’s book. Misha is there, walking just behind the coffin with his head turned and wearing a white shirt.
Pallbearers (including Misha, on the left) next to Mariátegui’s coffin. bottom: Mariátegui’s funeral procession.
Mariátegui’s funeral procession.
The fall of Leguía
When I was sixteen years old, my grandmother and I were talking about something, I don’t remember what, and in the course of our conversation she told me that she could well imagine the kind of charisma that Jesus had during his life because she had known a man with those qualities, José Carlos Mariátegui. This is the only time that my grandma spoke of José Carlos to me, even though I spent quite a lot of time with her. Noemí was rankled by any kind of name-dropping, and she was also not one to dwell much on the past. Noemí preferred to be in the present and in the future. In this case, though, she was offering evidence for a very specific point, which was that personalities like Jesus exist in the real world.
After Mariátegui’s death, the Lima that my grandparents knew began to close in around them. Everything was hanging by a thread: that world in which “nobody knew what a Jew was” and in which “there was no anti-Semitism” seemed to be waning, too. But above all they faced the close of exciting collective discussions in the Red Corner of the house on Jirón Washington, the end of their political activism in Peru’s unions, no more translations of German and Russian for Amauta, which also would fold very soon. Repertorio Hebreo, the journal that they had created, was also in an u
ntenable situation, and their many remarkable friends, such as José María Eguren, Blanca Luz Brum, and Jorge del Prado, would soon become distant.
On August 22, 1930, four months after Mariátegui’s death, there was a coup d’état. As it turns out, Augusto Leguía did not fall from power because of a Jewish-communist plot, but rather because of a much more (for South America) humdrum military coup, at the hands of a subordinate with fascist tendencies, Lieutenant Colonel Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro. After a few days, this “Traitor from Arequipa” (in the ever-fatuous rhetoric of Leguía) took power with the help of a portion of Peru’s “childlike” public opinion, hectored by “vegetarian bipeds, writers with no morals or scruples.”109
Immediately after the coup, a mob sacked Leguía’s house in Miraflores. After the crowd departed, my grandparents decided to take a walk to see the wreckage. And they had the good luck to find a small ivory statuette lying on the sidewalk, in front of Leguía’s house. It was a small Chinese antiquity that, I speculate, may have been offered to the president as a sign of goodwill by members of the Chinese legation. A peace offering from one of Peru’s at times persecuted minorities, and also a memento from the house of the man who had my grandparents arrested, following the anti-Chinese script. I grew up with that statuette, without knowing what it was or where it came from. It was when I began writing this book that my mother told me that story.
Expulsion
The military coup d’état did not improve things for my grandparents. Sánchez Cerro and his group were xenophobes and committed anticommunists, and on November 14 the Peruvian government denied Misha’s and Noemí’s applications for citizenship, expelled each of them from the country as communists, and declared them personae non gratae.
Noemí Milstein in Huancayo on November 23, 1930, shortly before her deportation from Peru.
Misha Adler’s order of expulsion from Peru, 1930.
The police dossier that closes with the expulsion of my grandfather mentions his assets, which, apart from his doctorate from the Universidad de San Marcos, consisted solely of the shares that he owned as one of Mariátegui’s partners in the Minerva publishing house, which printed both Amauta and Repertorio Hebreo. Upon his expulsion from Peru, Misha donated these shares to Anna, Mariátegui’s widow, a gesture that sealed my grandparents’ bittersweet goodbyes to a time that had been one of great happiness.
A trip to the country with José Carlos and Anna, c. 1928. Misha is to the left of Anna, and Noemí is on Mariátegui’s right. The back of the photo, written in Noemí’s handwriting, reads: “A memento of times past.”
PART TWO
The Debacle
CHAPTER NINE
Adulthood
Marriage
Reconstructing the sequence of events after my grandfather’s release from jail requires some conjecture. I think that what happened is that a few months after Misha and Noemí’s arrest in Lima, Noemí’s father, Boris, who had also been briefly detained, traveled to Tuluá, Colombia, to pave the way for yet a new migration, while his wife, Tania, and his daughters Noemí and Pupe waited in Lima. Financial records in Tuluá state that Boris set up a soap mill there in September 1929.110 It is not entirely clear why he chose to leave Lima at that point. There is no living memory of this in my family, but it seems likely that Boris had plans to leave Peru even before his daughter’s expulsion. And he might have had several reasons for that.
To begin with, Boris might not have thought that Misha was such a good match for his daughter. Misha was a communist sympathizer, and the Milstein family had lost a daughter, Shura, while escaping communist persecution. Misha was also an intellectual in a world that offered few options to intellectuals. Would he be able to support Noemí and their future children? Finally, the government raid in November 1929 had landed Boris and Noemí herself in jail, leading ultimately to her expulsion from Peru. Did Misha’s influence not have something to do with this misfortune?
I’m not really sure if these questions regarding Noemí’s relationship with Misha weighed heavily on Boris’s and Tania’s minds in their decision to move to Colombia, though I do know, from my mother, that things were tense between Misha and Noemí’s father. Boris’s decision to move may also have been guided by economic considerations. Possibly there was too much competition in the soap business in Lima. He may have been searching for a more isolated provincial town in which to set up business, and found an ideal spot in Colombia’s agriculturally rich Valle del Cauca. Whatever the case, the fact is that after Noemí’s expulsion from Peru in November 1930, Boris and family moved to Tuluá.
Misha, for his part, went to Buenos Aires. This was perhaps the journey that they had previously planned out with Mariátegui. Even so, it is not clear what Misha planned to do in Buenos Aires without him. Maybe he was waiting for Noemí to talk to her parents and persuade them to bless their marriage plans; or maybe he was looking to establish himself in Buenos Aires after marrying Noemí. I don’t really know. In any case, it certainly wouldn’t have been easy to survive in a foreign city in 1931; the global Depression had set in, and Buenos Aires was by no means excepted from it. Whatever the reason, though, Misha left Argentina for Colombia after a couple of months, married Noemí (with Boris and Tania in attendance), and the two of them passed briefly through Cali, which was the nearest city to Tuluá, before moving on to Paris.
Misha and Noemí, married and expecting Larissa.
Cali, Colombia, late 1931 or early 1932.
Paris
Noemí and Misha arrived in Paris at the beginning of 1932. Misha enrolled for doctoral studies in the Institut d’Ethnologie, which was at that time located in the Trocadero Palace. He was interested in three topics: Indo-American ethnology, Jewish ethnology, and the scientific and humanistic critique of racism. To tackle these issues, he studied under the direction of Paul Rivet, who led the institute at the time and was its leading figure together with Marcel Mauss. Rivet was what the French called an Americanist, that is, a specialist in South American ethnology, and he had done a great deal of fieldwork in Ecuador. He was also a member of the Socialist Party, an antiracist, and in 1934 he was named president of the Vigilance Committee for Intellectuals Against Fascism.
Misha Adler’s certificates for registration at the University of Paris (above; 1932) and membership in the International Institute of Anthropology (opposite; 1934).
Paris must have been a powerful experience for my grandparents; such an extraordinary city, with so much cultural effervescence. In the only letter I’ve found from Misha to Rivet, written twenty years later from Israel, Misha speaks of “the center of the civilized world that beloved Paris always represents,” and he looks still to create a “center for ethnological investigation, built around an Archive/Museum of Man, following the style and perfect model” that Rivet had created in Paris.111 After his studies with Rivet, Misha would identify himself as an ethnologist, and he would write for Americanist publications that were more or less specialized and coincided with the goals and methods of the so-called sciences of man. Each of these was oriented, according to my grandfather’s own expression, toward “the mutual comprehension of the races and peoples of the world.”
In Paris, there was also then a striking synthesis of aesthetics and politics. Exoticism — the influence first of African art, followed by the art of the so-called primitive peoples of Oceania and America — had been a central aspect of modernism. The critique of Europe’s rational pretensions, and in particular of its self-image as the height of civilization, became acute with the disastrous events of the First World War, while critical movements as diverse as Bolshevism, Dadaism, and Surrealism moved to center stage. Primitive art was thus the herald of a movement that shook modern aesthetics to its roots, and the Institut d’Ethnologie’s anthropologists — Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet, Alfred Métreaux — were closely connected and engaged with figures of the Surrealist movem
ent such as Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and André Breton, to name a few. Indeed, as anthropologist and historian James Clifford has pointed out, the Institut d’Ethnologie and the Surrealist Manifesto were launched just months apart from one another (1924–25), and their interconnection was intensive from the beginning.112
Noemí and Misha were in Paris between 1932 and 1934, which were also years during which Surrealist artists frequently attended classes at the Institut d’Ethnologie. Here those artists learned of the rationality of the people whom colonialism had tagged as irrational, while they exhibited the West’s own deeply seated irrationality in their work.113
The aesthetic rendering of pre-Hispanic and Indo-American objects, exhibited not only in the museum of the institute but also in art galleries and disseminated in the world in fashion, must also have made a big impression on my grandparents. The modern indigenous aesthetic of Amauta had in Paris an enormous stage that was brighter than anything that could exist in Lima, where cultural institutions, museums, galleries, and fashion industry were still very modestly funded. I imagine that the Parisian experience must have strengthened Misha’s conviction that the other America could be a space of redemption for Europe.
Paris would also introduce him to the sort of professional platform that is necessary to develop research and teaching, something that was then beyond the built capabilities of the Universidad de San Marcos in Lima. In his 1953 letter to Rivet, Misha tells him, “You continue, my dear professor, being for me the most convincing example of what we are capable of on this difficult path, always ascending toward the perfection of our many innate capacities.” The excellence that Misha found in his teacher could not be disassociated from the material conditions that made it possible, and these could be summarized, perhaps in a slightly mystified way, in one word: Paris.
Nuestra América Page 14