Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  In the same year as Motza and Marin’s funeral, Eliade found himself stripped of his professorship at the University of Bucharest because of his activities in the Iron Guard, which was a clandestine organization then. A year later, he was arrested as part of a government crackdown on the far right that charged him with authoring Iron Guard propaganda. During this tense period, Eliade wrote newspaper articles glorifying Motza and Marin and praising the Iron Guard’s founders. When he was released from jail, in November 1938, he immediately set to work on Iphigenia.

  Eliade’s work comfirms Ionesco’s complaint: for a fascist, the state is concrete while human beings are immaterial. To Eliade, a mythical character from antiquity like Iphigenia was transcendent, and the martyrs Motza and Marin were transcendent, but the flesh-and-blood humans who were to be sent to die in war in order to follow such “immortal” sacrifices mattered little. What really mattered was the immortality of their gesture, and not the fact that invading the Soviet Union implied sending the Romanian army off to slaughter.

  Eliade was also fond of another story that he believed offered a key to understanding the true Romanian essence: the legend of Master Manole. It tells of the construction of a great cathedral, a process that ultimately requires the pious master builder Manole (through a dream vision) to bury his pregnant wife alive in the building’s foundation. The story is, in essence, a Christian version of the tale of Iphigenia: the willing sacrifice of what one holds dearest for a higher ideal.

  Through all their fixation on sacrificial ecstasy, Romanian fascists never stopped to consider that the Jews perhaps might also form a part of their community, if given a chance. To them, the mass murder of Jews was an act of common prophylaxis. The death of two imbecilic heroes — who went to Spain voluntarily to fight for Franco — moved the country to tears, but the cowardly murder of one, one hundred, or even hundreds of thousands of Jews meant nothing except the “purification of the nation.” On the other hand, as the alleged source for all evils undermining the national community, Jews stabilized the fascists’ worldview, so anti-Semites might have felt some ambivalence about losing the Jews altogether. Their total absence might leave the surviving community with the melancholy feeling of having annihilated a people while still nursing the social ills for which they had been blamed. Maybe some of these fascists thought that they might bring the Jews back if they ever felt a need for them? If they did secretly hold such hopes, they were disappointed: today in Romania there is only their stark absence.

  Years after the war, Eliade published a (strategically redacted) edition of his diaries, where he offered effusive praise for Mihail Sebastian, exclaiming: “How I empathized with his immense efforts, and with all the suffering that came with each page he wrote!…I will never forgive myself for not going back to see him in August 1942, when I returned to Bucharest for a week. I was ashamed of myself at that point — I was a cultural attaché in Lisbon, while he had suffered numerous humiliations for having been born, and for wishing to remain Iosef Hechter. I now agonize over this in vain, as it is too late.”150 Iosef Hechter had taken on the pen name Mihail Sebastian, and insisted in his writing that there was such a thing as a Romanian Jew, that it was possible to be both Jewish and Romanian.

  With the publication of these lines about Sebastian having been humiliated for wishing publicly to remain Jewish, Eliade revealed himself to be a rascal and con artist. The affection and admiration that he had for Sebastian were genuine — the two were very close friends — but Eliade was personally responsible for at least a few of the humiliations suffered by Sebastian for “wishing to remain Iosef Hechter,” and as an ideologue of the rabidly anti-Semitic Iron Guard, Eliade could hardly expect Sebastian to have had an easy time “remaining Iosef Hechter.”

  Eliade mentions his shame for not having visited Sebastian in 1942, supposedly provoked by the privileges that he knew he enjoyed as a cultural attaché in fascist Portugal while Sebastian was humiliated for “wishing to be” Jewish in Bucharest. But Sebastian was not being persecuted for “wishing to remain” a Jew; he had been raised Jewish whether he liked it or not, and everyone knew that he was Jewish. Meanwhile, in all his pathetic self-recrimination, Eliade somehow fails to mention that anti-Semitism was part of the very foundation of the Iron Guard, to which he had himself been so committed.

  In his discussion of the origin of his image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco clearly identified the pivotal role that anti-Semitism had for Romania’s fascists:

  I have witnessed transformations [of people into rhinoceroses]. I’ve seen people change almost before my very eyes…There is the example of I. He was part of our group…We were young then, so how could we intellectually resist all the specialists who had converted into fanatics? Sociologists, cultural philosophers, biologists who had found “scientific” reasons to justify racism; writers, journalists…One day, I. showed up and told us that we were right, of course, and that the rest were without a doubt monstrous or stupid. “Nevertheless,” he said, “it’s strange that at times, at times, they seem to be right on a particular point…” One point out of 10,000…“Such as, for example, they say that the Jew…” At that moment, we all realize that I. has already been trapped by the machine…I gave them between four and six weeks before they succumbed definitively, giving in to the temptation of power…151

  Anti-Semitism was in fact the original feature of the rhinoceros.

  Sebastian, for his part, was an unusual witness to the Jewish genocide in Romania, because he knew it from its gestational period in the 1930s, since he worked and lived alongside the crème de la crème of Bucharest intellectuals. So many of them were leaders of the Iron Guard! Sebastian also witnessed how his old friend Mircea Eliade wrote articles from his post as attaché in Portugal as a kind of Nero, playing the lyre with his fascist panegyrics while the Red Army destroyed the Romanian army at the Battle of Stalingrad. After the war, Eliade covered up his role in the elimination of the Jewish population of Romania, but he and his companions in fact accomplished their mission, as Jews are now largely absent in that country.

  Coda: Shura

  When Boris, Tania, Noemí, and Pupe first crossed the Dniester, they were forced to leave behind Shura and Revka. Desolate, these two returned to the large house in Mogilev and were never rescued. Revka died when her granddaughter Shura was only six years old. Before her death, she split her large house in two, giving half to Shura and the other to a couple, Nahum and Surka, in exchange for them taking care of the little girl and looking out for her. But Shura once again had bad luck.

  Surka let her go hungry and beat her. According to Rita, Shura’s daughter, the only days that Surka and Nahum treated her mother well were when packets of food and money arrived from Peru and Colombia (sent by Boris and Tania). On the following day, they would again cut off the supply of what had been sent and continue to starve her as usual. Shura would wander the streets after school, looking for food. As soon as she graduated, she took a job as a salesgirl in a shop, and when she reached adulthood, she sold her share of the house for a loss and went to live in a rented room in order finally to take leave of the couple who had so abused her. In those years, Shura still maintained an occasional correspondence with her parents, although sadly the letters have not survived. Their correspondence was definitively cut off with the outbreak of war.152

  In 1940, one year before the Nazi invasion, Shura married Shmuel Grossman, who was from Yaruga, the same as Boris. At first the couple lived in Mogilev, but when the war broke out, Shmuel joined the Red Army while Shura, already pregnant, went to live with her in-laws in Yaruga. Shura lived in the same house as her in-laws, Susa and Haim, along with an uncle and his daughters. Shortly after her arrival, the town was bombed, and they sought shelter in the basement. At precisely that moment, Shura’s contractions began and her daughter, my aunt Rita, was born in that basement.

  Shura Milstein and Shmuel Grossman, recently married, 1940
.

  Because of the war, there was insufficient food for the baby. Shura drank a lot of water in order to have at least some milk to give her daughter. The little girl cried from hunger. When the Romanian and German troops invaded, the Jewish section of Yaruga was transformed into a ghetto, as had happened in all of the occupied towns of Transnistria. These ghettos were fenced spaces in which Jews were left to eke out a living or die little by little from hunger and thirst or from illnesses. At times, soldiers and police officers would shoot them.

  The people living with Shura worked on a collective farm (kholkhoz), and they were required to hand over their produce to the Germans and Romanians, leaving them only with food that was bruised or rotten. At times, their Ukrainian neighbors would give them a bit of milk for the baby. At night, they trafficked in contraband. The Romanians had constructed a ghetto in Mogilev that housed more than forty thousand Jews, and Shura would use a boat to sneak twenty-five-liter fuel drums across the Dniester. In Mogilev, she would trade the fuel for bread. It was very dangerous work, and I still don’t know where she got the fuel. Maybe she took it from the kholkhoz, but I can’t be sure. Shura could also occasionally produce small quantities of soap that she knew how to make: she was Boris’s daughter, after all.

  Naphtoli Rabinovici spent the war in the Mogilev ghetto, and he described the economy of the place. In order to survive, the Jews depended on two things: finding work repairing Romanian and German tanks and war equipment, and getting help from friends or relatives who had remained in the ghettos of Czernowitz or Bucharest. The rest depended on the black market economy, as was the case with Shura. The alternative was dying of hunger or typhoid, as happened to the majority.153

  Shura, little Rita (born in a Transnistria ghetto in 1941), and Shmuel, 1949.

  Shura managed to survive in the ghetto, but she had no idea what had become of her husband, Shmuel. During the war, newspapers didn’t circulate much, and there was no radio in the Yaruga ghetto. Rita, Shura’s daughter, remembers the day when they installed a microphone and loudspeakers in the village, in order to announce the end of the war. Rita would have been three or four years old at the time.154

  Shura was finally lucky, too, because Shmuel survived the war intact. He fought very bravely in the Russian army, was decorated and promoted to the rank of officer. One benefit of this was that the family was allowed to move to Czernowitz (which by then was known by its Russian name, Chernovtsy), where conditions were better than in Yaruga or Mogilev, and where many Ukrainian Jews who had survived the Holocaust took refuge. In Chernovtsy, things improved a bit for the young couple. They worked in a shop, and were occasionally able to hawk goods on the black market that was so crucial for the Soviet economy.

  Shmuel and Shura later had a son, Marc, who studied medicine. Both Rita and Marc grew up and got married. In the 1970s, Rita and her husband, Yuri Sikirin, requested permission to move to Israel, which was, in the end, granted. In 1977, Shura and Shmuel followed them. Shura died in Nathanya on May 5, 1980. Shmuel survived her by many years. He also died in Nathanya, in 2003. May they rest in peace.

  PART THREE

  Colombian Refuge

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Family Life

  Tuluá

  In 1936, Misha, Noemí, and Larissa arrived in Tuluá, situated in the Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Noemí arrived pregnant with Manuel, and she gave birth to him in that city. At the time, Tuluá was a town of no more than 12,000 residents, but it had a certain literary fame due to Jorge Isaacs’s María, considered by many to be the best Latin American novel of the nineteenth century. My grandfather was among the novel’s fans, in no small measure because Isaacs’s father was Jewish. Misha’s work on behalf of the Jewish people made him attentive to the contributions of Jews to cultural life. In the first issue of Repertorio Hebreo, Misha had already published a brief essay by the Peruvian poet José María Eguren on Isaacs’s genius. In the essay, Eguren speaks openly of the novelist’s origins: “Of the Colombian race and of the Hebrew race, of that most creative lineage, which at present counts among its number Albert Einstein, Henri Bergson, and Waldo Frank at the very pinnacle of knowledge.”155

  (It now seems odd to see the name of Waldo Frank, who has largely been forgotten, being invoked with such conviction and emphasis alongside those of Einstein and Bergson. Frank was a well-known figure in US intellectual and leftist circles, but Latin American intellectuals of the time held him in especially high esteem because he was one of the comparatively few established American figures who engaged in a direct dialogue with South American intellectuals. Before the Cold War there was not much interest in Latin American public opinion, and until the so-called Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, even intellectual figures of the stature of Mariátegui, Victoria Ocampo, or Jorge Luis Borges were pretty much unknown to readers of English.)

  Pupe, Tania, Noemí (behind baby Manuel), Larissa (as a child), Boris, Misha. Tuluá, c. 1937. The people in the photo were numbered by hand to point out to Shura who each one was.

  Our family arrived in Tuluá because Boris and Tania had settled there, in a large house on Calle 31, number 27-57. When my grandparents and my mother arrived, Boris had already set up a soap mill that resembled the one he had run in Mogilev. The milling of soap had been his family’s business for three generations, a fact that might explain Boris’s lifelong preoccupation with personal hygiene and neatness. Now, in Tuluá, he had returned to his ancestral occupation.

  Advertisement for Boris’s marbled soap. El Mercurio, 1934.

  According to a witness from the time, Boris’s marbled soap was “the first blue soap ever sold in Tuluá; before, the people washed their clothes with bleach.”156 The fact that the people of Tuluá used only bleach, and that there was not yet any commercial soap available for clothes, was surely a factor in Boris’s decision to settle in such an out-of-the-way place.

  According to my uncle Manuel, business was so good that they soon added a third oven to the operation. The mill was located in an annex that was next to the family’s home, and one could enter it directly from home through a secure metal door. Following Calle 31 from Boris’s house and walking past the soap factory, one reached the Tuluá River. There on the left it was common to find people bathing, and to the right women washing clothes. Upon first arriving at the town, Boris had gone to the river and showed the women how to wash with his marbled blue-and-white soap, a secret formula developed by his family, and he gave away samples.

  The innovation was appreciated, and the soap mill grew steadily. Soap was sold by the box, and meticulous records were kept. People came for the boxes with handcarts; the soap was then distributed to the stores in the city and in the surrounding small towns and villages. As a supplementary product, the mill also produced candles, which were sold in three sizes.

  I don’t know how many employees worked there. Manuel remembers that they were few — maybe around three. One of them had an exceptionally good singing voice. In a characteristic gesture, once my grandfather Misha discovered the man’s talent, he took him to a radio station in the region’s capital, Cali, so that they might hear him sing. The man quickly left his job at the soap mill and became a full-time singer under the alias “Arnulfo Granados.” His greatest radiophonic hit was with the song “Granada,” by the great Mexican composer Agustín Lara.

  I’ve tried to imagine the solitude that Misha and Noemí might have felt while living in Tuluá. Colombia had never been especially open to emigration, and it shut its doors to Jewish immigration tightly toward the end of 1938, after Kristallnacht.157 Perhaps Misha’s feeling of orphanhood was mitigated by the beauty of the landscape, which had transcended into literature thanks to Jorge Isaacs, a writer who was even more alone in his Judaism than my grandfather. Isaacs’s descriptions of the landscape of Valle del Cauca were already a commonplace in the Latin American imagination.

  “The s
ky,” Isaacs begins, “the horizons, the pampas, and the peaks of the Cauca move to silence all who contemplate them, as when in a dance hall one encounters the woman that we dreamed of when we were eighteen years old. She burns our forehead with one fleeting glance, and her voice becomes singular, unique. The great beauties of creation cannot be seen and sung at once.” The spellbinding power of the landscape motivated and authorized an inchoate flow of emotion that must have been engrossing and soothing at the same time. No need to talk. And now the family found itself precisely in that place. It was from there that Noemí and Misha would strive for the upkeep and education of their young family, but also for the survival of their people and of the world itself. It was from the Colombian provinces that the family would have to piece together its fractured history and develop a stance for itself in the world.

  Jorge Isaacs had achieved all of this in his writing, of course, but he had also devoted a lot of his energy to Colombian politics. Although his book begins with bucolic scenes of family love, a plantation home surrounded by the all-embracing foliage, with its main characters surrounded by loyal and adoring slaves, in real life, Jorge Isaacs participated in Colombia’s civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives of the 1860s, which left the family’s estates in ruins. By the time he finally sat down to write his María, he had lost his family’s fortune.

  Such a combination of idyllic memory, the recognition of a place’s utopian possibilities, and the harsh nature of actually experienced social life might well have inspired my grandfather, although I don’t know that for sure, because it is also true that Misha’s identification with Colombia was in some ways very different from that of Isaacs. George Henry Isaacs, Jorge Isaacs’s British father, had acquired Colombian citizenship through the intervention of Simón Bolívar himself, in exchange for his donation of some cows. Later he established two successful plantations in Valle del Cauca: La Manuelita and El Paraíso, which later served as models for the setting of his son Jorge Isaacs’s famous novel.