My grandparents, for their part, had no chance of obtaining Colombian nationality, even if they had had a whole herd of cows to offer then-president Alfonso López Pumarejo. Immigration policies in Colombia had already been somewhat restrictive since the 1920s, but by the time my grandparents arrived in 1936, anti-Jewish sentiment was being stirred up by certain sectors of the middle class. These were mostly businessmen who were resentful of the competition from Jewish peddlers and their wholesalers, and they vented their frustration loudly enough to express open sympathy with the Brown Shirts. In Colombia, there were three hundred officially registered members of the Nazi Party at the time, which put that country in second place for Latin American affiliates, after Chile.158
When Colombia closed its doors to Jewish immigration, in a law that went into effect in January 1939, it also took the opportunity to deny nationality to any current Jewish residents who lacked it.159 This law primarily affected German Jews, who had lost their nationality through the Nuremberg Laws (1935). Although my grandparents were technically Romanian, and they may or may not have been carrying a dubiously legal Peruvian passport, they were in reality either stateless or perilously close to statelessness. My mother, for her part, was unambiguously stateless, for she had been born in France to parents who were not permanent residents, and she could not receive Romanian nationality from them for the reasons I’ve already explained.
Despite these difficulties, though, my grandparents knew that they had political work to do in Colombia. They were needed to participate in the fight against fascism and Hitler, to defend European Jews, and to prepare Colombia’s position in the face of a world war that was now imminent.
Perhaps due to the urgency of the Jewish question by 1936, or because my grandparents had now become parents, my grandfather’s activity in Colombia was much more attentive to the Jewish community than it had been in Lima. His first journalism job was as an editorial assistant for Nuestra Tribuna, a journal published by the Bogotá Jewish community and directed by Jaime Fainboim. I have in my possession only one issue of that paper, from April 1937. The first thing that stands out is that Nuestra Tribuna was clearly looking to build excellent relations with the Colombian government. Thus, the issue that I have opens with an obituary for former Colombian president Enrique Olaya Herrera, who had just died in Italy. The piece closes: “It is for this reason that we, the Jewish community of Colombia, linked in numerous ways with bonds that compel us to feel love for this generous land, feel very deeply and weep with the Colombian people over the death of the illustrious man named Enrique Olaya Herrera.”160
There were good reasons for this expression of loyalty, together with a profession of love for the land. Olaya Herrera had been the president of Colombia from 1930 to 1934, and in those years, he allowed Jews from Eastern Europe to enter the country despite the fact that, as in most other countries on the continent, Colombian immigration policies from the 1920s manifested racist tendencies. For example, Law 48, passed in 1920, prohibited “the entrance into the country of elements who, given their ethnic, organic, or racial conditions, are determined inappropriate for nationality and for the better development of the ‘race.’ ”161 That law, and a subsequent one passed in 1922, legitimized a policy of Jewish exclusion, should such exclusion ever be deemed desirable.
Even so, a number of Jewish families like the Milsteins arrived in Colombia between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s. Olaya Herrera’s successor, Alfonso López Pumarejo, was also a member of the Liberal Party, nevertheless there was by that time much more resistance to Jewish immigration, as Colombian society began to fracture in the face of Nazism in Germany. Also significant was the effect of the Spanish Civil War, as the conflict’s Nationalist faction had stirred the sympathies of the Colombian Conservative Party.
Jewish immigration to Colombia, although numerically insignificant, was nonetheless quite visible. Jewish peddlers were knocking on people’s doors. That always makes people visible. But it also mattered that the peddlers subtly disrupted established class lines: tailored suits were important items at the time, indeed it is fair to say that suits were to middle-class status what noble titles had once been for the aristocracy. They certified legitimate inclusion.
Cartoon of the purported role of “Jewish rats” in Colombian national commerce.
In the South America of the 1920s, the “middle class” was still a relatively recent thing, and a suit was often required attire to navigate its labor market of white-collar employees, schoolteachers, and specialized tradesmen. Making tailored suits available door to door and on credit broadened popular access to the world of middle class aspirations, with significant political and cultural effects. In fact, greater access to urbane clothing was both one condition and one effect of Latin America’s first wave of “populism,” a set of movements that involved the eruption of upwardly mobile urban dwellers into the up-to-then restricted and aristocratic preserves of political life. This may well be the reason why the wardrobe became such an obsession of revered populist parvenus like Evita Perón, in Argentina, to name the most famous example. In such a context, the work of Jewish peddlers was both a symptom and a harbinger of social disruption and change in the class structure.
Because they resented competition from Jewish peddlers, some merchants espoused anti-Semitism, and allied themselves politically with conservative Catholics, who likely had only superficial interest in the Jewish question per se, but they sympathized with Franco and therefore also looked favorably upon his ally Hitler.
Although President López Pumarejo was a Liberal, his government was by no means immune to the pressures that came from a combination of Catholic Conservatives, the anti-Semitism of some merchants, and political groups that sympathized with the Nazis. So, in 1934 López Pumarejo’s minister of foreign relations, Dario Echandía, began to deny entry visas to German Jews, alleging that “Colombia’s possibilities, with the exception of the agrarian sector, do not offer a rosy picture for refugees who might come here and establish dangerous levels of competition with the workers of this country.”162
The foreign minister preferred to mask the anxieties of the merchants that he was protecting behind supposed concern for the interests and well-being of the workers. The workers in Colombia were not threatened by Jewish migration, in part because of its small numbers, and in part because Colombia’s low wages, its racial hierarchy, and the comparatively high education of Jews made it unlikely that Jews would become robust competitors for Colombia’s industrial workers. Still, it was easier to restrict Jewish immigration with the pretext that it would be harmful to workers than by acknowledging that they ramped up competition for Colombia’s privileged merchants.
As a result, Jews had to try to show that they had positive accomplishments that might contribute to Colombian progress in areas other than industrial labor and commerce — in the professions, for instance, or in agriculture. It does not seem unlikely to me that my great-grandfather Boris decided to buy land in Cauca Valley in order to acquire credentials as an agriculturalist, and so strengthen his claim of belonging in Colombia.
Historian Lina María Leal makes it clear that by 1936 there was a lobby of anti-Semites who intervened regularly in Colombia’s chambers of commerce, magazines, and newspapers. There had been nothing like that in Lima in the 1920s, when my grandparents arrived there. But now they were compelled to face this wave of racism, given that it manifested itself not only at the local level but above all globally.
In the context of internal class disruptions, and international alliances between the Conservatives and Europe’s fascist block, good relations with the Colombian government were very important, even urgent, for Colombian Jews to develop, and that contrasted with the confrontational attitude that Misha and Noemí had struck when they arrived in Peru, ten years earlier. In the police dossier associated with my grandfather’s deportation from Peru, he is mentioned as an individual with “disruptive id
eas” who, besides being “a confessed communist,” had taken part in a movement of unemployed workers and had given political speeches to textile workers.163
In Peru, Misha and Noemí felt free to exercise their activism among the working class and university students, even though the Peruvian government viewed those activities as subversive. Oppositional politics would not beckon them so much in Colombia, because the couple’s political efforts were directed instead to building or solidifying an alliance between the Jewish community and the government, and against any tendency that might tilt Colombia to the side of fascism.
Education
When my grandparents arrived in Colombia, their main job, beyond what they needed to do to support their family, was to help consolidate Jewish culture in this new country, and fight against fascism. Educational work came naturally to my grandfather. Within the Jewish community, through Nuestra Tribuna, he mobilized his Americanist knowledge to expand Jewish interest and identification with Colombia, and with the Americas more broadly. At the same time, he also looked to strengthen Jewish consciousness itself, by promoting Hebrew and Yiddish education.
In the first issue of Nuestra Tribuna on which my grandfather worked (April 1937), he translated from Yiddish an article written by a community leader, Simón Guberek, who speaks of the educational situation of the Jewish youth in Colombia and even proposes a role for Misha in it.164 Guberek begins by saying that the Jewish community of Bogotá had by that time existed for ten years and that there were roughly three hundred children who had no access to a Jewish education. “As a consequence of this, we have a generation completely distanced from our way of being and our national culture.”165 My own grandparents must have been a bit concerned about this specific issue: their daughter Larissa was at that time five years old, spoke only Spanish, and had little access to Jewish traditions outside of the family home. “Luckily for us,” Guberek continued, “Dr. Adler occasionally comes to Bogotá from Cali — a man from the world of science and a teacher with special gifts.” There was at that time a meeting of community members who adopted the resolution to entrust Adler with the responsibility of forming a Jewish school in Bogotá.
The task would not be easy because, to use Guberek’s own words, “it will be necessary to raise donations (even beyond the tuition that parents would pay) because there still does not exist an organized kehillah (community).”166 He then closed his article expressing hope for Dr. Adler’s school, though he also offered a sobering warning: “I know that the entire Jewish community will make sure that the current initiative does not suffer the same fate as earlier institutions in Bogotá.”167
In a separate book, published in Yiddish in Buenos Aires, Guberek wrote about the divisions that existed in Bogotá’s small Jewish community during those years before the war. In a nutshell, there was in it a conservative group that fought for the foundation of religious institutions such as the mikvah (a ritual bath required for women by religious authorities), and a leftist group that was fond of alluding to “a new light that comes from the East” (i.e., the Soviet Union).168 I don’t know the details of that conflict, but it surely contributed to the failure of the school my grandfather was asked to direct.
Just a few months after his arrival to Colombia from Bessarabia, Misha established the first Jewish school in Cali, the “Jorge Isaacs,” which was soon recognized as the best Jewish school in the country. I am told that the school still exists. From there, Misha moved to Bogotá in 1937 to establish the Colombian-Hebrew school, which he directed until 1938. Possibly due to the already mentioned internal rifts in the Jewish community, the school was not economically sustainable, so the family returned to Cali, and from there moved to Manizales, where Noemí and Misha’s third child, Mauricio, was born on October 20, 1941.
The move to Manizales, which was a provincial city of relatively minor importance, made it hard for my grandparents to lead either an intellectual or a political life, and it suggests that the young couple was not making ends meet in Cali. For my grandfather, Manizales implied a return to commercial life and also employment in his father-in-law’s business: Boris had just won a large contract as a supplier of railway ties for the railroad that was then being built between Nariño (on the border between Colombia and Ecuador) and Antioquia. The first phase of that work had been completed through a partnership with the sawmill of Boris’s neighbor in Tuluá, a Mr. Levy, but the second phase required a new sawmill, in Manizales, which Misha would now manage. Misha, it should be said, was a useful associate, given that he had studied at the university in Lima, and had engaged in political activity there, and thus he could easily build a fluid rapport with contractors, supervisors, and the like.
It had become clear that it wouldn’t be possible to support the family on what Misha earned through his intellectual work at that point, but this didn’t mean that those ideals were buried. Thus, Misha struck up a friendship with one of Manizales’s priests, Father Bernardo Jaramillo, an enlightened man with a desire to extend a hand of friendship to the Jewish people. Jaramillo even asked Misha to teach him Hebrew, which he did. My family still has a letter that Jaramillo wrote to my grandfather in Hebrew, after the family had moved from Manizales to Medellín.
Letter from Father Jaramillo to Misha Adler, written after a trip to Medellín during which the priest stayed in my grandparents’ house.
In Colombia, my grandfather’s educational work was thus oriented to Jewish education both within and outside of the community. From this period, we also have a letter from a Colombian senator, the Liberal Armando Solano, written in 1938. In it, Solano defends Jews against persecution and argues that Colombia should allow them to immigrate there. The letter was written only three weeks after Kristallnacht, and it is exactly contemporary with the decision of the Colombian government to close its doors definitively to Jewish immigration.
Solano mentions something in his letter with which surely my grandfather agreed: “It is not true that there is anti-Semitism in Colombia. Special interests, wounded by commercial competition and instigated by political reactionaries, have created that appearance. Our people are traditionally and radically opposed to all exclusion, to all racial hatred. Their hospitality is axiomatic.”169 My own sense is that Solano was to a large degree correct in this — people in South America tended to be both kind and hospitable to strangers, including to the new Jewish immigrants. On the other hand, it is also true that refugees and émigrés such as my grandparents tended always to emphasize this local quality, and to express limitless gratitude for having been taken in and accepted, while minimizing local chauvinist tendencies that also existed and surfaced at times. But the point, at that critical historical juncture, was to emphasize Colombian hospitality, on one hand, and to stress the Jews’ potential contributions to national progress.
So, for instance, Senator Solano spoke of the Jews’ promise as agricultural colonists, as a way of sidestepping anti-immigrant pressure from wounded special interests in the urban business sector. The senator added that “vast expanses of our territory can and should be colonized by Jewish communities, which have provided good evidence in Palestine and elsewhere of their agricultural capacity and organizing abilities. Colombia is a country of immigrants, and it could easily assimilate thousands of Jews.” My grandparents, for their part, highlighted the Jews’ diversity of talents — in art, the sciences, literature, philosophy, medicine, manual labor, industry, agriculture, and so on. It was important that not all Jews be seen as merchants and peddlers, and the best way to do this was to showcase the excellent work being done by Jews in a variety of domains. And indeed, even the first great Colombian novel, María, had been written by a Jew, during a time when there were practically no Jews in the country. Was this not an auspicious sign for their potential contribution to national society, if they were given the space and opportunity, and if prejudices were set aside?
Family life
It is not easy to
reconstruct the life of the Adler family between its arrival in Tuluá in 1936 and its move to Medellín, five years later. My mother, who was the oldest of her siblings, spent her childhood moving from one school to another and from place to place. This circumstance made access to formal schooling complicated when she was ready to start high school.
In 1887, Colombia signed a formal accord with the Vatican, the so-called Concordato, which stipulated, among other things, that the country would not offer mixed-sex education in public schools. That, in turn, meant that there was less access to secondary education for girls than for boys, especially in the provinces. My grandparents found themselves with little choice but to place my mother in a Catholic boarding school, the Instituto Central Feminino, in the city of Tunja, between Bogotá and Sogamoso. One of my childhood memories is Larissa’s story about her experience there. She lived in dread of being exposed as Jewish and having her classmates find her strange and reject her, and to avoid that, she went to mass every single day. But her anguish never relented, because of a teacher who watched over their dormitory at night, and took sadistic pleasure in making insinuations that she might expose Larissa’s secret to the class.
Manuel, Mauricio, and Larissa Adler in Colombia (possibly Medellín).
“Larissa, you were talking in your sleep again,” she would say, in front of my mother’s schoolmates. “You said such strange things…‘Everyone thinks that I’m —,’ you were saying, ‘but I’m —’ ” Every day my mother suffered the suspense that the teacher might at last finish the sentence. “Everyone thinks that I’m Catholic, but I’m Jewish.” The teachers knew of Larissa’s Judaism, because her parents had provided them with that information, ironically with the aim of exempting Larissa from attending mass on Sundays with the other students. But since her classmates had not been told, it had the opposite effect: in order to appear “normal,” Larissa attended mass every day.
Nuestra América Page 19