Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  At the end of the year, the family moved to Medellín, and Noemí and Misha took my mother out of that school and enrolled her in a local private school. The move to Medellín was due to my great-grandmother Tania’s cancer diagnosis. There was a hospital in Medellín with specialists better equipped to treat her than what existed in Cali or Tuluá. Also, Boris had opened a sawmill in that city, once again managed by Misha, to provide the railroad ties for the third phase of railway construction, so that the family could stay by Tania’s side during her treatment. Except that Tania survived for only a few weeks. She died in March 1942, without ever receiving any news of her daughter Shura. She was buried in Medellín, and Misha, Noemí, and their children stayed in that city for two years.

  These were times of enormous anguish. At Hitler’s conference in Wannsee (just outside of Berlin) in January 1942 the Nazis decided to move forward with the extermination of the Jews in all of Europe. My grandparents still didn’t know what had happened to Hershel, Leah, Shura, and their other relatives who had remained in Nova Sulitza and in Mogilev, Czernowitz, or Odessa, and they followed with anguish the news on the radio of Nazi operations on the Eastern front. The extent to which they communicated these worries to their kids isn’t entirely clear to me. I have the impression that Misha and Noemí made a consistent effort to shield their children from fully undertanding what was at stake.

  Bogotá’s Jewish community declares a day of mourning in response to Hitler’s decision to murder every Jew living in German-occupied lands.

  In the midst of the world’s difficulties, the family was establishing itself in Colombia. Children were being born — Misha and Noemí now had three. My great-uncle Alfonso (“Zuñe”) settled down and had a family in Bogotá. My great-aunt Pupe got married. My mother remembers that in her early childhood, Pupe Milstein had a secret Gentile (Catholic) boyfriend from an important Medellín family, and he wanted to marry her. They sometimes used Larissa as a decoy so that Pupe could go to the movies secretly to meet her boyfriend there.

  One day Misha saw them together, and he told Boris. According to my mother, Misha’s informing on his young sister-in-law might have been motivated by watchfulness of Larissa’s own future. If Pupe married a Christian, the possibility of a marriage within the Jewish community for Larissa diminished, and this may have been something that concerned Misha, because while Boris was a prosperous businessman, Larissa would have no dowry to speak of. That is one possible explanation, but in those years of such uncertainty in Europe, my grandparents might also have seen their situation in Colombia as transitory, and they feared the rootedness that came with assimilation.

  Under the Torah ark at Pupe Milstein’s wedding, 1944.

  In the center, Pupe, and to the right, my grandmother.

  To the left, her new sister-in-law, Sara Dargoltz de Perlman.

  Whatever the cause, what is known is that Pupe ended things with her boyfriend after they were caught, and was sent to study in Bogotá, where later she would meet and marry Isaac Perlman. I mention the anecdote of Pupe’s boyfriend to give a sense of the context in which my family lived in places such as Tuluá, which had almost no other Jewish families. For Boris’s generation, or even that of my grandfather, this was a completely novel situation: in Bessarabia, in Czernowitz, or in Ukraine, Jewish communities were large and geographically concentrated. There was, as well, very strong discrimination against them on the part of the dominant society, which made it pretty easy for people to marry “within the faith.” In South America, the situation became blurred as much for demographic reasons as for the relatively high prestige that Jews had in the Americas. In such a context, reproducing the community required explicit effort.

  Pupe’s wedding occurred during the war, although after Tania’s passing, and it suggests something about community life that was taking root in the South American margins of the European disaster.

  Tania

  Tania Greisser de Milstein died of cancer in Medellín, Colombia, on March 15, 1942. What in reality do we know of her? My mother remembers a lot. She says that every afternoon she would sit on the porch of their house in Tuluá and cry over the loss of her daughter Shura, who, for her part, grew up believing that she had been deliberately abandoned. Shura had no idea how much her parents had suffered for her, and she only learned the truth when my parents traveled to Moscow in 1970 to meet her.

  The story that Shura transmitted to her daughter Rita is that when the family was crossing the Dniester River and she started to cry, Tania wished to stay with her, but Boris insisted that they leave her and come back for her later. That is, it became accepted fact that Tania had been forced to leave her daughter behind. For me, Tania is the very figure of loss: crying in the afternoons on the porch of her house on the other side of the world from where her abandoned daughter had been left; using whatever strength she had to hold together what remained of the family; dying young of cancer.

  A characteristically matriarchal portrait of Tania, sent to Shura by her sister Noemí in 1955, thirteen years after Tania’s death.

  How old was Tania when she died? I’m not quite sure. Her gravestone doesn’t indicate a date of birth, but her oldest daughter, Noemí, was born in 1911. I imagine that Tania must not have been much older than twenty at that time, or perhaps even younger, in which case she would have been born just after 1890 and thus would have died at roughly fifty years of age, which coincides with my mother’s own estimates. Although in photos her appearance was always that of the prototypical Ukrainian matriosha — a short, round woman of indefinite years — this is more the effect of the style of the times than a reflection of her true age.

  Now, writing this book, it strikes me that Tania died in March 1942. If the family had remained in Czernowitz, eternally waiting for Shura’s departure from Ukraine, she would have died at roughly the same time, except in a Transnistrian ghetto, like Misha’s parents. It is unlikely that she and Boris would have survived the frozen journey through Bessarabia and Ukraine, the violence of the road, the conditions of the ghettos, or the concentration camps. In this, Tania was lucky, and Boris was at least partially right. Tania survived the violence of the revolution and the counterrevolution and managed to see two of her three daughters grow up. She became the matriarch of a flourishing family from her home in Tuluá, and she was able to spend time with three of her grandchildren — Larissa, Manuel, and Mauricio. Tania was the bridgehead for the survival of my mother’s family, no more and no less, but despite this, she is, at least in my imagination, a symbol of irreparable loss. Tania is, besides, part of the life experience that most marked my mother, and she doubtless shaped how the latter raised us: a philosophy very much opposed to complaining and that cultivated flexibility and adaptation instead. Shura had been abandoned because she cried, so one mustn’t cry. In my house, to be a complainer or whiner was a bad thing. Keep calm and carry on. And behind that calm, maintain a constant vigilance regarding family unity.

  Diglossia in America

  My great-grandmother Tania was the first member of my family to die in America. There is an interesting feature in the photos that I have of her grave. The first stone, the original, is written in Hebrew, and with the date of her death registered according to the Jewish calendar. The second, however, put in place to freshen up the grave, likely around 1960, carries an inscription in Spanish that reads: “Tania Greisser de Milstein died on March 15, 1942.” This linguistic detail warrants some reflection.

  left: The original grave of Tania Greisser de Milstein.

  right: Tania’s grave, ordered redone by Víctor Perlman, probably around 1960.

  Cemetery of the Union Israelita de Beneficiencia. Medellín, Colombia.

  Tania’s grave is in the first row of the women’s section of the Jewish cemetery of Medellín. It is, as Roberto Esquenazi, the president of the Jewish community of Medellín, has graciously informed me, the fifth oldest grave in the c
emetery. That is, Tania was one of the first Jewish women to be buried in Medellín (of course, only if we do not count so-called Marranos from the colonial period). Tania was part of the first generation of Ashkenazim in Colombia. Boris’s request to have her gravestone written in Hebrew, even without a date of death according to the Christian calendar, speaks of a generation raised in the diglossia of Russia, where Jewish separation was obligatory, and where communication in Yiddish or Hebrew was a way of unifying Jews, even in far-flung regions that had their own different national languages (Polish, Russian, or German, for example).

  Yiddish and Hebrew were also a way for the Old World and the New to communicate, especially given the success of the Yiddish press in New York and Buenos Aires.170 But how did this linguistic community operate in America? Was it even relevant in places such as Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali, that had such small Jewish communities?

  According to my uncle Manuel, his grandfather Boris was a man who liked routines. He woke up every day before five a.m. and after getting himself ready for the day, he sat down in a comfortable and simple armchair. In the room there was a round glass table and another rectangular one next to his chair.

  “There he is, seated, smoking his daily tobacco, drinking strong coffee, and reading the Yiddish newspaper that came to his home directly from New York.”171 The newspaper in question was the Forverts (Forward), which always arrived a few weeks late, but which Boris read scrupulously, all the way through. With a Social Democrat or socialist slant, the Forverts was the only newspaper that Boris read, in spite of the fact that he could read other languages and that the news in Yiddish always arrived a few weeks after the events being covered.

  Yiddish in America occupied a place somewhat different from what it had for Boris and Tania in Ukraine. There were Ukrainian and Romanian Jews in the capitals and provincial cities of Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama, and some even came from the very same villages in Eastern Europe. Nova Sulitza, for example, sent migrants to Lima, Caracas, and Bogotá, but also Cumaná, Cali, Cerro de Pasco, and Huancayo, not to mention Philadelphia and other US destinations. There were people from Czernowitz in all of those places as well. According to what Alvarez Gardeazábal has told me, Tuluá had a market called “Ucrania” (which, to be clear, did not belong to Boris). Such a geographically dispersed but socially connected diaspora still had some intimate uses for Yiddish, even beyond their interest in maintaining connections with the truly large Ashkenazi communities in Buenos Aires or New York, for example.

  Within Latin American cities, there were some attempts, usually unsuccessful, to create Yiddish-speaking communities that might have the same vitality that the language had in towns and cities of Eastern Europe. In fact, the work history of my grandfather Misha in Colombia is in part the story of the failure to construct a robust speech community. Misha founded the Jewish school in Cali (the Jorge Isaacs), and he also attempted to found one in Bogotá. Both efforts encountered serious difficulties in the 1930s and 1940s. Why was this so?

  In his 1937 call to form a Jewish school in Bogotá that would teach Hebrew and Yiddish, Guberek mentions as a cause of past failures a certain disunity in the community.172 That may well be, but it is also likely that the small size of the community played a larger part: it was difficult for such a project, which required teachers for all grades, to be economically viable with such a small population.

  Besides, there were other reasons for the Jewish community to communicate in Spanish, even internally. The newspaper Nuestra Tribuna comes to mind. It was published in Spanish even during the 1930s, when the whole of Colombia’s Jewish community still spoke Yiddish and many still spoke broken Spanish. The journal’s editors even went to the trouble of translating Yiddish articles into Spanish. Why worry about presenting everything in correct Spanish? Why did the Jewish community of Bogotá not publish something like the Forverts in Yiddish?

  I think the decision was prompted by two different factors. First, the community was concerned with tightening its bonds with non-Jewish allies. Nuestra Tribuna published a fair amount of copy on Colombian topics, learned articles on the history and archaeology of the country, and it adopted a generally patriotic attitude toward Colombia. Indeed, my grandfather’s learned Americanism served the community’s effort to strengthen these connections very well.

  The second factor may have been connected to the difficulty associated with developing a Yiddish education for the younger members of the community who were born or raised in Colombia. There were not the necessary resources to institutionalize a formal Jewish education, which meant that all the young people were being educated in Spanish-speaking schools. My mother, for example, who was among the first generation of Colombian Jews, went to Catholic schools and public high schools in which she was consistently the only non-Catholic in the class. She understood Yiddish, but she didn’t speak it, nor did she know how to read it.

  In this way, Yiddish became a generational trait and an oral language. The uses of proficiency in Yiddish to mark an “insider” and an “outsider” began to vary substantially, until it finally arrived at cases such as that of my brothers and me, who only know a few words (mensch, chutzpah, mishugge, etc.), a number of which are now even part of regular American English (though not of Spanish). What remains for us are the ruins of my grandparents’ native language; words that enrich whatever high-prestige language we speak — whether this be Spanish, English, French, or whatever — but, like any ruin, those words also mark a genealogy.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Need for a New World

  Nuevo Mundo

  One year after the death of my great-grandmother Tania, Nuevo Mundo appeared in Medellín, edited and administered by Dr. Miguel Adler (Edificio Jenaro Gutiérrez, Office no. 204; telephone number 175.38). The magazine was part of a larger business owned by my grandparents called Nuevo Mundo (New World), which presented itself as a distributor of books, periodicals, and art objects. They had tried to get it running from Bogotá in 1938, but with no success. Of those first attempts, there is only a 1938 letter written on letterhead that reads,

  Nuevo Mundo

  Monthly Journal

  Director Dr. Miguel Adler

  Bogotá, Colombia

  and that also states the business address as “Carrera 13-A No. 27-00.”

  It is thus not entirely clear whether Misha managed to produce anything in Bogotá in 1938 or not, but the magazine that appeared in Medellín is listed as the first issue of the first volume of the journal, and in no place does it say that this is a new series, so I suppose that the project was planned out in 1938 but that it did not manage to materialize until 1942.

  The first issue of Nuevo Mundo, with a photo on the cover of Augustín Tisoy Jacanamijoy, and a smaller image of José Carlos Mariátegui.

  On the title page of the first issue, there is an editorial titled “Norms and Purpose,” in which Nuevo Mundo presents itself as an antifascist publication, and then characterizes itself in the following way: “This is an open forum for all ideas, in accordance with the statement of Saint-Just: ‘Freedom for everything and all people, except for the enemies of freedom.’ ”173

  The cover of the first issue of the journal partook of the celebrations then taking place in Colombia on April 19 for the “Day of the Indigenous.” It has a photo of Agustín Tisoy, a young man from the Putumayo who, “as the son of a free Colombia, as a member of an aboriginal ethnic group, and as a practicing Catholic, knows that the Nazis threaten the independence of all weaker groups, the freedom of races they refer to as ‘inferior,’ and the sacred right of faith. For this reason, he appears making the Democratic salute of ‘V for victory.’ ”174

  According to my mother, Agustín Tisoy Jacanamijoy was a young Indian from the jungles of the Putumayo who sold native crafts in the streets of Medellín, and with whom Misha had entered into conversat
ion. One of my grandfather’s specialties was talking to all sorts of people, and in that conversation, Agustín mentioned that he wished to become a lawyer in order to defend his people. In a characteristic gesture, Misha brought him to live in his house and put him “under scholarship,” that is, he housed and fed Agustín for a year so that he could study. Larissa remembers that she, an eleven-year-old girl, and Agustín, who might have been around eighteen, would sit together at the dining room table to do their homework.

  In his introductory editorial, Misha wrote, “In our times, when the outdated nationalist systems of old Europe have capsized in a sea of blood, barbarity, and ignominy, the concept of what should be understood by New World (Nuevo Mundo) acquires for all Americans — and for Americanized Europeans who have arrived in this hemisphere in a search for liberty and refuge — a deeper and more transcendent sense than that held by the explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”175

  Misha’s Americanism had grown in rich soil: at José Carlos Mariátegui’s Red Corner and at the Universidad de San Marcos, at the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris with Paul Rivet, and especially in his extensive experience of the city and the country in Peru and Colombia. Now his Americanism took on world-historical relevance as an image of a possible collective future, in the face of Europe’s self-destruction.