Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  “America,” he continued, “is the laboratory in which a modern modality of human coexistence is put to the test. Here the blood of all the races is mixed, and a formidable block of nations is now being formed that will try to make their borders not barriers but rather conduits of exchange.” He later closed with:

  As long as there exists the danger that a fascist system will alter the rhythm of general progress, clutching in its claws a Europe that is enslaved by terror and imperialist exploitation, and as long as the already outdated methods of colonial domination exist in the most remote parts of the globe, the young American civilization will not be safe, nor will it advance with the speed and breadth that it might gain in a world where no peoples or persons are deprived of liberty.

  The main point of Misha’s inaugural essay — and of the publication as a whole — was to “maintain a combative stance in the most noble and elevated sense of the term: serving as an offensive and defensive weapon in the fight that all free people sustain against Nazi-fascist barbarity, and to contribute in this way to the universal triumph of democracy.” This was the Americanism of my grandfather in its maximalist expression.

  Agustín Tisoy Jacanamijoy

  On the third page of the first issue of Nuevo Mundo, reserved for advertisements that covered publication costs, there appears an ad for Piel Roja (Redskin) cigarettes, with the slogan, “It attracts us all.” No doubt. The pull of the native was strong and widely disseminated in Colombia.

  Advertisement in Nuevo Mundo, April 1943.

  According to a brief story in Nuevo Mundo, Agustín Tisoy had enrolled as a freshman in the Universidad de Antioquia, “the first time in this institution that a man of pure native blood has arrived in its classrooms in search of instruction.”176 The story continues, stating that, after meeting him on the streets of Medellín, Misha helped Agustín to enroll in the university. “This indigenous student embodies the Greek ideal of health: a healthy mind in a healthy body. He is vigorous, intelligent, observant, and unassuming; there is nothing boastful or servile about him; he is free from any inferiority complex. He knows that he can rise through his studies, and he is fully dedicated to his cultural development.” Agustín was, in essence, the Americanist (and socialist) ideal of the new man.

  Misha Adler, Agustín Tisoy, and two unidentified companions facing the future, in an Americanist photograph that imitates the aesthetic of Eisenstein. Medellín, 1943.

  Agustín also published a piece in Nuevo Mundo, where he tells the story of his village, Santiago, and the region where it is located, the Sibundoy Valley, in the Putumayo. He explains that the indigenous people of the Putumayo River are called “Ingas” and are descendants of Peruvian Incas.177 The grandeur of the Incas found a refuge in the Colombian Amazon. This way of making the past live in the present is something that brought Misha and Agustín together, because it takes the characteristic form of Jewish messianism.

  Each year during Passover, Jews commemorate their liberation from slavery — the departure from Egypt, the leadership of Moses. During Passover dinner, it is customary to explain to children the reasons for the celebration. All the pedagogical emphasis that characterizes Judaism is concentrated in those explanations. At one point in the ritual, the Haggadah presents the questions that four different types of children might be tempted to ask around the Passover feast: these four types are the learned child, the bad child, the foolish child, and the child who does not know how to ask.

  The bad child’s question is, “Why do you do these things?” And the answer is: “I do it because of what God did for me when he freed us from Egypt.” For me and not for you, because if the bad child had been in Egypt, God would not have freed him. That is a good example of messianic time, in which the acts of the past are always powerful, living examples. Redemption in the past is a sign of a redemption that is yet to come.

  Agustín Tisoy was an indigenous Inga, from the Sibundoy Valley. The Inga are Quechua speakers, and it is said that they descend from the Inca Huayna Cápac. For my grandfather, this story revived the past in the present, and offered hope for redeeming it. The fact that the Incas’ hidden descendants were alive and well provided an opening for a “New World” that would no longer be characterized by colonial exploitation but rather by a mode of coexistence in which “the blood of all the races is mixed,” and borders are “not barriers but rather conduits of exchange.” In this way, for my grandfather, Agustín Tisoy’s wish to study law in order to defend his people was a sign that the search for universal redemption through illumination and translation was well under way. For my grandfather, America was a laboratory in which the language of paradise could be developed, and might well come to life once again.

  The second issue

  I don’t know if my grandparents managed to publish more than the two issues of Nuevo Mundo that are still in my family’s possession. My mother helped her mother put copies in labeled envelopes and mail them as “exchange” to various contacts in Latin American capitals, but despite their efforts, it is practically impossible to find any trace of the publication in any library today. I couldn’t even find Nuevo Mundo in WorldCat, the digital library catalog that brings together data from university libraries all across the United States and Europe.

  The second issue of Nuevo Mundo appeared in June 1943, and we know, through a letter from Agustín Tisoy to my grandfather, that my grandparents had left Medellín before November of that year. As it was a periodical that was meant to appear three times a year, it is not impossible that there was a third issue, corresponding to September 1943.

  Cover of the second issue of Nuevo Mundo, June 1943.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Limits of Adaptation

  Colombian-Soviet friendship

  Nuevo Mundo was relatively successful, I think. For instance, in Medellín, Misha befriended Adolfo Restrepo, son of a former Colombian president, director of an important textile mill, and a militant anti-Nazi activist. It was perhaps because of this connection that Misha was invited to give a speech before the full Congress of Antioquia, arguing for Colombia’s entry into the war.

  Despite all this good work, though, my grandparents were compelled to shut down Nuevo Mundo in late 1943 and move to Bogotá, where Misha would work as the director of the Institute for Colombian-Soviet Friendship, created to bring these two countries together within the broader context of the Second World War. As a speaker of Russian, an Americanist trained and credentialed in Paris, and the author of a dissertation on Karl Marx, Misha was well qualified to carry out this work. The institute offered Russian lessons, taught by Misha and Noemí, and both of them also did work in translation from Russian to Spanish and vice versa.

  When I learned that Misha served as director of the Institute for Colombian-Soviet Friendship, I thought that he must have been a member of the Communist Party, despite my family’s strenuous claims to the contrary. There are clues that support my suspicions. In Repertorio Hebreo, for example, Misha published defenses of the Soviet Union, as we have seen. My mother also remembers that a number of Colombian communists would come to the house, including a man named Augusto Durán, who (according to her recollection) was married to Dina Chosnik, a Jewish woman and friend of her parents’.178 Doing a bit of research, I was able to confirm that Durán became secretary-general of the Communist Party of Colombia in 1938.

  On the other hand, there is also evidence that supports my family’s version of things. My grandparents were mariateguistas, and José Carlos Mariátegui had a complicated relationship with the Komintern, a fact that delayed the formation of the Communist Party in Peru.179 On the other hand, Paul Rivet’s example in the French Socialist Party and in an Anti-Fascist Defense League that promoted the formation of a wide front may have offered a more congenial position to Misha, especially in his Colombian circumstances.

  In the end, there is one persuasive piece of informati
on that convinced me that Misha and Noemí had not been members of the Colombian Communist Party. This is that in 1937, during the time of Stalin’s worst persecutions against Leon Trotsky, Nuestra Tribuna, where my grandfather served as an editorial assistant, approvingly published the following note: “In an interview given to a representative of the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Leon Trotsky declared that Jews need their own homeland. In the same interview, Trotsky accused the Soviet government of anti-Semitism.”180

  A positive mention of Trotsky, and an accusation of anti-Semitism against the Soviet Union, published in 1937, is not imaginable from any member of the Communist Party, even though my grandparents supported the Soviet Union in the context of the war and were friends with prominent Colombian communists who were indeed members of the party. I shared this hypothesis with Professor Victor Jeifets of the Russian Academy of Science, a specialist in the history of the Komintern in the Americas and author of a biographical dictionary of relevant figures that includes an entry for “Miguel Adler,” and he agreed with my conclusion, although there is still uncertainty in the case, because the Institute for Colombian-Soviet Friendship was destroyed during the Bogotazo riots of 1948.181

  Party member or not, though, the Soviet embassy felt sufficient confidence in Misha’s loyalties to ask that he help consolidate cultural relations with Colombia. And of course Misha was loyal to them. After the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, in February 1943, the Red Army went on the offensive on the Eastern front, and so the Soviets became first and foremost the force of liberation that kept alive Misha’s hope of still finding his parents alive.

  Birobidzhan

  For his work teaching Russian, translating, and other activities, Misha received a salary from the Soviet embassy. From that era, my mother remembered especially an embassy employee, a Mr. Antipov, who was a pleasant man and a friend of the family. But we enter into a blurry and polemical region of my family’s history here, because the memories of these times were Larissa’s alone — she was the oldest of her siblings — and they refer to an uncertain date. Even so, I think that it must have been right after the end of the war or perhaps a little earlier, maybe the end of 1944, when Ukraine and Romania had already been liberated, but before Misha came to know of the treatment that the people of Nova Sulitza received as subjects of the Soviet Union.

  Larissa remembers that her parents had applied for a visa so that the family might return to the Soviet Union.

  “What?” (This was my reaction upon hearing the story.) My mother then explained to me that, at a certain point, her parents decided to try to move to Birobidzhan, the “Jewish Republic” that Stalin established near the Soviet border with Manchuria.

  I confess that I had to read up on the place, since I had never heard of it until that point. Birobidzhan’s history is related on one hand to the complex trajectory that the question of nationalities had in the Soviet Union, and on the other with the anti-Semitism of the Stalin era, the Yiddishism that existed in the Soviet Union, and also the death of millions of Soviet Jews during the war. I’ll provide here a thumbnail outline of that story, to explain what was at stake.

  After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union implemented a genuinely innovative policy regarding nationalities. The historian Terry Martin characterizes it as an “empire of affirmative action,” because the Soviet Union was the first case of a republic concerned with providing political, linguistic, and cultural representation to each of the “nationalities” that existed in its vast territory.182 As we have seen, Lenin considered the emancipation of repressed nationalities to be a necessary step on the path to universal socialist emancipation, and for that reason, the Soviet Union was conceived of as a union of “republics,” formed in principle to recognize each one of the nationalities that composed the vast territory of the former Russian Empire. Each republic would be governed as a “Soviet,” in other words as a communist council.

  In this context, the international borders of the Soviet Union immediately became especially sensitive zones, because there were many communities from a single “nationality” that spread across international borders. This issue was especially difficult in the densely populated western borders of the Soviet Union, where there were Polish speakers on the Soviet and Polish sides of the border, Lithuanians on both sides of the same border, speakers of Ukrainian on the Soviet and Romanian sides, speakers of Yiddish that stretched across the Soviet, Romanian, Lithuanian, and Polish borders, speakers of German on the Soviet and Polish sides of the border, speakers of Armenian on the Turkish and Soviet sides of the border, and so on.

  In the 1920s, the communist government used its innovative policy on national minorities as a propaganda tool. Martin summarizes the strategy in the following way: “now on the Western border the Soviet Union divided the ethnic territory of Finns, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Romanians. Given this, they had the hope that an ostentatiously generous treatment of these ethnicities within the Soviet Union might attract their compatriots from Poland, Finland, and Romania.”183

  The policy, known as korenizatsiia, or “indigenization,” had positive results, because of which the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina tended to maintain an agnostic and at times a positive attitude toward the Soviet Union, in spite of their fear of communism. In the end, the Soviet Union was the only country whose government financed schools in Yiddish and also economically supported publishing houses, courts, and municipal councils that operated in that language.184 Indeed, there existed an enormous contrast between the Soviet policy of nationalities and the anti-Semitism that the Polish or Romanian states encouraged.185 This impacted Misha, who, as we have seen, argued in 1929 that “a true miracle has occurred with the October Revolution with respect to our Jewish problem.”186

  During the 1920s, and taking advantage of the positive results of korenizatsiia, the Soviet government asked the League of Nations to allow a plebiscite in Bessarabia to determine if the population preferred to return to the Soviet Union and thus reject Romanian annexation.187 The Romanian government never permitted such a plebiscite, and it instead projected its anti-Soviet sentiment on the Jews, who were represented as “Russian propagandists capable of anything to harm our state.”188 The belief that Jews were communist agents became a given in Romania.189 On the other hand, the Romanians had not done much to gain the loyalty of the Jewish population of Bessarabia, and even those who proudly identified themselves as Romanians of the “Old Kingdom” were the object of skeptical incredulity and not infrequent insults, as we saw in the case of Mihail Sebastian.

  The pamphlet “On the Struggle against Anti-Semitism in the Schools,” published by the Popular Commissariat for the Illumination of the Socialist and Federal Soviet Republic, 1929.

  The Soviet policy against anti-Semitism remained in place throughout the 1920s and, although to a lesser degree, the 1930s. It is certainly true that anti-Semitism — even official anti-Semitism — did not end with the Russian Revolution; but the official critique of anti-Semitism had very palpable effects nonetheless. In her study of the history of anti-Semitism in the border region between Romania and Ukraine, Dumitru shows that the common folk — peasants, artisans, and the people in general — in Bessarabia and Bukovina participated on a massive scale in the robbery, rape, murder, and genocide of the Jewish population, while the Ukrainian population, on the other side of the Soviet border, did not: “there is no evidence of episodes of collective violence against Jews in any of the villages, towns, or cities of Transnistria. Neither the testimony of survivors, nor government records — not even secondary sources — report this sort of event.”190 In other words, the Soviet state’s efforts to uproot anti-Semitism had a marked effect, a fact that became quite conspicuous after 1941, during the Nazi occupation, when peasants on either side of the old Soviet border were given a green light to kill and rob Jews.

  Even with all of these efforts to recognize and protect national minorities, the question of cr
eating a Jewish republic within the Soviet Union was problematic for Stalin, for various reasons. To begin with, in order to establish a national republic, there had to be a territory associated with that nationality. In the case of the Jews, this presented a serious difficulty, because the Jewish population of the Russian Empire had been concentrated in a Pale of Settlement that stretched across the entire western fringe of the Soviet Union, beginning in the north in Lithuania, passing through the annexed provinces of Poland (Galicia and Belarus), and down to Ukraine and Bessarabia in the south. It was an enormous territory, and of great strategic importance, given that it touched the borders of various other military powers (Finland, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Turkey…).

  The second problem was that Jews lived in urban areas that were surrounded by peasants who belonged to some other ethnic group: Moldovans, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians. It would be difficult to empty out the countryside of these nationalities in order to hand over land to the Jews.

  The third complication had to do with anti-Semitism, international support for Jews, and Soviet realpolitik. Although Soviet policy condemned anti-Semitism, it was a widespread phenomenon that had been promoted over centuries by the Orthodox Church and the czars, and it continued to be politically useful. Having a ready-made scapegoat at hand is never an easy resource for politicians to abandon, and both Stalin and his successors made use of it. Moreover, because the Jews had defenders beyond Soviet borders — notably in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States — they could be used as a bargaining chip for negotiations on the international stage. In a context of totalitarian oppression, the Jews could be (and sometimes were) treated as hostages when the opportunity arose.