For these reasons, Stalin did not want to establish a republic or oblast (administrative province) in Crimea or in any of the other areas of majority Jewish population; instead he declared in 1928 that Birobidzhan would be a Jewish district (raion), even though that territory had no Jewish population and was located thousands of miles away from the old Pale of Settlement. In 1934, Stalin granted the territory the status of oblast, and from that time forward, Birobidzhan was considered the “Judeo-Soviet homeland,” although it never managed to bring together more than thirty thousand Jews to live there, compared with the almost three million who lived in the Soviet Union before the Second World War, and the approximately one million Jews who survived the war. Robert Weinberg wrote a book about Birobidzhan, a small region on the Chinese border that was far from anything and lacking everything.191 And yet, at a certain point, my grandparents considered moving there. Why?
Reasons
To be perfectly honest, we will now never know what was behind my family’s Birobidzhan pipe dream. My mother says that she and her parents spent four months waiting for the Soviet visa, and that in the end, Antipov came to my grandparents’ house to inform them that their application had been denied. Given the friendship between my grandfather and Antipov, it doesn’t seem impossible that Antipov secretly decided to save my family the misery of moving to Birobidzhan and simply “forgot” to submit their application. If that is what happened, then may God bless Mr. Antipov!
Weinberg’s book provides information about what happened to Jewish intellectuals who supported the move to Birobidzhan.192 They were, for the most part, Yiddishists who felt a certain ambivalence about reviving Hebrew as a national language, and in the context of the extermination of European Jews, decided to support the formation of a Jewish homeland near the Soviet border with China. The majority of the most prominent of these intellectuals were in the end tried, sentenced, and executed by Stalin. Should they have moved to Birobidzhan, it seems rather likely that my grandfather too would have been marginalized and surveilled as an example of the much criticized “cosmopolitan Jew” (especially given his interest in Hebrew) and finally targeted by one of Stalin’s purges.
How could it have occurred to a man who was not even a member of the Communist Party to try his family’s luck in such a remote place? Here I have nothing but speculation. Indeed, not even the plan to go to Birobidzhan is verifiable, beyond the memory of my mother. Her brother Manuel, who was nine or ten at the time, neither remembers waiting for the Soviet visa nor believes that such a plan was possible. In the end, he says, Misha was always a Zionist. His plan was to go to Palestine, not the Soviet Union.
Manuel’s argument seems reasonable, but Larissa’s recollection could not have emerged from nothing. Her memories, although blurry in some aspects, were also very precise: she remembered the names of the communists who visited her parents’ house, as well as the name and even the face and gestures of the Soviet official who told them their visa had been denied. She remembered that the idea of a visa was motivated by a projected move Birobidzhan, which was an improbable and almost unknown place, and so a detail that was difficult to make up.
My own opinion is that the idea of moving to Birobidzhan was very real, and that there was, even if for a brief time, an earnest exploration of the possibility of moving there. But how to explain that such an outlandish idea could have been entertained by a family that was living in Colombia? Let me try my hand at an explanation.
The year must have been 1945 or maybe the end of 1944. If the war was not yet over, at the very least the advance of the Allies was now clearly unstoppable; or maybe the idea emerged immediately after Hitler’s demise, but before the end of the war in the Pacific. I’m not sure, but at that time, Misha and Noemí still had no news at all from Nova Sulitza — they hadn’t had direct information from the place since the Soviet annexation, in 1940. So they didn’t even know if Misha’s parents still lived or had died. They also didn’t know whether Shura was still alive. And there were other relatives, too, whose names I may never know, but whose faces remained in photos like this one of Leah and her sisters.
On the left, Leah Altman de Adler. To her right, three sisters whose names and fates I do not know. It’s not impossible that all of them died in Transnistria.
Besides this, Misha had spent one or two years working as the director of the Institute for Colombian-Soviet Friendship, and during that time he had access to Soviet propaganda and forged friendships with high-ranking members of the Colombian Communist Party, as well as with personnel from the Soviet delegation. Misha and Noemí had no ambivalence at that time with respect to who were the good guys and who were the bad guys in the Great Struggle. It was true that there had been a pact between Stalin and Hitler, but it seemed perhaps justifiable in the face of Hitler’s overwhelming military power; and after the war with the Soviet Union finally started, it was the Russians who managed to halt the German advance, something that nobody else had been able to do. The Russians had fought and won savage and devastating battles, like the Siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad. The Red Army was a liberating force, there was no two ways about that.
To this, one must add the policy of nationalities that had caught Misha’s attention since the last years of his youth. Given that Misha and Noemí both spoke fluent Russian, and the friendship that still prevailed among the Allies, I imagine that they thought that, no matter how remote or inhospitable the place might be, the “Judeo-Soviet homeland” could be a viable place in which to find and reunite their lost family members and then live in a Jewish cultural context.
Agustín Tisoy II
My family has in its possession a letter from Agustín Tisoy, dated December 11, 1943, from Santiago (Sibundoy Valley, in the Putumayo), directed to Dr. Miguel Adler, and written with excellent penmanship, with no lines crossed or words scratched out. It reads as follows:
My dear and most remembered Godfather:
If you are well and together with your family, this fills me with pleasure. I am well.
I am writing to you to express my gratitude for the honorable and complete manner in which you concerned yourself with my studies.
On November 30, I left Medellín to go to Putumayo, and on December 4, I arrived in the Sibundoy Valley, where I was well received. Everybody was so happy and quizzed me about life in the city, and they also asked about you and my godmother, and they all send their regards.
I did very well in my studies at the University of Antioquia; I received an award for my final exams, and I earned excellent grades this year; now some of my neighbors also wish to begin their studies.
I will continue studying at the University of Antioquia; but I also very fondly ask you after some years that you help me to transfer to Bogotá or to the United States.
This coming year I will finish the Ynga grammar, and I’ll be very pleased to send it to my godmother Doña Elisa Noemí so that we might publish it.
I need a few copies of Nuevo Mundo, should you consider it possible to send them to me — the issue with my picture on the front.
In the name of my tribe, greetings to the entire family, especially to my godmother, and my thoughts and best wishes.
It is my pleasure once again to express my sincere gratitude for all your help.
Yours very truly,
Agustín Tisoy J.
This letter is interesting for a number of reasons. Agustín expresses his desire to continue his studies, which implies emigrating, ideally no longer to Medellín, but to Bogotá or even the United States. He wishes to continue educating himself in order to deepen his study and writing on his people. He mentions the project of developing an Ynga grammar, to be published through Misha. At the same time, he asks for a few copies of the issue of Nuevo Mundo that has his picture on the cover.
The letter also reflects the tensions that are associated with cultural mediation that n
ative intellectuals have borne throughout Latin America: it becomes hard to stay in the native village, but also impossible to leave without deepening one’s identification with it. Agustín wanted to leave, and he wanted to write Ynga grammars. In the person of an intellectual figure of great stature, like the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, such tensions brought about the birth of new literary inventions, written in a Spanish that was markedly impacted by Quechua. But this sort of creative leap is very difficult to achieve indeed, and Agustín perhaps did not know how, or maybe he did not wish to make it.
The last news that my family received of Agustín Tisoy was that, thanks to his high level of education, and maybe even bolstered by his capacity to represent his people, demonstrated on the cover and in the pages of Nuevo Mundo, Agustín rose to the rank of cacique, and became a local political boss. In that lonely context, he then turned to alcohol. This was the difficult end of the young man who my grandfather believed might represent all of the pent-up potential of the New World.
The final period
In 1945 or 1946, Misha became gravely ill with typhoid fever, and was for a time on the brink of death. He was saved only by the recent discovery of penicillin. Even so, he was bedridden for several months, a situation that the Soviet legation took advantage of to sever its contract with him, without any workers’ compensation that might help his family through such a difficult moment. Afterward, Misha’s delicate health forced him to leave Bogotá. The family went to live in Sogamoso, a city not far from Medellín, that had the special benefit of being near the curative baths at Paipa, which my grandfather frequented regularly, following the doctors’ orders.
My mother says that this episode marked the origin of her anticommunism: the absolute lack of solidarity on the part of the communists with the people who had been loyal to them. She also mentioned a second factor: she did not like the way in which the elite members of the Colombian Communist Party treated their servants. Larissa would have been around thirteen years old at this time: old enough to sniff out the hypocritical distance that existed between grand claims and intimate practice, and also mature enough to understand and suffer the precarious condition in which the Soviet embassy had left her parents.
The family went to Sogamoso, and my grandparents opened up a store in the Central Plaza there, across from the church: the Almacén del Día. This establishment distributed a variety of products, frequently purchased from providers who were friends, and that ranged from knitting wool to ornaments of Mexican onyx. Their real strength, though, was vinyl records, and they also sold RCA-Victor record players. It was thanks to those records, which ranchers from the region purchased, that my mother learned much of the popular music that she sang to us throughout her life.
Advertisement for Almacén del Día in Grancolombia, July 1947.
One difficulty that came with moving out of Bogotá was that Larissa was still in high school, and Sogamoso had no secondary school for girls. The solution was typical of my grandparents, who never had money but always had friends. So Misha spoke to the director of the boys’ high school, who was a Liberal, and managed (why not?) to enroll Larissa in his school as its only female student. The memory of this experience was one of my mother’s favorite stories: the image of herself at fourteen, on the first day of class at an all-boys’ school. The rumor of her entrance had already spread through the entire town. She would have to walk up an ample staircase to the school’s second floor, which allowed the boys, who gathered in the patio to witness and comment on her entrance, to see her legs.
As the story went, the teachers gave Larissa the key to their bathroom, so that she didn’t have to share that with her classmates. And the faculty soon noticed that the boys started to behave better than usual, because a young lady was present, and they felt grateful for the positive effect that my mother’s presence had on the other students. Larissa soon became Miss Popularity at her high school, and she was even presented as the school’s candidate for Queen of Spring.
This is a story that I heard since my childhood, including its more or less predictable denouement: Colombia still had its agreement with the Vatican that prohibited mixed education in public schools, and someone from one of the “good families” of Sogamoso complained about the presence of a young girl at the school. Since the director defended his decision to admit her — with support, besides, from teachers and students — the case went to the Ministry of Education. The government at that time was Liberal, so the file made its way up to the desk of the minister of education himself, who, in spite of his own best instincts, found himself compelled to comply with the terms of the Vatican accord.
Larissa thus had to leave Sogamozo for Bogotá at the start of the following school year. The American School in Bogotá was mixed-sex, and so an adequate place for Larissa’s education. By 1947, my grandfather’s romance with the Soviet Union had ended, because news of Stalin’s purges had finally reached him, and also because of his own experience with the embassy, but above all due to the accounts of people from Nova Sulitza who had survived the war. Totalitarianism could not be defended by a libertarian like my grandfather, who cited Saint-Just to justify his work on Nuevo Mundo. Together with the Soviet Union, the Americans had also been the great rescuers of Europe and of European Jewry. My grandparents thus had a positive attitude toward the United States, making it acceptable for Larissa to study at the American School.
My grandmother went to the capital and dropped off her only daughter, who was fifteen years old, at the house of a woman who had survived the Holocaust and who had arrived recently in Bogotá alone and very traumatized. The woman almost didn’t speak at all, but she rented out a room to my mother. Before leaving her, Noemí told Larissa that she would never leave her alone in Bogotá if she did not believe Larissa to be an extraordinarily mature and responsible young woman. I think that this sense of premature responsibility, forged in a context of chronic precariousness, was also very present in my own upbringing.
Like her father when he arrived in Lima, Larissa dealt with her situation by making friends, and she ended up finding two excellent ones: Marcos Tychbrocher and Gerardo Gunsburger. They picked her up every day in the morning on the way to school and walked her home every afternoon. They went to the movies together. The three were inseparable.
Larissa with Gerardo Gunsburger, in a signed farewell photo. Bogotá, c. 1949.
Grancolombia
In July 1947, a date that was selected to coincide with Colombian independence, my grandfather launched yet another weekly periodical printed on newspaper stock that was titled Grancolombia. It was a publication that supported “the solidarity and the culture of the neighboring countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama.” It was also “the authentic voice of the Jewish community of [Colombia], in the service of Jews around the world, of peace, of universal brotherhood, and justice toward every human.”193
Grancolombia sought to create its own special niche: there was at that time no periodical in Colombia focused on Jewish culture, and I’m not sure if there were any in the other countries included in its scope. My grandfather had the recognition and the personal connections required to attract Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals from all of these countries, as well as collaborations from other South American countries, notably Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. Grancolombia wanted to be a collaborative space for Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. In this regard, it continued the spirit and idea that my grandfather had nursed since the publication of Repertorio Hebreo, and which he summarized in his opening editorial, stating that “our publication is an open tribune. The thought of free people will be favorably welcomed and respected in our pages…We wish to approach with great warmth the youth of these countries, and for them, Jews and non-Jews, we offer this journal, Grancolombia.”194
The effort to create a medium of dialogue between Jews and non-Jews was carried forth from various different angles. I
n social terms, it mattered that Grancolombia stepped into a recognizable intellectual space, and not just any member of the Jewish community of Bogotá could have achieved this. In the first issue of the periodical, Misha situates himself in the local intellectual field: “Upon entering the family of American journalists,” he writes, “I aspire to continue my defense of the democratic cause as I have done in Europe and also in this country from the space of my intellectual activities.”195 And he continued from here to name his intellectual associates and partners, from the cities of Medellín, Bogotá, and Caracas: Abel Naranjo Villegas, Otto Morales Benítez, Julio César Arroyave, Fernando González, Baldomero Sanín Cano, Luis Vidales, Armando Solano…The list is long, and with the exception of two names (Germán Arciniegas and Rómulo Gallegos), it was completely unknown to me, as I know little of Colombia. So I showed it to my friend María Victoria Uribe, a distinguished Colombian anthropologist, who did me the favor of identifying each one of the people mentioned. She later characterized the list as a whole in the following terms: “Your grandfather associated with the best-known Colombian intellectuals of the time, many of them Liberals, some freethinkers, and others communists.”196 This was the network of friends that Misha wanted to attract and bring into the pages of Grancolombia.
Bogotazo
On April 9, 1948, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Liberal Party presidential candidate and champion of the downtrodden, was murdered. This assassination produced expressions of collective grief and distress that are reminiscent in some ways of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and they sparked a day of enraged rioting, looting, and destruction — known as the Bogotazo — that was followed by the nation’s descent into a ten-year spiral of violence, known as La Violencia, ostensibly between Gaitán’s peasant supporters and their opponents in the Conservative Party. Gaitán was a popular leader whose platform converged with that of the Mexican Revolution — agrarian reform, anti-imperialism, defense of the workers. His assassination fractured Colombian political life for decades, maybe even into the present. For this reason, Colombians still think of the Bogotazo as a turning point in the nation’s history, a moment that left a very deep mark.
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