Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  My mother was at school that day, but when Gaitán was murdered it was immediately closed and all the children were sent home. Accompanied as always by Marcos and Gerardo, Larissa witnessed looting and the closing of the city firsthand. She then had the presence of mind to go with her friends to a radio station that was sending news to the people of Bogotá and to their relatives in the provinces. Telephone lines had been cut and transportation was interrupted. For all intents and purposes, the capital had been cut off from the world, so that only the radio remained to let family in the provinces know that you were safe. My mother sent a message to Tuluá saying that she was fine.

  Some of Boris’s neighbors heard the news, and they went over to his house to tell everyone. Misha, for some reason, had set off for Bogotá precisely on April 9, but he got stuck on the way. Meanwhile, my mother went to the building in which her uncle Zuñe (Misha’s brother) and her aunt Pupe (Noemí’s sister) lived. For reasons that I still don’t understand, neither of them was especially concerned about her situation, and they let Larissa return to the place where she was staying. Walking along the streets of Bogotá, my mother ran into a naval officer who knew the family from Sogamoso; he greeted her affectionately, and expressed concern that she was alone in the city. She explained to him that she was trying to get to Tuluá, and he accompanied her to the airport and arranged air transport to Cali. From there, my mother took the train to Tuluá, and arrived at her grandfather’s house safe and sound and without further trouble.

  This is the history that I have about my family during the Bogotazo. A trivial anecdote maybe, and thankfully one without any great consequences. Nevertheless, the Bogotazo and the endemic violence that followed it is part of the backdrop for my family’s history during its final years in Colombia.

  Why emigrate?

  From the time of the Repertorio Hebreo, my grandparents’ work had a Zionist element, but it accelerated strongly after the end of the war and with the chaos in which it left both the Jewish world and Europe. In this sense, their decision to leave for Israel immediately after receiving the news of its independence seems perfectly consequential. The attraction of Eretz Israel, the idea of having one’s own place, one’s own language, a history and a culture that could be upheld common; the idea of being able to construct a fully Jewish version of modernity and to regenerate the people after the implacable destruction to which it had been submitted, was a magnet that must have been attractive.

  Nova Sulitza no longer existed except as a network that was scattered throughout the world. Misha’s family members who had remained there were all dead. That entire world was gone. Shura was alive, but the family didn’t know this yet, and in any case, the possibility of returning to the Soviet Union made no sense and no longer held any attraction, besides the fact that their one attempt to gain a visa to go there had failed. Israel truly presented itself as the promised land where the family might establish itself and finally gain some stability.

  Even so, I believe that a decision to emigrate cannot be understood well if one doesn’t consider the dynamics between the place to which one is drawn and the one being left behind. What were my grandparents’ perspectives with regard to this migration out of America? What were they leaving behind? What horizons might now be opened to them? Those are hard questions to answer.

  The existence of the journal Grancolombia in itself indicates at least some ambivalence with respect to the idea of emigrating. It was an ambitious editorial project that looked to the future and was not just a pamphlet designed to convince people to move to Israel. Its ambitions were to open up a discussion in the countries of “Greater Colombia,” in other words, my grandfather developed Grancolombia within a properly South American sphere. As part of the project, Grancolombia announced that its parent company, Ediciones Nuevomundo, would also publish historical monographs on each one of the countries of Greater Colombia. This clearly implied a project extending beyond the short term.

  An ad for Ediciones Nuevomundo, directed by Misha Adler.

  In that same vein (i.e., that of a possible Colombian future), the first issue of Grancolombia announces that beginning in October 1947, the Revista Nuevomundo would now be relaunched, and would now appear on a monthly basis. Grancolombia also loudly announced its section editors and contributors: the journalist Carlos Delgado Nieto; the writer Salomón Brainsky; the historian Gustavo Jiménez Cohen; the artist Antonio Valencia Mejía; Bernardo Jipkevish and Isaac Brener, of the new generation of Colombian Jews; León Klar to edit a section devoted to chess; the writers Enrique Buenaventura, Manuel González Martínez, and Alejandro Vallejo; and the journalists Rafael Rash and Pablo Balcázar, among others.197 My grandfather would hardly have gone to such lengths to gather such a well-regarded crew and announce their collective commitment to the future of Grancolombia had he already taken a firm decision to emigrate. On the contrary, it seems clear that in 1947, when the independence of Israel was already imminent, emigration was not yet a part of my grandfather’s plans.

  One of the factors that may have weighed in favor of emigration was their children’s Jewish education. My grandfather could no longer live in Bogotá, which was at the end of the day the center of the Colombian Jewish community. Larissa had not been able to attend a Jewish school even for one year of her education. There also certainly existed the idea that Jewish children should come to know Israel and develop within an environment that would make them strong. Ilya, the youngest of the family, had been born in August 1945, barely three months after Germany’s surrender. In him, there was new life that needed to be nurtured much more urgently than any impulse to tarry too long over the dead. It was necessary to look to the future. Perhaps the desire to congregate, aggregate, and strengthen oneself is irresistible in a moment like that.

  I don’t think there was a very clear idea of what the economic implications of moving to Israel might have been. Starting over is always hard, and in Colombia, my grandparents had many friends. And while Misha and Noemí weren’t doing very well economically, they at least had a modest survival more or less secure, given their high level of education, the support they could receive from Boris in times of emergency, and the network of relatives and friends that was already successfully established in Bogotá. In Israel, it was possible that this might not be the case. There would be the old friends that they might find from the Romanian Hashomer Hatzair network as well as from South America, obviously, but beyond this there were no guarantees. From an economic perspective, leaving for Israel was a risky decision for a middle-aged couple that had four children to care for.

  Another thing that may have influenced their decision was the violence that began to spread to the Cauca region right after the assassination of Gaitán and the Bogotazo. There were signs and events that may well have worried them. First, diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were cut after the assassination of Gaitán, because of the initial rumor, fed by the right, that both the murder and the riots were the result of a communist plot. The Institute for Colombian-Soviet Friendship was burned down during the riots, and although by 1948 my grandparents were disillusioned with the Soviet Union, they may have felt vulnerable in the face of a rising anticommunist wave. Moreover, some prominent leaders of the Conservative Party were characterizing the Liberal uprising after the Gaitán assassination as a “Judeo-Masonic plot.”198 Misha and Noemí had already left Peru because of that sort of talk. They may not have wanted to continue living in such an environment.

  Also, at the time of the Bogotazo, the family was living in Cali, and there was a Liberal uprising in that city after Gaitán’s assassination that left twenty-five people dead and more than a hundred injured. This was countered in 1949 by the systematic persecution and murder of many members of the Liberal Party.199 My grandparents may have been afraid that this polarization would reduce their possibilities of employment. Or maybe they lost someone they knew. In the end, what political guarantees did they h
ave in Colombia?

  My grandfather’s sense of pride may also have influenced their decision to leave. Over the years, Misha had been forced to ask for help on different occasions. In Peru, in the wake of the Leguía coup, his old shipmates, young “Romanians” like him, had bailed him out. I’m sure that it didn’t pain him especially to receive their help, but in Colombia Misha had been forced more than once to rely on his father-in-law’s largesse. Boris had not been supportive of his beautiful and brilliant oldest daughter’s marriage to a figure as quixotic as my grandfather, nor did he sympathize with the latter’s relatively favorable opinion of the Soviet Union, since Boris and Tania had lost a daughter and several relatives fleeing that regime.

  I can’t imagine that it was easy for Misha to ask his father-in-law for help, even if only occasionally. With the breakout of La Violencia and the accompanying surge of Conservative power in Valle del Cauca, it likely crossed my grandfather’s mind that if the situation in Cali got worse, it might become necessary once again to seek employment through Boris. Leaving for Israel would allow my grandparents to frame the entire Colombian experience as an extended parenthesis, conditioned by war and exile, and it offered that intrepid couple the imagined possibility of a new beginning.

  I enter once again the terrain of speculation here. What I now write isn’t supported by any hard evidence except that it follows a certain logic. In proceeding in this way, I’m well aware that I may be wholly mistaken. In spite of those risks, though, I still would like to offer an interpretation.

  My grandparents were both Zionists from their childhood in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, because of questions of age and the politics of the time, my grandfather didn’t manage to emigrate to Palestine as a young man, and my grandmother was still quite young when her family left for Peru. Although the couple kept alive their Zionist sympathies while they resided in Lima, their time and energy there were spent waging a universal battle, of which Judaism formed but a part. Nevertheless, the death of Mariátegui, imprisonment, and their expulsion from Peru was a blow from which the young couple could not recover easily, in spite of the formal course of study that Misha had been able to undertake in Paris.

  The reason for this is tough to evaluate. It is possible that Misha didn’t have the necessary drive or talent to become a successful intellectual or writer, but such an explanation will always be hard to believe or accept for a grandson who loved him and admired him as much as I did. I think, rather, that circumstances complicated everything for Misha. First, from Paris he had decided to go to Nova Sulitza, where he spent two years trying to get people out. It was an urgent decision, but surely it had a professional cost. Afterward, in emigrating to Colombia, he knew how important it was for Noemí to remain close to her parents, and this is why they settled in Cali rather than Bogotá. Then there was the urgency of establishing Jewish education for the community and the difficulty of setting this up. And, as ever, his antifascist activism. But, above all, their Colombian residency coincided with the years during which they had their children, and Misha and Noemí were obligated to focus on supporting their family. The combination of all of these factors shaped their decision to leave for Israel. The decision represented for them a new beginning, in a land where they would be fully accepted, and where they could and would obtain citizenship. Besides this, perhaps Israel would allow Misha to take up once again the intellectual career that had been interrupted at each step by more practical matters.

  There is, as a matter of fact, a small bit of evidence that supports this interpretation, and it is the letter that Misha wrote to Paul Rivet from Israel in 1953, in which he tells his former teacher that he still hopes to form a Center for American Ethnological Investigation in Israel. The letter begins: “Although I have not lost the hope completely to free myself one day from the hard struggle for my family’s material existence, and to apply yet the energy, curiosity, and limited intellectual capacity that I possess to the Science of Man and the mutual comprehension between the races and peoples of the world.”200

  It is likely that Misha had lost any hope of being able to realize such a project in Colombia, and that his thinking now was that with a bit of luck he might yet be able to straighten out the path that the war had bent and overcome the setbacks he had encountered first in Peru and later in Colombia.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Limits of Translation

  Boris’s associates

  With Tania’s death, Noemí’s father, Boris, returned to Tuluá. He was a hard worker, and he labored from sunup to sundown. He was not one to stir up trouble, nor did he tend to have problems with others. He was, on the contrary, a man who loved his routine. One time, worried about Boris’s health, my uncle Manuel asked his grandfather why he didn’t stop drinking strong coffee and smoking his cigar each morning. Annoyed by the question, Boris gave him a terse response: “I’ve had this routine my entire life, and I’m not going to change it. End of discussion.”201

  I wonder if a zeal for routine was also behind Boris’s decision to remarry. Roughly two years after Tania’s death, Boris married a Jewish widow who was also a Yiddish speaker and the owner of a farm in Palmira. Her name was Luisa Blanc or Blank. But the marriage got off to a rocky start, and they divorced after two years. Shortly afterward, Boris married a different woman, also a widow from the community, a Dora Gutt de Finvarb, and that marriage did last.

  I’ve already said that Boris’s soap mill was essentially a copy of the one that he had run in Mogilev. This in itself can be read as a testament to Boris’s interest in routine, but we could also say, to be more exact, that Boris was intrigued by translation; that is, he was interested in accomplishing in America what he had done in Ukraine. He wanted to change while staying the same. He wanted to run a soap mill and engage in the manufacture and sale of railroad ties in Tuluá as he had in Mogilev; both were small cities that presented no competition for the soap mill, and neither was too far from an important urban center: Odessa in the case of Mogilev, and Cali in the case of Tuluá.

  Of course, there were also opportunities in America that did not exist for Jews in Ukraine, such as owning agricultural land. In fact, once Boris’s Tuluá businesses were set up, he acquired a farm in the nearby town of Río Frío, next to the Fenicia River, that was called Tesorito (Little Treasure). He also provided capital for the first transport company between Fenicia and Tuluá, which he and his partners called Transportes Fenicia.

  Who were Boris’s local contacts? There was, in this too, something of the transfer of his Ukrainian experience to the Colombian context. According to family lore, Boris was known to “have a drink with the goyim” in Ukraine, which is a way of saying that he had formed alliances with non-Jewish Ukrainians and Russians. In Tuluá, too, Boris had solid connections outside of the Jewish community. For example, he bought his house on Calle 31 as well as the lot next to it (on which he built his soap mill and a wood storage facility) from a neighbor, José Obdulio Acevedo. Boris’s Tesorito farm was next to La Graciela, a property also owned by Obdulio Acevedo, and both were partners in Transportes Fenicia, which was created by a small group of partners from Tuluá when the road to Río Frío was built. Boris’s relationship with Obdulio Acevedo would be of great importance during the final years of his life.

  Boris also maintained relationships with the small Jewish communities that had taken root in Tuluá, Buga, Palmira, and Cali. I know very little about these communities (when they arrived, etc.), but according to the information that Alvarez Gardeazábal has provided, there were Jewish families in Tuluá from at least the 1930s or 1940s: the Alcalays, the Nagys, the Chapavals, the Translateurs, and the Suttons. There was also the Levy family, who were Boris’s neighbors. Adolfo Levy was the owner of a sawmill, and Boris met him through his railroad tie business. As I’ve mentioned, Boris also had sawmills in Manizales and Medellín.

  I’m not sure to what extent the Jewish community was economically importa
nt for Boris’s business activities. It may not have been all that important; according to one version, he was not very close to the other Jewish families of Tuluá. The impression one gets is that the Jewish community was important to Boris mostly for emotional support and familial relations — he remarried twice within the community, for example. Boris also had at least one partner (Levy) and some providers or buyers from the community, but non-Jews also filled some of those same roles.

  Violence in Tuluá

  Gaitán was killed on April 9, 1948. Larissa witnessed the violence that followed this murder, the Bogotazo, but without a real understanding of its significance. When I asked my uncle Manuel if the violence affected Boris’s business, he replied that he felt that it may have affected the ranch a bit, given the banditry that took place shortly afterward, but not the soap business, the transports, or the railroad tie operation. He remembered that near Fenicia, where the ranch was, there was a place known as the ravine of the dead, down to which the authorities would venture on Mondays to recover bodies and try to identify them. Later they would be buried, usually in a mass grave.