Despite this macabre memory, Manuel doubted that the violence had affected Tuluá’s economy or Boris to any great degree. The unidentified bodies that the authorities buried in the common graves had been deliberately thrown into the ravine, and they were not the bodies of locals. Nevertheless, I think that Boris, and perhaps also Misha and Noemí, made a conscious decision to protect the family from the fear caused by La Violencia, because Gaitán’s murder unleashed a brutal wave of violence in the region of Tuluá, where a Conservative militia worked to cleanse the countryside of Liberals. Gardeazábal’s powerful novel tells how each night the bodies of the dead would flow down the Cauca River:
El Siglo says that they were Conservatives, and El Tiempo that they were Liberals, but in La Virginia, where they pulled them out with their bellies about to burst, their faces chewed up by fish, and their limbs almost always fractured by beatings, none of the dead carried identification papers; and since it was difficult to carry them anywhere in that state of putrefaction, they simply took them from the river and buried them among the other unnamed dead, whose presence steadily grew in the cemeteries of Colombia.202
The unnamed dead appeared daily in Tuluá between 1949 and 1953. Their anonymity provoked all manner of rumors, both with respect to who they were and to why they died. Little by little, killing became contagious and its causes evolved from political assassinations to personal vendettas, land grabs, and even the murder of neutral parties simply because they had stubbornly remained neutral. Those thought to be traitors were murdered, and then eventually those who just dared to speak out. Thousands of people were killed in the region around Tuluá during the first four years of La Violencia.
Sectarian violence must have affected Boris one way or another. He had lived in Ukraine during the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the civil wars that followed it, and also the ferocious pogroms carried out by Ukrainian nationalists against Jews in the region in that same period. Boris had remained steadfast through all of that. He milled soap and defended himself and his family, until the day came when he was threatened directly and forced to flee, losing his daughter and his mother-in-law along the way, and living always after with his wife, Tania, grieving over a daughter who might have remained alive and completely unprotected.
Boris would have had no taste for the ideological polarization between Liberals and Conservatives that had now escalated to a level of hatred he knew all too well. I don’t know if my great-grandfather was a supporter of Gaitán. He read the Forverts and had a daughter and son-in-law who were leftists, so he may have been a supporter, but the similarities between Gaitán’s oratory and the Russian agitation from his past may have bothered him, so I’m not sure. On the other hand, it was not easy for Boris to identify himself as a Godo (Conservative) either: he wasn’t Catholic, and his daughter and son-in-law were both Marxists. Regardless of his ideological sympathies, I’m certain that Boris looked with great concern as the society that had taken him in split in two.
Gardeazábal’s novel explains how Tuluá was taken by Conservative forces. When Gaitán was murdered, a throng of Liberal peasants entered the town and burned down the Angel Theater, looted the main store, passed around liquor, hanged a Conservative from the bell tower, and tried to set fire to the Salesian school. The reaction of the local Conservative elite, allied with that of Cali and Buga, was to enlist a local cheese vendor from the market — a man who was at once known to be very brave, ignorant, and fanatically devoted to the Church and the Conservative Party — to arm a local militia to defend the city “from the extermination of all Conservatives, of all religious communities, and above all the Christian faith.”203
The leader of that militia was known as “The Condor,” and his militiamen came to be referred to as his “birds” (pájaros). They made their rounds in blue automobiles, in a campaign designed to “cleanse” all of the surrounding countryside of Liberals. Gardeazábal calculates that there were upwards of 3,500 murders in the Tuluá region during the first four years of La Violencia, the great majority of the victims either Liberals or neutral parties. Toward the end of The Condor’s reign of terror, he also began to kill a few select members of the old Liberal political elite — high-profile figures from some of Tuluá’s oldest leading families. After one of these murders, against which even a local priest lodged a protest, “everyone closed up shop, put everything up for sale, or just left it all to the grace of God before escaping on the first train or the last regional bus that still stopped in the city.”204 Thus, in the years just before his death, Boris again faced the kind of political polarization he had left behind in Ukraine, and also saw his businesses suffer on account of the violence.
Still, there were factors that protected him. First, since he was Jewish and a foreigner, he could not be identified as either Liberal or Conservative. In the countryside, they referred to Boris as “el Míster,” and his foreignness mitigated the danger he might otherwise have faced. Boris was also Obdulio Acevedo’s neighbor and partner, and the latter was one of the organizers of the local Conservative militia; that is, he was the head of a group of “birds.” Because of this, Boris almost certainly enjoyed the protection of the faction that controlled Tuluá. Finally, some of Boris’s businesses were shielded from the violence: his sawmills in Tuluá and Manizales suffered very little, because the construction of Colombian railroads wasn’t interrupted by the violence, and the government was his main client. The milling of soap likewise went on pretty much as usual, as this product usually enjoys steady demand. It is certain that his finca suffered greatly, but I don’t know whether his transport business likewise suffered some adverse effect. In short, the violence did not ruin Boris, although it may have affected his finances to some degree.
It is nonetheless quite likely that the image of calm, routine, and serenity that Manuel remembers from 1953, a few months before Boris’s death, was kept up despite a violent situation that affected everything around him. It occurs to me that Boris’s calm and his unshakable insistence on routine were both, from the beginning, powerful coping mechanisms in a life that had been so deeply marked by violence. Boris had no desire to change his way of life because of some new upheaval. A life of work and routine were, in the end, his way of confronting uncertainty.
Boris’s two deaths
My great-grandfather, Boris Milstein, died of a heart attack in Tuluá on January 11, 1954. This was his second heart attack. After the first, he traveled to the famous Mayo Clinic in the United States to be evaluated by the doctors there. A short time afterward, my uncle Manuel, who was then seventeen years old, visited him in Tuluá and spent some time with him before going on to Bogotá. Manuel found him to be as he ever was, with his unchanging daily routine, and so on.
Later that spring, Manuel received news of his beloved grandfather’s death. He wasn’t able to attend the funeral, at the Jewish cemetery in Cali, because of the religious practice of burying the dead within twenty-four hours of their passing. However, Manuel did eventually see Isaac Perlman, Dora Gutt, and several of Boris’s friends who were by then in Bogotá, and he confirmed to the family that “there was never any reason to question the certified cause of death: myocardial infarction.”205
This is the same version of events known by my mother and all the other members of my family to whom I have spoken. I believe that story. Still, I am a historian, and that compels me to weigh diverging sources, when these appear; and there exists, in this case, a second version of Boris’s death, the source of which is Inés Acevedo, the daughter of José Obdulio Acevedo, Boris’s neighbor and business partner.
At the beginning of June 2017, as one of Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal’s many priceless acts of generosity, he decided to investigate some of the details related in this book. This involved interviewing the remaining old-timers who might remember Boris, and so Gustavo went to Río Frío, where Boris’s ranch had been, to interview Señora Acevedo, who was then eighty-nine years o
ld but still perfectly lucid. Inés remembered Boris and his family perfectly. She even cried when Gustavo showed her a photo of them that I had sent him. Inés remembered the story of their escape from Ukraine, the loss of a daughter on the journey, and many other important details. She also had information on Boris’s farm, which was adjacent to that of her family. She remembered that they had bought it from Juvenal Villa, who belonged to a family from Santa Rosa del Cabal. All of her memories checked out, except one: Inés affirmed that Boris had died from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a blow to the head. In other words, Boris died as the result of an attack.
His killer was a certain Carlos Arbeláez, who hit him over the head with the butt of his pistol in the offices of Boris’s transport business, Transportes Fenicia, the company in which Inés’s father, Obdulio Acevedo, was a partner. Roughly two years after Boris’s death, Carlos Arbeláez was himself killed, just as he was planning to murder Inés’s husband. Upon hearing the news, Inés told Gustavo Alvarez that she felt that “Divine Justice had made him pay for what he had done to Don Boris.”206
Neither of the two versions of Boris’s death has any eyewitnesses left for corroboration, and there are no police records for Boris’s or Carlos Arbeláez’s deaths, something that is common for murders during that time in that place, since there were thousands being murdered. One can suspect motives for distorting the truth in each of the two versions of Boris’s death. In the case of my family’s version, there are no survivors from my grandmother’s generation to interview; and it is certainly possible that the members of this generation decided to cover up any news of an attack as cause of death.
The possible motives for hiding this could have been that death by murder was considered shameful, most particularly in the Jewish community, since it might imply that the victim was quarrelsome or had enemies, or else that he or she did not lead an honest life. Moreover, my mother’s generation had already suffered enough: the loss of Shura, the murder of Misha’s parents, and those other, uncountable murders that had taken place both in Nova Sulitza and in Mogilev. There is, moreover, a document from the period, though a very ambiguous one, that leaves open the possibility of a family cover-up with respect to the true cause of Boris’s death. It is the first letter that Shura sent, from the Soviet Union, to my grandmother Noemí about a year after Boris’ death, in 1955.
Shura
I don’t know the exact channel — if it was through the Red Cross or through some Jewish organization — but some years after the end of the war, maybe around 1948, my grandparents received news about Shura. She had survived the war! Still, the investigative letters sent by Boris and Noemí took almost seven years to reach Shura’s hands, due to the displacements caused by the war and the general conditions of the region in those years. For this reason, the first letter that Shura sent to her older sister Noemí is from 1955, around a year after Boris’s death. It begins like this: “Hello my dear Lisa, Misha, and children. After seven years, I finally received a letter saying that some of you are alive.” And farther down she writes: “For many years, my heart has told me that father was dead, and I understand that the last two letters I sent arrived in Tuluá, and that they have given them to you.”
If I correctly understand what is implied in this opening — which carries a strong emotional charge according to Xenia Cherkaev, the young colleague and friend who did me the favor of translating Shura’s letters from Russian to English — the identity of the person who first contacted Shura remains a little ambiguous. It seems like the first letter that she got came from an organization, rather than directly from her father or sister, since Shura says: “I finally received the letter saying that some of you are alive.” She then says that she sent two letters to Tuluá, which finally arrived in Noemí’s hands. Noemí answered those letters directly, informing Shura, among other things, that their father had died. This is the sequence of events that is implicit in Shura’s opening lines.
The envelope of the first letter sent from Shura to Noemí, sent to the family’s address in Cali (Calle 25 Norte 5-46).
It is also understood that the two letters that Shura had sent earlier, when she was contacted by the Red Cross or some other organization, did not reach Boris, and that Shura, in turn, never received a letter from her father. The letter that she was now answering would thus have come from Noemí, and it would have been written from Cali, rather than from Tuluá. It must have been a long letter, in which Noemí told Shura of her marriage to Misha, of their children, of how their sister Pupe was doing, of Tania’s death, which had occurred thirteen years earlier, and finally of Boris’s recent passing.
Shura later asks for more information, including about a couple of family members whom I’ve never heard of (Lisa and Yasha), and she explains that she has a husband and two children, and that they are all well. Shura points out that of their family, “very few have survived, and we must maintain a close correspondence,” adding later that she would like very much to see Noemí, because her story is like a novel. She then adds the following sentence: “All my hope of seeing you has evaporated.”
The entire letter is heartbreaking and a bit disheveled, written in a sharp emotional pitch.
Sheet from the first letter that Shura sent to her sister Noemí, 1955.
At the beginning of the letter, Shura says something that makes me suspect the possibility that there was indeed something secretive or hidden in Boris’s manner of death. She says: “I ask you, my dear sister, that you tell me, precisely and with complete openness, the truth regarding everything that happened to Father: what and how it happened, who now lives in his house, and where Pupe is…” And then, at the end of the letter, Shura again insists: “Write in detail about Father, and what and how it happened to him.”
For me, these phrases leave open the possibility that there was indeed something delicate to explain with respect to the circumstances of Boris’s death, that it was not just a heart attack, which was a common cause of death during that time and presumably required little explanation. Maybe Shura was simply asking Noemí for further details about their father’s final moments, but the fact that she asks her for “openness” suggests that there was something more mysterious in the story that my grandmother had written to her sister, when she let her know of their father’s death. Shura’s letter thus requires us to leave open the hypothesis that Boris was attacked and that he died from to a blow delivered by Carlos Arbeláez.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dialectic of Silence
Column
In my family’s history, there is a type of figure. Or maybe it is best described as a syndrome rather than as a subject or a kind of person. Let’s call it the column syndrome. The column props up, buffers, protects, and endures. Of the Roman temples there mostly survive only the bases and columns as enduring vestiges. Boris had this syndrome, as did his daughter Noemí. My mother and Manuel had it, and they passed it on to me.
Boris was the support for his family in Yaruga and Mogilev. A column. He served as a local representative in Yaruga. Column. Patron. Column. He pulled his family out of the Soviet Union during their moment of greatest danger. Column. He made the decision to leave Shura and Revka behind. Column. He was his family’s provider in Colombia. Column.
His oldest daughter, my grandmother Noemí, was, if this is possible, an even stronger column than Boris. Noemí was easily annoyed by anything that smacked of whining or self-pity. Unlike her husband, Misha, she also viewed indigenismo with some suspicion, and for a reason that was at once aesthetic and moral: she was repulsed by “the lament of the Indian.” I remember her explaining to me, in her apartment in San Bernardino (Caracas), that she was couldn’t stand “Andean lamentations,” and she added: “I like the culture of the blacks. Nobody has suffered more than them. They were slaves, they have been discriminated against, and they are poor. But they celebrate life and emphasize joyfulness.”
In the same way, and for analogous reasons, my grandmother favorably compared the new Venezuelan folklore with its Chilean and Argentinian counterparts. She and Misha had been neighbors and friends of composer and singer Violeta Parra in Santiago, at the beginning of the 1960s. This circumstance filled me with admiration, because Violeta was at that time like a religion to me. Except that to my horror, my grandmother said in a matter-of-fact way that Violeta was crazy, and that she irritated her with so much fussing and whining. Noemí then finished by saying that she preferred to listen to the Venezuelan groups Quinteto Contrapunto and Serenata Guayanesa, which were joyful rather than so very mournful. It was a horrible thought for me at the time, but I now think that maybe she had a point.
My grandmother’s impatience with sentimentalism and her respect for use value extended to many other domains. Noemí hated the aristocracy both as a class and as an aspiration, and everything that she considered decadent. She hated antiques, too, and she loved the modern, the new. For the same reasons, she also felt a generalized antipathy for Europe, and for England most especially. On the contrary, she loved all of America, including the United States, which was a beacon of modernity. I can’t remember which English writer said that the United States lacked two things: souls and antiques. My grandmother would have taken that as a good thing. At times she exaggerated a bit with all of this. The Beatles, for instance, irritated her. One time, I was listening to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand!” and my grandmother muttered, “English. Decadent.”
Silence
Nuestra América Page 24