Maybe the column metaphor isn’t exact, because the work done by family members who serve as columns is not only to prop up, but also to buffer or cushion. The blows that the world inflicted on my grandparents’ generation were simply too violent for the family to emerge unscathed. There were always irreparable losses.
Boris “saved the family,” true, but he also lost his daughter. Despite having run the considerable risk of returning to Bessarabia during the mid-1930s, Misha failed to get his parents out of Nova Sulitza. There isn’t a column made that can withstand such magnitudes of disaster, and part of the work of the column quickly becomes to absorb the blows and attenuate them for others so that they don’t lose hope. Hope and serenity. This means that the role of column comes with a communicative function — to be a source of practical wisdom, to be sure, but also to temper or soften news so that fear doesn’t spin into vertigo and paralysis, so that depression doesn’t become overwhelming, and blows don’t prove fatal.
To understand how this works, it is useful to reconsider our two versions of Boris’s death. As I’ve already said, there were good motives to hide the fact that Boris had been attacked, if this was in fact the case. There is the anguish of picturing Boris, an old man living alone with his elderly wife, conducting business in a context of widespread violence, being brutally attacked without anyone in place to defend him. There is a frustrated desire to protect the protector. There is also the ameliorating fact that even if Arbeláez did attack Boris as Inés Acevedo said, his blow was not Boris’s immediate cause of death. Acevedo herself remembers it that way. According to her version of the events, Boris died about a month after the attack. Mentioning the attacker would in this case only serve to diminish Boris’s life and aggrandize an insignificant figure (Arbeláez). It was more faithful to the character and person that Boris had been to narrate his death as a case of natural causes; or if not this, then to describe it as an accident. And this, indeed, is what Shura ended up doing for her daughter, Rita. According to what Rita told me (through her daughter, Ilana), her mother had told her that Boris had died in a car accident.207
There is also the not inconsequential issue of how guilty a child can feel upon learning of a parent’s death when they are far away. The guilt of not having been there, or of having been doing something pleasant or even just something normal at the precise time that their loved one was suffering. Visiting a friend, maybe. Eating with the family. Beginning a new endeavor…
If Boris was attacked and the family was far away, the family was unable to protect him, just as he had been unable to protect Shura. And by the mid-1950s, when Boris died, the war was over, and one might well understand if the family just wanted some peace. It wished to move on to another generation and to another moment. Following this logic, it was thus maybe easier to blunt the pain of this unexpected blow, which was now brought on by Colombian violence. If this is in fact what happened, then Boris’s three daughters, Noemí, Shura, and Pupe, had all agreed to form a column among themselves.
Concerns
The third characteristic of columns is that they feel compelled to care for others: they even express worries and concerns that they never felt with regard to themselves. The most characteristic expression of my grandfather Misha, whose life was filled not only with adventures but also with very risky decisions, was “Dangerous!” Misha was constantly watching out for anything that might be dangerous for others. An open window: “Dangerous!” A child playing six feet away from that same open window: “Mamash [truly] dangerous!”
He was a column, a buffer, and a sentinel in a world of unmanageable dangers.
And Boris died in a hospital bed. Probably from a heart attack.
PART FOUR
National Liberation
Israel
The family left from Puerto Aventura (Colombia) for Israel in 1949, just a year after independence. Misha, for his part, took a more circuitous route. According to my mother, the US government had denied him a visa because of his earlier association with the Soviet Union (the Cold War had begun by then), and the plan was for the family to sail to Israel by way of New York. According to Manuel, my mother was wrong, and their father accompanied them as far as New York, and then went his separate way. According to Mauricio, their father traveled to Marseilles instead of Haifa, to help Eastern European refugees who were still leaving that region make their way toward Israel. I haven’t been able to corroborate any of this, each version is certainly possible, and whatever the case, it is certain that Misha arrived in Israel about three months after the rest of the family.
The family sailed first from Puerto de Buenaventura, Colombia, to New York. While in Manhattan, they stayed at the Greystone Hotel, which is not far from where I now live, and from New York they sailed to Israel. The ship itself was a liberating experience for Larissa, who found herself surrounded by Jewish teenagers for the first time, and many of them shared the same socialist ideals as her family. For a girl who had spent her life passing as Catholic, or saying that her name was “Alicia” because her real name sounded perhaps too “Polish,” this was an altogether new sensation.
When they arrived in Israel, Noemí tried to place the family in a kibbutz run by the Hashomer Hatzair. They showed up there one night with no prior warning, but the members of the kibbutz couldn’t accept them because those were difficult times and of the five family members, only my grandmother and my mother were old enough to work. The kibbutz was not in a position to feed the three younger children. As a result, they were taken to a Beit Olim — a refugee camp — in Lod.
Once at the camp, Noemí, who was always very resourceful, offered up her services as a translator for the refugees, since she spoke German, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, Spanish, and French, as well as some English. Her offer was accepted, and the family was given a house whose former occupants had left it as part of the large Palestinian exodus of 1948, a phenomenon Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (Disaster). I will never know how my grandmother felt about that. The creation of national states that were being carved out from the old British Empire was then generating ethnic and religious violence and displacement in a number of regions; the formation of a Jewish national state had sparked a war, created a new diaspora, and was turning the Palestinian people into a “minority” in lands that had for the most part been theirs. Even so, my family felt that the Jewish people had legitimate claims in Palestine, and that national recognition for the Jewish people was an indispensable achievement that offered the family a place where they might be relieved from the constant strain of assimilation and resistance, preserved from the constant threat of persecution, and finally live freely among themselves.
Misha (right) with a Dr. Zapler, upon his arrival in Netanya, Israel, November 1949.
When Misha arrived in Israel, the family moved to the Sha’ar ha-Amakim kibbutz, in the north of Israel. It was inhabited mainly by Serbian and Romanian Jews, and there were even some folks from Nova Sulitza there. Misha worked in construction as an engineer’s assistant in that kibbutz. He didn’t have much talent for this work, though, so he got a job as a teacher outside of the kibbutz, in the city of Petah Tikva.
The family (minus Larissa) in front of the house in Petah Tikvah (Shikun Fedya, B.84). It is an iconic depiction of the idea of Eretz Israel — a land where one could live free and modestly, cultivating the land and remaining in harmony with the body.
Misha worked as a Hebrew teacher, first in a school associated with a moshav (a kind of agricultural collective), and finally in a more prestigious secondary school, Seminar le-Morim, in Ein Shemer. Neither of those places was close to their home, so Misha had a substantial commute. Meanwhile, my grandfather’s intellectual aspirations were still very much in place; thus, at that time he wrote to his former teacher, Paul Rivet, that he had not completely lost “the hope of freeing myself one day from the hard struggle for the material existence of my family, to apply
the rest of my energy, curiosity, and the meager intellectual capacity that remains, to the Science of Man.”208
Misha with his students in a moshav near Petah Tikva.
According to my mother, my grandfather’s pride prevented him from asking favors from old friends who were already well established in Israel when they got there. Hannah Lamdan, for instance, had been part of Misha’s same kvutzah in Nova Sulitza, and she went on to become the director of the leftist party Mapai and a member of the Knesset. There was also Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, who had introduced Misha to Noemí, and who was also a member of the Knesset. But Misha refused to bother either of them even to ask the favor of being transferred to a different school. My mother remembered all of this very well, and I believe that my grandfather was in fact a proud man, and that pride may have exacerbated the difficulties that he faced while trying to establish himself in Israel.
Misha tells Rivet that he had begun “serious and insistent efforts in support of cultural relations between Israel and the countries of Ibero-America.” Misha also says that he had obtained an audience with the recently elected president of Israel, Isaac Ben-Zvi, whom he characterized as an exceptional man and “one of the few people still working in the abandoned field of Jewish ethnology,” to propose a project focused on strengthening cultural relations between Israel and Ibero-America. Ben-Zvi, who was originally a Ukrainian Jew, founded an institute dedicated to the study of Middle Eastern Jewish history and culture, and Misha evidently felt some empathy with Ben-Zvi’s effort to expand the European, Ashkenazi-centered view of the Jewish historical experience. And I don’t know what the upshot of their meeting was. Clearly, Misha tried all means at his disposal to get his project up and running, but he simply did not succeed in finding a way forward.
Larissa and Cinna
Let’s go back to the story of my mother. Upon arriving in Israel, Noemí sought to place Larissa on a kibbutz; the refugee camp in which they had been placed was dangerous for a teenage girl. Larissa was accepted in a kibbutz that had been created by sabras (Jews born in Israel, whose maternal language is Hebrew), in the north of the country, though she still did not speak Hebrew. She had to learn it as she went along. Larissa was later moved to another kibbutz, also made up of sabras, called Sarid. There she met a boy named Uri, a sabra painter who was “very handsome, with the face of a biblical character.” They had a romance that was a bit different from what she was used to in Bogotá, living as they did without parental supervision: Uri built her a tree house; they walked through the mountains, visited biblical sites.
It was in all an experience of freedom and discovery that had little in common with the constricted ways of Tuluá, Sogamoso, or Tunja. Larissa had always been an optimist, and this penchant found even more expression in Israel, where she enjoyed the security of knowing she could provide for herself, with manual labor, and the freedom of not needing to find her place in the rigid class hierarchy of Colombia. While still living on the Sarid kibbutz, my mother got married for the first time. It was a sham marriage: a friend of hers wanted to avoid serving in the army, and he could do that if he was married. This marriage didn’t please my grandfather at all, but that’s how things were at that time. He couldn’t do much about it. My mother divorced her friend when the threat of military service had passed for him, as they had agreed.
One day Noemí and Manuel were on their way to visit Larissa, and on the bus with them was a Chilean doctor, Marcos Kaufman, who wrote for the Hashomer Hatzair newspapers. Upon hearing them speaking Spanish, he struck up a conversation. He was from a nearby kibbutz called Ramot Menashe, which had been founded by South American Jews, mostly Chileans and Argentinians, and he extended an invitation for Larissa to come see him so that he might lend her books in Spanish. Larissa made some friends on that kibbutz, and then decided to move there. Her Hebrew was still rudimentary, and it made her happy to be among other Latin Americans.
While living in Ramot Menashe, Larissa met Cinna Lomnitz, my father. He had come to talk with her about a common friend who had committed suicide. With his characteristic black humor, my father told me that the conversation about the friend was just a pretext, that he had heard about my mother and he wanted to meet her all along. The beginning of the conversation, seated in the dining room of the kibbutz, was very much my father. He took a piece of bread from the table, pulled out a crumb and put it in front of my mother, and said, “Te presento a una miga” (Allow me to introduce you to a crumb) — a play on the Spanish words amiga (friend) and miga (crumb). They fell in love, and they got married while still living on the kibbutz.
Cinna and Larissa around the time that they met, c. 1950. Kibbutz Ramot Menashe, Israel.
My father had a more ideologically motivated entry into kibbutz life than my mother, since he had been a member of Hashomer Hatzair in Santiago, and had moved to Israel by himself rather than with his family, with the expressed desire of living on a kibbutz. His full range of motivations for this move had not been so clear to me until very recently, when an aunt discovered a five-page autobiography written by Cinna’s mother, my grandmother Bronis, that was penned in the early sixties, shortly after my grandfather’s death.
Cinna had been a loner in Chile and this worried his mother, so she introduced him to a German Jewish neighbor who had recently founded the Kidma in Santiago, a Zionist socialist organization that later affiliated itself with the Hashomer Hatzair. Although my father was not particularly enthusiastic about Judaism, and even less about clubs of any sort, he finally accepted an invitation to attend one of the organization’s meetings. Cinna immediately loved the people there — especially a tightly knit group of proletarian, rough-and-tumble Czech Jews, with whom he formed a deep and lasting friendship. Cinna joined the movement and remained in it for roughly seven years.
The year of Cinna’s introduction to the Kidma was 1943, and thanks to my grandmother’s autobiographical notes, I now realize that the experience of living in Chile during these years of the Second World War also played a part in his decision. My grandmother wrote how, one day, my father’s brother Eric came home from the French school saying that he was being called a dirty Jew (“sale juif”), and that he didn’t want to go back there. He wanted to be baptized and become a Catholic, and live just like everybody else. My grandmother understood what was beginning to happen in Chile:
I knew already, [she wrote,] I closed my eyes, I did not want to see, but the poison was already working. The German Colony, for generations in this country and not knowing any differences, closed their clubs, their schools to the Jews. Their propaganda, managed by skillful agents, had its effect already on the Chileans. They began to ask, to doubt, to suspect us. How is it possible that the Germans with their culture, their knowledge could do all these things — did they really do it, and if so, why? Is it not the Jews’ fault? How could we explain, we who did not understand ourselves — how tired we were to argue, to fight, to claim?209
Further on she writes: “And then one evening our older son tells us that he had joined the movement to go to Israel. ‘I will help to build a home for us all,’ he said this, ‘even in this distant end of the world [Chile] we are strangers, tolerated.’ ”210 Cinna, who was seven years older than my mother, experienced the anxieties that Misha and Noemí had known in Colombia during those same war years, fanned by sectors of Latin America’s urban middle classes that either flirted with or openly embraced Nazism. Jews who were fleeing Europe could not take these tendencies lightly, and I believe that, even though it was not yet majoritarian, the local anti-Semitic threat stymied Cinna’s self-identification as a Chilean during those years, and led him to embrace Zionism.
My mother’s situation was a bit different from my father’s. As opposed to Cinna’s parents, Misha and Noemí had long been committed to Jewish culture as such, and to the formation of Israel, but Larissa had grown up in the Colombian provinces and far from any Jewish organization.
Because she was still a child during the war, and had no direct European life experience the way Cinna did, perhaps Larissa did not feel as deeply threatened by local anti-Semitism, highly unpleasant though it always is. As a result, Larissa did not leave Colombia for Israel as the result of personal conviction. Rather, she moved there with her family, and found herself living alone in a kibbutz because it was safer for her there than in a refugee camp, whereas Cinna had arrived in Israel well prepared for the life of the kibbutz.
In a memoir that he wrote in 1987, Cinna recalled the movement’s ideology with a jaded distance: “In those communities, one practiced rigorous collectivism. The collective’s authorities were designated and removed in egalitarian assemblies. The kibbutz committee assigned each member their place to live, their place of work, and their functions. Clothing was distributed each Friday and remained the property of the collective: there existed no personal clothing, nor any personal objects. When members decided to leave the collective, they were given a shirt, a pair of pants, a change of underwear, a pair of shoes, and five pounds in cash.”211
My parents’ wedding pictures give an idea of the stark environmental, ideological, and material differences between life on the kibbutz and in a Latin American city, especially if we compare them with the photos taken at my aunt Pupe’s wedding in Bogotá, nine years earlier.
Cinna and Larissa’s wedding, Petah Tikva, 1952. Seated at the center are my parents. Behind them and framing the photo, two of their friends hold flower vases that seem to have been taken from the table. There is no special wedding attire, just clean clothes.*
Nuestra América Page 25