Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  The wedding of Pupe Milstein and Isaac Perlman in Bogotá, 1944. from the left: Misha, Boris, Isaac Perlman, Pupe Milstein de Perlman, Noemí, Larissa, and Manuel Adler.

  I continue quoting from my father:

  We aspired to this life that we glorified as if it were the realization of a millenarian dream. To be free in our own land! To be workers! To grow our own food! We wanted to create our own form of life, our own culture, our own sense of morality based on the rejection of all forms of exploitation. To prepare ourselves for this, we cultivated spartan habits. From the simplicity of our manner of dress to the rejection of “bourgeois” forms of life (such as smoking, drinking, wearing makeup, growing mustaches, going to dances and flirting)…212

  I don’t know the details of how or why, but my parents grew tired of life on the kibbutz. I do know that there were ideological conflicts as well as practical ones. My father’s 1987 memoir includes a number of friendly but critical comments with regard to Zionism and what happened in the kibbutz movement that he had belonged to. Although Cinna did not explain the specific events that led him and Larissa to leave the kibbutz (and, soon enough, Israel), he did at least suggest what some of his own reasoning may have been.

  With regard to Zionism, my father wrote that “Zionism bases its enormous emotional magnetism in the Jew’s desire to be normal, to be integrated in the community of nations like one more member, neither better nor worse than any of the others. We shall see how this desire for normality was, to a certain degree, frustrated by its success, but that dialectic was still very distant in 1943, when I joined the Kidma movement.”213

  That movement was deeply ideological, and not so different from what we saw in Misha and Noemí’s early formation, decades earlier: “The Marxism that we professed was European and, one might say, a little antiquated. We were anti-Stalinists, we read Trotsky, Bakunin, Saint-Simon, and Fourier, and of course Marx and Engels and their numerous interpreters…You couldn’t continue living and working in the Movement unless you renounced all private property and joined an agricultural collective.”

  But practical realities of Israel and the kibbutzim ended up producing a feeling of disillusion that Cinna explained as follows: “When the ideals are great, the causes for disillusion are often menial. There have been great socialists who have not been able to stand the smell of a proletarian concentration, and fervent revolutionaries who were unable to accept the chicanery of their own bureaucracy. When the State of Israel surged into the world of international politics in 1948 many changes ensued, both positive and negative, that had lethal effects on our juvenile idealism.”

  Some of these effects stemmed from the everyday realities of living on the kibbutz — the loneliness of that work and the overbearing quality of collective decision making — others from the engagement of wage labor on the kibbutz, and its implications for such spartan and dogmatic collectivist ideals as those that Cinna’s movement had cultivated while in Chile. Finally, there was also concern about the longer-term prospects for equality that were being held out by Jewish nationalism, given Israel’s beleaguered entry into the community of nations: “Like good socialists, we recognized the rights of the Arab working class and of the Arab nation, and we aspired to a binational state, similar perhaps to Belgium, Canada, or Switzerland (which is trinational), or to many others. We felt that there could only be a Jewish nation in possession of its land if it shared it with an Arab nation that might achieve equal development, with equal opportunities.”214

  However, after 1948, when the movement that Cinna belonged to became a political party, the MAPAM (United Workers’ Party), this position was no longer judged to be tenable from an electoral point of view.215 Whether one, two, or all of these sources of frustration sparked my parents’ actual decision to leave the kibbutz, I don’t know.

  In the end, though, they left the kibbutz as my father described: with a change of clothing in their suitcases and a five-pound note in their pockets. They moved to a new city, Beer Sheva, that was being built up in the Negev desert. My father was an engineer; he had graduated from the Universidad de Chile and had gone on to study for a master’s degree in soil mechanics at Harvard, under the supervision of Karl von Terzaghi, who is considered to be the father of geotechnical engineering. Cinna’s training had been somewhat underutilized on the kibbutz, where he had worked in kitchens, stables, and orchards, lifting rocks or driving a tractor. At least now he worked on a dam project as an engineer.

  The dam zone, near Beer Sheva, c. 1953.

  A triumphant Larissa with Jorge.

  Beer Sheva, 1954.

  When Cinna’s boss met my mother, he asked her if she too needed a job. Larissa said that she did, and when he asked her what she knew how to do, she candidly responded with the truth: “I know how to wash dishes.” This unpresumptuous (and honest) response pleased my dad’s boss, and he then placed her in an administrative position rather than in the kitchen. It was also in Beer Sheba that my brother Jorge was born, on March 23, 1954. Around that same time my father decided to apply for a fellowship for doctoral research, and so for their young family to leave Israel permanently. Cinna was awarded a scholarship to pursue his doctorate in geophysics at Cal Tech, in Pasadena, and the young couple left Israel for California when Jorge was still just a baby.

  Return to Colombia

  For the rest of the Adlers, life in Israel, while liberating in a number of respects, was nonetheless also not that easy. Misha and Noemí were maybe a bit too old to adapt to agricultural life on the kibbutz, and Misha’s possibilities in the intellectual field reached a ceiling, due mostly to the economic pressures that he faced as the head of a family, I think. Manuel was studying at a boarding school in Petah Tikva, but he suffered a serious accident when he was sixteen that broke bones in his face and made it impossible for him to engage in any aerobic exercise. After that, he left the boarding school and returned to live with his parents.

  In the afternoons, he went door to door selling books, until he moved to Tel Aviv to work and continue with his studies. There he was admitted into the prestigious Cameri Theater school. Here he was a student of writer Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter, who recommended that Manuel continue his studies in Pasadena, where Larissa and Cinna were soon to go. But Manuel went first instead to Colombia, to complete his recovery and save up a bit of money, selling shoes for his uncle Zuñe. Boris died while Manuel was there, and Noemí traveled to Cali and Tuluá, accompanied by little Ilya, to sign notary papers and receive her part of the inheritance.

  Letter from Misha (in Petah Tikva) to Noemí (in Tuluá), 1955.

  Misha and Mauricio now found themselves alone in Israel. First Manuel had left, then Noemí and Ilya, and finally Larissa and Cinna. It seems to have been during this separation, by way of letters that came and went, and after seeing what Noemí had received as her inheritance (a sum that would allow them to buy a house), that the couple decided that life in America would be better for them.

  My uncle Mauricio thinks that his parents decided to move back to Colombia because they identified more with the Latin American way of life. According to Manuel, it was because two of their four children had already definitively returned to America, so there wasn’t much point in staying. According to my mother, my grandparents led a physically trying life in Israel, particularly given my grandfather’s bad health. It also must have weighed heavily on Misha that he could not develop his Americanism in Israel, since as Misha told Paul Rivet: “I continue wholly enamored of Indo-Latin-Americans and of the marvelous cultural forms created by the ‘autochthonous’ and creoles in the (poorly named) Ibero- or Latin American countries.”216 Nostalgia, the closing off of possibilities, economic straits, family division…All of these reasons together shaped the decision, because without renouncing either his Israeli nationality or identity, nor his passion for Jewish culture, Misha finally opted to continue his life in the di
aspora, and Noemí, Mauricio, Ilya, and Misha returned to live in Cali.

  Misha and Manuel Adler, carrying Jorge (still a baby), and Larissa, visiting the home of Jorge Isaacs, Valle del Cauca, 1956. Cinna is the invisible photographer.

  How the marginalized survive

  My mother began to study for her bachelor’s degree at Berkeley, California, when she was thirty-two years old and had three young sons and a daughter on the way. I was eight years old then. My brothers and I greeted her decision to study with enthusiasm, as did my father, who supported her a great deal in this.

  Tania, the blessing of a daughter after three sons, with a parakeet. Berkeley, California, 1965.

  My mother began her studies enthusiastically, and with modest aspirations. For her, everything was a win, so Larissa devoted herself to her studies with an intense immediacy that led her eventually to become a recognized figure in her field. Her doctoral thesis, which was written after the family had moved to Mexico, was published in 1976 by Siglo XXI Press in Mexico City, with the title ¿Cómo sobreviven los marginados? (How Do the Marginalized Survive?). It is considered a classic in Latin American urban studies, and as I write these lines, the book is in its seventeenth edition. That book was also a factor when she was bestowed Mexico’s National Science Award and gained membership as foreign correspondent in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Larissa studying. California, c. 1967.

  Larissa’s book asks a simple question: How do the people who work in the so-called informal economy manage to survive in the face of chronic employment instability and the lack of any unemployment insurance? Her thesis answered this question descriptively, as a by-product of multiple conversations and observations. In these interactions, Larissa tracked and mapped out the fundamental importance of mutual support, not only in microlevel forms of assistance — in child care, small loans of money, or sharing food — but also in the history of migration itself, in residential patterns, and in work specialization. She documented how people’s decisions to migrate were usually conditioned by the fact that they had a relative or friend who invited them to move, who was willing to receive them, or who helped place them in the labor market. For these reasons, people from the same villages and towns frequently settled in the city as neighbors, at least initially. From these primary relationships, they went about expanding their circles of exchange and support. This study situated Larissa in the pioneering generations of anthropological researchers dedicated to the study of “social networks.”

  If we look at her work from the perspective of my own family, though, I think that my mother discovered her own history refracted in the Cerrada del Cóndor (Mexico City) shantytown that she studied in such detail. How did the Adlers and Milsteins survive? In my grandparents’ generation, their patterns of migration, friendships, and matrimonial alliances often revolved around a network of immigrants who came from Bessarabia or Bukovina, and even from Nova Sulitza itself. In fact, it is likely that the experience of Nova Sulitza was somewhere in the back of my mother’s mind as she developed her ideas about networks, migrations, mutual help, exchange of favors, patron-client relations, and so forth.

  For my family, Nova Sulitza was a kind of Eastern European counterpart of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s fictive town, Macondo. I’ve always thought of it like that, but with a difference: Nova Sulitza ceased to be a Jewish place in 1941, and it persisted only through the networks of its exiles, who found one another in places like Lima, Bogotá, Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Cali, and Caracas. Nova Sulitza existed only in relationships between in-laws, or in the commercial networks of peddlers who knocked on doors throughout much of South America, or in competitive parental bragging over their children’s achievements as they advanced in different fields, in Colombia, Israel, the United States, Peru, or wherever. García Márquez’s Macondo was figured as a transcendental place that lives on in Latin America’s unending history of eccentricity, while extinct Nova Sulitza became a horizon of reference and interpretative key only for a generation or two, because Jewish Nova Sulitza was forever extinguished. It could only be reenacted in social relations, as a more or less tenuously shared memory.

  When I was looking for information to write this book, I had an exchange with Victor Perlman, the son of my aunt Pupe, whose father had come from Hotin, a town very near Nova Sulitza. In an email, Victor made the following comment: “Niusic Coifman, the son of Aunt Sara, visited Hotin a few years ago. There’s nothing there.”217 “There’s nothing there” means that there are no Jews there. For families like ours, Nova Sulitza or Hotin became ghost towns, abandoned cemeteries.

  How did the Jews who were marginalized, oppressed, and expelled manage to survive? They survived by developing relationships and knowing how to find themselves in others, and also finding others in themselves. This explains my mother’s and my grandparents’ remarkable ability to make friends. Her capacity to find herself in others required a mimetic faculty that was so powerful that it was practically an illness, as in Woody Allen’s famous character Zelig. There was also understanding and communication in this identification, and not just camouflage. Even when it appears as a reflex, blending in is in fact never effortless. It requires careful observation, and observation produces understanding and is wedded to it. When you understand someone, you can interact, and when you interact, you have real material effects in social intercourse.

  Presence and encounter. A photo in which my grandfather (center) seems to be both with and not with scientist and scholar Alejandro Lipschutz (to his left) and poet Pablo Neruda (to his right). Santiago de Chile, 1960.

  My grandfather’s life was suffused with moments spent with famous figures. There were elective affinities among them, and they tended to understand one another very well. Looking back at the material traces that Misha left behind — photos, journals — he sometimes appeared to me almost as a kind of Zelig, with Mariátegui here, corresponding with Freud there, pleading for support from the president of Israel, corresponding with former Venezuelan president Rómulo Gallegos or Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, or living next door to Chilean folk composer Violeta Parra. My grandfather was a “minor figure” because he never had any permanence anywhere, nor did he enjoy material conditions that might have allowed him to lay down roots, but those encounters that he did have with so many friends and acquaintances were not merely adaptations on his part. They were genuine interactions that involved mutual influence, and not just mimesis.

  My nationality

  At some point during my adolescence, I began to rebel against assimilation. I started to feel proud about feeling rejected, and began to feel grateful that the Mexico where I came of age was not a country of assimilation, so that my foreignness would be with me forever. Unlike Misha, I didn’t think of Jewish nationality as a form of emancipation, because I never lived Judaism as an intensely communitarian experience the way he did. Nova Sulitza was too far removed. For me, being Jewish was a sensibility, a turn of mind and a family tradition. And, unlike my father, who later in his life tried to assimilate as a Mexican, I was not so attracted to an identity that I knew to be conditional, and from which I might be excluded at a whim.

  Almost unconsciously, I took in the experience of my paternal grandfather, Ricardo (Lomnitz), who was stripped of German citizenship even though he was a decorated war veteran. And also the story of Misha’s Romania, where Jews were compelled formally to request citizenship, even though they had lived there for generations, and where these requests were nonetheless routinely deferred or else flatly denied. I also took in the anticolonial nationalism of the Mexican Revolution, with its hoarse cry of “Mexico for the Mexicans,” and decided that it was not worth the trouble to invest in my own nationality. Instead, I happily held on to my Chilean passport, even though I had left my country of birth when I was just eleven. Unlike the Romanian Jews of my grandfather’s generation, I still have a Chilean nationa
lity just because I was born there. And, unlike what happened with Germany’s Jews, Chilean nationality always has been unrenounceable, to which I say, like any and all good Chileans, Viva Chile, mierda!

  My anti-assimilationism also led me to nurse or at least not to expunge all remnants of my Chilean accent, although I’ve never had the remotest intention of returning to Chile. I was born there and I spent my childhood there, and that’s it. Neither have I tried to eliminate the other Spanish intonations that I’ve acquired during my travels, or through the sonorous influence of my friends. I have come to realize and accept that I am “alingual” rather than bi- or multilingual: linguistically insecure. Jewish, I suppose. When I was in my twenties, I also accepted the German nationality that was bestowed on my father and my brothers, reverting to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that had originally taken it away. Decades later, I took United States citizenship, due to a set of practical considerations — I’d been living there for more than twenty years by then. And so, I voted for the first time. I voted for Obama. Still, I have never fully accepted the yoke of assimilation. Upon taking US nationality, I lost my German passport, without ever having used it. I had been German without speaking any German. Now that I am no longer German, I speak it a bit.

  Little by little, I developed an attitude that we might call Zapatista with regard to the topics of both family and nationality: “Family Is for Those Who Work It.” Similarly, nationality is for those who work it. Mexican anarchist and revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón felt that way, too, so that if a foreigner fought for the Mexican Revolution, his party granted him Mexican nationality, end of story. I have long felt, for that very reason, that I am Mexican, not only because I have loved Mexico, but because of how much I have studied it. In May 2017, thanks to the intervention of some dear friends, I finally received Mexican nationality with a presidential waiver, because, due to my job in the United States, I no longer met the ordinary residency requirements. I am proud of having it, because I “worked” in and on Mexico long before I received that recognition. In this case, which is unique for me, my passport certifies a status that I actually earned.