Nuestra América

by Claudio Lomnitz

  That was how we first came to know Tepoztlán, too, and we fell in love with the place. We walked all through its valley, which at that time was nothing but cornfields, picking through cow pies with a stick, as we searched for Egyptian emeralds: the rainbow scarab (Phanaeus vindex). The entire experience was sublime: the town, all adobe, stone and terra-cotta, the shade of the hog-plum trees in the rainy season, and everything surrounded by the russet-and-green wall of the mountains. Searching for the shiny green scarab in piles of shit. A double pleasure for any young boy.

  The rainbow scarab is a dung beetle abundant in the cornfields that cover the valley of Tepoztlán.

  Final (bar mitzvah)

  My grandfather couldn’t come to Mexico City because of his heart condition, so it was decided that I would have my bar mitzvah in Caracas. And that’s what happened. I went to my grandparents’ apartment, in the Plaza de la Estrella, in the San Bernardino neighborhood, and I lived with them for a couple of months before the ceremony.

  My grandmother was very involved in planning the event and organizing the banquet, while my grandfather sat down to give me an intensive introduction to Jewish culture. I had that immense fortune. I arrived in Caracas in June, and my bar mitzvah was scheduled for August, so I was able to spend a couple of months shadowing Misha, accompanying him to his clerical job at Lámparas Orly, to Bolívar Park to look for some priests who did linguistic work in the Venezuelan Amazon, or to the supermarket to buy this or that…wherever he went.

  Noemí’s list for planning my bar mitzvah banquet, August 1970.

  My grandfather taught me a lot that summer. He taught me, for example, how to pretend to pray, so that no one would notice that I didn’t know much about what was actually going on in the synagogue. He gave me very precise instructions, although they were only useful for Orthodox services. We talked about Judaism and Christianity. He told me a little about his arrival in Peru, and of the liberation that America had been for him. He spoke of the accomplishments of Jews in science and culture. We spoke of Moses and a bit about the prophets. A little about Jesus, too. Something of Marxism, something of South American history. At the time, I didn’t understand his interest in someone like Bolívar (he had several shelves of books on him), or in the independence movements of the various South American countries.

  Those were months of great fellowship and love between grandson and grandparents. The bar mitzvah ceremony, in the Unión Israelita in Caracas, directed by an awfully serious rabbi, was exciting despite the gravity. My grandmother Bronis had also come all the way from New York, as well as a great deal of family and friends from Venezuela. After the ceremony, the banquet, and the party, my grandparents invited the family to spend a week on the beach, at the Hotel Marcuto Sheraton. A big expense that they insisted on having. Those were days of intense happiness for my grandfather, who was surrounded by almost his entire family, children and grandchildren, in an event that he and Noemí had organized from start to finish.

  I think that plenitude can be a dangerous thing, or, as Misha used to say, “Mamash [truly] dangerous!” I have seen that in a couple of other cases. And so it was then that Misha had his second heart attack, with everyone there at the Hotel Marcuto. An ambulance came to take him and Noemí to Caracas, and they spoke during the trip. Misha said goodbye and told her how lucky he had been to share his life with her. He also told her that he did not want to be remembered as a businessman, but as an intellectual.243

  From his arrival in Peru in 1924 he had struggled for that, in the midst of difficulties that always forced him to do other things — sell clothes with Mr. Sarfaty, found Jewish schools in Cali and Bogotá, teach Hebrew to young people in Israel and in Chile. Contributing through his practical efforts to create a new language for a new national community, and more generally to work for universal emancipation through specific struggles, like the reformation of South American national societies, for instance, or Jewish emancipation and rebirth. Through all of that, Misha had to be attentive to the wants of the real world, to his family survival, surely, but also, for several decades, to the survival of freedom in the world. His work as an intellectual existed and flourished in the midst of those struggles, the way a mountain orchid blooms between the crags. Misha’s life was now ebbing like a sigh that had brought a bit of oxygen into a clamped-up world. My grandfather said his loving goodbye to Noemí, who would survive him by only six years, and Misha died before reaching Caracas.

  Portrait of Misha. Caracas, 1963.

  Having just officially entered religious adulthood, thanks in large measure to Misha, I was able to take part in the prayers of mourning for him. We sat shiva for a week at my grandparents’ home. It was then that I said my first kaddish.

  *1 The inscription in Hebrew reads: “Memorial for a beloved soul / Like a beautiful flower planted between streams but later ripped from the earth by a fetid wind, an assassin pulled from the world of the living and carried away the distinguished Sina Bar-Yakov Shimon Hakohen, on the fortieth day of Sfirat Ha-Omer (counted from Passover) in the Hebrew year of 5682. His fate was to live 63 years performing good acts with true generosity and charity. He was a pious and learned man, and Torah and wisdom were intertwined in his person. His sons and daughters will cry bitterly for him. May his soul remain tied to the bonds of life.” Translation by Elisheva Shaul.

  *2 The wealthiest man in the family, he moved to Belgium two years after his father’s assassination, where he gambled away most of his fortune. Simon died in Antwerp in 1930.

  Acknowledgments

  I had been interested in preserving the history of my family for a while, but I began to conceive of this book in 2012, when a scandal broke out around the hidden Nazi past of a founding figure of Colombian anthropology, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. When I read the news, I was struck by the fact that Reichel-Dolmatoff’s interests in South American Indians in some ways paralleled those of Misha Adler, even though Reichel was an Austrian aristocrat who had for several years been a member of the SS, while my grandfather was born to a Jewish family in the outer reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and had been a communist. Was there a difference between the motivation of a closeted ex-Nazi and a Jewish communist in their interest in the so-called Indian Question in South America?

  That’s when I began to think about this book. I became interested in the relationship between the exaltation of “the Indian” and the destruction of Europe. But when I finally started to write, the book took an increasingly more personal turn, and when my father died a few years later, I dropped my academic inquiry altogether and decided to make this book about the origin of my own point of view. This is a demanding subject for anyone, surely, but fortunately I was accompanied by Norma Elizondo throughout this deeply introspective and sometimes personally distressing process. I was nurtured by Norma’s love, consideration, and intelligence every step of the way.

  And indeed it was a sinuous course, not least because I ended up writing this book twice, first in a Spanish version, and now in this, deeply rewritten, English edition. At first I dreaded the idea of rewriting, and of recalibrating my account for the ear of a different kind of reader, one less familiar with Latin American culture, and maybe more at home in European history. I knew that writing this book in English would be exacting work, even though I was deeply fortunate to have a fine translation of the original Spanish text that I could use as a baseline, done by Vincent Barletta, to whom I am very grateful. I simply could not offer English-language readers quite the same book.

  Surprisingly, though, the experience of writing anew proved to be exhilarating: the process provided yet another fascinating bend in this story of constant translations. The effort also opened a new editorial experience for me, thanks to the close and intense dialogue I enjoyed with my editor, Judith Gurewich, whose singular commitment helped me find ideas that had existed only in embrionic form, chapter after chapter. I am deeply grateful to
Judith for her passionate intellectual dedication, and for the friendship that she and her family — Victor, Andreas, and Vladimir — have offered Norma and me.

  This work is dedicated to my two children, Enrique and Elisa. I hope that it will be instructive for them and for other members of our family. It was important to me that I finish the first version of this book in time for my infirm mother to read it. She has since passed. Larissa was a pillar of our family, and this book is filled with love and gratitude for her incredible vitality.

  I am a specialist in almost none of the areas covered in this book. Jewish history, for instance, or German, Colombian, and Peruvian history. Each of those subjects is a world unto itself, so I needed a lot of specialized help. Miraculously I received it at practically every turn, sometimes from unexpected corners. Cristóbal Aljovín and Juan Carlos Lupú found key documents in Lima. José-Carlos Mariátegui kindly facilitated two photos from the archives of his illustrious grandfather. In Colombia, María Victoria Uribe helped me understand the intellectual milieu of the 1940s, and Gustávo Álvarez Gardeazábal dug up new and unsuspected materials out of sheer personal curiosity. It was thanks to his generous spirit that I learned key details of the story of my great-grandparents, Boris and Tania.

  My family in Caracas and Bogotá was very supportive of my efforts throughout, and I am especially obliged to my uncles Manuel and Mauricio Adler. Yvonne Adler scanned all of their family papers. On the Lomnitz-Aronsfrau side, Barbara Lomnitz found and sent me invaluable documentation on my grandmother Bronis. I am also grateful to my second cousin, Vivianne Pommier, for her help and advice.

  My colleague Naor Ben-Yehoyada helped orient some of my (alas, very limited) reading on the history of Israel, and he put me in touch with Elisheva Shaul, who assisted me with translations from the Yiddish. I am indebted to Elisheva for her fine work. My incursion into Yiddish also found support in Mexico City, from Maia Ajzen and Sara Robbins, who I warmly wish to recognize. In Germany I was overwhelmed by generous help from historian Karen Strobel and her collaborator, Brigitte Zweger. Their painstaking archival research on the assassination of my great-grandfather, Sina Aronsfrau, changed my point of view with regard to my father’s story, and so also my own. Karen and Brigitte’s commitment to unearthing the history of racism and nationalist violence in their hometown of Mannheim has been an inspiration. I am also indebted to Professor Martin Sabrow, whose work on the Rathenau assassination was critical to discovering the key to Sina Aronsfrau’s untimely death. Finally, my friend and former student Xenia Cherkaev translated family correspondence from the Russian, and I am thankful for her careful, helpful clarification of the semantic range of some key words.

  A handful of close friends read the Spanish manuscript before it was published and provided invaluable comments. I am deeply thankful to Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, Jorge Aguilar Mora, Beatriz Martínez de Murguía, Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, and José Ramón Cossío for their close readings and comments. All of these friends, and a few others — Jorge Myers, Adrián Gorelik, Martín Bergel, Erika Pani, Carlos Altamirano — have been generous interlocutors; I hope that I can one day reciprocate their comradery.

  From an institutional point of view, this book was written thanks to the support of Columbia University and to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, that granted me its prestigious prize in 2017. This allowed me to write the first (Spanish) version of this book, which I in fact completed in Berlin while affiliated with the Freie Universität. I wish to thank professors Marianne Braig, Stephanie Schütze, and Stefan Rinke for their generous hospitality. I also benefited from time spent as a visiting scholar at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica in Mexico City, and am much obliged to its director, Dr. Sergio López Ayllón, for his invitation.

  Finally, I wish to thank the remarkable editorial team at Other Press, especially Yvonne Cárdenas, Alexandra Poreda, Janice Goldklang, Gage Desser, and Walter Havighurst, for their meticulous care.

  Journeys of Noemí Milstein & Misha Adler

  Family Tree

  * died in the Holocaust along with their spouses and descendants

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION: THE LANGUAGE OF PARADISE

  1. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997).

  Part One: Citizens of the World

  1: UNSTABLE AFFILIATIONS

  2. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Israel y Occidente, Israel y el mundo,” Repertorio Hebreo 1, no. 1 (April–May 1929): 4.

  3. For a recent appraisal in English of Mariátegui’s work and trajectory, see Lance Selfa, “Mariátegui and Latin American Marxism,” International Socialist Review 96 (spring 2015), https://isreview.org/issue/96/mariategui-and-latin-american-marxism. The English-language anthology that I refer to is Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker, ed. and trans., José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).

  4. “Nacionalismo y vanguardismo,” in Mariátegui total (Lima: Ediciones Minerva, 1994), 1:308; published originally in Mundial, November 27, 1925.

  5. Ibid., 1:6 and 4.

  6. Osmar Gonzales, La presencia judía en la izquierda peruana (Lima: Otramirada, 2014).

  7. Pinkas HaKehilot, “ ‘Novoselitsa’ (Novoselytsya, Ukraine),” Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Romania 2 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1980), 1–8.

  8. Great Britain Foreign Office, Historical Section, Bessarabia (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1920), 5.

  9. Ibid., 6.

  10. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, English trans. by Cesare Foligno (London: Marlboro, 1982), 208.

  11. Josef Govrin, In the Shadow of Destruction: Recollections of Transnistria and Illegal Immigration to Eretz Israel, 1941–1947 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 8.

  12. Malaparte, Kaputt, 44.

  13. Diana Dumitru, The State, Anti-Semitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 34.

  14. Naphtoli Rabinovici, Ich und Mein Shtetele (Tel Aviv: Private edition, 1965), English translation for C. Lomnitz by Elisheva Shaul.

  15. Great Britain Foreign Office, Bessarabia, 21.

  2: WHY MISHA LEFT

  16. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

  17. “Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations — such is the national program that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.” V. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, published originally in Prosvescheniye, nos. 4–6 (1914), English translation in Lenin Internet Archive, https://wwwmarxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch10.htm

  18. Quoted in Max J. Kohler and Simon Wolf, Jewish Disabilities in the Balkan States: American Contributions Toward their Removal, with Particular Reference to the Congress of Berlin (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1916), 2–3.

  19. Ibid., 13.

  20. Ibid., 26.

  21. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 38–47.

  22. HaKehilot, “Novoselitsa,” 2:5.

  3: EMANCIPATION AND EMIGRATION

  23. Moses Mendelssohn, On Enlightening the Mind (1784), trans. James Schmidtt, https://persistentenlightenment.com/2014/03/18/moses-mendelssohn-on-enlightening-the-mind/, 40.

  24. Great Britain Foreign Office, Bessarabia, 29.

  25. Rabinovici, Ich und Mein Shtetele, 3.

  26. HaKehilot, “Novoselitsa,” 2:3–5.

  27. For a history of anti-Semitism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, see B. E. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

  28. HaKehilot, “Novoselitsa,” 2:7.

&nbs
p; 29. Rabinovici, Ich und Mein Shtetele, 11.

  4: THEIR FIRST AMERICA

  30. Prefectura de Lima, Inspección General de Investigación y Vigilancia. Mesa de Partes y Archivo, lib. D, fol. 1, núm. 19 (October 7, 1930).

  31. HaKehilot, “Novoselitsa,” 2:6.

  32. For the case of Hungarian migration, see dissertation by Péter Torbágyi, Magyar Vandormozgalmak Es Szorvanyközøsségek Latin-Amerikában a Második Világháboru Kitöréséig, PhD thesis, Szegedi Tudományegyetem (Budapest, 2007). I am grateful to Brigitta Cser for translation of relevant passages.

  33. Adam McKeown, “Inmigración china al Perú, 1904–1937: exclusión y negociación,” Histórica 20, no. 1 (1996): 70–71.

  34. Salomón Brainski, Gentes en al noria. Cuentos bogotanos, Spanish translation by Luis Vidales, 2d ed. (Bogotá: Huecograbajo Litografía, 1973 [1945]), 64.

  35. Oscar Terán, “Amauta: vanguardia y revolución,” Prismas 12 (1984): 174.