Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  The Western Ukraine not only produced many of the great Jewish mystics. Its Christian population, too, periodically burned with religious frenzy. The area’s official churches included the Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Ukrainian Autocephalous, and Ukrainian Greek Catholic. It was a place where the Virgin Mary appeared to villagers with something like regularity and where statues of Christ were known spontaneously to bleed. It was a place where, around the time of Clarice’s birth, preachers led a whole constellation of charismatic sects, with names like the Flagellants, the Painters, the Israelites, the Foot-washers, the Tanzbrüder, the Studenbrüder, and the Milk-Drinkers of Saint Uncle Kornei and Aunt Melanie.

  “How difficult it is to write the history of the [Ukrainian] borderlands,” one scholar has noted, “without, temporarily, believing in divine apparitions. Ghosts, miracles, occurrences that today cannot be explained, made up a major part of everyday life.”8

  “Her eyes,” a friend of Clarice Lispector’s wrote, “had the dull dazzle of the mystic.”9 “I am a mystic,” she told an interviewer. “I have no religion, because I don’t like liturgy, ritual. A critic for Le Monde, in Paris, once said that I recalled Saint Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross—authors, incidentally, I never read. Alceu Amoroso Lima … I once called, asking to see him. He said: I know, you want to talk about God.”10

  Such was the fascination of Clarice Lispector’s mysterious figure, and so little known about her origins, that in her own lifetime a whole body of legend sprang up around her. In this she resembled the Jewish saints of her homeland, the Hasidic zaddikim, “bearers of that irrational something,” mythic figures in their own day, about whom an “overwhelming wealth of tales” indissolubly mix “triviality and profundity, traditional or borrowed ideas and true originality.”11

  Yet though she did not provide them herself, though she tried to rewrite the story of those origins, records do survive describing the family’s life in the Ukraine. The most important were left by Elisa Lispector, her oldest sister: an unpublished typescript called “Old Pictures” and a novel, In Exile, published in 1948, telling in thinly veiled terms the story of the family’s emigration.12

  Elisa, born Leah on July 24, 1911, was old enough to have a clear memory of the country the family was forced to abandon. She hardly knew her paternal grandparents, though she was haunted by the figure of her grandfather, Shmuel Lispector, the very type of the studious, pious Eastern European Jew. Obedient to the commandment prohibiting the reproduction of the human figure, Shmuel Lispector never allowed himself to be photographed.

  He lived in the tiny shtetl of Teplyk, not far from Chechelnik. Quiet and affable, he realized early on that he was “not destined for the things of this world.”13 When given the choice of studying the Holy Scriptures or working in the little shop full of “products with many different odors, and the noisy and irascible customers,” he naturally chose the former. A cousin of Elisa and Clarice’s remembered his fame as a saint and a wise man, whose knowledge of the holy books attracted scholars from the whole region. His concentration on his studies was absolute.14 This was possible because, according to custom, he had married a rich woman, Heived, or Eve. Learned men were sought-after husbands for the daughters of richer, but presumably less refined, families. “The rich parents supported the pair, enjoyed their offsprings and basked in the glory and respect of the son-in-law, who continued his studies,” wrote Nathan Hofferman. These marriages between poor men of scholarly background and richer girls from merchant families were neither unequal nor uncommon.

  The marriage, as was also the custom, was arranged, and produced five children, the youngest of whom, Pinkhas, Clarice’s father, was born in Teplyk on March 3, 1885.15 Elisa never met her grandfather, who died in his forties, but neither did she see much of her grandmother, who lived to be ninety-three. “Grandmother Heived visited us only once in Haysyn, where we lived. I don’t remember her well. I don’t think she stayed long. She was careful about getting in other people’s way, afraid of inconveniencing them. So the image that I have of her is of a docile, shy creature, of few words—a silence and a standoffish manner that her daughters-in-law easily interpreted as touchiness mixed with domineering.”16

  When it came time for Pinkhas to marry, Shmuel hired a matchmaker. The prospect turned up was Mania Krimgold, who was born on New Year’s Day 1889.17 Like his father, Pinkhas also married a woman whose father could support his studies. Pinkhas was not destined to become a scholar, but the match was wise in another way: Mania’s jewels would salvage her family from the coming war.

  By traditional reckoning, Mania’s father, Isaac Krimgold, was not a good Jew, and so what might have been a straightforward marriage became a complicated amorous history. As a young man, he had met Mania’s mother, Charna Rabin, at a wedding party.

  Elisa remembered him as “tall and strong as an oak, dignified, straightbacked.” Well-off, he had a grocery store in a town near Pervomays’k, at some distance from Teplyk, and, for his dealings in timber, rented land from a Russian nobleman.18 He had somewhat loose manners and close contact with gentiles. “In the big warehouse where he stored wood, he even occasionally drank a bit of vodka, and it was not unusual for him to fraternize with the lumberjacks.”19

  Unlike the strictly pious Lispectors, Isaac Krimgold was not religious. He headed to town to attend the synagogue only on the most important holidays. Charna’s father found this laxity unacceptable and denied his permission. Both Charna and Isaac married others. Isaac’s wife gave him three children, “and, when she died, he confessed that he did not mourn. She was hot-tempered, he said.” Charna, too, had one child before being widowed in her turn. Years later, she and Isaac met again and were finally married. Elisa remembered her “pious and modest” grandmother warmly, “her clothing and her jewelry almost sumptuous.” They had three daughters, including Mania, or Marian, the oldest. For little Elisa, her grandparents’ house, where she spent her summer holidays, was a thing of beauty: the veranda with its stained-glass windows where they took tea every afternoon, the river she played in with the neighbor children.

  But Charna died prematurely, and Isaac married a third time. That wife, too, he had to bury.

  Mania grew up in that large house, surrounded by trees. Like her father, she was independent and informal, “having always lived in the countryside, and not in one of the narrow alleys of the Jewish neighborhoods.”20 Yet her country background did not imply a lack of culture and elegance; to the contrary, like her famous daughter Clarice, she gave an impression of refinement. “She knew how to speak, she knew how to walk. She only wore clothes from designers in Kiev and Odessa. She always had an understanding word for one person, a coin for another.”21

  This was the woman the matchmaker found for Pinkhas Lispector. The bride and groom were allowed to see each other before the wedding, “in the presence of chaperones, of course.”22 After their marriage, which took place in about 1910, they moved. They would never again stay long in one place. By July 24, 1911, they were in the town of Savran, when their first child, Elisa, née Leah, was born.

  The young family knew periods of peace and prosperity. Elisa remembered the brilliance of their Friday evenings, her mother magnificent in her pearls, lighting the Sabbath candles; the table, in the splendidly clean house, decked with the delicacies of the Eastern European Jews; the Saturday mornings spent in prayer in the synagogue; the afternoons of reading and visiting family and friends; and then, when the first stars appeared in the sky, her father’s prayer over a glass of wine, “praising God for having distinguished between the sacred and the profane, between light and darkness, between the Sabbath and the days of work.”23

  But my mother was at her most brilliant on the nights that other couples came to visit. Nobody was as fascinating a conversationalist, moving so gracefully through a world she enchanted. Because on the nights when my parents hosted their friends, who were young like they were, the house, with its windows open to the night
in the summer, and cozy in the winter, was a true celebration.24

  Their marriage was arranged, but “love was the feeling that united them, I’m sure of it now, remembering them together,” Elisa wrote. “A halo surrounded them. There was a great understanding of mutual admiration. It was not unusual for me to catch them speaking more with their eyes than with words.” Elisa contrasts the radiant Mania with the slightly reserved Pinkhas: “Thin face. Sad expression. My father always wore a sad expression, but of an imposing seriousness.”

  An aspect of his character was not to be lavish with praise, and not because he did not recognize someone’s qualities, but because he lacked that streak of servility that can be seen in certain people and which flattery only worsens. Quite to the contrary: the more he recognized someone’s noble qualities, the greater his restraint in dealing with him. An expression he used with some frequency was a fainer mensch (a distinguished person), but if the person had won his complete admiration, he simply called him a mensch (a person). So when he said so-and-so is a mensch, he was paying him his highest honor.25

  Pinkhas had inherited his father’s seriousness, as well as his dedication to study. Elisa remembers him as ambitious: “He felt the world moving ahead all around him and did not want to be left behind.”

  Yet the world was determined to leave Pinkhas Lispector behind. His plight was that of generations of talented Russian Jews. His strictly traditional father, who allowed him to dress in a modern style, must have recognized that Pinkhas’s generation would not be as closely bound to old orthodoxies. But the ambitious Russian Jew broke loose from these traditions only to find he had no future in his own country. “ ‘Jew’ was the slur they used to block his way to the university,” Elisa wrote, recording that as a young man Pinkhas “was fascinated by mathematics and physics, but was always blocked by an immovable barrier: the stigma of being Jewish.”26

  Instead of becoming a scientist or mathematician, Pinkhas had to be content with selling odds and ends in a rundown hamlet. “Father never learned a manual skill either, since all the men of his pedigree were dedicated to the study of Torah, and that, he knew from experience, meant nothing in terms of earning a living. And he wanted to earn, he wanted to live. He wanted to see the world. When he married, he even moved to another town. His eyes were open to the future, along with a boundless desire for knowledge.”27

  The life of a shopkeeper, selling shoes, cloth, hats, and accessories, “acquired in Kiev and Odessa, which is why he had a very select clientele,” may have been a bitter comedown.28 But during Elisa’s earliest years he and his family prospered, though, as Clarice remembered, “his real talent was for spiritual matters.”29

  Like so many Russian Jews, Pinkhas turned inward. When the weather was so bad that no customers appeared, he went into the back of the shop, turned on a kerosene lamp, and started to read “everything he could bring back from the big bookstores he visited on his frequent journeys. But, besides Bialik and Dostoevsky, he also read, or rather studied, the Gemara (Talmud). The pious religious feelings of his father, whom he always saw hunched over the Holy Books, had become, in him, a way of thinking that was both spiritual and humanistic.”30

  Despite the humiliations that awaited the Jews in Russia, Pinkhas, according to Elisa, had never thought about emigrating, and nobody in his family had ever done so.31 That was not Mania’s case. Around 1909, her first cousins, the five sons of her maternal uncle Levy Rabin, went to Argentina,32 headed, like thousands of others, for Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s agricultural colonies.

  The greatest Jewish philanthropist of his day, Hirsch, a Bavarian banker and industrialist, poured his vast fortune into causes all over the world, making princely gifts to educational and medical institutions throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, and Palestine. When the Russian government rebuffed his offer of two million pounds to create a system of secular Jewish schools in the Pale of Settlement, he turned his attention to helping the Russian Jews emigrate. Through his foundation, the Jewish Colonization Association, Hirsch bought up land in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and especially the enormous, fertile, empty Argentine Republic. In that country alone he eventually acquired over seventeen million acres.33

  Like the Zionists, whose dream of a Jewish state he did not share, Hirsch believed that agricultural labor was the key to regenerating the Jewish people. But though the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) provided much of the colonies’ infrastructure, Hirsch’s scheme was no more socialist than was Hirsch himself. The immigrants were expected to buy the land they worked, and the colonies were meant to become self-governing municipalities. As conditions worsened in Russia after the 1905 Revolution, Jews flooded into Argentina. Between 1906 and 1912, around thirteen thousand arrived annually. Among these were Mania Lispector’s five cousins, who found work with “La Jewish.”

  From the beginning, however, Hirsch’s project in Argentina was troubled. Forbidden to work in agriculture in their homeland, the Russian Jews were essentially an urban, commercial people. Despite the training and assistance the JCA offered, they could not readily adapt to farming the pampas. Within two years of the colonies’ founding in 1891, almost a third of the original colonists had departed for the United States. And though conditions eventually improved, the remainder steadily gravitated toward the cities.

  Among those who left the countryside were the Rabin brothers. Of the five, only Abraham, who settled in Buenos Aires, remained long in Argentina.34 The other four went to Brazil. For some reason, one of them, Joseph, now Brazilianized as José, ended up in Maceió, in the northeastern state of Alagoas. Maceió was an unlikely destination, located in the poorest and most backward region of the country. The bigger, more prosperous city of Recife, not too far away, was a more promising target, and it was there that the other three brothers settled, sporting the Brazilian names Pedro, Samuel, and Jorge. There they took up the traditional entry profession of immigrant Jew: peddling.35

  By the beginning of 1914, therefore, five of the seven Rabin children were safely in South America. Sarah Rabin, their mother, was dead. Only Dora and Jacob, with their father, Levy, remained in the Ukraine. Dora soon met a young man from Chechelnik, Israel Wainstok, to whom she became engaged. They had planned to leave Russia immediately, but their plans were put off and they settled down in Chechelnik. There Israel’s widowed mother, Feiga, married the widower Levy Rabin, Dora’s father and Charna Krimgold’s brother.36

  The last of the family to depart before the war was Mania’s sister Zicela Krimgold, who was engaged to her first cousin José Rabin, the brother who had settled in Maceió. It is not clear whether this union had already been planned before José and his brothers departed for Argentina five years before. In any case, José and Zicela, now answering to the more Brazilian-sounding name Zina, were married in Recife on April 24, 1914.

  They escaped Europe just in time. For some reason, Dora and Israel Wainstok, along with their now married parents, Levy and Feiga Rabin, stayed behind. Perhaps they had spent their savings sending relatives on ahead of them and planned to join them later. Whatever the reason, it was a nearly fatal miscalculation.

  When the world war broke out in August, the normal paths of emigration—overland from Russia, through central Europe, and via Hamburg or the Holland ports to the Americas—were closed to the eastern Jews. Hundreds of thousands were being slaughtered on the front. Along it, as in the West, there was little movement after the armies dug into their trenches. And as in the West, millions of people were slaughtered for the gain of a few kilometers.

  Pinkhas and Mania were lucky in one respect. Compared to many Russian Jews, they made it through the war with relative ease. In distant Savran, far from the front, many of the horrors of the First World War would pass them by. But amid the chaos that was swallowing up the country, Pinkhas’s business did not prosper. By April 19, 1915, when their second daughter, Tania, was born, they had already left Savran and returned to Pinkhas’s hometown, Teplyk.


  But in contrast to France and Belgium, the Eastern Front was the scene of pogroms that surpassed anything that had come before them, and these would reach the Lispectors in due course. In the Polish and Ukrainian regions—whose loyalty the Russian Crown had good reason to suspect—attacks on Jews began almost as soon as the war did. They started with rumors: that Jews were smuggling gold to the Germans in the bodies of slaughtered geese; that they had put the plans for an antitsarist mutiny into a bottle and thrown it into the sea, where it could float to Danzig; that they were flashing coded lights from windows to assist the Austrian advance; that they were disrupting the telephones and fiddling with the telegraphs.37 The Russian Jewish writer S. An-Ski records a rumor he heard from a hotel maid in Russian Warsaw:

  “The telephones,” she said vaguely. “They tell the Germans everything. On Sunday, when the flying machines came over, the Jews sent them all sorts of signals—they told them that the biggest generals were in the church. So they started bombing it. Luckily, they missed.”

  The elderly maid went on, delivering a recitation that she apparently replayed for every guest she met. The bombs had killed or wounded a dozen people, she said, all of them Poles, and all because the “Jews have an ointment, which they smear on their bodies so the bombs won’t hurt them.”38

  Before long these absurdities devolved into slaughter. A wave of pogroms swept across the Pale. Though 650,000 Jews eventually served in the Russian army and 100,000 died in the war,39 their loyalties were suspect, especially in the lands that switched hands over the course of the war.