Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  The progress of the disease varies. But if Clarice was conceived in about March 1920, this suggests that Mania was probably attacked in or after the summer of 1919, when the wave of pogroms struck the family’s native region with such force. They were almost certainly fleeing by that time, though Clarice’s declaration on the subject is a masterpiece of elision. The family’s flight sounds like a holiday outing. But she makes clear that she was born en route: “When my mother was pregnant with me, my parents were heading toward the United States or Brazil, they still hadn’t decided which. They stopped in Chechelnik so I could be born and then continued on their journey.”17

  In her novel, In Exile, Elisa recalls a pogrom, probably one of the attacks in Haysyn in the summer of 1919, that left the family’s home uninhabitable: “The doors had been yanked out of their jambs; the broken windows stared silently out at the street, like blinded eyes.”18 The family fled to another house, where they hid in the kitchen, seeing the city in flames and hearing machine-gun fire throughout the night. There, a teenage boy, wounded and bleeding from his head, staggered in and expired in plain sight of Elisa and her mother. But there is a moment of hope: Pinkhas, hungry and terrified, finally manages to rejoin his family.

  There is widespread hunger. Soup kitchens open, and cooperatives, but it is too little and too late. A scene from Elisa’s book bears an eerie echo of something Clarice would later write:

  Ethel [Tania] stirred drowsily and asked for some bread.

  “There isn’t any, sweetheart. It’s night. I’ll buy some tomorrow.”

  “But I want some. Daddy brought some, I saw it. I saw white bread.”

  Then she turned over and went back to sleep, sucking her thumb in an instinctive effort to fool her hunger.19

  Years later, Clarice wrote a short piece that at first glance seems to reflect a middle-class Brazilian’s concern for her less fortunate fellow citizens. But it is probably a fragment of autobiography:

  I can’t. I can’t keep thinking about a scene that flashed through my mind, a real scene. A child has hunger pangs at night and says to his mother: I’m hungry, mommy. She says sweetly: sleep. He says: but I’m hungry. She insists: sleep. He says: I can’t, I’m hungry. She repeats, exasperated: sleep. He insists. She cries out, hurting: go to sleep, you brat! The two remain motionless, silent, in the darkness. Is he asleep? she thinks, wide awake. And he is too terrified to complain. In the black night the two lie awake. Until, out of pain and fatigue, both nod off, in a nest of resignation. And I cannot stand resignation. Ah: with what hunger and pleasure do I gulp down revolt.20

  When Haysyn is taken by the Red Army, the new governors promptly forbid commerce, removing any way for Pinkhas to earn a living. Mania and Pinkhas decide to take their chances and escape. As in tsarist (and Soviet) times, they need an internal passport to leave the city, and once they are outside they are accosted by a slimy Jewish character, “Barukh,” who promises to escort them across the border for a payment of 500,000 rubles. Barukh prides himself on his lack of sentimentalism and his hardheaded realism, which allows him to move with the times. He makes pointed comments that indicate a lowly class origin (“Me, I’m no rabbi’s son”).21 Like many unscrupulous Jews, he makes a living exploiting the desperate refugees.

  “What interested them,” wrote Israel Wainstok, who was fleeing at the same time, “wasn’t saving refugees but making sure they got all the money they could get out of these people.”22 With no other choice—the Jews so hated in Russia were also generally forbidden to depart legally—Pinkhas hands over all the money he has left.

  On their first attempt to cross the border, Barukh sends a message advising them against it; the crossings are too heavily guarded. All they can do is return to the nearest city. They have nothing left and no means of earning more. Both Elisa and Tania recall that Mania saved them with a hidden purse of jewels. These were the jewels she, the well-to-do daughter of a prosperous trader, had brought to her marriage; these were the jewels that would save the lives of her family. But they were the same jewels that, if discovered, could have meant the death of that same family. Mania’s gamble—that the bandits who infested the roads, preying on the helpless refugee population, would not find her out—was a desperate gesture. It was also the gesture of a courageous and formidable woman.

  “What does this mean?” Pinkhas demands in understandable terror when Mania calmly reveals the hidden purse. “How dare you? If ‘they’ had found it, what would have happened to us?”23 But the success of her bet allows the family to survive in a new town, Chechelnik, due south of Haysyn on the most direct road to Kishinev. They had relatives there, Mania’s cousin Dora; Dora’s husband, Israel Wainstok; and Dora’s widowed father, married to Israel’s mother, Faiga.24

  In Elisa’s book, the family stays in the unnamed town through several seasons. This may explain Clarice’s claim that she was born during the family’s emigration, between their first and second attempts to escape. In this village, probably Chechelnik, they celebrated Passover on April 3, 1920. That year, in the “ghost town,” the family must have recalled with a shiver the deliverance from Egyptian bondage. They themselves were not yet free.

  Throughout the summer and autumn they waited for Barukh, their Moses, to resurface.25 They were kept from starvation by the fortuitous appearance of a sick, elderly man, who approached Pinkhas in the street and offered to teach him a trade, soap making, in exchange for helping him reach the next town, in the direction of his own native village. Pinkhas quickly learned how to make soap, which gave the family a fragile source of income.

  But Chechelnik, founded as a refuge from Tatars and landlords, offered cold comfort. A couple of weeks after Passover, a detachment from the Ukrainian Galician army appeared. They were soon chased away by local Poles. In June, the Red Army arrived, and its soldiers were greeted as liberators. As elsewhere, however, the Soviet soldiers quickly wore out their welcome. The peasantry rebelled against taxes levied in food, which had the effect of inducing mass starvation.

  The south of Podolia seethed with counterrevolution; by summer no fewer than five Red Army divisions had arrived to quell the disturbance, and Olgopol County, where Chechelnik is located, was the most unstable area in all of Podolia. The Cheka, predecessor to the KGB, attributed most of the problems to the complex geography of the area (it is hilly and forested and thus ideal for guerrilla warfare) and to the “national-petit-bourgeois mentality” of the local residents. But even they mentioned the “tactless behavior” of the Soviet troops.26

  There is no mention of attacks on the Jews, but the Jews doubtless suffered more than their share throughout the year Mania was pregnant with Clarice. In 1920 in the little town of Chechelnik alone, five hundred peasant households were ransacked. Businesses were destroyed, fields went unplanted, epidemics raged. Starvation was the rule. Six years earlier, 8,867 people had lived in Chechelnik. By January 1921 the population had been more than halved.

  In these circumstances, in temperatures that reached 20 degrees below zero, Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector was born to a syphilitic mother on December 10, 1920.

  4

  The Missing Name

  The fragile child became a famous artist in a country her parents could then have hardly imagined. But it would be under another name. The name she received in Chechelnik, Chaya, which in Hebrew means “life”—and which also has the appropriate connotation “animal”—would disappear, reappearing only in Hebrew on her tombstone and not widely known in Brazil until decades after her death.

  Her writing is full of secret names. “One can say that in the work of Clarice Lispector there is a hidden name, or that her whole body of work is constructed upon her own name, disseminated and hidden,” one of her most perceptive critics has written.1 The name Clarice is hidden inside the name Lucrécia, the heroine of her third novel, The Besieged City. The protagonist of An Apprenticeship has the un-Brazilian name Lori, which is made of the first and last letters of the name Lispector.2 These may b
e coincidences, though they probably are not. Clarice’s work abounds with explicit instances of these sorts of word games: “I want to say things wrong. Like: Sued. That means God [Deus].”3 Or “But Brasília doesn’t pour. It is backwards. Like this: ruop (pour).”4

  The question of names and naming, the process by which things are called into being, dominates Clarice Lispector’s work. These questions, which she ultimately invests with great mystical import, may have had their origins in her own childhood, when she was suddenly assigned another name. In the posthumously published A Breath of Life (Pulsations), Clarice puts the following words into the mouth of her character Angela Pralini: “I quickly ran down the list of my possessions and was startled to realize that there is only one thing that has not yet been taken from us: our own names. Angela Pralini, a name as gratuitous as yours and which became the title of my quavering identity. Where can that identity take me? What am I to do with myself?”5 Like so many of Clarice’s fictional creations, Angela is an avatar of her author. But Clarice’s name had been taken from her; Chaya had become Clarice, and Clarice never, as far as is known, referred to her secret name, except obliquely: “I lost myself so many years ago that I hesitate to try to find myself again. I am afraid to begin. Existing so often gives me palpitations. I am so afraid to be myself. I am so dangerous. They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.”6

  The fear of losing her identity pursued her throughout her life, as in a letter she sent a friend three years before her death: “I was awakened by a terrible nightmare: I dreamed that I was leaving Brazil (as in fact I am, in August) and when I came back I learned that lots of people were writing things and signing my name to them. I complained, I said it wasn’t me, but nobody believed me, and they mocked me. I couldn’t take it any more and woke up. I was so nervous and electric and exhausted that I broke a glass.”7

  She created a myth about her name, which already appears in her first novel, published when she was twenty-three. She embroidered the legend throughout her life, claiming, improbably, that Lispector was a Latin name. By breaking it into parts—lis, lily, as in fleur de lis, and pector, chest or breast—she produced a nonsensical combination, “breast-lily.” On her deathbed, in a small scribbled fragment, she imbued this fantastical name with poetic resonance:

  I am an object loved by God. And that makes flowers blossom upon my breast. He created me in the same way I created the sentence I just wrote: “I am an object loved by God” and he enjoyed creating me as much as I enjoyed creating the phrase. And the more spirit the human object has, the greater is God’s satisfaction.

  White lilies pressing against the nudity of my breast. The lilies I offer to whatever hurts inside you.8

  But the ultimate reality is beyond names and language. The mystical experience, which she would dramatize most memorably in her novel The Passion According to G.H., is the process of removing language to discover an ultimate, and necessarily nameless, truth. Before her old life is shattered by a blinding mystical vision, the protagonist, G. H., summarizes her biography: “The rest was the way I had gradually become the person who has my name. And I ended up being my name. All you have to do is look on the leather of my luggage and see the initials G. H.—and there I am.”9

  In Chechelnik her name was about all the infant Chaya had. As Mania’s illness advanced, household tasks increasingly devolved upon Elisa, the oldest daughter. The nine-year-old had already lived through more than her share of horrors, and the physical burden of running the household added to her psychological trauma.

  The effects on her, she remembers in the most poignant scene in her book, were visible. And they caused her father to adopt a different attitude toward his oldest daughter: “He silently caressed her head, sometimes only barely pausing to glance at her thin face; her long, scrawny limbs; her expressionless mouth; her wild eyes. She was ugly, hideous, and it hurt him to see it. What hurt him most was her premature seriousness, the mark of her heavy responsibilities.”10

  This was not a family that needed more problems. But, sure enough, Pinkhas soon came down with the typhus fever that was then raging. Typhus, a disease of filth, is exactly the disease one would expect to find in a devastated country like the Ukraine. It is transmitted by rats and lice and thrives amid misery, in places where public hygiene has completely broken down. “The lice that carry typhus fever are common in large aggregations of persons who do not bathe or change clothes with any regularity and are forced by circumstances to live in close quarters. These are also the situations that infantry, refugees and prisoners are likely to find themselves.”11 Between twenty and thirty million people were infected in the typhus epidemic of 1918–1922. At least three million died.

  Throughout the winter, as her father lay motionless in bed, Elisa writes, her mother, “forgetting her own illness,” left every day to exchange some bit of their meager property for food for her family. In the Ukraine, in 1921, this was a grueling task, even for a healthy person. The country, known as the great breadbasket or granary of Europe, which before the war had produced an annual surplus of 300 million tons of grain, was starving.

  No less than Vidkun Quisling, whose eager participation in the Nazi occupation of Norway made his name synonymous with treason, visited the Ukraine with a League of Nations commission. He described the scene:

  The land is burnt black and stripped of trees and plants. One sees the straw of the roofs used as food for men and cattle, the miserable and often poisonous surrogates used for human first; hears the people tell how they have already eaten all the dogs, cats and crows they could get hold of, even dead cattle, leather of the harnesses, wood of the furniture. You hear of and get proof of necrophagy and cannibalism, speak with persons who have eaten their children or sisters and brothers, see the people lying like skeletons only in the houses, dying or awaiting death without any relief in view. You see the hospitals, which in reality are only places where the starving people are brought together to get a certain care, but where there are no beds, no linen, no medicine, and often no physician, the people lying narrowly together on the floor in the utmost misery. You taste the food which is given in those hospitals: a soup, salt water. You see the heaps of dead bodies, often with open eyes, nobody having cared to shut them.12

  From 1921 to 1922 a million people in the Ukraine died of starvation. In 1922 Quisling estimated that, of the three million Jews in the country, “the number of Jewish sufferers from starvation and disease does not fall far short of 2,000,000.”13

  Trapped in a war zone with millions of starving people, her husband immobilized by disease, her three young children hungry and helpless, her own health shattered, and without money or property to fall back on, Mania struggled to feed her family. Finally, when there was nothing left to sell, Mania, already partly paralyzed and in the middle of the Ukrainian winter, removed her own shoes, sold them, and wrapped her feet with rags. Elisa remembered her perfect composure.14

  Yet in the hellish context of the Ukraine, the family was, once again, luckier than many. Thanks to Mania’s determination and the bits of jewelry she still had, they were not among the million people who died of starvation, and Pinkhas was not one of the three million who died in the typhus epidemic. After he recovered, the family tried once more to escape. With a group of other emigrants they left the city, reaching the forest at night. In Elisa’s book there is no sign of Barukh, who presumably absconded with their money. Pinkhas carried their baggage on his back, Clarice tied to his chest, supporting the crippled Mania on his arm. After an exhausting journey throughout the night, they reached an abandoned village, where they slept the rest of the following day. Finally, at night, they arrived at the moonlit Dniester, where canoes waited to ferry them across to Romania. Elisa recalls, “To her surprise, the village faced the night with its doors and windows open, fearlessly! Here no one was afraid of the dark, or of the fugitives the night always hid. And there was light in the houses. Great kerosene lamps cleanly lit the simple, pleasant homes, and upo
n the tables there was bread, real bread, tea, and plates of meat. Then they slept in beds, real beds … beds for normal people.”15 This is Soroca, a town with a large Gypsy population just over the Dniester, in what is now the Republic of Moldova. The Lispectors would never return to their homeland.

  The closest Clarice ever got to her birthplace was Warsaw, where her husband was the Brazilian ambassador in the 1960s. She was by then a famous writer, and the Soviet government, anxious as ever to burnish its “cultural” credentials, offered her the opportunity to visit the land of her birth. She refused. “I literally never set foot there: I was carried. But I remember one evening, in Poland, at the home of one of the secretaries of the embassy, I went out onto the terrace alone: a great black forest movingly pointed me the way to the Ukraine. I felt the call. Russia had me too. But I belong to Brazil.”16

  5

  Statue of Liberty

  They left the Ukraine in the winter of 1921.1 From Soroca they traveled south to Kishinev, in Romania, now Chis¸inaˇu, the capital of Moldova. Compared to the Ukraine, the new land was prosperous, but it was also overflowing with some of the millions of refugees who had fled the world war and the Russian civil war. Europe was overwhelmed with these desperate people, and not only Europe: there were fifty Russian exiles in Abyssinia, a hundred thousand in China.2