Their numbers and desperate plight inspired contempt in many members of the established Jewish community. “Some Romanian Jews,” Israel Wainstok wrote in his Yiddish memoir, “looked down at the thousands of thousands of refugees like damaged goods, washed downstream by a flood.” Kishinev was “ ‘like the garden of the Lord in the land of Egypt,’ ” he wrote. “The Jews who lived there did good business and earned a lot of money. They showed themselves indifferent to the terrible situation of the Jewish refugees from Russia, who were exiled there and in other Romanian cities, drifting from synagogues to streets, awaiting some help from their friends and relatives in America.”3
Pinkhas Lispector was unable to find work. The family traveled south into what is now Romania, stopping in Galatz (now Galat¸i), an industrial center in the Danube delta, and eventually reaching Bucharest. “Bucharest was particularly inhospitable,” Elisa wrote. “Its sinuous streets all intertwined. By God it seemed more like a nightmare than reality.” They found provisional lodgings in a miserable hotel, “black from the smoke that escaped from the iron brazier that wasn’t enough to cook on or to heat the room, the room black from the almost total lack of light, even by day (because it was a room at the back), and from the sadness and worries that weighed upon us all.”4
According to In Exile, the family then moved to a refugee hostel. The five people were given two narrow beds in a long corridor with hundreds of other people, many of whom were sick. One day, when Pinkhas returned after another day vainly searching for employment, he found that his own daughters had fallen victim to an outbreak of measles and been removed to a hospital in a distant part of the city. Some responsible party also evacuated his wife, whose illness had progressed so far that “she found it increasingly impossible to drag herself every day to the free kitchen, where they served a dirty, greasy soup.”5
As at so many desperate points on this seemingly impossible journey, a kind of luck was with them. On the street Pinkhas ran into a landsman, a neighbor from his hometown, whom Elisa calls Herschel. Herschel had a bit of money and offered a loan to Pinkhas, with which the family managed to leave the hostel. Their circumstances improved, but they were not exactly well-to-do. Elisa, who herself no longer had any shoes, had to lug a pot to the communal soup kitchen, as she had to do in Haysyn after the Revolution. It was humiliating and painful, but there was hope: Pinkhas, with Herschel’s loan, started selling shoes in the marketplace. Her mother remained in the charity hospital. They were allowed to visit her only once a week, bringing bread, grapes, and apples, and then leaving her behind until the next week, when the “disdainful, severe” public charity again allowed them back.
“And then there were the uncertainties,” Elisa writes. “Uncertainties about how long we would have to be there (it ended up being months) and about where we would go. Until almost the day we left, we didn’t have any hope, we couldn’t see any promised land. The letters Mother and Father wrote to America and Brazil took a long time to reach their destinations, and the answers took even longer. And what worried us the most was the friendly and reticent tone in which those answers were given.”6
Mania’s half-siblings, children of Isaac Krimgold and his first wife, were in the United States, by far the most popular destination for Jewish emigrants. But on May 19, 1921, the U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, slashing by 75 percent the numbers of Eastern Europeans allowed entry. Brazil was still open, and probably the most attractive option anyway, given the greater number of relatives the family had there. But both countries required an invitation from someone who could guarantee they would not become wards of the state.
At last the invitation, with its “friendly and reticent tone,” arrived from Brazil. The family was issued a Russian passport on January 27, 1922, valid for travel to Brazil.7 It is hard to imagine a more joyless family portrait than the one staring out from this document. Elisa thought that Pinkhas was “the most pathetic figure. Yet full of dignity. … He was not a man who would turn up anywhere without a collar and a tie! … The face is grave, with a dark complexion and large mustache, and he is dressed like Charlie Chaplin: a dark coat and vest, quite threadbare and much too big for his emaciated body, an old crumpled shirt, and, knotted around his high collar, yes, knotted, is a poor substitute for a tie.” Elisa and Tania look thin and exhausted, “frightened by a world made of foreign countries, populated by strange people.”8 The youngest daughter is a tiny blur. The most striking face is Mania’s; she looks much older than her thirty-two years. She stares straight out, her jaw clenched. It is the same defiant gaze, “too intense for anyone to stand for long,” that would make her famous daughter instantly recognizable.
Soon after the Russian consulate in Bucharest issued them a passport for Brazil, the Lispectors traveled via Budapest and Prague to Hamburg, where they boarded a Brazilian ship, the Cuyabá. With twenty-five other immigrants, they traveled in third class.9 One can only imagine what an ordeal the voyage must have been for Mania. The Atlantic crossing was a trial even for the healthy, and the experience of steerage is a staple of immigrant literature.
Filth, and a stench enhanced by faulty ventilation, created on most of these ships an atmosphere an American report described as “almost unendurable. … In many instances, persons, after recovering from seasickness, continue to lie in their berths in a sort of stupor, due to breathing air whose oxygen has been mostly replaced by foul gases.” An American investigator, disguised as a Bohemian peasant, described the tiny quarters where the immigrants were piled atop one another, the open troughs that served as toilets, the smell of the vomit emitting from the seasick passengers. “Everything,” she concluded, “was dirty, sticky and disagreeable to the touch. Every impression was offensive.”10 In her own book Elisa mentions the heat and the suffocating, poisonous air in the hold. One evening, when she was lying in bed unable to sleep, an enormous rat ran across her pillow, brushing against her face, “its little eyes sparkling in its gray, repellent fur.”11
Unlike the hardships they faced in Europe, this one at least would be only temporary, and Mania and Pinkhas Lispector were surely comforted by the knowledge that their journey was about to end. Their children would grow up in a free country, one relatively unburdened by anti-Semitism. This was not because Brazil was historically well-disposed toward Jews. It was a Portuguese colony and hosted the Inquisition in colonial times, when professing Jews were barred. But it had nothing like the endemic anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe. This was in part because when the Lispectors arrived the “Jewish Question” was almost entirely academic.
Aside from a few small Sephardic communities in the Amazonian cities, few Jews lived there. In 1920, probably no more than fifteen thousand Jews lived in the entire enormous country. The previous thirty years had seen more than 2.6 million other immigrants arrive, mostly from southern Europe, along with an important contingent of Japanese. But only a handful of the new immigrants were Jews.12 Like the Lispectors’ relatives, many had originally arrived with the Jewish Colonization Association, either through Argentina, like the Rabin brothers, or through the far south of Brazil, where the Association had two agricultural colonies. But from the beginning the Jewish immigrants were drawn to the cities.
They mainly gravitated to the large southern cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The northeastern city where the Lispectors disembarked, Maceió, south of Recife in the small state of Alagoas, contained no more than a handful of Jewish families. These included Mania’s sister Zicela and her husband, Joseph Rabin. When they greeted their relatives at the port of Maceió, the gulf between them must have been yawning. The Rabins and the Lispectors had not seen each other in almost a decade. Brazilianized as Zina and José, the Rabins had had time to grow comfortable in their new home. They had a successful business, spoke Portuguese, and had two Brazilian-born children, Sara and Henrique. Most of all, they had not experienced the hellish years the Lispectors had spent trapped in the Ukraine.
Though the dock was graced wi
th its own replica of the Statue of Liberty, Maceió could not be easily confused with Manhattan. Three years after the Lispectors’ arrival, in 1925, the capital of Alagoas boasted no more than seven cafés, six hotels, and three cinemas.13 Not a lot happened there, and not a lot ever had. Between 1695, when Zumbi, the leader of the free black republic of Palmares, in the interior of Alagoas, was killed, and 1990, when corrupt local wastrel Fernando Collor de Mello was elected president of Brazil, it was a stranger to the headlines, a sleepy backwater in the poorest part of the country. The rivers were full of piranhas, and it is unlikely that Pinkhas and Mania Lispector were much heartened by the attractions Maceió offers the visitor today. The tropical climate must have seemed stifling to people used to the temperate Ukraine, and they were not likely to be spending much time on its wide beaches. Still, after all the family had experienced, Maceió, with its colonial plazas lined by tamarind and coconut trees, with its blue sea dotted with the distinct triangular sails of the jangadas, would certainly have seemed attractive.
In Maceió the family took Brazilian names. Pinkhas became Pedro, Mania became Marieta, Leah became Elisa, and Chaya became Clarice. Only Tania, whose name was common in the new country, kept hers. Clarice, not yet a year and a half old, would have no memory of Chaya, no memory of the horrors of the Ukraine.
Though in the bright tropical light the family might not have immediately noticed, in some ways Alagoas would not have been entirely exotic to them. It had much in common with the family’s homeland. Like Podolia, it was rural and preindustrial, and as in Podolia there was an extreme gap between the impoverished majority and the great landed magnates. Alagoas was Brazil’s most densely populated state, with eight hundred thousand inhabitants in 1912. But Maceió had only around forty thousand people, and it was by far the largest city.14 The almost entirely rural population was concentrated on the plantations that produced the region’s principal products, sugar and cotton. For practical purposes, these estates were small independent principalities, ruled by an intermarried oligarchy fiercely protective of its prerogatives.
This social structure was perhaps inevitable. Whereas the maldistribution of the rich Ukrainian lands was the result of perverse political leadership, Alagoas’s social problems were preordained by its geography and the commodities that geography could support. Neither, to say the least, encouraged the development of an egalitarian society. Sugar required enormous investments of money and labor. Brazil is vast on paper, but its fertile lands, especially in the northeast, peter off quickly as one moves west from the coast. There was never enough land to spawn an independent class of middling freeholders, and the area’s frequent, severe droughts, which could last years, weeded out all but the strongest planters. Early in the country’s history, landholding was concentrated in a few hands. And once the price of sugar fell from its historic highs in the seventeenth century, Alagoas, and places like it, were bound to stagnate.
Economic matters were made worse by the failure of Brazil to create cities. What cities existed were spread far apart and, with a few exceptions, such as Rio de Janeiro, were rarely cities in the true sense of the word. (Even Rio, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, was mainly a port and a seat of government rather than a city with a dynamic, self-sustaining economy, such as São Paulo became.) Maceió and places like it were simple outgrowths of the countryside. They shipped rural commodities abroad and imported advanced products for the plantations. They were, secondarily, social, religious, and educational centers for the elite, who mainly resided on their estates. They were country people, and the money they spent in town was country money. Practically all urban economic activities were related to the plantation.
This was true even in the metropolis of the Brazilian Northeast, Recife. In a commemorative volume published in 1925 the advertisements are almost exclusively dedicated to rural products.15 Besides the handful of ads for hotels, dentists, and tobacconists, the merchants of Recife trumpeted their expertise in cotton and castor seeds, the export of leather and hides, the grinding of coffee and flour. Even the industrial products are advertised for their usefulness in the countryside: motors for their convenience in sugar mills, machines for combing cotton.
Yet the traditional rural order was eroding. The abolition of slavery in 1888 caused a revolution in Brazilian rural society. The effects were not immediately apparent, but by 1900 the Brazilian south, helped by a quickly expanding supply of free labor, was rapidly industrializing. The most visible result was the explosive growth of the modern city of São Paulo. Other important cities also emerged at this time, such as Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, and Curitiba. The northeastern states were left behind economically, but their cities were expanding, especially as former slaves abandoned the increasingly forlorn countryside.
It was a great opportunity for immigrants. Millions poured into Brazil to take advantage of the growing economy. The Portuguese gravitated to Rio de Janeiro, the Japanese and Italians to São Paulo. Even places like Maceió were expanding, but they were not attracting the proto-middle-class immigrants arriving in the south. Instead they were filling with rural workers accustomed to slavery, people who generally lacked the basic education and skills required to go into business for themselves. Arriving in preindustrial towns that offered little in the way of work and generally unused to the cash economy, these people needed basic, cheap goods and services: the pots and pans and scraps of cloth indispensable to even the poorest household. Maceió had little in the way of a native middle class. A clever immigrant, even with a tiny bit of capital, might fill the niche.
Pinkhas, now Pedro, Lispector, had high hopes. “Father wanted to try a new life,” Elisa wrote. “He wanted to live in freedom.” In the passport photo she saw “his eyes fixed on the camera with something between bitterness and defiance. Since wasn’t he the first of the many generations of his family who had the courage to emigrate?”16
In Maceió the example of José Rabin’s successful business may have inspired him. Rabin began as a klientelchik, a peddler. It was a profession the Jews had long exercised in Europe. In Brazil, the first peddlers were Levantine Christians who had arrived slightly earlier than the Jews, and who, in emerging Brazilian cities, performed a vital service. The urban population had grown much faster than the petty retail and banking services the new inhabitants required. These were often the most basic clothing and household products, but there were few outlets that provided them. In these cash-poor regions, the Jews offered even the cheapest goods on credit. This gave the humblest immigrant something to sell and allowed even the humblest consumer to acquire needed merchandise.
The Jewish peddlers not only reached customers traditional retailers ignored, but they traveled to areas where traditional retailers would never have dreamed of turning a profit. They brought goods to the smallest towns of the American West; they had outposts in the pampa and the veld and the outback, places much more far-flung than Maceió, which, even if it didn’t amount to much, was at least an established city, a state capital. In fact, the cities of the Brazilian Northeast, most of which had previously been nothing more than ports for the plantations, were ripe for peddling. Urban populations were increasing with the decline of the rural economy. The cities were filling with just the kinds of people that an entrepreneur at the very bottom of the ladder could sell to.
For most Jews, peddling was simply a first step into the economies of their new homes. Though the work was arduous, they were spurred on by dreams of betterment for themselves and their children. The immigrant peddler, carrying his goods on his back, dreamed of a fixed shop. “It was not a very pleasant or respectable way to make a living,” wrote Israel Wainstok of his early career in Recife. “Still, however, many good people had worked their way up from peddling to become big businessmen and industrialists. So I too took to peddling, not that I had a choice!”17
Toward the end of her life, Clarice described her father’s profession as that of a “commercial representative.” “That was
n’t exactly it,” a friend said. “She said that as an affectionate way of dealing with the family’s poverty in Recife. … It was a commercial activity, but quite a different one. … He wandered through the streets of the poorest neighborhoods of Recife with a handcart, announcing, shouting with his foreign accent and his tired voice: Bey clooooooaz, bey clooooooaz. … He would buy up old, used clothes, and resell them to bigger dealers in the city. … To this day I can still hear Clarice’s voice imitating her father with immense tenderness, Bey clooooooaz; I’ve never forgotten it.”18
Most peddlers ended up in small-time commerce; some failed entirely. Even fewer founded great fortunes. In the United States, names like Guggenheim, Annenberg, and Levi Strauss owe their luster to Jewish peddlers. By the time the Lispectors arrived, José Rabin, who himself began as a peddler, had managed to place himself at the head of a small network of other peddlers, presumably more recent arrivals. These borrowed a small bit of money from him and set themselves up in business, peddling different goods in different areas of the city and returning a percentage of their intake to him. He was not a rich man, but he was on his way up.
José Rabin was also, it appears from Elisa’s book, cruel. After all the Lispectors had gone through, the chilly welcome that awaited them in Maceió was the last thing they had reckoned on, though they had perhaps had a hint of it in the “friendly and reticent tone” of the letters that reached them in Romania. Having survived racial persecution, civil war, rape, disease, and exile, they now faced the tyranny of petty relatives. Elisa’s book, written almost thirty years after these events, still smarts with anger over the humiliation José and Zina dealt her parents.
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