Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  Some of the friction could be attributed to the vastly different experiences the two families had had of the previous decade. “How little they knew each other!” Elisa marvels. “Where were the bonds of understanding, the slightest wisp of affinity?” But if we are to believe Elisa, her parents were also the victims of a deliberate campaign of mortification. José frequently bullied Pedro by shaking his head whenever a difficulty arose and saying, more in sorrow than in anger, “Ah, so you mean after all the trouble we took, after all our expenses in bringing you over …”19 He constantly sought refined new ways to remind Pedro of his great debt in bringing them to Brazil.

  It is hard to imagine the difficulties of Pedro Lispector’s position. Indeed, his entire life was an unrelenting, heartbreaking struggle. His crippled wife was in and out of the charity hospital. He had three small girls to raise. He constantly received letters from frantic relatives in Russia pleading with him, the lucky one, to save them. After his epic struggle to carry his family to safety halfway around the world, he found only an arrogant and miserly brother-in-law.

  Pedro made a bit of money teaching Hebrew to ungrateful children, and he sold pieces of linen on commission from José, who, to emphasize his mistrust, “meticulously counted them and then passed them to his wife, who painstakingly recounted them.” To keep his wife and children from the hunger that was a constant menace, he trudged day after day through the feverish streets of Maceió, earning a pittance. It was never enough. Elisa movingly recalls his sadness and desperation, the hours he spent silently smoking on the balcony, seeking a way out.

  At length he remembered the skill the old man had taught him back in Chechelnik. He could manufacture soap. In exchange for José’s initial investment, he proposed, he would provide the labor. In the torrid heat of Maceió, he spent hour after hour, day after day, stirring a boiling cauldron, breathing “the nauseating atmosphere of the tallow, the caustic poison of the tar.”20 He thought this enterprise would put him on a more equal footing with his brother-in-law. But it was to no avail. “On the days you’re not making soap, what are you doing, watching other people work?” José taunted him.21 Pedro was in no position to resist, and his self-esteem slowly eroded. There was still not enough to eat at home. Even in his rare free time he had to depend on his wife’s relatives for entertainment. Clarice later claimed that he immediately learned Portuguese. But Elisa wrote that in Maceió he had not yet had time to learn the new language. For his connection to the outside world he relied on the Yiddish newspaper Der Tog (The Day), which he borrowed from his brother-in-law. But eventually José stopped lending it.

  Elisa records her own increasing loneliness and her flights into the fantasy world she created to escape the grim reality of her life. She had learned some Portuguese, but not enough. At school she was mocked for her accent.

  “Say cadeado [padlock], say it.” The bullying children surrounded her.

  “Ca-de-a-do,” she repeated, emphasizing every syllable, afraid to make a mistake. The other girls laughed, jumping around her, one pulling her skirt, another, her ragged hair.22

  As the humiliations piled up, Pedro, whose ambitions had already been thwarted by the tsarist government, civil war, and emigration, began to pass those ambitions to his daughters. One night, as he sat listening to the sound of a piano coming out of a neighbor’s window, he said to Elisa, “I can have you taught music. Of course I can.” Piano lessons may have seemed extravagant for a man who could hardly afford to feed his family, but they were a small price to pay for a bit of dignity, for the feeling that his children would have a better life. Elisa wrote that he was determined for the world to see what kind of daughters he had.23

  His sacrifices were not in vain. One of those daughters would place the poor peddler’s name among the great names of Brazil. But Pedro Lispector would not live to see it.

  6

  Griene Gringos

  According to Elisa, the final blow to their lives in Maceió came when Marieta returned from one of her prolonged stays in the hospital. She had undergone a lengthy and fruitless treatment, and Zina, who in Elisa’s account was complicit in her husband’s cruelty, began whispering conspiratorial words into her sister’s ill and desperate ears. She encouraged Marieta to blame Pedro for the family’s difficulties, and when he came home from another arduous day of work, Marieta vomited cruel and violent words at her husband, words that drove him to tears. Even years later, Elisa remembered the incident with horror.

  The next day, according to Elisa, Pedro informed José that he was leaving the city. He took the boat to Recife, the capital of Pernambuco. Four months later, he had saved enough to send for his wife and daughters. Tania Lispector Kaufmann remembered the circumstances of the departure in another way: “Elisa might not have felt very good about the cousins. She was around 12 or 13. She might have had bad memories, as children sometimes do. There are always little tensions. But they weren’t the reason we went to Recife. Maceió, in those days, was little more than a village, so it was only natural to head to a bigger city like Recife, which was the capital of the Northeast. We all depended on Recife, which had more things to buy, and more competent doctors.”1

  They had spent three years in Maceió, of which Clarice would have no memory; she was five years old when they moved to Recife, which she would always think of as her hometown. “Pernambuco leaves such an impression that all I can say is that none, but none, of my travels throughout the world contributed anything to my writings. But Recife never fades.”2 “I grew up in Recife,” she wrote elsewhere, “and I think that living in the North or the Northeast of Brazil is to experience most intensely, to see most closely, the true life of Brazil. … My superstitions were learned in Pernambuco, my favorite foods are from Pernambuco.”3

  In the seventeenth century Pernambuco had been conquered by the Dutch, who transformed the sleepy backwater of Recife into South America’s richest and most diverse city. It was populated by Africans and Indians, Dutch and Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Englishmen, and Poles. Because “a greater degree of religious freedom was allowed in Netherlands Brazil than anywhere else in the Western world,” including in Holland, Jews flocked there, so many that in Recife they may have outnumbered white Gentiles.4 The first synagogue in the New World, Kahal zur Israel, was founded on the Rua dos Judeus, Jews Street, in 1637. One priest muttered that Recife and its twin city, Olinda, were “como a Sodoma, & Gomorra.”5

  There had been Jews in the Brazilian Northeast before the Dutch conquest, mainly forcibly converted Portuguese Jews and their descendents, who sought safety away from the more tightly policed metropolis. But though there was no Court of the Holy Office in Brazil, it was not entirely safe from the Inquisition, and periodic persecutions claimed many prominent Brazilians. Among the victims were Bento Teixeira, author of the first literary work written in Brazil, the Prosopopéia (“A bad poem, a poor imitation of Camões, and its main intention was to praise the governor of the capitania of Pernambuco,” wrote Clarice’s friend Erico Verissimo), and the family of Branca Dias, a prominent resident of Olinda who was the first person to provide education to women in Brazil.6 But under the Dutch, who took control of northeastern Brazil in 1630, the community blossomed. Many “crypto-Jews” who had been forced to disguise their backgrounds reemerged, and many Jews, mainly Portuguese who had taken refuge in Amsterdam, appeared in Recife.

  Arrival in the new land also brought novel problems. In about 1636 the community dispatched a letter to a rabbi in Salonica, Haim Shabetai, asking whether they could adjust their prayers to the conditions of the southern hemisphere, where the seasons were reversed: “And should we pray for rain between the months of Tishrei and Nissan, as other Jews do throughout the world, or should we adapt our prayers to the seasons of the year in Brazil?”7 The local Portuguese and their allies, having contracted enormous debts to the Dutch,8 mounted a fierce campaign to retake Pernambuco, and several times almost succeeded, besieging hungry Recife. At one especially des
perate moment two ships, the Falcon and the Elizabeth, magically appeared, inspiring the famous rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, who was a member of the Amsterdam tribunal that later excommunicated Spinoza, to compose a long song of praise, “Zekher assiti lenifla’ot El” (“I wish to recall the miracles of God”). This was the first Hebrew poem written in the New World.

  But God proved stingy with his miracles. He did not again intervene to rescue Netherlands Brazil. The Portuguese succeeded in taking Recife in 1654, putting an end to a brief golden age. With the reconquest, the Jews were expelled and the Inquisition reinstated. Twenty-three Recife Jews made their way to another Dutch colony, New Amsterdam, where on the island of Manhattan they laid the foundations for the greatest diaspora Jewish community the world has ever seen. The temple the exiled members of Kahal zur Israel founded there, Congregation Shearith Israel, exists to this day in a lavish building on Central Park West.

  For American Jewry, 1654 was a beginning. For Brazil it marked an end. Some of the Jews who remained converted to Christianity and maintained their religious beliefs in secret, some for generations. Eventually, however, they melted into Luso-Brazilian society, and by 1925, when the Lispector family arrived in Recife, there was no living connection to the Jews of Netherlands Brazil. The Jews of Recife, like all the Jews of Brazil, were recent arrivals.

  In Pernambuco today, the brief period of Dutch rule awakens an interest that borders on the fetishistic. Every taxi driver, it seems, can recite the achievements of the Dutch governor Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, and citizens openly long to have been colonized not by the bumbling Portuguese but by the tolerant and competent Dutch. This fascination is such a part of Pernambuco’s mentality, such a cornerstone of the state’s identity, that it seems it has always been thus.

  In fact, however, it is relatively recent. During the three centuries that followed the fall of Dutch Recife, the conquest of Pernambuco was presented as a triumph of a Catholic, Portuguese, and unitary state, an event so important that it was generally understood to mark the birth of the Brazilian nation. The large numbers of Jews in Dutch Recife also meant that the tone of these criticisms was often anti-Semitic. As late as 1979 the famous sociologist Gilberto Freyre could approvingly cite an earlier historian who saw the war against the Dutch as a struggle between “the cross and the shop-counter.”9

  Historians have always been attracted to the colorful Dutch interim. “No period of national history possesses such abundant literature as the troubled Dutch domination of eastern Brazil,” wrote Alfredo de Carvalho in 1898. But the pro-Dutch view began to be popularized only in the middle of the twentieth century. Books such as José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello’s Tempo dos Flamengos (The Flemish Time), published in 1947, emphasized aspects of Dutch rule that were appealing to a modern, democratic Brazil: the colony’s religious tolerance, along with its substantial artistic and scientific achievements. Two years later another writer compared the two colonial powers: “[With the institution of the Inquisition] the Portuguese expelled the classes that had freed themselves from feudalism … while the Dutch shook off old systems and embraced private initiative.”10

  The result of this revisionism, and the Dutchophilia it sparked, is that to be Jewish in Pernambuco today is to be directly connected to the most glorious moment in local history. The recent rediscovery, excavation, and reconstruction of the synagogue of Kahal zur Israel was a great boon to the Jewish community, which has rather unexpectedly found itself a central feature of pernambucanidade, Pernambuco’s identity.

  This situation could not be more different from the way it was shortly before the First World War, when the first Jews arrived in Recife. The immigrants, who were almost exclusively poor people from Eastern Europe, knew only vaguely that there had been an earlier community. They knew nothing about this past, and the locals, even the most sophisticated, knew nothing about the Jews.11

  Take this exchange from 1922, the year the Lispector family arrived in Brazil. The correspondents are two prominent Pernambucans, Gilberto Freyre and Manuel de Oliveira Lima. Freyre was probably Brazil’s most famous scholar; Oliveira Lima was one of Brazil’s greatest historians, a man of immense learning who left a personal library of forty thousand volumes to the Catholic University in Washington. In 1922 both were living in the United States. On January 18, 1922, Freyre writes, “Mr. Goldberg has returned to Boston. We’re so alike, in our tastes, our affinities, our interests! He’s going to introduce me to David Prinski, the great Jewish intellectual, whose house is the meeting place of all sorts of literary people. By the way: how do you say ‘Yiddish’ in Portuguese?” Oliveira Lima answered, “I don’t know how to say ‘Yiddish’ in Portuguese, or even what it is. I’d like to know, because I never stop learning.” Freyre replied, “By the way: ‘Yiddish’ is the name of the Jews, their modern language and literature. You say ‘so-and-so is Yiddish,’ ‘Yiddish literature,’ etc. I thought there was a word for that in Portuguese.”12 (There is: ídiche.)

  If this was the level of Jewish cultural literacy of internationally educated intellectuals, one can imagine the situation among the common people in this backward part of Brazil. “The less sophisticated people, especially outside the big cities,” wrote Samuel Malamud, a prominent lawyer and friend of the Lispectors, “confused the Jew with Judas, and they imagined him as something out of the ordinary, like the devil, with horns and a tail. The Jews they had daily contact with—either the peddlers who sold clothes, bed- and tableware, jewelry, and furniture, or even the businesspeople who were already established in different sectors—were called Russians, Poles, or simply ‘gringos,’ a word meaning any foreigner. For the Jews, ‘gringo’ was the same as griener (green), in Yiddish, meaning the ones who had just arrived in the country.”13 To most Brazilians the Jews were no different from other immigrant foreigners—Portuguese, Lebanese, Italians, Spaniards. As a separate category, Jews were unknown, and anti-Semitism hardly existed, even as a concept.

  The joke that a Jew trapped alone on a desert island would build two synagogues, the one he attended and the one he wouldn’t be caught dead in, also applied to the young kehilah of Boa Vista, Recife’s Jewish neighborhood. Mania Lispector’s relatives had been among the first Jews in the city. In November 1911 there were only eight Jewish men in Recife, including her cousin Pinkhas Rabin.14 Pinkhas had the honor of importing the city’s first Torah scroll in 1913, but the honor seems to have gone to his head. According to Avrum Ishie’s Yiddish memoir of 1956, Rabin’s stinginess with his holy book annoyed much of the community. Repulsed by his attitude, other men ordered their own Torah from Palestine. When it arrived in 1914, there were already four minyanim, or forty adult men, in the city. Two years later, the nascent community acquired a building to house a school and other Jewish institutions. “But we really were Jews,” Avrum Ishie recalled. A second group didn’t like the building, so they found their own and established a competing school. Later the Zionist Club and the Socialist Club, located next door to each other in tiny houses on the Rua da Glória, would struggle to win the little community’s hearts and minds.

  Despite these predictable squabbles, the community, evicted from the steppes of the Ukraine, Bessarabia, and White Russia and plunked down halfway across the world, was remarkably cohesive. They might not always have liked each other, but at the end of the day they simply had more in common with their fellow Jewish immigrants than with their exotic neighbors. The immigrants were, first of all, poor, at least when they arrived. One of the attractions of Recife was its location at the northeastern tip of South America; as the closest major Brazilian port to Europe, it was cheaper to get there than to the more famous destinations further south. Many stayed in Recife because they could not afford the glitzier options of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires.15

  Recife’s convenient location was not the only reason they chose the Northeast. Because the Jewish immigrants worked in similar professions, they needed each other’s support. With increasing immigration,
the large centers—Rio, São Paulo, Montevideo, Buenos Aires—were increasingly spoken for. Markets for the kinds of goods the Jews specialized in were nearly saturated.16 But there was still opportunity, and less competition, in the second-tier cities. In Recife, as in the much smaller Maceió, these peddlers often began selling merchandise, such as bits of cloth, on consignment, carrying it through the poor surroundings of Recife, the rough-and-tumble backlands of Pernambuco, and even into neighboring states.

  A decade after the first Jews arrived, the community had settled into the neighborhood of Boa Vista. The area was named after a palace built by the most celebrated of the Dutch governors, and though his princely splendor was far in the past, Boa Vista was still in the busy commercial heart of the city. Many of the original pioneers had by now managed to leave peddling and settle into a less arduous life of shopkeeping. In Brazil, they worked in jobs similar to those that had always employed Jews in Europe. In the old country, the Jews, such as Mania Lispector’s murdered father, were timber merchants; in the new country, which abounded with tropical forests, many Jews set themselves up as traders in wood. Others sold wood products, especially furniture, and other household items such as linens and dishes. And as in Europe there were many Jewish tailors and jewelers. Just as their distant relatives in the seventeenth century had had to adapt their prayers to the southern seasons, the immigrants had to adapt their offerings to the new climate; unlike in chilly Podolia, in sweltering Recife umbrellas were as often used to protect from the sun as from the rain.

  Recife may have been an important city in the Brazilian Northeast, but its economy was hardly more diversified or developed than Maceió’s. There was little manufacturing in the city. It was left to the Jews of Boa Vista to introduce items such as ready-made towels, sheets, and tablecloths (before this innovation, people had always made their own from rough bolts of cloth) as well as to amplify the primitive system of credit. Just as the Jewish peddlers allowed the poorest consumers to buy cloth and pots and pans on generous terms, the shopkeepers of Boa Vista later introduced credit and installment plans for bigger items, such as refrigerators, a practice long since fully naturalized in Brazil.