The Portuguese often had some bankable skills. In contrast, the uneducated and unskilled northeasterners, many of whom had been slaves or were the children of slaves, arrived in a city that had no use for them. They congregated in the slums, the favelas, that sprang up at the turn of the century. As the northeast continued its unstoppable decline into the twentieth century, more and more new arrivals joined those early unfortunates. But Rio was not generating new industry, and the newcomers could not be absorbed into an economy that was still mainly geared toward the export of agricultural products. The northeasterners often found that they had traded misery in one place for misery in another.
Pedro Lispector had more in common with the Portuguese immigrants than with those who were by now his fellow northeasterners. After years of work, his business in Recife was still not thriving, and he hoped that the capital would offer a wider field for his ambitions. He also hoped that Rio de Janeiro, with its large Jewish community, might offer suitable husbands for his daughters. Elisa was now twenty-four, Tania was twenty, and Clarice was fifteen. In Recife, with its two hundred Jewish families, they had presumably examined the offerings and found them wanting. In Rio they would have a wider choice.
Clarice never described the departure from Recife, where she had spent her entire childhood. She remembered the English boat that brought them to Rio in third class: “It was terribly exciting. I didn’t know English and chose from the menu whatever my child’s finger pointed out. I remember that I once picked cooked white beans, and nothing else. Disappointed, I had to eat it, poor me. A random bad choice. It happens.”3
Though she rarely returned, she spoke of Pernambuco often (“Recife never fades”),4 and alongside her throaty r’s she kept the place’s distinctive accent, a combination that made her an odd apparition in Rio. In a short elegiac essay, she imagined once again peering out the window of the house where she spent her childhood: “That is the river. That is the clock. It is Recife. … I see it more clearly now: that is the house, my house, the bridge, the river, the prison, the square blocks of buildings, the stairway, where I no longer stand.”5
Only two of his daughters accompanied Pedro to Rio. Elisa stayed behind working in Recife, rejoining the family a few weeks later. Shortly after she arrived, she took the civil service examination for the Labor Ministry, an open competition, and earned the highest score in the whole country.
But at that time there were no openings in the Ministry. However, for the first time in their lives, the Lispectors had connections. These came in the shape of the extravagantly named Agamemnon Sérgio de Godoy Magalhães, a Recife politician who had been sitting next to his friend João Pessoa when he was gunned down in the Confeitaria Glória. On the back of the ensuing revolution, Magalhães had managed to become minister of labor. Before reaching this exalted position, he had been a geography teacher at the Ginásio Pernambucano, where his students included Clarice and Tania Lispector.
Tania decided to help her family, and she proved a well-chosen ambassadress. With her full figure and black hair, the twenty-two-year-old Tania was “sensuous,” a neighbor remembered, “voluptuous, like a gypsy.”6 In her nicest dress, she went to the ministry in downtown Rio. “I explained that Elisa had come in first, and that she needed to work, that we needed to help our father because our mother had died,” Tania remembered. “And he remembered me and Clarice from Recife, and promised to help us.”7 With a nod from the minister, Elisa was hired by the Ministry, where she would spend the rest of her working life.
This promising start was difficult for Pedro to follow. He had come to Rio to improve the family’s fortunes, but he was barely more successful there than he had been in Recife. In the new city he sought work in commerce, as a sales representative, but had trouble finding a good job. For a time it seemed that another kind of happiness was in the cards, when, for the first time since Mania’s death, he met a woman. There was talk of marriage, but the woman apparently thought he had money and left him when she discovered he didn’t: another humiliation in a life that had already offered plenty.
Elisa’s income took off some of the financial pressure, and at the beginning of 1938 Tania, too, found a public service job. In January of that year, Pedro’s hope of finding his daughters Jewish husbands bore its first and only fruit, when Tania married William Kaufmann, a furniture salesman and decorator from Bessarabia (today’s Moldova), across the Dniester from the Lispector family’s own homeland. Clarice was impressed by her sister’s choice, who, she thought, looked like a movie star.8 Tania moved from Tijuca, where Pedro had settled the family, to Catete, on the other side of downtown, where she and William found an apartment on a street bordering the gardens of the Presidential Palace.
Inside that palace, Getúlio Vargas was now Brazil’s absolute ruler. The development would not have enhanced Pedro Lispector’s optimism. On September 29, 1937, a few months before Tania’s wedding, the army chief of staff called a press conference to reveal a “document of great importance.” The secret service, the general disclosed, had got their hands on a plan for implementing a Communist regime in the country, with the help of “Moscow gold.” A cry immediately went up from the usual quarters—the great landowners, the Integralists, and the military, along with the frightened middle class—demanding defense of the “Nation and its traditions.”9
Just who was behind this devious scheme was made clear by its name: the Cohen Plan. By the time it became obvious that the Cohen Plan, as the name also suggested, was a crude Integralist forgery, it had already achieved its objective. On November 10, Vargas answered the carefully orchestrated outcry to prevent the nation from falling into Muscovite hands. In the name of “national security,” he suspended all political rights, individual and collective; called off presidential elections; disempowered the courts and the independent judiciary; and surrounded both houses of Congress with military police.
The name of the new regime, the Estado Novo, New State, was borrowed from Portugal. There, in 1933, under the same name, António de Oliveira Salazar—who encouraged people to call him “God’s Chosen”—had established a regime that would become one of the twentieth century’s most enduring tyrannies. There were other inspirations for Vargas’s coup, especially Mussolini’s Italy, and the constitution sanctifying his seizure of power became known as the polaca because it was said to be modeled on that of Poland.
The word polaca had a different connotation, however. In Rio de Janeiro, “Polish girl” meant whore, and many of the prostitutes in Rio—as in São Paulo, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires—were in fact from Poland and were Jewish.10 Many were the orphans of the Great War, women who had not, like the Lispector girls, managed to escape safely abroad. Such girls, or those whose families had been reduced to destitution, were completely uneducated and easy enough to lure away to South America on the promise of marriage or a new life abroad. “The Man from Buenos Aires,” in Scholem Aleichem’s story of that name, was a pimp, a member of a fearsome Jewish mafia known as the Zwi Migdal, first based in Buenos Aires and which, when things heated up there, moved to Rio. For a time, it controlled the white slave trade in South America.
The Jewish presence in this business had not, of course, gone unremarked, and the existence of Jewish prostitutes and pimps was a prominent item on the Integralists’ list of complaints against the Jews. In fact, on June 7, 1937, before the Cohen Plan and the Estado Novo, a secret circular was in force to bar all Jews, including tourists and businesspeople, from entering Brazil. This was not only the work of Integralists. It reflected the broad anti-Semitism in the upper echelons of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, as well as in the government.11
This anti-Semitism was generally not, as for example in Argentina, translated into attacks on the Jews who already lived in Brazil. As Getúlio Vargas would go on to prove, the official Brazilian attitude was much more slippery. Even people who in their public life were quite determined to enforce anti-Semitic policies could be helpful to individual Jews—in part bec
ause it probably didn’t always occur to them, in a country with a tiny Jewish population, to wonder whether the people they were dealing with were Jews. An example was none other than Agamemnon Magalhães, minister of labor, who was willing to lend a hand to Tania and Elisa Lispector even as he was agitating within the cabinet to keep Brazil closed to the increasingly desperate refugees from Nazi Germany.12
Brazil was, in any case, far from unique in denying refuge to these people. Other large countries—the United States, Canada, Britain, Argentina, South Africa, Australia—as well as a host of smaller countries, from Ecuador to Liberia, shut their doors to the European Jews. Brazil grudgingly allowed in a few—between 1933 and 1942 almost twenty-five thousand Jews legally entered Brazil—though the Vargas regime considered Jewish immigration undesirable.13
In a country under heavy censorship, this undesirability was not advertised. It didn’t need to be. “We knew there were secret protocols to prohibit the entry of Jews into Brazil,” said one Recife Jew. “But they didn’t say there was—we felt it. It was the time of the concentration camps. … Sometimes they would say it was because the Jews were intellectuals and not farmers. There were already way too many intellectuals in Brazil. Then they said they wouldn’t bring progress to the country. So they never said Jews can’t get in. We talked about it in the community. In my house we talked about it.”14
The Jews paid a high price for Vargas’s grasp for absolute power. There was the price paid by Jewish Communists such as Olga Benário Prestes, the pregnant twenty-eight-year-old wife of the Brazilian Communist leader, deported to Germany and gassed. In the same year, 1936, Clarice’s cousin David Wainstok, a medical student in Recife, would also pay a price when, on suspicion of Communist sympathies, he was arrested and brutally tortured in Recife. “Brought up in a home where Zionism was the highest ideal, by parents who dreamt the dream of all the Jewish generations, the young Jewish student went a step beyond his parents, attempting to hasten the Jewish prophesies of ‘the end of days’ and ‘the earth shall be filled with wisdom,’ ” his father, Israel Wainstok, wrote in his Yiddish memoirs, making an explicit connection between his son’s Zionist upbringing and his thirst for social justice. After his arrest, “a black night descended on our family life. It stretched on and on, so many nights, weeks, and months.”15 David’s sister Cecília recalled a climate of terror. Their mother, Dora Rabin Wainstok, had buried all of David’s questionable books behind the house and covered them with cement, perhaps sparing the family greater complications; terrified Cecilia, a little girl, was followed to school by plainclothes police. After a year in the very prison that Clarice remembered seeing from her window, across the bridge from her house, he was finally released.
At the Ginásio Pernambucano, the school Tania and Clarice had attended in Recife, a certain Father Cabral began denouncing the Jewish girls for “seducing Christian boys,”16 and before long Jewish girls were expelled, as the school resolved to concentrate exclusively on educating boys. There are differing accounts of whether this was a direct reaction to Father Cabral’s agitation. But the Jews felt it was aimed at them; because the school was located in their neighborhood, and because it was free to those students who could pass its rigorous entrance examinations, it was attractive to a poor community that put a premium on education. The Jewish girls were forced to depart only a year after the Lispectors left Recife.
The equation of Judaism with Communism was potentially as dangerous to the Brazilian Jews as it had been to the Jews of Russia and Germany, though this equation had not, of course, been derived from an objective observance of actual Jews among the ranks of the Communists. As Gustavo Barroso’s formula had it, Communism equaled capitalism equaled Judaism. The Estado Novo took strong steps to repress all three. The Communists had been dealt with after 1935, and, as in Mussolini’s Italy and Perón’s Argentina, Brazil’s nascent industries were brought under a corporatist umbrella that did little to stimulate further economic growth.
At a time of world Jewish crisis, for people who had already survived the terrible massacres that followed the First World War and the Russian Revolution, any hint of repression would have been demoralizing, at the very least. Even Pedro Lispector, low as he was on the totem pole of Brazilian society, was a target of the Estado Novo’s new security measures. “He was a Zionist,” said Tania, “and he raised money for the Jewish National Fund. We had the little box in our house, where we put a coin on every occasion, whenever we could, for the Jews in Palestine.”17
This activism in no way distinguished Pedro Lispector from any other Jews, in Brazil or anywhere else; Pedro Lispector’s and Israel Wainstok’s homes were not the only households in which “Zionism was the highest ideal.” Shortly after his arrival in Rio, in March 1935, Pedro had served on the executive committee of the Zionist Federation when it was preparing its third national conference,18 unaware that this ideology, which would not have seemed to present much of a threat to Brazilian national security, would soon be banned as indicative of allegiance to a foreign government. (Of course, in 1937, when the ban took effect, there was no such thing as a Zionist government.) The pushke, the four-inch-tall metal box that Tania remembered, was declared “illegal and dangerous.”19 Even the word “Zionism” was banned; one lecturer was forced to refer to “a certain idea, well known to all, which Herzl helped to establish.”20
Luckily for the Brazilian Jews, the Integralists overplayed their hand, squandering the advantage they had gained when Vargas, adopting much of their rhetoric, cracked down on the Communist Party in 1935 and then, in 1937, instituted the Estado Novo. They resented Vargas’s ban on political parties, which included theirs. Plínio Salgado, their leader, who had always seen Vargas as a useful idiot, decided that it was time to install an Integralist dictator—himself—in his stead.
On the night of May 11, 1938, while Salgado waited in elegance above the fray in São Paulo, an Integralist battalion attacked Guanabara Palace in Rio de Janeiro, while Vargas and his family were asleep inside. Luckily, his gun-toting twenty-two-year-old daughter Alzira, a future friend of Clarice Lispector’s, managed to telephone around, rallying the troops, who, after long uncertain hours for the Palace’s residents, brought down the uprising toward noon of the next day. The plotters suffered far less than their Communist rivals. Salgado was dispatched to cool his heels in Portugal, where Gustavo Barroso soon joined him, and most of the military officers who participated in the coup were given token punishments or none at all.
Getúlio Vargas saw no point in retribution. The Integralists, the party of the right, had fumbled in exactly the same way that the Communists, the party of the left, had botched their chances three years before. It was a golden opportunity for the dictator to disencumber himself of any significant opposition without sullying his own hands. Though the Integralists, and many of their ideas, would return to haunt Brazil, their threat to the country’s Jews was now past.
The thirst for justice, the “dream of all the Jewish generations” that led the Communist idealist Olga Benário Prestes to the gas chamber and David Wainstok to the dungeons of Recife, took Clarice Lispector down another path.
After arriving in Rio de Janeiro in 1935, she spent a short time at a dinky neighborhood school in Tijuca before entering, on March 2, 1937, the preparatory course for the National Law Faculty of the University of Brazil. It was a most unusual decision for a woman—there were no more than a handful of female lawyers in the country—just as it was for a student of her background. The legal profession was everywhere in Brazil a preserve of the elite, and no school in the country was more prestigious than the law school in the capital. The girl from the Podolia shtetl was about to enter the top echelons of Brazilian society.
Careerism, however, was not what propelled Clarice into law school. The yearning for justice was bred in her bones. She had seen her mother’s horrible death, and her brilliant father, unable to study, was reduced to peddling scraps of cloth. She had grown up poor in Recife, bu
t she was also aware that her family, despite their struggles, were better off than many. “When I was a little girl,” she later wrote, “my family jokingly called me the ‘protector of animals.’ Because all someone had to do was accuse someone and I would leap to their defense. And I felt the social drama with such intensity that I lived with my heart perplexed by the great injustices which the so-called underprivileged classes suffered. In Recife I visited our maid’s house on Sundays, in the slums. And what I saw there made me promise that I wouldn’t let it go on.”21
Her advocacy of the defenseless was so fervent that people started saying she would be a lawyer. “That stuck in my mind,” she wrote, “and since I didn’t have any other ideas about what to study, I went to study law.”22 Her father, however, warned against it. He told one of her sisters that he was afraid she would end up thinking too much and fly off the handle. “Obviously,” she commented in a letter a few years later, “it wasn’t law school that made me like that. But now I understand so well what he meant.”23
Clarice had, however, a concrete goal. “My idea—an adolescent absurdity!—was to study law in order to reform the prisons,” she said.24 This was not a notion plucked out of nowhere, for in those years a movement existed in Brazil to reform the country’s prisons. Its most famous fruit was the House of Detention in São Paulo, a model institution open to visitors from across the world.
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who made his name in Brazil, came, and so did the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who visited in 1936, discovering that “exemplary cleanliness and hygiene transformed the prison into a factory of work. The prisoners made the bread, prepared the medicines, served in the clinic and the hospital, planted vegetables, washed the clothes, made pictures and drawings, and took classes.”25
Why This World Page 12