ADVANCE PRAISENuestra América
“Nuestra América is profound, riveting, and moving. Claudio Lomnitz reconstructs his family’s history vividly, and brilliantly weaves the lives and fates of German and Romanian Jews who fled to South America into the complex web of Latin American culture, history, and politics. As he interprets how several generations of his family struggled with migration, survival, hopes, ideals, identity, community, and tradition — in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and Europe and Israel — Lomnitz illuminates a poorly understood chapter in twentieth-century Jewish history and sheds light on the human condition and the quest for meaning amidst dark times.”
—Leon Botstein, President of Bard College
“This is a brilliant and beautifully written book. By way of personal memories, archival research, and impassioned listening, Lomnitz narrates how his Jewish family coped with violence and dispersion, and reflects on the depths out of which they found strength to begin life anew. The story of his grandfather’s collaboration with Mariátegui in Peru uncovers an inspiring chapter on the creation of intellectual and political communities. Lomnitz brings new meaning to Nuestra América as a necessary place for active new beginnings, which he has inherited.”
— Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Princeton University, author of La memoria rota
“In times of danger, writes Claudio Lomnitz, peril is at once collective and deeply personal. His Nuestra América is both an enthralling family chronicle and a stunning intellectual history of those condemned to bear witness to the scarcely suppressed barbarisms of twentieth-century nationalism in Europe and beyond; of racism, statelessness, and genocide, of evils epic and banal. In their eternal search for security, these exiles developed an acute understanding of the fascism that haunts modern statecraft everywhere. And, as intellectuals rising from the ashes, they worked to build a worldwide secular humanism, a vision of freedom for which the promise of America, both south and north, was the elusive ideal.”
—Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Research Fellow, Harvard University
“This is a beautiful, poetic book in the voice of a wise, erudite, and insightful narrator. Like a great novel, it illuminates the souls of its protagonists and the times in which they lived. Like a great ethnography, it is world-making. I have read many memoirs, and this one is among the most captivating. If the gods still communicated directly with humankind through doves or angels or oracles, they would say, read Nuestra América.”
—Thomas W. Laqueur, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley, and author of Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains
“Here, the author and the book make each other. By producing archives previously unbeknownst to him, Claudio Lomnitz enters into conversation with his own book to investigate himself and his family while building a theory of history: if this book puts the family as the center of that theory of history it is not just because Claudio is an anthropologist; it is not just because he was invaded by unbearable nostalgia; it is not just because he has suffered the loss of members of his family; it is not just because. It is also because the family as a random dynamic of people linked by consanguinity and affinity — that is, not as an institution, because institutions are elective, optional structures — is an impossible actor of historical events; its members are unpredictable, they wander around intimacy and distance, they cannot judge why despite being such perfect strangers they are so much alike.”
—Jesús R. Velasco, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Yale University and author of Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages
“This extraordinary book illuminates the agency of people in dark times, through transatlantic, multilingual, and pluricultural stories. Nuestra América interweaves the archive of the history of the Jewish diaspora with that of Lomnitz’s own family. Against the tragic background of global twentieth-century events, we learn the workings of individual lives and how these individuals deal with decision-making at the most critical moments of social and political experience.”
—Graciela Montaldo, Columbia University, co-editor of The Argentina Reader
“What do our family histories reveal and conceal? As he explores the migrations of his relatives between Central Europe, South America, and Israel, Claudio Lomnitz provides a poignant, finely wrought meditation on displacement, loss, and linguistic genealogies. Nuestra América invites us to think hard about what we can recognize, what we can know, and what we can protect when it comes to those we call kin.”
—Stéphane Gerson, Professor of French Studies, French, and History, New York University
“Nuestra América is a remarkable book — part family history, part intellectual autobiography, part eyewitness account of World War II, the Holocaust, the kibbutzim, part reflections on exile. With narrative mastery, Claudio Lomnitz leads us on an unsuspected journey from the outskirts of Bessarabia to Latin America and the United States, with pit stops in Israel and the Berkeley campus. A must-read for those intrigued by the vagaries of twentieth-century history, with its diasporas, migrations, settlements, and resettlements.”
—Rubén Gallo, Princeton University, author of Freud’s Mexico and Mexican Modernity
“In Nuestra América Claudio Lomnitz reveals his strengths as a historian, as well as his disarming vulnerabilities in a process of self-discovery, while unearthing a family saga worthy of a great Latin American novel. Lomnitz’s memoir is not just about his own family. It honors the lives of so many other spirited men and women who started new lives, learned new languages, and embraced new cultures while trying to keep a connection with their Jewish heritage, even as they kept quiet about the most traumatic events of their personal and collective experiences to protect their children and grandchildren from their silent despair.”
—Efraín Kristal, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA
ALSO BY CLAUDIO LOMNITZ
Exits from the Labyrinth:
Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space
Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico:
An Anthropology of Nationalism
Death and the Idea of Mexico
The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón
Copyright © Claudio Lomnitz, 2021
An earlier version of this book was published in Spanish in 2018
by Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, Mexico.
Lyrics on this page from “Forever Young” by Bob Dylan.
Copyright © 1973 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2001 by Ram’s Horn Music.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
Text designer: Julie Fry
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio, author.
Title: Nuestra América : my family in the vertigo of translation / Claudio Lomnitz.
Description: New York : Other Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographic references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022227 (print) | LCCN 2020022228 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635420708 (hardcover)
| ISBN 9781635420715 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio — Family. | Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio. | Jews — South America — History. | Jews, German — South America — Biography. | Jews — Migrations. | Jewish diaspora. | South America — Social conditions — 20th century.
Classification: LCC F2239.J5 L66 2021 (print) | LCC F2239.J5 (ebook) | DDC 980/.004924 — dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022227
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022228
Ebook ISBN 9781635420715
a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
Contents
Introduction: The Language of Paradise
Family history, for what?
Just plain Kartoffel
Comme c’est curieux
Wo wohnt der Mörder?
Panglossia
Alingualism
America
ONE: CITIZENS OF THE WORLD
1. Unstable Affiliations
Provincial cosmopolitanism?
Borderlanders
Diglossia
The Pale of Jewish Settlement
Social conditions in Bessarabia
Nova Sulitza
Romanian annexation
2. Why Misha Left
Romanian anti-Semitism
Body matters
3. Emancipation and Emigration
Education
Zionism, immigration
4. Their First America
How they arrived
Beginnings
San Marcos
The klapper and national consciousness
5. Lisa Noemí Milstein
Shura
Czernowitz
Also Lima
6. The Amauta
Blinding lights
Architecture of experience
A bohemian undertow
Friendship and tradition
The Amauta
Revista Amauta
7. Jewish Americanism
Tradition and transformation
Friendship
The Repertorio Hebreo
Misha
8. Expulsion
Prison
The Jewish-communist plot
Of nationalities and passports
The death of Mariátegui
The fall of Leguía
Expulsion
TWO: THE DEBACLE
9. Adulthood
Marriage
Paris
Nova Sulitza
10. Genocide
Transnistria
11. The National Disease
The banality of evil?
Rhinoceroses
Iphigenia in Bucharest
Coda: Shura
THREE: COLOMBIAN REFUGE
12. Family Life
Tuluá
Education
Family life
Tania
Diglossia in America
13. The Need for a New World
Nuevo Mundo
Agustín Tisoy Jacanamijoy
The second issue
14. The Limits of Adaptation
Colombian-Soviet friendship
Birobidzhan
Reasons
Agustín Tisoy II
The final period
Grancolombia
Bogotazo
Why emigrate?
15. The Limits of Translation
Boris’s associates
Violence in Tuluá
Boris’s two deaths
Shura
16. Dialectic of Silence
Column
Silence
Concerns
FOUR: NATIONAL LIBERATION
Israel
Larissa and Cinna
Return to Colombia
How the marginalized survive
My nationality
FIVE: CHILDHOOD AS A COLLECTIVE ACHIEVEMENT
God’s face
Geology of Machu Picchu
Sina and Cinna
Sina Aronsfrau
What’s in a name?
The Aronsfrau murder
Envy
Poor Cinna
The author of my days
Bigger but smaller
Mesohippus
Rainbow scarab
Final (bar mitzvah)
Acknowledgments
Journeys of Noemí Milstein & Misha Adler
Family Tree
Notes
Illustration Credits
“Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.”
— KARL MARX, Theses on Feuerbach
INTRODUCTION
The Language of Paradise
Family history, for what?
This is an account that speaks of how strangers help shape everything that we call ours. It begins in exile, like the Odyssey, and it bends and strains toward reunion. It is my family’s story, and it is also my story.
The collapse of Europe triggered a dizzying cycle of displacement. So much so that this account appears to have an unpredictable quality, skipping between countries and provinces that were only remotely connected. In many of those places — Peru, Colombia, Romania, France, Israel, Chile, Mexico — my family has had the kind of role that in Hollywood is known as a cameo: fleeting apparitions, minor parts, testimonials. There is something very Jewish in this.
In the Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia, for example, the Jews were the property of the king, who referred to them as “our Jews.” They lived in Jewish quarters (juderías) and moved about the cities dressed in peculiar clothing that was both a mark and a seal. Nevertheless, marginal though they were, those “Jews of the king” had an important role in the spiritual life of the community: they were condemned to be eternal witnesses of Christian happiness, to that to which they had turned their backs when they denied that Jesus was the Messiah. According to the logic of the Christian monarchs, Jews must be confined, identified, and punished, true, but they must also be protected so that they could carry out the theological role of the condemned witness: always present but never invited to the banquet. Someone is always required to envy whatever is deemed to be normal, because normality can scarcely justify itself on its own.
Of course there was also a material function for these people. Christian law prohibited usury. Jewish law also prohibited it, but only within the religious community. That is, Jews could freely charge Christians interest. For this reason, Christian monarchs made sure that “their Jews” were moneylenders and that they charged interest. This marked them as usurers and thus all but ensured that Christians would reject them as sinners. Afterward, the king would levy taxes against these same Jews, making himself the ultimate beneficiary of the greatest part of the income earned through usury, though without himself ever having violated Christian law. To use a rather unpleasant Jewish concept, the Jewish userer was something like the Christian king’s version of a Shabbas goy. The Jew did what was religiously forbidden to the Christian, but he did it for the Christian’s benefit, even more than for his own.
The point is that Jewish marginality was in fact crucial for the Christian order. The Jew’s place as forced witness served to highlight the blessings of that order, a dramatic role akin to that of hired mourners, whose loud wailing lent gravity to the funerals of great personages. On the other hand, the supposed fiscal immorality of the Jews was in fact indispensable for the proper functioning of the Christian economy, and their marginalization was nothing if not a formula to separate capitalism both from society and from the person of the king without the c
rown losing any of its earnings. Jewish marginalization was a useful fiction; costly for Jews, of course, but convenient for those in power.
Something similar happens to those who are relegated to immigrant status in national societies: they are a shadow, like the Jews in medieval Iberian towns, and they are also a witness that reminds the citizen of the nation’s real or imagined blessings. The myth of the American Dream would not hold if there were not migrants who were perceived to desire a life in the United States. And then again, migrants perform indispensable work that people from “good families” prefer not to do, even while national society prefers to imagine that it can get by without them. Like the medieval Jew, today’s migrant is at once a demeaned witness and a key economic player. Necessary, but always made to feel dispensable.
Just plain Kartoffel
My father, Cinna Lomnitz, was born in Cologne in 1925, but he left that city with his parents when he was eight years old. They first went to Brussels, where they stayed for only five years before making their way to Santiago de Chile in 1938. German Jews were then called yeques. Looking for the origin of this term, I find disagreement and speculation; but the theory that most convinces me is that yeque comes from a Yiddish term that signifies “jacket” or perhaps “suit jacket” (from the German Jake). Eastern European Jews referred to German Jews as “jackets” because they seemed to them very modern and assimilated: the yeques no longer dressed in the garb that was worn in the villages and ghettos of Russia or Poland, and which set those villagers apart as Jews; on the contrary, they dressed in the same manner as other German city folk.
Among Ashkenazi Jews, the yeque stereotype underscores a certain rigidity of character, associated with the assimilation of bourgeois values, a high level of education, secularization, and, frequently enough, pretentiousness. The superiority of the yeque with respect to the Jews of Eastern Europe — from Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, Ukraine, Russia, or Romania — was obvious to many: German Jews were civilized. They had enjoyed full citizenship since the first third of the nineteenth century, while in Russia this was not granted until the Russian Revolution. Yeques had come to have expert knowledge in worldly affairs — science and white-collar professions, medicine, and law — rather than closing themselves off to study the Torah and the Talmud. Following this trend, my grandfather Kurt (“Ricardo”) was a lawyer, and his brothers, Walther and Günther, were doctors. None of them was immune to nationalist passion, either, and they fought on the German side in the First World War. My grandfather was in fact awarded the Iron Cross for his courage driving ambulances at the front.