Latin American societies, which embrace individual Jews with open arms, are freighted with hostility toward the Jewish people. While flesh-and-blood Jews are welcomed into Christian bosoms with enthusiasm, Judaism in the abstract is anathema, an outdated creed discredited by the message of Christ. The enigma of Jewish life in Latin America is that Christians accept into their marital beds persons whom they would not admit to their clubs.
Within a generation of arrival in Latin America, intermarriage was making heavy inroads into the numbers of Jews. Rabbis being less tolerant than priests when it comes to conversion, intermarriage became a one-way street down which Jews and their children disappeared; only sustained immigration kept an identifiable Jewish presence going at all. Everywhere that immigration ceased, Jewish population size dropped, as individual Jews chose to cease being Jewish—by merging into the warm sea of family relationships, by passing themselves off as something else, by acceding to the Latin ethos and distancing themselves from the Jewish community. Today, Jews with a strong sense of identity cluster in highly visible institutions that thrum with Jewish activity, leaving tourists with the impression of a thriving communal life; meanwhile, thousands of other Jews slip out the back, hop on the bus, get themselves free.
“Anti-Semitism is not the problem: assimilation is.” All over Latin America, Jewish community leaders sing this threnody. They downgrade the overturned tombstones, the graffiti painted on synagogue walls. Such acts, they correctly point out, occur all over the world. But they seldom proceed to identify the real source of trouble, namely, a political and social climate that gives permission for these acts to occur. Jewish communal leaders follow a strategy of special pleading: police protection for Jewish buildings, suppression of anti-Jewish publications, etc. They win an occasional skirmish, but the strategy has been ineffectual in changing the fact that there is widespread toleration for intolerance when it comes to Jews.
At the heart of Latin anti-Semitism is the demand for total assimilation. This theme emerges again and again through the hundreds of life stories of Latin American Jews which I have collected and a few of which are presented here with names and situations disguised.
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2.
Hard by the northern reaches of Argentina and far from the Bolivian plateau lies the city of Tarija. Its citizens boast of their fair skin, clean blood, and limpid Castilian, all of which distinguish them from their darkling compatriots of the altiplano. Once upon a time, a great university was located not far from here, at Chuquisaca. But appalling isolation settled down upon the sons and daughters of the conquistadors after the empire collapsed, leaving only memories of colonial glory to console them. All the tarijanos had left to them was their pride of ancestry.
Into this proud, provincial town on a cold, clear morning in 1889 walked a turco, one of those indefinably foreign men who spoke with an accent and never went to church. He led a donkey hung with pots and pans, tablecloths and petticoats, knives and forks and spoons and missals, pictures of saints, and books from Buenos Aires. This buhonero, this peddler, walked the length of Argentina every year, from the coast to the foothills of the Andes, selling his load of consumer goods and collecting his accounts in towns like Tarija that lived beyond the world of factories and department stores. He spent his days trudging the old silver smugglers’ trail, and nights huddled against his donkey on barren mountainsides powdered with snow, undergoing trials and humiliations too numerous to remember, in order to bring his gewgaws to landlocked towns forgotten by their own national governments, which never got around to building proper roads.
He was able to make a living in this way because established merchants in the towns dealt only in efectivo, as the Spanish call ready cash, and for good reason; it is the only thing that has any effect. The buhonero, on the other hand, let his customers have the goods they wanted with very little efectivo—and on the first payment. The word of housewives, useless at the store or the bank, was good enough for him. The buhonero made a 100-percent profit on the items he sold, although most of what he sold cost only a few pesos, and he had to wait a long time to collect his accounts. He did not make a fortune; but it was enough to keep him marching up and down the plains and foothills between Buenos Aires and Tarija.
As a man of the world, the turco enjoyed some status in the town. The lack of other company even led some families—not those with the oldest names, of course—to drop their standards sufficiently to invite him to dinner. For in addition to more tangible commodities, the buhonero brought news of the big city, the latest word on ladies’ fashions and military coups (which are only men’s fashions), and even an occasional novel, forbidden by the priest but passed from hand to hand in a delicious conspiracy of the literate but bookless female population. Of course, being a turco, the man was clearly of no social standing, but he undeniably had a certain charm.
And so this particular turco, who kept his accounts in Yiddish and was no Turk at all but a Jew from the Russian Pale of Settlement, wooed and won a maid of Tarija, married her in church, settled in town, and had two daughters, who were baptized and took their first communion together with their classmates at the parish school. As a married man, he opened a real store, “La Bonaerense,” where he continued selling ordinary articles of household use that the speakers of pure Castilian disdained to sell, and where he went on extending credit to housewives without collateral.
The turco continued to be referred to as a turco by the people of the town, but as time passed, he was accepted well enough, especially as his wife and daughters performed their religious obligations meticulously. He continued traveling to earn his living, sometimes being absent a month or more but always returning with tales of the big city and pockets full of presents for his wife and daughters. In this way, he supported his family in respectable style until the day he left on a trip and never came back.
The turco’s wife, not knowing whether she was widowed or abandoned, assumed the proprietorship of the store and went on raising her daughters to be as respectable, Catholic, and submissive as herself. In time, she was able to arrange good marriages for them, the elder to a lawyer, the younger to an architect. They attended church regularly, observed the fasts and saints’ days, and who knows whether they ever dwelled on the mystery of their turco father who had left home one day and never returned.
Twenty years after her husband’s disappearance, the maid of Tarija, her black hair long since turned white, received a letter from a lawyer in Buenos Aires informing her of the turco’s recent death. There was a bequest. In the course of executing the legal documents necessary for collecting her inheritance, the widow discovered she had never been legally married. There had been another, earlier, family, a Jewish one, also with two daughters, living in Buenos Aires, who received the bulk of the estate. With the money she received she bought mourning clothes for herself and her daughters and paid for a mass for her late husband; she put the rest toward dowries for their grandchildren.
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Raquel Was Born and raised in Tres Arboles, the Jewish agricultural colony near Montevideo. It was an impoverished childhood, but in the way of the children of the poor, she was unaware of that fact. Grade school was the only education the colony afforded, but that was sufficient for a farm girl, particularly one as pretty as Raquel, who was bound to find a husband right away. Everyone thought Raquel a beauty, except her parents, who were not pleased: her blonde hair, blue eyes, and pushed-up nose were to them a reminder of the pogroms in their native Poland.
As a fifteenth-birthday present, her parents took Raquel to the Balfour Ball in Montevideo, where she met and fell in love with Miguel, who was twenty-one. Handsome, lively, the son of wealthy parents, top student at the law faculty, Miguel was obviously headed for a brilliant career, at least as brilliant as any Jew could achieve in Uruguay, still an unknown continent to these recent immigrants. So brilliant a prospect was he, in fact, that both families agreed he was far above marriage to a little farm girl with unsettlingly Gentile looks. Miguel and Raquel continued to see one another for three years, but in the end, their families refused to consent to their marriage.
So Raquel’s parents dragged her back, crying, to Tres Arboles, where she swore that, if she could not have Miguel, she would never marry any Jew. She turned down every eligible man in Tres Arboles, and during a family visit to Montevideo a year later, during which Miguel’s own marriage took place to a more suitable young woman, she refused to leave the house at all. Raquel retreated into herself, went in and out of her parents’ home like a shadow, showed no interest in marriage, and gave short shrift to any man who came courting—a dwindling number in any event. She moved to Montevideo, became an interior decorator, and when her parents died, invested the proceeds from the sale of their farm in a furniture store. Miguel, in the fullness of time, became a justice of the high court, fulfilling the immigrants’ dream.
At the age of thirty-five, Raquel married a widower of fifty, a Catholic of course, and to everyone’s surprise produced a child, Berta. This being Montevideo, it was possible to raise Berta without religion. Such a thing could not have happened in Tarija or in Tres Arboles; but Montevideo was a cosmopolitan city, secular to the core.
Raquel’s relatives observed the Jewish mourners’ rites when she married; her husband’s family never received her. The child’s birth went unacknowledged. Educated in the public schools, Berta performed brilliantly and won a scholarship that enabled her to attend college in the United States, where she became my student. She studied history and political science, intending to enter the Uruguayan diplomatic service.
“Tell Berta not to come home,” Raquel said to me. We were sitting in the storeroom of Raquel’s shop, now not so much an interior-decorating salon as a warehouse for secondhand furniture. The death of her husband had left Raquel entirely alone. Her comfortable home in a genteel residential neighborhood had been alienated by the peculiar property laws of the country. Uruguay, its economy destroyed by the military dictatorship, had slid down the tubes. Any uruguayo who could, had abandoned the country. Thousands were working across the river in Argentina, driving cabs or cleaning hotel rooms.
The storeroom where Raquel lived had one electric light bulb dangling from a cord from the high ceiling, which was more depressing than no light at all. She prepared dinner for me, with many apologies, on a kerosene stove beside her bed. The only heat in the room was generated by the bottle of wine I had brought. Raquel was suffering the embarrassment that only a middle-class person can feel when reduced to shabbiness. I had nothing to offer her. Berta had been her hope, a chance to vindicate old mistakes and might-have-beens. And now she knew that the only way to save Berta was to give her up. “Tell Berta not to come home,” she repeated at the end of the evening. “She must make her life elsewhere.”
At that time, I had known Berta for three years; she had visited in my home, knew that I was Jewish, and had never mentioned that she herself was Jewish. Either she did not know, or it was totally irrelevant to her.
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In the last quarter of the 19th century, a group of 100 or so Jews migrated from Lodz to Córdoba in Argentina, just in time to succumb to the epidemic of yellow fever that decimated the city’s population. One of the few immigrants to survive was a girl of ten named Blume. When her parents died, a kindly neighbor took her in and raised her together with her own children. When Blume, now renamed Flora, was sixteen, a local businessman came to call, sitting with the girl in her foster mother’s living room with its overstuffed Victorian furniture and its pictures of ancestors and saints hung high on the walls. Flora was pleased to have a suitor, happy that a respectable man would be interested in her, an orphan, a girl who could bring no advantages to a marriage. She liked his manner of speaking to her, the way in which he handed her down the front steps and into the carriage which he hired to take her on Sunday drives. But one thing troubled her.
“I know I am Jewish,” she told her foster mother, “and I think I remember that I am only supposed to marry another Jew.”
“My dear,” said her foster mother, “you are probably correct in what you remember. But where will you find a Jewish man to marry you? It appears they have all died. If you love Sr. Esquivel, it surely cannot be wrong to marry him.”
The wedding took place in church, after the bride had been instructed and taken her first communion. Her descendants, all of whom are Catholic, are fond of telling stories about their Jewish grandmother, who continued to light candles on Friday night until the week she died.
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Johannes was born in Vienna, the only son of physicians who had long since liberated themselves from Jewish tradition. In the concentration camp near Bayonne where he was incarcerated by the Vichy government because he was a Jew, he was registered as John by the representative who came from New York on behalf of the Dominican Republic Resettlement Association (DORSA). A healthy young man of twenty, judged to be capable of manual labor, he was extracted from the camp and shipped to the Dominican Republic, where, on land seized from a political opponent, the dictator Trujillo was allowing refugee Jews to be resettled in a gesture calculated to win the favor of the American President. So in a matter of months, John was liberated from slavery and death, transported to a tropical island, and told to become a farmer.
There were some 500 other “farmers” at Sosua with him, mostly young men like himself. They had little in common save their newly-forged perception of themselves as Jews and their complete ignorance of agriculture. They would not have made it at all but for the help of their Dominican neighbors, who showed them how and when to plant, how to manage horses, what to do when the ants marched across their fields, and how to pass the lonely nights. Local women gradually began to fill the gap left by DORSA, which had selected mostly men for its controlled experiment. The jealousies and quarrels that resulted from the imbalance of the sexes came close to breaking up the colony.
Johannes was one who prospered at Sosua by starting up a dairy farm. His isolated life became more bearable when he formed a household with a young Dominican woman who used to come selling fresh vegetables. Some colonists frowned on these informal unions, seeing them as a way of “going native”; but Inez’s lively eyes and incessant chatter brightened John’s life and gave him an interest in his own future. After the birth of their son, he married her. She called her husband Juan, their son, Juanito; the child could not be Jewish because his mother was not Jewish, and how could Juan not attend his own son’s baptism? Later, when other children were born to the couple and Juan was totally engaged with the dairy, he felt that the education of the children was better left to their mother.
Although he paid little attention to Jewish observance, there was one holiday to which Juan felt an attachment. Every year he recalled his own emergence from slavery by celebrating Passover. Together with the other colonists, he organized a seder, where the products they had created with their own labor, and which had never been produced on the island before—beef and ham and sausage, pasteurized milk, butter, and cheese of every kind—were served. Juan read the Haggadah as though it applied directly to himself; that was a day for remembering the camp at Bayonne and the way his father and mother had urged him to seize this chance at life, even if it meant they would never see one another again. Inez, who could only guess at what was in Juan’s mind, but who knew that her Lord had been betrayed at the Passover meal, joined in the songs.
But the highlight of the year for them both was Christmas. It was then that the family drove into Santo Domingo for midnight mass at the great Cathedral where Christopher Columbus may or may not lie entombed. The chanting of the priests, the swelling of the organ and the enchanting music, the incense, moved them deeply, calling forth feelings that lay dormant the rest of the year in Sosua. On that night, Inez felt reconciled to her Lord, who had himself been a Jew. On that night, Johannes pulled together the broken fragments of his life, remembering his childhood in Vienna.
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The Deportation began at five in the morning, when all the Jews in Helena’s town in Hungary were ordered to report to the railway station. Crowded together in the uncertain light, people milled about as though drunk, or stood and stared with unseeing eyes. As the soldiers pressed forward, herding people into a tighter and tighter knot, her mother whispered to her, “You are small. Crawl between the soldiers’ legs and run away and hide.” And that is what Helena did, running pell-mell up the familiar streets, back to her home which had already been looted down to the floorboards, and hiding in the basement. Hunger drove her out after two days, and she went next door, to where she had so often gone before, to Mrs. Nagy’s. Until two days before, a million years ago, Helena and Susu Nagy had been playmates.
Opening the door, Mrs. Nagy seemed surprised to see her. “My, my,” she said, and let her in and sent her to bathe and then sat her down at the supper table with the family. Susu, sitting next to Helena, said nothing, did nothing to show that she had ever seen her before. It was as though Helena had become invisible, vanished together with her family. Mrs. Nagy ladled a bowl of soup for Helena from Helena’s mother’s soup tureen. That night, Helena slept in the same bed with Susu. Her friend still said nothing to her, but just before falling asleep, she gave Helena her necklace that had a crucifix on it. In the morning, Helena started walking to Palestine. She was eight years old.
How Helena reached Palestine is a story for another time. In brief, she met up with a group of children in the same circumstances as herself and who were also headed there, and they walked and carried one another to the Promised Land.
Helena was placed on a kibbutz where she recovered her health and began to grow again. She learned Hebrew with the facility of the young and recovered the merry spirit that had been born with her in Hungary. She did not mind the hard work of the kitchen, and in any group of dancers she was always at the center, singing off key with abandon, her hair black as the tents of Kedar swinging out behind her in a thick braid, sparks shooting from her black eyes.
Once, when she was seventeen, Helena’s class got a day’s vacation in Jerusalem. The class voted for soccer in the park, followed by a trip to an ice-cream parlor. But Helena sneaked away on her own, wanting to visit the traditional sites. It was Sunday, and the only tours being offered were to the Christian holy places; she signed up for one of these, paying with her ice-cream money. That was how she met her Mexican.
Maximiliano was thirty-four and recently freed by annulment from a marriage that had begun to bore him. He was intrigued by the beautiful little girl from the kibbutz with the merry black eyes, hair rough as a goat’s pelt, and luscious white skin. She was taken by the charm and sophistication of this man who reminded her of the suave army officers she used to see riding through Pest, so much more interesting than the plainspoken boys of the kibbutz. Maximiliano besieged and won her. As there was no way a Christian and a Jew could marry in Israel, they flew to Cyprus. After the brief ceremony, he took her back to Mexico where, after two years of spoiling her and displaying her like a favorite toy to his friends, and six months after the birth of their daughter Mariela, Maximiliano acquired, by the usual means, an annulment of their marriage.
Having survived the drama of the first two decades of her life, Helena decided to survive the rest. In the little cottage that Maximiliano let her keep, she painted the walls yellow and hung the rafters with Mexican crafts, and reconstructed her life and that of her daughter, whom she renamed Ariela in memory of the distant days on the kibbutz. A born storyteller, she wove the stuff of her many lives into short stories and poems, achieving some reputation as a writer and poet. She wrote her way into a circle of artists and intellectuals attached more or less to the university, a bohemian circle of Jews and non-Jews who could not have cared less about religious affiliation. Yet, in some curious way, Helena did.
Neither mother nor daughter had ever been acknowledged by Maximiliano’s family. Perhaps, for all she knew, they did not consider her to have been married to their son; a family such as his might regard him as still married to his first wife. Perhaps they regarded Helena as their son’s amante, a necessary ornament for a young man wanting to make his way in society, but not a person you invite into your home. If she had had a child, that was due to carelessness on her part, or an effort to entrap him. How characteristically generous of Maximiliano to have let her keep the cottage!
In view of her marriage to a Mexican, Helena had lived apart from other Jews. Now, she decided to approach the community in order to bring her daughter up as a Jew. Neither the Orthodox nor the Conservative synagogue would have this anomalous pair, so she joined the Reform temple although it felt strange to her. After enrolling Ariela in the temple Sunday school, Helena returned to her cottage that seemed to reflect a life lived entirely in sunshine. Lying on her couch, which she had covered with a handwoven throw from San Pedro Sula, under the cheery straw baskets hanging from the ceiling and filled with growing plants, within the yellow walls that trapped the sunshine and repelled the gloom, she fell asleep. She dreamed that she was back in Hungary, and lived again the feelings of dread and fear that had filled her eight-year-old heart as she ran, ran away from her parents whom she would never see again in her life, and hid in the darkest corner of the darkest space in their looted home. But this time, in her dream she had placed her daughter on that railway platform from which she herself had escaped, and the train was entering the station.
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It happened that, in the capital of a Central American country, let us say San Salvador, a Catholic woman fell in love with and became engaged to an Israeli businessman who had established an import-export business in the city. Like most Israelis, he was a secular person who had never set foot in a synagogue. But anticipating the problems they would face if they continued to profess different religions, he decided that his fiancée should convert to Judaism. She, for her part, was a religious person, and taking her future husband for God, agreed to accept his religion. So the prospective groom sent his bride to Israel where, over the course of two very trying years, the young woman was accepted for conversion to Judaism according to religious law. Thereafter they flew from their respective hemispheres to London where they were married by an Orthodox rabbi. Directly after the wedding, they returned to Salvador.
There, the bride was disowned by her parents and snubbed by her friends, who believed she had sold her soul to the devil for a mess of pottage: everyone knew that Jews had secret ways of enriching themselves. She was not unprepared for this eventuality, and took refuge in her faith. She who had been a faithful Catholic now became a faithful Jew, regarding religious observance as the essence of her commitment. She attended services religiously—but without her husband, who had complied with only one of the 613 commandments required of a Jew, namely, that he be circumcised. Unaccompanied by a man, she was treated as though she were a widow or a Gentile woman, a shikseh. “Shikseh” in fact was how she was known by the Jews of the city, who vacillated between patronizing her for her earlier heathen condition and despising her for her religiosity. Anyway, social life here revolved totally around the Jewish sports club. So when the couple’s application for membership was rejected, they left the country and settled in Belize, where there are no Jews.
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“Justice, Justice shalt thou pursue,” read the note that Ricardo left for his parents when he joined the guerrillas. He was nineteen, and for the next seven years his family did not know whether he was alive or dead.
Like many Jewish children, Ricardo had been sent to a Jewish primary school, where his teachers delivered the message, “Be a Jew.” He absorbed a little Hebrew, but did not make it through to bar mitzvah—there was no rabbi around at the time, and his parents did not care that much. When he was of high-school age and entered a colegio, his parents changed the message to, “Be a success.” He was a good student, not brilliant but obedient and polite. A somewhat lonely boy, he bought a dog whom he named Javer (Hebrew for friend). In addition to the dog, the boy’s other passion was the United Nations (somewhat confused in his mind with world government). When in 1975 the General Assembly decreed that Zionism equaled racism, his heart hardened against his parents.
“Why do you give money to Israel?” he demanded of his parents, who were lifelong Zionists. “Don’t you see that your attitude is racist?”
“Look,” said his father, who had long ago accepted the Argentine view that Jews are a race, “if we don’t care for our own, who will? Look what happened during the war, when no one cared what happened to Jews. Israel is a place where any Jew can go, at any time, and they have to take him in.”
“But it’s racist to be concerned only with Jews! What about oppressed blacks in South Africa, the Negroes in the United States, the indios of Bolivia?”
“It’s not that we are not concerned with those other people, but they are not our people. We are more concerned for our people.”
“Well, why don’t you go to Israel, then, if those are ‘your people?’ ”the boy asked.
To this, the parents had no ready reply. By any objective standard, they were not very Jewish. They did not attend synagogue except to recite memorial prayers for their close relatives, they worked on the Sabbath, they remembered only a little Yiddish, which they could not read, and had no Hebrew at all. If they felt Jewish, it was mostly because, being Jewish, they could not feel entirely Argentine. Being Argentine had to do with the Catholic Church and tango and having a brother-in-law who was an army officer; as marginally Jewish as they might be, they could never feel Catholic.
As for their Zionism, that was of a rather lukewarm nature as well. Not being wholly accepted as Argentines left a void in their lives that was filled by the distant dream of Zion. As with any dream, it had only a metaphoric relation to reality, symbolized by an annual monetary contribution. Could they move there? Well, they had already made one big move in their lives—from the agricultural colonies, where they could not make a living, to the city, where they earned enough from their shoe store to have an apartment of their own and some left over for an annual vacation at Viña del Mar. They told Ricardo not to talk back to them, and they continued contributing money to Israel.
Meanwhile, Ricardo graduated from colegio and was admitted to the University of Buenos Aires. Suddenly, he was in an exciting world of ideals and counter-ideals, deals and counter-deals. For the first time in his life, he made friends his own age. The faculty of sociology, where he enrolled, was boiling with ideas for saving the country—nuestro pais, so rich and yet so poor!—to feed the starving, house the homeless, increase employment, and generally restore justice to the land. Best of all, these ideas related to the Argentine reality, not to some mythic country Ricardo had never seen. It was at the university that he learned that he could not be both a Jew and an Argentine, because Jews were Zionists and committed to a foreign country. Jews, they said, go to Israel! If you are Argentine, stay here with us and fight for our country. Nuestro pais! As Zionism was all Ricardo knew about being a Jew, and as he wanted desperately to be accepted as an Argentine, he quit considering himself a Jew.
The political repression in Argentina began in his sophomore year with the disappearance of the faculty of the college of sociology. He heard but could not confirm that numerous psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, and others suspected of subverting Christian family life had likewise disappeared. There were rumors of labor-union leaders and priests and entire classes of high-school students being dragged off to an unknown fate. The air of emergency and threat was sustained by the press, which, severely controlled by the government, daily reported acts of left-wing terrorism, assassinations of judges and other officials, and armed confrontations between police and guerrilla bands.
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Ricardo’s parents, only vaguely informed about national politics, knew they disapproved of Communists, troublemakers who wanted to disrupt and destabilize society. They knew Communism had brought disaster to the Jews in Russia. Their major fear was that their son would get caught up in the turmoil. They urged him to avoid politics and join a Jewish social club such as Maccabi, where he would make nice friends. He should participate more actively in the sports program, take up folk dancing, study Hebrew, go boating, take a girl to a dance. The Jewish institutions were purely social, they were safe, the military would not bother with them. “Gentile politics have nothing to do with us, Ricardo,” they said, and encouraged him to spend a year in Israel, perhaps on a kibbutz, a lovely cooperative way of living that they in no way associated with Marxist rhetoric.
But Ricardo was now obeying a different voice from that of his parents: the voice of his peers. He went underground, pausing only to leave a note reminding his parents that the demand for social justice is not absent from the Jewish tradition, feeling a little hypocritical because he could not quote Isaiah (or was it Jeremiah?) in Hebrew but only in Spanish, and disappeared into the guerrilla.
Seven years later, when it was all over, Ricardo wrote to his parents from Spain. He had taken part in some guerrilla actions, helped kidnap General Aramburu, and then, when things got too hot, fled the country. He felt at home in Spain by now, was managing a shoe store, had married a local girl and fathered two sons. He had no plans for returning to Argentina, where he might be prosecuted, though he had had nothing to do with the general’s murder; if his parents would like to visit him in Spain, that would be nice. Apart from missing them all, he was quite happy where he was, who he was.
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3.
You open a door off Florida, the down-at-heels pedestrian mall at the heart of Buenos Aires’s once-elegant downtown district, pass a security check, and climb the stairs to the United States. In the Lincoln Library, dozens of Argentines are reading American magazines, researching markets or museums, unions or universities, farms or factories, fact or fiction. The library would fit comfortably into the life of a medium-sized American city, but it is a showplace in Argentina, where books are more often condemned to perpetual confinement in unlit dungeons guarded by zealous troglodytes.
The Lincoln Library sponsors lectures on “American” (meaning North American) life; in 1984, there had never been one on Jews, and it struck the director as a timely topic. A year and a half into the presidential term of Raul Alfonsin, the climate of opinion was wide open. Jewish intellectuals were discussing their thoughts on being Jewish over Radio Belgrano every Saturday morning, recitals of Sephardic music were reviewed in the newspapers, The Diary of Anne Frank was being staged, and Jewish movie directors had catapulated onto the national screen.
In the light of all this ferment, a public discussion of Jewish life, held under non-Jewish auspices, seemed an innovative but mild venture. My presence in Buenos Aires, and the forthcoming publication of the Spanish edition of my book on Jewish life in Latin America, provided a focus for the evening. Treading lightly, considering how easily anti-Semitic reactions can be triggered, I suggested a panel on the more general topic of cultural pluralism. When we posted our announcement—“Pluralismo cultural: los judios en America Latina,” we did not know whether anyone would come, who our audience would be, or whether we might be bombed, as the Library had been in the past.
My trepidation was not wholly unwarranted. Radio Belgrano was indeed bombed shortly thereafter, and my publisher, opting for political prudence, never brought out the Spanish translation of my book. But that night at the Lincoln Library we drew a full house, made up of both Jews and non-Jews. There were people I had interviewed in the course of my work on the recent repression, students from the adult Jewish education program, regular patrons of the Library, and members of the public totally unknown to any of us, including three men in three-piece wool-worsted pinstriped suits, homburgs, and mustaches, looking out of place among the shaggy intellectuals.
I opened with a discussion of the similarities and differences between the United States and Argentina. Both were countries of mass immigration and both were faced with the challenge of molding people of diverse cultures, social class, and historical experience into one nation. But the solutions they found were quite different. In the pluralistic society of the United States, where religion is privatized and separated from the state, Jews were included within the definition of the nation. In Argentina’s monistic society, the unchallenged Catholic faith lying at the core of nationality marginalizes Jews and anathematizes their heritage.
The next speaker, being an Argentine Jew, was more self-confident than I. He had emigrated to Israel and was now back as a missionary to the lost Jews of Argentina, but he spoke with the assurance of one who was among his own people. Passionately, he described the way in which Jews internalize the hostility of non-Jewish society, ending by hating themselves as others hate them. Rejecting their Jewish heritage because it is unacceptable to others, they accept the definition of the Jew that is offered by non-Jews; in essence, they permit anti-Semites to define what a Jew is.
Students from the Jewish adult-education center who filled the front rows were listening attentively, but there was pronounced fidgeting at the back of the hall among the wool-worsted gentlemen. The speaker ignored it. “Only by reimmersing yourself in your authentic tradition can you alleviate this feeling of inauthenticity,” he exhorted his audience. “Only by acknowledging the validity of your Jewish heritage and relearning it, living it, can you heal the division within yourselves.” I had heard many Jewish educators talk like this in the United States, but I wondered how it would go down in Argentina, where Jewish topics were always addressed in two different vocabularies—one for them, one for us.
The next morning, I received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as having been present at the Lincoln Library the night before. Could we meet for coffee? On arriving at Le Petit Café, I picked out my interlocutor easily among the crowd, which was made up largely of well-dressed women shoppers and scraggly-bearded students. A three-piece wool-worsted suit, homburg, and mustache came toward me, invited me to a seat at a doily-covered table in a far corner. Over our first cup of coffee, we passed through the usual preliminaries. He seemed especially gratified at the fact that I had come to Argentina to study its Jewish community. Over the second cup, he asked the question he had invited me here to ask. “Do you think Argentina is anti-Semitic?” He fixed me with a gaze that was both quizzical and also, in a way, pleading. Wanting to draw him out, I replied in the negative.
Relieved, he leaned back in his chair. “Of course we are not anti-Semitic,” he said. “We allowed Jews freely to enter our country (nuestro pais!). We insist only that they behave like everyone else, be loyal to the same ideals as ourselves. How can we be accused of anti-Semitism? We expect nothing unusual from them, only that they love our country (nuestro pais!) and not have loyalties elsewhere. Otherwise, let them go to Israel, as that sociologist has done. I do not regard him as Argentine. He is a very poor example of an Argentine, since he abandoned our country (nuestro pais!). There is no more anti-Semitism here than anywhere else in the world, and always it is for the same reason. They don’t want to fit in. They form cliques, they don’t want to associate with us, they get together behind closed doors and talk about a foreign country. How can they claim they are oppressed? We welcomed them with open arms. I myself am married to a Jewess; she has no interest in the Jewish thing. Do you suppose that she is ‘oppressed’? Do you suppose that I am anti-Semitic?”
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Few in number and lacking a political base, Jews in Latin America cannot on their own change the fundamental assumptions of society. They need allies, understandings with other groups whose interest also lies in cultural pluralism, in breaking the monolithic mold. The recent emergence of democratic politics in much of South America offers Latin American Jews—as it does to others—an opportunity to seek such alliances.
In doing so, it is true, their options are limited: by racism on the Right, by hostility to Israel on the Left, by a Francophile style of enlightened thought in the Center that promises everything to the citizen, nothing to the Jew. Nevertheless, there is merit in the effort, so long as one is clear about the problem being addressed. Those who believe that the problem in Latin America is not anti-Semitism but assimilation misconstrue the nature of both anti-Semitism and assimilation. In Latin America they are two sides of the same coin.
