Showcase - Nuestra América My Family in the Vertigo of Translation by CLAUDIO LOMNITZ Other Press

Today I'm showcasing another riveting memoir from my favorite indie publishers, Other Press. This book follows eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz's family from Eastern Europe to South America.
Enjoy!

ISBN-13:  978-1-63542-070-8
Publisher: Other Press
Release Date: 02-09-2021
Length: 464pp
Buy It: Amazon/ B&N/ IndieBound

Overview:

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS

A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller.

In Nuestra América, eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz traces his grandparents’ exile from Eastern Europe to South America. At the same time, the book is a pretext to explain and analyze the worldview, culture, and spirit of countries such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, from the perspective of educated Jewish emigrants imbued with the hope and determination typical of those who escaped Europe in the 1920s.

Lomnitz’s grandparents, who were both trained to defy ghetto life with the pioneering spirit of the early Zionist movement, became intensely involved in the Peruvian leftist intellectual milieu and its practice of connecting Peru’s indigenous past to an emancipatory internationalism that included Jewish culture and thought. After being thrown into prison supposedly for their socialist leanings, Lomnitz’s grandparents were exiled to Colombia, where they were subject to its scandals, its class system, its political life. Through this lens, Lomnitz explores the almost negligible attention and esteem that South America holds in US public opinion. The story then continues to Chile during World War II, Israel in the 1950s, and finally to Claudio’s youth, living with his parents in Berkeley, California, and Mexico City.

Read an excerpt:

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 crown 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.
My grandmother Bronislawa (Bronis), for her part, was an opera singer, and a passionate fan of the music of Gustav Mahler. Bruno Walter himself had visited her parents to ask that they let her sing professionally. This was necessary because her father, a wealthy textile wholesaler, was against the idea: he considered a stage career to be something akin to singing in a cabaret. My grandmother’s professional singing career was cut short because of Germany’s rising anti-Semitism in the 1920s, but Bronis later gave singing classes in Santiago de Chile, and she attended concerts and operas devotedly during the many years that she lived in New York City and London.
With all this, my father had everything he needed to be a perfect yeque; however, and for reasons that I only half understand, Cinna never developed “yeque pride.” As a young boy in Brussels, he quickly learned that having a German identity was a disadvantage. Belgium had suffered a cruel German invasion during the First World War, and the country was at that time anxious about a second invasion under Hitler, which took place soon enough. My father and his brother preferred to speak French between them so as not to be classified as Boches (a derogatory term for Germans). Beyond their ardent desire for camouflage and to lose themselves in their surroundings, I believe that my father was irritated by German/yeque rigidity and an almost universal lack of any sense of humor. Above all, he was averse to what the Greeks called hubris: a sense of pride that ends up challenging the gods.
Perhaps all of this explains why, when on a certain occasion I asked my father to teach me German, he turned to the back seat of the car where I was sitting and told me that there was really no point. As he saw it, knowing how to pronounce correctly the words ja, nein, and Kartoffel was more than enough. Cinna then asked me to pronounce the word ja a number of times, then nein, and finally Kartoffel. Before long, I was able to pronounce them perfectly. This would be the first and final German language lesson my father would offer me.

Comme c’est curieux

Many years later, I had the opportunity to learn more German. I was invited to spend a year in Berlin, at the Wissenschaftskolleg, a prestigious institution that was built to allow professors such as myself the time and mental stimulus in which we might best develop our work. While there, I lived in Grunewald, a neighborhood in the midst of lakes and forests on the western edge of the city, the name of which means “green forest.” Grunewald was an upper-middle-class suburb at the end of the nineteenth century, and there were once a good number of Jews living there. Walter Benjamin, for example, lived at 23 Delbruckstrasse, just a few blocks from the castle at the Koenigsallee, where I was staying.
My stance on German had not changed from the time my father gave me my first lesson. I enjoyed the sound of the language, and I pronounced it with pleasure and never without emphasis; nonetheless, I refused to make much effort to learn it. If the language of Goethe entered freely into my unconscious, it would be most welcome, but I would make no effort to take control of it.
The Wissenschaftskolleg offered three free weeks of German lessons. I took them in order to be able to move freely through the city. Beyond this stimulus, I also found it pleasurable for once to take a class instead of always teaching them, and above all on something that wouldn’t be of any lasting use to me. My plan was just to follow my curiosity into the impractical; and after all, it would only be for three weeks.
The classes were offered in a mansion that the institute owned on the Wallotstrasse. At the entrance, embedded in the sidewalk, were two small squares of bronze with the names of the members of the Jewish family who had lived there. They had been murdered by the Nazis, sent to a concentration camp the name of which I don’t recall. The murder of Jews was ever the companion of theft, and the large house soon became a retreat for Joseph Goebbels’s hunting club. Now I would study German in this same house, and I had even been invited to do so (with all expenses paid) by a public institution under the auspices of the German republic.
What does one say to an experience like this? Just ja? Of course not. But nein? One cannot deny that the situation is now different. Then it hit me. In the end, the answer had long been given to me by my father: Kartoffel! I remembered Cinna’s enthusiasm for the theater of the absurd, his love for Eugène Ionesco, who will appear in another part of this story.

Wo wohnt der Mörder?

My father wasn’t very involved in my education. He never corrected my homework, for example, and I remember only a few occasions when he helped me with a class. The first of these was in Berkeley. I was perhaps eight or nine years old, and I needed to recite a poem from memory. I had been asked to choose it myself, and I had no idea where to begin. To help me, my father opened up an edition of Through the Looking-Glass and read “Jabberwocky” to me out loud, with a good deal of meaningful emphasis:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gire and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
How fascinating to grasp the drift of a poem so well and yet not understand a word! This was the first poem I ever memorized, apart from children’s songs. My father had a finely tuned ear for the displacement of language, and at nine years old I also had some understanding of this. Why build a bridge of understanding to the senselessness that was for us Germany? It was, in fact, precisely for this senselessness that I so enjoyed the sound of German, which is at once so emphatic and improbable. “Excuse me, sir” is said in a sneeze: Entschuldigen Sie! How could I not love such a singular language even a little? My father arrived in Santiago de Chile when he was thirteen years old. His schoolmates used to beg him to say, “Where does the murderer live?” in German, and Cinna did not understand why the answer — Wo wohnt der Mörder? — caused such hilarity, until he finally figured out that for his friends, the phrase sounded very much like the extremely Chilean expression huevón de mierda (roughly translatable into English as “fucking jerk”), only pronounced with a pompous and very sonorous German accent.
Where does the murderer live? That autumn of 1938, the murderer lived in Berlin, and his name was Adolf Hitler. But in Santiago, all that German madness seemed very far away, pus huevón. Apparently, at least. While I was at the Wissenschaftskolleg, some colleagues insisted that with or without the language, I was German, because in my house we listened to the music of Mozart and Mahler when I was a boy. They believed that I understood everything even while comprehending nothing. Maybe they were right, who knows?

Praise:

“[Lomnitz] takes his rich family history and builds a narrative of universal significance…There is no end of intriguing anecdotes in these pages…A masterpiece of historical and personal investigation.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“An intelligent book about a family’s struggle to find a home they could call ‘our America.’…a timely reminder of the humanity of immigrants…riveting.” —Foreword Reviews

“An autobiography in which we Latin Americans all recognize ourselves.” —Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

“Nuestra América means ‘Our America,’ and that collective pronoun encompasses not just Claudio Lomnitz’s family but multitudes who have wound up on South America’s shores. It is about history, language, ideas and how they shape, in the sweep of time, our eccentric individual lives. We’re all familiar with the memoir that brings a dissolving old family snapshot to life; Lomnitz combines that snapshot with a panoramic picture of Spanish America and Europe from the nineteenth century to present time. Among other things, Nuestra América will give you a distilled portrait of Peru that, for this reader, made that enigmatic country more vivid and comprehensible than ever. The real treat of this extraordinary book is Lomnitz’s acute lucidity and intelligence. Read it—you will be richly rewarded.” —Michael Greenberg, author of Hurry Down Sunshine

“Claudio Lomnitz’s riveting family memoir is an account of trauma and displacement, but also one of resilience, passion, and even joy. From Romania to Peru to Colombia to Israel to California to Mexico and beyond, his forebears, vividly portrayed, lived lives of profound political and intellectual engagement and were intimate with important historical actors. Nuestra América joins Philippe Sands’ East West Street and Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, bringing to light untold narratives of the Jewish diaspora.” —Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl

“An extraordinary journey—vital, absorbing, elegiac, and so finely honed.” —Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline and East West Street

“This is a brilliant and beautifully written book. Based on 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

“This book is a search for the author’s intellectual and spiritual sources in his family history. It includes the story of his grandfather, and how through a life of (often forced) emigration, between seven countries on three continents, speaking eight languages, he forged his own universalist variant of the remarkable secular Jewish humanist tradition—one part of a legacy that clearly lives on in the perceptive insights and wide sympathy of the grandson’s ethnography. It’s a really fascinating book!” —Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age and recipient of the Kyoto Prize

“Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation 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 20th-century history, with its diasporas, migrations, settlements, and resettlements.” —Rubén Gallo, Princeton University, author of Freud’s Mexico and Mexican Modernity

“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

“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 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

“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 20th-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

“Only someone with the extraordinary gifts of Claudio Lomnitz as both anthropologist and historian could produce a work as this, in which culture and history, family and individuality, all interact to create a unique kind of autobiography: not as life-story but as Bildung, as character-formation—written, moreover, with tenderness and talent. I loved it.” —Marshall Sahlins, author of The Western Illusion of Human Nature and, with David Graeber, On Kings

“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

“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

About the author:
Claudio Lomnitz is an anthropologist, historian, and critic who works broadly on Latin American culture and politics. He is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Lomnitz’s books include Death and the Idea of Mexico and The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón, among many others. As a regular columnist in the Mexico City paper La Jornada and an award-winning dramaturgist, he is committed to bringing historical and anthropological understanding into public debate.