Claudio Lomnitz was born in 1957 in Chile, but he is Mexican and is part of the National College, the institution that shelters the most outstanding scientists and humanists in the country. His father, Cinna Lomnitz, born in Germany, raised in Belgium and trained in the United States as a geologist, was the founder of modern Mexican seismology, and his mother, Larissa Adler, born in Paris, was an anthropologist specializing in the forms of survival of the outcasts.
Translation by Maria Luisa Rodriguez Tapia. The Gutenberg Galaxy. 376 pages. 23€ Ebook: 14.99€You can buy it here.
Our America is the odyssey of that Mexican family saga and, at the same time, a testimony of the Jewish diaspora, a reinterpretation of anti-Semitism and a lament for the failure of the socialist Israel of the kibbutz. It is also the story of the Jewish fascination with the Soviet revolution, the incarnated testimony of the harsh reality of the migration to South America of the most destitute Jews (Peru and Colombia were the fate of the Adler Milsteins, and Chile, that of the Lomnitz Aronsfrau). ) and the chronicle of the virtues of university life in the United States in the 1960s -which explains its rise then and its current decline-.
Lomnitz is a descendant of two distinct Jewish branches, both Ashkenazi and only unified in exile: Eastern Jews and assimilated German Jews. The first, trapped between the laws and special zones of the Russian tsars and the nationalist awakening -deeply anti-Semitic- of the new republics after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The latter, proud and confident of pre-Nazi Germany. Also, in two ways to face the survival of the Holocaust. In the case of the paternal family, from silence and blindness; in the maternal one, from memory and combat.
Our America is a tacit denial of the reduction of language and nation and of culture and identity. By delving into the history of his four grandparents, Lomnitz reconstructs the daily life of the Jewish people before the extermination camps and the mosaic of languages, nationalities and religions in which it developed, as Amos Oz does in his memoirs. . Let’s think about the language: in Bessarabia, where his maternal family was from, today integrated between Moldova and the Ukraine, the peasants spoke Romanian or Ukrainian; the official languages of school and high culture were Russian or German, depending on whether the people belonged to the Russian or Austro-Hungarian empire; but the mother tongue of the Jews was Yiddish and the ritual language Hebrew.
This essay also addresses the paradox of Jewish migration to South America: from persecuted to admired for their European ancestry, although that did not prevent them from being contempt at certain times, far removed, yes, from the insane hatred of the old continent. The book analyzes the links between Jewish migration and the indigenous claim and the intense relations between the Jewish intelligentsia and the utopian promise of the revolution and, therefore, its active role in the incipient communist parties in the area.
However, the most revealing passage in the book is the closeness of the Adler family with José Carlos Mariátegui. Indeed, Miguel “Misha” Adler and Lisa Noemí Milstein, Claudio’s grandparents, were contributors to Mariátegui’s magazine Amauta (“maestro” in Quechua) and regulars at his mansion in Lima in the late 1920s. Lomnitz’s reading of the work of the Peruvian thinker is original and profound. A contribution to the history of ideas in Latin America. Another key episode is the analysis of the seduction by fascism suffered by the Romanian intelligentsia, including Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran. This fall into the abysses is studied with the counterpoint of Mihail Sebastian’s diaries and the incorruptible attitude of Eugène Ionesco, and serves as a warning for today.
This tour also fearlessly delves into the dark corners of his family. For example, the abandonment of little Shura, Claudio’s great-aunt, when crossing the Dniester, or the stubborn refusal of the paternal family to acknowledge that the great-grandfather was murdered by a pre-Nazi organization and not by a common murderer, since that this would force the neighbors to be seen as necessary accomplices.
Our America, in short, is not a family history, or not only, but an essential reading to understand the folds of history and the interstices between daily life and collective drama. The book, multifaceted, opens many debates, and addresses some of the central issues of our time: identity and memory, subjective chronicle and national construction. An essential read.
Very active in networks, the historian echoes the Mexican controversies. A few days ago, after the death of several migrants in the fire at a detention center in Ciudad Juárez, he wrote on Twitter: “Mexico has been losing the moral authority required to criticize US immigration policy for a couple of decades.” And also: “The Mexican State blames migrants for their own death. ‘That happens to them for protesting’…”.
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