Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey

  She was wrong about my body and right about my mind, my life, my soul. I was falling, like every child who was ever born, I was falling into solitude and nothingness, headlong and headfirst, and my mother, by her very words, by the mere act of formulating her fear in a human language, inadvertently stopped my descent by introducing me to Spanish, by sending Spanish out to catch me, cradle me, pull me back from the abyss.

  I was a baby: a pad upon which any stranger could scrawl a signature. A passive little bastard, shipwrecked, no ticket back, not even sure that a smile, a scream, my only weapons, could help me to surface. And then Spanish slid to the rescue, in my mother’s first cry, and soon in her murmurs and lullabies and in my father’s deep voice of protection and in his jokes and in the hum of love that would soon envelop me from an extended family. Maybe that was my first exile: I had not asked to be born, had not chosen anything, not my face, not the face of my parents, not this extreme sensitivity that has always boiled out of me, not the early rash on my skin, not my remote asthma, not my nearby country, not my unpronounceable name. But Spanish was there at the beginning of my body or perhaps where my body ended and the world began, coaxing that body into life as only a lover can, convincing me slowly, sound by sound, that life was worth living, that together we could tame the fiends of the outer bounds and bend them to our will. That everything can be named and therefore, in theory, at least in desire, the world belongs to us. That if we cannot own the world, nobody can stop us from imagining everything in it, everything it can be, everything it ever was.

  It promised, my Spanish, that it would take care of me.

  And for a while it delivered on its promise.

  It did not tell me that at the very moment it was promising the world to me, that world was being disputed by others, by men in shadows who had other plans for me, new banishments planned for me, men who were just as desperate not to fall as I had been at birth, desperate to rise, rise to power.

  Nor did Spanish report that on its boundaries other languages roamed, waiting for me, greedy languages, eager to penetrate my territory and establish a foothold, ready to take over at the slightest hint of weakness. It did not whisper a word to me of its own imperial history, how it had subjugated and absorbed so many people born into other linguistic systems, first during the centuries of its triumphant ascendancy in the Iberian peninsula and then in the Americas after the so-called Discovery, converting natives and later domesticating slaves, merely because the men who happened to carry Spanish in their cortex were more ruthless and cunning and technologically practical than the men who carried Catalán or Basque or Aymará or Quechua or Swahili inside them. It did not hint that English was to the North, smiling to itself, certain that it would father the mind that is writing these words even now, that I would have to surrender to its charms eventually, it did not suggest that English was ready to do to me what Spanish itself had done to others so many times during its evolution, what it had done, in fact, to my own parents: wrenched them from the arms of their original language.

  And yet I am being unfair to Spanish—and also, therefore, to English. Languages do not only expand through conquest: they also grow by offering a safe haven to those who come to them in danger, those who are falling from some place far less safe than a mother’s womb, those who, like my own parents, were forced to flee their native land.

  After all, I would not be alive today if Spanish had not generously offered my parents a way of connecting with each other. I was conceived in Spanish, literally imagined into being by that language, flirted, courted, coupled into existence by my parents in a Spanish that had not been there at their birth.

  Spanish was able to catch me as I fell because it had many years before caught my mother and my father just as gently and with many of the same promises.

  Both my parents had come to their new language from Eastern Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, the children of Jewish emigres to Argentina—but that is as far as the parallel goes, because the process of their seduction by Spanish could not have been more different.

  And therein lies a story. More than one.

  I’ll start with my mother. Hers is the more traditional, almost archetypical, migratory experience.

  Fanny Zelicovich Vaisman was born in 1909 in Kishinev. Her birthplace, like her life itself, was subject to the arbitrary fluctuations of history: at that time, Kishinev belonged to Greater Russia, but from 1918 was incorporated into Romania and then in 1940 into the Soviet Union—only to become, after the breakup of that country, the capital of the republic of Moldavia. If my mother had stayed there, she would have been able to change nationalities four times without moving from the street on which she had seen the first light of this world. Though if she had remained there she would probably not have lived long enough to make all those changes in citizenship.

  Her maternal grandfather, a cattle dealer, was murdered in the pogrom of 1903. Many years later, I heard the story from my mother’s uncle Karl, in Los Angeles, of all places. It was 1969 and he must have been well over eighty years old but he cried like a child as he told us, tears streaming down his face, speaking in broken English and lapsing into Yiddish and being semi-translated by my mother into Spanish so Angélica and I would understand, his pain imploding like a storm into the mix of languages, unrelieved by the passing of time: how his mother had hid with him and his sisters and brothers in a church, how they had listened for hours while the Cossacks raged outside—those screams in Russian, those cries for help in Yiddish, the horses, the horses, my great-uncle Karl whispered—and how he had emerged who knows how many centuries later and found his father dead, his father’s throat slit, how he had held his father in his arms.

  It was that experience, it seems, that had led the family, after aeons of persecution, to finally emigrate. Australia was considered, and the United States, but Argentina was selected: Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association had helped to open the pampas to Jews anxious to own land and cultivate the prairies. Two brothers of my grandmother Clara set out, and when they wrote back that the streets of Buenos Aires were paved with gold, the rest of the family started making plans to leave as well. Only Clara’s mother was unable to emigrate: her youngest daughter would not have passed the tests of the health authorities in Argentina, apparently because she had had meningitis, which had left her seriously retarded. Which meant that both of them, mother and daughter, lived their lives out in Kishinev until they were killed by the Nazis. According to my mother, the old woman went out into the streets the day the blackshirts drove into town and insulted them and was shot on the spot; and though I would love this story to be true, love to have a great-grandmother who did not let herself be carted off to a concentration camp and forced her foes to kill her on the same streets where her husband had been slaughtered, I have often wondered if this version is a fantasy devised more to inspire the living than to honor the dead.

  What is certain is that my mother was saved from such a fate by departing with her parents. At the age of three months, she found herself on a boat from Hamburg bound for an Argentina that, devoid as it might be of pogroms, nevertheless had enough Nazis and Nazi-lovers to force her, thirty-six years later, into her next exile. The ambivalent attitude of the host country toward the Jews was presaged in two run-ins my mother had with the Spanish language at an early age.

  When she was six years old, my mother recalls, she had been sent to her first school. In the afternoons, private piano lessons were offered and my grandmother Clara insisted that her child take these, perhaps as a way of proving how genteel and civilized the family had become. On one of the first afternoons, my mother was by herself in the music room waiting for the teacher, when the door slammed shut. From the other side, a mocking chorus of Argentine children started shouting at her in Spanish. She tried to open the door but they were holding it tight. “No podés,”they taunted her. You can’t open the door, because you’re a Jew, “porque sos judia.”Definitely not the fi
rst words she ever heard in Spanish, but the first words she ever remembers having heard, the words that have remained in her memory like a scar. You talk funny, they said to her. You talk funny because you’re a Jew.

  She probably did talk funny. Yiddish had been the only language her family spoke in Argentina for years. It is true that my mom’s father, Zeide, forced himself to learn some rudimentary Spanish: a week after arriving in Argentina, he was peddling blankets house-to-house in Buenos Aires, starting with the Jewish community, and was soon knocking at the doors of Spanish-speaking goyim as well, prospering enough to eventually start a small shop. But his wife, at least during those first years, was inclined to stay away from the new life, from the new language: almost as if Clara feared, clutching her baby daughter to her, that out there the Cossacks were still lurking, ready to attack.

  Instead of the dreaded Cossacks, another military man passed briefly through the family’s life and inadvertently convinced my Baba Clara, several years before those anti-Semitic school brats refused my mother entry into the community, that Argentina was truly willing to welcome the immigrants.

  One day, an Argentine colonel emerged from his brother’s residence, next door to the Zelicovich house. He stepped into the torrid heat of the Buenos Aires summer and there, on the sidewalk, he saw his little niece playing with a pretty, blond-haired, foreign-looking girl—my mother, who was probably three years old, maybe four, who had by then picked up a smattering of Spanish from the neighborhood kids. The colonel advanced, reached out with one hand toward his Argentine niece and with the other did not take out a gun and shoot my mother but clasped her small hand and trundled both of them off to the corner for some ice cream. An irrelevant incident, but not to Baba Clara: my mother’s mother, upon seeing the colonel go off with the children so amiably and then return with prodigal ice-cream cones, was amazed beyond belief. She said she lifted her hands to heaven to thank the Lord. An Army officer, any member of any Army, was a devil, a potential Jew-killer: that such a man should invite a child from the Tribe of Israel to share sweets with his niece was as miraculous as the Czar quoting the Torah.

  My mother does not remember the colonel or the little friend or the ice cream. What she has consigned to memory is the reaction of her mother. What she remembers is her mother’s voice that very night, recounting in Yiddish the marvels of Argentina and its love of the Jews to her skeptical sister Rosa. Or was it on a later occasion? Because Clara repeated the same story over and over again through the years. Paradoxical that it should have been in Yiddish, because the story registers and foretells the defeat of Yiddish, how kindness forced it to retreat, her offspring’s first tentative, independent steps into a world where Yiddish was not necessary. A world that would demand of my mother, as it demands of all immigrant children, that she abandon the language of her ancestors if she wanted to pass through that door those children would soon be trying to slam shut. I believe this story has abided in the family memory so many years because it is foundational: the prophetic story of how my mother would leave home and assimilate, escaping from that ghost language of the past into the Spanish-echoing streets.

  Streets where my father, many years down the road, was waiting for her.

  By then, fortunately for me, they both spoke Spanish. I can almost hear him now convincing her to marry him in the one language they both shared, I try to eavesdrop so many years later on the mirror of their lovemaking, listening to how they conceived me, how their language coupled me out of nothingness, made me out of the nakedness of night, la desnudez de la noche.

  My father’s trail to the wonders of the sleek Spanish he murmured in her ears had not been as direct and simple as my mother’s. Rather than the normal relay race of one language replacing the other, it had been a more convoluted bilingual journey that he had taken.

  To begin with, he had emigrated not once but twice to Argentina; though perhaps more crucial was that he came from a family sophisticated in the arts of language, a sophistication that would end up saving his life several times over.

  Adolfo was born in 1907 in Odessa, now Ukraine, then Greater Russia, to a well-to-do Jewish family that had been in the region for at least a century and probably longer. As well as Russian, his father, David Dorfman, spoke English and French fluently, as did his mother, Raissa Libovich, who also happened to be conversant in German after three years of studying in Vienna. All those languages, but no Yiddish: they considered themselves assimilated, cosmopolitan, definitively European. If David and Raissa ended up in Argentina, it was not due to any pogrom. In fact, the 1903 pogrom where my mother’s grandfather died had been beaten back in Odessa by the Jewish riffraff and gangsters immortalized later in Isaac Babel’s writings. Their expatriation derived from a more trite and middle-class problem: in 1909, at about the time my mother was being born across the Black Sea, David Dorfman’s soap factory had gone bankrupt and he had been forced to flee abroad to escape his creditors. Of that venture, only a seal, used to stamp certain particularly fragrant epitomes of soap, remains in my father’s possession: “Cairo Aromas,” it grandly proclaims in Russian. But my grandfather, rather than heading for the mythical Cairo of the seal, set off for the more distant and promising Buenos Aires of history. And one year later his wife and three-year-old Adolfo followed him.

  Some years later—it was 1914 by then and the child was six—Raissa and her son were headed back to Russia, purportedly on a visit to the family, though persistent rumors mention another woman, whom David might have been scandalously visiting. Whether or not the gossip is true, what is certain is that my grandmother and my father picked the worst time to go back: they were caught in the eruption of the First World War and then in the Russian Revolution. The reasons for their staying on have always been nebulous. “We were going to beat those Prussians in a matter of months, it was going to be a picnic,” my baba Pizzi told me half a century later, when she and the world knew that it had been anything but a picnic. “And,” she added, “you always think it’s about to end and then it doesn’t and you wait a bit more and you’ve invested so much hope in believing that it’ll all finish tomorrow that you don’t want to give up that easily.” Pizzi would tell me this in English on my visits to Buenos Aires, before I myself would experience what it is to believe that something terrible will end soon, before my own exile would teach me that we spend a good part of our lives believing things will get better because there is no way we can imagine them, wish to imagine them, getting worse. My exile—when I fled Buenos Aires after fleeing Chile; my exile—when the phone rang in Amsterdam with the news that Pizzi had died and I learned that banishment does not take from you only the living but takes their death from you as well. Pizzi had died and I had not been there, I would never sit by her side again and ask her about the past, the steps of Odessa and the Potemkin, the Russian secret police raiding the house, never again be able to ask her about the day my father had brought my mother home to be introduced as his future wife, never again discuss with my favorite grandparent the difficulties of being a woman journalist in Buenos Aires, never again hear her painstakingly translate into English for my benefit the stories for children she wrote for the Argentine Sunday papers and had herself translated from Russian into Spanish, as she had translated Anna Karenina for the first time into Spanish, never again hear from her lips the tales of how they had survived the hardships of the war, how she had spent those years alone with her son, preparing to return to the land where her husband awaited them.

  And then the Revolution had come. Like so many Jews at the time, she fervently supported it. But how to make a living with everything in turmoil? While her son went to school with the bullets flying and the walls splattered with red slogans and the city changing hands overnight—she kept a home for him, and food on the table, and managed to put him through school, and it was all due to her languages; that’s what kept them alive. And she was so proficient at them that she started working with Litvinov and ended up serving the most prominent Bolsh
evik Jew of them all, Trotsky, acting as one of his interpreters at the peace talks with the Germans at Brest Litovsk, where the fate of the Soviet Union was decided. She remembered how he had paced up and down on the train as it sped through the Ukraine to the meeting: how much to give up, how much to concede, how much to pay for peace and the time to build a new Army, a new society?

  And while she was translating German into Russian in order to survive, her husband, half the world away, was patiently translating from Russian into Spanish in order to bring her and the boy safely to Argentina. When the Revolution broke out, it became almost impossible to get people safely out of the newly formed Soviet Union, but my grandfather had hit on a plan: there was a flood of immigrants streaming into Argentina and the police needed people who could interpret for them and help streamline the process, and David found a job with them, hoping that his new post would strengthen his assertion that his faraway wife and son were de facto Argentine citizens and should be helped to exit from Ukraine. Incredibly, he managed to convince some official in the Argentine government to intervene, and more incredibly, somebody in the frenzied Soviet Foreign Minstry listened, and that is how Raissa and Adolfo managed to take the last ship—at least so goes the family legend—to leave Odessa at the end of 1920. My father remembers a stowaway: the Red Army soldiers coming on board and the young man’s fearful eyes when he was discovered, the stubble on his face, the look of someone who knew he would die—and then they hauled him away, dragged him back to that glorious Odessa of my father’s youth, that Odessa now of danger and death.

  It’s hard to be sure, but there’s a good chance, my father says, that he and his mother would not have outlived the terrible year of 1921. The civil war, the famine, the plague, decimated Odessa and so many other cities in the country: most of Raissa’s family, left behind, died. And among the dead was Ilyusha, Adolfo’s older cousin. To the fatherless boy, Ilyusha had been a protector, an angel, a brother for seven lonely years. That cousin of his had let my father tag along as he plunged into the turmoil and romance of the Revolution. My father’s participation had not gone beyond carrying a mysterious black bag that Ilyusha always wanted near him, a bag that contained nothing more dangerous, it seems, than poems and pamphlets, but it was the first social activism of my father’s life and he was never to forget it. Ilyusha’s memory was to haunt him through the turbulent twenties and into the thirties as Argentina itself began to head for what seemed a revolution of its own.