Cracks in the Cocoon

Buenos Aires, the 1950s.

When I immigrated to the US in 1968, I brought with me two tiny ceramic kittens, each barely larger than a piece of candy. They were a gift I had given Mom after returning from my first summer camp, a colonia, as it was known in Argentina. The colonia was in Villa General Belgrano, a pretend Bavarian village in the central highlands. The kittens will forever remind me of that place and of shopping for Mom that day: I was a ten-year-old Jewish kid, looking for a gift in a quaint town inhabited by aging Wehrmacht sailors.

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The European cocoon of my childhood was not airtight. Cracks started appearing almost from the beginning. No matter how much Mom tried, she could not prevent the fissures. Three cracks that I remember clearly had to do with politics, religion, and the Holocaust; topics which are, to say the least, heavy.

Let me start with Peronista politics. One of my earliest childhood memories is the death of Eva Perón in 1952, when I was three. Evita was the much-beloved wife of Juan, and she died young, at the height of her working-class popularity. Evita was a passionate class warrior. She did not just rant against the oligarchy but despised the Argentine middle class and spared no words against us. Neither my parents nor their friends had much love for the Peróns. I think that my folks’ anti-Peronismo came not only from the class resentments fueled by Evita, but from past experiences. My parents, who had learned well how to survive autocrats in the Old World, followed the time-honored philosophy of Argentine self-preservation: No te metás. Don't get involved. The country was not fully theirs. They only played spectators in the unfolding drama. Mom and Dad rarely mentioned Evita and Juan at home, unless it was in some roundabout way. One of the reasons was Nilda, our working-class maid. There was no doubt that she was a Peronista, and neither she nor my parents ever discussed politics, best not to raise the subject.

Three years after Evita’s death, when I was six, Perón was overthrown by a junta. It was my first coup d’état and it involved a loud bomb explosion. The Coghlan general store, ran by a grocer with Peronista sympathies, was blown up the first night, with a blast that shook the neighborhood. I asked Mom what was going on, and, forever protective of the European cocoon, she replied, "Nothing, Schorschi. Du bist ein kleines Kind; it’s nothing that a small boy needs to know about. Time to go to sleep. . ."

And, as me, so the country. Overnight, the junta, in a gesture that Orwell might have appreciated, decreed that no one in Argentina could print or even publicly mouth the words "Perón," or "Evita." This was the beginning of a long process of “de-Peronization” that followed Perón’s overthrow. Not long after the coup, de-Peronization reached UDS, my grammar school. One morning about a month after Perón was gone, Señora Gonzalez, the school principal, came into first grade.

“Niños,” she started, “I must discuss something important with you today. Por favor, turn to page thirty-two of your book.” We ruffled through the book to page thirty-two. It was the beginning of a chapter called something like, BENEFICIO SOCIAL. “Do you see that the chapter goes on until page thirty-six?” she asked.

Ruffle, ruffle. “Sí, Señora Gonzalez,” we replied in unison.

“Bueno, niños . . . Carefully, please, you will now tear out each page of the chapter and, when you’re done, pass all the pages to the front.”

Señorita Martinez, our teacher, added, “El Ministerio de Educación del gobierno asked us to do this.” She sounded embarrassed.

One of the pages had a picture of Evita handing out gifts to a group of happy children, and another had a picture of Juan christening a big red ship. Both of the Peróns, as well as everyone else around them, were smiling. I never got to read the text but, no doubt, it praised their generous works and our good fortune to have them as our leaders. Señorita Martinez collected the pages and took them from our classroom forever.

Religion was the next crack in the cocoon. One day, when I was nine or so, Nilda and I were on the city bus, coming back from shopping. It was standing room only and Nilda was holding on to a ceiling strap to avoid the lurching, and I was holding on to her skirt. Just as the bus was driving past a small church, she put down her bag, let go of the strap and, moving her right arm, did something like swatting away a fly.

“Qué es eso, Nilda?” I asked. What’s that?

She looked down at me, confused. “Tu mamá didn’t teach you how to cross yourself?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, all niños católicos must cross themselves when they are in front of a church. No one has told you this?”

“No. . .Why?”

“Out of respect for our Señor Jesús, of course.”

“Oh. . .and how do you do it?”

“Here, I’ll teach you.” And, in the rocking bus, she showed me how to move my right hand from my left to my right nipples, then to my forehead and down to my belly button, ending the trip with a kiss to my thumbnail. I practiced the movement several times, holding on to her with my left hand, until I could do it in two flowing and graceful waves, like Toscanini conducting a symphony. I saw the approving smiles of the passengers and concluded that I was good at this stuff.

For the next weeks, I practiced crossing myself every time I saw a church. There was a white colonial one in barrio Coghlan, which I could see from the city bus. I was never sure whether seeing the church from far away qualified, or if I had to be right in front of it or, if the bus was going too fast, I still had to cross even if the church had already rushed by me. After a few weeks of practicing, I decided that the time had come to show Mom my new skills.

“Look, Mom. . .how I cross my heart,” I said one day, proudly. “Nilda taught me.”

She looked at me shocked. “You. . . what?” Turning toward the kitchen she called our maid, “Nilda, come here, please!”

“Sí señora, did you call me?”

"Nilda! Ay. . .ay. . .ay! What are you teaching the boy? We are Jews . . . Judíos, comprende?”

And looking at me, she added, “Schorschi, let me explain . . . Jews don't cross themselves . . ." But I wasn’t quite done with the crossing, happily showing her my finishing touch, where I bring my right thumbnail to my lips. “And stop crossing yourself, mein Gott!” she said.  

Poor Nilda had never met anyone who wasn’t Catholic, and she had no idea that there were people in the world with other leanings. She knew that we were rusos, as Jews were known in Argentina ever since the earlier Jewish-Russian migrations, but she had never made the connection. She learned it that day all right, and immediately stopped the indoctrination, the crossing, and any mention of Señor Jesús. Mom’s message, however, puzzled me. Mom was not much of a Jew herself. She had brought from Europe the assimilated Viennese habits of Christmas trees and Christmas caroling in German. She taught me to sing Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, which I can still do to this day. She even had a proclivity, when upset, to swear in a distinctly non-Jewish way, “Jesu, Maria und Joseph!”

However, after the events with the cross, she decided that at least her son needed to become, “A Jew.”  She taught me to say the Sh’ma Yisrael, the Jewish prayer of monotheism, and we did that together every night before I went to bed. She also arranged for me to go to synagogue once a year and sit next to our good family friend Onkel Max during Yom Kippur services. The services were at Templo Libertad, the main Orthodox synagogue of Buenos Aires. I couldn’t understand a word of what was going on at the Templo, since there was no Spanish spoken there, only Hebrew. I gathered that God did not understand the language of Cervantes. Year after year, I sat for hours in the back of the synagogue’s huge hall, far from the bima, the central pulpit where the action was. I was surrounded by men who were chatting away about business without paying much attention to the rabbis. The only excitement came from getting up for a while every now and then and sitting down again.

I was reminded of the Templo the first time I went to a baseball game in Boston.  (You may recall from Blog 9, Baseball Blues, that I was an avid Red Sox fan during my Harvard years). My seat at Fenway Park was far from the action, and I sat high up schmoozing with school friends in the sun, without truly understanding what was going on. Every now and again, I would look at the small distant figures and see that something interesting had just happened but that I had missed it. Whatever it was, we all got up at the same time and then all of us sat down. These moments of communal sitting and standing generated a lot of commentary, sometimes even an argument. But in the end, we would all go back to schmoozing about graduate school. It was just like Yom Kippur day in Templo Libertad, except it was sunny and you could have a beer.

The third crack had to do with the Holocaust. One year, Mom, following the advice of other European mothers, picked a somewhat Germanic place for me to go to summer camp. It was called Colonia Sulzberger.  The story of this camp is worth telling because it not only reinforces how far the Jewish-European bubble extended but also shows how seriously it leaked. The tale goes back to the Second World War.

In the last few weeks of 1939 Argentina and Uruguay, our neighbor across the Plata River, were witnesses to a naval war drama that has gone down in history as the “Battle of the Río de la Plata.” It pitted the German battleship Graf Spee against several English cruisers. After an exchange of fire outside the Plata, the Graf Spee was damaged and sailed into neutral Montevideo for repairs. The British cruisers blockaded the Plata and, through clever propaganda, convinced Langsdorff, the Graf Spee’s captain, that he would face a huge armada if he tried to leave. Langsdorff had to leave quickly because of war treaties dealing with limited safe-harbor at neutral ports. Rather than facing what he thought was certain loss of ship and crew, Langsdorff scuttled the ship outside the Plata and debarked with his sailors in Buenos Aires. He took a hotel room downtown, wrote a letter to the Führer, and shot himself. He was buried in BA with full military honors, with British officers in attendance. Hundreds of the Graf Spee’s men were imprisoned in BA and, after the war, most of them stayed and settled in Villa General Belgrano, a small village in the central highlands of Córdoba.

That very village was the site of Colonia Sulzberger, the highly recommended Germanic summer camp to which I was sent. While I have never heard any rumors that the camp’s director Herr Sulzberger was a survivor of the Graf Spee, he did choose to settle among the sailors, so go tell. Villa General Belgrano looked like a Bavarian town transplanted into the Argentine highlands. To this day it hosts annual Oktoberfests and Viennese Pastry Festivals. I remember window-shopping for a gift for Mom on the main street, where store after store had little signs that said, “MAN SPRICHT SPANISCH” (Spanish Spoken Here).  

There were other Germans—not as outwardly innocuous as Herr Sulzberger—living in Argentina. Juan Perón had allowed a number of Nazis to seek refuge after the Second War. They included Mengele, Eichmann, and SS-Hauptsturmführer Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon. Unknown to Mom and Dad, SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, the engineer of the Final Solution, lived in San Fernando, a barrio thirty minutes from us, under the name Ricardo Klement. The Israeli Mossad captured him in 1960 and he reappeared in Jerusalem a few days later. The knowledge that Eichmann had been a neighbor shook up my parents.

That year, when I was eleven, I first learned about the Holocaust, mostly from Mom. Dad said nothing of the murders of his brother Dan or nephew Muki at Auschwitz. It might have been a good moment to bring up those painful events but, as was his wont, he let it pass. I only learned about those things when, twelve years later, I sat in Aunt Carola’s rose garden in Trieste.

Mom may have thought that Villa General Belgrano was inside the cocoon, but it was not. The consequences of that summer camp, as well as the bomb that went off in barrio Coghlan the night of the 1955 coup d’etat, or the theology I learned from Nilda on that city bus, showed that the bubble was never that strong. It finally cracked wide open with Mom’s death in 1961. But because she died too soon, she never saw Eichmann go to the gallows.

The day when Mom’s Judeo-European cocoon broke in June 1961 became a pivotal event that divided my life into a before and an after. I will tell you that story in my next blog, The Day Mom Died.

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It was during summer camp in Villa General Belgrano that I bought Mom my first and only surviving gift: that pair of tiny ceramic kittens. She displayed them on her night table during the few months she had left between my return from camp and her sudden death. The kittens stayed with me at home in the US until fifty years later, when I gave them to my youngest daughter Sasha—less one paw, which must have broken off in one of their many moves.