Imagining Mom and Dad

Buenos Aires, 1924-1947.

Dad had quite a collection of mate gourds. They ranged from a simple hollowed steer’s horn to ornate silver ones resting on three legs. They were small enough for me to put on the right pile of things and bring them along in 1968. I don’t drink mate, but they sure look nice next to other things from his earlier past, such as the Goldstein & Galanis wine bottles that I brought back from Samos. By the time I knew him, Dad had become a porteño—a local of BA, the port city. His mate gourds are symbols of his porteñismo.

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As I grew up on the couch, I made peace with the new images of my parents; the images that emerged during my ten years of analysis. Mom was no longer the unquestioned angel into which I had frozen her at death. Dad was no longer the ogre; he emerged as a mensch. They both became well-rounded humans. These re-imagings allowed me to also re-imagine them, their early lives in BA, their courtship, their marriage. I allowed myself to envision things about which I knew little or nothing. I imagined how they arrived in Buenos Aires, how they met, how he courted her, and how they loved each other. They emerged from tales, whether fictional or not, that made sense to me. Some part of their story was, and still is, as much based on loving guesses as on facts.

“Morits,” as the online Argentine immigration logs have him, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1924 on the S/S Crefeld, from Bremen. His life in BA during the twenty-five years between his arrival and my birth in 1949 remains a mystery. Until I arrived in Trieste in 1971, his family in Europe lost touch with him—except for one visit in 1934. Mom met him in 1947. That year is when his story resumes. The rest is opaque.

It is clear from the one or two tales I heard about his bachelorhood in BA that he fit into the city pretty well.  Buenos Aires, with its traffic, noisy crowds, chaos, and mix of people must have reminded him of Smyrna. It did not take him long to become a porteño, down to the classic singsong with which we natives speak our Spanish. He changed his name to Mauricio, bought a calabash gourd and learned to drink mate.  A quick word about mate. Drinking yerba mate, mate herb, goes back to early South American Indigenous cultures. Leaves from the mate herb are chopped up, placed into a gourd, and soaked in hot water. The caffeine-rich infusion is then drunk through a metal straw, a bombilla. Following Argentine etiquette, it is customary to pass the same gourd from person to person until it is time to refill. Dad drank mate on Sundays, but he did not approve of the sharing custom, and he did not follow it.

In a city of fashion, I imagine him a dandy in straw hat and tailored suits. I see him wandering the crowded bookstores of calle Corrientes, an avenue lit up well past midnight, always happy to find the rare volume of history or classics. When I knew him years later, he was proud of Buenos Aires and defended it in many a debate with fellow immigrants who, like all immigrants, found this or that local custom not to their liking. Even after marrying Mom, he was still a man with habits he had obviously picked up during his bachelor years.  Sundays for lunch to Gambrinus, a German restaurant in BA where they made Kalbsbraten, calves’ roast with sweet and sour red cabbage, as fresh as that of his family’s brasserie on the Smyrna Quay. Lunch was followed by a movie in one of the many cinemas on calle Lavalle. In the early years after Mom died, when he tried to bond with me, we would sometimes walk down Avenida de Mayo and stop at the Café Tortoni for a cafecito, the small espresso of Buenos Aires. Then back to Coghlan.  On Thursdays he invariably bought a lottery ticket, but winning remained out of reach.

From the mid 19th century to the 1930s, the Argentine economy was the envy of the world. Dad was one of about five million Europeans who arrived there, bringing labor and intellect. The immigrants and their descendants created a large middle class. By 1910 Argentina was seventh in the world in per capita income. Unfortunately for Dad, he arrived a short time before the crash of 1929. After the crash, the old exchanges of plentiful Argentine beef and wheat for the world’s manufactures slowed to a trickle. By the early 1930s the Argentine Belle Époque came to an end. No more dreams of finding gold on the cobblestones of BA. Dad must have given up his plans of importing modern goods like Gillette razor blades, since very few were coming in. Maybe he invested in local manufacturing. If so, history tricked him once again.

In 1933 the government signed a treaty with the UK, the Roca-Runciman Treaty, under which the Brits agreed that they would buy certain minimum quotas of beef. The Argentines, in turn, gave the British preferential import duties on their manufactures.  Argentina became a de facto colony of the British Commonwealth. Just when Dad might have started reaping the benefit of his investments, BA was flooded with cheap Shetland sweaters and Mackintosh raincoats. He must have given up any hopes of financial independence and took a job as a manager and accountant with the local branch of Burberry. After that he remained an employee for the rest of his life. 

To make matters worse, the years between 1930 and the mid 1940s are known in Argentina as la década infame, the Decade of Infamy. It was not just the 1933 Treaty that gave these years their sorry name. It was the fact that, starting in 1930, Argentina suffered under a series of right-wing regimes assisted by a military that either overthrew democratic governments or that supported governments elected by fraud. The authorities even had a grotesque name for the cheating. They boastfully called it el fraude patriótico, the patriotic fraud. Mi viejo couldn’t have chosen a worse time to immigrate to Argentina.

But he never went back to the Old World. And he never told me about his clan. Maybe the distance from Grandpa Leon extended to others in our family. Maybe he felt shame that things didn’t quite work out in the new land as he had assured them when he left the wine business in Samos. Maybe he lost face and did not want to go back to Europe. Maybe I should add pride and shame to survivor guilt to understand why Dad never returned and why he talked so little about it. I will never know for sure.

“Rebeka Berman,” as the online Argentine immigration logs have her, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1938 on the MV Oceania from Trieste. The records show her arriving with her husband Walter, described as an engineer. They and all the other refugees from Central Europe sprinkled BA with little corners of the old country. They were hoping to heal their longing and arrest their fate, if only for a moment. One of the jewels of the old country in BA was Steinhauser, a favorite Konditorei, a colorful pastry shop fragrant of chocolate and vanilla. According to Mom, Steinhauser made the best Sacher Torte in South America. Its display cases overflowed with scones, napoleons, and eclairs. Behind the counters, crisply coiffed ladies in white aprons filled orders and made small talk in German. In the back of Steinhauser were small linen-covered tables where the expats could sit for hours and have Kaffee mit Schlag and Apfel Strudel as good as those of the Sacher. 

I visualize the refugees spending weekends in each other’s rooms, celebrating a birthday or anniversary, or just playing cards, with the nasal voice of Herman Leopoldi on the victrola. Leopoldi was a favorite of Mom’s. He was a talented cabaret singer from Vienna who sang witty songs while playing the piano. After escaping Europe and landing in New York in the thirties, his humor made him a beloved companion of Jewish expats all over the world. One of his classic lyrics is sung by a Dachshund, as he meets another small dog next to a hydrant in Washington Heights. In a mix of Viennese, Yiddish, and English, and to the one-two beat of a march, the Dachshund sings of his days as a big shot . . . over there:

Ich war einmal ein grosser Bernhardiner Over there, over there, over there Mein Stammbaum war ein Schwetschkenbaum ein griner Over there, over there, over there

I was once a St. Bernhard, a big one  Over there, over there, over there My fam’ly tree a plum one and a green one Over there, over there, over there

Leopoldi made them laugh at themselves, a remedy that Jews have used for ages. In later years, as families grew, the refugees rented weekend houses at the Rama Negra river. There, surrounded by plum orchards buzzing with mosquitoes, with no electricity or running water, the exiles came, played poker, and imagined that they were back in the Vienna Woods singing waltzes. 

Mom’s side of the BA puzzle looks, in many ways, a lot like Dad’s. Both were outsiders. Dad was a European in Ottoman Smyrna; Mom was  (or wanted to be) a sophisticate living in Leopoldstadt, surrounded by poor Galizianer Ostjuden. Even though not born in the city, she aspired to be a stylish Viennese. Her Marlene Dietrich photograph shows how far she had come by her teenage years. Her loving reminiscences of Vienna Gloriosa and her silences of Vienna Dolorosa reinforce the picture. While Uncle Jack never said the words, I concluded that, much as he loved her, he felt that his sister was a snob.

It should come as no surprise why I admit my own snobbishness. It is all in the genes I received from both sides. We Goldsteins have forever been and are wandering Jews, strangers in strange lands. Our snobbishness is nothing but a defense against what Julia Kristeva calls “an-other.” You may remember the French philosopher Kristeva, whom I introduced in Chapter 6, Rude Awakenings. 

Several years after Mom and her first husband arrived in BA, Walter died of cancer. He was buried in the Tablada Jewish Cemetery on a spring morning in 1945. When she became a widow the circle of friends embraced Riqui like never before. She was adopted as everyone’s sister, and it was their love that saved her. I felt their fondness for Mom during my childhood and, later, from their reminiscences.  

After Walter's death, Mom went into business for herself and opened a milliner’s salon downtown. Women came to try the latest in feathered hats or to just hang out and have a cafecito. But Mom was no businesswoman and, when the salon started losing money, she did not know what to do. In 1947, her friend Max—later to become my Onkel Max—said to her that he knew of a clever European man who did pretty well with numbers. Would it be all right if he called her to see if he could help? Oh, and did he mention that this man was single? 

If you are wondering how these two temperamentally different people fell for each other and decided to marry, you are not alone. I have wondered too.  I will tell you about that next.

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Here are two of Dad’s surviving mate gourds together with their metallic bombillas, their  ornate sipping tubes. Dad liked mate but Mom would not touch the stuff. I felt it was too bitter, but if I added a touch of sugar and maybe some milk, I could stomach it. No self-respecting porteño would add sugar and milk to his mate, so please do not tell my Argentine friends.