Book based on personal narratives retraces history of Jewish immigration to Brazil

Sociologist Eva Blay conducted years of research and interviewed 92 people to build a portrait of the contemporary Jewish presence.

By José Tadeu Arantes

Agência FAPESP – The Jewish presence in Brazil is as old as European colonization of the Brazilian territory. Two Jews are said to have participated in the expedition led by Pedro Álvares Cabral: João Faras, a physician, astronomer and astrologist who was the first to describe the Southern Cross constellation, and Gaspar da Gama, nicknamed “Gaspar de las Indias”, a navigator, adventurer and polyglot who had been Vasco da Gama’s pilot before serving under Cabral.

A couple of years after Cabral’s voyage, the Portuguese Crown leased Brazil to a consortium of cristãos-novos (Jews converted to Christianity) led by Fernando de Noronha. The lease gave the consortium a monopoly on trade in brazilwood. Successive waves of Jews later fled persecution by the Inquisition or economic hardship in the Old World by immigrating to Brazil. (*)

A sizable portion of this long saga is covered in O Brasil como destino: raízes da imigração judaica contemporânea para São Paulo (“Brazil as destination: the roots of contemporary Jewish immigration to São Paulo”), a book by sociologist Eva Alterman Blay, Senior Full Professor at the University of São Paulo. The book was published with the support of FAPESP.

Blay is the author or editor of many books. In this book, Blay includes a little of her own history as the daughter of Jewish immigrants – her father was born in Poland; her mother, in Bessarabia, now part of Moldova. “All of us, immigrants and children of immigrants, we all have memories that extend beyond our own experiences. They are memories of the experiences narrated by those with whom we have lived,” she writes.

Blay says she began to research the subject many years ago. For a long time, she had no idea how to shape the material that she collected. “Without associating one thing with the other, at that time I had a recurring dream in which I would go somewhere and get lost because I couldn’t find the way back. One day, having written and rewritten the book several times, I finally found the form I wanted. And I never had that dream again,” she told Agência FAPESP.

The form that Blay found consisted of allowing the immigrants who she interviewed to speak with their own voices. Their first-person narratives are prominent in the book, which also highlights the “baggage” brought by each one, which is peculiar in that it contains memories not only of the life lived back home but also of the life built in Brazil.

Her 92 interviewees mostly came from 16 countries: Argentina, Austria, Byelorussia, Egypt, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lebanon, Lithuania, Palestine, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and Uruguay. Some were born to immigrants in Brazil. Despite many differences, they all shared three characteristics: they were Jewish, elderly, and “here to stay”.

Journey’s end

“All the immigrants I’d previously studied in Brazil had a fantasy that one day they would return to their homeland. I’d found this nostalgic fantasy among Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards. But not among the Jews. The reason lay in the very conditions that had led them to come here. Returning was not a dream for them. Not least because, for many of them, there was nowhere to return to. Wars and short-lived peace accords had redrawn borders and redefined the political status of their birthplaces. For these Jews, Brazil was journey’s end,” Blay says.

Many of them were born in shtetls, small East European towns inhabited mostly by Jews, and led lives without much hope of improvement until they eventually came to view Brazil as a type of Eldorado. Even those who came from big cities with plenty of culture and opportunities, such as Berlin or Warsaw, were able to enjoy far greater freedom in Brazil.

“They escaped adverse situations in Europe, from poverty to pogroms, harsh military service akin to slavery, a ban on geographic mobility, and a lack of civil rights. In Brazil, they found an incomparably more tolerable situation, albeit full of traps,” Blay writes, referring to the anti-Semitism that has always festered in Brazil without reaching the extremes manifested in Europe.

Blay’s research focused more on Ashkenazi Jews, most of whom immigrated from Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, than on Sephardi Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and Middle East, whose presence in Brazil dates from colonial times but increased after the Suez Canal crisis of 1956.

The roll call of interviewees in Blay’s book includes men and women from all social classes, some of them famous, such as physicist Mario Schenberg (1914-1990), writer Tatiana Belinky (1919-2013) and philanthropist Ema Gordon Klabin (1907-1994).

Born to non-religious parents in Recife, Pernambuco, Schenberg began telling Blay his life story in 1982. He stated that he had no links to Judaism and expressed alarm about the emergence of a new “international wave of anti-Semitism”, which he believed was motivated by the State of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians.

In 1983, Tatiana Belinky, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, told Blay about the lengthy endeavors of her husband, psychiatrist Júlio Gouveia (1914-1988), one of the pioneers of television in Brazil, to convert to Judaism. Júlio, his son and grandson all celebrated their Bar Mitzvah (coming of age) together, in what may have been the only such event in the world. The ceremony typically takes place at age 13 for boys and 12 for girls (Bat Mitzvah).

Many Brazilians associate Ema Klabin with the cultural foundation that bears her name, Fundação Cultural Ema Gordon Klabin, a museum with more than 1,500 art objects, and with the Albert Einstein Jewish Hospital, whose construction was possible due to Klabin’s financial contribution. Born in Rio de Janeiro into one of Brazil’s most respected Jewish families, she inherited her share in the Klabin pulp and paper company from her father Hessel, who was born in Lithuania, and she became a leading art collector, patron and philanthropist. Blay interviewed her in 1982.

Microhistory and the construction of sociology

Commenting on these and other life stories, Blay highlights the role of personal narrative and “microhistory” in the construction of sociology. “I prefer this approach to sweeping generalizations,” she says. “It’s a movement started in the 1980s by Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, Aziz Simão and myself. We set out to foreground real life, people’s day-to-day experience, the behavior of individuals. We also placed considerable emphasis on empirical data. We came in for heavy criticism at the time.”

This approach requires certain precautions, however. “When working with life stories, you have to take care to bear in mind that people are telling a particular truth, which is circumscribed to the moment at which they unfold the narrative. There’s no such thing as Truth. There are memories recalled at a given moment, and these memories must be considered in their context,” she says.

One of the most striking life stories that she collected is a long narrative by Rifca Gutnik, who at the time of her interview (beginning in 1982 and continuing for several years), lived in the Jewish nursing home for the elderly that was maintained by the Albert Einstein Jewish-Brazilian Charitable Society (SBIBAE). Born in Bessarabia, Rifca had to abandon her studies when Alexander Cuza (1857-1946), whom some call the Romanian Hitler, banned Yiddish in schools. She became a factory worker at a tender age and led a strike against absolutely inhumane working conditions, including no meal breaks, no extra pay for night-time work, and no rights at all. The strike was victorious, but Rifca was fired. Jobless, she eventually emigrated to Brazil, where her boyfriend and future husband, Velvel, already lived.

In Rio, she joined a proletarian club that ran a school for workers (Arbeter Shule) as well as cultural activities and a canteen. After Aliança Nacional Libertadora’s failed insurrection in 1935, Velvel was arrested for being a Communist. Rifca and her daughter, Clara, stood in the sun for hours at the entrance to the prison while waiting for permission to visit her husband, and Clara later died of sunstroke. Rifca also lost her husband when he was deported to a Nazi concentration camp.

“I was deeply moved by Rifca’s story,” Blay writes. “After interviewing her at the nursing home, I went on to visit her regularly.”

Rifca played an active part in the life of the nursing home. She sewed using the sewing machine that she herself had donated; read books in Portuguese, Russian, Yiddish and German; invited the other residents to listen to her records of classical and folk music; and kept up with current affairs by reading two daily newspapers. Moreover, she helped Blay with her research by translating a book on the history of Britchon (Briceni), the shtetl where she was born in 1905.

The idea of doing things for others, which gave meaning to Rifca’s life despite all of its vicissitudes, is strongly associated with tzedakah, which can be translated as righteousness or social justice and is a mainstay of Jewish life. An example of this type of giving is the intense voluntary service done by Betty Lafer (1909-2006), a school teacher who was born in Schirwind, Lithuania, and earned her diploma in Araraquara, Brazil.

After a long career as a teacher, married and with adult children, Betty began volunteering for OFIDAS, the Jewish Women’s Social Assistance Organization, and later for UNIBES, the Brazilian Jewish Social Welfare Union, of which she later became honorary president. She was interviewed in 1982.

Social work was the main way that many of these immigrants practiced Judaism. “The generation I interviewed weren’t particularly religious,” Blay says. “At most, they kept the High Holy Days: Rosh Hashanah (which ushers in the Jewish new year), Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), plus Pesach (Passover). Today’s generation are much more religious, and indeed, many are Orthodox Jews. Some children or grandchildren of immigrants from that generation now wear traditional clothes, marry people who belong to the same group, and engage intensely in religious studies. This is a new trend that deserves to be researched.”

(*) See Wiznitzer, Arnold, Os Judeus no Brasil Colonial (São Paulo, Pioneira/EDUSP, 1966), and Serebrenick, Salomão, Breve História dos Judeus no Brasil (available at http://tryte.com.br/colecaojudaismo/livro10.htm).

To buy Eva Blay’s book and for more information (in Portuguese), go to: www.editoraunesp.com.br/catalogo/9788539304912,brasil-como-destino-o.