Oldal 310 [310]
OCR
COMPOSITION OF AN IDENTITY that had I been born a little sooner — I was born three years after my parent’s marriage, in the midst of war — and had I been born some forty kilometers from my city, I would not be here narrating this minimal biography. I mentioned at the start that it’s not easy being Jewish in Argentina, but it’s possible. I assume this difficulty is universal except in Israel and Manhattan. My family and I found in my country, Argentina, freedom. That is to say hospitality. My father didn’t come to America to make a fortune, a common antiSemitic misconception, but to leave behind war and the postwar period in Romania; in other words, to leave behind oppression and racism. He started a small sock factory in a western district of Greater Buenos Aires that with time became successful. The products were sold in a region inhabited by Armenians, Syrian-Lebanese Christians and Muslims, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews and Spaniards from Galicia. Before arriving in this country, the meat paradise of the world, my father, a thin and tall man, had experienced great hunger. At night, when he returned home, he had already eaten for lunch “puchero”, a dish called “cocido” in Spain and “pot au feu” in France. In Argentina it’s a stew made with beef, sausage, blood sausage, oxtail, bacon and vegetables. At dinner time, before sitting at the family table to taste my mother’s goulash or “chirkepaprikash” (chicken paprika) or “télt6tkaposta” (sauerkraut filled with pork meat) — dishes that require a slow digestion — he would stop at the railway station in Flores neighborhood to eat a mozzarella pizza, in line with the national tradition deeply rooted in Italian cuisine. As you can see, I have named a series of national origins in this anecdotic tale, Syrian-Lebanese, Armenians, Galician and Basque — the latter run the dairies were we bought yogurt, cream and milk — Italian, Jews, and I must add the Japanese who washed and ironed clothes in their drycleaners, and the Slovenians who my father employed in his factory. The Slovenians had left behind a Yugoslavia headed by Tito; many had supported the fascists, and they were even some monarchists amongst them. In any case, all sympathized with the Nazis, employees who worked for a Jew, in a Peronist Argentina who welcomed Jews, some converted, at least on paper, and others not, and Nazis, some camouflaged, others not. In this pluralistic country, which according to the 1914 census had, in its more populated areas like Buenos Aires and Rosario, more foreigners than natives, 1 must mention my own family with my Argentinian wife, Catholic, who has a Bavarian Father and Austrian mother and to whom I’ve been married for thirty years. When we met she already had two daughters from her first marriage with a gentleman of English origin. One of her daughters was born in London, the other in Nigeria, but has a German passport because of her mother. + 309 "
