Walking Made My Path

By Judith Laikin Elkin

Judith Laikin Elkin has been credited with creating a new field of scholarship, Latin American Jewish Studies. This book traces her paths from childhood in Jewish Detroit to the United States Foreign Service in Asia and Europe, to scholarly research in South America, and the founding of LAJSA, an academic association with members in more than 20 countries. Her experiences as vice consul at the American Embassy in London, as a lone traveler in Spain and Latin America, teaching at American universities at home and abroad, are described with humor, enthusiasm, and relevance for todays world.

Judith earned a BA in English, MA in International Affairs, and while raising two daughters returned to the University of Michigan to earn a Ph.D. in history. She is the author of Krishna Smiled: Assignment in South Asia; The Great Lakes Colleges Association: Twenty-One Years in Higher Education; and The Jews of Latin America, the foundational text for this subject. She has taught history and political science at Wayne State University, Albion College, Ohio State University, and The University of Michigan, where she is presently associated with the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies in Ann Arbor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462046287

Judith Laikin Elkin

Diplomat, historian, professor, journalist, mother, Judith Laikin Elkin made her way through the religious and gender battles of twentieth century America, emerging with her humor and her honor intact. Her story enhances our understanding of the social and political currents that run beneath history as usually written. Dr. Elkin, a former US Foreign Service Officer, has taught at Albion College, Wayne State University, and the University of Michigan, and is the author of The Jews of Latin America, the foundational text for the field.

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Contents

Preface

The Old Country

My Yiddishland

Who We Were

Adventures in Good Music

Student Life

Foreign Service

Imaging Israel

AmEmbassy London

My Paseo through Spain

Detroit: Coming Home

Help

Azusa: Starting Over

UM: Retooling

Colombia: Seeking Sephardim

Ecuador: Tropical Ararat

Peru: Jews at Machu Picchu?

Santiago: In the Wake of the Golpe

Recoleta: Civilization and Barbarism in Argentina

Habana Libre 1994

The Birth of LAJSA And the Emergence of an Independent Scholar

Eighty O’Clock

For Shevi

Preface

Nothing focuses the mind so keenly as news that a possibly fatal event taking place within your own body, without your consent, is likely shortly to clean your clock. Time, which once seemed endless, is running out. As I have exhausted my biblical allocation of three score years and ten, I can’t complain. Instead, faced by a dilemma for which there is nothing to be done, I fall back on my usual response, which is to do something. Thus, following years of procrastination, I set myself to the task of completing this memoir.

I began writing it as a pastime while doing other things, some of which turned out to be important and others not so. I have attempted to retrieve the memory of events I enjoyed or endured, and of people I have known who did not survive to tell their side of the story. Other memories I thought I had forgotten intruded themselves on me as I wrote. All were welcomed into this memoir, no doubt transfigured by the emotions that cling to half-remembered things and that become after a while inseparable from them.

My life was lived amid the creative turmoil of two major historical developments: the emergence of a cohort of American women who rewrote the rules for a newly gendered society; and the gradual absorption of Jews, marginalized in the world into which I was born, into American life. These evolutionary movements destroyed established patterns and eventually opened the way for younger generations to explore new ways of being.

Meantime, there were no paths and no signposts, no clearly marked way forward. As a result, it seemed to me throughout my life, that first I did one thing, and then I did another, pushed as much by prevailing social forces as by my choices—which were of course shaped by those forces, making the idea of choice delusional. I never saw a path before me that would lead to some desired goal. I only realized that I had created a path for myself when I looked back and saw my footprints. Walking made my path, and I recognized my destination when I got there.

I am grateful to friends who considered my story worth telling, and urged me to write it. I absolve Jon Fuller, Tony Merrill, S.G. Srinivasan, Diana Henriquez, and Sarah Leonard if this was an error in judgment. For critical reading of the manuscript in whole or in part, my thanks to Lois Baer Barr, Naomi Lindstrom, Zibby Oneal, Gloria Miklowitz, Barbara deBrodt, and most especially Renate Gerulaitis.

The Old Country

Growing up in 1930’s Detroit, no one I knew had grandparents. Our mothers and fathers had propelled themselves out of European ghettos and made their way to the land of freedom. Those who didn’t get out in the intervals between wars were now nowhere to be seen. So my family’s roots go back only to 1902, when my mother, age 6, arrived in Baltimore from Lithuania with her ticket hanging around her neck and her younger brother held by the hand. My father arrived in 1914, one step ahead of the Czar’s draft.

As a result, my sisters and I grew up in what might be called relative isolation. We weren’t different from other kids we knew. We had cousins in Baltimore whom we visited each year at Passover; there were rumors of a lawyer cousin in New York, Mother’s nurse cousin out West somewhere, and, off and on, an old man in Chicago, about whom we knew nothing. The only relatives who lived nearby were three old people we called the Fetter and the Mummes.

I thought those were their names, but later learned that these titles designated my great uncle and two aunts. They lived on the east side of Detroit—a foreign country from the west side where we lived. Whites no longer drove east of Woodward after dark; and Negroes (the polite term in those days) seen on the west side were generally suspected of being up to no good unless they—the men in overalls, the women with aprons—clearly worked for some white family. But once a year during Hanukkah, Mother would dress us girls nicely, pile us into the elegant red Packard touring car with its carpeted floor and jump seats between the front and rear seats, and take us on pilgrimage to the east side to visit the Ziskins.

Their three-story wooden house with its outdoor fire escape looked just like all the others on the street, where black people lived. But inside, the Ziskin’s house must have been different from theirs, seeing as how it was a chunk of Lithuania that fate had plunked down on Hastings Street. Heavy, dark upholstered furniture with carved wooden legs filled the living room; on the walls were photographs of bearded, heavy-set men in long black coats seated beside bewigged and bosomy wives. There was the obligatory picture of Herzl, leaning over a ship’s railing and staring at a distant vision of Zion. The center of the room was occupied by a three-legged table covered by a dark maroon scarf with heavy gold fringe dripping from it. On the table, a worn Hebrew prayer book and a book of psalms for women to read, in Yiddish because women were not taught Hebrew, as well as a cut glass bowl full of almonds and raisins. All together they completed (or perhaps formed) my idea of the Old Country.

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Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) Founder of Zionism as a political movement

I never did know the Fetter’s first name, but his wife was the Mumme (Aunt) Miriam, and the other woman—what her relation was to the others I don’t know—was the Mumme Friedl. Mumme Miriam wore a long grey skirt that fitted in tight wrinkles all the way down to the buttons on her creaky black shoes, with a green cardigan buttoned tight over her chest; I guessed she must always feel cold. I never could conceive of her having legs or a waistline, or—God forbid that I should mention it—a bosom. She was one solid mass from top to bottom, differentiated only by the two colors of her clothing. Mumme Friedl, who seemed even older than the other two, remained wrapped in a black shawl, smelling slightly of moth balls, sitting in an uncomfortable-looking rocker with frayed leather pads, and never once got up that I remember. Fetter Ziskin, whose coat, which my parents called a capote, exuded a dry, musty odor, would make hearty overtures to us when we first arrived, and hand out our Hanukkah gelt—shiny silver half-dollars. After that, he and Dad would retire to the next room to play checkers and fumfe, as Mother would say—mumble, that is, under their breaths, about—well, about what? No one ever got close enough to hear. I imagine they talked about the Old Country.

Mother would sit and talk with the Mumme Miriam, who would interrupt every once in a while to offer us nuts or some of the hard candy that came in exotic colored wrappers printed with strange pictures and that smelled better than it tasted. And we—we would sit and fidget, bouncing on the frayed velvet-covered sofa, whispering at first among ourselves, but as the afternoon wore on to a melancholy dusk, arguing in louder and louder voices to get the grown-ups’ attention. We would beg to go outside where mobs of kids were running freely up and down the fire escapes, playing stick ball, tag, having fun. But Mumme Miriam would look down her glasses and Mother would say, No, we’ll be going soon. So we would kneel on the sofa and look through the dusty windows at those lucky kids running around freely, not even thinking about how they were free. That’s the way it was. Pickaninnies, as their name implied, were members of an alien clan, outsiders in the Old Country.

Finally, when it was almost dark, Dad and Fetter Ziskin would emerge from the back room, Uncle carrying the board and the box with carved wooden checkers and Dad saying, Nu, we must go. Then long goodbyes and kisses all around, and for the last time until next year we would say goodbye to the Mummes with their one-piece bodies, unbending and unjointed. Then we would drive off in our wonderful Packard, which only came out on family occasions, (Dad drove an Essex to work) we kids vowing among ourselves never to return.

We always did, of course, parental mandate being more peremptory then than now, until I was about fifteen, when the visits ceased. It was mentioned, first, that Fetter Ziskin had died, and later, casually, that the two Mummes had moved to the Meshev Z’kainim, apparently a bourne from which no traveller returned. I would lie awake sometimes at night trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a Home for the Aged, with everyone smelling the same musty smell, but I couldn’t. And soon I quite forgot about Miriam and Friedl except around Hanukkah, and then I would feel sorry for them: for poor Mumme Friedl, who never left her chair, and for Miriam, because she was named Miriam but unlike her biblical namesake could never possibly have danced and sung and struck her tambourine; and for the Fetter, younger than both, but buried before either, and he was the only relative around to give us Hanukkah gelt.

One day, we were informed that Fetter Nachman of Chicago was coming to visit us. Immediate inquiries were launched concerning him. Gradually, a few facts were gleaned: he was my mother’s uncle, he had been living for the past thirty years in Chicago, where he had a small business jobbing remnants. Does he have a family? we asked the night before he arrived. Dad laughed ironically. It seems Fetter Nachman had come to this country in the teens to prepare the way for his wife and daughter. World War I (One! we had now endured the second world war!) intervened, and it was some time before he could send for his wife. Then she didn’t want to come. Fetter Nachman’s reaction to this rejection is unknown, but from Dad’s grin we understood there was more to the story than he planned to tell us. So there was Nachman in Chicago, puttering around in his junk shop, while his wife (whose name no one could remember) and daughter Soreh remained in Holland ("You have relatives in Holland, Mother?!) This daughter had now come to America to fetch her father home to Holland, and they planned to stop in Detroit to say goodbye (as well as hello) to us. Cousin Soreh and her family had spent the war years in the camps. As a refugee from Hitler, she would be a depressed and saddened old woman, and we were cautioned to be extremely nice to her: so many Old Country people, our parents told us, were ashamed of what had happened to them, though it was not their fault at all.

The Chicago train unloaded some surprises at Michigan Central station. First was Cousin—Sylvia, please—do not bodder weeth ‘Cousin.’ It sounds so… so forrmal—an elegant, grey haired woman, astonishingly like a stylish edition of Mother, and exuberant about America. Her English poured out in a delightful rush, interrupted by occasional hesitations that triggered a charming smile. We could see nothing about her that stamped her as a survivor of the camps.

It soon became apparent that there was incomplete communication between father and daughter. After thirty years in America, Nachman spoke a homey kind of Yinglish, perfectly intelligible to any resident of Chicago, Detroit or New York. Sylvia, whose native language was Dutch, not Yiddish, spoke better English than he did. Meanwhile, Nachman had forgotten his Dutch, which must have been their common language when he dandled little Sorele on his knee. Now they made out in a unique combination of the three languages.

Outwardly, Sylvia seemed not to have suffered from her experiences. She showed us pictures of her husband Wilhelm and of her son, who, to my parent’s horror, bore the same name as his father. Worse was yet to come, when Sylvia announced that young Bill was engaged to a gentile girl. What’s more, none of them knew a word of Yiddish (Where should we have learned it—in Bergen Belsen? Sylvia smiled.)

Sylvia was an enigma to all of us. Her mother and her daughter had died in the camps; she had been able to salvage herself, her son and her husband because they were transferred to Theresienstadt. There she was assigned to the kitchen and was able to smuggle food to them. After liberation, they had to fight another war back in Holland, as all their property had been taken over by their neighbors. They had to sue to get their own house back. But now Wilhelm had a job and life was okay. Sylvia dismissed the whole thing as a nightmare. Her only concern was to resume her life as a Hollander. When we have another war, she said, I build my own gaz-house.

Her father, our Fetter Nachman, was one of those Jews who, were he to convert to Catholicism and enter a monastery, would still be Jewish. Yiddishkeit was in his bones. And far from being a helpless old man whom his daughter had a responsibility to care for in his old age, he was an eccentric who marched to his own shofar. He was close to eighty, but each morning that they were with us, he rose at six for a walk in the park. How he found the park was known only to himself, since he’d asked no one in the family. All we knew was that that first morning, when we were ready for breakfast, there was no Fetter Nachman. A brief search of the house was followed by scurryings up and down the street til eventually I was dispatched to the park, about half a mile away. That is where I found him, seated on a bench under a tree, reading the Forverts. When I told him everyone was looking for him, he replied that he was no baby and could take care of himself. He invited me to sit down, as I was quite out of breath, and soon we were talking amiably about shoes and ships and sealing wax, until I said that the others would still be searching for him and we ought to get back. He sighed, folded the newspaper carefully, and tucking my arm under his, led me home. On the way, he told me about the pinochle game he had going in his shop in Chicago; it had been running for thirty years already, and it was probably going on right now without him.

He walked faster than the Mumme and Fetter Ziskin, and there seemed to be this animal energy or something coming out of him, that caused each short, sturdy leg to thrust full out ahead of him. I imagined him hefting bales of remnants in his shop, stepping over the boxes of buttons and zippers scattered on the floor, noting down quantities and prices all the while. Walking along with my arm firmly clasped to his chunky body, he might have been the grandfather I’d never known. My Yiddish, which I refused to speak to my parents, improved as we walked.

He asked me whether Detroit had a zoo. Chicago, it seems, has a fine one, and he used to spend Sunday afternoons there. Uh-huh, I said, vaguely indicating that I didn’t know whether it was open for the summer yet. Later, he asked my older sister Shevi the same thing, but she had no more information than I, other than that it was located out of the city and she had never been there by bus.

An excursion was planned for Sunday afternoon; Sylvia wanted to see the automobile factories. We’d saved the two front seats in the Packard for her and her father, but at the last minute Nachman was not to be found. We piled out and began what had developed into a routine search of the neighborhood. But this time he really was not there. Not at the park, nor the corner drugstore eating a peppermint ice cream cone, nor the Yiddishe Folk Shule where he’d found some fellow Litvaks. Then I thought of the zoo. The attendant who took my call was polite and amused, and told me to hang on. There were few people in the park, he would try to locate our man.

In five minutes he was back. Nachman was feeding the polar bears. Don’t let him out of your sight, I urged, and we set off to retrieve him. That took half the day. Nachman, realizing the guard was following him, managed to elude him—just for the heck of it, he confided to me later. He was angry that we should have thought he couldn’t take care of himself.

As the years passed, Sylvia wrote to us several times from Holland. Sadly, her father would not adapt to his new life, always mooning over the old days in Chicago, his pinochle pals, his jobbery, the Chicago zoo (local zoo animals had all been eaten or destroyed in the war). I could imagine him saying that he didn’t need his daughter to watch over him; he had taken care of himself for thirty years while living all alone in a strange country. But, Sylvia wrote, here in Holland we have a position to keep up, and I cannot have him running off and wandering the streets with his clothes all higglety-pigglety and without a hat.

We were invited to Bill’s wedding but my father replied that we would not attend: the bride was not Jewish and he personally didn’t consider the family Jewish anymore, despite what you have been through. What if there is another war, my father prodded. You must know which side you are on. It was then that Sylvia sprang the news that she had been too courteous to tell my father in his own house. She had already chosen which side she was on. You know, dear cousin, she wrote, the first thing we did when we were released from Theresienstadt was to find a church and convert to Christianity, me and Willem and Bill. There must be an end to this Jewish thing." Dad told her not to write to us anymore.

She did, though, once more, to tell us of Fetter Nachman’s death, not long after Bill’s wedding. She told us that, at the wedding banquet, Nachman played the badchen—the wedding jester—dancing and singing the traditional Yiddish songs and bantering rhymes without which no wedding, even a Lutheran one, would be complete. Chossen, kalleh, mazel tov! (Congratulations to the groom and bride) he sang, urging the guests to clap in rhythm to the strangely Oriental tune. When he got to the irresistible call to bride and groom to come greet one another,

Az ich vel zogn lecha dodi,

vest du zingen, tschiribiribim;

az ich vel zogn likras kalleh,

vest du zingen tschiribiribom.

some wedding guests joined in with a tongue-twisting tschiribiribim. I could imagine the formally dressed ladies and gentlemen looking on with curiosity as the quaint old man, his necktie loosened, his jacket slung over his shoulders, his fedora pushed to the back of his head Chicago style, sashayed among the tables, one hand on his hip, delivering Yiddish songs and witticisms, including a tongue-in-cheek plea for in-laws to remain friends despite their new relationship:

Mechuteneste mayne, mechuteneste getraye,

Lomir zayn oyf eybig mechutonim . . .

The old man was singing his Yiddish heart out for these former Jews and non-Jews who had witnessed the deportations of their Jewish neighbors—Holland had the highest proportion of its Jewish citizens deported of any country on the continent—but who remembered, maybe even pined for, whether they admitted it or not, what life had been like before their Jews were sent away. Nachman would have first heard these songs as a boy in Lithuania. No doubt he had sung them at weddings in Holland before the war, when Sylvia was a child and there were still Jews. And all those years in Chicago, how many wedding celebrations had he enlivened with his clowning? This last time, he played the badchen in judenrein Rotterdam, in the heart of his Christian family, remembering his Yiddishland, his Chicago, his Old Country.

My Yiddishland

From kindergarten through twelfth grade, following full days in Detroit public schools, I attended the Farband Folk Shule, offspring of the Socialist-Zionist movement, each weekday and another three-hour session on Sunday, to make up for Friday night (Sabbath) when we did not meet. Every evening I would walk down Twelfth Street (yet to be named Rosa Parks Boulevard) past the grocery store with its pickle barrel out front (a nickle a shtikle), the live fish store, the kosher butcher, the Hebrew book store, the Cream of Michigan where the Purple Gang hung out (they never bothered civilians, only killed each other); and Brown’s Drug Store (which was yet to be burned down in the 1947 riot). On to the unheated storefront where we met, sitting through the Michigan winter in our jackets and snow pants. Our teacher was a learned but humorless man who by day was a tool and dye maker at the Ford plant and whose dream it was to establish a Yiddish theater in Detroit. Instruction was in Yiddish, language of our parents, who funded the school.

My knowledge of Yiddish came from the reading group my father conducted in our home every Friday night after dinner. We children were reading the stories of Sholom Aleichem and Y.L. Peretz before we got to The Secret Garden or Adventures of Perrine. (Isaac Bashevis Singer was far too risque to be read by children; he was just a mote in the eyes of adult readers of the Forverts.) Later, while in public school we were reading patriotic stories about the American revolutionary war, in shule, our Yiddish texts were by authors such as Dov Ber Borochov, a Russian Social Democrat whose vision it was that, once Jews returned to Palestine, the Arab and Jewish working classes would assert their common proletarian interest and unite in the class struggle for social justice.

The shule’s innovative curriculum included Hebrew as a modern language (religious schools were still teaching Hebrew from the prayer book). The geography of Palestine contained for us the imaginary outlines of a future Jewish state; for music, we sang songs of the pioneers who were already working the Land of Israel, still under Turkish rule. Then there was Jewish history, all 5000 (sic) years of it. For three hours a day, the shule dropped the full burden of Jewish history on our heads. No horror was spared us: the centuries of pogroms, the families jammed into synagogues and set on fire, the Crusaders’ progress across Europe over the bodies of entire Jewish communities, the humiliation of the yellow badge, crowded ghettos, limitations on entry into professions, every kind of legal barrier to a decent life, and, as they became known, the horrors being committed at that very moment by the Nazis. To this dreary history I added the footnote that I, who had never suffered these devastations, had no right ever to desert the Jewish people who had persevered through so much tragic history to pave the way for my own privileged existence. History had confirmed the vision of Herzl who, witnessing the Dreyfus trial in which a French Jewish officer was railroaded to Devil’s Island, concluded that a national home for the Jewish people was a necessity if Jews were to survive. Evidently, he had been right.

We also studied Tanach in Yiddish, though of course it was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic, its authorship lost in the mists of time. Tanach consisted of Five Books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings. Moses was an historical figure who founded the Jewish people at a time of year that we now observe as Passover, and who left a record of his dealings with other peoples and their gods, as well as with a mysterious figure who strode through the text wreaking havoc wherever he went, and who sometimes went by the name Adonai, a name so toxic it could not be spelled out on the page, and at other times by the inscrutably plural Elohim.

When our class of five students observed our graduation from shule we were addressed in English by a distinguished person who bestowed on each of us a book