On the night of June 9, 2009, an email arrived in my inbox. It had been written by my father, Horacio, and had the subject line “Your great-grandfather”:
Hola Javi,
Go to this address: www.generacionesmv.com/Generaciones/Victimas.htm. The author, Mijl Hacohen Sinay, is your great-grandfather. I just found it and, apart from everything it means for us emotionally and historically, there’s a touch of a crime report about it.With some curiosity I clicked through and read the title of an article: “The First Fatal Victims in Moisés Ville,” which was completed farther down with: “An account of the first murders suffered by the colony.” The site proclaimed itself as “The Generations of Moisés Ville, a website dedicated to the first Jewish agricultural colony in Argentina.” I skimmed through the text and confirmed that the touch of crime my father had referenced was obvious.
In it was the account of a killing: in the year 1889, a group of Jewish immigrants were starving, begging for biscuits from anyone who would spare them a look, and a gaucho wanted to take a wretched princess of a girl from their ranks in exchange for a simple dowry; the whole thing ended in bloodshed. The case was a real one that had taken place in Argentina. After that it narrated another crime, then another, and another, until more than a score had been detailed. The text was powerful and gruesome, historical and eye-opening, forgotten and valuable. A very dark piece of Argentine life and the saga of immigration had been preserved there.
For my own part, I had heard, as far back as I could remember, that the colonization of the Jewish gauchos had been a pastoral adventure. I had never thought that it might have been tinged with blood or that this immigration could have met with such resistance.
To tell the truth, I also lacked any knowledge of who my great-grandfather, the author of the article, had been. The family’s memory didn’t stray that far back around the Sunday table, which my grandmother Mañe loaded down with delicious plates of gefilte fish with carrots and salads in many colors and flavors. “Your grandfather’s father ran a newspaper,” I had once heard, between one dish and the next, but I let the comment pass. And now my grandfather Moishe—the son of that great-grandfather, Mijl Hacohen Sinay—is dead. He passed away in the fall of 1999 without ever telling me a word about his father—and I still wonder why. But his wife, my grandmother Mañe, is still around. She was Mijl’s daughter-in-law and remembers him well.
And what was that about “Hacohen”? A first name or last? “It means ‘the kohen,’” my grandmother told me, in her colorful santiaguídish melody—for, although she was born in 1922 in the town of Lanivtsi, within the region of Volhynia (then part of Poland, today in Ukraine), she was raised in La Banda, quite close to the provincial capital of Santiago del Estero, Argentina. Of religion she knows what she absorbed in her Polish home in Santiago del Estero, which is to say, what any girl from a shtetl—or Jewish village—would know, and that, to be sure, is far more than is within my grasp. “The Kohanim have a special status: they’re the direct male descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses, and were the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem. The tribe passes from father to son. You too are a kohen,” she said when I asked her that day.
Searching online, I easily find a monograph on the journalists who arrived in Argentina in the period of 1850–1950, which includes a few lines about my great-grandfather: “Mijl Hacohen Sinay was born in 1877. In 1894, the Sinay family immigrated to Argentina and settled in Moisés Ville, in Santa Fe province. There, Mijl became a teacher at the first school in the colony. In 1898, his family moved to Buenos Aires, where, at twenty-one, he founded the first Yiddish-language newspaper in Argentina, Der Viderkol. He went on to found other publications as well and reported for many more, both local and international. He died in Buenos Aires on August 8, 1958.” A note indicates that the text is quoted from the book La letra ídish en tierra argentina: Bio-bibliography de sus autores literarios, written by Ana Weinstein and Eliahu Toker.
It’s no common thing to discover, four generations back, a figure who seems so familiar. The matter digs into me like a thorn, keeping me up at night: if I found this much with so little, it’s because there is more out there.
However, the internet does not hold the answers; the trails end quickly. But the most serious issue is not to do with the lack of results, but my ignorance: I don’t know what title I’m searching for or where more information about the crimes of Moisés Ville might be found.
So, I turn to the only person I’m sure can help me: the writer Eliahu Toker, author of that short biographical note, and ask him about my great-grandfather, Moisés Ville, and the periodical that Mijl founded. I suspect that this newspaper, Der Viderkol (in English, The Echo), which was produced in 1898—during the same period in which the murders were committed—might well have recorded them. As I draft my message to Toker, I’m scarcely aware of his standing as a nobleman of the local Jewish population, a champion of Yiddish culture, and also a poet, writer, and researcher.
“The place where I saw a copy of Der Viderkol at one time was the IWO, I think before the attack it suffered in 1994,” he responds, barely three days after the email from my father that set everything in motion. Those first hours, fed solely by the fuel of excitement, had already led me to a reference to the IWO, the Institute for Jewish Research or, in Yiddish, Idisher Visnshaftlejer Institut, an organization dedicated to the research, dissemination, and conservation of Jewish culture. Although it no longer operates out of the offices of the AMIA (the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, the largest community center in the country), it had been there on July 18, 1994, when the building was destroyed by a terrorist attack. Toker goes on in his email: “I don’t know if they still have that copy or any other. It appears in facsimile form in a few books, including one that I have, but I’d tell you to begin your investigation at the IWO. Your great-grandfather was an interesting character, and it would be good to do something with his biography, maybe conducting research within your own family. Can you read Yiddish? There’s a book by Pinie Katz about Jewish journalism in Argentina that must have some material about your great-grandfather and his newspaper. That’s all that occurs to me at the moment.”
But no, I can’t read Yiddish.
And Der Viderkol, my great-grandfather’s newspaper, which might well lead me to the murders, will not be easy to track down. For several nights, one question has been keeping me awake: how can I investigate a crime that took place in the twilight of the nineteenth century, out in a poor páramo of Santa Fe? Used to walking the courtroom hallways and seeking out witnesses, to speaking with investigators and looking at a crime scene through the eyes of the victim or the killer, in short, accustomed to justice that answers through a press office and to the media-hyped crime of the twenty-first century, where the protagonists involved love the cameras or seek to profit through them, I discover that in this text left behind by my great-grandfather there is nothing of the kind. Here, the victims’ names run one after the other: Lander, Iegelnitzer, Seivick, Fainman, Kantor, Gerchunoff, Horovitz, Wainer, Bersanker, Kristal, Finkelstein, Schmucler, Waisman, Aliksenitzer, Reitich, Tzifin . . . But the criminals’ names don’t even appear. As if they didn’t matter. They are always just gauchos; or gauches, in the original Yiddish text.
In a comment on brutality as a literary virtue, Borges references Eduardo Gutiérrez and “the monotonous scenes of atrocities that he dispatches with resignation.” It isn’t a fair comparison—it does credit neither to one nor the other—but that Borgesian footnote echoes in my head as I face this text by Sinay the older, whose words invite us to spring from one pool of blood to another. That is also the sense of the brief summary in Spanish that accompanies the original lines, published in Yiddish so long ago, by way of introduction:
It was not without victims that Jewish colonization in the Argentine Republic began. More than twenty young lives were cut short in this area alone. Not long after their arrival, the Jewish pioneers in the territory of Santa Fe paid their first blood tribute to the customs of the gaucho. The bloody and barbarous events narrated in this article play out with an abundance of detail, one by one, following the crime report. The author does not categorize the events but presents and documents them using the available literary testimonies, turning them into more interesting reading, to understand the gauchos’ methods in that period.
I should now add that the first of these killings occurred in 1889 and the last in 1906. The balance stands at twenty-two victims in seventeen years. It isn’t that strange: in the countryside of Santa Fe, homicide was routine, and outlaws didn’t hesitate to slit their victims’ throats before or after robbing them of their belongings.
In many cases the victims numbered among the colonists. They, unlike the rugged gauchos, were generally mundane, hardworking, bound to the slow cycles of agriculture. Moisés Ville remained the only colony of Russian Jews in Santa Fe province for more than twenty years, until that of Montefiore was founded in 1912. In other settlements the colonists were of Italian, French, German, and Swiss origin, Catholic or Protestant; the same nationalities that had populated the first and largest of all the colonies, that of Esperanza, since 1856.
Nevertheless, it was nothing new to anyone that immigrants could generate resentment among the locals after 1872, the year when some fifty gauchos attacked the town of Tandil under cries of “Long live the Argentine Confederation! Long live the faith! Death to gringos and masons!” Thirty-six foreign immigrants were massacred. The event was instigated by Tata Dios, a mysterious witch doctor who died not long afterward, in prison. That same year, José Hernández published The Gaucho Martín Fierro, in which that most famous of all gauchos sang: “I don’t know why the Government sends us / out here to the frontier, / these gringos that don’t even know / how to handle a horse.” In the background, political struggle fueled the words: Hernández rejected the liberal ideas of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who held the nation’s presidency at the time, and who viewed these immigrants as civilizing agents.
In an article written two decades later, Gabriel Carrasco—a politician, lawyer, and journalist from Rosario—reported an average of seventy-one murders per year in the province during the period of 1874–1892. Some inhabitants of Moisés Ville must be counted among those victims as well: the three Iegelnitzer brothers, killed out of vengeance; Wainer and Bersanker, murdered and robbed, like many others, out on the lonely road; Kantor, finished off mysteriously inside his own locked room; Gerchunoff, stabbed by an impulsive drunkard. And statistics from a later period must include the homicides of still others from Moisés Ville: Horovitz, who went out looking for his horse on the vast plain and never returned; the Waisman family, massacred in their own home for a couple of pesos; the beautiful young Aliksenitzer, assaulted by a policeman; Reitich, Tzifin . . .
Fifty years later, my great-grandfather gathered all of those killings together once more, yet this time not with the coldness of figures but the warmth of narrative. In 1966, the researcher José Liebermann wrote in his book Los judíos en la Argentina: “One devout author—Miguel Hacohen Sinay—wrote the history of the colonists murdered in Santa Fe, paying a deserved homage to all the pioneers of our rural epic who we honor here once more. May these words be the ‘Kaddish’ for their memory, with a fervent vote for the eternal remembrance of their names even if unmerciful time has erased them from fallen headstones in the lonely cemeteries of the colonies.”
*
In the early days of the 1900s, the French criminologist Edmond Locard, head of the police laboratory in Lyon, formulated his famous exchange principle: whenever an object makes contact with another, it transfers part of its material onto it. That is, a murderer leaves something of himself on the victim and takes something of theirs with him, and it is impossible for him to act, especially amid the tension of a crime, without leaving any traces. Investigators confirmed the exchange principle using fingerprints, footprints, and residue. Applied within these pages, Locard’s principle is cultural: the colonists and gauchos make exchanges in their conflicts, but also in their agreements. The encounter between two such uneven worlds knows nothing of bargaining or terms and conditions.
But time is part of the problem as well. The long century that has passed since the crimes took away the memories with it. The nineteenth-century dénouement is far away, and delving into its wilderness will require ingenuity and skill. I repeat: how can I investigate so distant a crime? And a still more complex question: why investigate it? If, becoming immersed in the abyss of time, one can extract something more than one or two names and the memory of a bloody knife, it must be owed to the notion that one is now heir to all of it.
The first people who missed their chance to record everything—and hand down a few useful clues to us—were the same Jews who arrived in Argentina as part of the migratory boom and shaped a community that would become one of the most fruitful of its kind in the world (comparable, in the interwar period, to those in Odessa, Moscow, and New York). That first group was the one to establish the basis for the creation of the new Judeo-Argentine element, but it all happened too quickly for anyone to realize it. Not even them. Many (all?) believed that the community was only passing through South America and would be expelled from there sooner or later as well, or, given a favorable wind, would emigrate to Israel following the precepts of the Zionist movement, as cemented by Theodor Herzl at the Basel Congress in 1897—eight years after the first Moisés Ville killing and one before the publication of my great-grandfather’s newspaper. And if the community would have to strike camp again someday, there didn’t seem to be much use in sitting down to record history.
In a very short time, Argentina had emerged as an attractive option for Jewish emigrants from Russia thanks to the agricultural colonization being promoted by the local government and the German philanthropist Maurice de Hirsch, founder of the Jewish Colonization Association. In fact, Theodor Herzl himself had to fight against the expectations generated by this exotic destination. Proposing that Zionism’s efforts should concentrate on the foundation of a political state in the Land of Israel, in 1896 Herzl wrote The Jewish State, a book in which one chapter is entitled “Palestine or Argentina?”
Here, Jewish print media have followed one after the other ever since my great-grandfather’s newspaper, Der Viderkol, arrived on the streets in 1898. Within that same year two more appeared, published weekly, and a decade later there was a daily paper in circulation. In 1914, the largest of them all, Di Ydische Zaitung (whose own front page used that spelling to transliterate its name) was founded, and 1918 saw the birth of its antagonist on the left, Di Presse. Today, much of the account of the homicides can be found scattered among all of those pages.
On the other hand, in his email Eliahu Toker had turned my attention to a simple and decisive question: “Can you read Yiddish?” The popular Jewish language had already fallen out of everyday use by the time I set myself to investigating the crimes of Moisés Ville. Which posed another problem: all of the colonists spoke Yiddish, and even the commentators on their adventures and misfortunes wrote in Yiddish. Without looking any further, the original version of “The First Fatal Victims in Moisés Ville” (according to the title on the website my father directed me to) was published in 1947 in Yiddish: its actual title is “Di ershte idishe korbones in Moisés Ville” (“The First Jewish Victims in Moisés Ville”). It appeared in the fourth issue of the series Argentiner IWO Shriftn (or Annals of the Argentine Jewish Scientific Institute), a collection of historical, sociological, and literary studies. It isn’t a brief article: it extends to twenty-seven pages. Taken in terms of its singularity, the article is more like a small book. For that matter, in the 1980s a Judeo-Argentine historical studies association republished it in the format of a sixty-page pamphlet.
At this moment I have the original Argentiner IWO Shriftn book on my desk: its cover is a dull sky blue and it is two hundred pages long. The Yiddish letters look, to my novice eyes, like ants in a line; the language is now, and always will be, a barrier in reuniting with my great-grandfather, with his textual legacy. These IWO yearbooks began being published in 1941, always in Yiddish, and continued with a few interruptions until the 1980s—and even into our own time: as I write these lines, I wonder at the contents of the yearbook issue 16, soon to be published online.
And, like the IWO yearbooks, almost all the documentary sources I might wish to turn to in order to follow the trail of the crimes of Moisés Ville have been written in Yiddish.
But no. I repeat: I can’t read Yiddish.
And I know very little about the language. I’ve heard only the sayings with which my grandmother seasons her gefilte fish and her borscht, her soup derived from a Russian recipe.
It was against this backdrop that, sometime after receiving that first message from my father, I set course for Moisés Ville.
