By SAMUEL KILSZTAJN*

An exile never returns to his homeland. In my case, even if I wanted to, I could never return, because my homeland was extinguished, it no longer exists.

When I was in Shanghai in 1987, the Chinese asked 你從哪裡來吗, where are you from? I answered that I was from Brazil. Then they said that I didn't look Brazilian. I explained that my parents were Polish; and they asked if I was born in Brazil or Poland, to which I answered that I was born in Palestine. Already a little confused, the Chinese asked where I lived, in Brazil, Poland or Palestine; and I, already a little embarrassed, answered that I was living in the United States.

Yiddishland

You may have never heard of Yiddishland, only Deutschland, Disneyland, England, Finland, Greekland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Nederland, Russland, Scotland and Switzerland. But don't worry, Yiddishland no longer exists, it was extinguished in the Second World War.

Yiddishland was the ancient home of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe, who by the 16th century constituted the largest community and center of Jewish culture in the world. This stateless, generalless people, who spoke Yiddish and were armed with pens, developed a humanist, internationalist and pacifist culture, which can be seen in their vast and fruitful literature, both religious and secular. There were certainly Jews who did not align themselves with the dominant humanist culture, but they were marginalized.

Most of the Jews who lived in Yiddishland were exterminated in the Holocaust, and the survivors were driven out and exiled from their homeland. Nine out of ten of my relatives were exterminated, led to the slaughter like sheep to the slaughterhouse. The Nazis considered the Jews to be vermin, subhuman, passive, weak, without honor, who did not fight, did not defend themselves, who accepted being attacked without showing the slightest resistance; in short, they were cowards.

Jean-Paul Sartre, however, wrote that the Jews' meekness in the face of injustice and violence was the true mark of their greatness. Yet the Nazis managed to produce Jews. supporters, terrorists who actively participated in the resistance, including the suicidal Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

During World War II, most Jews were against the supporters, believed that resistance would encourage an escalation of violence, and the Nazi Germans did in fact attack the community in retaliation for the actions of the terrorists, which was called collective responsibility. Resistance movements in the Ghettos generally only erupted during the last deportations…

In the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto in September 1943, the United Partisan Organization (FPO), of which the Holocaust survivors Avrom Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski were members, deemed it appropriate to abandon the ghetto to join the supporters of the forest, because he considered that, in the event of an armed confrontation with the Nazi Germans, the Jewish population of the ghetto would fight against the FPO.

My father survived the Nazi concentration camps and my mother was deported to Siberia. Armed with an enormous strength, they did not fight back and submitted to abuses, violence, humiliation and, despite the humiliation they suffered, they still became true activists for life. I was born in exile, in Palestine, then we went to Germany, where we were arrested as illegal immigrants and, finally, fate anchored us in the Port of Santos, without ever having heard of a country with the same name of Brazil.

An exile never returns to his homeland, because they are no longer the same, neither the exile nor his homeland. In my case, literally, even if I wanted to, I could never return, I am an exile for eternity, because Yiddishland has been extinguished, it no longer exists.

Brazil land

We were dazzled by Brazil. For those who come from the Old World, the joy of Brazilians is contagious. Everyone is kind, communicative and friendly. The people welcomed us with open arms, despite the restrictions imposed by Secret Circular 1127 of 1937 on the entry of Jews into the country, which was in force until practically 1953.

In line with the racial ideology that dominated the entire world in the first half of the 20th century, the Brazilian elites, in their immigration policy, had as their principle the whitening of the country, in order to “improve the race”, without showing any shame regarding the population of African origin, who had been forcibly immigrated from the 16th century until the mid-19th century. According to racial ideology, white was synonymous with Aryan and, therefore, Jews, no matter how pale they were, could never be considered white. Besides, everyone knew that Jews were a bunch of socialists.

Yes, I was a political prisoner during the dictatorship and, although I was acquitted by the Military Court, my request for naturalization was denied. I remained stateless for many years, even after the 1979 amnesty, because naturalization is a concession from the government, and not a right of the foreigner.

The military dictatorship persecuted, arrested and exterminated all those who opposed its abuses. “Brazil, love it or leave it”, love the military who seized power in a coup d'état or vacate the country. A generation of Brazilian children was banished from their homeland. The Editor's Letter gathered the memories of 46 Brazilian children in exile.

Exiled from Yiddishland and born in exile, I identify with all expatriates, extraterrestrials, and citizens of the world. I have always felt strong empathy with the native peoples of this land that welcomed my family and with the population of African origin that remains segregated to this day. In my activism for racial quotas in universities, I used to say that my father had been a slave and, only after the incredulous looks of my comrades, did I add that he had been a slave of the Third Reich.

With internationalization of productive capital that followed the Second World War, the swear, the invaders, who until then had occupied only the country's coast, decided to transfer their capital from the seaside to the Central Plateau, in order to take possession of the Center-West and the Amazon Basin. The genocide of the native peoples, which had begun in the 16th century, then gained new impetus with the occupation of lands that had previously been uncoveted.

What for the swear was to occupy an empty space with a futuristic open-air museum, for the indigenous people it was the great assault on their lands in the second half of the 20th century, which paved the way for the Trans-Amazonian of the Military Dictatorship and to the nightmare that currently bleeds alive in the midst of greed that threatens the Amazon.

Palestine

The Palestinian people were displaced from their homes, villages and cities, expelled from their lands, to make way for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, secured by the member countries of the United Nations, who refused to absorb them and decided to settle them in the lands of the Levant, despite the protests of the native population that had lived for centuries between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Jaffa, my hometown, had been designated as an Arab enclave within the Jewish state even according to the despotic Partition Plan for Palestine. But in order to prevent the formation of the enclave, even before the creation of Israel on May 14, 1948, the terrorist organizations Irgum and Haganah rushed to throw 45 Arabs from Jaffa into the sea, which they anchored in Lebanon.

Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel, who directed the award-winning documentary A world that is not ours [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPKoyTYhr5A], portrays the misery to which the native population of Palestine was reduced by the violence of the Zionists. Fleifel accompanied the refugee Abu Eyad from the age of 10, in the Ain el-Helweh camp, in Lebanon.

In 2012 he produced the short film Xenos, with image of Abu in Greece. In 2020 Fleifel produced 3 logic outputs, in which Abu Eyad says that displaced Palestinians can choose to become involved in the world of drugs, join armed militias or seek exile.

What is the relationship between the dominant culture of Yiddish Jews and the racist, xenophobic and militaristic culture of the State of Israel, which occupied and continues to expel Palestinians from their homeland, and has the support of most Jews in the diaspora? Watch the documentary The Settlers by Louis Theroux. Even the movement's activists Shalom Arshav (Peace Now), who denounce the settlements, mourn the victims while they continue to kill Palestinians. Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona are committed to protecting humanistic Judaism from the clutches of Zionism.

My mother tongue is the dying Yiddish, but as Isaac Bashevis Singer said when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, “a mother is never really dead.” True to my cultural heritage, I have categorically abandoned Judaism, despite the warnings of my friends, both Jewish and non-Jewish, that I will not be spared by the anti-Semites, nor accepted among the Palestinians, damn it. But that is not my problem, it is theirs.

Only the country that is in my soul is mine, the one I enter without a passport, said Marc Chagall.

Do Cariri we lost ourselves in the world, with hope ahead, carrying our dead, so that no one gets left behind.

*Samuel Kilsztajn is a full professor of political economy at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of Yiddish. [https://amzn.to/4iPxwEF]

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE