Oy, Caramba! by Ilan Stavans

Author:Ilan Stavans [Stavans, Ilan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2016-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Living with someone probably means losing part of your own identity. Living with someone contaminates; my father alters my mother’s childhood and she loses her patience listening to some accounts of my father’s childhood. Once we had all gone to the cemetery on the first anniversary of my uncle’s death and Lucia recalled the attempted pogrom that my father had experienced. So I asked him to tell me what had happened to him:

“I was working in the Jewish Charity Association at 21 Gante Street, on the corner of Venustiano Carranza, which used to be called Capuchinas, and your mother had her shop called Lisette on Sixteenth September Street, number 29, selling ladies’ bags and gloves. I came out of the charity place and there was a big meeting under way (it was in January 1939). I was on my way to the shop when I met a young man called Salas. He knew who I was. He’d been a student in Germany and spoke very good German. He came toward me with two other lads and he yelled ‘Death to the Jews. Jews out of Mexico!’ and I had a willow stick with me, and I broke it over his head and it split into three. He grabbed it out of my hand and tried to push me in front of a tram, but I held onto a lamppost and wouldn’t let go. I don’t know how I managed to break free and run to the shop, which was shut, though the steel door still wasn’t down.

“The police came right away. I don’t remember how many there were. There could have been fifty or a hundred, and Siqueiros’s brother; if he hadn’t been there I’d have been killed. He said to me: ‘They’ll have to get me before they get you, Jacobo,’ and he stretched both arms out wide. He was a giant of a man. They had a truck outside full of stones and they were throwing them at the shop and they smashed the shop window and took everything they could get. I don’t know how I got out of there.”

“Where was Mother?”

“She’d gotten out with the assistant. There were stones flying all over the place. I didn’t know where to hide, because everywhere I went there were more stones. I thought I’d never get out of there. I thought I was done for. There was nothing I could do. There were so many people outside and so many stones and I was covered in blood. There was a man called Osorio outside, a Cuban whom I knew quite well, and he stood up on a platform and made a Hitler-type speech, and even though he knew me, he spoke against me and against Jews in general. When they ran out of stones, they went to San Juan de Letran, where your Uncle Mendel had his drinks stand, and they came back with great chunks of ice, which they started throwing at me, and a massive lump of ice hit me on the head and that was a sign from God, because the ice saved me.

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