After the previous day, Nate and I and I still hadn´t made it to Casa de Libertad, which was
Simon Bolivar´s house here in Sucre. But given what we learned about the
Bolivian mentality, we weren´t so shocked when the person at the desk told us, ¨Yes, its open every day, and every morning, just not this morning. Come back this afternoon.¨ So we sighed and moved on to plan B - visiting the cemetary, which was supposed to be beautiful and of which the locals are incredibly proud. We got there, and bought several small bunches of flowers and decided to wander through and put them on any graves that looked neglected.
As we walked through this beautifull manicured walled yard crowded with huge well-kempt moseleums, we came across the un pruned grave of Gerda Goldberg, who died in the mid 1930s. We joked that she might be Jewish (though we knew that there were probably no Jews in Sucre) and laid down a bouquet. But as we wandered further we came across a wrought iron gate crowned with a Star of David. It was open and we wandered into a yard of no more than 100 square feet, filled with names like Edith Kassewitz, Dr. Arthur Hiller and Elaine Peiser. It could have been a graveyard in Chicago or Miami or Israel. All the dates of death were after 1945 and in the center of the space was a memorial to "Our murdered brothers, 1933-1945." It took us a few minutes to realize that we weren´t alone in the cemetary. There were also 2 Bolivian woman and a tiny elderly woman with pale freckled skin and short red hair.
The elderly woman´s name was Eva Kassewitz, her community was burried in that yard. She had to be upwards of eighty and she told us in Spanish that she had come to Sucre from Germany with her family when she was very young, just after the second world war. Theirs been a small tightly knit group of German Jews, and she was the last. It was now her responsiblity to take care of and maintain the graveyard. The two Bolivian woman were helping her do that. We told her we were Jewish and talked a little about our own families. Maybe it was that she alone was the guardian of the memory of her community, maybe it was the fact that she and I have essentially the same name, or maybe it was that her bottom teeth were crooked in the exact same way that my grandmother Billie´s were, but as we talked, my chest physically ached and a small persistant lump began to rise in my throat.
And then the last Jew of Sucre and kissed us both hard and made her way slowly out of the yard. If the Casa de Libertad had not been unexpectedly closed, we would have missed her entirely. After she had left, the Bolivian woman, Arimanda (?), pointed out the graves of Eva´s mother, father and daughter (the daughter only lived 2 days) and told us the spot on which we had talking with Eva was actually Eva´s own plot. At that point I lost it. Nate and I stood and said Kaddish for the community and for those who will soon have no one to say Kaddish for them. Belatedly, we realized it was Shabbas morning. We left our last bouquet of flowers and Amiranda (who took this picture) locked the gate behind us.
As we walked through this beautifull manicured walled yard crowded with huge well-kempt moseleums, we came across the un pruned grave of Gerda Goldberg, who died in the mid 1930s. We joked that she might be Jewish (though we knew that there were probably no Jews in Sucre) and laid down a bouquet. But as we wandered further we came across a wrought iron gate crowned with a Star of David. It was open and we wandered into a yard of no more than 100 square feet, filled with names like Edith Kassewitz, Dr. Arthur Hiller and Elaine Peiser. It could have been a graveyard in Chicago or Miami or Israel. All the dates of death were after 1945 and in the center of the space was a memorial to "Our murdered brothers, 1933-1945." It took us a few minutes to realize that we weren´t alone in the cemetary. There were also 2 Bolivian woman and a tiny elderly woman with pale freckled skin and short red hair.
The elderly woman´s name was Eva Kassewitz, her community was burried in that yard. She had to be upwards of eighty and she told us in Spanish that she had come to Sucre from Germany with her family when she was very young, just after the second world war. Theirs been a small tightly knit group of German Jews, and she was the last. It was now her responsiblity to take care of and maintain the graveyard. The two Bolivian woman were helping her do that. We told her we were Jewish and talked a little about our own families. Maybe it was that she alone was the guardian of the memory of her community, maybe it was the fact that she and I have essentially the same name, or maybe it was that her bottom teeth were crooked in the exact same way that my grandmother Billie´s were, but as we talked, my chest physically ached and a small persistant lump began to rise in my throat.
And then the last Jew of Sucre and kissed us both hard and made her way slowly out of the yard. If the Casa de Libertad had not been unexpectedly closed, we would have missed her entirely. After she had left, the Bolivian woman, Arimanda (?), pointed out the graves of Eva´s mother, father and daughter (the daughter only lived 2 days) and told us the spot on which we had talking with Eva was actually Eva´s own plot. At that point I lost it. Nate and I stood and said Kaddish for the community and for those who will soon have no one to say Kaddish for them. Belatedly, we realized it was Shabbas morning. We left our last bouquet of flowers and Amiranda (who took this picture) locked the gate behind us.
1 comment:
Incredible.
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