RobertoB

In the little magazine “Seleções do Reader’s Digest”, American pocket literature very much in vogue in Brazil in the 1950s-1970s (translated and sold at “newspaper stands”), one of the fixed sections was always “my unforgettable type”, where readers sent texts alluding to the theme and some editor or copy desk at the publishing house gave it a good finish. I read Seleções a lot and, every now and then, I identify people worthy of being perpetuated on paper, for being folkloric, for how interesting they are, for some skill, for standing out in something, for overcoming something, for some brilliant moment, in short, for having marked me or for my having seen them mark someone. All this because I am going to speak of an unforgettable type, RobertoB (May 10, 1947).

We met in the first days of class at the UFRJ School of Engineering, in 1966. We were 4 classes of 100 and it happened that we ended up in the same class. He from Piauí, I from Rio. He was big (1.85 m?), expansive and “ugly” (me too, but at 1.75 it was less noticeable). But he had his charm (me too, but I was smaller). To complete it, after a few months of classes, he published a book of poems (“contradição”), printed on mimeograph, “half A4” size, which he went around selling to everyone and, at night, would sell in cinemas, bars and restaurants. Wherever there were gatherings of young people, there went Roberto selling his poems. He earned the nickname “poet” and today, more than 50 years after our graduation, few remember who Roberto or Broder was, but everyone remembers the “poet”.

No sooner had he graduated than he returned to Piauí. He thought it was his obligation toward the province where he was born and that had formed him. Soon he was deputy mayor of Parnaíba, his hometown, and had professional success as a businessman. I was lucky enough to be able to live with him a little more closely because, around 2002 to 2007, I managed to work in Piauí and for Piauí, thanks to a little hand that my colleague gave me and that I will tell in another chronicle, because it is also a story worthy of record.

In those 5 years of work in Piauí, I went some 6 to 8 times to Therezina (and Roberto came some 5 times to Rio), which ended up allowing us to share many bottles of cachaça and many hours of conversation. Of the stories I heard, I highlight this one:

Around the years 1925 to 1935, Europe was going through serious crises, with hunger and exodus to the Americas. Jews and Spaniards, especially the young, could not even manage to leave the countries where they lived. The Spaniards because the civil war was looming and both factions wanted soldiers, that is, passport, no way. The Jews because they were in a legal-institutional limbo, with many European States, instigated by speeches of demagogic hatred, considering themselves exempt from obligations toward the “Jewish nation” and many countries in the Americas making visas difficult for them.

Conclusion, everything favored collusions so that people would let themselves be deceived or deluded: hunger, the lack of alternatives, the persecutions. The New World was a dream and a real possibility. Nirvana! People were easily co-opted into coming to work in South America. Argentina was a paradise, Buenos Aires one of the 5 best cities in the world at the time, Uruguay was the Switzerland of the southern hemisphere (because of the banks with numbered accounts). Many people did well and the news came back to the places they had left. Mainly the news of those who did well, or only of those who did well, but who cared about the others?

Families would even take on loans to pay for the tickets or would allow recruiting agents to take them, with or without their children, or only the sons/daughters, already leaving with debts to be paid, who knows how. They entered the holds of the ships like cattle; it was a new slavery, white. And there is no ethnic or national group that does not have good people and bad people.

It was no different with European Jews. Families ended up, even for lack of option, entrusting daughters and sons to swindlers and rogues, men and women, because swindlers cannot have the face of swindlers, so they are usually charming people. In this field, South America filled up with white slaves, men and women. In Rio de Janeiro, “polaca” even became a synonym for prostitute. Many were Jewish; they even had to make their own cemetery because the Jewish community would not receive them in its cemeteries (it is the Israelite Cemetery of Inhaúma, or read the book Ciclo das Águas by Moacyr Scliar and others cited there).

One “case” went like this: the family agreed that three daughters would come to work in Argentina as long as they were accompanied by their brother, then about 18 years old. Those ships, which on the way out carried carne de sol, salted and smoked meat, wheat, in short, food, imagine the smell on the way back, with the holds full of people, were coming along and almost all made a little stop in Brazil (Recife, Salvador, Rio, Santos) to refuel and stretch their legs. There, in Recife, the “tour guide”, also Jewish, got off with the 18-year-old boy and found a way to leave him on land and continue only with the sisters.

The boy, who only spoke Polish, went through a “hard time”, until he ended up seeing a Star of David in a store and was helped by some Jewish man from Pernambuco, who got him work as an assistant to a traveling salesman. In five years the young man had already mastered the trade and, so as not to compete with his first boss, went to occupy a “territory” farther ahead, up in Piauí. He ended up settling in Parnaíba. Much later, through letters, he learned that his sisters had been prostituted in Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

This traveling salesman, named Jacob (Jacob Krim VelBroder), married a local woman (Dona Morena) and had children, one of them my friend Roberto, who, with his voice choked and tears in his eyes, told me this story, or more or less this one, also heard with emotion and tears in my eyes (my father, Spanish, arrived in Brazil at the same time, also without documents, therefore both were illegal!).

Great Roberto, my colleague and my friend, died in 2021 from COVID-19, which had already frustrated our meeting scheduled for April 2020 in Porto, Portugal, to where both of us and some 18 more colleagues already had tickets bought, aiming to celebrate 50 years since graduation. I felt I could not fail to record this epic, as a tribute to Roberto, to his father and to his aunts, who are in heaven. How many stories like these are not told or recorded for lack of opportunity, out of modesty, out of prejudice (shame), or for whatever reason. I think it helps improve the world to know the difficulties our ancestors went through. All families have similar stories, which reach us only in fragments, but which deserve to be recorded because they ennoble.

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the Institute of Engineering # written in May 2023, 6,500 characters

with help from Tarsila Broder, via www.RobertoBroder.com