Carnaval sem Cachaça?

I visit Brazil only infrequently these days but, when I've done so it’s usually the border town of Foz do Iguaçu because it’s been part of my beat when writing guidebooks about Argentina. After foreigners see the Argentine side of the famous falls, they almost always cross the Tancredo Neves bridge to see them from the Brazilian side.

The Brazilian side of the Cataratas do Iguaçu (Iguazú Falls)

I once took an intensive summer course in Portuguese—the equivalent of a full year at university level—but it’s only my fourth-best language after English, Spanish and German. Brazilians have been remarkably patient when I lapse into Spanish cognates, though I don’t always understand their responses.

In Buenos Aires, Carnaval is a decentralized neighborhood phenomenon.

Montevideo's Museo del Carnaval depicts the origins of Uruguay's tradition.

I’ve traveled a bit in northern Brazil—Porto Velho, Manaus, Salvador (Bahia) and Belém—but know the megacities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro only through their airports. That means I’ve missed the signature event of Brazilian Carnaval, though I’ve seen its counterpart in Argentina (where it’s experienced a neighborhood-oriented revival) and Uruguay (where it’s seriously under-appreciated by foreigners).

Moqueca de peixe is a flavorful fish dish.

I enjoy Brazilian food—particularly moqueca de peixe—and really appreciate the refreshing cachaça-based cocktail known as the caipirinha, made of cane liquor, lime and sugar. Brazilians themselves, though, probably consume far larger amounts of beer, especially during Carnaval.

Care for a caipirinha, Mr Mayor?

That is, unless Rio mayor Marcelo Crivella has his way. Somehow, Brazil’s liveliest party town elected this evangelical bishop to its highest office in 2017, and he has just asked that cariocas (Rio residents) refrain from drinking alcohol during Carnaval celebrations. He also embraces creationism, and objects to homosexuality and abortion rights.

If Mayor Crivella truly trusts in what he preaches, though, perhaps he could just pray that his constituents refrain from drinking during the festivities. Then again, his for-profit Universal Church of the Kingdom of God may well take a cut from alcohol sales.

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Operation Finale - a Film Review

In my youth, it was a stereotype that South America—especially Argentina—was crawling with Nazis in the aftermath of World War II. That wasn’t entirely false, given the presence of monsters like Josef Mengele in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil—but it was also self-serving when the United States itself allowed many Nazis and their collaborators into North America after the war.

For South America, the best account of this history may be Uki Goñi’s The Real Odessa, which details the manner in which the government of Juan Domingo Perón—colluding with the Vatican in so-called “ratlines”—admitted escapees from European justice immediately after the war. If many such stories are prone to exaggeration and even fabrication—a cottage industry of “Hitler in Argentina” publishing still exists—there’s concrete truth in the tales of individuals such as Mengele, Erich Priebke, and especially Adolf Eichmann.

This selection of titles at the 2016 Buenos Aires book fair suggests the worst of "Nazis in Argentina"  publishing.

Eichmann, of course, made international headlines when Israel tried, convicted and executed him for crimes against humanity in the early 1960s. His story has recently reached the big screen in director Chris Weitz’s Operation Finale, about the Nazi functionary’s capture and abduction by Israeli agents in the “Zona Norte” sector of Buenos Aires suburbs. It’s also available for streaming, for a charge (below is a trailer; I watched on iTunes).

As an Obersturmbahnführer (Lieutenant colonel) during the war, Eichmann organized Jewish deportations to various death camps but, after the war, he evaded capture and eventually reached Argentina with false documents. There, living under the pseudonym “Ricardo Klement” in the northwestern suburb of San Fernando, he kept a low profile.

Played by Ben Kingsley, Eichmann is a creature of habit and, after the Israelis stake out his home and observe his commuting routine—taking the same bus at the same time every day—they manage to spirit him away to an apparently nearby safe house (Weitz filmed in the western suburb of Hurlingham, but I’ve no idea where the actual house was).

First denying his identity, Eichmann presents himself as a simple bookkeeper and family man before eventually, under interrogation, admitting who he is. Even then, he refuses to sign an Israeli-drafted agreement to stand trial in Israel, spurring arguments among his captors about forcing him to do so. Eventually, though, Israeli agent Peter Malkin (portrayed by the Guatemalan-American actor Oscar Isaac) persuades Eichmann to sign, with a promise that he will again be able to see his wife and family.

It’s worth stressing here that, for all the espionage and skullduggery, this is not an action thriller, but rather a psychological drama. After signing, Eichmann delivers a snarling justification of his role in the Holocaust, but there remains the task of spiriting him aboard an El Al jet to return to Israel—a task which, despite some apparent over-dramatization here, goes off without a hitch.

The following year Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem and, after he exhausted his appeals, the Israelis executed him by hanging in mid-1962. Before his execution, though, the Israelis honored Eichmann’s request to see his wife.

Argentina's Heroic Forger

Late last year, I briefly noted the publication of Sarah Kaminsky’s Adolfo Kaminsky, A Forger’s Life, the tale of her father’s service in the French Resistance of World War II. That interested me, partly because Kaminsky is an Argentine, and partly because the Resistance provided forged identification that helped my 94-year-old uncle, who lives in Los Angeles, escape the Nazis after being shot down over France in November of 1943. His own account of traveling across France and into Switzerland is positively cinematic.

The English and Spanish-language versions of Kaminsky's story

I received a copy of Kaminsky’s book from the US publisher but, on my recent trip to Buenos Aires, I purchased a copy of the Spanish-language edition Adolfo Kaminsky El Falsificador, primarily because it includes a prologue about Kaminsky’s boyhood in the Argentine capital. Though he spent only five years there before his parents returned to Europe, he offers surprisingly vivid memories of a free-range boyhood in an immigrant neighborhood that sounds like the edge of Barrio Norte (he mentions living on Calle Ecuador, apparently near Avenida Córdoba, but is not more specific than that). 

The intersection of Ecuador and Paraguay is roughly where the Kaminskys lived in Buenos Aires.

Kaminsky’s mother, born in Tbilisi, married his Russian-born father in Paris during World War I. Given the disorder in Europe, heightened by the Bolshevik Revolution, the family had moved to Buenos Aires, where Adolfo was born in 1925. Interestingly, when the family returned to France, what struck him was the contrast with Buenos Aires, the noise from the cars, trams and trucks that crowded Parisian streets—“It was so different from Calle Ecuador!” In the ensuing century, Buenos Aires has more than caught up.

The return to Europe didn’t go as expected because the French would not grant the family immediate residence, and they spent two years in Turkey waiting for permission to return. The lack of papers, Kaminsky implies, may have inspired his interest in falsifying documents: “Nothing destined me to become a forger but, however, those papers that my family needed when I was a child were going to govern my life.”

Only 14 when World War II broke out, Kaminsky (and his Jewish family) survived the earliest years of the German occupation because of their nationality—Argentina remained a neutral country until nearly the end of the conflict. Adolfo, meanwhile, had acquired skills in printing, dyeing and photography that allowed him to produce passports and other papers that saved as many as 3,000 Jews from the Nazis.

Eventually, the Kaminskys themselves had to scatter and hide—with the help of Adolfo’s bogus documents—but after the liberation of Paris he provided Allied forces with new forgeries that helped them infiltrate German lines. After the war, he assisted European Jews in reaching Palestine—though he deplored Zionism—and then helped figures in the Algerian independence movement move between North Africa and Europe. He prided himself in never charging for his services—everything was pro bono for causes that he either supported or saw as a better alternative to the status quo.

Kaminsky did his last forgery in 1971 and lived in Algeria for a decade, marrying a Tuareg woman, before finally returning to France in the early 1990s. His daughter’s persistent inquiry into her father’s murky history eventually resulted in this book, presented as a memoir from a hero who, accustomed to staying in the background, refrained from boastfulness.

Is Francis a Freudian? The Pope and His Shrink

Earlier this month, the world’s most prominent religious figure made international headlines when Pope Francis acknowledged that, in his early forties, he had regularly visited a Freudian psychoanalyst for several months. Now 80, the Pontiff wouldn’t reveal the reason for what, statistically at least, would appear to be a midlife crisis, but his position and celebrity made this a high-profile story.

The Facultad de Medicina at the Universidad de Buenos Aires is a hotbed of Freudianism.

For many, there’s still a stigma associated with psychoanalysis, and the Catholic Church was slow to accept the idea. Still, while New Yorkers may stereotypically chatter about their therapists, the porteños of Buenos Aires can match or surpass them—in the Argentine capital, psychoanalysis and other therapies are not for the upper and upper-middle classes alone. Once, during registration time at the Universidad de Buenos Aires medical school, I saw a flurry of flyers offering psychoanalysis and psychotherapy with UBA professionals—the first session free—for individuals, couples, and groups. Subte handouts may declare that “Asking for help is the start of solving the problem” and tempt commuters with “unlimited sessions.”

Francis had his therapy during the dictatorship of the “Proceso” but, at the turn of the century, the therapy obsession was at least partly a function of economic crisis, and even the former corralito banking restrictions have been interpreted in this context. In an early 2002 interview with National Public Radio’s Martin Kaste, a Freudian psychiatrist argued that “Money has a certain symbolic equivalence to the penis. People put their money in the bank, but at the moment they want to withdraw it they lose their money, so this produces a castration anxiety.”

"Tango therapy" may be an option - Francis was a dancer in his youth.

Another claimed that “sexual desire has also been caught in the corralito—men worry about lack of desire and premature ejaculation, and women are unable to have orgasms.” The 2002 Festival de Tango even included a session on Tango de Autoayuda (Self-Help Tango). Meanwhile, angry real-estate brokers picketed the residence of caretaker President Eduardo Duhalde—himself a former realtor—but not necessarily in hope of any relief for a frozen real-estate market. Rather, proclaimed one protestor, “This turned into our therapy, a place to set our anguish free.”

Clients purchase their meds at Farmacia Villa Freud.

Therapy, though, is not just a function of recent times; it began with the 1930s arrival of Jewish refugees from Europe. Historian Mariano Ben Plotkin has chronicled this tale in Freud in the Pampas: the Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2001). Many of Buenos Aires’s thousands of shrinks practice in Palermo’s so-called Villa Freud, where their clients can top off their meds at the Farmacia Villa Freud. One online magazine specializes in listings for professional office rentals, and even acting classes are often exercises in therapy.

In 2002, the Centro Cultural Borges paid Freud a month-long homage.

Institutions add to the therapeutic ambience. The Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina once organized a month-long exhibition on “Psychoanalysis, Culture and Crisis” at the Centro Cultural Borges. The Museo de Psicología Experimental Horacio Piñeiro recounts the experimental efforts of an early-20th-century pioneer. Villa Freud’s everyday literary locus is Librería Paidós, an inconspicuous bookstore in a small shopping gallery, but the annual Feria del Libro always shows the latest in psychoanalytic scholarship.

Amateur and professional Freudians crowd the display at Buenos Aires's 2016 book fair.

In Argentine cinema, therapy is no less common than in Woody Allen films—in Rodolfo Durán’s 2007 comedy Terapias Alternativas (Alternative Therapies), an apathetic loner psychoanalyst winds up unexpectedly caring for his own son by a brief relationship and simultaneously sharing accommodations with a suicidal patient. Woody himself is a great favorite, for that matter; he once even suggested he might film in Buenos Aires.

"Help Me, Dr. Freud!" - a stage play in downtown Buenos Aires.

Not that long ago, a hit play on Avenida Corrientes went by the title Therapy…If Only Freud Could See This, but such matters are not always humorous. In the summer of 2010, after junior lightweight boxer Rodrigo “The Hyena” Barrios killed a pregnant woman in a Mar del Plata hit-and-run, he took several hours to surrender to police, apparently to avoid alcohol and drug tests. In the ensuing days, he managed to remain free on bail as he underwent “psychological testing,” but he is currently in prison.

A year ago in May, the Argentine Psychoanalytic Congress held its annual meetings in Recoleta.

Where the Pope fits into this context is open to speculation. Might it be that, in his midlife crisis, he harbored doubts about the existence of a supernatural being for which there is no empirical evidence? Freud, after all, dismissed theistic beliefs as a collective neurosis.

Vikings, from Buenos Aires to Berkeley

In late 2014, I traveled crosstown from our Palermo apartment to San Telmo’s Svenska Kyrkan (pictured above), where the Scandinavian communities of Buenos Aires—Swedes, Norwegians and Finns—were holding their annual Xmas festival. I’m not religious—to say the least—but I was still curious about this gathering of the Vikings in what, on the face of it, is an improbable urban environment.

San Telmo's Dansk Kirke is Buenos Aires's Danish church.

To the best of my memory, the Danes were absent from the event, though there’s a separate Danish church just a few blocks away and lunches at Retiro’s Club Danés are a delight. In the Buenos Aires province beach resort of Necochea, it’s common to see cars with Argentine plates and “DK” decals, but here I recall nothing.

Flags of Finland, Norway and Sweden hung from the ceiling at the Svenska Kyrkan.

All throughout the building and the grounds there were Scandinavian delicacies, along with souvenir items—some of them brought by the countries’ respective embassies because, at that time, arcane import restrictions effectively kept private parties from acquiring them. Most of the baked goods were local, but almost everything produced overseas had to enter by extra-official channels.

Many of the manufactured foodstuffs arrived through embassy intercession.

That’s not the case in Berkeley, adjacent to my hometown of Oakland, where the Nordic House specialty shop imports all sorts of Scandinavian food items and even carries a selection of Nordic noir novels (mainly in English) and travel guidebooks. On Saturday, though, Nordic House hosted my first-ever kräftskiva, at which Swedes and other Scandinavians devour plates of boiled crayfish and slug down shots of akvavit, with a shout of “Skål!” at the end of boisterous drinking songs.

Berkeley's Nordic House carries a diversity of Scandinavian supplies.

A plate of crayfish and potatoes at Nordic House's kräftskiva

In honesty, I didn’t find the crayfish especially appetizing (it doesn’t help that they make a messy meal), though almost everyone else devoured as much as they could grab. Nor did the various herrings and other specialties thrill me—I much preferred the roast moose, scalloped potatoes (identical to what my Swedish-American mother used to make) and other side dishes that my Swedish cousins served us in rural Värmland. Still, my only real complaint about Nordic House is that they’ve run out of Hungry Troll lefse (my Norwegian grandmother used to make this), but I’m told it’ll be back next month.

Lunch in Värmland. Note the scalloped potatoes (upper left) and the roast moose  (upper center-right)