Nazis and Peronists organize a blind date

I tell a love story but it is really a political story;

It happened more than 70 years ago but it is a current story.

A woman from Buenos Aires and a Ukrainian, both Jews, married in the United States in 1948. Those responsible for their meeting were Hitler and Perón.

The happy lovers, Yakov and Rosa, met thanks to the fact that Germans and Argentines allowed their governments to be led by unscrupulous people with apathy and unconsciousness.

Rosa Lida (1910-1962) was a student of Spanish literature and its classical sources, a wise medievalist, with works that we continue to read in the faculties of philology and history.

In my opinion, she was the scholar who has written the most interesting footnotes, with a knowledge built on data that we miss today, when sometimes the academic world makes the inconsistent triumph of fried air.

For his part, Yakov Malkiel (1914-1998) was a great linguist, concerned above all with the roots of words.

His work was very analytical: he broke down a word as if on an operating table and explored its life history, extracting the genes from each of the parts that add up to form voices.

The union of both intelligences in a common life is one of those academic marriages that sometimes occur in the history of science.

But delving into the personal biography of each of them until the wedding occurs is more a lesson in politics than a love preamble.

Malkiel was born in kyiv at a time when the current Ukrainian capital was under Russian rule.

Because of the Russian civil war, his family emigrated to Germany and Malkiel studied there at the University of Berlin;

he soon saw the anti-Jewish hatred coming and wisely left for the United States: he was saved.

For her part, Lida came from a family that had come to Argentina migrating from the Austro-Hungarian empire, studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and joined the Institute of Philology of Buenos Aires, a flagship of Argentine intellectual solidity that began to be torpedoed in the mid-1940s by the Peronist government.

In a climate of concern, she sticks her head out looking for a professional destiny outside of herself and accepts a scholarship to go to the United States: she was saved.

Sometimes politics pushes citizens from behind, throws them to a fencing station and each one ends up negotiating with their new scenario.

I speak of two characters at the height of the exceptional romance that was then in Europe and America, who lived in an intellectual environment completely uneven compared to the miserable political climate that surrounded them.

Both began by exchanging publications and professional questions by letter;

his correspondence, published a few years ago by Cliff under the title

, ended up being a love epistolary, courting.

After months of love by letter, they meet in person for the first time in the United States, marry and practice at the University of Berkeley.

This, by the way, has its shield in blue and gold, colors that, seen from afar, are very similar to those of the flag of the unfortunate Ukraine.

More information

María Rosa Lida or the lights of philology

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