by Talia Carner
kurve—A vulgar word for a prostitute.
lechayim—To life. A salutation upon drinking alcohol.
maven—An expert.
mazel—Luck, fortune.
mendeveshkes—(Russian) Pubic lice.
meshuge—Crazy, insane.
metziah—Great find, a bargain.
mezuzah—Piece of Torah-inscribed parchment in a tiny decorative case that is hung on the side of a door.
mikveh—Jewish communal ritual bath.
milonga—(Spanish) Dance hall for tango.
minyan—Quorum of ten men required by Jewish law for a public prayer.
mitzvah—(1) Good deed; (2) Decreed religious rule.
muzhik—(Russian) Peasant.
nigunim—Wordless Jewish religious melodies, joyous or mournful.
ocho—(Spanish) Eight. In tango, marking the figure eight on the floor.
Once—(Spanish) A district in Buenos Aires, so named because of the no. 11 train station. Pronounced “OWN-say.”
palanca—(Spanish) In tango, levering a woman to help her jump.
peyes—Coiled sidelocks Orthodox Jewish men grow.
piastre—(Turkish) An Ottoman coin, one hundredth of a lira.
pikuach nefesh—The principle that the preservation of human life takes precedence over all the other commandments in Judaism.
pisherke—A nobody, an insignificant person (literally a boy who pees in his pants).
pitzik—Diminutive to describe a very small thing or person.
polaca(s)—(Polish) A derogatory name for prostitutes born in Eastern European countries.
pulke—Chicken drumstick, thigh.
punchkes—Jelly donuts (a Chanukah delicacy).
puta—(Spanish) A vulgar name for a prostitute.
quebrada—(Spanish) In tango, a sudden body twist.
reb—Mister. An honorific title, not a rabbinic one.
sarafan—(Russian) A long, trapezoidal traditional Russian jumper dress; a pinafore.
shaygetz—Non-Jewish man. (Also derogatory for any brute or scoundrel.)
Shema—A liturgical twice-daily prayer that expresses the Jewish faith in God.
sheyn meydele—Pretty girl.
shiksa—Non-Jewish female.
shiva—Seven days of mourning.
shtiebel—Makeshift prayer and meeting room.
shtille chuppah—“Silent” wedding, with only one witness, no rabbi.
shver—Father-in-law.
sofer—Scribe of religious documents.
tahara—Religious purification of the body in preparation for burial.
talis—Fringed prayer shawl worn by Orthodox Jewish men.
tangele—Yiddish tango in Argentina.
tchotchkes—Trinkets, knickknacks.
tijera—(Spanish) In tango, feet or legs scissoring.
tkhines—Women’s prayers in Yiddish.
tme’ah—Contaminated; feminine (masculine plural tme’yim; feminine plural tme’ot).
tranvias—(Spanish) tram lines.
tsures—Problems, troubles.
tzaddik—A righteous man, a man of the highest virtues (plural tsaddikim).
verst—(Russian) A distance measure—about two-thirds of a mile.
yahrzeit—Anniversary of a death.
yapa—(Spanish) A bonus item for a purchase.
yerba maté, maté—(Spanish) A tea-like beverage drunk with a straw out of a hollowed gourd. Pronounced “MAH-teh.”
yichus—Lineage, social status.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Talia Carner
Buenos Aires, 1996
About the Book
* * *
The Historical Background of The Third Daughter
Ezrat Nashim Poster
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Meet Talia Carner
TALIA CARNER is the former publisher of Savvy Woman magazine and a consultant to Fortune 500 companies. She is a board member of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the Jewish women’s research center at Brandeis University, as well as an honorary board member of several anti–domestic violence and child abuse intervention organizations. Her previous novels—Hotel Moscow, Jerusalem Maiden, China Doll, and Puppet Child—have been hailed for exposing society’s ills. Dozens of Carner’s award-winning essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in anthologies, literary reviews, and leading websites. She is a committed supporter of global human rights, having spearheaded projects centered on the subjects of female plight and participated as a panelist or delivered more than three hundred keynotes addresses at civic and cultural organizations.
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Buenos Aires, 1996
Ronald Carner
Following the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) building, which housed all Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires—a bombing that left eighty-five dead and hundreds injured—author Talia Carner participated in a demonstration in front of the Argentine Department of Justice, which had been assigned the task of investigating those responsible for the attack.
For twenty-three years, all investigations met a brick wall, culminating in the murder of the key prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, in 2015, hours before he was to present his findings to the Argentine National Congress. Finally, in December 2017, a federal judge indicted former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for colluding with Iran in the cover-up of Tehran’s role in the bombing.
With the destruction of the AMIA building, a huge archive of Jewish history in Argentina was destroyed. However, police and court records regarding Zwi Migdal can be found in other venues, such as the 1925–1926 files of Zacarias Zytnitzky, then president of Zwi Migdal, which had been stored in a private home.
Talia Carner thanks the authors and researchers who had viewed these Spanish- and Yiddish-language documents for distilling the information and thus helping her study this most shameful chapter in Jewish history.
About the Book
The Historical Background of The Third Daughter
This novel is set in Buenos Aires during a time when prostitution was legal in Argentina and the Varsovia (Warsaw) Society, which later changed its name to Zwi Migdal, operated as a mutual-aid union of Jewish pimps. The organization had a hierarchical structure and a strong internal code of ethics, and it spread throughout South America, with tentacles reaching India, China, South Africa, Germany, Poland, Turkey, and even New York City’s Lower East Side. It operated with impunity from the early 1870s until 1939, when Jews could no longer travel to Central and Eastern Europe.
Zwi Migdal’s method of kidnapping women for prostitution was as described in this novel: well-dressed men, speaking Yiddish and flaunting their success, would return to their native Eastern European countries on recruitment expeditions subsidized by the union. They offered marriages and jobs in the New World.
Four hundred years of the persecution of Jews in Europe through official anti-Semitic policies had severely restricted Jewish work occupations, land ownership, and permitted places of residence. Furthermore, these policies were coupled with repeated bloody pogroms in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. (In 1918–1919 alone more than 1,200 pogroms took place in Ukraine, and a pogrom was even reported in 1904 in Ireland.) The unrelenting savagery and slaughter to which the Jews were subjected made them vulnerable to the charm of the traffickers and their promises.
The victims, girls and women ranging in age from their early teens to early thirties, were repeatedly raped and beaten, caged, starved, and physically tortured. By the time their ocean voyage ended three to four weeks later, they were broken. There are no records of the suicide rate during this early stage of the “training.” But in Inhaúma cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, established by the local Jewish prostitutes, a large, separate section for suicide victims—as ordained by Jewish burial customs�
�tells the tragic story of many of these women once they were put to work. In the rest of the cemetery, the disproportionate number of tombstones of prostitutes who died in their twenties and thirties reveals the fate of the rest of them.
Zwi Migdal members regarded their “merchandise” in much the same way owners of black slaves in North America and the Caribbean did: they were less than human, with only economic value. However, unlike the enslavement of blacks by Caucasians, this was a Jew-on-Jew crime, with family members often preying on their own kin: not only were offers of a better life “in America” extended to nieces and sisters-in-law back home, but family men who had left their wives behind in Eastern Europe sometimes brought them to Argentina or Brazil in order to force them into prostitution. These men may have left Eastern Europe believing in the myth of incredible riches, but they were unskilled and did not speak the language and would inevitably fail to find jobs. The Warsaw Society embraced these men and convinced them to adopt the new entrepreneurial spirit in which the pimps viewed themselves as businessmen.
Pimping in Argentina was so culturally associated with Jews that the name for a pimp in Spanish, caftan, was borrowed from the word for the long black coat worn by Orthodox Jewish men. Similarly, polaca, the word for a prostitute, was adopted from the Yiddish name for Polish women.
Records of Jewish ownership of brothels from as early as the 1895 census in Buenos Aires show in one city block alone a concentration of twenty brothels housing two hundred women. Concurrently, an 1899 city registry of prostitutes in Buenos Aires reveals that 30 percent of them were Jewish. A record from 1913 shows more than 3,000 brothels in Buenos Aires (and 430 in Rio de Janeiro), with Jewish ownership disproportionally large—data corroborated by records of the Varsovia Society from that year, listing four hundred members (a roster that soon grew to more than five hundred). By the 1920s, Jewish brothels employed thirty thousand women, each generating on average 3,000 pesos a month in a country where the average monthly salary was under 100 pesos. At the turn of the twentieth century, Zwi Migdal’s profits were reported at $50 million a year.
The union’s activities comprised not only trafficking but also gaming houses and smuggling operations. Members pooled their resources to bribe government officials, policemen, and legislators, keeping many of them on a monthly payroll. When pimps were arrested, the mutual-aid society bribed judges and prosecutors or hired shrewd lawyers; either the charges were dropped or the cases won. The bribing at all levels included not only cash, entertainment, and expensive gifts, but also apartments and cars. Before long, Jews were seen as the source of the systemic corruption in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
WHO IN EUROPE knew what was going on? Victor Hugo wrote a letter in 1870 condemning “white slavery” from Europe to South America (although he didn’t single out Jews). Sholem Aleichem, the popular Yiddish storyteller whose character Tevye the Dairyman appears in his collection Railroad Stories, wrote “The Man from Buenos Aires” in 1909. From a Polish newspaper report in 1891 to a Polish novel in 1930—and numerous articles about local arrests of traffickers during the in-between years—the published information was unlikely to reach the Yiddish-speaking Jewish population in Poland. They were not only illiterate in the language of the country where they lived but also too dispersed in the countryside to have access to news. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles denounced trafficking as a crime, and in 1921, the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations) held an International Conference on White Slave Traffic. Two years later, the French journalist Albert Londres, who had ingratiated himself into the pimps’ networks in South America, published in France a lengthy exposé that detailed the horrific conditions in which the women lived, with those in La Boca serving up to seventy men a day. The exposé was translated into Spanish and English in 1928 and was reviewed in the New York Times. None of these languages were spoken by the Eastern European victims or their families. Several plays about pimps and prostitutes were produced in Spanish and Yiddish in South America earlier in the century—dramas depicting current events—but they were too late for the women already enslaved there.
Though the reports—and even the occasional letter that sneaked past the pimps’ vigilance—failed to reach families before they entrusted their daughters to the care of strangers or to alarm desperate widows seeking ways to feed their children, they finally spurred into action some benevolent organizations in the Jewish communities of Great Britain, Austria, and Germany. Women activists of Ezrat Nashim, the League of Jewish Women, and the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women roamed European train stations and seaports, on the lookout for naive girls traveling either alone or in the company of well-heeled men. These activists distributed flyers and attempted to offer advice and warnings before the would-be victims sailed away. Unfortunately, rarely was the advice heeded or even believed. The lure of the chance for a better life far from the starvation and hellish anti-Semitism of Europe was too strong.
ALARMED BY THESE developments and fearing a reprise of the horrendous anti-Semitism from which they’d fled, upstanding Jews in South America opposed this immorality that tainted them all. They shunned the pimps and prostitutes, blocked their access to synagogues, and refused to bury these tme’yim (sullied, impure) in their cemeteries. Local Jewish benevolent and charity organizations not only refused to extend services to prostitutes and their children, but also forbade any discussion of their cases at their meetings. However, the Jewish communities’ efforts to discredit the pimps, refuse their generous donations to the synagogues and Yiddish theaters, and engage with the authorities to limit Zwi Migdal’s influence were futile in Argentina, where a 1908 law allowed unlimited recruitment of prostitutes to brothels, further legalizing ownership of “white slaves.” At times, in both Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, the conflict between the two Jewish factions escalated into violent confrontations.
While ownership of prostitutes was legal, it was subject to restrictions such as thrice-weekly medical checkups, providing the women with clean living conditions, allowing them freedom of movement, and giving them the right to collect and keep their earnings—none which was met by the pimps. Therefore in some cases, subjugated women managed to lodge an official complaint. In 1896, eighteen-year-old Sophia Chamys, after five years of beatings and betrayals by her husband, Isaac Boorosky, spoke to a policeman in the Fourth Precinct in Rio de Janeiro. She had tried to complain once before, when her husband trafficked her in Buenos Aires, but got no traction with the police there. This time, the policeman wrote down her lengthy story. Boorosky was arrested—then promptly released. In 1910, in Buenos Aires, Rosa Schwartz, a.k.a. Lili of the Jewels, threatened to expose Zwi Migdal and was murdered. Ester K., Irena A., and Reise K. (full last names not recorded) were turned away from the police station when each independently attempted to file a complaint. In retaliation, their pimps sold them to brothels in the interior of the country. In Brazil, Klara Adam denounced her pimp, Sigmond Richter, with documents. Her testimony “evaporated” and, just like what happens to a woman in this novel, a “professor” penned a condemning letter to her family in Poland, shutting down her escape route back home.
WHAT FINALLY BROUGHT Zwi Migdal to its knees?
Early on, Argentina’s government condoned prostitution. It let it thrive in the rapidly expanding colonial settings, not only because of the massive amounts of money the state received from the brothels in the form of taxes (in 1920, 25 percent of the state’s money was generated by brothels), but also because, as a Catholic state, it believed that this necessary evil “protects good women, families and gender order.”* However, Zwi Migdal’s crimes and corruption motivated Julio Alsogaray, a federal police commissioner in Buenos Aires, to act. He had been working for a decade on his mission “to clean up the pollution of Argentina”† and had forged an alliance with Jews who condemned the pimps when, on New Year’s Eve 1929, into his office walked Raquel Liberman. The twenty-nine-year-old prostitute, the widowed mother of t
wo boys, had arrived from Poland seven years before. She had tried to get out of prostitution by investing her savings in an antique shop. Time and again, Zwi Migdal sent goons to ransack her shop, forcing her back into a brothel.
Liberman’s cooperation was what Alsogaray had been waiting for. In May 1930, after seventy years of Zwi Migdal operating with impunity, a ten-day police raid, accompanied by photographers and newspapermen, arrested three hundred pimps. Unsurprisingly, the union had been tipped off, and hundreds of Zwi Migdal members had fled the country—temporarily. Of the men arrested, only 112 went to trial, and of those, only 3 were sentenced to prison. The others were exiled, but they returned within three to five years. Unrelated to these events, in September 1930, a coup d’état brought a nationalist, fascist, and puritanical government to power in Argentina and the constitution was replaced, outlawing brothels and abolishing regulated prostitution (though allowing private exchanges of sex for pay).
Earlier, in 1913, the government of Brazil declared that it would not be a clearinghouse for the white slave trade. It deported 120 pimps, who transferred the running of their brothels to madams until they could return, which they did shortly afterward. However, in 1930, as in Argentina, a military coup d’état put the dictator Getúlio Vargas in power, and he aligned Brazil with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. He soon singled out the Jews as responsible for the country’s economic woes. Jews were barred from entering the country, and pimps and prostitutes were sent back to their now Nazi-occupied countries of origin, where they most likely perished.
Zwi Migdal was weakened but did not cease its operation throughout South America. It continued until 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland and traveling there was no longer possible.
DESPITE ALL THE available documentation about this trafficking syndicate, researchers have been reluctant to pinpoint the number of girls and women kidnapped or enslaved over seventy years. It is estimated, based upon the known figures of the peak numbers of brothels, the number of workers, and the recorded earnings generated, that between 140,000 and 220,000 women fell victim to the scheme, not counting the thousands who committed suicide before they began working and therefore did not contribute to the confirmed profits.
