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75 CHAPTER FIVE From Stolen Textiles to Off-Track Betting Urban Crime and Disorder Samuel Susman, Nisen Gerovich, and Menach Aisemberg did not expect to get caught by the police when they went to a café on November 18, 1914. They had just carried out three successful robberies in downtown Buenos Aires and had an appointment to try and sell some of their stolen textiles. The three men headed to a café in the heart of the Once neighborhood. Perhaps they drank tea or glanced at the newspaper, but the main reason they were there was to meet peddler Kiba Bochin. Bochin may not have known that the textiles were stolen, but he probably suspected that the deal was not entirely legitimate when he found out the fabrics were in the men’s rooms a few blocks away. In the end, the meeting was a mistake. Cafés on busy Corrientes Street were not very private, and before they could finish, the police interrupted the transaction and carted the men off to jail.1 Through interactions created by crime and disorder, Jews and other residents of the city encountered each other as victims, perpetrators, and bystanders , gaining new knowledge of other residents of the city and helping forge the new porteño national identity.2 Most shared a common interest in resolving the crime or accident, bringing in the police, and allowing the state to intervene. My sources show that Jews interacted with people from different ethnic backgrounds in a variety of ways, learned to navigate the state through their contact with the police, and took their grievances to police reporters at the national chapter five 76 newspapers when the response of the police was insufficient. Like other porte- ños, Jews lived and worked in and traveled through the many city neighborhoods and had a variety of types of relationships, both business and personal, with Jews and non-Jews. My sources on crime and disorder reveal these forces clearly, showing the networks of people in all parts of the city whose lives were touched by various crimes and accidents, as both victims and perpetrators.3 Susman, Gerovich, and Aisemberg were Jewish and chose other Jews as their coconspirators and a location in their own neighborhood (and that of many other Jews) to attempt to sell their goods. Yet they were not operating in an environment comprising only other Jews. The small section in the police news in La Prensa about the three thieves included more information: the police were later able to capture the other two members of the gang, Bernardo and Israel Libidinsky, who were waiting with the stolen goods at the apartment the men had rented a few blocks away from the café where they were caught. In addition, the police reporter noted that Susman, Gerovich, and Aisemberg had stolen from three stores owned by men with Italian names: Dino Delle Nogara, Carazo Calvo, and Antonio Cairoli, all of whom were located in the central business district. All of the men in the story, connected through the crimes and their residence in Buenos Aires, demonstrate the variety of relationships that made up the fabric of porteño life. Though the ways in which people interacted with each other might not have been positive (as was often the case with crime and disorder) they were all porteños, living, working, and traveling through the same urban spaces. The readers of the police news in La Prensa would have understood that Susman, Gerovich, and Aisemberg were living and meeting with the peddler in Once, locating themselves in the places where people expected to find Jews, but they were also moving outside of that zone, stealing from businesses in the downtown area. The neighborhoods that few associated with Jews, particularly the poor areas in the south and even the elite sections in the north, appeared throughout the police news. Salomón Geiman, for example, was robbed at knifepoint in the room where he lived behind his junk store in the southern working-class La Boca neighborhood.4 Samuel Edelberg, at the other end of the city, lost 200 pesos worth of merchandise from his home on Cabildo, the main street of the elite northern neighborhood of Belgrano, in 1908.5 Tracing the victims and perpetrators of crimes demonstrates the ways that Jews moved far beyond the Jewish neighborhoods into all areas of the city. Ethnic group members were part of the larger city through their interactions with a diverse array of...

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