Name J.F. Normano | Died 1945 | |
Books The Struggle for South America: Economy and Ideology | ||
J. F. Normano (also: John F. Normano, João Frederico Normano; 12 July 1887 – 25 April 1945; true name: Isaac Ilyich Levin, Russian: Исаак Ильич Левин) was a Russian-American economic historian and banker.
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Biography
Isaac Levin was born in Kiev and grew up in the Russian/Ukrainian Jewish community. He enrolled for his academic studies at the Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University, where his main teacher was Peter Berngardovich Struve. After his exam, Levin got his first experiences with banking, lectured and published. Politically he was close to the liberal Kadets. For their newspaper Nash Vek, he wrote a critical article on Lenin’s way of economic thinking. He left Russia for Finland and moved to “Russian Berlin” in 1921. There, by 1926, he had accumulated sufficient capital to buy a traditionally run private bank. As of 1927, the number of banking crises increased, and Levin’s bank was added to the list of insolvent institutes in 1929. The bills he tried to discount were considered downright fakes.
Levin left Paris for Brazil, called himself João Frederico Normano (i.e. John Frederic Normano) and claimed he was 40 years old. This double passport-forgery was tailored to the position he was reaching for; a junior scientist at Harvard. The great leap forward was a success, he became the associate director of the Harvard Bureau of Economic Research in Latin America and published a highly acknowledged book, which some consider to this day to belong to the roots of the theory of Brazilian economic development. But in December 1932, his real identity was found out. After the Nazi takeover of power, the “Normano Case” led to foreign political conflict. The German Foreign Office demanded his extradition, but the young Roosevelt government got under pressure from the Jewish Community. Levin was not forced to leave the United States. He was expelled from Harvard, but still respected in the circles of Latin-Americanism and focused, as of 1941, on lecturing and research with a Pacific reference. However, before he could become really influential in this area, he died in April 1945. In the literature of the Stalin-Era, he was only briefly mentioned in a systemic ideological classification. It was not until 2010, that a book about him was published in Moscow, with reprints of his works.