J.F. Normano

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.

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, his main teacher was Peter Berngardovich Struve. After his exams, Levin made 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 lowered his age to 40. This double passport-forgery was tailored to the position he was reaching for; junior scientist at Harvard. The great leap forward was a success, he became the associate director of the Harvard Bureau for 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 on 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 thrown out of Harvard, but still respected in the circles of Latin-Americanism and concentrated, 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 shortly mentioned in a systemic ideological classification. Only in 2010 a book about him was published in Moscow, with reprints from his works.

• Normano, J. F.: The Struggle for South America. Economy and Ideology, London 1931 and Boston 1931(re-edited Westport 1973). Brazilian edition: A Luta pela América do Sul, São Paulo 1944.
• Normano, J. F.: Brazil – A Study of Economic Types, Chapel Hill 1935 (re-edited: New York 1968). Brazilian edition: J. F. Normano: Evolução econômica do Brasil, São Paulo 1939 (re-edited São Paulo 1945, São Paulo 1975).
• Normano, J. F.: The Spirit of American Economics, New York 1943.
• Normano, J. F.: Asia between Two World Wars, New York 1944.
• Normano, J. F.: The Spirit of Russian Economics, New York 1945.

• Olga Jerochina: Ученый-экономист И.И. Левин: жизнь и деятельность в России до 1918 года (The economist I. I. Levin: Life and work in Russia until 1918). In: Terra Economicus, Rostov University, 7 (2009) 3, S. 128–132.
• Andrei A. Belych (ed.): И.И. Левин: Акционерные коммерческие банки в России (I. I. Levin: Joint-stock commercial banks in Russia), Moscow 2010.
• Hans H. Lembke: Bankier, Fälscher, Historiker. Der Weg des Isaac Lewin durch die Geschichte seiner Zeit (Banker, Forger, Historian. Isaac Levin’s way through time), Freiburg 2012.