Yiddish Buenos Aires and the Struggle to Leave the Margins

ABSTRACT

Yiddish culture developed in Argentina within the context of a self-perception that figured Buenos Aires as a marginal and peripheral locale on the global Yiddish map. Against this backdrop, Argentine Yiddish culturalists argued for the strengthening of local Yiddish culture with a goal of elevating Buenos Aires's status within the international hierarchies of Yiddish culture. Buenos Aires indeed emerged in the 1920s as a producer of Yiddish cultural contents, maintained networks of international cultural contacts with other Yiddish centers, financially supported Eastern European Yiddish establishments, and hoped that these contacts would allow for solving Buenos Aires reputation problems. The pre-World War II preoccupation with the status of Buenos Aires as a center of Yiddish culture provided a basis upon which post-Holocaust discourse of Argentine Jewish responsibility for the maintenance of Yiddish culture was constructed.

KEYWORDS:

• Argentina
• Buenos Aires
• marginality
• peripherality
• Yiddish culturalism

Yiddish institutions dotting the streets during the first half of the twentieth century in the Buenos Aires neighborhoods of Once and Villa Crespo marked these areas as Yiddish spaces. Most of the Yiddish newspaper offices, community buildings, and theaters were in these two neighborhoods. The streets were filled with the sound of Yiddish and displayed the Yiddish alphabet, strengthening the perception of Buenos Aires as a Jewish city with a strong Yiddish life. The success of the Yiddish press and theater was linked with the prosperity and density of Jewish businesses. All of this activity was especially important for culturalists and activists like Samuel Rollansky. This is how Rollansky’s daughter, Esther Rollansky, who grew up in Buenos Aires in the 1930s and 1940s, remembered it:

We always lived very close to the Diario Israelita [editorial office of Di yidishe tsaytung], in the barrio of Once. When my dad was leaving the office at 4 am, there was no public transport, no tram which would take one home. Hence we always lived very close to Diario Israelita … The daily was at Corrientes 2300, on the corner of Pasteur and Corrientes. We lived at Pasteur/Corrientes, later at Viamonte, between Ayacucho and Junín. Always just a few blocks away from the daily, from the IWO, from the [teachers’] seminary. The seminary and the IWO functioned in the same building, at Pasteur 633, in a building which was erected on a lot where the Jewish theater was earlier [Ombu].¹

Buenos Aires culture makers strived to present Buenos Aires as a city involved in the global currents of Yiddish culture. The loyalty of Argentine Jews to Yiddish culture was proudly manifested during the visits of Yiddish writers, theater directors, and cultural activists from Eastern Europe and North America. Argentine Yiddish culturalists used the visits of well-known Yiddish writers to underline their allegiance to high Yiddish culture and their international networks. While walking the streets of Buenos Aires in 1914, the Yiddish playwright and travel writer Perets Hirshbeyn felt as if he was in any other big Jewish city. Hirshbeyn was surprised that “new Jewish books from Warsaw and Vilna, printed just a few month ago, [were] proudly laying here on display, with their well-known titles and familiar covers.”² He was astonished not only to see the names of famous authors like Sholem Aleichem or Y. L. Peretz, but even his own works imported from Europe. After spending a few days in Buenos Aires, Hirshbeyn was convinced of the vitality of Yiddish in the Argentine capital. He wrote:

I was surprised to hear the beat of local Jewish life. Yiddishness has crystalized in such an abundant way! By no means did I expect to meet here such great Jewish youth, who is so up to date with everything that happens in the wide Jewish world. I felt ashamed that we [Eastern European Jews] don’t know anything about their life here in Argentina. They feel so attached to us, even from afar. They pay close attention to everything that is arriving from the Jewish world, whether from Russia or North America.³

By welcoming Perets Hirshbeyn, Hersh Dovid Nomberg, Marek Turkow, and H. Leivick, Buenos Aires Jewish leaders showed themselves to be important actors, who despite the presumed peripherality of Argentina and its capital city, were familiar with modern Yiddish culture and desired to develop its variant there. This served as a counter-argument to discussions claiming that Buenos Aires was falling behind other Jewish metropolises in terms of its Yiddish cultural presence. The desire for external recognition of Argentine Yiddish endeavors is well voiced in Buenos Aires Yiddishist Lazaro Zhitnitsky’s 1928 contribution to Warsaw’s Literarishe bleter. He describes Argentina as a “younger brother” of Old World Jewish communities and a diaspora center that “will have a lot of influence on the Jewish communities around the world.” Zhitnitsky complained that the Jewish press in Poland “only rarely pays attention to our work and life” and that Argentine Yiddish literature is unnoticed in Poland.⁴

How did the status of Yiddish culture in Buenos Aires differ from its status in other Jewish centers? What was specifically Argentine about Buenos Aires’s Yiddish culture? The present article analyzes the cultural and social spaces to illuminate the status of Yiddish in Buenos Aires during the first half of the twentieth century. First, I argue that Argentina’s self-perceived peripherality was, in the early twentieth century, a motivating factor for activists in Buenos Aires to invest their time in building strong Argentine-Yiddish initiatives, which ultimately would bring recognition to Argentina within global Yiddish cultural networks. Fundraising for Yiddish schools or the YIVO in Buenos Aires, developing Yiddish theater, or establishing a literary journal all served the goal of raising the visibility of the city within the Ashkenazi Jewish world. Buenos Aires culturalists wanted to see themselves and be externally recognized as an involved and meaningful Jewish center. This issue was particularly important for urban immigrants who arrived from Eastern Europe and brought to Argentina Jewish left-wing ideals of a strong, secular Yiddish culture. Second, I suggest that Buenos Aires indeed emerged as an important producer, and not just consumer, of Yiddish culture and Yiddish-language social services. The pre-World War II preoccupation with the status of Buenos Aires as a Yiddish center provided a basis upon which post-Holocaust discourse of Argentine Jewish responsibility for the maintenance of Yiddish culture was constructed. Realizing that Nazi Germany destroyed the Eastern European centers of Yiddish civilization, many Argentine Yiddish culture makers saw their country as an increasingly important Yiddish center within the postwar order and perceived the development of Yiddish culture as compensation for the largely annihilated Eastern European Jewish heritage.

This article contributes to the recent wave of literature revaluating Buenos Aires’s status as a “proper” Jewish city that produced Yiddish culture. Susana Skura has explored Argentine Yiddish theater life, showing how Yiddish plays and musicals not only had a cultural function, but also a significant role in ethnic empowerment and visibility.⁵ Zachary Baker and Ariel Svarch’s work has uncovered materials by Buenos Aires Yiddish bard Jevel Katz along with a broader development of popular Yiddish culture in Buenos Aires.⁶ Following their discoveries, I suggest that fundraising campaigns for Yiddishist causes, Yiddish schools, or Yiddish book publishing, were, next to Yiddish theater, cultural spaces of ethnic empowerment proving the vitality of Yiddish in Buenos Aires. Malena Chinski has been working on Yiddish cultural activism and Yiddish publishing after the Holocaust highlighting the emergence of Argentina as an important venue of Jewish memorial practices in Yiddish.⁷ My article inscribes the postwar efflorescence of Yiddish publishing in Argentina into older cultural and geographical hierarchies in which Argentine Jews needed to “convince” other global Jewish actors of the vitality and relevance of Argentine Yiddish culture. In showing multiple snapshots of Buenos Aires Yiddish life, I provide a perspective that underlines the continuity of an Eastern European model in Buenos Aires Jewish culture as well as its defined specificity and adaptation to the local Argentine conditions.

Buenos Aires as Marginal and Peripheral

In 1919, referring to Buenos Aires’s perceived peripherality, Buenos Aires writer and journalist José Mendelsohn wrote of Argentina as “being distant” from the “great Jewish centers.”⁸ The sense of being at the periphery had its roots both in geographic distance from Eastern European and North American centers, but also in Buenos Aires’s reputation as a city of Jewish brothels and prostitutes. The urban Jewish experience in Buenos Aires has long been traditionally reduced to Jewish female trafficking and prostitution, which attracted a lot of attention both inside and outside Argentina.⁹ The sex underworld of Buenos Aires was an integral part of the city’s Jewish social and cultural fabric, while at the same time ethnic activists invested their time and resources into advancing other facets of the city’s Jewish life.¹⁰ The activists did not question the existence of paid sex work in Buenos Aires, but rather desired to see these issues proportionally. This approach showed that paid sex was just one of many forms of local Jewish life. Buenos Aires journalist Yankev Botoshansky complained in 1931 that Jews abroad were interested only in pimps and prostitutes and did not value Argentine cultural efforts.¹¹ Moreover, the internal and external stereotypes about Jewish culture in Buenos Aires being “low,” have made Yiddish culture there seem unworthy of study. Early twentieth-century Buenos Aires Yiddish literature, theater, or schooling have been continuously described, in Argentina and Europe alike, as marginal, low-level, and peripheral.¹² The Jewish hierarchies shaped first by Eastern Europe and later by the United States and Israel continued to see Latin America as a marginal space, when necessary to be exploited as a source of income for diverse Jewish causes (both prewar Eastern Europe and postwar Israel) or a reservoir of immigrants (Israel).¹³ This mobilized some Buenos Aires Jews to combat this paternalistic approach and to argue for Argentina’s productive embeddedness in global Jewish and Yiddish matters.

Jewish Argentina’s focus on its agricultural origins resulted in Buenos Aires Jewish life being underemphasized. Argentina’s Eastern European Jewish community, established at the turn of the 1880s and 1890s, took pride in underlining its agricultural roots.¹⁴ For instance, the anniversary publication 50 años de colonización judía en la Argentina (50 Years of Jewish Colonization in Argentina) stressed the internal hierarchies within which the first settlers were defined as heroes of the entire community.¹⁵ Jewish farming colonies that were established at the end of the nineteenth century served as symbols for Jewish liberation by way of agriculture, which was made possible because Argentina opened its gates to persecuted Eastern European Jews. Even though the agricultural colonies were rather short lived and most of the second-generation settlers left them for Buenos Aires, in the early twentieth century the colonies served as an identity anchor symbolically binding Argentine Jews to Argentine soil.¹⁶ The majority of Argentine Jews considered Alberto Gerchunoff’s Los gauchos judíos (The Jewish Cowboys), which told the story of Jewish farming colonies, rather than any urban, Buenos Aires-centered text, to be the essence Argentine-Jewish literary canon.

Complementing this landed, nationally focused story of Jewish agricultural colonization, a Yiddish urban Jewish discourse adds an additional layer to studying Jewish-Argentine identifications. From this standpoint, Buenos Aires cultural activists argued for intensified engagement with Yiddish and saw it as a way of both compensating for local shortcomings and as a claim for granting Buenos Aires a status of an important location within global networks of Yiddish culture. Local Yiddishist journalist Pinie Katz saw Argentina as a new branch of global Yiddish literature that should enrich Yiddish literature with uniquely Argentine inputs.¹⁷ In his vision, Argentina and Buenos Aires specifically should appear as a producer, and not only a consumer of Yiddish cultural contents. Whereas bustling Yiddish culture in the United States was to a great extent autarkic and local activists did not face a need to constantly reassure its status, Yiddish culturalists in geographically peripheral Argentina needed to find mechanisms that would ensure international Jewish recognition for Buenos Aires. Yiddish-centered institutions, such as landsmanshaftn (hometown societies), Jewish libraries, theaters, or schools functioned as venues of urban ethnic empowerment via Yiddish culture and chapters of analogous Jewish initiatives abroad, serving as evidence that Buenos Aires was up-to-date with modern Jewish currents.

Yiddish Buenos Aires and Mechanisms of Claiming International Recognition

The thriving Argentine Yiddish daily press was proof of the vitality of Yiddish cultural institutions in Argentina. The Yiddish press in Argentina functioned both as a platform for nurturing an ethnic readership, thus preserving ethnic identity, as well as a stage for voicing internationally the transformation that Jews were experiencing in Argentina. The first regular daily newspapers in Argentina, Yidishe tsaytung (1914-1974) and Di presse (1918-1994), were broad in their thematic focus and included both Argentine matters and European content. In a 1928 advertisement, Di presse underlined that it had permanent correspondents in all major European and North American Jewish centers. The daily saw itself as “the only Yiddish daily, which with full responsibility, reports about social problems in Argentina and abroad.” Understanding the economic aspirations of its readers, the daily saw itself as the “most reliable venue for commercial propaganda.”¹⁸ Next to key Yiddish dailies, there was a number of diverse magazines, including Far groys un kleyn (For Big and Small), Penimer un penimlekh (Faces and Little Faces), and Der Kundas (The Prankster). Yiddish newspapers popularized a belief in the social and political power of Yiddish. Yosl, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Argentina at the age of twelve in 1923, saw Di presse editors Botoshansky and Pinie Katz as his “Yiddish teachers.” He recalled that the daily was for him the main form of information on Jewish and international news, as well as a venue to learn correct written Yiddish.¹⁹ This serves as an evidence that Buenos Aires Yiddish press functioned as a mechanism of ethnicization and nationalization and defined Yiddish as language of culture and international politics.

In an attempt to validate Buenos Aires’s embeddedness into global Yiddish cultural debates, Buenos Aires Yiddish periodicals consciously decided to include texts commissioned from Eastern Europe. Regular articles written by journalists living in Poland had a prominent place in shaping Argentine Jewish discussions about the alter heym (old home). A veteran Polish correspondent of Buenos Aires’s Di yidishe tsaytung was Abraham Goldberg (1891–1933). Commissioning Goldberg as the daily’s correspondent signified that the editors were well-informed on Poland’s Jewish life. Goldberg was not just a journalist, but also one of the leading cultural figures of pre-1939 Jewish Poland. He was the founder of the Warsaw-based daily newspaper Haynt, a liberal Zionist activist, and fervent defender of Jewish national rights. His articles appeared in Buenos Aires almost every week and featured a broad cultural and political spectrum. For instance, in 1926, Goldberg informed Argentine Jews about developments surrounding the coup d’état of Marshal Józef Piłsudski.²⁰

Another Warsaw journalist Borekh Schefner, who wrote under the pseudonym “Bet Shin,” published regular pieces in Di presse, including his impressions from his travels in the Polish periphery.²¹ Yaakov Zerubavel wrote regular updates from Warsaw about the worldwide conference of the YIVO Institute in Vilna and about conflicts between Jewish artists in Poland and the United States.²² By publishing their texts, the Jewish journals brought to Buenos Aires a range of clearly Eastern European Jewish problems and opinions. These articles answered both the needs of new immigrants for updates from their homeland, established lines of cultural, literary, and discursive connections between Buenos Aires and Eastern Europe, and demonstrated Buenos Aires’s link to the heart of Yiddishland.

Argentine Jews traveled to Europe and attempted to influence the way Jews in Eastern Europe perceived Argentina in the moment. In October 1929, Di presse editor Pinie Katz visited Vilna. The journalist, who served as one of the key promoters of Yiddishism and progressive Jewishness in Argentina, was welcomed in Vilna as an old comrade. Katz spent a week there, visited numerous Jewish institutions (schools, theaters, editorial offices, etc.) and gave a lecture about Jews in Argentina at the Vilna branch of the Farayn fun yidishe literatn un zhurnalistn (Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists).²³ Katz was seen as a representative of all Argentine Jewry and was warmly welcomed by Zalmen Reyzen, one of the most prominent figures of the YIVO. Welcoming Katz, Reyzen remarked:

But only in hearing his stories about the builders and activists of the Jewish yishev in Argentina has this land become so close to me, this land of so many fulfilled and broken hopes for a new healthy, productive Jewish life … a land of people who within forty years laid a strong foundation for a yishev of 250,000 souls, a yishev that already began to contribute its part to world Yiddish culture. And when we see the efflorescence of the Yiddish word in that distant land, about big newspapers and journals full with content, about numerous books published there, when we hear about local libraries, theater groups, schools etc., we know that to a great extent they are a product of Pinie Katz’s work.²⁴

Katz's visit to Vilna and the recognition given to him by the YIVO was a symbolic embrace of Argentina into Yiddishland’s symbolic capital: Vilna. Vilna’s Yiddish journalist Sh. Erzet saw Buenos Aires as one of a few cities in which radical Yiddish culture could exist and where figures such as Pinie Katz “led a struggle for a living Yiddish culture.”²⁵ Reyzen referred to Katz’s recent book on Yiddish journalism in Argentina which revealed to him the abundance of local Yiddish cultural life. By talking about how unknown Argentina was in Eastern Europe, Reyzen approached the issue of external recognition for their cultural efforts that Buenos Aires Jewish culturalists expected from their fellow Jews in other diaspora centers.²⁶ Reyzen’s speech established Argentina as a new important center of Jewish life – a status to which many Argentine culturalists strived to. While Reyzen referred to Argentina as a country, rather than Buenos Aires specifically, by underlining Katz’s contribution to Yiddish journalism and literature in Buenos Aires, he established the city as a venue where Yiddish culture could flourish. Three years later Reyzen could personally confirm his predictions. In 1932, Reyzen travelled to Argentina to raise funds for YIVO and praised the “warm,” “exemplary,” and “conscious” welcome he received both in Buenos Aires and in the provinces. YIVO’s report underscored the role of the Buenos Aires Yiddish press in advertising the campaign and the involvement of dozens of local Jewish institutions. Buenos Aires emerging from the YIVO report was as a vibrant Yiddish center.²⁷

Regular visits in Poland helped Buenos Aires culturalists to map out Buenos Aires as an important locale of Yiddish cultural initiatives and not a peripheral and culturally passive city. In 1931, Yankev Botoshansky travelled to Warsaw where he talked at the Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists. There he claimed that the diasporic character of Yiddish culture demanded cross-border cooperation. Some Polish Yiddishists agreed with Botoshansky, which found its expression in regularly praising Buenos Aires’s involvement in global Yiddish enterprises. In 1926, Warsaw’s prominent Yiddish weekly Literarishe bleter reported that Argentine activists established a YIVO support committee²⁸ and in 1929 the journal celebrated the tenth anniversary of Buenos Aires publishing company Kapliansky.²⁹

In the 1930s, Botoshansky regularly contributed to Literarishe bleter and updated Poland’s Yiddish cultural elite about the developments in Argentina.³⁰ Botoshansky travelled to Poland again in 1935 for a YIVO congress. His presence in Vilna suggested that Buenos Aires Jews felt co-responsible for maintaining modern Jewish culture, which the YIVO symbolized, and desired to be seen and heard at major Yiddishist gatherings. This desire of belonging has been recognized in Poland at least in a declarative manner. Literarishe bleter placed Buenos Aires next to other Yiddish centers in its subscription campaigns. The weekly wrote: “We cover everything that happens in the Yiddish culture of Warsaw, New York, and Buenos Aires, in Moscow, Vilna, and Kiev, etc.”³¹ Also Israel Joshua Singer, one of the weekly’s founders, saw inclusion of Buenos Aires, among other new centers, as one of Literarishe bleter’s most important achievements.³²

Pinie Katz’s visit to Polish Vilna followed his visit to the Soviet Union where, in 1929, he spent four months as a delegate of Procor, an Argentine organization responsible for raising funds and gaining public support for agricultural colonization in Soviet Russia. Procor began operating in 1924, and its membership grew as the project in Russia advanced. In 1926, Procor had only seventy-one affiliated members in Buenos Aires, whereas a year later almost 1,200. Katz published in Di presse regular reports from his stay in Soviet Union what suggests a sustained interest of Argentine Jews in Jewish life in Soviet Union. For Argentine Jewish communists and socialists like Pinie Katz, Soviet Russia was an important ideological center. There, the ideas these activists supported were not controversial for a substantial part of a Jewish public, like they were in Argentina. In Soviet Russia, as Katz argued, “on the ruins of the tsarist world bloomed the world of my dreams.”³³ This referred also specifically to the empowerment of Yiddish as a language of Soviet Jews and the development of a unique Soviet Yiddish culture. In Kharkov, Katz was amazed by how diverse national cultures could exist side by side and receive financial support from the state for activities such as Yiddish book publishing.³⁴ Soviet Jewish delegates also visited Argentina – Jacob Levin in 1929 and Gina Medem in 1935 – and called on Argentine Jews to contribute to Jewish colonization in Birobidzhan and Crimea and consequently also to the development of Soviet Yiddish publishing, schools, and theater.³⁵ Whereas Katz’s trip to Moscow was focused on agriculture and emerging Soviet Yiddish culture, much of Argentine support for Soviet Jewry was centered in Buenos Aires: it was from there that Procor worked and most of the money raised came from there, too. The international cooperation between left-wing Jewish activists validated Argentine Jewish involvement in the main currents of social and cultural Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

Its growing contribution to global Yiddish culture supported Buenos Aires’s desired status as a key Yiddish outpost, and the most fruitful efforts in this development came by way of the diverse fundraising campaigns organized in the city. Often, Jewish entertainment events were merged with activism that benefited Eastern European Jews. For instance, in 1931, when money was raised for TSYSHO (Central Yiddish School Organization) schools in Poland, the local fundraising committee in Villa Crespo published a flyer inviting guests to a “big family party”.³⁶ The party that took place on October 24, 1931 at “Salon Nordau” featured games, a beauty contest, and a concert of “the best Buenos Aires orchestra.”³⁷ A similar program was organized for an event on behalf of the same cause in La Plata close to Buenos Aires on August 22, 1931. After the welcome speech by TSYSHO emissary Boris Tabachinski, patrons enjoyed an evening featuring a stand-up comedy show by M. Auerbach, a theatrical performance by Misha Schwartz, a violin recital by E. Novarra, and a performance by opera singer Estela Budman.³⁸ The program for the La Plata event shows that in Argentina there was little contradiction between living an Argentine life and remaining committed to Eastern Europe and Yiddish-focused modern Jewishness. By raising money for the TSYSHO schools, the patrons acknowledged their responsibility for Yiddish schooling in Poland, whereas by choosing an Argentine violin player, probably of Spanish origin, to perform at the TSYSHO event, La Plata Jews demonstrated their involvement in the non-Jewish cultural world of Argentina. Buenos Aires Jews financially supported also the YIVO Institute in Vilna. The fundraising campaigns in 1932 and 1934 established Buenos Aires Jews as responsible for maintaining Eastern European Yiddish landmarks, especially in the context of growing antisemitism and economic crisis in Poland.³⁹ Fundraising for Yiddish causes, as Buenos Aires activists hoped, could define their city as a cultural Yiddish cultrual outpost, a status that would also be recognized in the Eastern European center of the Ashkenazi civilization.

Fundraising for Eastern Europe and regular cross-border journalistic cooperation between Buenos Aires and Eastern European centers such as Warsaw or Vilna was a mechanism to demonstrate Buenos Aires’ rootedness in global Ashkenazi Jewish issues. By creating and maintaining these cultural channels, Buenos Aires Yiddish culturalists wove lines of connection between new and old centers and projected Buenos Aires as a meaningful center of urban Yiddish culture. The visibility in Eastern European Yiddish institutions, such as the YIVO and Literarishe bleter, provided Buenos Aires Jews with a much-desired sense of external recognition as meaningful cultural activists and helped to shed the image of Buenos Aires as peripheral and at the end of the Jewish world.

Building Yiddish Buenos Aires

Social and cultural offerings in Yiddish were a central feature of planting roots in Argentina, prevalent especially among first-generation immigrants who joined the landsmanshaftn (home-town associations). The landsmanshaftn were the product of Jewish migration in Argentina who argued that Yiddish culture brought from Eastern Europe could help them build community in Argentina. As Susana Skura and Lucas Fishman point out, for Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Yiddish continued to be a language of daily communication, but also a space of recognition of a common origin, and a substitute for a “lost home.”⁴⁰ As numerous memoirs and landsman publications demonstrated, the landsmanshaftn were designed as a space of intimacy and inclusion, where Yiddish could be spoken, and the immigrant Jewish community’s problems were a central focus of the discussions. The landslayt (members of a landsmanshaft) argued that one of their chief goals was to maintain traditional and comfortable social relations in an Old-World milieu. In that sense, the landsmanshaftn were an important space for Jewish immigrants in their Argentine place-making.⁴¹ The landsmanshaftn developed an extended system of libraries, youth clubs, women’s sections, social and family events, and periodicals, which served lansdlayt’s social and cultural needs or interests. These establishments promoted intra-group interactions and served as venues offering specific cultural content unavailable in gentile establishments and, with time, became spaces where hyphenated Jewish-Argentineness was negotiated.⁴²

Following landsman terminology, landsman “salons,” libraries, and clubs allowed patrons to immerse themselves in what was called a “heymishe svive,” a familiar environment. References to heymishe svive appeared regularly in landsmanshaftn brochures inviting guests to events and in texts on landsmanshaft history written by its members. A landsman from Ostróg recalled that the immigrants felt miserable after a day of hard work and meeting a countryman at a landsmanshaft club was their greatest happiness.⁴³ The phrase heymishe svive was also used as a slogan for recruiting new members. The term defined landsmanshaftn as a space of intimacy and a sui generis extension of the Eastern European “home.” David Szyszacki, secretary for the IWO during the postwar years, recalled that new immigrants often turned to landsmanshaftn in order to talk about people and stories that the landslayt coming from the same town knew.⁴⁴ As many of the landslayt members preferred to communicate in Yiddish and were proud of their Yiddish heritage, the cultural offering of the landsmanshaftn was seen as a “gaystiker heym” (spiritual home) for the immigrants.⁴⁵ For instance, members of the Lemberger farayn believed that the organization was responsible for “raising the cultural level” of its members.⁴⁶ In most cases, by this the landslayt meant popularizing high Yiddish culture. By celebrating Eastern European Jewish culture, the landsmanshaftn claimed that Argentina was not on the periphery of the Jewish world but remained up-to-date with the cultural developments in the Old World. This also conveyed a message that Yiddish culture belonged to Argentina.

Yiddish libraries and bookshops in Buenos Aires served as a tool for ethnic empowerment and a space for developing Yiddish ethnic culture. Many of the libraries were in Once and Villa Crespo but appeared in any neighborhood with a Jewish presence. Libraries were one of the primary means by which the average Jew came into contact with the cultural movements and modernist ideologies of the early twentieth century.⁴⁷ By providing a rich Yiddish literary offering Argentine Jews again referred to their perceived ambition of “catching up” with more developed centers of Yiddish culture. As Alejandro Dujovne argues, libraries strengthened the role of the book as a conveyor of Yiddish culture.⁴⁸ Libraries were available to basically everyone, and imported books and journals allowed for an exchange of ideas with centers in Eastern Europe or North America. “Der Onfang” (Beginning), the first Yiddish bookshop in the city, was run by Mordechai Stoliar from about 1910 onward. The future big names of Argentine Yiddish letters such as Pinie Katz, Israel Helfman, or Noyekh Vital were said to be regulars there. “Der Onfang” served as a departure point for the first regular daily newspaper in Buenos Aires, Di yidishe tsaytung.⁴⁹ Later, the library and publishing house of G. Kapliansky served as a main locale for Buenos Aires Yiddish aficionados. In the 1940s, the IWO’s library, established in Buenos Aires in 1939, took over as the hub of Yiddish print culture.⁵⁰ Many libraries were linked to diverse Jewish groupings, such as the liberal Sociedad Hebraica, or other Zionist or left-wing associations. These establishments defined Buenos Aires as a center of Yiddish writing, underscored Yiddish as a visible part of city’s urban fabric, and marked the transnational flow of Yiddish cultural contents. I agree with Dujovne, who argues that the ethnic libraries distorted the linear paths towards becoming Argentine. The popularity of the libraries underscored the importance of immigrant languages in the cultural and social life of Buenos Aires and the process of linguistic acculturation into Spanish was accompanied by celebrating one’s ethnic background. Yiddish libraries also held books by non-Jewish authors, like Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Alexandre Dumas, and many works by Argentine authors, which serves as evidence that cultural Argentineness, ethnic empowerment via Yiddish culture, and interest in other national cultures were not exclusive, but complementary.⁵¹

Maintaining a network of Yiddish schools, as activists believed, would elevate Buenos Aires to a level equal to other Jewish cities such as New York or Warsaw. The development of a school network that would provide its students with a socially progressive Yiddish education emerged within the new Jewish urban working class, centered around Once, Caballito, Villa Devoto, and other neighborhoods. In the 1920s, two networks of Yiddish schools existed in Buenos Aires: Borokhov schools and Arbshulorg arbeter shuln, with the former representing left-wing pro-Yiddish Zionism and the latter Bundism. Each had between five and ten schools. In 1932, the authorities closed most of the Yiddish schools in Buenos Aires under accusations of spreading communism.⁵² The Yiddish education structure was subsequently reopened in a new form in the mid-1930s. Then, the Bundist Gezelshaft far yidish veltlekhe shuln (Society for Secular Jewish Schools), based on the Polish TSYSHO system, appeared.⁵³ Former communist-socialist schools in the 1930s distanced themselves from communism and began to represent what Visacovsky sees as “bourgeois progressivism,” which socialized children with ideals of equality as well as a Yiddishist-European legacy.⁵⁴ For the Jewish residents of Buenos Aires, the intersection of class and ethnicity were of the utmost importance around the 1930s and 1940s. Yiddish schools served as local centers of Yiddish culture, organized theater shows, concerts and other activities not only for their students, but also for an extended circle including students’ family members.

Yiddish theater was a central platform for claiming Buenos Aires Jews’ devotedness to Yiddish language and culture. By inviting Eastern European stars and running the same shows as in Warsaw and New York, Buenos Aires Jews imagined themselves as very much involved in international Yiddish cultural networks. For many Jewish porteños (the term used to describe a resident of Buenos Arires), a visit to a Yiddish theater was less about participating in an artistic event and more about expressing belonging to a specific cultural community. For years, Yiddish theater in Buenos Aires suffered from issues related to reputation. In a city known throughout Eastern Europe for its infamous Jewish prostitution, the worlds of theater and sex work were interconnected. In 1925, Peretz Hirshbeyn wrote that “there is a direct path from a brothel to the Jewish theater. There are 20,000 pimps and prostitutes in a [Jewish] population of 100,000. The truth will always come out, no matter how bitter it is.”⁵⁵ There was a direct financial connetion beteen the sex underworld and Yiddish theaters in the first three decades of the twentieth century. For instance, the income from Avrom Goldfaden’s Sulamita was devoted to the maintenance of the Cemeterio Israelita Barracas Al Sud, which was where Jewish prostitutes were laid to rest.⁵⁶ Developing Yiddish theater free from the influence of paid-sex work was thus a means to elevate the reputation of Jewish Buenos Aires both internally and among Jews in other countries. In the early 1930s, some theaters explicitly prohibited prostitutes and pimps from entering.⁵⁷

Argentine Yiddish theater embodied transnational Jewish culture defined by mass migration. As in Eastern Europe or North America, both critics and the public in Argentina differentiated between highbrow art theater and the lowbrow shund. Until around 1910, Yiddish plays by Abraham Goldfaden and Jacob Gordin dominated the Buenos Aires Jewish scenes.⁵⁸ In the following decades, along with the bourgeoning of the Buenos Aires Jewish community a number of local playwrights emerged, including Marcos Alpersohn, Samuel Glasserman, and Jacobo Liachovitzky. This allowed Buenos Aires to imagine itself as a vital producer of Yiddish cultural contents. In the 1920s, the first Argentine professional theater associations were established, such as the “Sociedad dramatica Yacob Gordin” [Jacob Gordin Drama Society] as well as a labor union for Jewish actors. In 1935, Buenos Aires had two permanent Yiddish ensembles, one dramatic and one revue.⁵⁹ Yiddish stages included Ombu, Soleil, Mitre, El Excelcior, and the Jewish People’s Theater, also known as Teatro IFT. Other stages, such as Odeón or Coliseo, also hosted shows by Yiddish artists. Earlier, in the 1910s and 1920s, Yiddish theaters organized their shows in halls belonging to other ethnic communities, such as Italia Unita and Orfeón Español.⁶⁰ This demonstrates a burgeoning Yiddish cultural life in Buenos Aires that from the 1930s on was able to maintain a number of Yiddish stages. The existence of these easily identifiable Yiddish venues manifested the visibility of Yiddish in the urban space of the city and a fact that the city was indeed catching up with Eastern Europe and the United States concerning the Yiddish culture.

By the 1930s, Argentine-made theater was in decline and in its place came the domination of a so-called star system.⁶¹ Eastern European and North American stars of Yiddish theater, such as Jacob Ben Ami, Maurice Schwartz, the Turkow brothers, Molly Picon, and others regularly came on tours to Buenos Aires. Most of the actors and plays during this period were imported from Eastern Europe, which led some contemporary critics to describe Yiddish theater in Argentina as an “echo” of cultural developments happening in bustling Jewish centers elsewhere. Rollansky wrote that Buenos Aires was like a “hotel with a transit visa.”⁶² While the popularity of foreign theater groups signaled that Buenos Aires Jews’ might have been critical of the local theater scene, visits from European and North American stars proved that Buenos Aires was hungry for Yiddish cultural content and maintained a network of cultural exchange with other centers of Yiddish culture. Using Debra Caplan’s term Yiddish theater embodied “itinerant multimodal transnationalism” which included Argentina in the geographies of Jewish culture that was traversing countries and continents.⁶³

The fact was that attending a Yiddish play, along with being entertained, amounted to making a public declaration of both Jewishness and support for Jewish art. The Yiddish stage was central to the experience for thousands of Jews and should be studied as a valuable facet of Jewish modern history.⁶⁴ With many Argentine Jews distanced from traditional-religious Jewishness, Yiddish theater offered a platform for expressing ethnic belonging. This was especially important from the 1930s onward, when the number of Argentine-born Jews was growing. Rollansky wrote that some Buenos Aires Jews did not speak Yiddish nor read any books or newspapers in Yiddish, and that the theater was their only connection with Yiddishkayt.⁶⁵

By creating and maintaining an array of Yiddish cultural institutions, Buenos Aires proved (in front of itself and in front of foreign Jewish centers) that it did not lag behind developments in Eastern Europe. Networks of Jewish libraries and progressive Yiddish schools corresponded with analogous developments in the most important centers of Yiddish culture and were involved (especially theaters) in a process of trans-Atlantic cultural and political exchange. The landsmanshaftn, through its cultural offer and rhetoric, suggested that Yiddish could be framed as a crucial aspect of Jewish life in Buenos Aires. In that sense, Yiddish institutions marked Buenos Aires as a bustling venue of Yiddish creativity.

After the Khurbn. Maintaining Yiddish Culture in Argentina as a Jewish Obligation

The Holocaust has redefined the geographies of Yiddish culture and most Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe were murdered. Yiddish culture began to be perceived as a heritage belonging to the past and without a perspective for a bright future neither in Israel nor in other countries. Yet, for about two decades following the Holocaust, Argentina managed to recreate and safeguard the idea of a secular Yiddish culture to a certain extent.⁶⁶ In 1941, a Yiddish Teachers’ Seminary was opened in Buenos Aires. In 1942, more than 3,000 children attended Jewish schools in Buenos Aires, and by 1946 enrollment increased to 4,800 across sixty schools, staffed by 120 teachers.⁶⁷ The cornerstone for the new Yiddish Sholem Aleichem School in Villa Crespo (on 341 Serrano St.) in Buenos Aires was laid in 1940. It opened two years later. The money to erect the building was gathered from multiple sources across Argentina; the fundraising effort was an initiative to expose the value of Yiddish culture for Argentine Jews. The impressive two-story building was imagined as an embodiment of the existential powers of Argentine Jewry and its willingness to continue the cultural tradition of European Jewry that the Nazis attempted to destroy. The call to support the construction of the building read as follows:

Our community … needs now, more than ever, to assume responsibility for the development of Jewish culture. When the Jewish cultural center in Europe is destroyed, when the heart of Jewish cultural life is torn out, when our existence as a nation is in danger, this is our obligation, the Jews of countries free from a devastating war, to receive from our brothers from the other side of the ocean the luminous cultural heritage … we were called to preserve the holy fire of Jewish national culture … In order to save this culture, to continue shaping it, we ought to do it from the foundations, that is, starting with the school.⁶⁸

Calls to rebuild and invest in Jewish life in Argentina were strengthened during and after World War II, when the erasure of Europe’s Yiddish cultural centers allowed for the growth of new centers in Buenos Aires, Montreal, and Tel Aviv. Buenos Aires’s Jewish activists suggested an increased responsibility on the part of Argentine Jews to preserve Jewish continuity and the Yiddish language. In 1945, Yankev Vengrover, leader of the Poylisher farband and AMIA’s (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, the kehilla of Buenos Aires) secretary general, argued that mourning the victims of the war in Europe was not enough and in fact paralyzed creativity. He argued for the existence of Jewish and Yiddish life in the diaspora, envisioning Argentine Jews as fighters for Jewish national and cultural continuity. Vengrover stressed the need for Argentine-produced and Argentina-inspired Jewish culture. The ethnic leader argued that, since Jewish life in Eastern Europe lay in ruins, Jewish Argentina needed to stand on its own two feet and take on its new role in a postwar order.⁶⁹ In the same period, YKUF (Yiddisher Kultur Farband in Argentina) leaders sought to “spread and enrich the secular Jewish culture, and stimulate its development, contributing to social justice and equality.”⁷⁰ The arguments for “Argentina’s turn” in maintaining the legacy of Eastern European Jewry were rooted in prewar Jewish dynamics that rarely perceived Argentina as a major actor within international politics of Yiddish culture, as well as in existing cultural networks between Jews in Eastern Europe and Argentina.

The late 1940s and 1950s proved that Argentine Yiddish culture was relatively thriving. In 1954, American Jewish Yearbook wrote, “Argentina turned into a global-scale leader in Yiddish publishing.”⁷¹ Prior to 1939, Buenos Aires was largely a receiver of cultural content produced in Europe or the United States. However, by the 1940s and 1950s, Argentina had emerged as a prolific cultural producer in its own right. Several new Yiddish publishers appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s (Idisch, YKUF, Idbuj, Altveltlekher yidisher kultur-kongres, and IWO). Wolf Bressler and Abraham Mitelberg, founders of the publishing house Idisch, wrote: “The world Jewish catastrophe elevated our yishev and appointed us with a tragic and great privilege … Via the Idisch Publishers, the Argentine yishev is starting to rebuild what the enemy has destroyed.”⁷² By publishing the collected works of Y.L. Peretz, the newly established publishing house drew on a tradition of cultural life in Eastern Europe and seemed to argue that the cultural treasures could be recreated and made useful in a postwar period. Even though Jews in Argentina increasingly preferred to speak Spanish in the public sphere, a big part of the community was linked to prewar concepts of Yiddishist cultural belonging. These connections were made possible in large part due to a generation of devoted ethnic leaders including Marek Turkow, Abraham Mitelberg, and Samuel Rollansky, as well as to the support of the landsmanshaftn.

The Tsentral-farband fun poylisher yidn in Argentine (Poylisher farband) published 175 Yiddish books in their book series Dos poylishe yidntum (The Polish Jewry) between 1946 and 1966.⁷³ In sponsoring the book series and drawing on its prewar activism, the Poylisher farband saw its responsibility to assist survivors economically, but also to maintain what they imagined to be Polish-Jewish culture. After 1945, Argentine Jewry felt an obligation to publish in Yiddish in order to preserve the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. Mark Turkow, who edited the book series, argued that its goal was to discuss both the “glorious past” and the “tragic present” of Polish Jewry.⁷⁴ The publishing endeavor was sponsored by community institutions (Poylisher farband, Folks-bank of Buenos Aires and later the Claims Conference) and featured content from contributors around the world (including Polish Jewish landsman organizations in the United States).⁷⁵ For its part, Dos poylishe yidntum helped to establish Argentina as a central point on the Jewish world map.⁷⁶ In 1955, when the 100^th volume of Dos poylishe yidntum was published, its editors and the Poylisher farband began to consider their project as “erecting an eternal monument to Polish Jewry.”

Another Argentine Yiddishist, Samuel Rollansky, published the book series, Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Masterpieces of Yiddish Literature) between 1957 and 1984. Rollansky relied on the heritage and Yiddishist legacy of the Argentine IWO, of which he was the head. He was successful in recruiting philanthropists and individual subscribers, which allowed him to publish 100 titles, including anthologies and works of fiction. It was an attempt to create a complete and representative “artistic biography of Jewish people.”⁷⁷ Novels, memoirs of prewar life in Poland, and Holocaust narratives were to bear witness to unspeakable crimes perpetrated against the Jews.⁷⁸ The Musterverk was sponsored by South-African philanthropist Yosef Lifshitz, which again underscored the transnational networks of Yiddish culture connecting Buenos Aires and other centers. In that way, they were “a space of transcendence” and a “sanctuary” allowing its editors and readers to reflect on the meaning of Holocaust for Yiddish literature and on the new role of Argentine yishev.⁷⁹ Both Argentine memorial series were secular endeavors, a testament to the enduring power of Yiddish peoplehood and its progressive national ideals, as well as a clear sign that after the war, Argentina had taken its place as one of its leading centers.

After the Holocaust, Argentine landsmanshaftn also played a role in defining Argentina’s strong position within Jewish memorial system. As good example is Grodner opklangen, published in Yiddish as a yearly almanac from 1948 until the early 1980s. As its editor Mijl Hacohen Sinay proclaimed in the 1950s, Grodner opklangen was an “open tribute” to the former residents of Grodno in Poland (now Hrodna in Belarus) from all around the world. As the editor asserted, the journal’s goal was to present materials pertaining to “the death of our martirer-kdoshim” (holy martyrs), but also to the personalities who lived and worked in Grodno “spreading the fame of the city.”⁸⁰ The process of editing the journal was a collective work of the landslayt. The journal invited people to contribute materials that could provide information about the history of Grodno. “Everyone can do this in his/her own way. You don’t need to be a good writer,” the editor encouraged.⁸¹ Especially appreciated were texts that could tell the everyday history of Jews in Grodno: “You can write down the simplest things, the most basic, the least important, maybe even seemingly worthless things … we believe that these texts, maybe in a few generations, would be interpreted otherwise, would teach and inform.”⁸² Nevertheless, the editors also celebrated famous Grodners, such as Leyb Naydus, Leyb Yaffe, and Abraham Zak.

Grodner opklangen served as a platform uniting Yiddish speaking grodners from around the world. The common past was conceptualized as a factor uniting Grodno Jews living in Argentina, Canada, the US, and Israel.⁸³ The international network was used especially when preparing the yizkor bikher (memorial books). While Buenos Aires emerged as one of the most important centers publishing this type of publications, the Grodners felt that they were not in the avant-garde of commemoration activism. Fanny Zak appealed in 1955, “Why do our Grodners not feel an internal urge to take up the responsibility to eternalize our glorious past, our colorful yesterday, our disappeared home?”⁸⁴ She continued to argue that statues or sculptures might be destroyed, but “written memorials” would survive forever. The Grodno book as a “textual matsevah” was supposed to commemorate the farshvundene shtot, the disappeared city, and the forefathers who “belonged to the Grodno landscape.” Despite the fact that Grodner from the US, France, and Israel did network and planned to publish a memorial book in the 1950s, the goal was accomplished only in 1973 by the Israeli Dov Rabin. The fact that the book was published in Hebrew marks the linguistic evolution within the Jewish world and in Argentina. In 1955, knowing that in Argentina many analogous books were published in Yiddish, Fanny Zak could still passionately call for the publication of a Yiddish Grodno yizkor bukh. In the 1970s, Hebrew and Israel exercised a dominant influence on Jewish life and Yiddish lost its importance even for memorial books.

In the post-Holocaust era Buenos Aires culturalists argued that their city faced new obligations concerning the maintenance of global Yiddish culture. When the Eastern European center ceased to exist, Buenos Aires culturalists claimed increased responsibility on the part of Buenos Aires Jews to invest time and money in Yiddish endeavors. By expanding the Yiddish schooling and launching new Yiddish publishing initiatives, the activists marked Buenos Aires as a key Yiddish center of the post-Holocaust order. The Yiddish efflorescence in Buenos Aires proved that Buenos Aires had definitely left the margins of the Jewish world.

Conclusion

Yiddish culture developed in Argentina within the context of a self-perception that figured Buenos Aires as a marginal and peripheral locale on the global Yiddish map. Against this backdrop, Argentine Yiddish culturalists argued for the strengthening of local Yiddish culture with a goal of elevating Buenos Aires’s status within the international hierarchies of Yiddish culture. Buenos Aires’s Yiddish-speaking Jews indeed maintained cultural networks with other Yiddish centers, most importantly with Eastern Europe, and hoped that these contacts would allow for elevating Buenos Aires’s Yiddish cultural reputation. Discussions in the Yiddish press, international fundraising campaigns for Yiddishist causes, and regular visits from writers and thespians served as platforms for developing a cross-border Yiddish culture and established Buenos Aires as a meaningful city within the geographies of Yiddish culture.

The notion that the artistic features of Yiddish culture in Buenos Aires ought to be elevated to compensate for what was seen as a shortcoming in the city’s cultural scene continued after the Holocaust. In the 1940s and 1950s many Argentine Jews saw themselves as responsible for sustaining Yiddish culture, which would compensate for or commemorate the destroyed Eastern European center of Yiddish life. Buenos Aires was home to two of the most important postwar Yiddish publication series, and the city witnessed a golden age of Yiddish schooling. For a time, Buenos Aires’s Jews managed to maintain the continuity of Yiddish culture following the khurbn. Buenos Aires Yiddish culturalists were exploring the borders of adjustability of global hierarchies of Yiddish culture and via numerous channels carved out a niche for Jewish Buenos Aires.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Mariusz Kałczewiak is cultural historian focusing on Jewish History, Eastern European Studies and modern Latin America. Kałczewiak is Senior Research Associate and Lecturer at the Chair of Central-Eastern European Culture and Literature at the University of Potsdam. Kałczewiak holds a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University (2017) and an MA from University of Warsaw (2011). Kałczewiak's first book Polacos in Argentina. Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture appeared in 2019 with the Alabama University Press.

Notes

1 Interview with Esther Rollansky by Sandra Deutsch, November 3, 2000. Institute of Oral History, University of Texas at El Paso. IWO is Argentine counterpart of YIVO (Yidisher Visenshaftlekher Institut, Jewish Scientific Institute). YIVO began operating in Vilna in 1925; following the Holocaust it has been based in New York.

2 Hirshbeyn, Fun vayte lender, 45.

3 ibid., 49.

4 Zhitnitsky, “Funm zeydens kval,”484, 489.

5 Skura and Glocer eds., Teatro ídish argentino.

6 Svarch, “Der freylekhster yid in Argentine,” 225–49; Baker, “‘Gvald Yidn, Buena Gente’”: Katz, “Yiddish Bard of the Río de la Plata,” 202–22.

7 Chinski, “Un catálogo en memoria del judaísmo polaco ,” 213–38; Chinski, “Yiddish culture after the Shoah,” 42–68; Chinski and Fiszman, “‘A biblyotek vos felt’ (a library that is lacking),” 135–53.

8 Mendelsohn, Oyf di bregn fun La Plata, 23.

9 Mirelman, En la búsqueda de una identidad, 341–4.

10 On Buenos Aires Jewish prostitution see Deutsch, Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation, 42–147; Guy, Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires.

11 “A lebediger grus fun yudish lebn un yudisher kultur in argentina. Vos dertselt der bekanter yudisher shriftshteler fun argentina yankev botoshansky,” Grodner Express, May 13, 1931, 7.

12 Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles, 244.

13 Klor, Between Exile and Exodus.

14 Similar patterns can be found in the United States. See Imhoff, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism.

15 50 años de colonización judía en la Argentina.

16 Cherjovsky, Recuerdos de Moisés Ville, 20–8; Avni, Argentina y las migraciones judías, 215–6. For the North American context, see also Imhoff, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, 97–127.

17 Katz, “Argentiner tsvayg fun der yidisher literatur,” Geklibene shriftn, vol. 7, 7–14. See Sinay, “Pinie Katz and I,” 176–192.

18 Almanakh 1928, 67.

19 Itzigsohn et al., eds, Integración y marginalidad, 197–8. The interview does not mention the last name.

20 Abraham Goldberg, “Yidishe karbones fun revolutsye,” Di yidishe tsaytung, June 24, 1926.

21 Borekh Schefner, “A yidisher kontsert in a poylish shtetl,” Di presse, April 8, 1933, 6.

22 Yaakov Zerubavel, “Alveltlekhe konferents fun yidishn visnshaftlekhn institut,” Di presse, December 1, “Likvidirt di milkhome tsvishn yidish aktyorn org. in nord amerike un in poyln,” Di presse, December 18, 1929, 8.

23 Sh. Erzet, “Pinie katz in vilne,” Di presse, November 1, 1929, 6. The article was written in Vilna on October 17, 1929.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Katz, Tsu der geshihkhte fun der yidisher zhurnalistik in argentine.

27 Argentine un uruguay far dem YIVO, Vilna 1934, 1–5.

28 “Yedies fun visenshaftlekhn institut”, Literarishe bleter, April 23, 1925, 271.

29 “Khronik,” Literarishe bleter, June 28, 1928, 512.

30 “Haynt gezegunsovent far yankev botoshansky,” Haynt, May 13, 1931, 5; “Buenos-aireser zhurnalist yankev botoshansky in varshe,” Unzer express, August 13, 1935.

31 “Tsu unzere lezer!”, Literarishe bleter, September 16, 1927, 713.

32 Israel Joshua Singer, “In aygn vinkl,” Literarishe bleter, March 2, 1928, 163.

33 Pinie Katz, Geklibene shriftn, vol. 2, 7–14.

34 Katz, Geklibene shriftn, vol. 2, 76–77.

35 Victor A. Mirelman, 144–145.

36 TSYSHO stands for Tsentrale yidishe shul-organizatsye (Central Yiddish School Organization), a group that coordinated a network of Yiddish schools in interwar Poland.

37 Flyer, TSYSHO campaign materials, document no. 1036/64, IWO, Buenos Aires.

38 Flyer, TSYSHO campaign materials, document no. 1036/6, IWO, Buenos Aires.

39 Argentine un uruguay far dem YIVO. Barikht fun der aktsye far dem yidishn visenshaftlekhn institut (Vilna, 1934).

40 Skura and Fiszman, “Idish en Argentina, ideologias linguisticas,” 233–53.

41 Weisser, A Brotherhood of Memory, 13.

42 Kałczewiak, “Becoming Polacos,” 32–51.

43 Grines, “In loyf fun zvantsik yor,” 10.

44 Szyszacki, “Tsu der geshikhte fun yidishe landslayt-faraynen in argentine,” 137, 133.

45 “Unzer kultur-arbet,” In Landsmanshaftn. Spetsyele oysgabe fun di tsentrale fun di faraynikte poylish-yidishe landsmanshaftn in argentine tsum dritn zid amerikaner tsuzamenfor, 24–25.

46 “Landsmanshaftn un zayere oyfagaben,” Ershter almanakh fun hilfs farayn fun lemberger un umgegent, 7.

47 Veildlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, XVI.

48 Dujovne, Una historia, 69.

49 Rollansky, Dos yidishe gedrukte vort un teater in Argentine, 95–6.

50 Dujovne, Una historia, 73.

51 ibid., 244.

52 Visacovsky, Argentinos, judíos y camaradas, 50.

53 ibid., 52.

54 ibid., 53, 67.

55 Perets Hirshbeyn, “Argentine (briv fun veg),” 1925, 4, RG 833, Papers of Peretz Hirschbein (1880-1948) 1900-1971, YIVO, New York.

56 Hansman and Skura, “Los afiches como modo de acceso al estudio del teatro ídish en la Argentina,” 88–89.

57 Hansman and Skura, “Los afiches,” 260–1.

58 Skura, “A por gauchos in chiripá. Expresiones criollistas en el teatro ídish argentino (1910–1930),” 9.

59 Seibel, “El contexto espectacular,” 17.

60 Hansman and Skura, “Los afiches,” 21.

61 Skura, “A por gauchos,” 12.

62 Rollansky, Dos yidishe gedrukte, 254.

63 Caplan, Yiddish Empire, 3.

64 Berkowitz and Henry, “Introduction,” 2–3.

65 Rollansky, Dos yidishe gedrukte, 216–7.

66 Dujovne, Una historia, 190–219.

67 Meiern-Laser, Dos yidishe shulvezn in argentine, 178.

68 Flyer, “Boy komitet farn aygenem binyen fun der sholem aleichem shul,” Laser collection, folder TSVISHO, Central Archive for the History of Jewish People, quoted in Zadoff, Historia de la educacción judía en Buenos Aires (1935–1957), 329–30.

69 Flyer, “Boy-komitet farn aygenem binyen fun der sholem aleichem shul”, Laser collection, folder TSVISHO, Central Archive of the History of Jewish People, quoted in Efraim Zadoff, Historia de la educación judía en la Argentina, 1935–1957, 329–30.

70 Dujovne, Una historia, 74. See Visacovsky, Argentinos, judíos y camaradas; Lotersztein, “The Abandonemtn of Yiddish by the Jewish-Argentine Communist ICUF,” 69–99.

71 American Jewish Yearbook, vol. 1955 (1954), quoted in Dujovne, Una historia, 65.

72 Dujovne, Una historia, 96–100.

73 See Chinski, “La correspondance de Marc Turkow et l’elaboration de la collection Dos poylishe yidntum,” 245–55; Chinski, “Un catalogo en memoria del judaísmo polaco,” 213–38.

74 Quoted in Chinski, “Ilustrar la memoria,” 14.

75 Dujovne, “The Book as a Combat Weapon.”

76 Schwartz, Survivors and Exiles, 93.

77 Malena Chinski, Lucas Fiszman, “‘A biblyotek vos felt’ [A library that is lacking],” 142.

78 Schwartz, Survivors and Exiles, 116.

79 I borrow these terms from Alice Crawford. See the introduction to The Meaning of the Library, XVII.

80 Mijl Hacohen Sinay, “Di dershaynung fun undzer zhurnal halt on,” Grodner opklangen, 1955, 1.

81 Mijl Hacohen Sinay, “Di dershaynung fun undzer zhurnal halt on,” Grodner opklangen, 1955, 2.

82 Mijl Hacohen Sinay, “Di dershaynung fun undzer zhurnal halt on,” Grodner opklangen, 1955, 1.

83 Rebecca Kobrin developed an analogous argument concerning Białystok. See Kobrin, Jewish Białystok and Its Diaspora.

84 Fanny [Rems de] Z[ak], “Shoyn di hekhste tsayt,” Grodner opklangen, 1955, 3. Fanny Zak was probably the wife of a Grodno-born Yiddish poet and journalist Avrom Zak who lived in Argentina from 1952.