Yiddish Culture After the Shoah: Refugee Writers and Artists as “Fresh Creative Energies” for Buenos Aires (original) (raw)
Survivors and exiles – Yiddish culture after the Holocaust
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2016
Jan Schwarz, a professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University in Sweden, sets out in this book to "present a multi-faceted picture of a transnational Yiddish culture" (3) that grew out of the near complete annihilation of its speakers during the Holocaust. Focusing on the years 1945-1971, Schwarz argues against the common portrayal of Yiddish as being in a state of "irreversible decline and extinction" during these postwar years, instead claiming that its "cultural leaders emphasized consolidation and continuity. .. completing historical and cultural projects that in some cases had been initiated during the war" (7). He symbolically derives these questions and goals from the poem "Yiddish" by Avrom Sutzkever, written in 1948: "Where will the language go down? / Maybe at the Western Wall? / If so, I shall come there, come, / Open my mouth, / And like a lion / Garbed in fiery scarlet, / I shall swallow the language as it sets. / And wake all the generations with my roar!" (3). Sutzkever (1913-2010) was born in Eastern Europe, survived the Holocaust via the Soviet Union, and settled in the Land of Israel in 1947 prior to the state's establishment. Two-thirds of his life were spent in Israel, and it is there that the core of his literary work was produced. Schwarz's fascinating recount of Sutzkever's works in chapter 1, "Vilna," continues the trend of past scholars by strongly deemphasizing Sutzkever's "Israeliness" and highlighting instead his "European" Holocaust poetry. However, even the poem, "Yiddish," which serves as the book's starting point, portrays a clash between the refugee Yiddish poet and the Land of Israel, both as symbolic and physical reality. Unfortunately, the story of this clash and the creation of Yiddish Israeli culture after the Holocaust is not a part of Schwarz's book. This omission equally applies to his chapter devoted to another Yiddish writer who also survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel, Leib Rochman (1918-1978). But more broadly, it speaks to the need for a dual outlook on Yiddish culture, both through the transnational framework, which Schwarz emphasizes, and also via the local-national perspective. Schwarz acknowledges the latter when he deals with the influential role that Yiddish American culture had within the American and the Jewish-American cultural spheres. Chapter 3 tells the story of Rochman's memoirs. Schwarz writes that the memoir genre was "the main feature of the Yiddish cultural world, in the af
Historia Crítica, 2021
Objective/Context: This article examines the role of translators as agents and translation as a mediating strategy to establish Jewish-Argentine identities in Argentina, from the rise of Nazism until the end of the Second World War. It presents the case study of Jewish-Russian immigrant Salomón Resnick and his publishing project Judaica (1933-1946). The journal translated Jewish literary works to positively influence the opinions of Argentine intellectual elites about Jews, while aiding in the construction of Spanish-language Jewish-Argentine identities and culture. Methodology: A qualitative textual analysis of articles and works of fiction, original pieces and works translated by Judaica, as well as reviews of translated books of Yiddish literature by Argentine literary critics. These primary sources are interpreted vis-à-vis the global and local sociopolitical contexts to identify motives, editorial choices, and reception. Originality: This article adds to the historiography of R...
Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust by Jan Schwarz
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2016
Jan Schwarz, a professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University in Sweden, sets out in this book to "present a multi-faceted picture of a transnational Yiddish culture" (3) that grew out of the near complete annihilation of its speakers during the Holocaust. Focusing on the years 1945-1971, Schwarz argues against the common portrayal of Yiddish as being in a state of "irreversible decline and extinction" during these postwar years, instead claiming that its "cultural leaders emphasized consolidation and continuity. .. completing historical and cultural projects that in some cases had been initiated during the war" (7). He symbolically derives these questions and goals from the poem "Yiddish" by Avrom Sutzkever, written in 1948: "Where will the language go down? / Maybe at the Western Wall? / If so, I shall come there, come, / Open my mouth, / And like a lion / Garbed in fiery scarlet, / I shall swallow the language as it sets. / And wake all the generations with my roar!" (3). Sutzkever (1913-2010) was born in Eastern Europe, survived the Holocaust via the Soviet Union, and settled in the Land of Israel in 1947 prior to the state's establishment. Two-thirds of his life were spent in Israel, and it is there that the core of his literary work was produced. Schwarz's fascinating recount of Sutzkever's works in chapter 1, "Vilna," continues the trend of past scholars by strongly deemphasizing Sutzkever's "Israeliness" and highlighting instead his "European" Holocaust poetry. However, even the poem, "Yiddish," which serves as the book's starting point, portrays a clash between the refugee Yiddish poet and the Land of Israel, both as symbolic and physical reality. Unfortunately, the story of this clash and the creation of Yiddish Israeli culture after the Holocaust is not a part of Schwarz's book. This omission equally applies to his chapter devoted to another Yiddish writer who also survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel, Leib Rochman (1918-1978). But more broadly, it speaks to the need for a dual outlook on Yiddish culture, both through the transnational framework, which Schwarz emphasizes, and also via the local-national perspective. Schwarz acknowledges the latter when he deals with the influential role that Yiddish American culture had within the American and the Jewish-American cultural spheres. Chapter 3 tells the story of Rochman's memoirs. Schwarz writes that the memoir genre was "the main feature of the Yiddish cultural world, in the af
‘A Rescued Jewish Young Lady Comes’: Malka Owsiany’s Reception and Testimony in Buenos Aires
Promised Lands North and South: Jewish Argentina and Jewish Canada Compared, 2024
In mid-November 1945 thousands of Jews in Buenos Aires met a Holocaust survivor for the fijirst time. Her name was Malka Owsiany (1925-2005), a nineteen-year-old woman from Raków, a Polish town located in the Kielce district. Owsiany obtained a visa to join her father and two siblings in Argentina, all of whom had settled in the country since before the war.1 Soon after her arrival, she was invited to speak briefly at a Jewish event aimed at fundraising to help Holocaust survivors in Europe. Her name would become well known among the global Yiddish-speaking readership, thanks to the publication of her story by the prestigious Warsaw-born writer and cultural leader Marc Turkow (1904-85), who had settled in Argentina in 1939.2 First serialized in the Buenos Aires Yiddish daily Di Idishe Tsaytung as "Malke Ovshyani dertseylt"3 (Malka Owsiany recounts), Owsiany's complete testimony was then published in March 1946 as Malke Ovshyani dertseylt… Khronik fun undzer tsayt (Malka
Structuring Jewish Buenos Aires at the end of the long nineteenth century
A common Jewish Argentine creation story begins in 1889, with 824 Russian Jews disembarking in Buenos Aires and ushering in three decades of massive Jewish migration to that city. In six key themes, this article expands the parameters of that story chronologically, spatially, culturally, and politically. It focuses on the Jewish gaucho (skilled horseman) as an iconic representation of the intersections of Jewish and non-Jewish Buenos Aires; the meanings of neighborhood; the tragedy of 'white slavery'; cultural institutions; Sephardic porteños (Buenos Aires residents); and the Jewish anarchists and socialists.
Outcasts Within: Zionist Yiddish Literature in Pre-State Palestine
Jewish Social Studies, 2001
I n the new Zionist society that was evolving in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century, the emerging dominant Hebrew culture controlled the public stage. The disparaging term "jargon" used by early Jewish and non-Jewish proponents of the Enlightenment-including Yiddish-speakers themselves-continued to denote Yiddish, the mother-tongue that was perceived as an integral part of the negative character of the diasporic Jew. Yiddish, the language and emblem of the Diaspora, had to be abandoned in favor of Hebrew, the once and future language. The mainstream culture created a historiography that suppressed the Yiddish culture imported into Palestine with the pioneers who were nurtured in it. However, not only did this culture continue to survive but it also produced significant original work. The selective creation of a new national identity, emblematized by Hebrew, was fraught with tensions. Although the ruling British Mandate authority designated Hebrew as an official language of Palestine in 1923, a large proportion of the Yishuv's population (the new Zionist community) considered Yiddish their language and defined themselves as ignorant of Hebrew. Censuses of Jewish workers in Palestine carried out by the Histadrut (the Jewish Labor Federation) in the 1920s show that the percentage of Jews who reported that they knew Hebrew had actually dropped from 91.6 percent in 1922 to 85 percent in 1926. 1 Roberto Bachi attributes this drop to the massive immigration from Poland, in particular, in the wave known as the Fourth Aliya (1924-28). Even more intriguing than the statistic itself is Bachi's footnote. He remarks that "the data of the two official censuses of 1922 and 1931