Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing (review)

The Jewish presence in Latin American literature, a topic that for a long time was comparatively neglected, has in recent years been accorded an increasing level of critical attention. Works by several Spanish- and Portuguese-language authors, including Alberto Gerchunoff (Argentina), Isaac Goldemberg (Peru), and Moacyr Scliar (Brazil), have come to be considered minor classics, and their Jewish specificity is readily apparent to any reader. All the same, the marginality of Jewish writers south of the Rio Grande is underscored by their status as members of a tiny religious minority in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic environment.

Yiddish, the ancestral language of most of today's Latin American Jewish authors, was both a bridge connecting their Central and Eastern European forebears with the wider Jewish world and a fortress behind whose walls they might utter their secrets without fear of being overheard. As Alan Astro observes in the new anthology, Yiddish South of the Border, use of Yiddish enabled authors "to air their grievances" freely (p. 7), unhindered by the apologetic agendas that tended to color much Jewish writing in Spanish and Portuguese. Mame-loshn also served as an impermeable barrier to subsequent generations, and its literary legacy is virtually unknown to today's readers.

Indeed, students of Latin American Jewry today are largely cut off from the primary sources of decades past—the Yiddish newspapers, anthologies, novels, poems, and plays that once proliferated throughout that region. Yet just a few decades ago, many of those works were read and performed far beyond the boundaries of the Latin American republics. Even now, any respectable Yiddish library contains volumes belonging to Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry) and Musterverk fun der yidisher literature (Masterworks of Yiddish Literature), two important series emanating from Buenos Aires after World War II.

New Mexico University Press has performed an invaluable service by publishing translations from Spanish and Portuguese as part of the ongoing series that is edited by Ilan Stavans, Jewish Latin America. Now these works have been joined by a noteworthy addition, Yiddish South of the Border. This sampler contains short stories, poems, memoir excerpts, journalistic reportages, and dramatic scenes by thirty individual authors representing seven Latin American countries, along with San Antonio, Texas. As Astro notes in his introduction, it "is the first anthology ever of translations of Latin American Yiddish works into English" (p. 2); moreover, very few such anthologies exist in Spanish and none at all in Portuguese.

The extensive corpus of Latin American Yiddish writing that is surveyed here both reflects the experiences of Jewish immigrants and travelers to countries in that specific region and is "of a piece with its counterparts elsewhere." Astro summarizes the key themes as "proletarianism, peddling and whoremongering," with a dash of "Jewish farming" thrown in for good measure (p. 6). The works that he has selected reflect both the "astonishing particularities" of the Latin American Jewish experience and those aspects that they share with Yiddish literary creativity elsewhere.

Among the anthology's most striking literary selections are Aaron Zeitlin's poem, "The Gallego," in which he contemplates the legacy of the Inquisition; "An Engagement Dinner," Rosa Palatnik's setting of middle-class Brazilian Jewish life in the Fifties; and the Mexican writer Meir Corona's mildly satirical humoresque "Quite a Bank." Pinye Wald's "Nightmare" is a chilling and riveting memoir of the "Tragic Week" of January 1919, when the Argentine government ruthlessly suppressed—often with antisemitic overtones—a series of labor demonstrations and strikes. These examples hint at the wealth of Yiddish works from Latin America that still await their translators and readers.

Today's English-speaking reader is likely to be drawn less to narratives bearing a heavy-handed, self-consciously proletarian impress (e.g., "In Opposite Directions," by Hirsh Bloshtein) than to those evoking a sense of the exotic. Perhaps the outstanding example of this is Pinkhes Berniker's story "Jes...