Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America ed. by Malena Chinski and Alan Astro (review)

Yiddish culture has been relatively neglected in the fields of Latin American Jewish Studies; similarly, Latin America has been largely overlooked by researchers in Yiddish Studies. Lately, though, there has been an upswing of scholarship on the rich cultural legacy of Yiddish-speaking Jews in Latin America. And, as the editors of Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America observe (invoking a concept introduced by Jeffrey Shandler, in his 2006 book Adventures in Yiddishland), this growing academic interest is paralleled by the emergence of new, popular "manifestations of Yiddish postvernacularity in Latin America," (4) such as gatherings of Yiddishists, television broadcasts of klezmer concerts, and even the production of a Yiddish-Cuban opera, Hatuey.

Most of the current scholarly output on Yiddish in Latin America is in Spanish (and to a lesser extent, Portuguese), by researchers based in or originating from countries south of the Río Bravo (the Rio Grande, as it is known to North Americans). As the contents of Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America attest, some work on this subject is now being presented in English. The volume represents the exemplary collaboration between its co-editors, one of them based in Argentina and the other in the United States. Malena Chinski is a social scientist whose research interests include Holocaust commemoration within the Buenos Aires Jewish community, and Yiddish book publishing in Argentina. Alan Astro is a professor of Spanish and French literature at Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas), with a sub-specialty in Yiddish Studies. In 2003, he edited the pathbreaking literary anthology Yiddish South of the Border (University of New Mexico Press).

The Jewish experience in Latin America spans a heterogeneous geographic, national, and linguistic terrain. This vast region was host to numerous Yiddish publishing, literary, educational, and theatrical endeavors, primarily—but not exclusively—in its major urban centers. A plurality of Latin America's Jewish immigrants headed to Argentina, where large-scale immigration continued well after severe restrictions on immigration to the United States were imposed in 1924. This chronological factor means that "Argentine Jews were for the most part a generation or two closer to their immigrant roots than their U.S. counterparts," the editors write. In addition, "pride in Yiddish was often firmly installed in the consciousness of many Eastern Europe[an] Jews who arrived in Latin America in the 1920s and later." (2)

The volume is divided into three sections: 1) On the History of Yiddish in Latin America, 2) Reading Yiddish Literary Works, and 3) Individual Portraits. By discipline, the essays thus fall into the following categories: language, literature, history, and biography. Six of the ten essays center on Argentina, with the balance (one essay each) devoted to Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Uruguay. In part, this geographical disparity parallels the demographic weight and cultural heft of the Argentine Yiddish-speaking community; in addition, it likely reflects the current state of academic research on Yiddish across Latin America.

A diverse range of topics is covered in this anthology: refugee writers and artists in Argentina (Malena Chinski); the abandonment of Yiddish by the pro-Communist ICUF in Argentina (Israel Lotersztain); the literary and linguistic phenomenon of Argentine criollismo (literature that is set in the countryside) in a Yiddish novel by Mordkhe (Marcos) Alperson (Susana Skura and Lucas Fiszman); the life and death of the popular Argentine Yid-dish singer-songwriter Jevl Katz (Ariel Svarch); personal reflections about two Argentine Yiddish writers: the prominent leftist editor Pinie Katz (Javier Sinay) and Simja Sneh, journalist and author of novels about the Holocaust (Perla Sneh); Yiddish culture in Brazil (Roney Cytrynowicz); analyses of fiction by the Mexican Yiddish writer José Winiecki (Tamara Gleason Freidberg), and by the Uruguayan writers Shloyme Zytner and Elie Verblun (Alan Astro); and the Cuban-ness of Eliezer Aronowsky's Yiddish poetry (Rosa Perelmuter). The ten essays included in this anthology obviously...