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

Splendor, Decline, and Rediscovery of Yiddish in Latin America, edited by Malena Chinski and Alan Astro, is a scholarly labor of love. The contributors comprise an international group of historians, archivists, literary scholars, and journalists, who in some cases are also descendants of their very subjects. The current volume provides a different perspective than Alan Astro's 2003 anthology of selections from Yiddish works translated for an English-speaking audience, who might not have considered that there are Jews in [name the Latin American or Caribbean country], or Eliahu Toker's El ídish es también Latinoamérica, published the same year for a Spanish-speaking public. Transnational in scope and authorship, spanning Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cuba, the volume illustrates the fruits of a new generation of scholarship on Yiddish culture in Latin America. Of course, Ashkenazi immigration comprises but one piece of Jewish transatlantic migration at the turn of the twentieth century. However, the present volume provides an important contribution not only to Ashkenazi Jewish studies, but also to the fields of diaspora studies, migration studies, history, and literature.

As a cultural historian, I appreciate the book's organization into three sections: historical, literary, and biographical, with the latter focused on key cultural figures. Of special interest was the opening chapter on Brazil, itself a refreshing presentation whereby the Portuguese-speaking country is not relegated to an afterthought in an often Spanish-centered view of the continent. Written by Roney Cytrynowicz, who served as the director of document collections at the Brazilian Jewish Historical Archive for over fifteen years, the chapter provides a study of the presence of Yiddish within the country that received 10% of Eastern European Jewish migrants in the 1920s. While the chapter notes the lesser productivity and vibrancy of Yiddish in Brazil in comparison to its neighboring Argentina, its placement reflects the country's importance within the region in receiving Jewish immigrants and offers a reflection on diversity and assimilation through the lens of Yiddish proliferation. At the same time, the chapter connects the individuals who left Poland for Brazil in the interwar period to those who remained, including the relationship between immigrant Meir Kucinski and Emmanuel Ringelblum, storied leader of the clandestine Oyneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw ghetto. Notable also in Cytrynowicz's chapter is the prominence of a woman, Rosa Palantik, who was celebrated as much in her native Brazil as in Montreal and Israel. Gender diversity is generally absent topically in the rest of the volume, either within historical accounts, literary subjects or cultural figures, notwithstanding the matter of sex trafficking. While this broader deficit may be partly due to a historic gender bias, as Cytrynowicz demonstrates, it should have been addressed critically by the editors and contributors alike.

Committed to unveiling less-known aspects of Yiddish life in the region, Tamara Gleason Freidberg shows through a close study of José Winiecki's Baginen that sex trafficking and Jewish agricultural settlements were significant—if less renowned—features of Jewish immigrant life in Mexico. Malena Chinski provides an insightful study that questions narrative versus reality in the preservation of a vibrant Yiddish culture in Argentina, assessing the case of community sponsorship of a group of Yiddish Polish figures who are revealed to be more war-torn refugees than the celebrated luminary cultural ambassadors so presented. Among the overall collection's many strengths is a nuanced understanding of the evolution and institutionalization of Yiddish within Latin America in relation to evolving transnational historical contexts. For example, Israel Lotersztain's chapter on the ICUF (Idisher Cultur Farband), a socialist Argentine Yiddish institution, positions the evolution of Yiddish in Buenos Aires within the context of local Jewish institutional politics and relative to an evolving relationship with Israel and the Soviet Union at pivotal times in these states' own histories.

The historical contributions dovetail nicely with literary studies that consider language in terms of a...