Nina Sibirtzeva and Isa Kremer: Latin America in Jewish Musical Globalization

On the eve of World War II, at the end of the large wave of migration from the Old World to the Americas, two Russian Jewish artists made it to Argentina. Singer and actress Nina Sibirtzeva (née Elka Szapiro) was born in 1899 in Russia. Singer Isa Kremer was born in 1887 in Bessarabia. They arrived separately in 1938, Sibirtzeva in Buenos Aires and Kremer in Córdoba. Their lives had been similarly peripatetic; both arrived in their adulthood, and both would remain in this new land for the rest of their lives (passing away 1957 and 1956, respectively). They may, perhaps, have met at solidarity concerts, but this is uncertain. Both of them performed their European repertoires not just in Argentina but on tours that took them to many other places in the Americas, and their aesthetic choices were very much alike: polyglots, they combined disparate languages, music genres, and cultural origins in their programs. They were truly internationalists. And at the end of their careers, both opened their songbooks to Latin American music. But whereas Kremer became a star, Sibirtzeva remained unknown. In this sense, they incarnated what today we call "musical globalization"—Kremer its visible face, Sibirtzeva the hidden one.

Both left their personal papers, press clips, professional pictures, programs, song lists, and memorabilia to the care of the IWO Foundation in Buenos Aires, in boxes later rescued from the 1994 bombing of the building that hosted Argentina's Jewish community headquarters and archive. In 2008, IWO's scholar and archivist Silvia Hansnam pointed me to Nina Sibirtzeva's box when I showed up one day asking about musical archives for my doctoral dissertation, and sociologist Alejandro Dujovne, knowledgeable about Jewish cultural networks in the Americas, suggested that I take a look at the papers of his fellow cordobesa Isa Kremer.¹ I wondered why both troves of documents ended up archived at IWO—a question about legacy and transmission—and learned, thanks to historian Adriana Brodsky, that Jewish cemeteries in Argentina were established according to varied interethnic relations resulting from the relative size and might of each Jewish community (whether of Sephardic, Mizrahi, or Ashkenazi origins) and their relations with other communities in each location. Perhaps, thus, Sibirtzeva's and Kremer's (or their relatives') decisions to donate their documents to IWO, a centralizing archive of the Jewish community, tells us something both about their identities as Jewish Argentines and about the lack of a centralizing archive of Argentine musicians that could provide artists with a sense of belonging to an Argentine collective memory.

In any case, while Sibirtzeva's career went almost unnoticed, Kremer attained fame and success very young. Sibirtzeva's forgotten steps as an actress in grassroots Yiddish theater stages throughout the Pale of Settlement, Siberia, and Buenos Aires contrast with Kremer's name set alongside Tchaikovsky and Puccini in a piano maker's advertisement and printed in programs at the Philharmonic Great Hall in Berlin and Carnegie Hall in New York. The little we do know about Sibirtzeva's life, including her search for gigs to make a living in Buenos Aires, I had to extract from her correspondence with friends and acquaintances scattered by the war and the Holocaust. She was very active in the 1940s and early 1950s at the Jewish theaters of the Once and Villa Crespo neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Acting and singing were her profession and her life. But in her last years, without a stable job or income, her letters show her asking in vain for opportunities, beyond the dwindling market for Yiddish musical theater in Buenos Aires, at the tiny or already packed ones of New York, Mexico City, Paris, and Tel Aviv.

In contrast, Kremer's stardom appears in the records of the grand public's applause from Moscow (where she was trained as a soprano) to Istanbul, Paris, and London, including praise from the likes of Albert Einstein, and performing on Argentina's mainstream radio. Kremer's first husband was the editor of the Odessa News, and after divorcing him, she married...