Ilustrar la memoria: las imágenes de tapa de la colección Dos poylishe yidntum (El judaísmo polaco), Buenos Aires, 1946-1966

Abstract

In 1946 the Central Union of Polish Jews in Argentina began publishing a Yiddish book collection entitled Dos poylishe yidntum, under the editorship of Marc Turkow. The aim of the series was to pay homage to Polish Jewry-the largest ethnonational collective victim of the Nazi genocide. This paper focuses on a specific paratext: the book cover, which can be understood as constituting the "faces" of the hundred and seventy-five volumes of the collection throughout its two decades of publication. Three dimensions within time are analyzed in the selection of images presented. First, the "time of the artist" corresponds to the years of publication. In this section I try to reconstruct the trajectories of the more or less anonymous immigrant illustrators who created these works of art. Second, the "time of representation" relates to the different characteristic moments in the history of Polish Jews that are condensed into the illustrations. In this section I interpret the images as visual narrative units that enable us to understand the attempts made in the post-war years to integrate the years of destruction into an extended narrative. Third, "the time of interpretation" corresponds to our present. In this final section I consider the images as potential vehicles of Polish Jewish cultural memory.