The Jewish Presence in Argentine Literature

Abstract

Jews have been a presence in Jewish-Argentine literature since the beginning of independent life in the 1810s. At the beginning of the twentieth century a specifically Jewish literature—written by Jews, with Jewish characters, Jewish themes, references to Jewish languages—emerged and has been going strong since then. If we were to draw a graph of Argentine Jewish literature, we would see a glorious beginning with the publication of Los gauchos judíos in 1910, the appearance of Jewish periodicals, and the legitimation granted by the fascination of Borges with Jewish topics and Jewish books. A strong tradition of Jewish periodicals and Yiddish theater frame the experience of lettered Jewish production in the first half of the twentieth century. The second part of the twentieth century until the present would be represented by a proliferation of genres, authors, and audiences. The arc of Jewish literature in Argentina starts with massive immigration and access to publication and is vibrant now with a mostly optimistic version of Jewishness as particularism in a global understanding of difference. I start this chapter focusing on Alberto Gerchunoff´s Los gauchos judíos [The Jewish Gauchos] as the foundational text of Jewish-Argentine literature (and of modern Jewish literature in Spanish) and the moment of massive immigration. I then treat Jorge Luis Borges as a contrapunctual figure, a canonical writer who engages with transnational Jewish literatures and draws strategies from Jewish reading and writing to devise his own literary models. I then move to the 1950s and 1960s to examine the impact of the Shoah on Argentine Jewish literature focusing on playwright Germán Rozenmacher and in the world of Yiddish and Ladino publishing. Tamara Kamenszain is subsequently described as an author that espouses “reluctant belonging,” someone who has engaged with different subjects and different styles but never ventures very far away from Jewishness. The third part treats the use of the Holocaust metaphorically to discuss state terrorism in the works of Reina Roffé and Sergio Chejfec. I conclude with a reflection on contemporary writing. My discussion, albeit brief, includes a variety of literary genres such as novels, short-stories, plays and personal writing. This chapter cannot account for the prolific and diverse production of writing that can be considered Jewish. Yet by focusing on certain key moments, I hope to provide a glimpse into the Jewish presence in Argentine literature.