Global Form and Fantasy in Yiddish Literary Culture: Visions from Mexico City and Buenos Aires

Abstract

This study examines the ways that the dispersed migratory life of East European Jews in the first half of the twentieth century informed new discourses and practices of literature on a world scale, advancing a spatial paradigm in the study of Yiddish literature, more usually governed by periodization around major historical events. More specifically, the study marshals neglected literary works, historic periodicals and archival material to show, through close reading and contextual analysis, how writers, editors and critics imagined and enacted the expanding boundaries of Yiddish literary culture as it came to span Eastern Europe and the Americas in the interwar period. The study places particular emphasis on the perspectives of immigrant writers Yankev Glantz and Yankev Botoshansky, whose careers in Mexico City and Buenos Aires respectively help to make visible strategies and processes of cross-regional mediation between new peripheral Yiddish cultural sites at different scales and the established prestige centers of Warsaw and New York City. By tracing cultural circuits that took shape in newspapers and literary journals, and through travel writing, lyric and epic poetry, popular fiction and criticism, the study reveals patterns of circulation and representation occluded by a prevailing focus on Yiddish high modernism, and on this basis advances an understanding of world literature predicated not on enduring circulation and cross-cultural prestige, but on patterns of representation, mediation and connectivity among disparate geo-cultural coordinates.

The introduction considers how influential Yiddish editors and critics in New York and Warsaw conceived of their literature’s expanding geography as a world domain, and outlines a conceptual frame that brings facets of this discourse into dialog with contemporary terms in the study of world literature. Chapter 1 examines the role of the Buenos Aires daily newspaper Di prese and its editors in the consolidation of Argentina as a Yiddish cultural periphery through travel and publication in Warsaw and New York. Chapter 2 presents a reading of Yankev Botoshansky’s newspaper novel Buenos Ayres in the context of the errant intercontinental mobility of its characters and of the novel itself in the Yiddish daily press. Chapter 3 shows how a durable triangulation of Yiddish poetry, Soviet affinity and visual art in Mexico City obtained distinct and contradictory forms of visibility in the work of immigrant poets. Chapter 4 traces the development of an expansive Hispanic spatial and cultural-historical sensibility in the poetry of Yankev Glantz, culminating in the long poem Kristoval Kolon (Christopher Columbus).