UC Berkeley

My dissertation argues for a joint literary historiography of Yiddish and Spanish texts within Jewish Argentine literature. I situate my work within the existing (and marginalized) corpora of literary criticism for Jewish Argentine literature in Spanish and Yiddish, which have historically remained isolated from each other. I propose a bilingual Yiddish/Spanish canon for Jewish Argentine literature that is self-critical from its inception. I choose “origins,” “others,” and “afterlives” both as thematic and symbolic markers within the literature that I study, but also as phrases that shape a literary canon itself. By considering the figurative, translational, and intertextual strategies that are used complicate these phrases, I destabilize any easy or singular understanding of what it means to represent Jewish-Argentine literature and its communities.Establishing an originary, foundational, or first presence is paramount to the authority of literary canons and their claims to representation. My dissertation begins with a study of the so-called originary works of Jewish Argentine literature in Spanish and Yiddish respectively: The celebrated (and critiqued) Los Gauchos Judíos (1910) and the forgotten Yiddish-language memoir of Mordechai Alpersohn (an agricultural colonist; first volume published in 1922). I revisit these works, which have never been studied comparatively, and discuss the contested nature of beginnings themselves. I suggest that Gerchunoff’s translations, misquotations, and anachronisms yield an intertextual collage that fictionalizes Jewish-Argentine life on the pampas; close reading thus renders the erasure that the work performs in order to be first. In the Yiddish memoir, I show that Alpersohn and his fellow agricultural colonists use the act of translation to domesticate what is foreign to them. “Home” for the colonists is the Jewish discursive universe (described by Benjamin Harshav in The Meaning of Yiddish) that contains so many other exiles within it. In fact, it is the oppositional constructs of “home” and “exile” themselves that wander in both of these works, which in turn contests the premise of autochthonous literature itself and the category of a foundational or first work. The next chapter of my dissertation examines “Others;” in particular, the literary treatment of the figure of the prostitute in the Yiddish play “Ibergus” by Leyb Malakh and the book of poems Versos de Una … by the pseudonymous Clara Beter (both works were published in 1926). In both works, the prostitute asserts that she belongs at once to everyone and to no one, and this condition makes her an excellent metaphor for metaphor itself. The prostitute is employed both as a metaphor for other phenomena, and also shrouded in figurative language. This dual use of prostituion as a source and target metaphor reveals a complex and ever-shifting terrain upon which supposedly stable identity categories are built. I use the word “prostitute” instead of “sex worker” to reinforce the degree to which these works deal with their characters as tropes, but I also identify the way that prostitutes weave in and out of positions of limited agency. The last chapter of my dissertation examines the notion of literary afterlives in Yiddish literature, especially in the Argentina-focused volumes of the Musterverk fun Der Yidisher Literatur (Model Works of Yiddish Literature, 1957¬–1984) edited by Shmuel Rollanski. I discuss the work of three different writers featured in the Musterverk—namely, Avrom Moshkovitsh, Nahon Millertski, and Mimi Pinzón. I consider the way that excerption, translation, biographical discussion, and criticism all have a profound influence on our reception of both the pieces and the authors themselves. Critical sources rely heavily on figurative language to evoke supposedly literal ends and afterlives, and the critical sources themselves participate in shaping the end and afterlives of their subjects.