Anxieties of Space and Place: Geographies of Yiddish Literature in a Postwar World

• In Event: Post-Holocaust Yiddish Publishing and Theater

Abstract

Although home to a historically vibrant Yiddish-speaking Jewish community, Argentina's unique relationship to Yiddish literature remains relatively understudied. Yiddish scholarship has only recently looked with interest to Latin America, acknowledging Buenos Aires as a major postwar Yiddish cultural center. But what does it mean to have achieved this designation, and with such a qualifier?
This paper explores the anxieties of identifying and labeling spaces of the postwar Yiddish world, particularly in light of the displacement of previously established geographic centers and peripheries.
I examine the hundred-volume Musterverk anthology (1957-1984), published by the Buenos Aires Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (IWO) and edited by the prominent Yiddish intellectual Samuel Rollansky. Recent scholarship by Malena Chinski and Lucas Fiszman focuses on the didactic role that the anthology sought to play as a collection that both attempted to contain and demonstrate the breadth of Yiddish literature, filling a perceived gap in school and personal libraries. However, the ways in which the Musterverk anthology delineates cultural and geographic changes in the contours of the postwar Yiddish world remain unexplored. In this respect, focusing on the implicit connections communicated by the medium and the hierarchies that such grouping reifies, this paper argues that the act of anthologizing serves as a world-building gesture. I assert that Musterverk represents an attempt at canon-creation with a twofold function. First, it solidifies a final rupture between Europe and the “New World” by memorializing European Yiddish literature in its collection and re-publication in discrete volumes. And second, in Musterverk’s gesture toward wide geographical representation—seen in volumes with a diverse spread, including Israel, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, and Uruguay— it attempts to define new centers and peripheries of the postwar Yiddish world.
Not only is Musterverk a project of situating Yiddish literature among other world literatures, but this master anthology project delineates the haunted silhouette of the postwar Yiddish world, asserting the prominence of Buenos Aires at the center of this undertaking.

Author

• Rachelle Grossman, Harvard University