Global Form and Fantasy in Yiddish Literary Culture: Visions from Mexico City and Buenos Aires by William Gertz Runyan A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in the University of Michigan 2019 Doctoral Committee: Professor Mikhail Krutikov, Chair Professor Tomoko Masuzawa Professor Anita Norich Professor Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, University of Chicago William Gertz Runyan [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3955-1574 © William Gertz Runyan 2019 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my dissertation committee members Tomoko Masuzawa, Anita Norich, Mauricio Tenorio and foremost Misha Krutikov. I also wish to thank: The Department of Comparative Literature, the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan for providing the frameworks and the resources to complete this research. The Social Science Research Council for the International Dissertation Research Fellowship that enabled my work in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Tamara Gleason Freidberg for our readings and exchanges in Coyoacán and beyond. Margo and Susana Glantz for speaking with me about their father. Michael Pifer for the writing sessions and always illuminating observations. Jason Wagner for the vegetables and the conversations about Yiddish poetry. Carrie Wood for her expert note taking and friendship. Suphak Chawla, Amr Kamal, Başak Çandar, Chris Meade, Olga Greco, Shira Schwartz and Sara Garibova for providing a sense of community. Leyenkrayz regulars past and present for the lively readings over the years. This dissertation would not have come to fruition without the support of my family, not least my mother who assisted with formatting. Nor would I have completed the work when I did without the encouragement and companionship of Sara Katz. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ ii Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction: THE GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF YIDDISH LITERARY CULTURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ............ 1 Part l: The View from Buenos Aires .............................................................................................. 17 Chapter 1 BUENOS AIRES BETWEEN PERIPHERY AND CENTER ................................................ 26 Chapter 2 BUENOS AYRES, A GLOBAL YIDDISH NOVEL .......................................................... 67 Part II: The View from Mexico City ............................................................................................. 101 Chapter 3 MEXICO CITY AT THE THRESHOLD OF YIDDISH CULTURE ....................................... 106 Chapter 4 YIDDISH POETRY BETWEEN SEPHARAD AND THE NEW WORLD .............................. 138 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 166 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 172 iii 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 iv 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). v Introduction: THE GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF YIDDISH LITERARY CULTURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE YIDDISH EMPIRE TO COME In my mind it’s a long way from here to South Africa, as is really the case. And yet I receive the journal Dorem Afrike (South Africa), so I feel that the country is just at the border of the United States, and then arrives Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain) from the State of Israel, Davke (Precisely) from Argentina, Foroys (Onward) from Mexico, Frayland (Freeland) from France or Bleter far geshikhte (Historical Pages) from Poland; all these spheres of Jewish life grow near, as if they were part of North America. This I would dub the cultural collapsing of distance (kfitses-haderekh), where there are no longer any oceans, any borders, but Yiddishland is one great territory. I surmise that the bond between Babylonia and the Land of Israel some 1800 years ago must have been of this kind.1 The author of the preceding words, Polish-born, Montreal raised and Harvard minted psychologist Abraham Aaron Roback (1890-1965), counts among the twentieth century’s most avid observers of Yiddish print culture. For decades, publications from all corners of the world 1 “Far mir iz Dorem Afrike mi yodea vi vayt, vi der emes iz. Kumt mir ober on der zhurnal Dorem Afrike, azoy fil ikh, vi dos land iz mamesh ba di grenets fun di Fareynikte Shtatn, un vider kumt on Di goldene keyt fun Medines- Yisroel, Davke fun Argentine, Foroys fun Meksike, Frayland fun Frankraykh oder Bleter far geshikhte fun Poyln, vern ot di yeshoyvim noent, vi zey voltn geven a teyl fun Tsofn Amerike. Ot dos volt ikh ongerufn kultureler kfitses haderekh, vu es zenen mer nisht faran keyn yamen, keyn grenetsn, nor Yidishland iz eyn groyse teriyorye. Ikh bin meshaer az der band tsvishn Bovl un E’Y hot gemuzt zayn aza mit a vosere 1800 yor tsurik.” A. A. Roback, Di imperye yidish (Mexico: Shloyme Mendelson Fond, 1958), 83. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1 arrived to his residence in Cambridge, MA, as attested by the countless address labels that populate the Yiddish collection of Harvard’s library, built largely by Roback’s voluntary effort. Not only a reader of these far-flung publications, at times he also contributed to them, and may also be found showcasing the fruit of his labor in a Spanish-language Jewish journal edited in Buenos Aires, for whose audience he describes fifty years of collected Yiddish material from and about Argentina.2 Only in 1958, however, after authoring diverse popular and scholarly English- language tomes on psychology and Jewish culture, did he fulfill a longstanding wish to publish a book in his mother tongue, fittingly subsidized by a Yiddish cultural organization in Mexico City. Its title: Di imperye yidish (The Empire of Yiddish). In this book, comprised of a series of interrelated articles and essays previously published in a New York Yiddish newspaper, Roback advances his vision for Yiddish culture’s continuing survival (kiyem), a perennial subject of debate and speculation that in the wake of the Holocaust tended to elicit considerable pessimism. In contrast to a prevailing narrative of irrevocable decline (yeride), Roback finds cause for optimism in the unabated production of Yiddish newspapers, journals and books on six continents, and highlights the scores of compelling writers active across France, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, England, Germany, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Holland, South Africa and Australia—to say nothing of those in the United States, Israel