The Integration of Jews in Argentina

The Jewish intelligentsia in Argentina is as visible today as it was in Germany before Hitler. In the liberal professions, in the press, in university life, in literature and the arts, the Jews seem to be everywhere. This did not prevent the Argentine police, linked to Iranian terrorists, from preparing the attack on the AMIA¹ — the worst attack on a Jewish target since the Second World War. The Jews are still not completely at home in Argentina, despite the enormous progress observed since the era of the first immigrants. The appearance of Jews in Argentine cultural life, in particular, followed a complicated and ambiguous process. Their integration into the literature of a strongly Catholic country such as Argentina is a fascinating subject. We spoke about it with Susanna Poch, a Jewish Argentine scholar who wrote her thesis on this theme at the University of Buenos Aires, and who teaches today at the University of Montevideo, where she pursues her research.

For Susanna Poch, Argentine Jewish literature is a very rich domain that comprises all sorts of writers. However, three great names symbolize three different currents in the intellectual evolution of the Jews of Argentina and their integration into the country’s culture: Alberto Gerchunoff (1884–1950), Samuel Eichelbaum (1894–1967), and César Tiempo (1906–1980).

Gerchunoff began his literary career in 1910, at the moment when Argentina was celebrating its century of independence, with a collection of short stories about the Jews who had become farmers and cowboys. He gave the work a title full of defiance: Los gauchos judíos (The Jewish Gauchos), to signify that Jews could be as Argentine as the atypical lads of the pampas, describing an ideal world where the Jews had found a new promised land. According to him, the Jews could become full-fledged Argentines while preserving their own cultural identity. But within the framework of Argentine literature, Gerchunoff brought his own universe of original fiction, but also his ideology. He set about writing Spanish — not the language of the street, but the classical language of Spain. Other cultural currents, such as the “hispanismo” of Manuel Gálvez and the “indigenismo” of Ricardo Rojas, sought the country’s cultural roots among the Spanish conquerors and the vanquished Indians, but Gerchunoff discovered another source of Argentine culture in the most universal and the most Jewish book that exists: the Bible. Yet biblical inspiration was not enough. It had to be preserved in the purest Spanish. Other writers, such as Borges, expressed their disagreement: the language of the Argentines possessed its own values. Writing in a language that no one spoke any longer made no sense.

But thanks to his pure and “ultra-Hispanic” Spanish, Gerchunoff conquered his place in Argentine letters. Spanish is a language endowed with a long Jewish tradition: such was his argument. Our Jewish ancestors in Spain spoke it while Argentina did not yet exist. Gerchunoff sincerely believed in integration and wrote that the day he had obtained his Argentine citizenship had been the happiest of his life. During the notorious “Semana trágica” (Tragic Week) of 1919 — the first “pogrom” organized in Latin America by right-wing groups against the real and fictitious anarchists of Buenos Aires — Gerchunoff did not write a word. But he changed his position during the thirties. He could no longer ignore the antisemitism widely diffused among the Argentine ruling classes. He organized a tribute to Heinrich Heine, symbol of Jewish resistance to tyranny, and did not hesitate to sharply criticize the Nazi regime in Germany — a courageous attitude considering the supposedly “neutral” political climate that reigned in Argentina. In 1945, he wrote an essay that became famous, “A Man’s View of the War,” in which he very openly proclaimed his Jewishness — a Jewishness that no longer sought integration into Argentine tradition and culture. Toward the end of his life he forgot the dreams of his youth. He devoted the last three years of his life to the Zionist struggles. He even played a very active role in the work of the Keren Hayesod. The optimistic message of Los gauchos judíos, seized with exaltation as they sing the Argentine anthem, had been forgotten. Political realities denied it too violently.

Samuel Eichelbaum’s position was very different. Unlike Gerchunoff, he had no ideological pretensions and did not seek to play the role of ambassador of the Jewish community in Argentine cultural life. He felt no need to transmit ideological messages about the integration of the Jewish community. In fact, he was an assimilated Jew who loved Argentine popular culture and felt at ease within it. Eichelbaum wrote neither articles nor essays, like Gerchunoff, but plays. Perhaps no other Argentine writer depicted popular characters as faithfully as Eichelbaum in his successful plays El hombre de la esquina rosada (The Man on the Pink Street Corner) and Un guapo del 900 (A Tough Guy of the 1900s). But Eichelbaum also wrote two plays on Jewish subjects, in 1926: El judío Aarón (The Jew Aaron) and Nadie la conoció nunca (No One Ever Knew Her), the first evoking the story of an idealistic Jewish colonist who wished to share the profits among all the members of the colony, Jews and non-Jews; the other concerned a Jewish prostitute who had become the mistress of an Argentine “señorito” (a young member of the upper bourgeoisie) who had taken part in the antisemitic riots of the “Semana trágica” of 1919, in which his father had been killed. In both plays it appears that Jewish integration in Argentina is not easy. It can constitute a painful, distressing, and even tragic process.

The case of César Tiempo was even more conflicted than that of Eichelbaum. His real name was Israel Zeitlin, and in erasing it he wanted, in a certain way, to forget his heritage. But he was incapable of it. His Jewishness was stronger than his desire to rid himself of his identity. Like Gerchunoff, he earned his living as a journalist; like Eichelbaum, he was strongly imbued with Argentine popular culture. Yet his poetry dealt essentially with the Jewish ideal of the Shabbat, for him a symbol of purity, of spirituality, of human dignity. In his own way, César Tiempo idealized the Jewish ghetto. Sometimes he attacked the rich and unfeeling Jews: thus in his powerful poem on the death of Bialik, in 1934. In his books of poetry on the Shabbat, he created an ideal Jewish world. But he held contradictory attitudes: in 1935, he drew up a violent indictment of the famous writer Hugo Wast, who was then the prestigious director of the National Library… and the most venomous antisemitic pamphleteer in Argentina; but two years later he wrote the play Pan criollo (Creole Bread), in which he presented mixed marriage as the best way to put an end to the Jewish problem. He was acclaimed by the Argentine nationalists and antisemites… and severely criticized by the Jewish community. Unlike Gerchunoff, César Tiempo never returned to the bosom of the community. Until his death, he remained the wandering Jew of Argentine letters.

The new generations of Argentine Jewish writers are living through better times. For example, Susanna Poch sees in Marcos Aguinis an improved version of the Jewish ambassador of Argentine letters that Gerchunoff was; he writes much more freely than the latter, as much on Jewish subjects as on specifically Argentine themes. Yet this generation bears a burden that did not weigh on its elders. How to write after the attacks against the Israeli embassy and the AMIA? An unprecedented, painful dilemma, impossible to resolve.

(Translated by Anne Rabinovitch)

Notes