Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.015 June 11, 1996 1) Buenos Aires, two years after the bombing (Zachary Baker) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 22:43:53 -0500 (EST) From: yivo1@metgate.metro.org Subject: Buenos Aires, two years after the bombing (Part 2) In Part 1 of this posting I described the art restoration project that brought our small delegation (Brad Berman, of the Judah L. Magnes Museum, Jim Bernstein, an art conservator from San Francisco, and me) to Buenos Aires at the end of May 1996, in connection with the Argentine YIVO's (IWO) collection of paintings by the Polish Jewish artist Maurice Minkowski. Part 2 is devoted primarily to a North American tourist's impressions of Yiddish (and Jewish) Buenos Aires. First of all, I should preface this section by stating that during both this visit and my previous one (November 1994) I did not stray from metropolitan Buenos Aires. My impressions of the Argentine Jewish community are formed exclusively on what I saw and experienced in the Federal Capital and immediate environs. (No, I did not have a chance to visit Moisesville or any of the other Jewish agricultural colonies.) The Jewish population of Argentina, I am told, is now approximately 225,000, which marks a steep decline from estimates of close to half a million just a few decades ago. (Probably 80%-85% of the country's Jews are concentrated in and around Buenos Aires.) Whatever the accuracy of these estimates, it is clear that the ranks of Argentine Jewry are much smaller than was once the case and they are still thinning. As in other Diaspora communities part of the cause for this demographic decline resides with such factors as a low birth rate and a high level of intermarriage. Emigration, however, plays an equally -- or perhaps more -- important role. I heard estimates that anywhere from 60,000 to 90,000 Argentine Jews have made aliyah; that would be equivalent to approximately 750,000 U.S. Jews settling in Israel since, say, the 1967 Six-Day War (whereas the figures for aliyah from the U.S. are much lower and have moreover been balanced by a significant flow of Israelis moving to the U.S., at least during the 1970s and 1980s). In addition, many other Argentine Jews have settled in the U.S. and Canada since the 1960s. Political instability and economic uncertainty have been among the main "push" factors causing Argentine Jews to emigrate. The past 30 years have seen dictatorships, urban guerrilla warfare, severe military repression (a disproportionate number of the "desaparecidos" during the "Dirty War" of the late 1970s were Jews), hyperinflation, and lately, a stabilization in the value of the Argentine peso and a turn toward free market policies that have led to mass unemployment -- officially around 20%, a figure not much below figures prevailing in the U.S. at the peak of the Great Depression. I heard constant complaints, during my visit, that the gap between rich and poor in Argentina is growing wider, and that the Jewish middle class is being pauperized. And then there were the bombings -- first of the Israeli embassy, in 1992, and then of the AMIA, in 1994 -- which have cast a pall (literally and figuratively) over the Jewish community. Jewish institutions can now be easily identified by the presence of brick-and-concrete flowerpots in front of them, which are intended to shield them against explosions. A "third bomb" is still widely anticipated. Security is also very strictly maintained at most Jewish sites. I heard more than one person complain about the (physical and psychological) "ghettoization" of Jewish institutional life in Buenos Aires that has come about since July of 1994. As I mentioned in Part 1, there is little expectation that justice will be served in the AMIA bombing case. Each Monday morning, at 10:00 a.m., a demonstration sponsored by a group called Memoria Activa takes place in front of the Tribunales (law courts), bearing witness and demanding that the guilty parties in the AMIA case be sought out and prosecuted. (The AMIA bombing took place at 10:00 a.m. on a Monday morning.) IWO, in its quarters at Casa Simon Dubnow, has a small exhibit devoted to that event. Included in the display cases are Yiddish typewriters that were crushed by the impact of the explosion, a catalog drawer -- cards also included -- that has been distorted all out of shape, and a clock whose hands are stopped at 10:00. On the floor is a slab of black marble containing a portion of the letter "A" -- for AMIA -- salvaged from the building's facade. One result of all this is a continued, steady flow of emigrants to Israel. They do not arrive unprepared. Young people who are attending Jewish schools these days receive a thorough grounding in Israeli Hebrew and many are already quite fluent without having ever set foot in Israel. English is also intensively taught in Jewish schools. (I paid a visit to an evening Yiddish course for adults, held at the Sholem Aleichem school in Villa Crespo, a Buenos Aires neighborhood. The classroom -- which during the daytime is used by children -- had signs in Hebrew, Spanish and English, but not Yiddish. One English sign read, "Where is the bathroom?") The last Jewish school in Buenos Aires where children were taught Yiddish, the I. L. Peretz school, has just been closed after a visit by a group of educational consultants from Israel. (This closure was recently reported by the Buenos Aires correspondent of the "Forverts," Melekh Frydman.) In the educational realm, apparently, the study of Yiddish has now been reserved for adults only. Nevertheless, there is a sizable cohort of Buenos Aires Jews, from their 30s on up, who are able to speak and read Yiddish. One reason for this is that, unlike the U.S., immigration was not abruptly interrupted in the mid-1920s; another is that many Argentine-born Jews have attended the Yiddish schools that were once the pride of the community. It is striking that Moishe Korin, Abraham Lichtenbaum, and Ester Szwarc -- the president, director, and librarian/archivist, respectively, of IWO today -- are all Argentine-born and educated; all possess a formidable grounding in Yiddish language, literature and culture. During this visit, our group was welcomed with open arms and showered with warmth and hospitality that can hardly be matched. We attended two broadcasts of "Di naye yidishe sho," which is broadcast on Radio Jai (Khay) on Sunday evenings, from 10:00 to 11:00, and we also spent an evening watching a Yiddish/Spanish revue, "Varietei (con limene)," about which more, later. It is striking that the radio program, which can be heard within only a very limited radius of the studio (in Barrio Once), and which is on the air at an hour that gringos find rather late, has a devoted, even fanatic audience. (Despite the show's name, it is really a Yiddish-theme program, conducted largely in Spanish, and not a Yiddish program per se.) The co-hosts are Moishe Korin and Abraham Lichtenbaum, and after observing them twice during this trip and once in 1994 I wonder if they have not missed their calling, because they are an irrepressible team! One of the ways in which the program's hosts are able to track the level of listenership is through a "name that singer" segment, which is dubbed "nuestro retenish." Close to 100 callers phoned in with their answers to the retenish on the first program that I attended during this visit, many with brief messages which are usually read over the air (a la Garrison Keillor, on "A Prairie Home Companion"). The second Sunday (June 3rd) was broadcast from Casa Simon Dubnow, rather than from the studios of Radio Jai, and lasted from 10:00 until midnight, due to this being the 100th "Naye yidishe sho" to air. A very enthusiastic and responsive live audience was on hand, for a change. To the outsider -- especially one raised in the American Middle West -- perhaps the most fascinating aspect of a trip to Yiddish Buenos Aires is the opportunity to observe not only the community's "Yiddishness" but also its "Argentineness." (The reciprocal might also be true.) Midway through the first hour of the special, two-hour "Naye yidishe sho," a guest was introduced to the audience: the announcer for the program that airs from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. on Radio Jai -- a Jewish station, mind you. His show is devoted exclusively to tango music, which is undergoing a phenomenal revival these days in Argentina. The tango deejay greeted the Yiddish program's listeners with the observation that both programs had similar goals in mind, namely, the preservation of their listeners' cultural heritage. He then played a rare recording (in Spanish) of a tango that had been composed by a Jewish band leader, probably in the 1930s. This was followed by a live performance, by a singer who I am told is in her 80s, of a tango that was translated into Yiddish by Shmuel Tsesler (Samuel Chesler), a well-known Argentine Yiddish writer. When she repeated the song in the original Spanish, many of those in the audience joined in. This Yiddish-Spanish synthesis could also be observed in the revue "Varietei (con limene)," which I saw at Teatro IFT, a theater that was originally established by the "linke" (Argentine ICUF/YKUF). Like the radio program, much of this production was also in Spanish. It comprised a melange of songs and monologues, ranging from such chestnuts as "Oyfn pripetshik" and "Rozhinkes mit mandlen" to the delightfully macaronic ditties of Jevel (Khevl) Katz, a Vilna-born songwriter who deserves far wider recognition but whose songs, alas, probably would not travel well outside of the Argentine milieu in which they were composed. Jevel Katz was a parodist par excellence, and his one published booklet of songs, "Argentiner glikn," includes Yiddish tangos, rancheras, rumbas and foxtrots (without music). He emigrated to Argentina in 1930 and died of kidney failure ten years later, at the age of only 38. His funeral was attended by as many as 40,000 mourners (though Jacob Botoshansky, in the Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, gives a figure of "only" 20,000 mourners). According to Abraham Lichtenbaum, Jevel Katz made only four recordings of his songs, but those that were sung at the "Varietei" revue were familiar to many in the audience, including people who were too young ever to have heard him sing them. The spelling "Varietei" merits explanation. I was told that Yiddish-speaking immigrants had difficulty in pronouncing the final "e" in Spanish (as in the name Jose) without diphthongizing it -- hence Varietei, instead of Variete (which in any case is French). This mispronunciation is what makes the ensuing bilingual pun possible. During the performance I caught what I surmise are other elements of Yiddish-accented Argentine Spanish, such as a very guttural "j" (the Spanish "j," as in Jose, is slightly guttural), substitution of "oy" for "ue" (Boynos Aires), and inability to trill the initial "r" and "rr." Again, these are a tourist's impressions. _What next for IWO?_ Perhaps the best way to conclude this overly long posting is with a hopeful look toward the future. The AMIA and IWO are rebuilding. The day that I arrived in Buenos Aires I paid a visit to Pasteur 633, the site of the AMIA building. Construction crews are busy at work there, rebuilding from ground up. (There is also a small, makeshift memorial next to the scaffolding, with the names of the bombing victims having been spray-painted onto the scaffolding and neatly printed on the large sign announcing the building's architects and engineers.) The new AMIA structure will, as previously, house IWO -- this time on the lower level, affording IWO far greater visibility than it had before, when it was located on the third and fourth floors, sandwiched between office levels. The new building is being constructed so as to withstand all but the most powerful of bomb blasts, and will contain the most up-to-date security measures, as well as proper climate controls. We met with one of the architects, who emphasized that will not be vulnerable to the sort of threat that caused its predecessor to collapse like a house of cards. IWO's facilities will include space for a 50,000-volume library, along with the institute's archives, a media center and a gallery where some of its art collection can be viewed. In addition, IWO will retain the Kultur-Kongres building, Casa Simon Dubnow, just a few blocks away. We were told that the new AMIA building may be ready for occupancy as soon as April 1997. Whenever IWO is able to move into the new AMIA building, only will the institute fully be able to reorganize its collections, which for the most part remain stored in boxes and distributed among several warehouses. Thus, the task of reconstruction -- for IWO, for AMIA, and for the Jewish community of Buenos Aires -- will continue for some years after the building itself is replaced. The physical scar promises to be healed soon, but the genuine recovery process is only now beginning. Zachary Baker ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.015