The Other/Argentina

Amy K. Kaminsky

Description

The Other/Argentina looks at literature, film, and the visual arts to examine the threads of Jewishness that create patterns of meaning within the fabric of Argentine self-representation. A multiethnic yet deeply Roman Catholic country, Argentina has worked mightily to fashion itself as a modern nation. In so doing, it has grappled with the paradox of Jewishness, emblematic both of modernity and of the lingering traces of the premodern. By the same token, Jewishness is woven into, but also other to, Argentineity. Consequently, books, movies, and art that reflect on Jewishness play a significant role in shaping Argentina's cultural landscape. In the process they necessarily inscribe, and sometimes confound, norms of gender and sexuality.

Just as Jewishness seeps into Argentina, Argentina's history, politics, and culture mark Jewishness and alter its meaning. The feminized body of the Jewish male, for example, is deeply rooted in Western tradition; but the stigmatized body of the Jewish prostitute and the lacerated body of the Jewish torture victim acquire particular significance in Argentina. Furthermore, Argentina's iconic Jewish figures include not only the peddler and the scholar, but also the Jewish gaucho and the urban mobster, troubling conventional readings of Jewish masculinity.

As it searches for threads of Jewishness, richly imbued with the complexities of gender and sexuality, The Other/Argentina explores the patterns those threads weave, however overtly or subtly, into the fabric of Argentine national meaning, especially at such critical moments in Argentine history as the period of massive state-sponsored immigration, the rise of labor and anarchist movements, the Perón era, and the 1976–83 dictatorship. In arguing that Jewishness is an essential element of Argentina's self-fashioning as a modern nation, the book shifts the focus in Latin American Jewish studies from Jewish identity to the meaning of Jewishness for the nation.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program—a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program website at: https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/FOBP, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1711.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. Planting Wheat and Reaping Doctors: Another Way of Being Argentine

2. Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Anxiety

3. Provisional Identity

4. Family Stories and the Invention of Memory

5. Jewish Legibility and Argentine Self-Fashioning

6. Incidental Jewishness

7. Embedded Jewishness: Memory and the State in Times of Terror

8. Troubling Difference: Jewishness, Gender, and Transgressive Sexuality

By Way of Conclusion

Sujets

• Caribbean
• Latin America
• Latin American

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438483306
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE OTHER/ARGENTINA
SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture

Rosemary G. Feal, editor
Jorge J. E. Gracia, founding editor
THE OTHER/ARGENTINA
Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation
AMY K. KAMINSKY
Cover image: Archeology of a Journey , 2018. © Mirta Kupferminc. Used with permission.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kaminsky, Amy K., author.
Title: The other/Argentina : Jews, gender, and sexuality in the making of a modern nation / Amy K. Kaminsky.
Other titles: Jews, gender, and sexuality in the making of a modern nation
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2021] | Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031728 | ISBN 9781438483290 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438483306 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Intellectual life—Argentina. | Jews—Civilization—Argentina. | Argentina—Ethnic relations. | Jews—Identity.
Classification: LCC F3021.J5 K354 2021 | DDC 982/.004924—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031728
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the next generations:
David, Sarah, Adam, and Elliot;
to Jonathan, of blessed memory;
and
in memory of Sarah May
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Planting Wheat and Reaping Doctors: Another Way of Being Argentine
2 Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Anxiety
3 Provisional Identity
4 Family Stories and the Invention of Memory
5 Jewish Legibility and Argentine Self-Fashioning
6 Incidental Jewishness
7 Embedded Jewishness: Memory and the State in Times of Terror
8 Troubling Difference: Jewishness, Gender, and Transgressive Sexuality
By Way of Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.1 Children’s mural of the arrival of the SS Weser.
Figure 1.2 Children’s mural in Moisés Ville.
Figure 4.1 Mirta Kupferminc, On the Way ( En camino ).
Figure 4.2 Mirta Kupferminc, Arqueology of the Journey ( Arqueología de un trayecto ).
Figure 5.1 Mirta Kupferminc, To Be a Witness ( Ser testigo ).
Figure 5.2 Guillermo Kuitca, El mar dulce ( The sweetwater sea ).
Figure 7.1 Mirta Kupferminc, Ghosts at the Lodz Ghetto (In Daniel Kupferminc’s memory) [ Fantasmas en el ghetto de Lodz (En memoria de Daniel Kupferminc) ].
Figure 7.2 Mirta Kupferminc, That Place ( Ese lugar ).
Figure 7.3 Marcelo Brodsky, NEXO 7: LOS CAMPOS ( NEXUS 7: THE CAMPS ).
PREFACE
A t the Ottawa Conference of Inter-American Women Writers in May of 1978 I found myself sitting around a table with a bunch of mostly Argentine writers and critics when someone observed that every single one of us in that room was Jewish. I no longer remember who exactly was there: Saúl Sosnowski and Pablo Urbanyi, for sure. Evelyn Picon Garfield and Marta Paley de Francescato, I’m pretty certain. What was notable about that moment was that being Jewish had nothing to do with why we were at that particular conference. For most of us, beyond our professional interests as writers and academics, another identity issue was part of what brought us there as literary scholars, women, and/or as Latin Americans. But the realization that all of us in that room were Jewish made a momentary difference, a sense of another, unexpected, kind of belonging. And of course, by no means all the Argentines at the conference were Jewish—Marta Lynch was there, as were Griselda Gambaro, Alicia Jurado, Elvira Orfée, Luisa Valenzuela, and her mother, María Luisa Levinson. To my recollection, no one presented a paper dealing with Jewishness in Ottawa. The Latin American Jewish Studies Association—LAJSA—would not be established for another four years, and feminist studies generally paid little attention to the fact of Jewishness within feminist activism or scholarship. What was perhaps the earliest lesbian-feminist Jewish anthology, Nice Jewish Girls , would be published in the US in 1982, coinciding with the founding of LAJSA. Jewishness was beside the point yet somehow meaningful for those in that room in Ottawa. My own interest in Jewishness as an area of scholarly investigation was decades in the future, a result of my bumping into Jewish-themed texts and Jewish-named writers, filmmakers, and visual artists in my research and teaching, until it seemed inevitable that I pay attention. The present book is the outcome of this slow gestation.
The Other/Argentina is deeply indebted to the growing body of research on gender, sexuality, and the modern nation, especially in relation to the field of Jewish studies in the United States and Europe. At the same time, it has been my intention to push the boundaries of that research, turning its gaze southward. Jewish studies in the US approaches the question of modernity largely by considering the triangle Europe–the United States–Israel, taking little note of Jewish communities and the way Jewishness means in other parts of the world. For its part, the impressive body of research in Latin American Jewish studies has barely been acknowledged by the US-based scholarly community. Conversely, the development of Jewish cultural studies, which has been revolutionizing Jewish studies in the United States over the past few decades, has thus far had little purchase in Latin America.
By limiting this study to Argentina, I open up some avenues and close off others. Jews are a minority in Argentina, but of all the countries of Latin America, Argentina has historically had the largest number, and proportion, of Jews in its population. Hence this book’s focus on Jewishness in relation to Argentine self-fashioning, with regard to the position of Jews as simultaneously exemplary of, and the abjected other to, European modernity, and in the context of Argentina’s own claim on a European identity in the face of Europe’s refusal to accept any Latin American nation as its full equal. Argentina’s Jewish history is certainly connected to that of other Latin American countries: many Jews leaving Europe or the Middle East who wound up in Latin America were hoping to get to the United States and landed instead in “the other America,” sometimes Mexico or the Caribbean, Venezuela, Brazil, or Uruguay, and often Argentina. For the most part they reproduced a version of life in the old country in their new places of residence—they built synagogues and formed burial societies, created community centers, learned a new language but did not forget Yiddish and Hebrew, and held on to old rituals as well as to a sense of connectedness with Jews beyond their borders. Nevertheless, Jewish history in Argentina is distinguished by at least three factors: (1) the deliberate creation, by a German Jewish philanthropist, of Jewish settlements designed to create a Jewish homeland far away from the perils of Europe; (2) the immigration policies of postindependence Argentina that, in its desire to bring Europeans to settle, eventually expanded the list of the invited to include Jews; and (3) the Argentine elites’ belief in their own difference from the rest of Latin America—that theirs is a modern European nation, with all the attending baggage surrounding Jews as both a part of and apart from whatever it is that constitutes Europe and modernity. These three intersecting phenomena suggest that Jewish ethnicity signifies somewhat differently in Argentina than it does in other parts of the continent.
Still, the very idea of Jewish modernity, even in its least nuanced form, challenges the Catholic Latin America to which Argentina belongs. In that worldview, Jews represent an intensely premodern cultural landscape thankfully superseded by Christian enlightenment. 1 Deeply held prejudices against Jews mark the Argentine cultural imaginary. Jewish and Gentile writers alike make use of the competing cultural, and deeply gendered, myths of Jews as an ancient people and as prototypical of modernity. The Jew is a complex marker: Luisa Valenzuela’s liminal Israeli translator who scales walls and is unfazed by locked doors and windows in her 2010 novel El Mañana (The Mañana) vexes all borders and commonplaces. Erin Graff Zivin, recalling that the wandering Jew is a Christian trope, calls Jewishness “the wandering signifier.”
My exploration of the traces of Jewishness in texts that may not be explicitly specific to Jews does not aim to excavate some essential Jewish nugget buried in Argentine soil, but rather to understand the different meanings that Jewishness carries in Argentina, and how sexuality and gender, as both lived experience and ideology, help code such meanings. Because gender, imbricated with sexuality, is an organizing principle of identity, it is inescapable as an effect of cultural texts, and it is a crucial category of analysis in teasing out the ways the Jewish presence in Argentina has affected that country’s effort to establish itself as a modern nation. The project of thinking Argentine modernity through its relationship with