Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture

POLACOS IN ARGENTINA

JEWS AND JUDAISM: HISTORY AND CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

Mark K. Bauman

Adam D. Mendelsohn

FOUNDING EDITOR

Leon J. Weinberger

ADVISORY BOARD

Tobias Brinkmann

Ellen Eisenberg

David Feldman

Kirsten Fermaglich

Jeffrey S. Gurock

Nahum Karlinsky

Richard Menkis

Riv-Ellen Prell

Raanan Rein

Jonathan Schorsch

Stephen J. Whitfield

Marcin Wodzinski

POLACOS IN ARGENTINA

POLISH JEWS, INTERWAR MIGRATION, AND THE EMERGENCE OF TRANSATLANTIC JEWISH CULTURE

Mariusz Kałczewiak

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond and Futura

Cover image: Polish passenger ship, the MS Sobieski

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2039-3

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9269-7

לאהובי עירד

To my always loving Irad

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Note on Translation, Spelling, and Transliteration

Introduction

1. Jewish Elites, Gentile Opinions, and the Argentine Dream

2. Between Hope and Fear: The Imageries of Argentina in Poland’s Yiddish Channels

3. Argentine Branch: Extending the Yiddishland to Latin America

4. Meeting the Gaucho and Searching for Indians: The Trajectories of Exoticization

5. Israelita Argentino or Argentiner Yid? Cultural Choices, National Belonging, and the Weight of European Baggage

6. Being a Good Polish Jew in Buenos Aires: Landsmanshaftn and Jewish-Polish Ethnicity

7. Aktsyes, Protest-aktn, and Helping the Old Home: Argentine Children of Jewish Poland Respond to a Changing Europe

8. All Immigrant Jews Live with Their Soul in Poland? Debating the Tension between New and Old Home

Epilogue

Glossary

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Jewish migrations from Poland, 1919–1939

2. Map of Jewish agricultural colonies in Argentina

3. Bargash Shakhbar, Argentina. Leyent un veyst vohin ir fort

4. Yaakov Yedvabnik, Di beshraybung fun argentina un ire kolonyen

5. Invitation to a lecture, To Where Can the Jews Immigrate?, given by M. Krymski

6. JEAS (Jewish Emigration Aid Society) poster of Spanish and English courses, Warsaw, 1920s

7. Advertisement of RMSP, Haynt June 21, 1923

8. Advertisement of RMSP, Haynt January 4, 1923

9. Peretz Hirschbein, portrait, 1911

10. Peretz Hirschbein’s article in Der Moment, Fun mayne rayzes in argentina

11. Hersh Dovid Nomberg, image from the cover of Dos bukh felyetonen

12. Hersh Dovid Nomberg’s article on Argentina published in Der Moment, Fun mayn rayze keyn argentina

13. Peretz Hirschbein and his welcome committee in Córdoba, 1925

14. Jewish colonists in the province of Entrie Rios, 1930s

15. Cover of Judaica from December 1935

16. Members of Poylisher Farband according to their place of residence in Buenos Aires, 1928

17. Founders of Poylisher Farband in 1916

18. Reading room of Poylisher Farband in 1928

19. Kinder-klub of Poylisher Farband in Argentina

20. Cover of Dos Naye Vort from December 1932

21. Report summarizing the 1931 Argentine-Uruguayan campaign for the Yiddish secular schools in Poland

22. Anniversary volume published by Di Presse in 1928

23. Conventillo in the first decade of the twentieth century

TABLES

1. Total Jewish Immigration to Argentina, 1888–1935

2. Immigration to Argentina, 1915–1939

3. Jewish Immigration to the Principal Immigration Countries, 1921–1939

4. Jewish Emigration from Poland to Argentina, 1919–1938

5. Professional Structure of Poylisher Farband in 1924

Acknowledgments

This book is a product of five years of intellectual journeys between Warsaw and Buenos Aires. Countless friends and colleagues have accompanied me across borders and continents, in Poland, Israel, Germany, Argentina, and the United States. It was unbelievably exciting to follow the footsteps of Jewish migrants and to analyze their journey from Europe to Latin America. I dedicate this book to the memory of Polish Jews who bravely crossed the Atlantic and constructed Jewish Argentina in all its diverse facets.

My special thanks go to Raanan Rein of Tel Aviv University who has been for me a best possible guide through Argentine history. He has always been attentive, helping, and inspiring. Raanan helped me to grow as a scholar, to avoid black and white divisions, and not to take things for granted but to constantly dig for deeper meanings. He encouraged me to be critical and was confident in my attempt to merge Eastern European and Latin American history. I thank three respective directors of the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University: Billy Melman, Leo Corry, and Aviad Kleinberg. Thank you for welcoming me in Tel Aviv and making my studies smooth and pleasant. In Germany, Peter Haslinger of Justus Liebig University in Giessen has helped me to sharpen the eastern European aspects of my research and taught me how to maneuver through the labyrinths of the German academic system.

This research could not be realized without financial help of diverse institutions. Between 2012 and 2015, the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture of Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, provided me with generous scholarship support, including a travel stipend, which allowed me to research in Buenos Aires for several months. The Shlomo Glas and Fanny Balaban-Glas Foundation, as well Tel Aviv University’s Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, allowed me to pursue my studies in financial comfort in 2015 and 2016. Tel Aviv University has supported me with numerous travel grants, as well as funded me with a scholarship during the write-up phase. I am happy to acknowledge the financial support of the Center of Jewish History in New York, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Smathers Library at the University of Florida, and the Center for Research on Polish Jews and Israel-Poland Relations of Tel Aviv University.

This book would not have become what it is without numerous conversations with colleagues around the world. I express my sincere gratitude to Kamil Kijek, Magalena Kozłowska, and Claudia Stern for reading the introduction and their insightful thoughts about Polish and Latin American Jews. I thank Hana Wirth-Nesher and Scott Ury for being curious and critical guides through the world of Yiddish letters and of Eastern European Jewish history. My Yiddish teachers, Abraham Lichtenbaum, Karolina Szymaniak, Marek Tuszewicki, and Kobi Weitzner, allowed me to understand the language spoken by Polish Jews in Argentina and in Poland. I have been privileged to be a lajsero and participate in biannual conferences of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). I thank Naomi Lindstrom for carefully reading and reviewing my manuscript. Adriana M. Brodsky, Leonardo Senkman, Marcos Silber, and colleagues at the Sverdlin Institute for Latin American History and Culture (Tel Aviv University) provided me with insightful comments on Argentine history. In Poland, Polish Association for Yiddish Studies and Polish Association for Jewish Studies invited me for conferences where I could present and discuss my ideas. The congresses of European Association for Jewish Studies, as well as biannual Poland-Israel Workshops in the History and Culture of Polish Jews have been amazing platforms for scholarly exchange.

I thank Ezequiel Semo, the librarian of the IWO Institute in Buenos Aires, for his wonderful help during my research in 2014. I am grateful to the archivists at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, National Library of Poland in Warsaw, and at Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires. My utmost words of gratitude go to Tomasz Frydel, Maxwell E. Greenberg, and Susan Harris for masterfully editing the manuscript. Michał Śmielak has wonderfully helped to create maps used in my book. Dan Waterman, editor in chief at University of Alabama Press has been extremely helpful in making this book available in print. I would like to thank the editors at Brill for permission to publish a revised version of an article that first appeared in The New Ethnic Studies in Latin America (Brill 2017). I also acknowledge the permission to publish fragments of my article that appeared earlier in Studia Judaica (vol. 33 [2014]).

I am endlessly grateful to my mother, Grażyna Kałczewiak, for showing me how to be a good and passionate teacher, no matter if one teaches Polish literature at a neighborhood elementary school or Jewish history at the university level. Dziękuję, mamo. My loving husband, Irad Ben Isaak, has been a constant inspiration and support throughout the research and writing process. Irad has always made me sure that I am on the right path. I dedicate this book to him with love and appreciation.

A Note on Translation, Spelling, and Transliteration

As this work relies heavily on Yiddish sources, extensive transliteration was necessary. The transliteration is usually based on the standardized YIVO transliteration system. There are several exceptions to this system. If a title or a name had an original (at the time of publication) and more easily identifiable transliterated spelling, I follow this spelling. For instance, I spelled the Buenos Aires daily newspaper as Yidische Zaitung, instead of Yidishe Tsaytung. Similarly, I transliterated the name of travel writer Peretz Hirschbein, instead of Perets Hirschbeyn, as suggested by the YIVO. By analogy, I decided to use the widely acknowledged Spanish spelling of Samuel Rollansky, rather than transliterate it from Yiddish as Shmuel Rozhansky. Geographical names appear according to their respective historical names instead of their contemporary forms, unless there is a conventional English equivalent (like Warsaw for Warszawa). Though, I use Jewish studies conventional English form Vilna instead of contemporary Vilnius or Polish Wilno. Foreign words are italicized only the first time they appear, at which point they are explained. In terms of the few cases of Hebrew transliteration, the Library of Congress system was followed. All translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction

In 1923, a Varsovian Yiddish author Hersh Dovid Nomberg wrote: "Argentina! Once it was a word that was heard in all Jewish cities and shtetls, as a call of redemption, a word that made Jewish hearts tremble with happiness, expectation and hope. As a lovely spring wind, the message traveled around all Jewish places: a country for Jews, for Jewish agricultural workers, the Redeemer arose, Baron Hirsch! . . . The newspapers were agitating, this one for, the other against. . . . The intelligentsia had debated: is Argentina a competition for Zion or not? In short, for some years Argentina occupied a very prominent place for the Jewish public."¹

Between the 1890s and 1930s, Argentina, after the United States and Palestine, became the main destination for Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, and other eastern European Ashkenazi Jews searching for safety, civil rights, and better economic prospects. One of them was Lazaro Pinchuk, from a little Polish town called Włodzimierz Wołyński. This was the mid-1920s, and Lazaro was a twenty-one-year-old man with no clear perspective of what he wanted to do in life. Suddenly, all the colleagues at his carpentry shop were speaking of Argentina. He had family members living in the United States, but the United States was just about to close its gates to new Jewish immigrants. In 1923, Lazaro decided to immigrate to Argentina by himself. The young shtetl boy managed to obtain a passport and Argentine visa and navigated his way from Poland to Trieste in Italy. He left all his family behind and started a new life in Buenos Aires. He moved to a new country, to a city dozens of times bigger than his hometown, with a new language and climate. Even though initially he barely earned a living as a furniture polisher, he always made sure he had enough money to buy the Yiddish left-wing daily Di Presse. From time to time, he saved enough to go to the Yiddish theater. The story of Lazaro is emblematic for thousands of polacos, Polish Jews who immigrated to Argentina in the interwar period.

This book explores their migration journey, its historical context, and social and cultural consequences. I tackle migration as a sociocultural dialogue on Jewish ethnicity, modernity, and diasporism. My study explores the evolution of transatlantic cultural migrant networks and sheds light on heterogeneous ethnonational and diasporic processes engendered through emigration. Of key importance in this research are the following issues: 1) ethnic identity in the context of migration and Jewish and Argentine national projects and 2) the emergence of a political, social, and cultural writing space between Jews in Poland and Jews in Argentina. This book approaches Jewish migration to Argentina and the following development of a transnational Jewish culture as a multilateral process that took place on both sides of the Atlantic. At the turn of the twentieth century, people and literature began to circulate between Poland and Argentina. Beginning in the 1890s, Poland’s elitist Hebrew press began publishing Argentina-themed articles, followed by emigration pamphlets, Yiddish travel writing on Argentina, immigrants’ reports, and works of fiction; a prolific writing territory was developed, connecting both sides of the Atlantic. In order to demonstrate these cultural entanglements, I use a framework of Yiddishland, a geographic and cultural space inhabited by Yiddish-speaking Jews that encompassed not only Poland and Argentina but also the United States and Soviet Russia.

This book encompasses the period of intensive interwar (1914–39) immigration from Poland to Argentina, when individuals, ideas, popular beliefs, and social issues transcended geographic borders. This study starts in 1914, a year that marked the beginning of the Great War, the suspension of transatlantic passenger traffic between Europe and the Americas, and, most significantly, the end of the first era in Jewish immigration to Argentina. The fall of the Austrian, German, and Russian empires after World War I led to a reconstruction of an independent Polish state, challenging and reshaping the ethnic identifications of Jewish migrants. World War I also marked the establishment in 1916 of Agudas Ahim (later known as Poylisher Farband, or Union of Polish Jews, in Argentina), a central body uniting the Jewish residents of Argentina who shared a strong attachment to Poland, their place of origin.² The Polish-Jewish landsman movement was a platform for discussing the Jewish place within Argentine society and within the diasporic ethnocultural space of Yiddish speakers (Yiddishland), while also contributing to the cross-border discourse on nationalism and transnational belonging. The year 1914 also marked the arrival of Yiddish writer Peretz Hirschbein in Argentina. This Poland-born author, journalist, and global cosmopolitan was one of the few Polish Jews who visited Argentina and wrote a travelogue describing the Jewish life emerging in this country. Hirschbein’s memoirs reveal a vivid portrait of how Yiddish culturists perceived Argentina, emigration, geographic expansion, and the transculturation of eastern European Jewish lives. Hirschbein himself embodied the growing entanglements between Jewish Poland and Argentina.

This book looks at migration from two ends (Argentine and Polish), challenging the linear approaches that often do not pay enough attention to premigration visions of the receiving nation or to the postmigration links maintained with the homeland. Jewish migration to the Americas was not merely an answer to pogroms and economic hardships experienced back home.³ Migration was also catalyzed by changing economic and social structures, the erosion of the shtetl, and the political reconfigurations in Europe. Of equal significance were Argentine programs that facilitated emigration; although never geared toward Jews specifically, these programs allowed many to settle in Latin America. I build off the work of José Moya, whose study of Spanish immigration to Argentina criticized that the notion of [a] new country’s superiority and the assimilating power of its environment made pre-arrival traits more or less irrelevant.⁴ Mass migration to the Americas created a form of Jewish cultural, conceptual, and textual networks, the study of which requires historians to capture both life in the host country as well as debates concerning the nature of transatlantic migration among European communities. The transnational scope of Jewish debates and practice between eastern Europe and Argentina needs to be studied as a continuous development, rather than a sudden rupture of Jewish life in Europe. This book thickens previous historiographies of Jewish migration from eastern Europe to Argentina by tracing the images of Argentina that prewar Polish Jews constructed and subsequently circulated.

As a case study, Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina illuminates how ethnicity evolved and transformed among migrants and their children, along with the dynamics that emerged from the tension between rootedness to a new country and commitments to the Old Country. I focus on a generation of migrants—Polish Jews—who relocated to Argentina and lived there following World War I. This generation of Jews reflects a transitory stage in the course of individual and collective ethnic identity development. Emigration transformed Polish Jews into Argentine Jews and the children of these migrants became Jewish Argentines. Several important factors shaped the evolution of ethnic identities between first- and second-generation Jewish migrants. First, the Yiddish language, as an expression of Jewish ethnicity, was constructed around Poland-centered Jewish ethnonationalist project. It suggested a transformative path toward a progressive, secular, ethnic Jewishness that could be relevant both in eastern Europe and in the Americas. Even as Argentine Jewish culture developed in multiethnic Buenos Aires, where Jewish ethnicity was shaped vis-a-vis other migrant communities, the interwar Ashkenazi Jewish case was modified by a desire to forge a new secular Yiddish culture, often looking to Poland for influence. In this sense, the Old Country was not simply a reservoir of conservative norms but a resource of modern ideas on Jewish life in diaspora. In the realm of Yiddish culture, Poland was one of its interwar centers, while Argentina was at its periphery.

Second, the dynamics between Poland and Argentina did not always parallel the dominant narrative of Jewish immigration to the United States, wherein the new country was positively imagined as an advantageous destination with economic possibilities and high levels of democratic freedoms. In Jewish Poland, the social imaginaries of Argentina were complex, as Argentina was rarely imagined as an unambiguously desired destination and often criticized as hazardous and challenging. While Argentina offered Jews civil rights and economic opportunities, these migrants were simultaneously limited in their political mobility and social and cultural expression. At the same time in Poland, Zionist and non-Zionist visions of the Jewish future were conceptualized and hotly debated, and Jews could claim cultural rootedness, primarily through secular Yiddish literature, journalism, and scholarship. In Argentina, these aspects never reached a stage comparable with the situation in Poland. The gradual identification among Jewish migrants as Argentine Jewish was dually informed by preconceptions about Argentina formed in Poland and notions of Jewish nationhood that migrants brought from eastern Europe. Drawing from landsman sources, Yiddish press, and immigrant literature, I argue that that becoming Argentine was shaped by a process in which immigrants continuously positioned themselves between their new homeland and their home country, including their sustained involvement in eastern European matters.⁵ The process of becoming Argentine Jews is best elucidated through the fund-raising campaigns conducted for the benefit of Jews in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s.

Jews in Argentina were shaped both by their Argentine surroundings and by external influences from eastern Europe. This reflected the situation for Jews who remained in Poland. Poland’s Jewish society was never hermetically sealed but involved interaction, cooperation, and common practices with Christian neighbors. Jews were simultaneously the agents and the receivers of influence.⁶ Similar tendencies were visible in Argentina. Life in Buenos Aires was characterized by a cultural porosity and a constant exchange between the Jewish and non-Jewish world, what some local Yiddishists (especially in the 1930s) interpreted as posing a certain ethnic danger. While Argentine nationalism invited Jews to imagine themselves as Argentines, social and political discourse in Poland largely placed them outside of a Polish nation. The Argentine nation-state and its melting-pot policies that included efforts at nationalizing immigrants offered Jews the promise of secular universal citizenship and national inclusion. Simultaneously, in early twentieth-century Argentina, the local national discourse challenged Argentine Jews’ ethnonational identification with compatriots in other parts of the world. Jewish migrants to Argentina were encouraged (both externally and internally) to identify with their new homeland. Despite the discrepancies between Argentine national belonging and diasporic Jewish identifications, both phenomena proved to be compatible in early twentieth-century Argentina.

In a pre-1939, globalizing Jewish world, alternative visions of Jewish ethnicity and nationalism were at play. Not all immigrant Jews quickly and without reservations embraced their new countries as loving homelands. In addition, Jewish national arguments were regularly raised not only by Zionists but also by Bundists, Diaspora Nationalists, and other political movements. As Jews migrated to the Americas, this sociopolitical aspect gained additional importance and contributed to the development of transatlantic networks and identities. This book brings together the impact of a Yiddish-centered ethnonational revival, the entanglements of diasporism, and the civic promises offered by Argentina to understand the complex experiences of Jews migrating from Poland to Argentina. More specifically, this book explores the diasporic Yiddishland nation that emerged within the cultural and textual space between Poland and Argentina. Thus, this work challenges the unilateral assumptions concerning Jewish migration to the Americas, namely that contacts between Argentine and eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century were weak or nonexistent. Traditional scholarship tends to approach the migration of eastern European Jews to the Americas exclusively from the perspective of the host country, discussing mostly the integration and acculturation of Jewish immigrants, the economic and social changes of their community, and the formation of Jewish institutions in the new country.⁷ Until recently, little was known about how this east to west migration was imagined in the home country, along with the diasporic links that emerged between Polish Jews who migrated to Argentina and those who remained in Europe. I suggest an alternative approach to ethnicity in context of migration and suggest Yiddish print culture as a platform for building transatlantic networks.

The year 1939 is the closing caesura of this book. The Holocaust and the almost complete annihilation of Polish Jewry radically redefined the geographies of the Jewish world. Before 1939, Poland housed the biggest European Jewish community of around 3.3 million in 1939. After the Holocaust, Poland ceased to be a major center of Jewish life, and its links with multiple diasporic communities of Eastern European Jews became limited or, as in the case of Argentina, structurally redefined in a direction of commemoration policies. Zionism’s victory and the establishment of the State of Israel challenged the diasporic ethnocultural project that Yiddish language defined. As Judith Butler put it, Zionism exercises a hegemonic control over the concept of Jewishness and consequently dismantles the notion of diasporic Jewishness.⁸ A Yiddish cultural link that connected Jews in Poland and Argentina was largely cut off and, by the late 1940s and 1950s, was gradually replaced in Argentina by growing popular support for Zionism and Israeli statehood. Yiddish gradually lost its national and cultural meaning; its unifying power decreased while Yiddish cultural networking ceased to be relevant. My book explores the transatlantic commitments and networks that post-1939 events have largely erased from dominant narratives of Jewish-Argentine history.

Jewish Emigration from Eastern Europe to Argentina

Between 1870 and 1930, four million immigrants arrived in Argentina, radically changing the country’s demographics during the early twentieth century. In 1930, Argentina’s population reached 11.9 million, up from only 1.81 million inhabitants in 1870 (see table 1).⁹ Eastern European Jewish immigrants began arriving in Argentina beginning in the 1880s thanks initially to the resettlement project sponsored by German Jewish financier Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Inspired by the ideas of Jewish productivization and redemption by manual work, de Hirsch’s enterprise facilitated the immigration of nearly ten thousand Jewish colonists to Argentina between the 1880s and 1920s. Argentina’s stakes in Baron de Hirsch’s colonization project was largely tied to the government’s desire for European migrants to immigrate to and assimilate into Argentine society; the incorporation of European migrants was perceived as a process of whitening Argentina. The agricultural settlements in Argentina sponsored by de Hirsch became a cornerstone of Argentine Jewish mythology, even though the urban population quickly outnumbered those living in the colonies. In 1925, a mere 12.9 percent of the Jewish population inhabited the agricultural settlements.¹⁰

Immigration brought about a dramatic social reconstitution of Argentine society. Between 1820 and 1932, Argentina was the second receiving country after the United States and took in 6.5 million people (11.6 percent of the total number of migrants in the world) (see table 2).¹¹ In 1914, around half of Buenos Aires residents were foreign born; in the surrounding province, 34 percent of the population was also foreign born.¹² Argentina’s population continued to grow, almost doubling in the interwar years from around 8 million in 1914 to 14 million in 1939.¹³ Throughout the entire period between 1870 and 1930, immigration was responsible for around 30 percent of population growth.¹⁴ Between 1921 and 1939, emigration from Poland increased, and soon, Polish citizens (Jews and non-Jews) reached the status of the third-largest immigrant community after Spaniards and Italians.¹⁵ In 1920, Argentina was home to more than 130,000 Jews, and by 1930, Jews numbered 280,000.¹⁶ The sociologist Jacob Shatzky estimated that around 210,000 Jews permanently settled in the country between 1901 and 1945.¹⁷ The implementation of a near closed door immigration policy in the United States in 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) reoriented Jewish immigration to Latin America; in the period between 1926 and 1930, Jewish immigration to Latin America accounted for 43 percent of total Jewish migration (table 3).¹⁸

Precise pre-1918 statistics accounting for country-of-origin among Jewish immigrants to Argentina are mostly unavailable. Immigrants were statistically segregated according to nationality, but many of those who emigrated from the Russian and Austrian empires, and were labeled as Russians and Austrians, were in fact Jews originating from Polish lands. Yet the available archival materials suggest that emigration from Russia was a pattern most clearly visible among the empire’s Polish Jews. N. Reiff believed that 44 percent of Jews emigrating from Russia to the United States came from Polish provinces; a similar percentage could be attributed to immigration to Argentina.¹⁹ This high percentage likely correlates to the spatial concentration of Jews in the western part of the Russian Pale of Settlement, which included Polish territory. Historian Konrad Zieliński estimated that prior to 1914 approximately 11.5 percent of Jewish emigrants from the Russian-occupied Congress Poland had immigrated to Argentina.²⁰ Polish Jewish sociologist Arie Tartakower estimated that before 1914, two-thirds of all emigrants leaving Congress Poland were Jews.²¹

Polish emigration statistics become clearer in the post–World War I period (see table 4). Between 1920 and 1937, 1,820,000 people left Poland, including 395,000 Jews (22 percent).²² Poland was one of the most important sending countries to Argentina between the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the 1920s, Poland was often the third sending country, after Spain and Italy, and represented 13 percent of total immigration to Argentina.²³ On average, Jews formed around 35 percent of Polish immigration to Argentina in interwar period, but during certain years (1923, 1924, 1933, 1934), Jews represented more than 70 percent. Beyond Jewish immigrants, numerous Christian Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian peasants also relocated to Argentina.²⁴ In the interwar years, Argentina was the third most important receiving country of Jewish emigrants following the United States and Palestine: between 1919 and 1939, the country received 110,000 eastern European Jews.²⁵ The Jews who immigrated to Latin America were largely of Polish origin and in the 1920s represented around 55 percent of all Jews settling in Argentina.²⁶ As estimated by Victor A. Mirelman the Jews of Poland formed around 70 percent of all Jewish immigration to Argentina during the years of the highest Jewish immigration (1924–30).²⁷

My study focuses specifically on the experience of Polish Jews in Argentina. Whenever I use the phrase Polish-Jewish, I refer to the experience of Polish Jews, rather than to relations between Jews and gentile Poles. Although some would justifiably argue that it was not only Polish Jews who left Europe, it is worth thinking about Polish Jews specifically within the larger eastern European and Argentine contexts. The reemergence of an independent Poland in 1918 influenced the way Polish Jews perceived themselves and were perceived by others. For Jews in the process of migration, their subethnic identity was of key importance and was forged vis-a-vis Jews from other regions. This process of intraethnic identity formation was also at play in the context of eastern Europe, where Jewish regional identities were very powerful. In the Americas however, Jewish subethnic identities needed to be remapped on a transnational terrain.²⁸ Within its 1918 to 1939 borders, Poland was home to more than three million Jews and, to a great extent, was the epicenter of Jewish life on the European continent. It held the highest share of Jewish citizens in the world (roughly 10 percent of the overall population) and despite growing anti-Semitism, it figured prominently as a political, social, and cultural center of Jewish life for smaller and younger diasporas, including Argentina. Polish Jewry was extremely heterogeneous, and various plans for improving the situation of Jews in Poland were implemented. The secularist-socialist supporters of the Bund party wanted to focus on local problems and act in the here and now, the orthodox were interested in preserving the disintegrating traditional social structure, while the Zionists saw the Jewish future in Palestine. Emigration was also a popular option. Immigration to Argentina was the result of the social and economic transformation of Jewish Poland: industrialization, the decline of the shtetl, and ongoing secularization and Polonization of the younger generation.²⁹ These changes allowed other nontraditional life choices to seem possible and relevant.

As Scott Ury aptly noted, it is hard to give a clear description of who was/is a Polish Jew.³⁰ The Jews who lived in interwar Poland were a complex amalgam of identities and cultural choices. For the purpose of this study, I conceive of Polish Jews as those born on territories that were part of the Second Polish Republic after 1918. While many Polish Jews were religious Yiddish-speakers, Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), acculturation, Jewish nationalisms, and proletarian struggles were redefining what it meant to be Jewish, both individually and collectively.³¹ In a region of Galicia, Polonization had made profound advances before the Great War, and in 1921, around 42 percent of Jews declared their nationality as Polish. The influence of Polish nationalism within Polish Jewry challenged many identifications with orthodoxy and later Zionism. In the former Kingdom of Poland, the Polonization of the elite was outweighed by the Yiddish-speaking Hasidic orthodoxy in pre-1918 times. In the multinational Kresy in northeastern Poland, the Jewish elite had predominantly acculturated in Russian culture. During the interwar years, these diverse groups were defined as Polish Jews but maintained different individual trajectories and experiences. As Kenneth Moss noted, interwar Poland experienced a process of acculturation without assimilation.³² While Jews spoke Polish and were rooted in Polish culture, they hardly ever were seen and perceived themselves as regular Poles.

Those Jews who migrated to Argentina as adults shortly after World War I were born as citizens of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Prussian empires but were influenced by contact with the surrounding Polish culture and Poles. It is noteworthy that some pre-1918 Jewish immigrants to Argentina identified as Polish Jews despite never having lived in independent Poland. It was their experience of immigration to Argentina that defined them as Polish Jews. The Jews from Poland (or from what came to be defined as Poland in 1918) were transformed into Polish Jews precisely when they left Poland. By settling in Argentina, the immigrants needed to conceptualize their (sub)ethnic identities. Although many Jews still saw themselves as litvaks, galitsianers, or Russian Jews, the independence of Poland, there-centered Zionism, and Yiddish-centered nationalism demanded that they conceptualize their self-identifications according to the new political entity. This was true both in eastern Europe, as well as for immigrants in Argentina. Further, the process of becoming Argentine and forming Jewish Argentine identities demanded a redefinition of their relationship to the place of origin and subethnic identifications. Even those Jewish immigrants who might not have defined themselves as Polish before World War I, in post-1918, Argentina began to imagine Jewish Poland (not Russia or Austro-Hungary) as an embodiment of the Jewish homeland, where Yiddish ethnonational life unfolded.

To analyze the experiences of Polish Jewish immigrants in Argentina, and the transnational Yiddish culture, I focus on the capital city of Buenos Aires, a dense site of Jewish life. This reflects the spatial distribution of the interwar arrivals who rarely ventured to the agricultural colonies. Yet, when discussing Polish-Jewish conceptualizations of Argentina, I refer to the entire Argentine territory and include the Jewish agricultural colonization. The periodization of this book encompasses two eras in Argentine history: the democratic period of mass Jewish migration that lasted from 1916 until 1930 and the 1930s with the authoritarian takeover and immigration restrictions. In 1916, Hipólito Yrigoyen of the Unión Cívica Radical rose to power, marking the beginning of a decade and a half of radical governments in Argentina. The radicals took power following the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1912. Benefiting from the evolving social structure and the rise of popular party politics, the radicals succeeded in recruiting the support of working-class masses. Two governments of Yrigoyen (1916–22, 1928–30) and of Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear (1922–28) allowed social progress for second-generation immigrants by making accessible university education (Reforma universitaria in 1918) and through the continuous development of employment in the public sector. These radical governments are considered the first democratic governments in Argentina’s history.

José Félix Uriburu came to power in Argentina in 1930, which was the beginning of the so-called Infamous Decade, marked by a conservative and oligarchic backlash. The conservatives questioned the principle of universal suffrage and limited some constitutional freedoms. Argentine politics of the 1930s closely resembled the fascist governments in Europe, particularly that of Mussolini in Italy.³³ Numerous political opponents were sent to concentration camps in Ushuaia, the alliance between the government and the Catholic Church was strengthened, a paramilitary Unión Cívica Argentina was established, and the state’s economic policies increasingly intervened in the industry. The early 1930s was a period of economic crisis that resulted in growing poverty, criminality, and hopelessness. In 1930, Uriburu raised the price of immigration visas from three to thirty pesos, and in 1931, immigration was limited to agricultural workers. Two years later, policy dictated that only those with job security or other financial support in Argentina would be granted entry into the country.³⁴ Nevertheless, the immigration from Poland continued through the 1930s, marking the decade as a period of immigrant integration into the Argentine national culture. The nationalist spirit of the era also reinforced immigrant identification with their new homeland. The economic recuperation visible from 1936 allowed immigrants to participate in Argentina’s growing middle-class society, enjoying leisure activities such as trips to the cinema, dancing, and visits to the beach.³⁵ For Argentine Jews in the 1930s, the liberal integrationist ideals of the previous two decades were perceived as outdated. Many acculturated Jews began searching for ways of rapprochement with their Jewishness by way of Zionism, ethnic activism, and/or transnational solidarity.

Nation, Ethnicity, and Diaspora

Jewish emigration from Poland to Argentina is a lens for observing the competitive collision between diasporism and nationalism. In Poland, the early 1920s marked a period of growing Jewish Diaspora Nationalism, while the 1930s ushered in an era of Zionism; it should be noted that both movements were criticized by the antinationalist and nonnationalist orthodoxy and communists.³⁶ Interwar Warsaw had two key Jewish national figures: the Zionist Yitshak Grünbaum and the Yiddishist supporter of a Jewish cultural-national autonomy, Noyekh Prilutsky, with each representing different Jewish nationalisms. Polish and Argentine nation-state nationalisms conceived of the Jews within a national framework as includabe or excludable subjects, while the supporters of the Yiddish-based, diasporic Jewish nationalism offered a counternarrative of Diaspora Nationalism. The latter emphasized doikeyt (here-ness) and underlined that eastern Europe, or other diaspora countries, could offer a basis for an improved Jewish life. Both in Poland and Argentina, the revival of a Yiddish-centered, secular, Jewish ethnonationalism gained popularity among a considerable share of the local Jewish population. This study reconstructs how Jewish national and cultural life was influenced by migration through the analysis of transatlantic discussions that explore language, ethnicity, and nationalism.

While Zionism emphasizes the territorial foundations of Jewish identity, diasporism puts the focus on genealogy and a shared past.³⁷ Although the triumph of Zionism overshadowed other manifestations of Jewish nationalism, Diaspora Nationalism continues to be used as a critical framework for diaspora scholars. As Julie E. Cooper points out, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin conceive of Jewish diasporism as a powerful countermodel to Zionist-centered Jewish identifications.³⁸ Building upon previous arguments made by the Boyarins, I apply the diasporic lens to unpack the diversity of Jewish-Argentine cultural identifications shaped both by Argentine experiences and the eastern European developments in the first half of the twentieth century. Following Roza Tsagarousianou, I aim to trace the connectivity and linkages that transnational migration demanded, rather than casting migrant experiences as displacement or exile.³⁹ I argue that Polish-Jewish migrants carved their identities both in the context of diasporism and Jewish and Argentine nationalisms. This was a simultaneous and not exclusive process. By succeeding in Argentina, they did not shed their diasporic identifications but shifted them to another level.

Despite the focus of Jewish studies on the exile from Zion, Jews quite often felt comfortable in diaspora.⁴⁰ Despite repeated violence, Jewish communities flourished outside of their primordial homeland, whether in medieval Spain or the Hellenistic world.⁴¹ Yerushalmi correctly noticed a duality of attachment both to the ancient land of origin and the desire to fill the place of resettlement with familiarity and to perceive it as Jewish. The notion of dual attachment relates not only to Zion and the dispersion in Europe but also to Jewish mass migration at the turn of the twentieth century. Ashkenazi Jews in diaspora often imagined Poland as an eastern European Zion, even as they were engaged in building their lives in Argentina. Focusing on the Polish city of Białystok, Kobrin traced the multilayered links between various centers of the Białystoker diaspora, including the Argentine one, bound mostly by the memories or imagined connections to their remote hometown in eastern Europe. Her study proved how a common ethnic origin remained relevant after migration and the importance of remembering a shared past. Following Rebecca Kobrin, I suggest a broader concept of Jewish diaspora, one that goes beyond Zionist