Spanish Discovers Yiddish: The Cultural Policies of Salomon Resnick in Argentina in the Interwar Period

Abstract

Thanks to the large Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and Poland that arrived in Argentina between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, Buenos Aires became the meeting place of two cultural and linguistic universes practically unknown to each other: Spanish and Yiddish. In this chapter, Dujovne analyzes this contact through the intellectual, translation and publishing activities of Salomon Resnick (Russia, 1894–Argentina, 1946), one of the main figures in the introduction and presentation of Yiddish culture and literature to Spanish readers, Jews and non-Jews. The chapter places Resnick’s actions within the broader transnational context of the Jewish diaspora: at a time of rapid modernization and politicization of Yiddish, the rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany and in Argentina, as well as within the framework of the process of cultural integration of Jews in Argentina and of the development of the publishing market in this country.