Features
Anthology of Latin American Jewish stories
Oy, Caramba! Edited by Ilan Stavans. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2016
Reviewed by CARL ROSENBERG The world of Jewish communities in Latin America has only become widely known in Canada and the U.S. in the last two decades or so, partly thanks to the pioneering work of writers and scholars such as Ilan Stavans, the editor of this anthology.
Stavans, a Jew born and raised in Mexico and now living in the U.S., notes that while many Latin American writers are widely read outside the region, the writings of its cultural minorities, including Jewish Latin Americans, have been virtually unknown.
This anthology is a revised version of an earlier anthology by Stavans, Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers (Holmes & Meier, 1994), which I reviewed in Outlook Magazine in 1998. Some earlier stories were dropped, and new ones have been added–two/thirds of the original anthology are retained in the present version. Of the 28 selections, 18 are translated from Spanish, six from Yiddish, and two from Portuguese. Two stories were written in English–one by Stavans himself, the other by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, who like Stavans has lived in the U.S. for many years.
In his introduction, Stavans gives a useful historical overview. He stresses the often-overlooked cultural diversity of Latin Americans, whom many outside the region often assume to be entirely of Iberian or Indigenous descent. The first Jewish immigrants were Sephardic Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition. Most were absorbed into the surrounding population, although there were later waves of Sephardic immigration. Most Latin American Jews today are Ashkenazi, stemming from Central or Eastern Europe like their Canadian and U.S. counterparts.
Stavans notes that since the 1950s, political turmoil, repression and economic crisis “have led many Jews to immigrate to Israel and the U.S. and Canada.” He contrasts Jewish Latin American writers with their U.S. counterparts in that the latter “have acquired a wide international readership,” whereas “most of the Jewish writers included in this anthology remain unknown, appreciated by a rather small audience, primarily Jewish.”
These stories express various moods. The Argentine writer Alberto Gerchunoff, the first Latin American Jewish writer in Spanish (before him, Jews in Latin America wrote in Russian, Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish), represented here by “Camacho’s Wedding Feast,” expressed an idealized view of Jewish immigrant life in Argentina in the early twentieth century, seeing the country as a land of boundless opportunity.
Some stories describe experiences familiar to many Jews in Canada and the U.S., such as immigration, and being caught between two religious and cultural worlds. These are especially reflected in the stories translated from Yiddish, such as “Temptation,” by Salomón Briansky (Colombia), “Solomon Licht,” by Yoyne Obodovski (Chile), “The Bar Mitzvah Speech,” by Salomon Zytner (Uruguay) and “Jesus” by Pinkhes Berniker (Cuba).
Other stories–although these themes overlap–also describe political violence, repression and anti-Semitism. Two examples are by Argentine writers: Aída Bortnik, in “Celeste’s Heart,” portrays a Jewish girl’s act of defiance to fascism. Mario Szichman’s “Remembrances of Things Future,” set in 1939 Poland, could also be set in any one of various Latin American countries under military rule. The latter story makes use of a peculiarly deadpan gallows humour. Two other stories, also leavened with irony and humour, deal with these realities from a child’s point of view: the Guatemalan Victor Perera’s “Kindergarten,” and the Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar’s “Inside My Dirty Head–the Holocaust.”
Stavans appropriately concludes the anthology with three stories by a non-Jewish Argentine writer, the renowned fantasist Jorge Luis Borges, who often showed a strong interest in Jewish culture, as evinced by his stories here: “Death and the Compass,” “The Secret Miracle,” and “Emma Zunz,” the latter occurring mainly within the Jewish community of Buenos Aires.
The book contains useful headnotes, as well as an extensive bibliography listing works by the authors and works on Jewish life in Latin America. Unfortunately, there is frequently no indication as to when each story was first written or published. Given their historical background, such information would shed greater light on many of these stories.
Nevertheless, this book–like many other works by Stavans–will be of great interest to anyone concerned with either Latin American or Jewish history, literature and experience. I share Stavans’ hope that “Oy, Caramba! will once again attract a generation of readers eager to explore the vicissitudes of Jewish life south of the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Carl Rosenberg, a lifelong resident of Vancouver, BC, edited Outlook: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine from 1998 to 2016. He has also written for Latin American Connexions, Quill & Quire and Jewish Independent, Vancouver’s Jewish community newspaper
Features
The horrifying story of how thousands of Polish Jewish women were forced into prostitution in Argentina by a Jewish organization known as “Zwi Migdal”
By BERNIE BELLAN Often the most interesting story ideas come in the oddest of circumstances.
Such was the case recently when I was attending the unveiling of an old friend. The rabbi who was officiating at the unveiling was Rabbi Anibal Mass.
Following the unveiling I walked over to Rabbi Mass to say hi. We were engaging in an amiable conversation when out of the blue he asked me: “Have you ever heard of Zwi Migdal?”
“Zwi Migdal?” I answered. “What is a Zwi Migdal?”
Rabbi Mass proceeded to tell me a story that I found so utterly amazing I told him that I would definitely follow it up – and write about it.
Zwi Migdal, Rabbi Mass explained to me, was the name of a leader of Argentinean Jewish gangsters who had originally come from Poland – thus the name of the group came from his name.
But it was the principal activity in which those gangsters were engaged that I found so horrifying, and almost unbelievable: They lured young Jewish women from Poland into coming to Argentina with promises that they would find work there – perhaps as au pairs or as seamstresses, but once they arrived to Argentina they were forced into prostitution.
They were forcibly kept in brothels and warned that if they ever tried to escape they would be hunted down and forced back. The enforced confinement of thousands of Jewish women in brothels in Argentina occurred over a very long period – from the 1860s to 1939.
According to Wikipedia, “During the 1920s the organization grew to its largest-ever size. At its height, 430 individuals, acting as pimps and in other criminal roles, oversaw a network of 2,000 brothels and approximately 4,000 women in Argentina alone.”
There were also branches of Zwi Migdal in other countries, including Brazil, the United States , Poland, South Africa, India and China.
Actually, if you want to read a detailed description of how Zwi Migdal operated, the entire Wikipedia article lays it out in graphic detail, including the modus operandi that Jewish pimps in Poland used to lure young women – who almost always came from poor families where the opportunity to have a better life in Argentina was so alluring that thousands of women fell prey to those false promises
Now, there was a reason Rabbi Mass brought up the story of Zwi Migdal in a cemetery. As he told me more about what happened in Argentina – and I was quite stupefied by the story he was telling me, he explained that eventually – and it was as a result of one very brave woman by the name of Raquel Liberman, that the members of Zwi Migdal were finally brought to justice.
Over 100 of them were put on trial – but even though many of them were convicted and sentenced to prison, the judicial system in Argentina was so corrupt that all but three were released from prison in short order. However, the public outcry over the release of all those pimps was so huge that justice officials were forced to rescind their releases. Many of them ended up moving to Uruguay.
It was what happened to them when they ended up being buried in one particular cemetery in Buenos Aires, Rabbi Mass told me, that was so unusual – and was the reason he was telling me this particular story in a cemetery: They were all buried in one section of that cemetery and a huge wall was built around the area of their graves – so as to forever cordon them off from the rest of the cemetery.
Something else that Rabbi Mass mentioned to me during our conversation was that Orthodox conversions are not allowed in South America. I asked him why that was? He said it was because many Jewish men had been marrying non-Jewish women who had gone through a “conversion of convenience.”
Here’s what I found when I asked AI why Orthodox conversions are not allowed in South America:
“Mainstream Orthodox communities in Latin America are traditionally highly tight-knit and conservative. Local leadership often uses the restriction to filter out ‘conversions of convenience’ (converting solely to marry a Jewish partner). By requiring candidates to travel to Israel or North America for final conversion, authorities ensure the applicant has the financial means, intense dedication, and long-term commitment required to live an Orthodox life.”
Later that same day Rabbi Mass sent me even more information about Zwi Migdal, including a link to a movie about Raquel Liberman on Vimeo. The movie is called “Raquel: a marked woman.”
The movie is somewhat of a docudrama in that it intersperses actual footage from the early 20th century with dramatizations of Raquel Liberman’s life in Argentina. Her courage in defying the gangsters who were forcing her to work as a prostitute is something to behold.
Another fascinating aspect of Zwi Migdal is that, while its members were held in total contempt by mainstream Argentinean Jewish society, they were able to fashion their own separate society, including building their own Orthodox synagogue – for which they had rabbis who were willing to serve as rabbis despite knowing what complete degenerates the members of Zwi Migdal were.
The notion that there was a Mafia type organization made up entirely of Jews is not in itself so difficult to comprehend. After all, there is a long tradition of Jewish gangsters; Murder Incorporated, for instance, which was made up of murderers for hire, was a Jewish organization.
But to think that hundreds of Jewish men – for a period lasting almost 70 years, were engaged in forcing young Polish Jewish women into prostitution? I was so amazed by the story Rabbi Mass told me that when I told him I would just have to write about that story, he responded that “This is worth, at least, a Limmud session.”
I responded in kind, saying that while it was something I would certainly consider proposing to the organizers of Limmud, rather than me conducting a session about Zwi MIgdal, given his own South American background, he would be far more suited to telling the story of Zwi Migdal at Limmud. Wouldn’t that be fascinating?
Features
Uri Poliavich and Yael Foundation Activities: Expanding Educational Opportunities
Uri Poliavich is a co-founder of the international charitable organization Yael Foundation. The foundation systematically works on developing quality education and supporting schools in many countries. The organization’s activities cover the development of educational infrastructure and improving the physical resources of institutions. For teachers, the foundation holds international meetings, seminars, and educational events. To recognize educators’ achievements, the annual Yael Awards are presented. All the organization’s initiatives are implemented in dozens of countries and yield long-term results.
Creation of Yael Foundation, Core Principles, and Scope of Operations
In 2020, Uri Poliavich co-founded the Yael Foundation. The foundation directs investments into quality education to strengthen identity, expand community opportunities, and build a future for children. The work is built on an evaluation model and long-term investment in educational impact.
Today, Yael Foundation’s activities with the participation of Uri Poliavich cover 48 countries and 101 cities. Overall, Uri Poliavich supports 145 educational institutions through the foundation. This program covers over 29,000 children in various regions. Cooperation takes place directly with local communities. Specialists study the real needs of schools and determine the necessary amount of assistance. Uri Poliavich contributes to creating safe and modern conditions for students. Educational institutions are provided with tools to upgrade equipment and improve their physical facilities.
Principles for the selection of projects: Impact assessment and infrastructure investments
Grants are awarded based on clear criteria. The team reviews requests from educational institutions and determines the feasibility of support. Uri Poliavich focuses on projects aimed at student development and teacher support. Each program includes measuring achieved results, and funding is allocated under a structured model taking into account the educational impact that forms over time. The physical condition of premises directly affects the quality of education, which is why Uri Poliavich pays special attention to updating school infrastructure.
Comprehensive Institutional Development and Professional Development for Educators
Financial assistance is only part of the Yael Foundation grant programs. Uri Poliavich works to ensure that educational institutions receive comprehensive support for their daily operations. Schools receive resources for updating equipment, improving living conditions, and facility safety. Uri Poliavich involves specialists to study the needs of each institution. The organization provides mentorship support and recommendations for organizing educational processes. Uri Poliavich helps create conditions under which institutions expand educational opportunities and operate stably over many years. The success of any initiative depends on the people who implement it. Uri Poliavich relies on experienced educators and organizers. Conditions for continuous learning are created for teachers. Uri Poliavich supports holding international meetings, seminars, and workshops for teachers. Sharing experience helps educators raise the quality of teaching in their schools.
Strategic Philanthropy and Long-Term Social Impact with Uri Poliavich
Modern philanthropy is changing its approaches and priorities. One-off assistance is giving way to well-thought-out projects with clear goals. Uri Poliavich applies this exact approach in his public activities. For him, it is important to create conditions where every initiative yields long-term results.
Consistent work makes it possible to resolve deep social tasks. Uri Poliavich focuses efforts on strengthening the educational sphere and supporting youth. This approach allows institutions to function stably for many years.
Transition to Systemic Projects
One-time donations rarely solve complex community challenges. Philanthropy is moving toward building sustainable support models. Uri Poliavich supports this direction of development. Instead of isolated actions, Uri Poliavich builds the foundation’s work on long-term partnerships with educational institutions. Systemic projects imply sequential resource allocation. This allows schools to plan their development and expand educational opportunities.
Respecting Cultural Characteristics and Supporting Institutions
Yael Foundation activities cover dozens of countries around the world. The organization provides support to schools, kindergartens, and specialized institutions. The main objective of these projects is acquiring a quality education. Children study their own culture, language, and traditions. Educational programs are tailored to the requests of specific communities. This helps preserve students’ national identity.
Apart from education, the condition of premises is of major importance. Many institutions need internal infrastructure updates. The organization allocates resources to improve physical facilities. Upgrading classrooms and purchasing equipment creates proper working conditions. Students and teachers get a comfortable space for daily classes.
Main areas of support for educational institutions:
- Support for programs to preserve children’s cultural identity.
- Funding renovation work in school and kindergarten premises.
- Purchase of new school furniture and educational materials.
- Meeting the basic household and technical needs of institutions.
- Creating a safe educational space for students and teachers.
Features
Book Review: A Yiddish Play about an American Miscarriage of Justice
By HENRY SREBRNIK Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair, by Leib Malach, edited by Alyssa Quint, translated by Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint (Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2026; 128 pages, $89.50USD hardcover, $29.50USD paperback).
On March 22, 1935, enthusiasts of Warsaw’s avant-garde theatre scene slipped into a community hall at 19 Dluga Street to see an edgy, new play called “Mississippi” performed by the Yiddish experimental theater group, Yung Teatr (Young Theatre; in Polish, “Teatr Mlodych”).
A new book that includes a translation of the play retells the story of the notorious Scottsboro Affair. Alyssa Quint, the editor, is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theaterand the editor of two forthcoming volumes on the Yiddish theatre, Women on the Yiddish Stage and Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis: a Critical Edition. Ellen Perecman holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the City University of New York. Her book, Ten Yiddish Plays in Translation, includes translations of plays by Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Peretz Hirshbein, H. Leivick and David Pinski.
Although devoid of any Jewish themes, “Mississippi” is, nonetheless, an original Yiddish play. In their English translation” Perecman and Quint have undertaken what the publishers call “a work of cultural salvage.” Penned in 1935 by Polish-Jewish playwright Leib Malach, “Mississippi” was performed on the Warsaw stage by the experimental Yiddish theatre company Yung Teater (Young Theatre) led by legendary director and drama theoretician Mikhl Weichert. Yung Teater dramatized favorite themes of the international left, including the trials of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro trial. Malach and Weichert were keen to depict a dramatic episode from contemporary life that reflected their humanistic and leftist political ideas as well as avant-garde theatrical practices. Weichert praised the cultural activities of the Soviet Union, especially its innovations in the theatre, but he and Malach were not members of the Communist Party, as Communism in interwar Poland was illegal, though they saw their production as contributing to this movement.
Writing in the weekly Literarishe Bleter on the eve of Mississippi’s premiere in March 1935, Malach explains how watching Weichert’s theater group inspired him to write about the Scottsboro Affair:
“I itched to write something with a social theme. I had just been in America. . . . I had attempted to represent in dramatic form the tragic event of the Scottsboro incident, the tragic lynch-sentence of nine Black boys. The event is well known to everyone. But the living drama is so big that my first attempts at capturing it struck me as lifeless . . . But seeing the youth of Yung Teatr in their performance [. . .] brought the Scottsboro tragedy back to my head.”
Malach, Quint tells us, researched and laboured over the play “in the context of a growing corpus of literature by Yiddish writers who trained their focus on racism in the Jim Crow South, and who identified with the socialist and Communist Party politics attached to the ordeal of the Scottsboro Boys. Moreover, they also found that the racism and lynchings depicted in the play bore a deep resemblance to the injustices perpetrated against Jews both historically and contemporaneously.”
Quint notes that historically, Malach’s most significant encounter with Black Americans and Black American culture was in Harlem, and the very specific details with which one of the Scottsboro Boys, Peter, dreams of Harlem are likely a product of this encounter.
The Yiddish composer Henekh Kon wrote all the songs that appear throughout the play. They are in Yiddish but based on Kon’s understanding of African-American genres including gospel, freedom songs and jazz. A self-taught musician who grew up immersed in Jewish music — tunes of the Hasidim, of the klezmorim and of the wedding jesters — and who later trained at the Music Academy of Berlin, Kon composed music for over forty works, including the film version of S. Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk (1937).
“Today’s readers of Mississippi will note that it is not a play that might have been written or performed today,” Quint writes. “Its portrait of African-American life tilts toward stereotype, its Communist ideological aspirations are also too baldly expressed, and the play lends itself to charges of cultural appropriation.” Since the actors are all white, they also perform in blackface. Presumably, there were few, if any, Yiddish-speaking Black actors in Poland, so the problem of how to present the actors playing the Scottsboro Boys as Black Americans without the production’s resorting to make-up might have seemed insurmountable.
I’ve written books and articles on American Jews and Communism, so I’m familiar with the story of the “Scottsboro Boys.” But I knew almost nothing about Leib Malach and “Mississippi,” though it has been mentioned in some books by, among others, Amelia Glaser, in Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine; Joshua Morris, in The Many Worlds of American Communism; and the very many others who have written shorter articles on the Jewish left and theatre, like Zack Rothbart and Jeffrey Veidlinger. In fact Alyssa Quint herself has written about the play in a volume, Oyfn Sheydveg: At the Crossroads: Jewish Intellectuals and the Crisis of 1939, edited by Joshua Karlip.
Leib Malach (the pen name of Leib Zalzman, 1894-1936) was born in Zwolen, Poland where he received a traditional Jewish education. He moved to Warsaw as a teenager, supporting himself by working in various trades. His literary talents were discovered by Hersh Dovid Nomberg, who helped him publish his first ballad in 1915. He later became a prose writer and noted dramatist. He emigrated to Argentina in 1922 and traveled widely in South America. After his return to Poland in 1929, he continued to travel and write popular travel sketches. He lived in Mandate Palestine from 1934-35 and was active with the Labour Zionists. Many of his plays reflect his leftist politics and concern with social injustices. He died after an illness in a Paris hospital, aged 41.
Born in Podhajce in eastern Galicia and raised in Stanislawow, Weichert received his education at kheders and in Polish schools. He attended law and humanities programs at universities in Lwów, Vienna, and in Berlin, where he studied avant-garde theatre with the preeminent German director Max Reinhardt.
“Mississippi” is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. It was staged in Warsaw in early 1935 and hundreds of times thereafter at various theatres in Poland, Israel, Canada, and Argentina. While the Scottsboro trial played out in the state of Alabama, the playwright thought it best to set the play in Mississippi, a name closely associated with the American South. The internationally acclaimed play highlighted the injustices of the American South, resonating with Eastern European Jewish audiences. It demonstrated how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of American Blacks.
In her introductory essay, Quint treats the political aspirations that animated Malach and Weichert, and the vulnerability felt by European Jewry that it saw reflected in the experience of Black Americans. It was the first play on the Yiddish stage — and possibly on a Polish stage — to depict the oppression of Black Americans. It traveled to multiple Polish cities and was met by the Jewish press with almost uniform enthusiasm and curiosity. That the Scottsboro trial unfolded against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism in Germany lent Jewish works more urgency in seeking solidarity across ethnic lines.
In the 1930s, the story of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama, was reported in newspapers around the world. From the American south to the Yiddish stages of Eastern Europe, news of the affair and the injustice that followed spread quickly. Many believe the high-profile series of events was an inspiration for the book and movie To Kill a Mockingbird.
The Scottsboro Boys case began on March 25, 1931, when nine young Black men and boys hopped aboard a Southern Railway train in search of work in Memphis, Tennessee. At some point a fight with whites on board erupted, and the Black riders forced some white travelers off the train. The ejected riders then claimed that they had been attacked, and two of the female white riders then asserted that they had been raped. An all-white jury convicted the nine, and all but the youngest, who was 12 years old, were sentenced to death. Numerous retrials followed, all resulting in guilty verdicts.
No crime in American history– let alone a crime that never occurred — produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as this one did. Over the course of the next two decades, the struggle for justice of the Scottsboro Boys launched and ended careers, wasted lives and produced heroes, opened southern juries to African Americans, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America.
The Scottsboro Boys, thanks to the efforts of, among others, a New York Jewish lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, who later took over their defence and was himself under attack by antisemites, avoided execution. The fact that Leibowitz was Jewish and brought in by Communists certainly did not help his cause, nor that of his clients, once the retrial commenced. His style and bravado were not welcome in Alabama.
But he prevailed and they were all ultimately spared the death sentence. In the years and decades that followed, all of them had their convictions overturned or were pardoned. This included three posthumous pardons granted by the governor of Alabama in 2013, more than two decades after the last of them had passed away.
A cause celebre, Scottsboro has been the subject of countless articles and books, and this new one, about a Yiddish play that dramatized the affair, provides an interesting lens to how deeply it resonated with Jews in Canada, the United States and Europe.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
