The Other/Argentina

Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation

Amy K. Kaminsky

• Editore: SUNY Press
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438483306
• Argomento: Scienze sociali
• Categoria: Studi sull'ebraismo

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.

CHAPTER ONE

PLANTING WHEAT AND REAPING DOCTORS

Another Way of Being Argentine

The fabric that is Argentina is woven of many threads, not least of which are the warp and woof of cultures, languages, and beliefs of the people who made their way into that nation. In this book I search for one of the strands in the complex fabric of Argentine history and self-representation, the strand of Jewishness. I tug on the fibers of Jewishness in Argentina to test the strength of the weave that holds them, and I consider the patterns of nation and meaning they form in combination with the threads alongside which they lie and those with which they interlace. The fabled Argentine Jewish migratory route from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the agricultural settlements of the pampas and to the urban centers of the nation gave rise to the sardonic observation that Jews came to the countryside of Argentina where they sowed wheat but reaped doctors, as their children went off to live in the nation’s urban centers. This pattern is just one of the ways that Argentina’s Jewish history resonates both with Jewish diasporas more generally and with Argentina’s past as a nation of immigrants, even as the story of Jews in Argentina rings changes on other Jewish and Argentine migration and assimilation narratives.1 Jewishness and Argentineity have been modified and inflected by each other so that Argentineity slips into Jewishness, just as Jewishness is another modality of Argentineity.

The very project of modernity in Argentina, the weaving of that cloth of many textures, relies, in part, on a submerged and troubled relationship to the paradox of Jewish otherness in, and identification with, the nation. It thereby claims a central place for Jewish-authored texts and the deployment of Jewishness, as an idea as well as an identity, in shaping Argentina’s cultural landscape as a modern nation. As a multicultural immigrant nation with a large, and still largely ignored, indigenous population as well as a little-acknowledged history of African slavery and its aftermath, Argentina struggles with, and is enriched by, conflicting and interlacing meanings of religion, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and gender.2 Visual artists, filmmakers, and writers, who often speak both of documenting their world and discovering it as they create, have often interrogated the meaning of Argentine modernity in relation to Europe and to the rest of Latin America. Literary and visual texts marked by complex representations of Argentina’s sites of difference, tied to such critical moments in the nation’s history as the rise of labor and anarchist movements in the early part of the twentieth century, Peronism in midcentury, the dictatorship and repression of the 1970s and 1980s, and times of economic crisis like those of the turn of the millennium are, therefore, critical sites for both exploring and temporarily stabilizing such meaning.

Argentina claims to be a modern nation, a claim that would be utterly precarious were it predicated only on the nation’s political and economic status in the world. Instead, Argentine modernity rests on a balance between unitary national identity and a mix of often-subdued internal differences that may trouble such unity but that also link the nation to a globalized cosmopolitanism. Both close and symptomatic readings of Argentine literary, visual, and cinematic texts to examine cultural representations of difference, give ample evidence that Argentine modernity is predicated on such a balance. The texts I call upon, mostly by Jewish-identified authors, a category that is hardly uniform or unambiguous, give ample evidence that Argentine modernity is poised between a unitary sense of nationality and a range of marginalized ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender identities.

For its part, Jewishness holds multiple meanings related to Argentina’s claim to modernity.3 In the context of Argentina’s struggle to claim a place in the modern world, Jewishness is, among other things, a matter of cultural representations and elisions. At times Jewishness is salient, for good or ill. For Jewishness is a productive irritant that, in Argentina as elsewhere, refuses to dissolve completely. Making their way into the very stuff of the immigrant nation, Jews and Jewish culture inflect national identity in ways that are embedded in Argentina’s vibrant literary and visual cultures. Argentina’s Jews are associated with urban life and rural development, capitalism as well as socialism, medicine, psychoanalysis, and intellectual and artistic pursuits—in other words, with modernity. Nevertheless, theorists of modernity often consider it as a purely European phenomenon, and in fact European modernity produces itself against the colonial, raced, and feminized other that includes both Jews and Latin America. This is the modernity of the atomized subject that has come under so much feminist scrutiny, but it is also one that is almost immediately recovered for community by the (distinctly masculinist) social contract. Modernity is necessarily globalized insofar as it produces itself against the other from without, as well as in contrast to the other within.

The familiar if somewhat tired argument that Latin America has never been part of modernity, but rather has always been postmodern, derives from the notion that the singular, European (unmarked but for that reason no less masculine) subject can never have been fully transplanted onto American soil: that the criollo was by ancestry Spanish, but by history and geography American.4 The embrace of hybridity came much later, but it sealed the (post)modern pact as forever and necessarily marked by the incorporation of at least one of its others. One observer, Adolfo Colombres, distinguishes between “dominant modernity,” the modernity of the Enlightenment, which “aspired to put reason at the service of liberty and justice” (95) but lost its way and became an obsessive religion of progress (95) and “our [Latin American] modernity,” produced through the diversity of Latin American cultures, traditions, belief systems, and histories (106ff.). Nevertheless, despite his attention to class differences, Colombres’s Europe is ethnically monolithic, excluding Jews and other minorities, and both his Europe and his America are hetero-masculine, with room neither for women or sexual minorities.

On the other hand, the dominant strains in Jewish cultural studies approach the question of modernity with little reference to Jews outside Europe, the United States, and Israel. Until the quite recent entry of feminist and queer perspectives in Jewish cultural studies, gender and sexuality were not taken into account in either the affirmation or the theorization of Jewish modernity. Still, even this narrow understanding of Jewishness makes space for the suggestion that Jewishness and modernity are linked. Despite having absorbed European understandings of Jewishness, Argentina, as a hybrid nation, necessarily modifies the conventional European view of Jewish difference. Jews remain outsiders among more easily assimilated immigrants to the nation, but because most Argentine Jews are European, they are not so “other” to the dominant culture as are indigenous people and Afro-Argentines. The recent exodus of Jews from Argentina is another mark of Jewish difference, but these new Israelis, Europeans, and North Americans identify also as Argentines.5

As languages and narrative systems, English and Spanish both inscribe actor and action in relation to some other. Written narrative implies a multiplicity of subjects circulating among the subject of the sentence, the narrative voice, and the author her or himself, and always presupposes at least one subject-receptor, the reader or listener. Nevertheless, the indirect complement of the verb, the one who is not its subject and whom I am loath to call its object, may stand in a relation of alliance, friendship, and trust. It is a relationship that Martin Buber calls I/Thou, in which the encounter between the two is not the monological relationship between subject and object, but rather an encounter between subject and subject, in which both may undergo a certain transformation as a result of their coming together. In the encounter between Jews and Argentina, both are changed, and both grow.

This discursive ground is not without moments of conflict. Two foundational texts of Argentine Jewishness, Julián Martel’s antisemitic, urban The Stock Market (La bolsa, 1891), and Alberto Gerchunoff’s The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (Los gauchos judíos, 1910), which stakes a Jewish claim to Argentina’s iconic pampas, frame the contested meanings of Argentineity and Jewishness.6 Subsequent writers have embraced and rewritten the emblematic figure of Gerchunoff’s Jewish gaucho, while The Stock Market’s blatant antisemitism persists as a symptom of anti-Jewish sentiment.

The pseudonymous Martel published the foundational (if noncanonical) antisemitic text of Argentina, The Stock Market, within two years of the arrival in the port of Buenos Aires of the steamship Weser, which carried the first group of Russian Jewish immigrants headed for a rural life in Argentina. Less than twenty years later, Alberto Gerchunoff, a descendant of one of the Weser passengers, wrote his own story of Jewishness in Argentina. Gerchunoff’s The Jewish Gauchos, like Martel’s The Stock Market, stakes a claim to authentic Argentineity; each organizes that claim around radically different representations of the Jewish immigrant and diametrically opposed views of the value of Jewishness to Argentina as a modernizing nation. What is more, both Martel and Gerchunoff implicitly represent both Jewishness and Argentineity in distinctly gendered and sexualized ways as they develop an understanding of Jewishness in relation to its bearing on Argentina as a modern nation.

The urban setting of The Stock Market troubles traditional masculinity, which, in the city, is challenged not only by the domestic demands of the bourgeois Catholic woman, but, more overtly, by what the narrator describes as a veritable invasion of immigrants. The modernity of industrial-era civilization is a cause of anxiety. Among the trappings of that civilization, the brightly lit home that Luis Glow, the novel’s embattled hero, provides for his loving but implicitly demanding wife, Margarita, and their children both symbolizes the enlightenment of modernity and testifies to the rash, ostentatious spending that threatens the traditional, conservative family. The newly developing capitalism that promises Argentina entry into the modern economic world is shot through with the danger of degeneracy, corruption, and deceit. In The Stock Market, these dangers are embodied in the figure of the Jewish speculator. He is not the only corrupt figure in the novel, but he is unmistakably the source of corruption. Textual anxiety about the inappropriate entry of Jews into the fabric of polite society finds an echo in distress over class mobility. A conversation between Glow and his friends expresses astonishment and not a little dismay that a former waiter is now hobnobbing with the gentry and can no longer be berated by his (erstwhile) social betters. It is the Jew, however, whose presence most threatens the social order. Martel’s Jewish man is deficient in his unhealthy body; described in feminine terms, he is both degenerate and dishonorable:

The one who mangled these French words with German teeth, and not the purest German at that, was a pale, blond, lymphatic man, of short stature, and in whose disagreeable and effeminate face could be observed an expression of hypocritical humility, which earmarks the Jewish race through a long period of servility. He had small bloodshot eyes, like the descendants of the tribe of Zabulon and the hooked nose typical of the tribe of Ephraim. He dressed with the flashy showiness of the Jew, who can never quite acquire the noble distinction which characterizes the man of the Aryan race, his antagonist. His name was Filiberto Mackster [sic] and he had the title of Baron which he had bought in Germany believing that this would lend importance to his obscure name. (1948, 33–34)

[El que lo hablaba, masticando las palabras francesas con dientes alemanes, y no de los más puros, por cierto, era un hombre pálido, rubio, linfático, de mediana estatura, y en cuya cara antipática y afeminada se observaba esa expresión de hipócrita humildad que la costumbre de un largo servilismo ha hecho como el sello típico de la raza judía. Tenía los ojos pequeños, estriados de filamentos rojos, que denuncian los descendientes de la tribu de Zabulón, y la nariz encorvada propia de la tribu de Ephraim. Vestía con el lujo charro del judío, el cual nunca puede llegar a adquirir la noble distinción que caracteriza al hombre de la raza Arya, su antagonista. Llamábase Filiberto Mackser y tenía el título de barón que había comprado en Alemania creyendo que así daba importancia a su oscuro apellido. (1891, 35–36)]

Mackser’s physical degeneracy is echoed by the social and moral corruption embodied by his young associate, a man engaged in sex trafficking, slavery, and pro-Jewish propaganda:

He was accompanied by a young man, countryman and fellow believer, who practiced the white slave trade, supplying the brothels of Buenos Aires with all the beauties which supply the German and Oriental markets. He also wrote for a daily evening paper, in whose columns he lent important services to the interests of the Jews, quite often winning public approval for them. He was, besides, president of a club of slave traders. (1948, 34)

[Iba acompañado de un joven, compatriota y correligionario suyo, que ejercía el comercio de mujeres, abasteciendo los serrallos porteños de todas las bellezas que proporcionan los mercados alemanes y orientales. También escribía en un diario de la tarde, en cuyas columnas prestaba importantes servicios a los intereses judíos, consiguiendo muchas veces dirigir la opinión en favor de éstos. Era, además, presidente de un club de traficantes de carne humana. (1891, 36)]

Martel’s schematic description of Mackser and his sidekick crams a cartload of stereotypes into these short passages. Between them, the Jewish men are sickly, pale, short of stature, unpleasant to look at, effeminate, affected, hypocritical, servile, flashy, corrupt, and quite possibly homosexual:

Pale blond, sickly, and of short stature, God only knows what strange bonds united him to the Baron de Mackster [sic], whom he seemed to treat with extreme consideration. (1948, 35)

[Pálido, rubio, enclenque y de reducida estatura, sabe Dios qué extraños lazos lo unían con el barón de Mackser, al que parecía tratar con exagerados miramientos. (1891, 37)]

The religiously suspect, sexually degenerate Jew is part of an international conspiracy to take control of the new nation’s sources of wealth:

The Doctor [Glow] knew that the Semite was an envoy of Rothschild, the English banker, who had sent him to Buenos Aires to operate in gold and to exercise pressure on the market. What the Doctor didn’t know was that Mackster [sic] had the assignment of monopolizing, with the help of a strong Jewish syndicate, the principal productive sources of the country. (1948, 35)

[No ignoraba el doctor que aquel semita era un enviado de Rothschild, el banquero inglés, que lo había mandado a Buenos Aires para que operase en el oro y ejerciese presión sobre la plaza. Lo que el doctor no sabía era que Mackser tenía la consigna de acaparar, de monopolizar, con ayuda de un fuerte sindicato judío, a cuyo frente estaba él, las principales fuentes productoras del país. (1891, 37)]

Mackser and his partner mimic Gentile ways in a manner that is always insufficient: they mangle both French and German, and their attempt at elegance inevitably misses the mark. The older man affects a language and a title to which he has no right and, in an echo of the scurrilous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is the envoy of an international Jewish conspiracy bent on taking over the nation’s economy.7 Mackser’s companion traffics both in women and in propaganda, and he writes pro-Jewish columns for the press. A third Jewish character, a moneylender who refuses to lend the protagonist funds when he learns that he is the financially ruined Glow, is a similar caricature.8

The Stock Market is blatantly antisemitic in its condemnation of Jewish lust for money, accusations of treachery, and the suggestion of an international, antipatriotic conspiracy that would undermine not only the naive blond protagonist but the ever-whiter nation he embodies as well. Martel marshals the culturally available hate-mongering stereotypes quite overtly, but he is only a bit more circumspect about the way th...