Yiddish Literature in Mexico

My forthcoming article in Comparative Literature Studies analyzes Yiddish literature produced in Mexico from a multilingual and multi-medial perspective. In it, I analyze the works of Isaac Berliner, whose book City of Palaces was illustrated by Diego Rivera, and Jacobo Glantz (father of Margo Glantz). My comparative approach to the study of Yiddish modernism examines the ambiguous intersections between minority writers, the nations where they live, and global literary networks.

The 1920s saw a great influx of Jewish immigration to Mexico from Eastern Europe in part because of new quotas at the time that restricted immigration to the United States. Though many Eastern European Jewish immigrants came to Mexico intending to relocate to the United States once restrictions were lifted, a large community settled in Mexico for the long term, primarily in Mexico City. There they established communal institutions, schools, aid societies, and newspapers, learning Spanish within a decade, but continuing to speak and teach Yiddish as a way to maintain a Jewish identity.

While these Jewish immigrants wrestled with their relationship to Mexican national identity, the very meaning of national belonging in modern Mexico was itself in flux. In the fractured sociopolitical context that emerged after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), a racialized concept known as mestizaje (racial mixing) came to define the boundaries of mexicanidad (Mexicanity). As a term that reflected the racial mixing of indigenous peoples and Spanish colonizers, mestizaje claimed the cultural inheritance of both for modern Mexico.

As politicians and intellectuals debated the boundaries of Mexican national identity in the public sphere, Isaac Berliner and Jacobo Glantz published Yiddish poetry that interrogated these very borders for a Yiddish readership both local and abroad. They integrated aspects of Mexican modernism into their Yiddish poetry as a means of legitimizing Jewishness in Mexico. At the same time, their interest in this local mythohistory was also part of their modernist poetics because it let them experiment with the limits of what Yiddish could represent. This strategy was common at the time among Yiddish modernists around the world, and playing with the language in this way helped connect Berliner and Glantz to this larger Yiddish literary scene, which was centered primarily in New York and Warsaw.

In analyzing the work of these two poets, we can see how they negotiated Jewish difference in the midst of a culture of mestizaje. While Berliner’s poetry engaged with the Jewish encounter between race and indigenismo, Jacobo Glantz rhetorically uncovered the Jewishness within Mexico’s Spanish colonial history through a strategy of Neo-Sephardism.

Their cultural work not only exposes the limits of the nation, but it also reveals its artifice. Similarly, by attending to the function of Jewishness in their work and what is signifies, we can also see how this category is itself exposed as a construct with its own fluid boundaries.