Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein. New Jewish Argentina Chap. 5

The New Jewish Argentina

Facets of Jewish Experiences in the Southern Cone

Edited by

Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein

LEIDEN • BOSTON2013

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 23346 1

CONTENTS

List of Tables, Maps, and Figures ............................................................... viiAcknowledgment ............................................................................................ ixList of Contributors ........................................................................................ xi

Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 Raanan Rein and Adriana Brodsky

Chapter One The Jewish Experience in Argentina in a Diasporic Comparative Perspective ......................................................................... 7 José C. Moya

Chapter Two From Textile Thieves to “Supposed Seamstresses”: Jews, Crime, and Urban Identities in Buenos Aires, 1905–1930 ... 31 Mollie Lewis Nouwen

Chapter Three Uprooting the Seeds of Evil: Ezras Noschim and Jewish Marriage Regulation, Morality Certifĳicates, and Degenerate Prostitute Mothers in 1930s Buenos Aires .................. 55 Mir Yarfĳitz

Chapter Four Print Culture and Urban Geography: Jewish Bookstores, Libraries and Printers in Buenos Aires, 1910–1960 ..... 81 Alejandro Dujovne

Chapter Five “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” Battles the Nacionalistas: Crítica, the Funny Pages, and Jews as a Liberal Discourse (1929–1932) ............................................................................... 109 Ariel Svarch

Chapter Six The “Other” Gerchunofff and the Visual Representation of the Shoah .................................................................. 131 Edna Aizenberg

Chapter Seven An Argentine Experience? Borges, Judaism, and the Holocaust .............................................................................................. 147 Federico Finchelstein


vi contents

Chapter Eight Electing ‘Miss Sefaradí ’, and ‘Queen Esther’: Sephardim, Zionism, and Ethnic and National Identities in Argentina, 1933–1971 .................................................................................. 179 Adriana Brodsky

Chapter Nine Politically Incorrect: César Tiempo and the Editorial Stafff of the Cultural Supplement of La Prensa ............... 213 Raanan Rein

Chapter Ten Generation and Innovation in the Rise of an Argentine-Jewish Community, 1960–1967 ........................................... 235 Beatrice D. Gurwitz

Chapter Eleven Reading Kissinger’s Avatars: Cold War Pragmatism in Argentina’s Middle East Policy ................................. 263 David M. K. Sheinin

Chapter Twelve “Memories that Lie a Little.” New Approaches to the Research into the Jewish Experience during the Last Military Dictatorship in Argentina ....................................................... 293 Emmanuel Nicolás Kahan

Chapter Thirteen Child Survivors of the Shoa: Testimony, Citizenship, and Survival in Jewish Buenos Aires ........................... 315 Natasha Zaretsky

Chapter Fourteen Body and Soul: Therapeutic Dimensions of Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy in Neoliberal Argentina ............................ 341 Shari Jacobson

Chapter Fifteen The Other Becomes Mainstream: Jews in Contemporary Argentine Cinema ........................................................ 365 Tzvi Tal

Index ................................................................................................................... 393



CHAPTER FIVE

“DON JACOBO EN LA ARGENTINA” BATTLES THE NACIONALISTAS: CRÍTICA, THE FUNNY PAGES,

AND JEWS AS A LIBERAL DISCOURSE (1929–1932)

Ariel Svarch

On September 2, 1929, a mustached, bald, stocky old man debuted on the last page of Crítica, the best-selling Argentine newspaper. This was not his fĳirst brush with the public eye; since 1912 and under another alias, he had appeared regularly in the comic-strips of the New York Journal, flagship of William Randolph Hearst’s media empire. In the United States, where syn-dication put him in several newspapers every day, this man went under the common name of Sam Perkins, although everyone called him “Paw.” Upon his arrival to Buenos Aires, he adopted a new identity: he became Don Jacobo, a Jewish immigrant from somewhere in Eastern Europe.

“Don Jacobo en la Argentina” was what the anonymous translator(s) of Crítica re-titled Clifff Sterrett’s classic “flapper” comic “Polly and her Pals,” one of the several strips that Natalio Botana, the newspaper’s owner, bought from the Hearst media and syndication empire to attract a larger readership. It was the only imported strip not simply translated into Span-ish (which often implied a slight adaptation of the strip for the Argentine public), but rather completely rebuilt, its characters and narrative altered by a new textual framework. With “Don Jacobo en la Argentina,” Botana and his stafff decided to transform “Polly and her Pals” into the humorous story of a Jewish immigrant in Argentina, giving the character “Paw” not only a new name and a highlighted role as the lead of the strip, but also a heavy “Yiddish” accent.

This paper argues that Crítica strategically portrayed the narrative of successful Jewish immigration and adaptation in “Don Jacobo en la Argen-tina” in accordance with its commitment to an ideology of modernization, liberal populism, and inclusive and expansive nationalism. The translated nature of “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” was part of a broader intervention in public discourse regarding the nature of Argentineness and the role of immigration in it. Crítica strategically deployed Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazim) to argue for the success of assimilation and the positive

110 ariel svarch


impact of immigration on Argentina’s economic growth, and cultural and intellectual progress. By emphasizing positive images about Jews (their supposed intelligence and commercial ingenuity, for example) and sub-verting the negative stereotypes (the claims of irreducible foreignness, cowardice, and avarice), Crítica purposefully worked to influence the public debate—and, in particular, the new group of readers with no pre-vious contact with mass media—through positive portrayals of Jewish-Argentines. At the same time, Crítica’s image of the Jewish immigrant as represented in “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” was conceived as a way to challenge the Argentine Right’s deployment of negative stereotypes of Jews as a xenophobic argument.

Perhaps the most vital way in which Crítica argued for the assimilabil-ity of Jews was through their deployment of ethnic markers of identity. Unlike the periodicals and intellectuals of the Argentine Right, which represented Ashkenazim not only through behavioral stereotypes, but also through physical markers like hooked noses, long black beards, and the traditional garments of the Orthodox practitioners of Judaism, Crítica relied on linguistic markers to denote the traces of Jewishness in those it deemed new Argentines.1 Even fĳirst-generation immigrants were pictured as unidentifĳiable citizens until they spoke, betraying their origin with their Yiddish-Spanish patois. The newspaper’s narrative, however, emphasized the success of trans-generational assimilation by arguing that children of immigrants, who grew up in the national environment and received the mandatory public education, embraced Argentine Spanish as their mother tongue and retained only a remnant of their Jewish “otherness” in their foreign-sounding last names.

That the best-selling periodical of the late 1920s and 1930s—at its height over half a million copies daily—could repeatedly signal “Jewish-ness” relying not on physical, but rather linguistic characteristics2 suggests that, at least for many Buenos Aires dwellers (the main readers of Crítica), such markers were sufffĳicient for them to identify Jews. While this does not necessarily show that Jews were only recognizable as such through their use of Yiddish and its efffect on their Spanish, it does hint that the popular

1 For examples of the nationalist newspapers, see Juan Emiliano Carulla’s La Voz Nacio-nal, Rodolfo Irazusta’s La Nueva República, and La Fronda. Sandra McGee-Deutsch, Coun-terrevolution in Argentina, 1900–1932: The Argentine Patriotic League (Lincoln, 1986). Sandra McGee-Deutsch and Ronald H. Dolkart (eds), The Argentine Right: Its History and Intel-lectual Origins, 1910 to the Present (Lanham, 1992). Leonardo Senkman, El antisemitismo en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1989).

2 Including Jewish-sounding names like “Jacobo.”

“don jacobo en la argentina” battles the nacionalistas 111


image of “the Jew” was far from that of a totally—physically, religiously, linguistically, and behaviorally—alien “other.” Additionally, that most Crítica readers could identify Jewishness implies that Eastern European Jews had considerable social visibility in Buenos Aires by the end of the 1920s and beginnings of the 1930s.

Critica: Liberalism, Modernity, Immigration, and the Jews

“Don Jacobo en la Argentina” was one of many comic-strips that adorned Crítica’s last page, with their attractive drawings and promises of fun and entertainment. They were part of Botana’s attempt to attract a broad public by adopting the techniques of modern journalism, as it was being developed in the United States by the likes of Joseph Pulitzer and Wil-liam Randolph Hearst.3 Crítica also used large, eye-catching titles; articles focusing on technology, social conflict, human drama and crime; and involved its public, enticing readers to send in scoops or leading them in protests or political campaigns.4

After his initial failure to create a massive newspaper in the 1910s, Bot-ana overhauled Crítica and installed it as the self-proclaimed “voice of the people”.5 It was the fĳirst afternoon periodical designed to attract new social sectors recently incorporated into the public sphere through the adoption and adaptation of the marketing tactics that proved successful in the United States. The periodical was the fĳirst to adopt the tabloid for-mat, and the one most committed to follow as well as defĳine the interests of its readers. Beyond his commitment to modernizing the newspaper, Botana’s editorial line also embraced a discourse that celebrated moder-nity through its coverage of modernist literature, motor vehicles, new architectural trends and artistic vanguards.6

Crítica broadened its base of readers by including literature and philosophical essays along with gory police stories, detailed sports and horse-racing coverage, and supplements targeting specifĳic social groups

3 While Crítica was a pioneer in the modernization of Argentine journalism, the fĳirst use of imported comic-strip from the United States can be traced back to the magazine Caras y Caretas, beginning in 1912. See Marcela Gené, Varones domados. Family strips de los años veinte (unpublished manuscript).

4 Silvia Saitta, Regueros de tinta: el diario Crítica en la década de 1920 (Buenos Aires, 1998), p. 38.

5 Saitta, Regueros de tinta, p. 40.6 Saitta, Regueros de tinta, pp. 55–64, 125–152.

112 ariel svarch


(workers, children, and women) or devoted to topics with an emphasis on modernity. It was also the fĳirst newspaper to have a last page full of comic-strips, most of them by syndicated artists in the United States. By 1929, Crítica had between 12 and 14 strips on the last page and inside the newspaper, in addition to ad-hoc satirical or illustrative cartoons its own artists drew on demand.7

Botana’s product dethroned La Razón as the best-selling afternoon peri-odical after siding against its competition and with the union of paper-boys (“Canillitas”) in their labor demands. It also gained wider support among the Buenos Aires working classes by taking political and social positions previously supported only by socialist parties and organiza-tions. This stance earned Crítica an attempted bombing, several criminal trials, the arrest of a large part of its writing stafff, and an offfĳicial closure. Botana capitalized on these episodes, making the newspaper itself not the medium but the object of news and creating a narrative of Crítica’s mar-tyrdom and heroism as the “voice of the people.” By 1929, the newspaper’s several editions sold on average more than three hundred thousand cop-ies, displacing even the morning newspapers (La Prensa and La Nación). Botana bragged that his newspaper defĳined the results of local elections through its endorsement of one party or candidate. The claim was fur-ther reinforced by socialist Nicolás Repetto, who complained that Crítica’s lack of support had cost his party several thousand votes, as well as by arch-conservative Leopoldo Lugones Jr.’s accusation that the newspaper defĳined the 1928 presidential election in Hipólito Yrigoyen’s favor.8

A ubiquitous dimension of Crítica’s liberal populism was its embrace of an inclusive nationalism. This illuminated the newspaper’s position on the issue of immigration and minorities in Argentina, putting them at odds with the traditional nationalist groups and intellectuals, heav-ily influenced by nativist-Hispanist rhetoric and a Catholic-centric con-ception of Argentineness.9 Crítica’s editorial stance projected confĳident optimism regarding the integration and contribution of immigrants of diffferent ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds to their new South American home.

This was particularly true in the case of Jews. As its fĳight with the dif-ferent factions of the Argentine Right intensifĳied, Crítica increasingly

7 Saitta, Regueros de tinta, pp. 91–117. 8 Saitta. Regueros de tinta, pp. 16–17, 229.9 McGee Deutsch and Ronald H. Dolkart, The Argentine Right.



used the Eastern European Jewish experience as an argument for the success of immigrant integration. On November 2, 1929, the same day “Jacobo en la Argentina” debuted on its last page, the newspaper devoted a page to an article titled “The Killing of Jews Agitates a Popular Porteño Neighborhood.”10 Although it was apparently conceived as a story on the local Jewish reaction to the 1929 “Palestine Riots” in the Middle Eastern British Protectorate, the text failed to reference any killings whatsoever. It was actually a general interest article about Eastern European Jews living in the city of Buenos Aires. The referenced “popular porteño neighbor-hood” was the centric district of Once, imagined by both Argentine Jews and non-Jews as a “Jewish” living and commercial space.11

The narrative of the article follows the assimilation of the Jews, from complete “ethnic” strangers to Argentines. It starts describing

comb-resistant beards; boys with yellow fuzz on their cheeks; women hold-ing their dresses with their bony shoulders; the dreadful dance of misery and unleavened bread that swirls in the poor Jewish homes . . . and in the poor Hebrew girl [la pobrecita hebrea] who goes out to work every morning with her lips painted red, as if her mouth was the heart of Israel.12

After this exoticizing image, the narrator describes the early integrationist Jews as those who adopted the habits of the host society in public yet kept on practicing Talmudic Judaism in the privacy of their homes. The follow-ing subtitle, “Jewish-Argentines,” notes the arrival of Jews in Argentina looking for hope, giving birth

every day to an Argentine that, following the intervention of the mohel,13 becomes Jewish . . . and when the boy grows and makes friends, adapting to the environment, his steps, unlike the heavy, painful steps of his ancestors, become agile as they follow the melodious rhythm of a quick tango. His fore-head, however, carries forever the atavistic sadness of his persecuted race.14

The article argues for a progressive assimilation, with each generation becoming more and more Argentine. It also states a faith in the ius solis

10 Anonymous, “Las matanzas de judíos mantienen en vilo a un popular barrio porteño”, Crítica, September 2nd, 1929. Porteño means “of Buenos Aires”. It can be used as a noun to reference the residents of the city (plural: porteños), or as an adjective to denote the quality of being from or of Buenos Aires.

11 See Eugene Sofer, From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires (New York, 1982).

12 Anonymous, “Las matanzas de judíos . . .”13 Mohel is the Hebrew term for the professional in charge of circumcision. 14 Anonymous, “Las matanzas de judíos . . .”

114 ariel svarch


principle: merely by being born in the country, the children were Argen-tines, and only became Jewish through the ritual of circumcision. These native-born Jewish-Argentine youths, “quieter than others, but more stu-dious,” gave back to the country “to which they own a sacred debt.” The article explains how, through efffort in a land of equal opportunity, the liberal professions and the arts fĳilled up with new names ending “in intri-cate pronunciations.”

What have these men done? They have erased the imaginary stain, the stigma that other peoples’ egotism had branded on their foreheads. They have given their country of birth, the country which granted their parents the bread that fed them, the best of their enlightened brains and labor, and children of their own who, maybe, the mohel will not touch a few days after they are born.15

The editors further reinforced the message of Jewish adaptation through the accompanying pictures. Two photographs at the edges of the page show older men with sidelocks, derby hats, bushy beards, and long black overcoats. They contrast sharply with the larger picture at the center of the page, which shows a group of young men, modernly dressed in two- and three-piece suits and ties. They are all clean-shaven except for the one sporting a thin, well-groomed mustache. Gathered around a table in a cafe, they seem to be chatting and reading the newspaper. They are only marked as Jews because one of them reads “Di Presse,” a Yiddish newspa-per. The captions below the pictures of the elderly Orthodox-looking Jews have “quotes” of them in a broken Spanish with a Yiddish-heavy accent.16 In contrast, the one below the modernly dressed men in the central picture simply notes that in the social gathering at the café, “everybody reads”.

The Crítica article developed a clear narrative of unidirectional assim-ilation, showing that Jews had already become productive members of society while retaining some ethnic markers, such as private Jewish ritual, obscure names, and their ethnic language. The author seemed confĳident that they would go on to blend completely with the broader population. The Jewish seed found fertile ground in the rich Argentine pampas, he argued, and the fruit it produced was national. In fact, the article argues that the ultimate—and desirable—stage of the integrationist experience was the disappearance of ethnic particularism, in this case of the practice

15 Anonymous, “Las matanzas de judíos . . .”16 “¿Pir quí mi sacás fotografías?” “ ¿Dicís qui saldré en la CRÍTICAS? Boino”. In Anony-

mous, “Las matanzas de judíos . . .”



of Jewish religion (symbolized through the act of ritual circumcision). In this regard, the article’s stance is similar to traditional assimilationist posi-tions endorsed by non-Jews in other historical contexts.17

The above-mentioned article is perhaps Crítica’s most explicit endorse-ment of Jewish integration into Argentina, but by no means the only one. The Arts section celebrated Jewish-Argentine actress Berta Singerman without referring to her ethnicity, describing her as having the poten-tial to become “the highest expression of our theatre.” At the same time, the article hoped Singerman would choose more plays from Argentine authors “to stop being the Argentine artist who has done the least in favor of Argentine theatre,” a veiled criticism of the actress’s insistence to devote part of her time to local Yiddish theatre. Crítica’s literary supple-ment also employed Jewish-Argentine writers like Alberto Gerchunofff (famous for his fĳictional pro-integrationist work The Jewish Gauchos [Los gauchos judíos]) and César Tiempo. Still, the Jewish fĳigure that showed up most often in the newspaper’s pages—and whose Jewishness was more explicitly mentioned—was the cartoon character Don Jacobo, a daily fea-ture of Crítica’s funnies.

Comic-Strips as Integrationist Devices

Why did Crítica decide to transform “Polly and her Pals” into a strip about immigrants? Why turn American Sam Perkins into a Jewish immigrant, instead of a “regular” Argentine? If they wanted an immigrant protago-nist, why make him Jewish, when Argentina had many more Italians and Spaniards than Ashkenazim?

The editorial meetings of Crítica’s board left no minutes to reconstruct the reasons for choosing “Polly and her Pals” over the dozen or so other syndicated comic-strips from the United States to make a story about immigrants in Argentina. It is possible, however, to identify several con-ditions that shaped the fĳinal cultural product. The nature of the medium determines that the narrative of any comic-strip must combine two difffer-ent dimensions, one visual (the drawings), and the other verbal (the dia-logues). Nadine Celotti, a theorist in the particular subfĳield of Translation Studies that deals with comic-books has emphasized that the graphics are

17 See for example Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradi-tion and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor, 1999).

116 ariel svarch


not a corset but a tool, necessary “to grasp the totality of the meaning,” and that the meaning of the image is not universal, but rather local.18 In creating “Don Jacobo en la Argentina,” however, Crítica’s goal was not a traditional translation, but rather to craft a completely diffferent story by replacing the speech balloons with new text. To this end, a fĳixed visual dimension often was a structural corset which determined the limits of text to convey new meaning while keeping the whole of the strip coher-ent and intelligible.19 Sometimes attempts to tell a diffferent story than the one drawn by Clifff Sterrett for the Hearst empire resulted in a collapse of narrative coherence. Take the following example:20

In the new “translation”, Jacobo’s wife threatens him with bodily harm after he commented on Ruperta’s stockings. In the fĳinal panel, the wife tells Jacobo “this is how I will split you in half,” as the strip’s new punch-line. Following the text, the reader is supposed to assume that her hands are holding a broken twig. The drawing, though, shows that she is not actually holding a broken item, but a pair of bobby pins. The chrono-logical narrative between panels three and four makes it evident that, from the way her hairdo changes, she has just removed the pins from her hair. The original textual narrative is unavailable, but it is clear that the translation deviated from it. This example illustrates the limits a pre-existing graphic dimension posed to the transformation of one cartoon into another through the modifĳication of the text.

18 Nadine Celotti, “The Translator of Comics as a Semiotic Investigator”, in Federico Zanettin (ed), Comics in Translation (Manchester and New York, 2008).

19 Not always, though. “Flapper” comic-strips like “Polly and her Pals” were modernist; hence, the drawings were often better suited than other strips to convey Crítica’s message.

20 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, September 2nd, 1929.

Figure 1. “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, September 2nd, 1929.



All the strips required translation to a certain degree, which entailed more than simply rewriting the content of the speech-balloons in Spanish.21 The strips’ translators often had to adapt the set-ups, punch lines and jokes to make them intelligible to a new audience. This included not just the speech balloons, but also other “grammatical devices” such as the strip’s title, character names, onomatopoeic words (which are always used outside speech balloons), and even writings that were efffectively part of the graphic dimension (such as a jar labeled “tea” or a shop sign reading “Saloon”); all of these devices had to be regularly modifĳied to work within the cultural environment of Spanish-speaking Buenos Aires in general, and with the readers of Crítica in particular.22

Most of the comic-strips received only minor changes. This is how “Tilly the Toiler” became “Pepita la Dactilógrafa,” with the added subtitle “Todo lo que ocurre en una ofĳicina” (everything that happens in an offfĳice). “Gus and Gussie” by Jack Lait and Paul Fung became “Escalope y Severina,” subtitled “Los humildes servidores de un gran hotel” (the humble stafff of a great hotel). These two cases exemplify attempts to keep the translation as close to the original as possible, even though the character and strip names were reinvented.

Other comics required more invasive interventions, like “The Katzen-jammer Kids,” which became “Los Sobrinos del Capitán” (the captain’s nephews), transforming the captain from foster-father to uncle. One other transformation pervaded the comic’s appearance in Argentina; the trans-lation to standardized and unaccented Spanish obscured the original Ger-man-accented English of the characters. It is possible that the translators at Crítica eliminated the German accent because they thought the Buenos Aires public would not recognize it. However, it is signifĳicant that Bota-na’s team made the editorial decision to erase the accent—thus removing the ethnic nature of the characters—rather than replacing the German linguistic markers with an accent more familiar to the local readership (such as Italian).23

Such a comparison with “The Katzenjammer Kids”/“Los Sobrinos del Capitán” makes the transformation of “Polly and her Pals” into “Don

21 Celotti, “The Translator of Comics as a Semiotic Investigator”.22 Federico Zanettin, “Comics in Translation: An Overview”, in Zanettin (ed), Comics

in Translation. 23 The strip was also titled “The Captain and the Kids” due to the fact that, after a long

legal fĳight, both the Hearst empire and Joseph Pulitzer’s newspapers retained the rights to use the characters.

118 ariel svarch


Jacobo en la Argentina” more intriguing. The original narrative of “Polly and her Pals” would have been intelligible for Crítica’s readers without modifĳications. In fact, the humorous story of an emancipated “flapper” girl whose flirting drove her father crazy paralleled the newspaper’s frequent attention to women’s issues and its commitment to modern-ization. Paw’s transformation to Don Jacobo did not grow out of the specifĳicity of his dialogue, but rather from the potentiality of the graphic dimension to be understood in a specifĳic way to a Buenos Aires audience. Whereas “Tilly the Toiler” took place inside an offfĳice, and “The Katzen-jammer Kids” aboard a ship sailing in the African wilderness, most “Polly and her Pals” strips happened either inside a house or within the confĳines of a city (easily read as Buenos Aires). Its main characters formed a mod-ern nuclear family of the kind that was common in U.S. metropolises and was crystalizing in urban Argentina; in this case, elderly parents and a young-adult daughter.24

Crítica’s editors, then, chose the graphics of “Polly and her Pals” in order to craft a strip about an immigrant and his family. Through this comic, they sought to familiarize readers with both recognizable “ethnic” and relatable characters in a way that implicitly underscored their acquired Argentineness. Why use Jews, then, rather than Italians, Spaniards, or other ethnic minorities?

I posit that the Crítica recreated Paw’s family as Eastern European Jew-ish to challenge the intellectuals and popular writers of the Argentine Right, who relied on stereotyped images of this group. Xenophobic writers made Jews central to their demonization of immigrant minorities for sev-eral reasons: they were an ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority; they had a public visibility that surpassed their demographic signifĳicance; and propagandists could draw on arguments from various sources to legiti-mize their views.25

Members of the Right argued that because Eastern European Jews arrived with a diffferent language (written in diffferent characters), were not Catho-lics (and thus, had no morals), and had no country of their own in Europe, they comprised an overly alien, inassimilable group. Even “moderate” Argentine nationalists like Ricardo Rojas, who saw Italian immigration as

24 Eduardo Míguez, “Familias de clase media: la formación de un modelo”, in Fernando Devoto and Marta Madero (eds), Historia de la vida privada en Argentina. La Argentina plural (1870–1930), Tomo 2 (Buenos Aires, 1999), pp. 21–45.

25 For discussions on the relationship between “Nacionalismo” and anti-Semitism, see McGee-Deutsch, The Argentine Right, Senkman, El antisemitismo en la Argentina.



desirable (within certain parameters), agreed on the “Otherness” of Jews (as well as other non-European minorities).26 Jews also enjoyed a visibility beyond their sheer numeric presence in Buenos Aires. This could in part be explained by the high concentration of Jewish institutions, businesses, and homes in the centric neighborhood of Once. However, the presence of a discursive Jewish “Other” predated the arrival of immigrant Jews; Julián Martel published “La bolsa,” the fĳirst anti-Semitic novel in Argentina, in 1890, when only a handful of Jews were living in the country.27

The widespread availability of sources legitimizing anti-Semitism fueled the metonymic relationship between Eastern European Jews and broader undesirable immigration. Traditionalists and Hispanists could draw on Catholic theological condemnation of Judaism dating to the colonial period; while Positivists engaged “scientifĳic” eugenic explanations about the unsuitability of Jews for productive and honest labor and their racial degeneracy. Finally, the conspiratorial-minded had a wealth of treatises extolling Jewish plans for world domination. Argentine fĳiction writers like Gustavo Martínez Zuviría (writing under the pseudonym Hugo Wast) and nationalist intellectuals like Rodolfo Irazusta liberally combined these diverse sources.28

In response to this trend, “Jacobo en la Argentina” portrayed an Eastern European Jewish family precisely because the Argentine Right established “the Jew” as a stand-in for the inassimilable immigrant. By appropriat-ing and inverting the symbol, Crítica aimed to destabilize the discursive power of the Argentine Right as it argued for an inclusive nationalism. The ubiquity of both negative and positive stereotypes about Jews (such as stinginess, cowardice, and intelligence) also allowed the translators of the strip to address and subvert them.

26 Senkman, El antisemitismo en la Argentina. See also Ricardo Rojas, La restauración nacionalista: informe sobre educación (Buenos Aires, 1909).

27 Julián Martel (José María de Miró), La bolsa (Buenos Aires, 1890), Erin Grafff Zivin, The Wandering Signifĳier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Durham, 2008).

28 Hugo Wast (Gustavo Martínez Zuviría), El Kahal (Buenos Aires, 1935). Hugo Wast Oro (Buenos Aires, 1935). For the use of diffferent arguments in Argentine anti-Semitism, see Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, 1991), Grafff Zivin, The Wandering Signifĳier, Leonardo Senkman and Saúl Sosnowski, Fascismo y nazismo en las letras argentinas (Buenos Aires, 2009).

120 ariel svarch


“Don Jacobo en la Argentina”: One Strip to Rule Them All

“Don Jacobo en la Argentina” replaces Polly the flapper girl with her father as the main character. The name Jacobo, a common Jewish name (as was Rebeca, Crítica’s new name for Polly’s character), and the character’s new centrality to the title establish the strip as a narrative of immigration from the perspective of the immigrant generation. No other strip in the newspaper mentions a geographical location; the addition of Argentina to the title underscores the foreign status of Don Jacobo, as it implies there is something notable about his presence in the country and that he had not always been “in Argentina.” The subtitle,29 “Vida de un qui mi cointas,” reinforces his particular origin; “qui mi cointas” means “what’s up” in the Yiddish-accented broken Spanish for “what’s up.” It reflects how locals reproduced the way of speaking of the non-native Spanish-speaking Jews.

These elements of the title and emphasis on language throughout the comic-strip grew out of the particular medium. The pre-existence of the graphic dimension made it impossible for the editors of Crítica to incor-porate physical markers of Jewishness:

Paw/Jacobo does not look “Jewish” in the way of traditional anti-Semitic caricatures: his clothes do not resemble those of Orthodox Jews. While he sports a bushy mustache, he lacks even the slightest hint of a beard,

29 The subtitle is not present in every strip of “Don Jacobo en la Argentina.” There seems to be no meaningful explanation for this inconsistency.

Figure 2. Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, physical characteristics A.

Figure 3. Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, physical characteristics B.



let alone sidelocks. Sometimes he dons a bowler hat, but most men wore hats in the early 1900s; he also never covers his head inside his house. His facial features do not match what physiognomy and eugenics specialists of the 1920s and 1930s agreed to be the traditional visage of Jews: he has a round nose of a regular size (for a cartoon character) instead of the large hooked beak, and regular ears. He is short and wears glasses, features which could be understood as Jewish along with other traits, but hardly so by themselves.

Graphically speaking, Paw/Jacobo is a neutral fĳigure. The drawings do not codify him as Jewish, but they also do not foreclose such an inter-pretation; he is not tall and muscular or of African descent, for example, two physical characteristics that would have worked against attempts to “Judaize” him. It is Jacobo’s speech pattern, a crude imitation of how native Yiddish speakers spoke Spanish, what defĳines him in ethnic terms; it matches Crítica’s portrayal of the speech of Jews in other articles. In the article about the Jews of Once published the same day “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” debuted, photo captions read “¿Dicís qui saldré la CRÍTICAS? Boinos. [You are saying I will appear on Crítica? OK]” “¿Pir quí mi sacás fotografías? [Why are you taking photos of me?”30 Don Jacobo’s speech pattern reflects the same mispronunciations (such as the replacement of most vowels with “i”) alongside the particularly porteño use of “vos:” “Istá qui ahí lo tenés, quiridos. ¡Ti ha hecho un desafíos in forma! [There you have it, my dear; you have been properly challenged!]”31

Translators were so certain that readers could decode such linguistic markers as a reference to Jacobo’s Jewishness that they never used the term “Jewish,” “Jew,” “Hebrew,” or “Israelite” in the title or in the speech balloons over the period of the strip’s publication.32 Further confĳirmation of the visibility of East European Jews in the public sphere, if not of their actual physical presence, this absence of such explicit ethnic defĳinition suggests that Crítica’s publishers thought readers (around 300,000 in 1929) would be able to identify Jacobo as an Ashkenazi immigrant based on linguistic markers of ethnic identity. This assumption implies that the image of the “Jew”—at least for most Crítica readers—could work almost exclusively on a linguistic, or at least discursive, dimension.

30 Anonymous, “Las matanzas de judíos mantienen en vilo a un popular barrio porteño” . . . See footnote 10.

31 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, 8/30/1930.32 Newspapers, authors and even Jewish institutions in the fĳirst half of the twentieth

century in Argentina used the terms “Hebrew” and “Israelite” as neutral stand-ins for “Jewish.”

122 ariel svarch


Though Crítica generally played with and subverted stereotypes about Jews to show this ethnic group’s assimilability, they occassionally deployed certain negative stereotypes for comedic purposes. Some of Jacobo’s behaviors can be traced to the colonial stereotypes and Catholic dogma. For example, Jacobo’s libidinousness references the historical circulation of the image of the sexually promiscuous Jew, as well the visibility of Jew-ish prostitutes and pimps in 1920s Buenos Aires.33

This is merely one of the many strips that show Jacobo as lecherous.34 In the fĳirst frame, he complains about older women who dress like young girls, only to be ridiculed by his wife and daughter. The punch line, how-ever, has him join his nephew in a trip to the cabaret. The graphic dimen-sion of this trip offfers no clue regarding the topic of the original strip: it only determines with which characters Jacobo/Paw interacts and in what order. It was Crítica’s translation which determined both the theme and resolution.

Several strips use traditional negative stereotypes about Jews for come-dic purposes. Jacobo is often shown to be cheap and stingy, once even refusing to enter a tailor’s shop because he’s “afraid of spending.” He also represents the trope of the cowardly Jew: he is afraid of his violent wife, and several running strips play on his fear of a dog.35 Just as often, however, Crítica’s reinvention of the narrative would subverted these stereotypes:

33 Donna Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argen-tina (Lincoln, 1991). See also Myrtha Shalom, La Polaca: inmigración, rufĳianes y esclavas a comienzos del siglo XX (Buenos Aires, 2003).

34 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, September 19th, 1929.35 The trope of the violent wife and the submissive husband was common in comic-

strips both in Argentina and abroad, regardless of the ethnicity of the characters. See Manfredo Guerrera, Storia del fumetto, Autori e personaggi dalle origini a oggi (Roma, 1995).

Figure 4. “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, September 19th, 1929.



This strip shows Jacobo as he overcomes his fear of the dog to pat it on the head. The punch line justifĳies this subversion (and nuances it) by recur-ring to a positive stereotype: Jacobo managed to make himself look daring not through inherent bravery but rather through (Jewish) wit. The last frame shows Jacobo walking away with a prop “hand-on-a-stick,” and say-ing that he was not only “very brave,” but also “pretty intelligent.”36

Jewish stinginess was another negative stereotyped subverted by the strip:37

Here, Jacobo’s wife appears concerned about his reaction when she tells him she bought a new hat. In the middle panels, Jacobo proves her wrong. His only reaction is to exclaim “I am glad, woman. It wouldn’t be worthy of me to deny a hat to my other half.”38 Once again, the last frame nuances

36 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, September 28th, 1929.37 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, December 26th, 1929.38 There was a mistake by Crítica’s translator in this strip: the speech-balloon says “no

es digno tuyo negar un sombrero a su cara mitad” [It is not worthy of you to deny a hat to his other half]. Oftentimes either the translators or the linotypist confused the pronouns and switched the speech-balloons, attributing them to the wrong character.

Figure 5. “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, September 28th, 1929.

Figure 6. “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, December 26th, 1929.

124 ariel svarch


the subversion by showing Jacobo’s response to be so out of character that his wife suspects his generosity proves he has something to hide. Note that the meaning of this strip comes almost entirely from the dialogue, as the graphics are not indicative of any developments until the last frame, where the wife is clearly angry at Jacobo. Only Crítica’s editorial decision made the script turn around Jacobo’s newfound liberality.

Sometimes the subversion of stereotypes is less ambiguous and more straightforward. In several strips, Jacobo shows an aptitude not only for courage but also for physical violence by kicking his daughter’s suitors out of the house. On one occasion, he faces a bullying policeman and ridicules him to his face. With regard to the stereotypical cheapness covered above, at least one other instance shows him willing to cheer up his niece by buying her presents.39

Such a challenge to negative stereotypes accompanies the attempt to show Jacobo and his family as fully integrated into Argentine society as they embrace certain aspects of modernity promoted by Crítica more broadly. Although Jacobo complains about older women dressing as young modern girls as described above, he also buys himself a fancy fur coat. This purchase can be interpreted not only as adaptation to modern fashion, but also as a show of social progress, a vital component of the assimilationist argument. Similarly, another strip in Critica emphasizes the social and economic participation of modern women when Jacobo buys a car and crashes into a vehicle driven by a woman.40

39 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, January 31st, 1930.40 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, December 20th, 1929.




The use of a woman driver dovetailed with Crítica’s view about moder-nity. The automobile section of the newspaper often portrayed women driving cars, and the section’s advertisements offfered vehicles specifĳically “for women” alongside masculinized sports cars and trucks. Of course, the graphic dimension of the strip predetermined that a woman would be driving the car, and the translator had no choice but to work within this premise. While the strip’s creation is not entirely Crítica’s, the end result was something the newspaper celebrated.

Assimilation in “Don Jacobo en Argentina” goes beyond embracing modernity: it also implies a commitment to the country’s cultural mores and an eventual loss of ethnic particularity in order to become Argen-tine. Jacobo shows signs of this process not only through his consumption patterns, but also in his openness to accept a non-Jewish suitor, a man linguistically marked as a Spanish immigrant. The suitor’s origins and comfortable economic status are confĳirmed by his accent and the way he brags about his properties in Andalusia:41

The panels determine the direction of the strip only in that Jacobo gets angry with the man in the striped suit and kicks him as the punch line, but the ethnicization of the characters is provided only by the speech bal-loons. The “Spaniard” lacks any physical characteristics typically associated with Spanish immigrants; a closer look shows that he actually a recurring character of the strip simply dressed in a new suit. The translator either did not notice or had no interest in narrative continuity, because he trans-formed a regular character intended to be a family member into a Spanish suitor for Rebeca for a single strip.

41 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, November 25th, 1929.

Figure 8. “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, November 25th, 1929.

126 ariel svarch


This comic challenges one of the main arguments about the un-assimi-lability of Jews. By not simply accepting, but instead pushing the Spaniard into proposing to his daughter, Crítica’s Jacobo subverts commonly held beliefs about Jewish tribalism and endogamy. The narrative argues that Ashkenazim were not only willing to mix with outsiders, but also even intermarry. Jacobo’s interest in climbing the social ladder also works as an engine of assimilation: the wealth of the suitor leads him to endorse the Spaniard, thus giving a positive meaning to the negatively trope of materialism, usually coded as a Jewish trait. The strip could also be read as an endorsement of the belief on a “melting pot” that would mix the best characteristics of immigrants and, through national education, create a new generation of Argentines.

Don Jacobo is also shown to be sensitive to Argentine cultural tradi-tions. In the strip of January 2, 1930, the fĳirst vignette opens with him singing what appear to be the lyrics of the tango “Niño bien”. The choice contrasts with the accompanying graphics, where the character seems to be flexing his muscles in preparation for some heavy lifting or fĳighting. The following vignettes explain the purpose for the singing, as Rebeca’s suitor shows up—a well-dressed young man despised by her father. The lyrics Jacobo sings describe a man who dresses, acts, and claims to be a rich member of the oligarchy, but in reality is of poor, plebeian origins.

The 1929 Christmas cartoon42 provides further proof of Jacobo’s grow-ing integration into Argentine culture and behavior:

42 “Don Jacobo en la Argentina”, Crítica, December 24th, 1929.




The story portrays Jacobo buying a Christmas tree. Of course, he does it in a “Jewish” way: he asked the salesman for a “nice and cheap” tree. Still, it shows the internalized nature of assimilation: the tree is intended for the private enjoyment of his family, not the performance of Argentineness to a public gaze. This does not imply a process of conversion, as the religious tradition of Christmas and the narrative of the Nativity are completely absent. The embrace of the holiday seems to be purely cultural; Jacobo and his family engage in a national, rather than a religious, tradition. Once more, the “assimilationist” meaning seems to be almost exclusively a con-tribution of the translator: the image of the shop offfer no clues that it sells Christmas gifts or decorations, and the object Jacobo buys bears only a passing resemblance to a Christmas tree. Only through Jacobo’s dialogue does the reader know that the object he purchased is in fact a Christmas tree—a very fragile one at that.

There is a fĳinal argument for assimilation in “Don Jacobo en la Argen-tina;” through the character of Jacobo’s daughter, Crítica makes a case for full trans-generational assimilation. The former Polly, Jacobo’s daughter Rebeca, engages with every aspect of modern Argentina. Her clothes dis-tinct from traditional Jewish feminine garments; the character Polly was, after all, a flapper girl. Not one of the men with whom she flirts is coded as Jewish (neither physically nor linguistically). Even more meaningful is the fact that Rebeca herself has no Yiddish accent. This second-generation immigrant is linguistically marked as Jewish only though her name. This argument strongly echoes Crítica’s article analyzed above: the children of Jews born in Argentina, thanks to the national education and environ-ment, will not be Jews, but rather Argentines.

Rebeca’s link with modernity also prompts questions regarding the gen-dered nature of assimilation in the newspaper’s narrative. To what extent does her gender afffect how Crítica portrays her as a modern assimilated Argentine? The graphic dimension of the strip determined that Jacobo’s child was female—and, like Polly, a modernly dressed, emancipated girl—but it is worth considering whether Crítica coded assimilation as feminine, or even as a form of cultural surrender. That Jacobo’s wife, who seems to be either an immigrant herself or immigrant-descendant (this is never made clear), speaks in unaccented Spanish, further argues for a relationship between gender, modernization, and cultural assimilation.43

43 There is only one exception to Jacobo’s wife speech: her only accented term is her husband’s name, which she pronounces Jacoibos in several strips.

128 ariel svarch


Censorship and Comic-strips as Political Speech

Botana’s liberal afffĳiliation did not preclude his newspaper from advocat-ing for a coup d’état. In fact, starting in 1929 Crítica repeatedly used its front cover to accuse Yrigoyen of corruption, crime and ineptitude, call-ing for an end to his presidency. The newspaper originally hailed General José Félix Uriburu, the new dictator, as a savior who delivered the country from Yrigoyen’s tyranny, and the new regime acknowledged the periodi-cal’s role in bringing about the successful revolt.

This political honeymoon was notably short. Crítica soon realized that Uriburu’s agenda combined the demands of the Catholic Right with modern fascism in imitation of Benito Mussolini’s Italy. The newspaper maintained its support for secular education against the pressures of the church and the Right’s organization and militias, called for elections, and attacked the government’s repression of labor and political disputes. In 1931, the police shut the newspaper’s offfĳices and arrested its director, who later fled to his native Uruguay.

Botana’s wife, anarchist poet Salvadora Medina Onrubia, immediately re-launched Crítica under a new name, Jornada. The new director, influ-ential General Agustín P. Justo, leader of the liberal faction of the Armed Forces and presidential candidate, guaranteed immunity from state-based and paramilitary aggression so long as the newspaper limited its criticism of the regime. Jornada kept Crítica’s stafff, design (including typography), sections, and even liberal ideology, although it channeled its antipathy for the dictatorship through attacks on fascism abroad.

Jornada even kept its predecessor’s translated American comic-strips on the last page, with a single exception: the absence of “Don Jacobo en la Argentina.” On February 20, 1932, Crítica reopened and Agustín P. Justo was sworn into offfĳice as the next Argentine president (after a fraudulent election process). The re-launch of Crítica included Don Jacobo’s tri-umphal return. The context of the strip’s return, amidst a flurry of arti-cles aggressively attacking Uriburu and the most infamous members of his administration, suggests that its absence during Jornada’s tenure was due to censorship, and its return represented a reaction to the year-long repression and censorship. Was the hiatus of “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” a demand of Uriburu’s government, or an act of self-censorship to guaran-tee the publication of Jornada? Regardless of the motivations behind Don Jacobo’s exclusion from the pages of Jornada, the premise of the comic—that Don Jacobo and his family were at once Jewish and Argentine—threatened the ideological tenets of the Argentine Right represented in Uribiru’s government.



After Crítica’s comeback in 1932, “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” remained a fĳixed component of the newspaper’s comic-strip page for a whole decade, sharing spaced with fresh additions of international renown, such as “Mickey Mouse” (“El Ratón Mickey”), “Tarzan,” “The Phantom” (“Fan-tomas”), and “Bugs Bunny” (“El Conejo Castañuelas”). In 1942, the editors moved the strip to the new full-color Wednesday comics section, where it stayed until Crítica went on a fĳive month hiatus in 1946. “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” was last printed April 3rd of that year.

Conclusions

Natalio Botana considered his periodical as—among other things—a vehicle for influencing public opinion. According to both friend and foe, the newspaper (later supplemented with a radio station) capitalized the appearance of a new reading public, successfully brought new topics to the fore of national debates, influenced the results of local and national elections, and took part in the struggles to defĳine the nature and limits of Argentineness.44 The image of the Jew, particularly that of the Jew-as-Argentine (or Jewish-Argentine, following the recent historiography), became a discursive weapon for Crítica’s attempt to defĳine national iden-tity as expansive and inclusionary, able to bring into the fold even the immigrants codifĳied by traditional stereotypes as the most problematic.45

The daily presence of “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” on Crítica’s last page underscored a conception of “Jewishness” that relied strongly on linguistic markers of ethnicity and periodically subverted tropes about the supposed parasitic behavior and essential un-assimilability of Jews. Its apparent apolitical nature and its reliance on humor possibly height-ened its efffectiveness, disguising the propagandistic aspects of the car-toon. Its censorship by the xenophobic dictatorship of Uriburu hints that at least those opposed to an inclusionary citizenship perceived it to be efffective. This, however, lacking the means to analyze reception, remains inconclusive.

The analysis of Jews in general and of “Don Jacobo en la Argentina” in particular suggests Crítica deployed the image of the Jew for two ends. On the one hand, it allowed Crítica to make a positive argument about

44 Saitta, Regueros de tinta . . .45 See Jefffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, “New Approaches to Ethnicity and Diaspora in

Twentieth-Century Latin America”, in Lesser and Rein, eds., Rethinking Jewish-Latin Ameri-cans (Albuquerque, 2008).

130 ariel svarch


successful, trans-generational integration to further its claim for an inclu-sive, expansive Argentine-ness. On the other hand, it aimed to deprive the Argentine Right of one of its discursive weapons: the reliance on nega-tive images of Jews that drew from traditional Catholic dogma, modern pseudo-science, and conspiracy theory-based anti-Semitism. Crítica chal-lenged these images by contrasting them with a new symbolic Jew, a fam-ily man not unlike regular porteños, who only betrayed his foreign origins when making small-talk with his neighbors. “Quí mi cointas?”

Bibliography

Devoto, F. and M. Madero, dir. (1999). Historia de la vida privada en Argentina. La Argen-tina plural (1870–1930), Tomo 2. Buenos Aires: Taurus.

Endelman, T. (1999). The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Gené, M. (Unpublished). Varones domados. Family strips de los años veinte.Grafff Zivin, E. (2008). The Wandering Signifĳier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American

Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press.Guerrera, M. (1995). Storia del fumetto, Autori e personaggi dalle origini a oggi. Roma: Tas-

cabili Economici Newton.Guy, D. (1991). Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argen-

tina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Lesser, J. and R. Rein, eds. (2008). Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans. Albuquerque: Uni-

versity of New Mexico Press.McGee-Deutsch, S. (1986). Counterrevolution in Argentina, 1900–1932: The Argentine Patri-

otic League. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.McGee-Deutsch, S and R. Dolkart, eds. (1992). The Argentine Right: Its History and Intellec-

tual Origins, 1910 to the Present. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefĳield Publishing Group.Saitta, S. (1998). Regueros de tinta: el diario Crítica en la década de 1920. Buenos Aires:

Sudamericana.Senkman, L. (1989). El antisemitismo en Argentina Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América

Latina.Senkman, L. and S. Sosnowski. (2009). Fascismo y nazismo en las letras argentinas. Buenos

Aires: Lumiere.Shalom, M. (2003). La Polaca: inmigración, rufĳianes y esclavas a comienzos del siglo XX.

Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma.Sofer, E. (1982). From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires. New York:

Holmes & Meier.Stepan, N. (1991). The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press.Zanettin, F., ed. (2008). Comics in Translation. Manchester and New York: St Jerome

Publishing.

Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein. New Jewish Argentina Chap. 5

Documents

Transcript of Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein. New Jewish Argentina Chap. 5