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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the correspondence exchanged between Josep Sabah, a teacher originally from the Ottoman Empire, and the leaders of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Colonization Association, institutions that had sent him to Argentina to found a network of Jewish schools in several towns in the province of Entre Ríos, from 1894 to 1922. In the first place, we focus on the contradictory ways through which this cultured Jew, educated in French and Sephardic schools, represents the new settlers sent from Russia to Argentina by the Jewish Colonization Association. Second, we focus on the self-rendering of this teacher in his letters, and on the tensions between the expectations of his employers, the demands of the settlers and the gradual disenchantment with the conditions of life in his adopted country.
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Notes
1 In the introduction to the collection of letters written by Josep Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos [Between Language and Worlds], Mónica Szurmuk reports that Sabah was the only teacher sent by this institution who remained in Argentina until his death.
2 The definition of an immigrant on the Argentina’s first immigration law during Nicolás Avellaneda’s government reads as follows: “Any foreign laborers, artisan, industrialist, farmer or teacher who, being under 60 years of age and being able to prove his morality and aptitude, arrives as a 2nd or 3rd class passenger on an immigrant ship with the intention of settling in the Republic of Argentina, shall be considered an immigrant” (my translation). Ley [Law] 817, Inmigración y colonización [Immigration and colonization], art.12 (1876).
3 In this regard, it is interesting to note the conclusion in Sabah’s first letter to the Alliance president, from Clara, in which he evaluates his work for this institution and recounts the good services he has rendered so far: “In many circumstances, you have expressed to me, Mr. President, the esteem in which you held me. It is because of this sentiment, Mr. President, that I hope that you will not erase me completely from your staff and that you will consider me as if I were on leave for an indefinite period”. Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 3 (my italics AK).
4 Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 13.
5 Ibid., 25.
6 I refer primarily to the assumption that immigrants were supposed to be a blank slate and that ethnicity was seen as a remnant of the past destined to disappear. For further discussion of this problem, see Bargman, “Construcción de la Nación,” 19–36.
7 To be precise, I remember only one mention on the learning of Spanish and Yiddish. In the letter dated March 8th, 1895, he comments: “So far I have shared my time between office work, my learning of Spanish and Judeo-German, and my excursions in the colony”. Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 21.
In order to understand Sabah’s relationship with the French, Turkish and Spanish languages, Mónica Szurmuk, in the introduction to the correspondence, transcribes a fragment from another Alliance teacher, which she extends to the relationship Sabah might have had with those same languages. I quote: “One of the Alliance teachers described the languages he spoke as follows: ‘Turkish is a borrowed suit; French is a gala suit; Judeo-Spanish is the dressing gown in which one feels most comfortable’”. And she concludes: “Something similar was certainly true for Sabah. Undoubtedly, the language he felt most comfortable with was Ladino, and he wore French as a formal outfit, which accredited his social ascent and his westernization. His mother tongue was Judeo-Spanish, which in Entre Ríos became more and more like Rioplatense Castilian.” Szurmuk, “Introducción”, XVII.
I agree with what Szurmuk points out, but I also take into account, as I mentioned in the body of the text, the mark of foreignness that this non-Argentine language must have had for a long time, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax and in terms of accent. Any contact with Judeo-Spanish marks the differences between that language, brought over from the 15th century, which was probably influenced by Turkish, and the Spanish of Argentina. I also imagine, in a different sense from Szurmuk, that Sabah’s Judeo-Spanish must not only have been transformed into a River Plate Spanish but must surely have begun to be marked by Yiddish, since, for better or worse, both Clara and Moisés Ville, where Sabah moved to at the beginning of the 20th century, were towns where that was the dominant language, a language that over time incorporated and adapted Spanish vocabulary.
On the other hand, it is not surprising that these marks never appear in the letters, since this is a correspondence that is always strange to orality and where Sabah practically never abandons his persona, connoted by the difference that separated him from the settlers.
8 In 2019, Mónica Szurmuk publishes her translation of those letters, unpublished until then, in the collection En el país del sauce [In the Country of the Willow] at the Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos. We are working with this version.
9 Entre lenguas y mundos, 6. Mónica Szurmuck notes that in Entre Rios, mí país [Entre Ríos, my country] – Gerchunoff’s autobiography – the autor credits Sabah with “having learned to love the Entre Rios landscape [which], in his literature will always be a place of rest, solace and harmony” Szurmuk, “Introducción”, XXV.
10 Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 6.
11 By way of example, in a letter to the directors of the JCA in October 1900, he comments: “The winter of 1895 was very wet. This year’s was even more so. How many times has the school had to close this last quarter! Even the children of Carmel cannot get there, as the roads from the house to the school are impassable. I have got them used to getting to the school through fences and hedges, across the grass; but the school is located in the centre of the village –which is an enormous advantage–, between two rivers, and you have to cross some small bridges of very rudimentary construction which heavy storms sometimes sweep away, even two at a time. This is the drawback. We only had 53 days of work: 22 in July, 17 in August, 14 in September”. Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 217.
12 In his early letters in particular, Sabah often emphasized the Russian immigrants desire to move to the city. Thus, in August 1895, he wrote to the president of the Alliance: “Today they are putting a brave face, and cast envious glances at the large and small towns they are beginning to get familiar with and to which they are inevitably attracted. One remembers that he had been a hat maker; another a tailor; the shohet settler apologizes and goes to work in Buenos Aires, etc., etc., etc. The examples of desertion are numerous. Our Russians are not yet peasants, they do not yet have the love of the soil. But that will come, let us hope” Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 47.
13 Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 95.
14 On April 12th, 1895, he wrote to the President of the Alliance: “It did not take me long to discover in my favourite pedagogical readings – I own the Buisson dictionary and I beg you to believe that I use it to serve me in the particular role I have to play here in the school. The need to make them understand and love the beauties of nature; to inspire the children’s taste by engaging all their senses and speaking to their hearts; also to explain to them what life in the cities is like, the struggles it is made of, the disappointments it almost always reserves for those who prefer it to the happy life of the countryside. This is where I must focus” Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 33.
Sabah’s stance regarding the city/countryside opposition, in which the teacher exalts the latter, falls within the traditional opposition studied at length by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City, a book in which he traces the contrast back to classical times. Although it is well known, I quote the second paragraph of his text, because it accurately describes the teacher’s thinking: “On the actual settlements, which in the real history have been astonishingngly varied. The country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance and limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back to classical times” Willians, “Country and the City”.
15 Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 26.
16 Ibid., 10
17 Ibid., 13.
18 Ibid., 16.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 18, (my italics).
21 In one of his first letters, dated April 1895, Sabah writes to the president of the Alliance: “When I left you, this time last year, to come to Argentina to organize the work of the schools of Clara, you told me: ‘You will make an experiment there, you will give the children of the settlers instruction, the nourishment of the soul. But above all, make them men worthy of their name, form their character above all’” Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 29 (my italics AK).
22 Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 220.
23 Ibid., 49.
24 Ibid., 34. The biblical quotation appears in the letters in Hebrew and in the characters of that alphabet.
25 The religious connotation of the word “work” in Sabah’s correspondence is important, as it is marked by the idea of transcendence that drives the colonization project, insofar as it aims at converting Jewish merchants or moneylenders into farmers. The connotations of this conversion project are manifold: on the one hand, it has the function of refuting the antisemitic idea that Jews only engage in usury, and on the other, to make those same Jews, who traditionally despised peasants, become farmers and produce grains to feed the world.
26 For further discussion of this problem, see: Pérez, Liliana, and Rogieri, Patricia. “Lengua nacional y lengua de inmigración”.
27 In the specific case of Jewish colonization, this liturgy became more complex, because the veneration of the patriotic symbols of the country of immigration was compounded by the veneration of the figure of Baron Hirsch, whose portrait hung in the classrooms alongside that of the Argentine founding fathers. Unlike them, who had been the agents of the transition from colony to republic, but who were distant and unknown to the settlers, the cult of Baron Hirsch, a figure directly involved in their departure from Russia, was surrounded by a biblical aura, since he had made possible their arrival in Argentina, a place connoted as a land of promise, wellbeing, and freedom.
28 Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 30.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 33.
31 Bargman, “Construcción de la Nación”, n.p.
32 Ibid.
33 Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 209 (my italics).
34 Ibid., 50.
35 Ibid., 96.
36 Molloy, Vivir entre lenguas [Living Between Languages], 18. In the chapter “Territorio” [Territory], the writer says: “Each language has its territory, its time, its hierarchy. My childhood school is divided into two halves, English in the morning, Spanish in the afternoon. It is therefore a bilingual school. But it is called an ‘English school,’ no doubt because of the prestige the term connotes, but also because of the law. If a pupil speaks in Spanish in the morning and not in English, and is caught by a teacher, she is punished”.
37 In one of the notes to the edition of Sabah’s letters, Mónica Szurmuk explains that: “The figure of the monitrice was a local teacher who, although hired to work in the schools, was not part of the administrative structure of the Alliance and, therefore, did not have access to the pension system or to the benefits of those with the title of ‘professeur’” (2019: 331).
38 Sabah, Entre lenguas y mundos, 246 (my italics).
39 According to the Brazilian edition of Um amigo de Kafka [A Friend of Kafka] which contains the story, the author himself and Evelyn Torton Beck were the translators into English. In the Spanish edition, a peninsular variant, the translator’s name does not appear. In both cases they are translations from English. I use these versions aware of the limitation of working with a translated text.
40 Rulfo, “Luvina.” in Toda la obra. São Paulo: Coleção Arquivos. São Paulo: ALLCAXX/EDUSP, 1996.
41 Saba, Entre lenguas y mundos, 45.
42 From a similar perspective, Fernando Degiovanni interprets Gerchunoff’s transition from a poor child in the colonies up to his insertion in the literate city of Buenos Aires. He writes: “The qualitative leap that takes Gerchunoff from a childhood of near destitution in the immigrant colonies of Entre Ríos founded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, to his successful porteño youth, must be read in relation to a series of conditions of social mobility originating in the strong modernising impulse that affected the Argentine society from 1880 onwards.” Degiovanni, “Inmigración, nacionalismo cultural, campo intellectual”, 367.
43 If the idea of the pampa as a desert is reiterated in many of the texts of 19th century Argentina, it is unquestionably in Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo where we can read a systematic project to populate this space with European immigrants, bearers of the “civilization” that would put an end to the “barbarism” of the native populations: Indians and gauchos.
In this sense, the bewilderment or discomfort felt by the agents of this transformation who, as I pointed out in the body of the text, were alien to the purpose for which they were intended, is not without irony.
44 As Cecilia Roda reports in “Entre la clase y la etnia. Las colonias judías de Entre Ríos” [Between class and ethnics. The Jewish Colonies of Entre Ríos], the main contractual clause of the JCA determined that the contract signed by the future settlers did not grant them ownership of the land, but rather conferred a promise of ownership at the end of 20 years’ tenure. This was a clause to ensure that the process of settling and converting those Jews into farmers was carried out satisfactorily.
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Adriana Kanzepolsky
Adriana Kanzepolsky is Professor of Spanish Literature at Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. Her current research project deals with memory, autofiction and biography in contemporary Latin American literature. She has published Tamara Kamenszain por Adriana Kanzepolsky (EDUERJ, 2020)