Singing the 1930s Doldrums: Jevel Katz’s Argentine Yiddish Parodies

Abstract

Abstract Buenos Aires arose as a center of Yiddish culture, and theatre turned into a main cultural manifestation of Argentine Jews during the first half of the twentieth century. Jevel Katz-songwriter, singer, musician, and performer-became a leading figure of the Yiddish stage in Argentina during the 1930s. Born in Vilna in 1902, he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1930 as an impoverished immigrant and rapidly climbed to fame, which lasted until his untimely death in 1940. This essay offers my translation from Yiddish into English of two lyrics by Katz-in which he parodies a Cuban son and an Argentine tango-released in his only published collection, Argentiner glikn: parodyes un kupletn (1933). Taking an intertextual approach to the discussion of his parodies, this study examines the cross-cultural dialogue that the songwriter maintained with contemporaneous Latin American tunes to entertain Yiddish-speaking immigrant audiences as he articulated their acculturation quest. This article discusses the Yiddish texts as part of the Argentine literary and cultural production.