Yiddish Culture and Language

Between 1957 and 1984, there appeared in Argentina a collection of one hundred books, entitled Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur (Model Works of Yiddish Literature), hereafter designated as Musterverk, which quickly gained visibility throughout the transnational world of Yiddish letters. The volumes were published by the Instituto Científico Judío (translation of Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) (IWO), often referred to as a "branch" of the YIVO Institute, currently located in New York City. The editor of the collection was Samuel Rollansky (1902–1994), a foremost educator, writer, journalist, and institutional organizer in the Argentine Jewish community. This article represents the first study of this collection, just one part of the vast corpus of Yiddish books and periodicals produced in Latin America, a nearly submerged bibliographical continent that scholars are only now beginning to explore. Indeed, only recently has the field of Yiddish Studies acknowledged Buenos Aires as a main postwar Yiddish cultural center.

In the prologue to the first volume, a mighty motto is provided: Musterverk will fill the gap represented by a "biblyotek vos felt" (a library that is lacking). Thus we see the logic behind Rollansky's ambitious project. Having diagnosed a bibliographical deficiency, he proposed to offer the library so sorely needed. If we keep in mind the fate of the Yiddish-speaking world in the twentieth century, the plan to realize such a momentous task in Argentina appears all the more significant. It makes patent the geographic displacement of the traditional centers of Yiddish culture to regions of the world that had been perceived as peripheries prior to World War II.

In this article, we propose to examine the context in which the Musterverk emerged and circulated, to describe its defining characteristics, and to analyze its multiple objectives (as haphazardly put forth in prefaces and appendices of various volumes and in the promotional materials of its publishers). Our hypothesis is that Musterverk should be understood as an attempt to create the ultimate collection of Yiddish literature, through several strategies that we analyze in four sections: representativity of the works, standardization of the language, procedures of legitimation, and criteria on aesthetics. However, Musterverk, as we shall see, must also be viewed as a didactic undertaking and an enterprise of cultural transmission. These aspects of Musterverk coexisted and sometimes interfered with each other.