Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
In Geveb; a Journal of Yiddish Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2020) 21 pp.
Keywords:
Pelay, Ivo,
;
Musical theater History
;
Theater, Yiddish
;
Jews in the performing arts
Abstract:
In 1926, well-known Argentine playwright Ivo Pelay premiered two plays during the Buenos Aires theater season, both about Jews. Judío [Jew] recast the Merchant of Venice as a comical “Shylock criollo [Creole Shylock].” Judía [Jewess] premiered three months later. Though both are virtually forgotten – notably, the script of Judía is nowhere to be found – recent cultural criticism reclaims Judía as the founding work of Argentine musical comedy. The problem is that there were musical comedies in Argentina before 1926 – chiefly in Yiddish. Despite obvious influences of Yiddish theater, Judía elides any connection with Yiddish, as its Spanish-speaking, foreign-born Jewish main character acts out contemporary preoccupations about immigration. Read together in the context of the 1926 season, Judío and Judía, “Jew” and “Jewess,” thematize anxiety not only about the Argentineity of Jews, but also about the Jewishness of Argentina: the promise of assimilation and the threat of subversion. For this reason, I propose the psychoanalytic concept of compromise formation as a useful metaphor for how radically ambivalent, “allosemitic” Jewish stereotypes function in both plays, as well as for the revisionism that has made Judía the founding text of Argentine musical comedy.
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