Polacos in Argentina

Kałczewiak has gone far beyond writing an excellent study of transatlantic migrant cultures. Through pathbreaking, multi-archive, multilingual research Polacos in Argentina transforms our understanding of transnational Jewish and Yiddish cultures. As the best studies always do, this book transcends its specific topics to offer new insights into how scholars might understand the movement of peoples across multiple borders, and how long term migrations come to transform both destination societies and the places from which the migrants originally came.’
— Latin American Jewish Studies Association Book Award Committee

‘This is a pioneering and fascinating study of global Yiddish culture, beyond the borders of Eastern Europe, with special focus on its encounters with non-European cultures.’
—Raanan Rein, author of Argentina, Israel, and the Jews: Peron, The Eichmann Capture and After and Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines?
 

After the United States and Palestine, Argentina drew the third largest share of Eastern European immigrants in the interwar period. Yet, Jewish Studies scholarship in English has scarcely mined the richness of Jewish life, especially Yiddish culture, there. Drawing on a diverse and novel array of printed and archival sources in above all Polish, Spanish, Hebrew and Yiddish, Kałczewiak makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the shaping of identity among ‘Polish’ Jews in Argentina and the image of Argentina among Jews in Poland in the first half of the twentieth century. He shows us that Jewish immigrants not only struck deep roots in their new country. They and their children also cultivated meaningful ties with Poland and constituted their (new) homeland as part of a global Yiddishland through a dynamic, multi-sided process that was continuously informed by and simultaneously informed Jewish identity in pre-Holocaust Poland.’
—Kalman Weiser, Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, York University, Toronto