Event details
The Yiddish Columbus: Critical Counter-History and the Remapping of American Jewish Literature
This talk introduces Jacobo Glantz’s 1939 Mexican Yiddish epic poem Kristobal Kolon, which centers on Luis de Torres, the only Jew on Columbus’s crew. Hired as an interpreter, de Torres is in Glantz’s epic an interpreter in the most capacious sense, interpreting visions and dreams, lamenting the Inquisition’s violence and prophesying the bloody conquests to come.
For Spanish readers Glantz may be most familiar as the protagonist of his daughter Margo Glantz’s family memoir, Las genealogías (1987), in which she describes her parents’ experiences of migration and her own coming of age as a Jewish woman in Mexico. But in the world of interwar Yiddish, Glantz was one of the most important poets of his day.
Rachel Rubinstein is professor of American literature and Jewish studies at Hampshire College. She is the author of Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination (2010) and co-editor of the forthcoming Modern Language Association volume Teaching Jewish-American Literature (2019).
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