PLANTING WHEAT AND REAPING DOCTORS - Another Way of Being Argentine T

The fabled Argentine Jewish migratory route from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the agricultural settlements of the pampas and to the urban centers of the nation gave rise to the sardonic observation that Jews came to the countryside of Argentina where they sowed wheat but reaped doctors, as their children went off to live in the nation’s urban centers. [...] Literary and visual texts marked by complex representations of Argentina’s sites of difference, tied to such critical moments in the nation’s history as the rise of labor and anarchist movements in the early part of the twentieth century, Peronism in midcentury, the dictatorship and repression of the 1970s and 1980s, and times of economic crisis like those of the turn of the millennium are, theref. [...] The children © 2021 State University of New York Press, Albany 18 THE OTHER/ARGENTINA were among the first to be buried in the town cemetery; their graves are marked by the long grass of the pampas, at the edge of the crowded rows of headstones of their parents and subsequent generations. [...] The origin story of the journey of the Weser—the struggle to survive, the leadership of their rabbi, and the rescue by Lowenthal and later Hirsch— has become part of the mythology of Argentine Jewish history. [...] Despite the minoritarian residue of antisemitic xenophobia, the majority of the Argentine people recognize themselves in the cinematic images of the erstwhile “Russians” [i.e., Eastern European Jews] and identify with the small triumphs of the Jews of the film.