The Yiddish literature of Latin America presents a series of farmitlungen (mediations) between Jewish society and the countries to which the Jews had immigrated. In the case of Argentina and Brazil, the earliest Yiddish literature portrays attempts to eliminate the flawed mediators that stood between the immigrants and the host societies: the Jewish white slave traders that had given their coreligionists a bad name. One of the most daring Yiddish plays of all times, Leib Malach's Ibergus (Remolding), shows in expressionist style the Jewish community's combat against prostitution rings in their midst. Troublingly, the director, Jacob Botoshansky, a leading Yiddish man of letters in Argentina, does not hesitate to use anti-Semitic language to bring home his point. In fact, in accordance with the physiocratic view of the economic farmitler as parasite, the pimp looms as a metonymy for the entire class of traders that Jews traditionally were.
Mordechai Alpersohn's best-selling three-volume memoirs of Jewish agricultural settlement in Argentina, also from the 1920s, remind us of how the Jewish "return to farming” - the aim of campaigns in Palestine, the Soviet Union, the pampas and the U.S. Midwest - was supremely anachronistic: the Jews' time-honored status as farmitlers was more in sync with the growing importance of the tertiary sector of the economy. The Jewish planters in Argentina, rather than functioning as farmitlers, were actually the adversaries of the cattle-driving gauchos, who hated the farmers' fences. However, Alpersohn's account shows how the Jews draw upon their traditions of shtadlones (mediation for the community) to deal with opponents even more intractable than the gauchos: the equally Jewish, feudal-minded administrators of the agricultural collectives.
Jews as farmitlers also abound in Yiddish literature of Cuba, Uruguay and Venezuela, where we see them trade in the most surprising goods of all: Christian icons. Authors like A. J. Dubelman, Salomon Zytner and Simon Brainsky take perverse pride in restoring the image of the Jewish trader as traitor. Jews dealing in crucifixes and plaster saints betray not only their own religion (in a literal sense), but Christianity as well (on a symbolic level, by re-enacting Judas' selling of Jesus). This ambivalent self-presentation corresponds to the oxymoron that Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Latin America often felt they embodied, as Jews seeking refuge in lands where the Inquisition once ruled. An atavistic fear of the Santo Oficio can be seen in Dubelman's diary and in the Mexican Yiddish poetry of Isaac Berliner, illustrated by Diego Rivera. The descendent of Marranos emerges as a farmitler between Jews and the host society in numerous Yiddish works from Latin America, by such writers as Alpersohn, Berniker, and Aaron Zeitlin.
