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Buenos Aires had already passed its brief heyday as a Yiddish publishing center when the journalist, Yiddishist, communist, literary scholar, and teacher Mimi Pinzón (1910-1975)published her autobiographical novel, Der hoyf on fentster (The Courtyard without Windows; 1965). The novel tells an immigrant coming-of-age story set in a conventillo (Argentine tenement). Central to the novel's action-and politics-is the conventillos hoyf, or courtyard, a space of radical, multilingual possibility that stands in contrast to the often brutal repression-psychological and physical-of the monolingual state. In Yiddish, the novel crafts a miniature, multilingual Argentina thatfinds its "nationhood" in loose networks of humane solidarity. I argue that Pinzón's choice to articulate this radical linguistic vision in a language that would soon be inaccessible to all but a handful of readers-her insistence on minor language maintenance, her willingness to risk noncirculation-models an expansive vision of world literature that broadens our understanding of this concept.
The Argentine journalist, Yiddishist, literary scholar, and teacher Adela Weinstein-Shliapochnik (1910-1975), who adopted the pseudonym Mimi Pinzón, immigrated to Argentina with her parents at the age of four from Belotserkov, near Kiev.1 She is best known-if she is known at all to contemporary audiences-for her novel, Der hoyf on fentster (The Courtyard without Windows; 1965), which tells an Argentine immigrant story through the eyes of Etl, a precocious young girl. The majority of the novel's action takes place in a multilingual, multiethnic conventillo, a resonant setting for the Argentine immigrant experience. While the conventillo has been compared to the Lower East Side tenement, its hoyf, or inner courtyard, distinguishes this "Argentine tenement" from its iconic U.S. counterpart. Separated by a gate from the alienating streets beyond its walls, Pinzón's hoyf demarcates an alternative space of multilingual exchange that stands in opposition to the monolingual nationalism-enforced at school and in the streets-of the Argentine state.
The novel implicitly links its moment of publication back to the political and social upheaval of the time of its setting some decades years earlier. Set in the second decade of the twentieth century, when conservative and nationalist backlash against immigrant lower classes contributed to the terrifying Semana Trágica (1919), the novel's first scenes were written during the authoritarian Peronist regime. Pinzón continued to write during the chaotic years between 1955-when Perón...