João Delgado’s poetry first appeared as an anthology of translated poetry in He’arat Shulaym Issue 1, published in November 2001 in Jerusalem by the artist collective Sala-Manca. The entire issue was devoted to João Delgado. Delgado was a Portuguese-Argentinean poet, born in Lisbon circa 1920 (or not), who left Portugal as a political refugee for Buenos Aires. He disappeared in 1976 during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). Since 1976, there has been no trace of his fate, although new fragments of his work are constantly being discovered, translated, and published by the Sala-Manca group. There is no evidence of any originals of his work. Literary critics in Israel praised Delgado’s poetry and art and even identified previously unknown relationships to poets and artists from the European avantgarde. In Sala-Manca’s artistic work, dating back two decades, João Delgado and his heteronyms would have a central role and focus, blurring the boundaries of the group, blurring the fictional with the “real”, and proposing a subjectivity that embraces multiplicity and dispersion. Translating his poetry into Hebrew, a foreign language (to Delgado), and bringing it into print for the first time in neither its original language nor the cultural context in which it was created may be seen as a kind of de-contextualization of the poet’s poetry, since Delgado always kept himself and his oeuvre connected to the immediate surroundings where it was produced. On the other hand, perhaps it is actually this possibility—to “become only in translation”—that is one of the outstanding characteristics of Delgado’s poetry, emblematic of its linguistic and conceptual elasticity. This paper examines João Delgado’s poetic work in relation to Sala-Manca’s artistic work and the way in which both Sala-Manca and Delgado create a “system of life” by being heteronyms of one another, allowing for a multiplicity of identities, and stressing the relation to Others.

nspired by contemporaneous modernist artistic and literary movements, groups of Jewish writers and artists coalesced in Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia during the first two decades of the 20th century. The influence of modernism on theater, poetry, literature, music, dance, and plastic arts was reflected in the works produced by these Jewish artists, who subsequently took the new trends with them to other lands, especially the Americas (Jewish Aspects in Avant-Garde, cited under General Overviews). They sought to challenge both artistic language and Jewish literature, developing new, even revolutionary, means of expression in Yiddish, Hebrew, or the vernacular spoken in their surroundings (Challenging the Literary Community: The Warsaw Yiddish Avant-Garde and Khalyastre, cited under General Overviews). Many of those groups launched independent frameworks to disseminate their works: some organized readings and exhibitions or even established journals in which they published literary works, manifests, and reproductions of the works of art created by their members. Among these platforms were Eygns (Kiev, 1918–1920) edited by Dovid Bergelson; Yung-Yidish (Yung-Idish; Łódź, 1919–1921); Albatros (Warsaw, 1922; Berlin, 1923), and Khalyastre (Warsaw, 1922; Paris, 1924) (The Albatrosses of Young Yiddish Poetry: An Idea and Its Visual Realization in Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Albatros, cited under General Overviews). Some of these innovative Jewish writers, poets, theater directors, musicians, and visual artists took part in the development of a modernist and sometimes avant-garde Jewish theater (Authenticity and Modernism Combined: Music and the Visual Arts, cited under General Overviews). The “slippery” and fluid concept of Jewish avant-garde theater can be defined as theatrical projects created by Jews for a mainly Jewish audience that were influenced, aesthetically or ideologically, by historical avant-garde movements (such as the International Dada in Zurich, German expressionism, Italian and Russian futurism, and Russian constructivism and suprematism), movements that made radical aesthetic innovations in form and content. Such projects developed or attempted to develop a Jewish theatrical aesthetic that would subvert or provoke a break with popular Yiddish theater and the bourgeois style dominant in the contemporaneous Yiddish and Jewish theater scenes. These influences were evident in various aspects of the Yiddish stage: stage design and actors’ makeup (for example, the Vilner trupe’s Dybbuk, see Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy, cited under General Overviews), in the representation of space (Yung-Yiddish breaking the fourth wall), in the design of visual materials (the playbills of Ararat or the Vilner trupe designed by Berlewi or Swarc, see Visual Artists and Yiddish Avant-garde Theatre in Poland and The Yiddish Stage as a Temporary Home—Dzigan and Shumacher’s Satirical Theater (1927–1980), both cited under General Overviews), and, of course, in the texts themselves (for example, Moyshe Broderzon’s texts, see Moyshe Broderzon: Un écrivain yiddish d’avant-garde, cited under General Overviews). This article, which focuses on Yiddish avant-garde theater in the interwar period, refers to the major figures who contributed to the development of these avant-garde aesthetics or approaches in different fields and ends with references to avant-garde approaches in Yiddish performance today. Accordingly, it considers Jewish avant-garde theater as a broad topic, one that includes an elastic and transnational corpus of varying quality that was characterized by a common attempt to reflect or express a contentious approach (or an alternative) to mainstream Jewish theater.

This article deals with the dialogical relation between modern Hebrew culture and Yiddish culture as reflected in the discourse of both the Hebrew and Yiddish press about Yiddish theatre in the State of Israel between 1948 and 2003. By considering the struggle for power between Hebrew and Yiddish, I outline the establishment of Hebrew as the national language of the new state, as the local and native language, and as the language of power and knowledge. I illustrate that Hebrew’s institutionalization occurred in tandem with a constant process of repression and alienation of Yiddish culture and language, as well as the repression and alienation of all the considered Diaspora cultures. If this cultural policy affected the economic conditions for the development of the Yiddish theatre in Israel, then the discourse about the Yiddish theatre in the press also affected the public reception and the public status of Yiddish theatre in Israel.

At a time when it was unusual in Israel for a group of residents to organize a grassroots campaign against a municipal decision about urban planning—and triumph—something even more uncommon occurred in Jerusalem: three students from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem instigated the first steps for such a campaign and launched important actions that contributed greatly to the establishment of a green park where a four-lane highway had been approved. Route 34 was slated to be paved along the route of the old railway from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, and thence through the Pat and Gonen neighborhoods at the outskirts of the Talpiot industrial zone, the Mekor Hayim neighborhood, and Emek Refaim Street. The joint initiative, launched by the Garin Dvash (Honey Group) of the Society for Protection of Nature and the Keshet School, ended with the halting of the urban plan to pave the new road and the construction of a park along the railway tracks—dubbed the Railway Park. The park has turned this inter-urban nexus into one of the most challenging connections within one of the most divided cities in Israel and beyond.