Between Chicos de España and “Homenaje al pueblo español”: Toward an Interpretation of Samuel Glusberg’s Solidarity from the Margins

Disillusioned and perturbed by the recalcitrant nationalism and growing xenophobia emanating from right-wing political, military, and intellectual circles within Argentine society with the support of the Catholic church, the Jewish-Argentine writer and editor Samuel Glusberg decided to extend a family visit to Chile in 1935 into a stay that lasted some forty-odd years. During his protracted residence in this country, the son of Jewish immigrants from Kishinev continued to pursue his cultural campaigns and politics of “persons and periodicals,” propelled by his unwavering faith in the redeeming and rallying potential of (Latin) American letters. In Santiago, Glusberg revived his literary review Babel and published extensively about Latin American writers and culture, as well as contemporary social, political, aesthetic, and ideological polemics, but now from a clearly leftist perspective. A close reading of two key texts devoted to the Spanish Civil War will allow us to understand that the double immigrant’s solidarity with the Republican cause had as much to do with his humanitarian concern for their plight as with his preoccupation with the transculturation of identities within cohesive intellectual spaces where perceived experiential commonalities and aesthetic or political affinities carried more weight than barriers of nation and ethnicity.