This chapter proposes a reading of Argentine-Jewish literature that stresses key moments of production. It begins with a focus on Alberto Gerchunoff´s The Jewish Gauchos as the foundational text (and of modern Jewish literature in Spanish) and the moment of massive immigration. Gerchunoff is read alongside Borges, who is treated as a contrapunctual figure, a canonical writer who engages with transnational Jewish literatures and draws strategies from Jewish reading and writing to devise his own literary models.  The second part examines the impact of the Shoah on Argentine Jewish literature of the 1950s and 1960s focusing on playwright Germán Rozenmacher and in the world of Yiddish and Ladino publishing. Tamara Kamenszain is subsequently described as an author that espouses “reluctant belonging,” someone who has engaged with different subjects and different styles but never ventures very far away from Jewishness. The third part treats the use of the Holocaust metaphorically to discuss state terrorism in the works of Reina Roffé and Sergio Chejfec. It concludes with a reflection on contemporary writing and the variety of literary genres.

In the years following World War II, modern Hebrew poets like Leah Goldberg wrestled with the rupture from European culture and their own longing for it against Zionism’s “rejection of the diaspora.” In this context, translation allowed for a continued dialogue with past and present Europe, while it also constituted a vital investment on behalf of a national literature in Hebrew. Anthologies of shirat ‘olam, world poetry, appeared with greater frequency in the post-war years, both to increase the corpus of world literature in Hebrew translation and to position Hebrew as a national literary language on the world stage. This chapter explores how an understanding of world literature took shape in early twentieth century Hebrew literature, and particularly in the field of poetry, where translated poems circulated widely in a range of formats, from radio broadcasts to newspapers and anthologies. Drawing from Goldberg’s oeuvre, this chapter considers her translation activity as part of a broader discourse on “world literature” in early to mid-twentieth century Hebrew literary culture, one that privileged, as I show, a European world literary model. Goldberg’s translations of the poetry from Far Eastern languages, specifically Chinese and Japanese poetry, both expand and complicate the coordinates of her world literary map. The inclusion of Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation expanded her poetic map “beyond Bialystock” and Tel Aviv, but as translations mediated by German translation and European Orientalism, they bring into relief a critical tension between “the far and the near” that underlies world literary models in general, and the case of the Hebrew ‘olam in particular.