César Tiempo — poet, playwright and screenwriter with roots in the Russian Empire
César Tiempo was the pen name of Israel Zeitlin, born, it is believed, on 3 March 1906 in Yekaterinoslav, in the Russian Empire, now Dnipro in Ukraine. His family left during a wave of antisemitism and brought him to Buenos Aires before his first birthday; he grew up in the city's Jewish quarter, studied at the national school of fine arts and became an Argentine citizen in 1924. The pseudonym played on his surname: Zeit is German for 'time', tiempo in Spanish.
While still a teenager he joined the Boedo group of socially engaged writers. His first book of poems, Versos de una... (1926), appeared under the name of Clara Beter, presented as a young Russian-Jewish prostitute writing in Buenos Aires; the invented poet was taken for real by many readers and critics, and the hoax became one of the best-known episodes of Argentine literary life. Under his own pseudonym he went on to publish Libro para la pausa del sábado, which won the Municipal Prize for poetry in 1930, Sabadomingo, Sabatión argentino and Aviso para encontrar a Jordana, poetry drawn from the Jewish neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires and their meeting with criollo culture.
He was also a playwright, author of Pan criollo and El lustrador de manzanas, and received the National Theatre Prize. From the late 1930s he wrote more than three dozen screenplays for Argentine cinema, among them Safo, historia de una pasión (1943), and in 1945 won the Municipal Prize for the best screenplay; in 1961 he appeared as an actor in Esta tierra es mía. From 1937 to 1942 he founded and edited the magazine Columna, he co-founded the Argentine-Uruguayan publishing house Sociedad Amigos del Libro, and he translated and promoted writers between Argentina and other countries.
In 1935 he published La campaña antisemita y el director de la Biblioteca Nacional, a pamphlet against antisemitism in Argentina, and he remained a public critic of it. From 1973 to 1975 he directed the Teatro Nacional Cervantes in Buenos Aires. His correspondence and papers have since become a source for the history of Argentine culture.
He died in Buenos Aires on 24 October 1980, aged seventy-four.
"Brought to Buenos Aires before his first birthday; Argentine citizen from 1924."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Yekaterinoslav, Yekaterinoslav Governorate (now Dnipro, Ukraine)
Born Israel Zeitlin in Yekaterinoslav, in the Russian Empire, in 1906, he was brought to Buenos Aires as an infant by a family leaving a wave of antisemitism, and grew up in the city's Jewish quarter.
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Yekaterinoslav, Yekaterinoslav Governorate (now Dnipro, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.