Jevel Katz — singer-songwriter and stage performer with roots in the Russian Empire
Jevel (Khevl) Katz was born on 10 May 1902 in Vilna, in the Russian Empire, now Vilnius in Lithuania. When he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1930, the city had become, by then, Polish Wilno, and the local Yiddish press introduced him as a son of the Vilna streets, presenting him in top hat and formal dress in the manner of one of his European idols and parodic models, the Russian singer Alexander Vertinsky. He brought with him the toolkit of the Yiddish kleynkunst, the small-form cabaret of Eastern Europe.
He became the star of the Yiddish stage in 1930s Buenos Aires almost immediately. Describing himself as a cabaret singer, he performed in a tuxedo, dressed as a gaucho or in women's clothes, accompanying himself on the accordion. His speciality was humorous song: he took popular tangos, foxtrots, rumbas, rancheras and boleros heard on the radio and wrote new lyrics about the lives of Jewish immigrants in Argentina, freely mixing Yiddish with Spanish and with lunfardo, the slang of Buenos Aires. His songs described the streets, tenements and cafés of the Jewish neighbourhoods where his audience lived, as well as the agricultural colonies of the interior, and satirised both the old world and the new.
His success extended beyond Buenos Aires to other Argentine cities, to the Jewish colonies and to neighbouring countries. The Yiddish press called him 'the happiest Jew in Buenos Aires', and between 1939 and 1940 the daily Di yidishe tsaytung ran a section devoted to his texts. In 1936 he was among the performers at a benefit in Buenos Aires for YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna.
After receiving an offer of work in the United States, he underwent a tonsil operation, and died of its complications in Buenos Aires on 8 March 1940, aged thirty-seven, at the height of his career. Tens of thousands of people, some forty thousand by one account, attended his funeral; he is buried in the Jewish cemetery of Liniers. His portrait and accordion are displayed at the IWO Foundation in Buenos Aires, and in 2005 the director Alejandro Vagnenkos made the documentary Jevel Katz y sus paisanos about him and his audience.
"Emigrated from Vilna to Buenos Aires in 1930."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Vilna, Vilna Governorate (now Vilnius, Lithuania)
Born in Vilna, in the Russian Empire, on 10 May 1902, he grew up as, in the words of the Buenos Aires Yiddish press, 'a son of the Vilna streets', and brought its cabaret tradition to Argentina in 1930.
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Vilna, Vilna Governorate (now Vilnius, Lithuania). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.