Fig.1. Facade of the Casa do Povo in 2017, with artistic interventions by Etcétera collective and Yael Bartana. Photo courtesy of Casa do Povo Archive
This article will present Casa do Povo as an institution that operates through fundamentally diasporic means. To do so, we will highlight some of its historical and daily dynamics, with emphasis on its collection and library. We will seek to deepen the idea of what we will refer to as a “diasporic structure of functioning” by offering two significant concepts to a certain lineage of the Jewish diaspora: do’ikayt and glitch. Finally, we propose to articulate these concepts as a possible compass that points directions for an institution (or part of it) to function diasporically.
Casa do Povo (the People’s House) is a cultural institution in São Paulo, Brazil, built from the ground up with the intention of fostering community in a diasporic context.[1] It was founded in 1946 by a group of mostly Eastern European Jewish immigrants that came to Brazil escaping from pogroms and anti-Semitic violence. A self-proposed “living monument” to the victims and survivors of the Shoah, the institution was conceived as a place of gathering for the region’s immigrant community, founded upon a progressive, left-wing, secular worldview. Being founded and maintained by members of the historical Jewish diaspora, today it embraces the several diasporic identities which currently compose its city’s landscape, occupying the position of “Otherness” once inhabited by its founders. If the Jews represented the great Other in Europe, when they arrived in Brazil they were faced with populations that occupied this place, already historically persecuted and marginalized—notably black and indigenous people.[2]
Fig. 2. Members of the choir at the building’s roof-laying party in 1952. Photo courtesy of Casa do Povo Archive
In the course of nearly eighty years, Casa do Povo housed many peoples and events. To name a few, it has staged historically important plays in its theater, TAIB (Teatro de Arte Israelita Brasileiro), provided the infrastructure for a women’s league, the Israelite-Brazilian Feminine Association (AFIB), and managed a secondary school in its premises, Ginásio Israelita Scholem Aleichem, which also acted as an important site of refuge and resistance during the Brazilian civic-military dictatorship (1964–1985) by taking in the children of persecuted political activists under false names. Today, beyond its mandate as a memory and cultural institution, it sustains its mission as a site of communal responsibility.[3]
Casa do Povo is situated in Bom Retiro, a neighborhood in downtown São Paulo known as the historical textile factory hub of the city—an activity mostly conducted and developed by immigrants, from the late nineteenth century until today. The neighborhood has remained a welcoming territory for 140 years, simultaneously sheltering different national and international diasporas: Jews, Italians, Koreans, Bolivians and Paraguayans, Brazilian Northeasterners, crack users, travestis, and LGBTQI+ people. The neighborhood diasporas have since become some of the communities that inhabit and use the diasporic social technologies present in the institution.[4]
Also known as Povo da Casa (the House’s People),[5] the social body that uses and participates in the daily life of the institution is composed of different groups, including a number of political and artistic initiatives, such as Mitchossó, a Korean feminist collective; Empreendedoras Sin Fronteras, a sewing cooperative of Bolivian immigrant women; Parquinho Gráfico, an accessible printing workshop and independent publishing endeavor;[6] Coral Tradição, a ladies’ choir that sings exclusively in Yiddish; Boxe Autônomo, a boxing collective that revives the notion of popular gym and anti-fascism through sport; and MEXA, a performance collective composed mostly of transgender people who live in a public shelter in the neighborhood.
Fig. 3. Coral Tradição, MEXA, Boxe Autônomo, and Empreendedoras Sin Fronteras. Photos courtesy of Casa do Povo Archive
In this melting pot of improbable coexistences, different collectives meet, most of them autonomous and with a strong political charge—practices that can only happen in Casa do Povo because it is a kind of a refuge. A refuge-institution differs from a vitrine-institution. While the vitrine-institution is always making its practices visible, seeking the greatest possible transparency, so that its inside can be seen from the outside, the refuge-institution works based on opacity, to preserve and protect the practices that take place there. And while vitrine-institutions seek to be looked at, that is, they seek spectators and audiences, the refuge-institution seeks arms and brains, people who come to use it and to participate. Casa do Povo has constantly negotiated between these two states, because to be a good refuge it is good to have a vitrine that seems to show everything.
In refuge-institutions, belonging and dissent are constantly articulated and incorporated into the very structure of institutional functioning. Two practical examples illustrate this. Each of the collectives that make up Casa do Povo has its own copy of the building’s key. This non-control of the door, which could generate the fear of neglect of the institution, is the same device that generates the tranquility of a more effective care, because it is shared by many. With the right to enter and leave whenever one wants, there is also a co-responsibility for the common space. Multiplying the key and access is a gesture that expands and deepens the bonds of community belonging.
Unlike conventional institutional buildings, designed according to a specific architectural schema of activities and needs, the Casa do Povo building has no pre-established program, enabling a multiplicity of uses. There are four open floor plans with free spaces inviting the imagination. It is a diasporic technology, in the sense that it was programmed to welcome and support the shifting necessities of whatever is demanded within the given instability of the context. Programming is made, therefore, from the desires and needs not only of the staff of Casa do Povo but also of the Povo da Casa and external users who send proposals for using the space. Put into practice simultaneously, belonging and dissensus are values capable of producing transformations that no one (not even the institution itself) knows in advance.
Fig. 4 and 5. Second floor of the Casa do Povo on two different occasions: “Intérpretes em crise” (Interpreters in crisis, 2015), performance by Clarice Lima (LOTE), photo by Eduardo Knapp / Jornal Folha de São Paulo; and “Laboratório para Estruturas Flexíveis” (Laboratory for Flexible Structures, 2017), which hosted talks and activities about management techniques in cultural initiatives. Photos courtesy of Casa do Povo Archive
If belonging and dissent mobilize the possibility of cohesion and transfiguration, it is perhaps a notion of care that makes such a movement feasible. Care is understood here as a human technology of solidarity and community production, or even as a diasporic tactic that brings together what was dispersed, marginalized, or placeless. In Casa do Povo, caring is the basis of the institution, which cares for the Povo da Casa while being cared for by them. There is no Casa (House) without Povo (People). In welcoming diasporas, Casa do Povo uses its historical social technologies and accumulates new ones, incorporating other gestures, practices, and perspectives in a constant movement of re-updating beyond its Jewish origin.
If, so far, it has been possible to briefly visualize some modes of operation that reflect diasporic values of Casa do Povo, it is worth a deeper dive into what is perhaps the driving heart of the diasporic ethos of this institution.
Casa do Povo’s library is quite peculiar in relation to its surrounding context. Out of the 9,000 volumes that make it up, around 5,000 are in Yiddish, making it one of the most significant archives of the language in Brazil. The books are mostly immigrants themselves, first having been brought along from Europe, taking up precious space of fleeing luggage, from the late nineteenth century up until the 1980s, arriving at the library in from Warsaw, Minsk, New York, Buenos Aires, and other places which had thriving Yiddish publishers, either brought back by members after traveling or through a wide network of cultural exchange. With time, volumes were not only bought by and for the library, but institutional archives and personal libraries of members of Casa do Povo were donated to and accessioned into the institution, composing a collection from a vast list of fonds.
Fig. 6. Installation Voz Ativa: Biblioteca Social by Mariana Lanari, 2019. Photo: Rubens Crispim Jr
Within Ashkenazi Jewish communities, the relationship between the Yiddish and Hebrew languages is filled with tensions. While historically Yiddish was the everyday language of the group and Hebrew was reserved for sacred and liturgical purposes, in the second half of the nineteenth century this established order was upturned. With the ascension of Jewish Nationalism and Zionism, Hebrew was revived and reimagined as a current language, and both languages began disputing dominance as this scattered population’s sole language. Although this is an oversimplification, the Yiddishist side came to be understood as the internationalist/diasporic side and the Hebraist side as the Zionist one. It is widely acknowledged that, with the foundation of the State of Israel, Hebrew was victorious. Yiddish, by contrast, was never tied to a nation-state project and remains to this day a language without land, without borders, without a state. However, both languages keep co-existing, despite a somewhat bitter divide.
Fig. 7. Part of the Casa do Povo’s Yiddish book collection. Installation Voz Ativa: Biblioteca Social by Mariana Lanari, 2019. Photo: Carol Quintanilha
The history of Jewish culture is a history of debate, dissent, and branching. The Talmud, for example, is a millennial strategy to institutionalize dissent—useful for formalizing “Otherness,” that is, for bringing a plurality of perspectives into official structures with the same standing. Thus, one does not remain forever in the condition of a commentator, of marginalia, of an external element, of the “other” in relation to the “original” text. And Casa do Povo itself is a dissenting expression of this current, since its foundations lie in the tension between secular and religious Jewish culture, between Zionism and local pragmatism, between ethnocultural care and universalism. Despite potent convergences, in the history of Casa do Povo the collectivity has never been harmonious and univocal. And in its library, it could be no different. Doubts, hesitations, ponderings, clashes, and above all, different views pervade its whole collection.
The first publication of the Brazilian Israelite Cultural Institute (ICIB), as Casa do Povo was officially called in its early days, illustrates how the library was dreamed up in the institution’s diasporic project; its cover features a representation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, headed by a globe with books spinning in its orbit.[7] The book appears as the connecting element, the vehicle through which a people who had just experienced near annihilation would remain united, and through which new ideas that could transform the world would be propagated and created. The Ghetto Warriors are both defense and offense, books being their main means of communion and expansion. No wonder in the publication, made before the construction of the headquarters in Bom Retiro, the future library appears with great prominence. For Bernardo Seibel, one of the Casa’s founders, the library would be “a sumptuous monument […] where instead of flowers that wither, one will cultivate the garden of eternal flowers: the books.”[8]
Fig. 8. Front cover of ICIB’s (Casa do Povo) first publication. Image courtesy of Casa do Povo Archive
With this memorial and revolutionary ambition, the collection’s establishment was a rigorous project. Here, a specific diasporic logic is at work, in which the past and tradition merge with the here and now. In its original statute, the founders define that the library would be composed only of works “of Brazilian and Jewish literary and scientific value.”[9] That is, the ambition that Brazilian and Jewish books, thoughts, and debates would mix and contaminate one another. This way of acting, as it will be further elaborated, was grounded in a particular way of conceiving time and space, on which the entire institution was based.
So much so, that the year the building was inaugurated, 1953, the library promoted events dedicated to Jewish literature—such as homages paid to writers Moissaye Joseph Olgin and I.L. Peretz—but also to Brazilian literature, with a roundtable on the latter featuring members of the Brazilian Writers’ Association (ABDE) and a lecture on writer Monteiro Lobato. The desire to connect roots, however, was not only toward the dominant Brazilian culture, at the time mostly made up of white descendants of Europeans, but also with the African black diaspora, which was more diffuse and longstanding on the Brazilian territory. To that end, for example, they held a literary-artistic evening to commemorate the Liberation of Slaves in Brazil.[10]
With an initial collection of around 3,500 volumes, the library has grown to its current 9,000 volumes, bringing together not only Jewish and Brazilian books, but also books from various (particularly European) traditions of thought. However, the intellectualist frontier has rarely been crossed; there are almost no cookbooks or books on practical, everyday themes, as one might expect from a community library. They are mostly volumes of literature, sciences, history, philosophy, or dedicated to the “great” questions of Judaism, Brazil, and humanity.
If throughout its first decades of existence this library served as a basis for the formation and broadening of horizons of the hundreds of members who borrowed books or met for heated debates in its quarters, around the 1980s the library began to take on a different character. Gradually, from a living library it became a monument library, a collection. Concurrent with a period of general dormancy of the institution, in which a lack of funds and a series of historical contingencies had left Casa do Povo in a precarious situation between the early 1980s and the late 2000s, the library became a memory more than an actual place. The books were stored in boxes, which were still maintained to the best of the remaining members’ capacities and kept in the building outside of public reach.
Fig. 9. Detail of installation Voz Ativa: Biblioteca Social by Mariana Lanari, 2019. Photo: Carol Quintanilha
Starting in 2011, Casa do Povo experienced a resurgence and returned to being the bustling cultural catalyst it was once known to be. As part of this initiative, in 2017 an ongoing program to reactivate the library was established. Between then and now, the books have been cleaned and reshelved, artists have been invited to interact with the collection in different ways, and new practices have been established to allow for the public to engage with the volumes.
Throughout this resumption of the library, the institution formally began to view it as a collection and no longer a lending library. From then on, it became a research library that began to lend its infrastructure to other collections, either temporarily or permanently. For example, the Sueli Carneiro Library, an important collection of the activist and thinker of the African black diaspora, is provisionally organizing itself within the Casa’s library space, using its resources. On a permanent basis, Casa do Povo has also been willing to accommodate historical but placeless collections, such as that of Feira Plana, an independent publications fair; the documental archive of Jacó Guinsburg, an important Jewish Brazilian publisher; and of Anatol Rosenfeld, a Jewish German-Brazilian critic and scholar of theater and literature. Finally, the collection today also gathers the publications of various collectives which form the Povo da Casa, becoming in this sense an archive of different collectivities. The library moves as to embrace other collections which have similar values, such as memorializing dissident voices, resistance, and experimentation in a more gregarious approach.
Part of the library’s infrastructure is being upscaled in an attempt to learn from the institution’s tactics and translate its ethics into a new layer in the database, in a project proposed by Archival Consciousness (Mariana Lanari and Remco van Bladel) to incorporate the multiplicity of voices present in Casa do Povo in shaping collectively the reception of the collection. Each object received a radio frequency identification tag that acts as a bridge between the physical object and its digital representation. Not in an attempt to substitute the physical object for the digital, but to extend it to new realms of access and visibility. It will allow the community, staff, and researchers to add relationships and enrich existing metadata of the collections in a shifting cartography that is constantly in the making.
Through a bespoke interface, readers will be able to annotate text and contribute to reveal the social network of people, places, periods, events, and concepts that are implicit in dormant state in the collection. This system learns from and represents a catching up with the strong Yiddish publishing tradition that helped to document the Jewish diaspora. The slow and ongoing process of translating the collection into findable and reusable data will extend the reach of the collection beyond the physical boundaries of Casa do Povo. The ongoing digitization process will allow the community to establish and record connections, or reconnect and reconcile with other Yiddish organizations, in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New York, and Paris, to name a few, and like-minded cultural institutions.
The library is one of the sites which bring forth Casa do Povo’s relation to the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter-Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland (General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), or simply Bund, a major force in left-wing politics in the region from the 1890s to around the end of the Second World War. The Bund, not quite a party as much as a political association, fought for workers’ rights and, ultimately, a democratic and socialist society. Explicitly Jewish in character, it sought the betterment of Jewish life, defending civil rights, rejecting assimilation, and actively fighting anti-Semitism. However, the expression of Judaism backed by the organization was mostly a secular, cultural, progressive one, and their socialist inclinations meant class solidarity surpassed religious or ethnic ones, choosing always to side with non-Jewish workers in place of conservative or upper-class Jews. Bund was, to a large degree, a political school for early or pre-Casa do Povo political activities by its founders. They are, albeit not exclusively, part of the genealogy of the aforementioned progressive, left-wing, secular, predominantly anti-Zionist and Yiddishist stance adopted by the institution. Behind this line of moral descriptives, a deeper notion of political time adopted by the Bundists lays hidden. To describe the nature of their particular struggle, Bund activists used a Yiddish word: do’ikayt.
Do’ikayt translates quite directly to English as hereness. Do means here, and kayt is a suffix which acts as -ness, making a noun off another syntactic category. It signifies a specific relation to space, a demand for presence and a commitment to where one stands. However, the term also connotes a specific relation to time, and the time it calls for is now. In that sense, a more appropriate translation would be here-and-now-ness. What that meant in the hearts and minds of Bundists, and later of their successors, was that their actions pertained to their specific context and should not envision grand alternatives, but instead improve their conditions then and there, or, from where they saw it, here and now.
Do’ikayt proposes an alternative approach to place (in space and in time) to the hardened dichotomy between internationalism and territorialism. Ambivalent in nature, this concept offers a “decentralized, extra-territorial idea of nationhood, one that insisted that Jews were not bound by territory or the state, but by history, language, and culture,” as described by historian David Slucki.[11] From within the boundaries of space and time, do’ikayt suggests immanence and urgency as tactics. Commitment to here and to now, tied to a responsibility of provoking radical transformation.
This was in stark contrast to a growing section of European Jews who adopted a Jewish Nationalist, Zionist (and Hebraist) perspective, and therefore sought to achieve a future, distant homeland for the universal Jew.[12] Bund militants stood for their long and hard-fought history in the region, claiming Ashkenazi Jews were not a foreign, unrooted people, but part of the social and cultural landscape of the places they inhabited. In the words of prominent Bund member Vladimir Medem, in place of a Nation State, they held the ideal of a State of Nationalities.
Do’ikayt, as literary scholar Madeleine Atkins Cohen makes a point of recalling, is a fundamentally deictic concept. That is, while its meaning is fixed, it can only be entirely parsed with contextual information—what defines here [do] is opposition to there [dort], and both are necessarily defined in relation to a specific enunciator. So, this proposed here and now is, consequently, constantly shifting.[13] While some might take this to mean that the Bundist demands are not actually for the right to inhabit their here and now, but in fact for an altogether “different here and a different now,” and they might be right, we can rephrase this to state that the deeper intention is for this here and now, with no concessions, to be, quite simply put, the site of change. To quote Cohen, we can read this mentality as the rhetorical questions posed as a chant in protests and rallies: “If not now, when? If not here, where?” In that sense, do’ikayt politics reframe the temporality of liberation, as it stands in either Zionism or Soviet communism, from an imminent, always forthcoming state of glory to an immanent state of things where all the conditions are given and just need to be acted upon.
This same political philosophy of time can be later seen in the establishment of the members of this community who established themselves in the Brazilian Southeast, and ultimately in Casa do Povo itself. The old country was here no more, and so a new identity had to be formulated for their struggle, one that responded to their current do. What this has meant throughout the decades was not only a pivoting towards a Brazilian-centric rather than Eurocentric involvement in politics, with many left-wing immigrant Jews taking a front-line position in the opposition of both the 1937–1945 fascistic Estado Novo dictatorship and the 1964–1985 civic-military dictatorship. An even more present-based form of here-and-now-ness transformed Casa do Povo into a local cornerstone for the support of working people, the homeless population, and new immigrant communities, which at present face many of the hardships the arriving European Jews did some eighty years ago.
Libraries were a foundational pillar in Yiddish diasporic communities, alongside the school, the temple, and the cemetery.[14] In the histories of this diaspora, the library was a community method of occupation—not just of a physical location, but also of a space of discourse. Yiddish libraries functioned as community centers and were shaped by public debates of a population highly organized around values of collectivism and education.
Yiddish literate culture does not refer to the sacred—written in Hebrew—but to current affairs, public debates, literary experiments. This could be read as evidence of the do’ikayt spirit, of a collective pedagogy through political engagement. It is possible to think, therefore, the movement of the Yiddish language in tandem with the image of diaspora that does not only flee across great distances, but that, mostly, slides, roots, and proliferates in different present contexts.
The library is an unstable place in which many timelines coexist and overlap. In that sense, one could argue it embodies the ambiguity of do’ikayt: simultaneously here and now, and a different here, different now. This instability is akin to being in a constant state of trembling, and though the library is highly regulated and organized through indexes and catalogues, there is always a certain fogginess to it. In the Yiddish library of Casa do Povo, this can be illustrated by translation glitches, a word derived from the Yiddish glitsh, to slip (fig. 10).
Fig. 10. Spelling variations of the same name, and versions of the same title, freely translated from Yiddish to Portuguese, and from Portuguese to English, encountered in an export of the database of the library of Casa do Povo. Freely translated from Portuguese to English for the purpose of the present article.
Transliterated and translated, these titles’ small variations seem to refuse essentializing. Is there a correct title? How to identify it? Should one discover or elect the “true” title, or embrace the instability and refuse fixity as the tone for our relationship with these books? Due to these inconsistencies, the interpretations of the books themselves are up for debate; their emphasis is in constant motion. Inconsistency and instability can be read as states of movement; the library gains dynamism from it.
Different unofficial translations render the act of translation evident. To make the translator’s hand visible is a democratic posture of transparency, which invites the public to reflect and wonder about meanings and possibilities, in contrast with being given a ready answer, a fixed title, which does not invite questioning. The library opens itself up for debate.
Again, this is an outlook which can be adopted institutionally. First, one must undo the pejorative tone that “inconsistency and instability” usually evokes. On the contrary, it is possible to think about what kind of dynamics these concepts could produce as a countermeasure to the standard institutional will towards stabilization. That is, in order to be “consistent and stable,” institutions tend to control everything (schedules, spaces, metrics, audience, programing, etc.). The effect being that they usually become lethargic, not very lively environments, besides imposing certain logics which subject “diasporic objects” to a form of violence by trying to immobilize them in normative protocols or categorizing them within a system of hegemonic art history.
We cannot disregard a certain fear institutions have of losing their collections and a legitimate desire to ensure their conservation. This evokes actions of standardization, compacting, in order to “facilitate access” and “ensure security,” which are real, but also univocal. In the case of a Yiddish library and in the context of Casa do Povo, with the language barrier, traditional methods do not guarantee access to the books, hence the search for alternative routes, metadata, the channels that converge and diverge, the connection points between the thousands of documents and books. The rarity of the books, the fragments of the time period they represent, the stories of people who have touched their pages, the technological possibility of deciphering their contents, are enough reasons, albeit not the only ones, for them to be preserved. The library is also a memorial and, above all, it refers to a history that is not elsewhere, only there.
An archive and an institution of a diaspora, located in a place where many diasporas meet and exchange experiences, affects, tactics, must embrace contamination and movement in order to remain alive.
Both the people and the objects that constitute Casa do Povo, historically and today, have been slipping between and across heres and nows in an ongoing attempt to form community and to (re)build worlds. The commitment to a real, grounded, albeit constantly shifting context contained in the idea of do’ikayt, sided with the recognition that plurality is tied to dissent and glitshing instability, are major threads in the thick fabric that sustains this cultural institution. It is a place founded upon the imperative of staying and doing together, despite the challenges and the distances.
The Casa do Povo library as we know today is larger than the sum of the smaller parts which compose it: personal donations from different eras, inherited libraries from older cultural associations, books which came from other countries or have been incorporated along with other peoples and communities that joined the institution through the ages. It is undeniably a library of many voices.
Today, in 2022, the Yiddish library that once marked the identity of a group presents a language barrier. Few people read Yiddish in the world, in Brazil, and in São Paulo. Is this library accessible? If so, accessible to whom? Yiddish was once a quotidian language, especially in Eastern Europe. The historical contexts of persecution and violence that deeply marked the twentieth century made Yiddish acquire a political sense of resistance. Is the loss of its everyday use synonymous with assimilation or annihilation? As previously mentioned, many books came as war fugitives—one could say that the Casa do Povo library, besides being a refuge, is also a stronghold. The unofficiality of Yiddish expects the associations that were amalgamated by the use of the language to take responsibility for preserving it, to try to ensure its survival. At Casa do Povo, even if most people do not speak Yiddish, there are several Yiddish cultural values—sense of humor, political inclinations, ways of thinking, and above all, this community’s inherited diasporic disposition—which constantly contaminate the Casa and its inhabitants (staff, visitors, collectives).
An institutional library will also change its identity as the living organism that houses it grows. In the twenty-first century, is it still a library of resistance? Of what and for what purpose? Even if the context differs, there are permanences, noises, fragments, traces of the past that mark the present. Individually, these books would not have survived, but they did as a set, in the manner of the very people who carried them before they occupied the shelves of Casa do Povo. Survival does not depend only on the individual; it is a collective endeavor. And, as a collective enterprise, the survival of the diaspora to which we refer is achieved through values and procedures distinct from those established by historically dominant groups and institutions.
This institution transcends the specific characteristics of its founding diaspora, not being tied strictly to one migratory group or another. The diasporic institutional framework at Casa do Povo means that their operation is open to the reception of different movements, to the lending of its physical structure and operation to those who need it, and to the articulation of communities. The library-archive also responds to this, lending its spatial and specialized knowledge infrastructure to archives from other diasporas and expanding its collection to incorporate the House’s current activities, that is, those that are marked by groups other than that of its founders.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Casa do Povo case is the institutional interpretation of diaspora as a volatile shape that cuts across a range of groups and cultures that suffer from forced displacement. Thus, it is possible—and necessary—to articulate diaspora as a way of building collectivity in a new context.
micro-histórias (Pedro Beresin, Mariana Lanari, Marília Loureiro, Alice Noujaim, Pedro Zylbersztajn) is an interdisciplinary research group composed by architectural historian [author], artist [author], curator [author], anthropologist [author], and artist [author] which aims to reveal and create historical and contemporary connections between the library and archive of Casa do Povo, its people, and its activities. While this research happens in close connection and in tandem with the activities of the institution, micro-histórias is an autonomous group entirely composed of voluntary, non-staff members, and the perspectives proposed in this essay are not necessarily shared by the Casa do Povo administration.
[1] Building on its founders’ experience as communist and socialist militants in the so-called Pale of Settlement of the former Russian Empire, the place’s original structuring adhered to the name and principles of the People’s Houses tradition that emerged in the same region during the late nineteenth century up to the 1917 Russian Revolution. These were communal centers which offered leisure and assembly space to the working masses, aiming to provide access to art and culture, all the while sustaining political engagement.
[2] Casa do Povo, “Arquivos de resistência em diálogo: raça, história e memória,” December 8, 2020, video, 77 min.
[3] Benjamin Seroussi, “A Casa do Povo: valores progressistas em contexto adverso,” Cadernos CONIB: Publicação da Confederação Israelita do Brasil, no. 2 (January 2014): 77–82.
[4] Sarah Feldman, “Bom Retiro: bairro múltiplo e mutante,” Anais do XV Encontro Anais do XV Encontro da Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional 15, no. 1 (2013): 1–18, accessed November 25, 2022.
[5] In Portuguese, the term is a direct inversion of the institution’s name, forming a wordplay in which the House (meaning the building, but also the institution itself) and the People who use its space every day are part of one single being, without hierarchy between them.
[6] Also home to the São Paulo branch of international publishing platform Publication Studio SP.
[7] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest Jewish revolt of the Second World War, in which the inhabitants of the ghetto refused to be sent to the Majdanek and Treblinka death camps by the SS. This episode has become one of the most revered moments of resistance in Jewish history, and April 19, the date which marks the beginning of the uprising, has been the most important yearly celebration at Casa do Povo since its founding.
[8] Bernardo Seibel, “Assim eles comemoraram a vitória,” ICIB – Instituto Cultural Israelita Brasileiro, no. 1 (1946): 7–9.
[9] “Estatutos do Instituto Cultural Israelita Brasileiro” (1946), from the Fiszel and Rosa Czeresnia collection at the Center for Documentation and Memory of the Jewish Museum of São Paulo.
[10] Beyond the 1953 literary interactions, there were also dialogues in other artistic fields. In 1959, for instance, playwright and black movement activist Solano Trindade, at the time the organizer of the Teatro Popular Brasileiro (Popular Brazilian Theater), presented his spectacle “Noite Folclórica Brasileira” at Casa do Povo. O Teatro, “Notas do I.C.I.B,” O Teatro (June 1959): 3.
[11] David Slucki, “A Party of Naysayers: The Jewish Labor Bund after the Holocaust,” AJS Perspectives: The Labor Issue (Fall 2013): 42.
[12] It is worth mentioning that the future sought by Zionism is one that promises a spatial-temporal return, which is also directly at odds with the Bund’s revolutionary perspective.
[13] Madeleine Atkins Cohen, “Here and Now: The Modernist Poetics of Do’ikayt” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2016).
[14] Casa do Povo, “LIVE | Arquivos e territórios ídiche: como pensar os arquivos de uma língua sem fronteira,” December 2, 2020, video, 104 min.
Museum for the Displaced Interview Transcript