Yoine Bird

The poet, playwright, and short-story writer Natalio (Nosn) Budasoff was born in Russia; he immigrated to a Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) agricultural colony in Entre Ríos, Argentina, in 1914. A locust plague in the early 1930s continued for years, bankrupting farmers. In the aftermath, Budasoff moved to Buenos Aires, where he worked as administrator of the Jewish Hospital. Budasoff’s book on the locusts, La langosta: Un mal nacional y sudamericano (1946), describing their economic impact and proposing ways to rid South America of them, was highly praised. His literary works focused primarily on two themes: the dilemmas of medical ethics and the hardships of early Jewish immigrant farmers who, though spiritually attached to the land, were plagued by natural disasters. Many of his early unpublished works were written in Yiddish.