The Jewish Gauchos

The journalist and fiction writer Alberto Gerchunoff was born in Proskurov (now Khmelnytskyi), Ukraine. In 1891, he moved to Argentina, where he lived in the Jewish agricultural colony of Moisés Ville. He later settled in Buenos Aires. Mastering Spanish and deeply drawn to the emerging Argentine civic and cultural life, Gerchunoff worked for the newspaper La Nación for more than forty years and played a central role in Argentine letters. Early in his career, he wrote his immediately famous Spanish-language Gauchos judíos (The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas), a collection of stories about the lives of Jewish agricultural colonists in the province of Entre Ríos. This was the first great work of literature created about Jewish life in South America. The underlying message of The Jewish Gauchos is one of Jews’ harmonious integration into a new Argentine identity and nature, and indeed Gerchunoff saw himself as a co-creator of the new Argentine culture, rather than a Jewish writer. But the Holocaust and the efforts to create a Jewish state that culminated in the creation of the State of Israel drew him back to active participation in Jewish life.