Home in the Pampas: Alberto Gerchunoff's Jewish Gauchos

MÓNICA SZURMUK

Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity

Littman

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2010; p. 241 - 256

In this essay, I argue that the publication of this book opened up a symbolic space for Jewish immigrants in the lettered culture of Buenos Aires and also in the future of the country. Paradoxically, this is achieved, not through a text thematizing the cosmopolitan life of Jews in the city, as has been the theme of Jewish modernist writers in other countries, but rather through a depiction of bucolic Jewish life following biblical prophecy. Published at a time when nationally a realist literature taking up rural themes was emerging in Argentina in contraposition to more avant-garde forms, Gerchunoff?s opera prima condensed Jewish life in the country as a usable past ? albeit contrived ? for the Jews of the city of Buenos Aires. To achieve inclusion in the literary and political world of the city, Gerchunoff claimed a past rooted in Argentinean traditions, and the Argentinean landscape for himself and for the nascent Jewish community by extension. This connection to the land distanced Jews from the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the time that portrayed them as money-hungry metropolitans. Gerchunoff?s literary strategy is not only set in the land as home, but in the domestication of identity by using Jewish women as the keys to integration into modern life in Argentina. As I will show, his female characters as home- savvy characters are used to bridge the old and the new worlds.