SOURCE: Kandiyoti, Dalia. “Comparative Diasporas: The Local and the Mobile in Abraham Cahan and Alberto Gerchunoff.” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 1 (spring 1998): 77-79, 95-122.

[In the following essay, Kandiyoti compares two works of Jewish immigration fiction: Abraham Cahan's Yekl and Alberto Gerchunoff's Los Gauchos Judios, and with the section on Gerchunoff, she considers how regional politics and nationalism influenced his writing.]

Recently proliferating theories and politics of migration and diaspora have focused on issues of assimilation, nativism, and nationalism without sufficient consideration of one important concept: the discourse of place as a generative source of culture, and, significantly, the role of place in the experience of displacement and immigrant identity.¹ This is a curious gap in critical thinking, especially since the current border crises and immigration panics are about constant redefinitions of place, territory, and frontiers. Even the postmodernist stress on theories of “the local” and the politics of location has produced relatively little thought about the intersections of territory, immigration, and narrative. The nature of places (of origin or dispersal) is crucial to studies of displacement and transition, for the migrant and the conquered have to negotiate new ways of being in concrete spaces with specific attributes. The returning regionalism in literary criticism and politics relies all too often on new versions of patriotism (see Dainotto) without the benefit of a dynamic interpretation of places that may incorporate change and movement.

In a recent article, Richard Sennett writes about the impact of globalization on places, arguing that “the identity of places has weakened, becoming more hybrid in composition because of the impact of global labour migration; … the power of place has weakened” (13). While globalization has certainly brought manifold changes, the contention that places as such were once homogenous and not “hybrid” or that they used to be self-determining (13) is not tenable. As geographer Doreen Massey has suggested, “places for centuries have been complex where numerous and conflicting communities intersected” (6) and never provided “seamless coherence of character” or “comforting, bounded enclosure” (8). Similarly, while certain fictions and criticisms of “the local” focus on static, unchanging place-identities, diasporic literatures may provide an alternative production of the local in which change, heterogeneity, and instability define place.

In this essay, I examine turn-of-the-century immigrant narratives that thematize place and localness to configure identity-in-displacement. If “the local” may promise to render a sense of permanence, repetition, and security, in what manner then did immigrant writing highlighting mobility, change, and insecurity draw on ideologies of place? At the crossroads of “the local” and immigrant fiction, each of the two Russian-Jewish authors I consider, Abraham Cahan in the U.S. and Alberto Gerchunoff in Argentina, challenges the ideology of location as primordial or fixed and conceives a locus of mobility by refashioning, to a certain measure, the languages of rootedness in American literary and cultural nationalisms and adding a Jewish inflection to them. Through this analysis of their pioneering works and their contexts, I show how the trajectory of immigrant identity, and especially Jewish identity at the turn of the century, is recreated through space and spatial discourse. James Clifford has argued in an important article on diaspora that “the term diaspora is a signifier, not simply of transnationality and movement, but of political struggles to define the local as distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement” (308; emphasis added). In the works of Cahan and Gerchunoff, it is partly through this redefinition of space and the local that displaced culture gets reassembled and literary genre is modified.

Localization and territory are doubly important for fictions of the Jewish experience, given the problematic nature and history of Jewish territoriality. And for turn-of-the-century East European Jews, the configuration of the new American spaces was to be permanent. For, as historians such as Ronald Takaki have pointed out, these Jews were not immigrants; they were refugees. Possible options for other turn-of-the-century migrants such as transnational mobility, plurilocality, and return were denied them. In the U.S., over 50 percent of the Italians in the 1880-1924 period returned home, and many “commuted,” as it were, for seasonal work (Thernstorm 1036). In Argentina, out of the four million foreigners who entered the country between 1890 and 1914, 2.4 million stayed permanently (Solberg 33). For East European Jews, the urgent task of redefining culture in the new diaspora required a shift in the parameters of Jewish and American identities partly through new definitions of the local. Both Cahan and Gerchunoff used and reconfigured the dominant discourses of place and territory to narrate the cultural fate of the two most momentous waves of Jewish immigration to the Americas …

The “founding texts” of any literary tradition bear the privileges and burdens of longevity and anachronicity, influence and rejection. Alberto Gerchunoff's Los gauchos judíos (1910), an originary narrative of Jewish-Argentine letters, has been subjected to both uncritical glorification and severe denunciation for its peculiar groundbreaking status. Jewish literature in Argentina, according to most of its scholars, begins with this both beloved and reviled text. One contemporary critic's article on Gerchunoff and authors writing after Gerchunoff is entitled “Parricide on the Pampa” (Aizenberg), in reference to the distance that many subsequent and recent writers put between themselves and this father figure.

As my focus is on how a literature of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigration to the Americas may represent place and make literary history in spatial terms, I will concentrate on discourses of Argentine territoriality through their presence and translations in Gerchunoff's work. Naturally, such discourses do not exist separately from others on nationalism and assimilation, both literary and sociopolitical. And the moment in which Gerchunoff's first novel appeared as a book (it was first serialized in 1908 in the elite daily La Nación, where he was employed), was the year of the Argentine Centennial, just at the time when Argentine national identity was being discursively reshaped by the intellectual and cultural elite in the context of modernization and its Argentine corollary, massive immigration. Gerchunoff, both an immigrant and member of nationalist avant-garde circles, attempted to bridge the chasm erected by the intellectuals between the elite and the immigrant formulations of argentinidad in his first work. Linguistically, generically, and ideologically, Los gauchos judíos is a paradoxical gesture toward the prevalent formulations of nationalist territoriality through a rewriting of both Argentine autochthony and Jewish mobility.

Like Yekl, Los gauchos judíos received mainstream attention and encomium upon publication. As Cahan was encouraged by Howells, Gerchunoff was prompted by the eminent poet and critic Leopoldo Lugones, whose xenophobic and fascist tendencies had yet to surface explicitly. Both immigrant authors wrote fiction in their adopted languages; but, whereas Cahan ultimately chose to straddle two linguistic worlds, Gerchunoff established his reputation on the fictional, essayistic, and journalistic work he created in the language of his new country. Most importantly, both authors cast their work in the spirit of predominant spatial imaginings burgeoning at the time of their writing. While Yekl was an act of translation from the focus on the rural into the representation of urban marginalia, Los gauchos judíos conserved the rural setting to stage Jewish belonging. And while much of Cahan's work, like Yekl, demonstrated the ambivalence or impossibility of assimilationist desire, Gerchunoff attempted to evacuate his text of all such equivocation. But by incorporating Argentine nationalism unquestioningly into his story of Jewish destiny, Gerchunoff in fact shifted not only the terms of Argentine autochthony, but also of Jewish territoriality.

Los gauchos judíos is an episodic narrative composed of nearly two dozen vignettes. Its Jewish protagonists in transition find harmony with the rural environment of the pampa and its legendary inhabitants, the gauchos. The vignettes range from portrayals of virginal Jewish milkmaids to depictions of brave gaucho neighbors, to stories of courtship, and to descriptions of the keeping of Sabbath and other Jewish rites. There are a few darker incidents, such as one about the murder of a settler by a gaucho (the fate of Gerchunoff's own father), although in general, the gaucho, described as the “native,” is depicted as heroic.

In its episodic character, loose weave, picturesque detail and illustrations, and occlusion of misery and injustice, the text is reminiscent in some ways of the immensely popular tradition of costumbrismo in nineteenth-century Latin America, a genre that had its origins in England (via Addison and Steele's The Tattler) and Spain. Referring to Los gauchos judíos, Gerchunoff writes in his 1916 Autobiografía, “En 1910 publiqué un libro en el cual trato de pintar las costumbres de los agricultores judíos” (“In 1910, I published a book in which I try to describe the customs of the Jewish farmers” [64]). The detail, descriptive emphasis, and geographical containment of costumbrismo have some similarities to the U.S. local color tradition. Doris Sommer writes that the function of costumbrismo (like that of local color) was “to promote communal imaginings through the middle stratum of writers and readers who constituted the most authentic expression of national feeling” (14). But while costumbrismo's sketchy, often satirical physiognomies had a solid footing in the realistic tradition and the drive to describe a middle class to itself (Sommer 328, n. 43), Gerchunoff's text reads more like a fable, an idyllic construct that portrays a pastoral community's difference from and adaptation to the dictates of the national imaginary.²

To better understand the textual and ideological operations of Los gauchos judíos, it is essential to attend to the complexities of the moment of the Argentine Centennial in 1910. The years surrounding the turn of the century in Argentina witnessed an overwhelming transformation of national self-definition, values, and politics. Much has been written on this subject; therefore, I will confine myself to a brief overview of the changes with specific regard to telluricism and immigration, as these are the very issues to which Los gauchos judíos speaks. The Argentine formulation of territory and space underwent a profound change in the nineteenth century. Through most of the century, the land on which Argentinians were establishing themselves as an independent nation constituted a problem, perhaps the problem, of Argentine modernization and self-definition. For the Generation of '37, and especially Domingo Sarmiento, geography, perceived as destiny, was a force to be overcome. The landscape of Argentina was a desert in which uncivilized Indians and unruly gauchos roamed. No progress could be made in such a setting, a vast “emptiness” crying out to be filled.³ “El terreno es la peste de América” (“The terrain is the plague of America”), pronounced Juan Bautista Alberdi (qtd. in Ainsa 180). Nature had to be tamed, to be turned into culture, and, as Graciela Montaldo points out in her valuable study of ruralism in Argentine literature, this Nature was not the Nature of the Romantics, a “virgin” place of solitude and contemplation (40). The Argentine landscape was savage; by implication then, it was not literally empty since it contained the forces of barbarism, such as gauchos, Indians, and caudillos. The “desert” was seen as empty primarily because it was devoid of “civilized” populations and had to therefore be populated—“gobernar es poblar” (“To govern is to populate”) was a famous Alberdi dictum—with immigrants.

The devalorization of Argentine space as well as the “conquest of the desert” through the displacement and extermination policies of Argentine rulers regarding Indians continued until the last two decades of the century. Now, the space having been “emptied” as much as possible, it awaited new inhabitants and new mythologies. Argentine terrain was a chief factor in the post-1880 period of economic triumphs, which lasted about three decades. Hugely successful agriculture and its export rested on the availability of new land and the cheap labor of immigrants from Europe who began arriving in great floods, mostly from Spain and (southern) Italy, but also from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. About 2.5 million immigrants settled in Argentina between 1890 and 1914, and, “[b]y the eve of World War I, 29.9 percent of the population had been born abroad, which gave Argentina the distinction of a higher proportion of immigrants to total population than any other country” (Solberg 35-36). The population of Buenos Aires was 49.4 percent foreign-born in 1914 (Solberg 44). The enormous social and political changes following the infusion of the country with immigration, as well as modernization, industrialization, and entry into the club of wealthier nations, caused radical shifts in the national imaginary.

A seesaw effect took place in the topoi of the immigrant and territory as articulated by the country's intellectual elites. Whereas until about the 1880s the immigrant was perceived by Bernardino Rivadavia, Alberdi, Sarmiento, and others as a boon that would populate the desert, once the influx began, the perception changed rapidly. Sarmiento's call for immigration had assumed the arrival of an educated, preferably Anglo-Saxon elite that would raise Argentina to the educational and economic heights that the U.S., a nation he admired greatly, had achieved. Mostly, of course, the newcomers were poor and uneducated, whether they were from southern Italy, northern Spain, or the shtetls of Russia. Within a few years, the immigrant garnered a reputation for being boorish, clannish, politically troublesome, and materialistic. Of all the charges, the Jews were particularly associated with the last three. Julian Martel's 1890 novel La bolsa, a diatribe against “Jewish speculation” that blamed financial crisis on the Jews, sold well. Italians were also charged with greediness and materialism, as Florencio Sánchez's 1904 play La gringa staged it, as well as with destroying the Spanish language. Certain other literary forms registered the reaction to immigration; for example, David Viñas argues that the main motivation for the aesthetic voyage narrative was the immigrant impact and the need for a refuge (185-86). Argentine criminology and the newly burgeoning sciences of “race” and “nationality” found easy targets in the immigrants in the search for perpetrators of rising crimes such as prostitution, gangsterism, and so on.⁴La delincuencia argentina (1905) by Cornelio Moyano Gacitúa, a sociology professor, scapegoated immigrants in its study of crime and had wide influence on sociology and criminology (Solberg 97).

Immigrants were also seen as political agitators, as many immigrants were involved in labor struggles and leadership. Many scholars have attributed the anti-immigrant sentiment of the turn of the century chiefly to the political and economic threat that immigrant workers' demands, strikes, and protests caused. Maristella Svampa argues that the elites transformed the class struggle into the opposition between “native” (criollo) and immigrant (297). In 1902, a Residence Law was passed, according to which, any foreigner “whose conduct compromised national security or disturbed public order” could be deported or denied entrance to the country (qtd. in Deutsch 33-34). In fact, the glorious centennial celebrations of 1910, to which heads of state from around the world were invited, were framed by pre- and postcelebration violence, arrests, and killings of “agitators.” The year 1919 was witness to the “semana trágica” [tragic week] in which a pogrom against Jews, seen as “Russians” and therefore as Bolsheviks, took place, and many lost their lives.⁵ The general tide had turned against the immigrant and toward the “native.”⁶

Lo criollo captured the imagination of Argentinians with its triumvirate of the gaucho, the ranch, and the plains (Prieto 18), all of which were disappearing under the new industrial order. For elite classes, criollismo was a vehicle of self-legitimization and the rejection of the foreign; for the popular classes, now displaced in urban areas, it constituted an avenue of nostalgia or even antiurban rebellion (Prieto 18). The centros criollos established at the turn of the century were feverishly promoting a certain idea of nativism that involved reading and reciting gaucho epics as well as singing, dancing, performing, drinking mate, and even eating in the newly constructed “traditional” style of the interior (Prieto 145-46). Criollo events, objects, theater, and fictions began circulating in a dizzying fashion and were distributed through popular and commercial venues.

The exaltation of the criollo came in lockstep with the idealization of Spanish blood and roots. The Spanish tradition, together with its fruition on Argentine soil, was said to have created the superior criollo. While through most of the nineteenth century, Spanish origins had been thought of as Argentina's “curse,” in the post-1898 period, there was an upsurge of feeling for hispanidad. From being a symbol of backwardness (See Navarro; Shumway 136-39), Spain came to be associated with “spiritual” values in opposition to the materialism of the foreigner (Rock 273). Spain's humiliating defeat in the war with the U.S. was experienced all over Latin America as a marker of prospective U.S. hegemony in the region and led to a reexamination of Spanish “roots,” wariness of relationships with the “colossus of the North,” and skepticism toward the U.S.-sponsored idea of Pan-Americanism. In the face of the Northern threat, tradition—and specifically Spanish tradition—emerges as an alternative route. In their essay “La Argentina del centenario,” Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo point out that the revalorization of “la herencia española” found itself enveloped in the new myth of race (74), which led the way to new racialized discourses about the non-criollos, whether they were immigrants or Anglo-Saxons of the North.

The alternatives to a suspicious Pan-Americanism were based on racial and nativist formulations. In Latin America, the need to assert a legitimate autochthony was behind the belief in pan-latinismo, pan-iberismo, pan-hispanismo, and hispanoamericanismo that claimed one single history, ethnicity, and literature among all the Latin American nations, as Carlos Alonso discusses (52). Alonso also makes the interesting argument that the novela de la tierra (the telluric novel) that is the focus of his comprehensive study owed its prominence in early twentieth-century Latin American letters to “the profound anxiety experienced by Latin American intellectuals in their consideration of the United States; a crisis that originated during the last years of the nineteenth century and continued unabated until the next” (47). Thus, Pan-Americanism, which the U.S. promoted enthusiastically, and the threat of the North encroaching in other ways as well shaped partly the discursive reconstruction of the autochthonous (and therefore the telluric) in such cultural forms as the novel and elsewhere. In Argentina, the new territorialism had also much to do with asserting the literal and figurative ground of the superior, spiritual race of the criollo, who was conceived, as Altamirano and Sarlo point out (94), in strict opposition to the immigrant, or the gringo (foreigner, especially the Italian).

The feverish embrace of Argentine soil, once considered the blight of the nation, stands at the center of what has been called “el primer nacionalismo,”⁷ that is, the cultural nationalism of the generation of the Centennial. Graciela Montaldo argues that the exaltation of “lo rural” (a backbone of the “primer nacionalismo”) was precisely a construction of modernity (21). Cultural nationalists, antimodernist or not, were part and parcel of Argentine modernism. The Herderian nationalist Ricardo Rojas⁸ was one of the most important thinkers to conceive of an Argentine “national spirit” and attempt to conjure “territorial emotion” in his writings; Manuel Gálvez, another representative intellectual of the period, locates the “spiritual” past and Argentine character in the interior, away from the Jews and Russian anarchists. Not surprisingly, Maurice Barrès's poetic (and proto-Fascist) regionalism was a huge influence on both Rojas and Gálvez. Regions can be construed (though they do not have to be) to offer, as Dainotto has argued, a cure for current social ills and a space of an invented pure past. Gálvez notes that they resist “los avances del cosmopolitismo odioso” (“The rise of odious cosmopolitanism” [qtd. in Altamirano and Sarlo 104]). The execrable cosmopolitanism was of course associated with urban life, that is, with Buenos Aires. Thus, intellectuals with elite provincial backgrounds such as Rojas, Gálvez, Emilio Bécher, and others indulged in what we may call interiorism. This served not only to mourn the bygone privilege of the upper-class provincials displaced by cosmopolitan, immigrant, and/or urban upstarts but also to vociferously advocate a reorientation toward the “innernational,” the territorial and historic emotion that is supposed to exist in every criollo.

Along with the Argentine soil, another nationalist topos of which Gerchunoff availed himself was that of the gaucho. This romanticized figure, reviled in the nineteenth century and resuscitated and aggrandized in the early twentieth, still occupies a significant space in the mythologies of Argentina. A November 1996 issue of the New York-based daily El diario that provided an extensive portrait of Argentina devoted substantial space to the idea of the gaucho as a representative of the Argentine psyche. The fabulously famous soccer star Maradona's recent descent into scandal led to characterizations of him as the “gaucho trágico.” And Jorge Luís Borges's still influential essay on Argentine literary tradition is pivoted on a consideration of the poetry of gauchos and gauchesca literature. The history of the gaucho and gauchesca literature has been amply covered elsewhere.⁹ Suffice it to say here that as part and parcel of the pampa, the now-beloved terrain, the gaucho was converted into a personification of autochthony from the lawless, brutal, antisocial, despicable roamer most nineteenth-century liberals perceived him to be. While a critical and scholarly appreciation of gauchesca literature, a vastly varied poetic form, began at the end of the nineteenth century, the reversal of the gaucho's representational fortunes was solidified in the early twentieth: “El gaucho fue el héroe y el civilizador de la Pampa” (“The gaucho was the hero and civilizer of the pampa”), declared Leopoldo Lugones, in a 1916 collection entitled El payador, based on his public lectures of 1913 (36). In his addresses, which were attended by influential statesmen, Lugones, another provinciano, raised the genre of the gauchesca to the level of national literature, at par with Homeric writings. Like Greek literature for Western civilization, gauchesca stood at the origin of Argentine creativity, just as the gaucho, the brave, disinterested, artistic noble savage now became the archetypal Argentinian, as the latter was before the scourges of materialism, cosmopolitanism, urbanization, and immigrant invasion. For Lugones and Rojas, Jose Hernández's El gaucho Martín Fierro (1872), popular at the time of its appearance but largely ignored by critics until the turn of the century, was the Argentine epic, expressive of a regional way of life that was eminently national.

Thus, by the second decade of the twentieth century, when the gauchos and the gaucho way of life had all but disappeared, the vanishing gaucho and gauchesca literature were conflated to serve the myth-makings of populists and nationalists from Lugones to the Peronists. This was a classic instance of what Renato Rosaldo has referred to as “imperialist nostalgia,” which is a “particular kind of nostalgia, often found under imperialism, where people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed. Imperialist nostalgia thus revolves around a paradox: a person kills somebody and then mourns his or her victim” (109). But the Argentine hold on the gaucho also went beyond mourning. Shumway writes, “Peronist populists made of Martín Fierro a battlecry against the abuses of Argentine liberalism” (278); and it is well known that Juan Perón himself frequently drew on both the poem and its protagonist in his public speeches. In “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” Jorge Luís Borges tries to counter the recruitment of gauchesca poetry for its presumably populist origins. For Borges, much of gauchesca poetry, especially Martín Fierro, is a genre separate from the poetry of the gauchos, as gauchesca works are replete with criollo affectation in speech and local color modalities, which are absent from the works of the popular poets. He declares that “la poesía gauchesca … es un género literario tan artificial coma cualquier otro” (“gauchesca poetry … is as artificial a literary genre as any other” 153]), and, what is more, “El culto argentino del color local es un reciente culto europeo que los nacionalistas deberían rechazar par fóraneo” (“The Argentine cult of local color is a recent European cult, which nationalists should reject as foreign” [156]), thus playing the populist/nationalist call for the vernacular against itself. Since “la genuina poesía de los gauchos” (154) does not resort to the vernacular, and it is gauchesca literature such as Hernández's epic that creates an “artificial” criollo world,¹⁰ enlisting Martín Fierro as a populist hero does not make sense. Nor is Argentine literature or tradition to be distinguished by an exclusive focus on the local. Although Borges identifies “popular poets” too easily with “genuine” or “authentic” expression while complicating the gauchesca genre, his literary and political directions are clear: representation of the vernacular (idioms and customs) is neither a prerequisite of political and literary argentinidad nor a mark of the authentic populace.

In what ways then is Los gauchos judíos shaped by the fervent rewriting of the Argentine topoi of territory, region, and the gaucho at the turn of the century? Much more than Cahan at the time of Yekl's publication, Gerchunoff faced an intense atmosphere of nativism as he was composing his pioneer work. As I asked of Cahan's work, what is the place of the Jewish narrative of diaspora within the nativist context? Los gauchos judíos is in many ways an exercise in unproblematic literary and social assimilation through the adoption of prevailing cultural nationalist myths. The book's dedication is to the celebration of the republic and dated simply as “año del primer Centenario Argentino” (Gerchunoff 5). Declaring this occasion to be the greater Passover (“Pascua magna es ésta”), the author invites Jews to join the “los coros enjoyados de luz” (“the choirs bejeweled by light”) and sing from the Song of Songs in praise of Argentina (5). Most of the nationalist topoi that were circulating in Gerchunoff's time are reproduced in the text unquestioningly. Gerchunoff, at that time a member of elite, literary, Buenos Aires circles and a writer for La Nación, the most prestigious newspaper of the day, details the joy of Jewish migration and agriculture.

Three geographic entities are referred to as Jewish spaces, in ascending hierarchy: Russia, Spain, and Argentina. The first, the origin-place of the immigrants, is repudiated from the very first paragraphs for its persecution of Jews. Spain is cursed not only for having victimized Jews but also for having been the place where they abandoned working the land. The Dain reminds everyone that according to the first book of the Talmud, “la vida de campo … es la única saludable y digna de la gracia de Dios” (“the country life … is the only one salutary and worthy of God's grace” [8-9]). Argentina, where the Jewish Colonization Association was being established by the wealthy Baron de Hirsch, then, becomes the land of salvation, the new Zion: “A la Argentina iremos todos y volveremos a trabajar la tierra, a cuidar nuestro ganado … / Ojalá pueda en mi vejez besar esa tierra y bendecir bájo su cielo a los hijos de mis hijos” (“We will all go to Argentina and return to working the land, taking care of our cattle … / In my old age, I hope to kiss this land and bless the children of my children under its sky” [9]).

Thus, Argentina, the Promised Land, opens its arms to the homeless Jews, who learn once again to grow grains and raise cattle. Many critics (among them Aizenberg, Lindstrom, Senkman, and Viñas) have commented rightly on the inaccuracy of the picture Gerchunoff presents, including his occlusion of anti-Semitism by both the cultural elite and the gauchos who were the colonists' neighbors; the terrible, sometimes deadly, difficulties of adjusting to a new mode of work and land [Weisbrot 50]; as well as the paradoxes and exclusions of Argentine national identity in formation. Indeed, even the grim events surrounding the murder of a colonist by a gaucho and the false accusation of a Jew of theft are passed over lightly, with quasi-Christian forgiveness [Senkman 28]. An optimism that dreams of the future in which “el elogio de próceres hebreos, hecho después del católico te deum, bajo las bóvedas santas de la catedral” (“The praise of Hebrew leaders after the Catholic te deum, beneath the sacred domes of the cathedral” [Gerchunoff, Los gauchos 74]) takes place.

If it is not a faithful picture of Jewish-Argentine “reality” that Gerchunoff offers, it is a pacific kind of regionalism, though reconfigured, that we find in Los gauchos judíos. The author details laboring in the land with a quasi-adoration of things telluric. References to the colonists' love of nature (85) and “la excelencia del suelo” (20) in the “tierra armoniosa y bravía de los gauchos” (“harmonious and fierce land of the gauchos” [39]) abound. In his brief Autobiografía, this adoration of the soil becomes even more explicit:

La tradición del lugar, los hechos memorables del pago, las acciones ilustres de los guerreros locales llenaron mi alma a través de los relatos pintorescos y rústicos de los gauchos, rapsodas ingenuas del pasado argentino, que abrieron mi corazón a la poesía del campo y me comunicaron el gusto de lo regional, de lo autóctono, saturándome de esa libertad orgullosa, de ese amor a lo criollo, a lo nativo. … En aquella naturaleza incomparable, bajo aquel cielo único, … mi existencia se ungió de fervor, que borró mis origenes y me hizo argentino.

(The rustic and picturesque stories of the gauchos, ingenious rhapsodies of the Argentine past, filled my soul with tradition of place, the memorable events of the region, and the actions of the renowned local warriors. They opened my heart to the poetry of the countryside and imparted a love of the regional, of the autochthonous. I saturated myself with this proud freedom, of this love for the criollo and the native. … In that incomparable nature, beneath that singular sky, my being was anointed with fervor, which erased my origins, and I became Argentinian.)

[50; emphasis added]

Both in this manifest statement of assimilationist drive and in the novel, Gerchunoff reproduces the interiorism found in the writings of Lugones or Gálvez in his characterizations of the pampa as a fertile and welcoming home. However, while the Argentine writers posit the interior as the site of tradition, the past, and the historic native spirit, Gerchunoff effects a double move of locating in the pampa both a past and a future whose terms are different from the regionalist criollismo of the elites. While Argentine nativism finds its personification in the vanishing gaucho with his reinvented virtues and intrepid mode of life, Gerchunoff's new immigrant Jews, who could not resort to such an identification, reinstate another tradition on the very site of Argentine pride a picturesque Biblical way of living, a timeless Jewish tradition to continue on the benevolent Argentine soil. If nationalist feeling dictates there is tradition to be found in the interior, then Gerchunoff too locates it there, however idiosyncratically.

Argentina, the space of the future, free of Cossacks and persecution, paradoxically becomes an occasion to recover the past. Viñas has remarked on the quality of timelessness embedded in the narrative in which “en cada acto permanece la historia y la memoria” (“In each act, history and memory remain” [305]). The residents, whether they are laboring in the land, raising cattle, or tending the home, are hardworking, cheerful, and pious. Old men have the countenances of prophets; young women are beautiful prototypes of Jewish womanhood who suggest “las hembras gloriosas de la Biblia” (“the glorious women of the Bible” [Los gauchos 85]). Of Raquel, an idealized Jewish milkmaid, Gerchunoff writes: “Raquel, tú eres Ester, Rebeca, Débora o Judith. Repites tu tareas bajo el cielo benévolo y tus manos atan las rubias gavillas …” (“Raquel, you are Esther, Rebecca, Deborah, or Judith. You do your work beneath the benevolent sky and your hands tie the golden sheafs” [13]). Raquel/Esther recreates the ancient way of life: “Tu presencia renueva, con la vaca mansa y la cabra discreta, la vida remota del Jordán … Y como en los dias lejanos de Jerusalem, tu padre, … reza al Dios de Israel … y en hebreo arcaico le saluda” (“Your presence restores the ancient life of Jordan, as the life of ancient Jordan is restored now, as you milk the gentle cow and watch over its tender calf … And just as in ancient Jerusalem, your father … prays to the God of Israel, … greeting him in ancient Hebrew” [13]). In this restored Jordan, the plow sings psalms of full harvests (11), and even the natural disasters are reproductions of Biblical plagues: in one episode, it is a cloud of locusts that invades the orchards. The sabbath is observed with devotion, and requests for divorce are handled according to Jewish law by the elders who, uninformed by Argentine law, would deliberate and “aplicaban las leyes del reino de Israel, ya de este modo, la sabiduría de Hillel, de Gamaliel y de Ghedalia” (“and would apply the laws of the King of Israel, and in this way, the wisdom of Hillel, Gamaliel and Ghedalia” [128]), while the “peoncito” served them several rounds of maté.

Gerchunoff translates the Argentine nationalist determination to fix a new glorious past onto the continuity of a Biblical past in the pampa. However, this other tradition does not overtly challenge or subvert the Argentine myths of heritage. The two may coexist because they intersect in their focus on land, peaceful agricultural labor, and courageous countrysiders within the respective mythologies. The gaucho himself is figured prominently in the text as brave and stoic. One colonist exemplifies the convergence of Jewish and Argentine ideals as well as the possibilities of pluralistic belonging. Favel Duglach, a “poet” well versed in the sacred works and legends as well as all the regional gaucho tales, wears gaucho pants (bombachas) under his Cossack. In his Autobiografía, Gerchunoff has a similar description of himself, in gaucho get-up, reigning over the cattle with much skill (48).¹¹ Gerchunoff's pride in Jewish brawn is reminiscent of the call for “muscle Jews” (Muskeljuden) by the famous Zionist and anti-Decadent author Max Nordau in 1903.¹² In Los gauchos judíos, Favel explicitly calls himself a Jewish gaucho and says, “admiro tanto a los gauchos coma a los hebreos de la antigüedad. Como éstos, son patriarcales y nobles” (“I admire the gauchos as much as the ancient Hebrews. Like them, they are patriarchal and noble” [77]). Holding the ancient Hebrews and gauchos in equal esteem, Favel Duglach “sabía revivir la grandeza del reino extinguido y embellecer las fábulas de la comarca” (“knew how to revive the greatness of the lost kingdom and embellish regional tales” [79]). Favel is not only a hybrid figure representing two traditions that, in pluralistic fashion, can coexist unproblematically, but is also emblematic of the similarities between the traditions that Gerchunoff constructs. For Cahan's protagonists, in Yekl and elsewhere, the gulf between the shtetl and New York may be irredeemably extensive, but for Gerchunoff's immigrants, there is not much to be overcome in the new Promised Land. Jordan is restored; and in their majesty and “nobility” gauchos are reminiscent of the ancient Hebrews whose lives the Russian Jews are busily reenacting in the pampa. Argentine terrain is blessed, because it affords Jews a setting for the reinvention of collective identity through work on the land.

The presence of the past is reinforced through the incorporation of yet another Argentine symbol of nationhood—Spanish roots as a prominent source of identity. The “renewed sense of sympathy and fraternity with Spain” (Rock 273) in Argentine nationalist discourse is translated into a clearly articulated appreciation of past Jewish presence in Sefarad (Spain), which overrides a condemnation of the country early in the text for having tortured the Jews (8). The Hispanism of the criollo idea is mirrored in the “Sephardism” (Aizenberg 28-29) of Los gauchos judíos and in its corresponding linguistic “purity.” Senkman considers extensively the archaism and grandiosity of Gerchunoff's language and relates it to the author's emphasis on a Judeo-Spanish fraternity as a tool of legitimation. The use of a classic Castilian, references to Cervantes, and the avoidance of any local or ethnic speech (despite the regionalist impetus) shows an insistence on demonstrating an authentic relationship to the Spanish language through Jewish identity (Senkman 40-51). This choice of linguistic register made sense not only for its bridging of Jewish and Hispanic heritage but also for the vindication of the immigrant, who was accused of distorting and destroying the Spanish language. By showing that an immigrant could make mellifluous and reverent use of language, Gerchunoff was implicitly endorsing those such as Ernesto Quesada, Miguel Cané, and many others who were fighting to preserve the purity of Castilian against the immigrants who would pollute it with foreign words or create dialects such as lunfardo.

Besides a linguistic Hispanism, Gerchunoff also attempts to establish a common ground with lo argentino through references to the Sephardic philosopher Moses Maimonides and the poet Yehuda Halevy and the invocation of a peaceful Jewish existence in Spain, writing for example, of “allá en el tiempo en que nuestros hermanos vivían tranquilos al amparo de los reyes de Castilla” (“the time when our brothers were living peacefully under the protection of Castilian kings” [Los gauchos 94]). Spain, like the pampa, is another Jewish place in which the Argentine and Judaic elements coexist in harmony. Thus, in a move that indicates both presence and absence, the Jewish immigrants are made visible with the portrayal of particular customs and productive labor, but they are also conveniently absent because their difference is unobtrusive and in many ways continuous with prevalent Argentine definitions of belonging.

While Gerchunoff's Jewish space in Argentina, protected by the generous roof of a sky always blue and white like the flag (5), conforms to the Argentine nationalist model in its territorialism, Hispanism (via Sephardism), and love of the gaucho, it looks rather different from the perspective of Jewish nationalism. At the turn of the century, persecuted East European Jews had the option, for the first time, to end the diasporic state and settle in Palestine. Vast numbers chose instead to reestablish themselves elsewhere; however, for many, the questions of Jewish continuity, territory, and the necessity of a nation-state remained vital. Unlike Cahan, to whom the question of Jewish settlement was subsidiary to the Socialist struggle, Gerchunoff was attuned to the meaning of this choice between exile and return. In Los gauchos judíos, he presents a way of having both—to make possible a felicitous, if not factual, kind of Jewish territoriality and to remain diasporic. The pampa is benevolent, because there Jews are able to live like Biblical Jews immersed in the land before Christian persecution, the obligatory martyrdom, and the despised profession of usury. Therefore, the pampa is not only the space of the Argentine past, but it is also the terrain on which a Jewish past and continuity can be established. Even if some of the colonists are in drag as gauchos, they and the others can still be observant Jews tied to their traditions. These are so amply described in the text that they must be the reason anti-Jewish readers found the book “too Jewish,” while some Jewish publications thought it was too assimilationist (Mirelman 181).

While still in Russia and discussing Argentina as the prospective land of liberty, the rabbi quotes the Sephardic poet Yehuda Halevy: “Sion está allí donde reina la alegría y la paz” (“Zion is where peace and joy reign” [9]). In his Autobiografía, Gerchunoff devotes a chapter to the time when his father rejected the need to refer to “our captivity” in prayers, at the risk of being considered a heretic by his fellow elders for negating that life outside Palestine constitutes slavery and for renouncing the hope of return to Jerusalem. The father finally convinces the others that they are no longer in captivity in the free republic of Argentina, and Gerchunoff reports dramatically that in 1891, in Moisés Ville, the chosen people for the first time omitted the request from God to be delivered from captivity (38-39). Through the paternal voice, then, Gerchunoff abandons the idea of fixed territoriality for Jews and revalorizes diasporic life. While this is of course an assimilationist tactic to integrate in the national corpus with ease, it is also a political gesture regarding Jewish nationality. Although Theodor Herzl himself and other Jewish nationalists had considered the establishment of a Jewish state outside of Palestine (possible sites were Uganda and Argentina), the Zionist Congress had ultimately decided on the Holy Land as the only possible location. As Étan Levine writes, the Judaic concern with time was replaced with the spiritualization of space around the beginning of this century. Levine suggests that territorial Zionists “equated space with power, and confused the control of space with the control of destiny” (6). In accessing Argentine space, Gerchunoff was indeed accommodating Argentine nationalism but at the same time distancing himself from territorial Zionism, which would fix a single space of belonging and a single fount of authenticity.¹³

Jewish survival in Argentina depends, for Gerchunoff, on an emptying of time in favor of a textual way of living. An inspired article by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi on territory and exile in the modern Jewish imagination examines the vastly differentiated spaces of Jewish homelands—textual, intermediate, sacred, or migrant—in traveling through the works of authors such as Eric Auerbach, George Steiner, Elsa Lasker-Schuler, Yehuda Amichai, Y. H. Brenner, and Saul Bellow. Ezrahi argues that “there is a specific poetics of exile that emerges in modern Jewish culture not only from the experience of mass displacement but from the struggle with an inherited construction of homecoming that was essentially ahistorical” (467). Although it is precisely this ahistoricity that Gerchunoff seizes with his idealized picture of Jews striking root and returning to an ancient mode of living, it is not in the name of primordialism. In translating Zion into the pampa, Gerchunoff does draw on the Zionist credo of land as redemptive and regenerative of the Jewish people, but at the same time he severs the fulfillment of Jewish destiny from geographical, Biblical determinism. Specific place and belonging are not automatically equated as according to the dictates of Zionist nationalism. Gerchunoff maps the dehistoricized tale of exile's end onto the Argentine instead of the Palestinian landscape. He thereby transforms the Argentine site, which affords a pastoral textual realization, into a sacred space. The geographical particularity of Jewish continuity in its primordialist form is denied and reconfigured according to the new exigencies of survival. Gerchunoff, then, “naturalizes” Jewish collectivity in diaspora through one telluric discourse (Argentine) that displaces the other (Zionist).

Gerchunoff was and is still criticized for his unwillingness to support the realization of a national home in Palestine (Lindstrom 9) despite his involvement in Jewish causes and organizations. For champions of territorial Zionism and for some other Jews, the negativity of Galut (exile/diaspora) was a given, an irrefutable truth in light of Jewish history, Biblical and post-Biblical, and the Jewish future. By declaring America to be the new Zion, Gerchunoff may be conforming to “host country” nationalism, but at the same time he is moving away from Jewish nationalism, an enterprise that can be as dangerous and exclusive as the Argentine.

It has been said famously of nationalism that it is Janus-faced: both liberatory and exclusionary, both affirmative and negative, it can never be simply one or the other (see Watson). A similar observation can be made about assimilationism and pluralism. While a simple accomodationism expunges particularity and difference, the very nature of “incorporation” can work to reframe the context in question. For example, the terms of nativism, the most salient form of Argentine nationalism at the turn of the century, have to shift if the national body is to accept the merger of non-“natives” into itself. For Gerchunoff, the strength and continuity of a people does not depend on fixed and constrained notions of place, on which both nationalisms insist. In his Jewish geographical imagination, Palestine is not the only site of belonging, nor is Argentina the exclusive realm of the so-called autochthonous gaucho or provinciano. If place is severed from ethnicity, roots, and continuity the way Gerchunoff envisions it in relation to the promised land, and if Jerusalem is a portable idea and not a spatial fixture, the author is also reconfiguring a primordial Argentine nationalist site, the pampa, by inserting a Jewish space within it. Gerchunoff uncouples the telluric glory of the nation from nativeness by positioning Argentina as Promised Land for Jews and shows us that place does not automatically equal race or ethnicity. Despite his reterritorialization of Jewish belonging and acceptance of Argentine telluricism, he detaches, as does Cahan, the dominant discourse of Argentine place from autochthony. For, if Jews and others can have access to the pampa, it cannot after all be the exclusive realm of the “native” Argentinian whether gaucho or provinciano.¹⁴

The writing of the local in the texts of both Cahan and Gerchunoff are scenarios of crisis, in process, or as background. Zygmunt Bauman writes that a “peculiar feature of the Jewish diaspora was the universality of Jewish homelessness, a quality that the Jews shared perhaps only with the Gypsies. … The permanent and irremedial homelessness of the Jews was an integral part of their identity virtually from the beginning of their diasporic history” (35). Hitler believed that because Jews did not have a territorial state, they made for far more insidious enemies than those who did and could go about war and conquest using traditional methods (Bauman 35). The permanent diasporic state of Jews and Judaism, considered an affliction by some Jews and non-Jews, put them in a peculiar position vis-à-vis territorial discourses they encountered and engaged. The turn-of-the-century immigrant writer's “rediasporization”¹⁵ in Argentina and the U.S. had to contend with the various, reterritorializing discourses of nativism. Drawing on discourses of place and autochthony, Cahan and Gerchunoff configured new modes of literary construction of belonging. Ambivalent in Cahan's case and enthusiastic in Gerchunoff's, the struggle with discourses of place and belonging was a struggle of multidimensionality, an aspect of the diasporic Jewish people that rendered them repugnant and incongruent according to Bauman (40-41). Both authors staged the complexity of immigrant and Jewish multidimensionality walking a tightrope of conflicting literary discourses and political visions in order to assert their varying politics of location. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin “propose Diaspora as a theoretical and historical model to replace national self-determination” (711), and write, “Diaspora can teach us that it is possible for a people to maintain its distinctive culture, its difference, without controlling land” (723). In rewriting and naturalizing the nativist local, Cahan and Gerchunoff both engage this possibility and create its distinct and fraught articulations.

Notes

1. While it seems like there is an enormous recent surge in the reexamination of space and place, there are few studies devoted to the intersection of migration, the literal and discursive places in which migrants and the territorially dispossessed find themselves, and creative expression about displacement and space. Moreover, much of recent humanities criticism bearing the words “space” and “place” in the titles turns out to use the concepts only metaphorically, without analyzing, problematizing, or historicizing them. Articles in recent anthologies such as Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, edited by Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires, or Displacement, Diaspora, and the Geographies of Identity, edited by Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, however valuable for other aspects, do not (with a few exceptions) engage the notions of spatiality, place, and location as such, but take them as givens in order to explore other issues.

2. I consulted Sommer, Pupo-Walker, and Zanetti on costumbrismo. See also Salvador Bueno, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Giaconda Manín, and, for the Spanish context, Susan Kirkpatrick.

3. See Montaldo 34-41; Shumway 133-36; and Sommer 60-65.

4. See Solberg 93-98, 108-116; and Guy.

5. Let me note that I am simplifying the chronology for the sake of brevity: five years after La bolsa was published, Rafael Obligado's Santos Vega, an epic poem, set up a gaucho against an immigrant and has the latter triumph because of his devotion to progress. And in 1910, Leopoldo Lugones praised the immigrant who has been cultivating the country in “Ode a los ganados y los mieses,” which appeared in Odas Seculares in 1910, one of his several books dedicated to the Centennial.

6. While Nativism was not new to Argentine formulations of national identity (see Shumway 214), it was not until the turn of the century that various antiliberal ideologies gained enormous momentum and a full-fledged, persistently articulated and defined nativism was introduced in the spirit of nationalism.

7. See Carlos Paya and Eduardo Cárdenas.

8. Earl T. Glauert makes an explicit connection between Herder's and Rojas's nationalisms.

9. See Ludmer, Prieto, and Shumway as well as Becco et al., Lichtblau, Molas, and Slatta.

10. Interestingly, in his essay “La poesía gauchesca,” Borges writes that Hernández's work is distinguished by its lack of local color and spatial specificity, which are traits of British literature, in its focus instead on the character of the hero (16).

11. The documentary film The Yidishe Gauchos (1989) includes interesting historical footage and interviews with Jewish farmers, a few of whom still maintained agricultural and gaucho identity until very recently.

12. Nordau penned “Jewry of Muscle” to praise the opening of a gymnastic club for Jews in 1898 in Berlin. Like Gerchunoff, though much more explicitly, Nordau too linked Jewish physical prowess to ancient tradition, which had been corrupted by persecution and ghetto life. He wrote, “In the narrow Jewish street our poor limbs soon forgot their gay movements; in the dimness of sunless houses our eyes began to blink shyly. … But now, all coercion has become a memory of the past, and at least we are allowed space enough for our bodies to live again. Let us take up our oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men” (435).

13. For critiques of territorialist Zionism and Jewish autochthony, see Boyarin and Boyarin; Davies; and Eisenzweig.

14. If Gerchunoff shows place to be a site of such negotiations, it needs to be noted that, in his staging of this mediation of space between new immigrant and native gaucho, like most of his contemporaries he ignores the original destruction of place and indigenous people that affords him a utopian vision of a Jewish-Argentine locus.

15. This term is used by Jonathan Boyarin (Clifford 305).

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