SOURCE: Aizenberg, Edna. “Introduction” In Partricide on the Pampas? A New Study and Translation of Alberto Gerchunoff's ‘Los Gauchos Judios’, pp. 11-32. Madrid, Spain: Vervuert Iberoamericana, 2000.

[In the following introduction to her detailed examination of Los Gauchos Judios, Aizenberg provides a historical perspective to the events surrounding the period from which this book arose, as well as a critical appraisal into its textual components.]

I pick up The Jewish Gauchos once again. I reread the book, nostalgically reliving each of its pages. I see my father's comments written in the margins, and my comments under his. So many decades come alive, so many memories, so many echoes shaking me to the core … As I close the beloved book, I am moved to tears by this testimony to our youth and to the magic of the new land.

Lázaro Liacho

What is the meaning of [Gerchunoff's] bucolic Argentina in the face of … the violent Argentina of the Buenos Aires pogroms?

David Viñas

This book inspires strong passions. At first read, it seems an unlikely candidate for such outbursts of emotion. The Jewish Gauchos is a collection of twenty-three stories about turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants to the Argentine pampa authored by one of their own, the Russian-born Alberto Gerchunoff. Gerchunoff began to publish vignettes based on his country life in 1908. These sketches, some first printed in the influential Buenos Aires daily, La Nación, became the seed of Los gauchos judíos, which appeared as a volume two years later.

If the genesis and content of Gerchunoff's work are as bland as the bare-bones outline, then why the fuss? Why the powerful reactions, the virulently opposing opinions, the heated critical discussions, the many reprintings and imitations, this new study and translation? Readers of Gerchunoff's better-known countryman, Jorge Luis Borges, might recall the acrimonious debates surrounding that author's work, the longstanding arguments between the adherents of the “good” Borges whose fictions helped remake contemporary literature, and the enemies of the “bad” Borges who escaped the realities of his nation (see Aizenberg 1997). But Gerchunoff?

The controversies about Gerchunoff are less familiar, but in this era of fierce disputes about immigration and multiculturalism, it is high time for an English-speaking audience to become acquainted with his creation. Borges's El Aleph (1949) may be the most famous “Jewish” book to come out of the republics of the south, yet Gerchunoff's was a precursor text. Much before Borges, the agriculturalist-turned-writer posed important questions about literature written at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, and displayed the problematic multicultural layering since considered characteristic of the best Latin American fiction.

On the brink of the twentieth century, Gerchunoff—a colorful figure in Buenos Aires literary and journalistic circles, a founder of the Argentine Writers' Association, a defender of Borges, and a friend of Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, and other Latin American literary lions—presented sociocultural dilemmas common to both Americas: How do you negotiate the breach between the demands of homogeneity and the need to sustain ethnic identity? How do you open up histories, ideologies, and literary canons? How do you constitute culture on the periphery and resist the forces of authoritarianism and prejudice?

Gerchunoff asked these questions at the century's opening, hopeful about its possibilities. Now that it has closed, still struggling with the predicaments he experienced, it is appropriate to let his inaugural book speak to a broad readership that includes, in North America and elsewhere, large Hispanic and Jewish communities, as well as other minority and immigrant groups. At a moment when writers are struggling to create modes of expression that do not hide ethnic or sexual difference, his book addresses the difficulties inherent in any reductionist view of community and self (see Foster).

THE CONTEXT OF A CANONICAL TEXT

The story of Gerchunoff's pathbreaking words begins with prior words, found in the Argentine constitution of 1853: “The Federal Government will encourage European immigration, and will in no way … restrict … the entry into Argentine territory of foreigners whose aim is to work the land, improve industry, and introduce the arts and sciences.” A radical departure from colonial Spain's closed-door policy in Latin America, the declaration embodied the desire of independent Argentina's nation builders to “govern by populating”—to fill their country's vast, unharnessed spaces with hardworking immigrants whose European habits and skills would lift the land out of its “barbarism” into “civilization.”

This unabashedly Eurocentric modernization project called for the extermination of the Native Americans and the domestication of the gaucho, the free-riding cowboy of the pampa, whose wild ways no longer suited an Argentina intent on becoming a progressive member of the concert of nations. “Peace and prosperity” meant closely tying Argentina to Europe, but not as an industrial partner, as an exporter of meat and wheat; this longterm weakness was overlooked in the rush for modernization.

Riddled with contradictions, the modernization program did nonetheless succeed in imposing its model on reality, changing the demographic face of Argentina and fostering greater economic well-being. By 1910, year of the first centennial of Argentine independence, the country's leaders could boast that the nation had become a prosperous melting pot in which people of diverse backgrounds were amalgamated harmoniously. The price paid by minorities for such “amalgamation,” and the fissures in the smooth façade—labor strikes, anti-immigrant pogroms—were scarcely mentioned.

The words of the 1853 constitution were broadcast by emissaries sent from the far-off New World to the Old. They found a ready audience in Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the Judeo-Belgian philanthropist anxious to undertake a civilizing mission of his own—the saving of his Jewish brethren from the barbarism of the Russian Pale. Under his auspices, starting in 1891, the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) began to purchase acreage on the pampa in order to settle Jews; Moisesville was the first colony to be established.

In fact, just as Argentina's immigration policies were an attempt to move away from Hispano-Catholic feudalist pastoralism, so was the baron's plan part of the modernization of Jewish life. From the beginning of the last century, the Jewish world had undergone radical transition from a “medieval” to a modern existence, as Jews, impelled by czarist anti-Semitism and diminishing economic horizons, emigrated by the millions to North and South America. The period saw an expansion of traditional Jewish culture, anchored in the Hebrew Scriptures, with new secular literatures in Hebrew, Yiddish, and European languages. Jews adopted new ideologies of action—Zionism, Socialism, Territorialism—that contrasted profoundly with religious teachings fostering obedience to God and faith in His redemption.

The intersection of the two modernization processes, Jewish and Argentine, had a particular coloring, significant for understanding Gerchunoff. These were modernizations on the margin, of peoples in ambiguous relationships with the centers of Western culture. At the turn of the century, Jews—the quintessential minority—and Argentines, long colonized by Spain, both had an uncertain territoriality, an undefined linguistic-cultural identity, and a murky ideological field, in which newer forces of pluralism struggled mightily with older exclusivist models.

Like many postcolonial peoples, the Argentines had only recently unified their national space and were struggling to cohere a physical and imagined community called “Argentina.” Building an identity was a fundamental aspect of this task: If Argentines were no longer subjects of Spain yet continued to speak Spanish, how should their language differ? And what should they do about the languages of the immigrants flooding the country? Should Argentine identity be based on the fast-disappearing Hispanic ruralist model, symbolized by the landowner and the gaucho, or was it to be a Europeanized, urban identity? Were the literary paradigms to remain gauchesque literature, poetry and prose based on the exploits of the gaucho, such as José Hernández's master poem, Martín Fierro (1872), or were newer forms, often inspired by continental fashions, to prevail? Did the coming of the foreigners signal greater openness in the political system, or could the country continue to be governed in oligarchic style?

Jews, for their part, were even more unsure as they entered modernity. Exiled for two thousand years, they had no territory at all. The major ideologies of the period contended with this vital problem, made desperately acute by the latest round of czarist pogroms. Zionism proposed the establishment of a Jewish home in the ancestral Promised Land; Socialism aimed at Jewish normalcy through a juster order wherever Jews lived; Territorialism sought to end dispersal anywhere—for instance, in agricultural colonies on the pampa. A literal, regenerating “living on the land” was an integral part of the ideological effervescence. Jews became farmers and a more urban folk at one and the same time.

Cultural-linguistic disputes were likewise heated. Was Yiddish, the idiom of Eastern European Jewry, to be the modern Jewish tongue? Or was it Hebrew, the scriptural language that had united all Jews? What about the European languages, which Jews increasingly made their own? And as Jews integrated into society, to what extent should they abandon their relatively closed, traditional communities and “melt” into the secularized, though still Christian environment? The issue was of great consequence, since secularism and integration exacted a price seen in the existential anguish of those who abandoned old ways without being totally accepted by society, and in the diminution of strongly-marked Jewish identity.

Territory, language, ideology—the similar challenges that faced Jews and Argentines did not, however, make for an easy coexistence; more often than not the unresolved problems of the two peoples-in-flux resulted in friction. Gerchunoff's work, deeply imbued with his Jewish background, and equally permeated by the Argentine milieu, illustrates the predicaments of cohering new communities and imagining novel discourses on the periphery.

THREE VERSIONS OF GERCHUNOFF

Since a work is constituted by the history of its reception, the challenges of territory, language, and ideology can best be studied in The Jewish Gauchos through three versions of Gerchunoff—the “good,” “bad,” and “complex.” All three begin with the same facts:

Alberto Gerchunoff established an authoritative discursive practice because he founded a new form of Jewish life in a new country. But in order to transform his experiential pioneering into literary pioneering, Gerchunoff had to leave the pampa, move to Buenos Aires, and initiate a successful career as a journalist and writer. It was away from the rural setting he lovingly portrays that he again became a founder. His book was among the earliest Latin American accounts of Jewish emigration to the New World, and among the first works of literary value to be written in modern Spanish by a Jew. Gerchunoff was thus the forerunner of contemporary writers of immigrant stock, the Argentines David Viñas, Andrés Rivera, Alicia Steimberg, Santiago Kovadloff, and Marcos Aguinis, the Mexicans Margo Glantz and Sabina Berman, the Venezuelan Isaac Chocrón, the Brazilians Clarice Lispector and Moacyr Scliar, and a growing number of U.S. Jewish-Latino authors, Marjorie Agosín, Ariel Dorfman, Mario Szichman, Isaac Goldemberg, and Alicia Borinsky. Gerchunoff's existential and literary firstness helped win canonical status for his book.

From this point on, the paths of the three versions fork.

PATH I: THE GOOD GERCHUNOFF, OR ARGENTINA, LAND OF PROMISE

Territory: Gerchunoff's work rooted Jews on Argentine soil. Bernardo Verbitsky, a fellow intellectual, claimed that Argentine Jews received their citizenship papers through the book, which represented them at their new country's Centennial celebrations. To term a work of fiction a group's “citizenship papers” may be hyperbolic, but it speaks to the power of literature to create what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities,” in eras of nation-formation.

Gerchunoff understood that during the Centennial, Jews, long bereft of a land, had to declare themselves part and parcel of the community envisioned by Argentina's founders. The most powerful symbol of Argentine territoriality was the gaucho, a figure extoled in speeches, festivities, and books; Leopoldo Lugones's La guerra gaucha (1905) [The Gaucho War] and Martiniano Leguizamón's De cepa criolla (1908) [Of Native Stock] were just two examples of the copious literature that glorified the pampa cowboy and all things autochthonous. By positioning “Jews” alongside “gauchos,” and portraying the immigrants as adopting rural ways, Gerchunoff earned them the right to belong.

Language: Although he knew Yiddish and Russian, the immigrant tongues, testimony after testimony cites Gerchunoff's mastery of the Spanish language, his love for its classical sources, his special devotion for Cervantes. Borges notes Gerchunoff's interest in the twists and turns of vocabulary and syntax (Figuras 14). Luis Emilio Soto points to the author's nuanced use of modernist linguistic impressionism (9). Gerchunoff was a champion of modernismo, the literary movement that renewed Spanish-language poetry and prose at the start of the century, whose best-known figure was Rubén Darío (see his essay “Rubén Darío”). In Los gauchos judíos, Gerchunoff wed modernist chromatism to oral gaucho idioms, and modernist barroquism to archaic Castilian and Judeo-Hispanic turns of phrase, demonstrating that, through their handling of Spanish, Jews could be true Argentines. And if to be true Argentines, Jews had to shed their Old World linguistic heritage, so be it.

Ideology: The Centennial represented the high point of nineteenth-century constitutionalist, free-trade Argentine liberalism. Thanks to this ideology, Argentina had opened its doors to immigration, and Gerchunoff underlined Jewish identification with its tenets, structuring his work like a secular Haggadah, the Passover narration that recounts the Israelites' journey from slavery to freedom. His portrait of the grateful Russo-Jewish immigrants was taken up by the poetic giants of the period, Leopoldo Lugones, in his Oda a los ganados y a las mieses [Ode to Flocks and Grains], and Rubén Darío, in Canto a la Argentina [Song to Argentina], both written for the Centennial. The implications are evident: Argentina is the modern land of liberty where Jews have been redeemed from Russian oppression. Loss of identity in the assimilationist melting pot was a small price to pay.

This version of the “good” Gerchunoff has become a keystone of official rhetoric, and has given rise to multiple reelaborations, including Juan José Jusid's film Los gauchos judíos (1975), and the play by two of Argentina's best-known dramatists, Roberto Cossa and Ricardo Halac, Aquellos gauchos judíos: recuerdos de la colonia (1995) [Once Upon a Jewish Gaucho: Memories of the Colony]. Any reference to Argentina's acceptance of Jews, to Jewish integration to the Land of Liberty, inevitably involves an allusion to Gerchunoff's cowboy epic of the new homeland (see also Ricardo Feierstein's anthology, Los mejores relatos con gauchos judíos).

PATH II: THE BAD GERCHUNOFF, OR ARGENTINA, LAND OF THE DISAPPEARED

Territory: Gerchunoff's work misrepresented Jewish rootedness. From the outset, Jews left the colonies for the cities, unable to overcome the pampa's lingering latifundist legacy, crop failures, ICA mismanagement, limited educational opportunities, and rural violence. Gerchunoff himself lived through these bitter experiences; after a drunken gaucho murdered his father, the shattered family moved to Buenos Aires.

In the past two decades younger intellectuals, often victims of repression and exile, took Gerchunoff to task for what they saw as his uncomplicated territorialism. David Viñas, Saúl Sosnowski, Leonardo Senkman, Mario Gerardo Goloboff, and Mario Szichman are among those “parricides on the pampa” who challenged Gerchunoff in critical works and novels, presenting a contradictory deracination or a complex polyterritoriality—Argentina, Europe, Israel—as the more accurate portrait of numerous Argentines, who were scarcely settled on Argentine soil in peace and calm. Bitterly parodying his predecessor, Szichman writes the following in his novel about persecuted Russo-Jewish immigrants sailing to Argentina: “On the first day of the crossing they were shown a film called ‘Argentina, the Promised Land.’ The screen had been divided into four parts … you could see wheat fields, cows … ships … and a family … looking up at a radiant sun … In the country that had been prepared to fool the immigrants … there were no … short folks … fat folks … or anti-Semites … money grew on trees, and the immigrants became expert broncobusters” (Los judíos, 77).

Language: Gerchunoff's skillful handling of Spanish silenced the immigrants' multilingualism and glossed over the impediments to fluency in the new tongue, since then, as now, bilingualism was considered threatening (Senkman, 80-81, 97).

Countering Gerchunoff's perceived strategy of linguistic accomodation, the literary parricides intentionally recreate the difficulties of switching from one linguistic code (Yiddish) to another (Spanish), as in this excerpt from Goloboff: “Argentineh. Aryentineh. Argentina. First is the homeland of speech, you must shape a tongue from its very roots. A language that in order to sound like tug and mean día [day] must be día from the deepest depths” (26). Their protagonists incorporate traces of Yiddish to recreate a certain texture of life and to conjure up a storehouse of Jewish experience. Szichman has so many Yiddish words in his novel that he provides a glossary; Feierstein continually interrupts the narrative flow with footnotes to explain idn, melamed, toit shtibl, schwitzer (Jews, teacher, death-house, showoff). They foreground bilingual tensions in order to resist homogeneity.

Ideology: Gerchunoff capitulated to the reigning political philosophy for a place in the Argentine sun. In a caustic essay that became the parricides' manifesto, David Viñas forcefully attacks Gerchunoff, to be seconded by Leonardo Senkman (Viñas, “Gerchunoff: gauchos judíos y xenofobia”; Senkman, La identidad; see also Lindstrom). Peace and integration, whatever the cost, are the watchwords of Los gauchos judíos, Viñas charges. Where, he asks the patriarch, is the conflict, the discontent?

PATH III: THE COMPLEX GERCHUNOFF, OR ARGENTINA, LAND OF CONTRADICTION

Which, then, respect or vituperation? Both positions, good and bad, simplify the book, since they are based on the premise that Gerchunoff constructed a one-voiced text and an uncomplicated figure. But did Gerchunoff truly obliterate Jewish ethnic and idiomatic signs? And was his work unremittingly monovocal and accomodationist as claimed? The evidence is more complicated than either side would have it.

Translation is the best way of reading. It forces you to get into the nuts and bolts of the text, to notice the minutae. If criticism looks at macrostructures and makes generalizations, translation focuses on microunits—articles, prepositions, words, phrases. The English translation that forms part of my new look at Gerchunoff, the first ever made of the original 1910 version of Los gauchos judíos, uncovers a far greater ideological and linguistic-cultural intricacy than has been allowed, calling for a more nuanced assessment. It has permitted me to rethink the work, and to revise some of my earlier “parricidal” analyses (see “Parricide on the Pampa”).

To put it bluntly: most critics base their opinions about what Gerchunoff thought and did in the Centennial period on the wrong text, the second version of Los gauchos judíos published in 1936, a quarter of a century after the original. They make assertions about Gerchunoff's melting-potism and Hispanism unaware—or unconcerned—that they are judging a much later reworking.

Yet the 1910 edition was the Jewish community's entry into the Argentine imagination. It seems imperative to present the foundational text as it was at the founding. At the same time, it is essential not to ignore Gerchunoff's revisions, because they throw light on the depth of his ideological contentiousness and his intense work-in-language right from the book's initial inception. Los gauchos judíos must be read in the shuttle space between versions, as a process not as a stasis.

I read the book in just that way, using the insights of genetic criticism and current translation theory. Genetic criticism considers texts to be complex entities constituted of notes, drafts, emendations, and reprintings; translation theory posits interlinguistic transfer as a tense act, meant to lay bare rather than to smooth over roughness and ambiguity¹. Together, these approaches provide important keys for understanding Gerchunoff's knotty creation. Like Mark Harman's new translation of Kafka's The Castle, mine is based on a “restored text,” and like Harman's it mimicks the strange oscillations and dense counterpoints of the original (xvii).

Three major textual components make up the translation portion of this study: 1) the entire 1910 version of Los gauchos judíos, including the barely-known introduction by Martiniano Leguizamón; 2) some significant changes made in 1936, included in brackets (square for omissions, brace for substitutions); and 3) an appendix containing the two stories added to the second edition. My intent was to give a broad audience a sense of the text and its evolution, not to produce a critical edition with detailed variants². This is the only manner to fully appreciate Los gauchos judíos as an experiment in forging a new idiom for a novel experience.

Territory: Rereading The Jewish Gauchos as an argumentative, kaleidoscopic work highlights previously-ignored moments—its crucial opening scene, for instance. At a Sabbath gathering set in the Old Country the learned Dayan (rabbinic sage) explicates difficult points in the sacred texts employing the semiotics of talmudic discourse. Traditional Jewish exegesis applied past precedents to present events, and allowed no ideological position to be expressed without a real or hypothetical counterposition (Harshav, 16). Not surprisingly, then, the future immigrants, steeped as they are in the world of the Talmud, critically consider various territorial possibilities, and—just as inevitably—lock horns over the choices.

The antagonists argue contrary points of view: praise for Spain, its mild climate, and kindness to the Jews in centuries gone by; condemnation for blood-saturated Iberia and the horrors of the Inquisition. On the one hand, there is acclaim for Argentina's virtues; but on the other, profound awareness of the millenary pull of Zion, a pull reiterated throughout the work. Even as the newcomers express deep gratitude to the South American refuge, they recall that they are not in Jerusalem, that Argentina is not the Promised Land of their ancestors.

Palestine or the Argentine? Benevolent or malevolent new Hispanic earth? Old Russia, where they lived badly but feared God; or the New World, where the young stray from the faith? Gerchunoff does not silence the loud territorial disputations of his time, letting the settlers wrangle and have their say—with the gravity of talmudists, as he frequently points out—signaling to his readers that a single territoriality was far from easy for his persecuted brethren.

Language: Contrary to what might be expected, at the time of the Centennial, when melting-potism and Hispanism were regnant, Gerchunoff's text was exceedingly particularistic and openly yiddishist. The author incorporates the idiosyncratic cultural baggage of the greenhorns: words in Yiddish and Hebrew; multiple footnotes to explain these words; specific references to classic Jewish religious works; translations of Yiddish songs; allusions to popular Yiddish plays and novels; Hebrew-Yiddish forms of biblical names; Spanish calques of Yiddish expressions.

The work brims with non-Spanish expressions: “Cherbale-chaim,” “Sana toikef,” “Mischnais,” “Zeroim,” “Gemara”, “Iorudea,” “ben-yuchid,” “shel yod,” “umed,” “kitol,” “Yom Kippur,” “Rabbenu Yehudah Ha-Kadosh” (see “Names and Terms” list for meanings). Gerchunoff peppers the stories with allusions to jerga vulgar [popular vernacular], a translation of zhargon, a common name for Yiddish; to “El canto de la Sulamita,” Abraham Goldfaden's famous romantic Yiddish operetta, “Shulamis” (1880); to novels by the best-selling Yiddish author, Shomer; and to the cities of Kishinev, Zhitomir, and Elizabetgrad, important in the history of Eastern European Jewry. Women are addressed Hebraically as “Dvorah” and “Esther,” not “Débora” or “Ester,” and men as “Rabí,” Gerchunoff's rendering of the Yiddish reb through multilingual layering that melds Hebrew, Yiddish, and Spanish.

Reb, Yiddish for “mister” (used with the first name), derives from the Hebrew Rab, “teacher, rabbi,” but it does not have that meaning. Rabí does—it is the medieval Spanish term for “rabbi.” Gerchunoff's recontextualization of the old Hispanic word appears far from perfect to contemporary eyes, but it gives an idea of the author's linguistic experimentation. I have retained it in my translation to convey the sense of complexity, polyglotism, erudition, archaism, and even estrangement it evokes. Rabí exemplifies the tone of Gerchunoff's book, a tone I have endeavored to preserve, since I fully agree with what Mark Harman says about his work on Kafka: “Literary translators must forge a prose style that mimicks the original” (xiv).

To render Gerchunoff's book in breezily colloquial English, to omit its learned circumlocutions and the various strata of language, to substitute the unfamiliar with the familiar, the uncomfortable with the comfortable, would not do it justice. Gerchunoff, it is now clear, was working in uncharted waters and essaying untested solutions. He has not been given enough credit for his efforts even if they now seem eccentric—like rabí. Gerchunoff himself often realized where he had gone astray, as can be seen by reading the editions together. What do you call Jewish prayer, the Jewish prayerbook, the holy ark? The author tries on misa “mass,” misal “missal,” and santuario “a niche for a saint's image.” He modifies or eliminates these Christological terms in 1936. But he also omits anti-Christian remarks in the colonists' speech, such as “sus escasas luces de cristiano” ‘his thick Christian head,’ surely a translation of the Yiddish expression “goyisher kop.” In fact, a number of Hebrew-Yiddish idioms are likewise toned down—kitol becomes ropón blanco, “white tunic,” for example, and Iorudea merely los libros “the books,” producing a more generic, though not un-Judaic, second version.

What emerges is hardly a smoothly-blended text in which linguistic wrinkles are quickly ironed out, but an agonistic writing, shaped and reshaped by an author who did not hide the tensions of plurilingualism. (To give another example: Gerchunoff's unadorned matarife “slaughterer” for the Yiddish shochet may be more grating than a softened rendering like “ritual slaughterer”—but Gerchunoff did not soften the word.) It has not been noted that in Gerchunoff's hands modernist philological cosmopolitanism was not the stuff of fashionable idiomatic borrowings from Paris, or from a long-gone Greco-Latin antiquity; it was an existential struggle. Again and again, the immigrant storyteller registers the greenhorns' tonguetiedness: Spanish, he says, could be as hard as stone.

Ideology: If territory and language are more complicated than has been allowed, then ideology—the crux of the matter—could scarcely be neat. Territory and language are in themselves ideological: Gerchunoff's inscribed the acerbic territorial battles of his day among Zionists, Territorialists, and Socialists; and his verbal toil revealed the strain between the dominant Spanish and the minority Yiddish, the embarrassments of “glottal” assimilation (see Zabus). Gerchunoff's reputation has hinged on the question of assimilation: Did he, or did he not, produce an accomodationist work, and was this good or bad?

In the rarely-reprinted introduction to the 1910 version, Martiniano Leguizamón lauds the young Jewish immigrant women as the sexualized vessels of cross-ethnic breeding, the genetic crucibles that would smelt down identifiable Jewish traits. But his supposed protégé, Alberto Gerchunoff, gives a far less rosy picture, registering the bitter dismay and profound shame the comely Jewish maidens bring to their families and community when they “blend.” This pain remains unaltered in both editions: “It's a disgrace. But is it true? Unfortunately, it is. She ran off with a peon, a gaucho. We saw it coming. She lit the samovar on the Sabbath and ate chickens killed by the peon. What a slut!” Even the gaucho, Gerchunoff's alleged ideal for nativist political correctness, receives ambivalent treatment, sometimes depicted as noble and patriarchal, sometimes as ignoble and murderous.

A gaucho protagonizes the most glaring subversion of the Argentina, Land-of-Technicolor ideology, the narration “Tale of a Stolen Horse,” in which he falsely accuses a Jew of filching his mare, as the authorities turn a blind eye. An epigraph from a medieval Castilian document sets the tone: Nuño de Guevara, a Spanish knight, has stolen a fellow hidalgo's sword but has imputed the theft to Don Moisés de Sandobal, “for it is more virtuous to blame the dogs of Jewry than Christian noblemen.” The learned slaughterer talmudically teases out the reluctant message: the landscape and the peasants may change but a Jew is a Jew; Argentina may be not so different from Russia, after all.

Gerchunoff attempts to end on a high note—”I want to believe that it won't always be this way”—yet leaves the disturbing implications. These are only underscored by “The Silver Candelabra,” one of the two stories he added in 1936. This fiction about the theft from a Jewish home of the valuable and symbolic object—Will Judaism be “stolen” in Argentina? How safe are Jews in the Argentine haven?—closes that most familiar edition of Gerchunoff's paean. He was uncannily prescient: in 1994, a bomb destroyed the institutional home of Argentine Jewry, the AMIA building on Pasteur Street which housed an irreplaceable library of Jewish authors—including Gerchunoff (see Aizenberg 1994).

Republishing the book in 1936, some twenty-five years after its initial appearance, was itself a symptom of the artistic and ideological restlessness I have been tracing. On the one hand, it vigorously affirmed Jewish identity at a time of growing anti-Semitism in Europe and Argentina; on the other, it reflected Gerchunoff's distancing from the colonies' original ethos and speech milieu, and from the greater hopefulness of the earlier period (see also Senkman 1999). That does not mean that we can neatly posit a first, Hebraic, unbeat version and a second, dehebraized, downbeat writing, since the quarrelsomeness and questioning are there from the start. Read against the long-accepted grain, Don Alberto emerges less as the high priest of quietism—the object of “parricide on the pampa”—and more as a dynamic forerunner of intellectuals who today strive with homogeneizing ideologies, problematic postmodernities, and impoverishing ethnic, linguistic, and historical verities.

Notes

1. On genetic criticism see Louis Hay and Péter Nagy (eds.) (1982), Avant-Texte, Texte, Après-Texte, Paris: Éditions du CNRS, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó; and Michael Malicet (ed.) (1986), Exercices de Critique Génétique (Cahiers de Textologie), Paris: Minard. I quote from the introduction to Exercices: “Toutes ces études illustrent l'importance de la critique génétique qui peut d'autant mieux fournir la base de toute interprétation ultérieure qu'elle révèle la nebuleuse primitive dont nous parlions plus haut, où réside la plupart de temps la source de la polysémie du texte définitif” (4). For current translation theory see, for example, André Lefevre (1992), Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context, New York: Modern Language Association. Also, Suzanne Jill Levine (1991), The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Literature, St. Paul: Graywolf.

2. I have been invited to prepare such an edition for the Colección Archivos, a landmark series of critical editions of twentieth-century Latin American literature funded primarily by UNESCO.

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