| advertisement |
|
|
| advertisement |
|
|
|
| Page tools |
 |
|
|
|
PARIS (EJP) --- “Jewish Gauchos” is a common name for Jewish immigrants who settled in the fertile regions of Argentina, mostly in “agricultural colonies”.
The author Alberto Gerchunoff, a major figure in Argentine literature, had a genius for evoking landscapes and places. Many stories take place in small Argentinean villages, and the dust of the pampas as well as the boisterous fiestas, the heat and the smells, the lash of the wind, rise from the written words.
Described by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges as "an indisputable writer", Gerchunoff was an associate university professor and editor of numerous magazines and newspapers. He wrote many important novels and books on Latin American Jewish life.
Gerchunoff’s family (1884-1950) and 824 others emigrated in 1889 to the agricultural colony Santa Fe in northeastern Argentina, founded by philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsh as a haven for Jews fleeing the pogroms of Europe.
From the 1880s through 1914, Argentina was second only to the United States as a magnet for European immigrants. The Argentine classic “Jewish Gauchos” appeared in 1910 during the centennial of the country's independence. Gerchunoff assimilated into Argentine and Spanish culture by absorbing Spanish classics, especially Cervantes.
Daily life on the pampas
“Jewish Gauchos” is a series of vignettes about shtetl life in Argentina. Praised for its depiction of how two entirely different cultures could coexist in a symbiotic relationship, Jewish Gauchos was written about a decade after Jewish immigration to Argentina began in earnest.
The book tells the true story of men and women who, to escape from misery and persecutions, left their snow-covered villages of Eastern Europe to cultivate the fields and to grow closer to God on the wild and hard expanses of Argentina. With as their main project the building of a new Jerusalem.
In a style which mixes prose and magical realism, lyricism and the story-telling, the Hassidic Alberto Gerchunoff depicts the daily labour, the harvest, the seasons which go by, love stories, in short, the life from day to day of these men who were transformed forever by the violent and demanding grounds of the New World.
“The Jewish gauchos” by Alberto Gershunoff, Translated from Spanish to French by Joseph Bengio, Editions Stock
|
|
 |
|