Kasrilovke of Entre Ríos: Gerchunoff’s LOS GAUCHOS JUDÍOS Between Two Peripheral Inheritances

• In Event: Lightning session in Literature {Jewish Yiddish, Hebrew) and Jewish Politics

Abstract

In his controversial essay, “Conjectures on World Literature,” (2000) Franco Moretti proposes a paradigm for mapping the relationship between centers and peripheries in a simple equation: foreign form + local content = local form. In the years that have elapsed since he proposed this model, scholars have challenged his binarism, arguing that it reifies Anglo-European literary hierarchies, discounts multidirectionality between centers and peripheries, and occludes relationships between forms and contents that are more complex and nuanced than his equation suggests.
Joining in these current debates, this paper analyzes Alberto Gerchunoff’s LOS GAUCHOS JUDÍOS, whose multi-peripherality challenges easy categorizations of “center” and “periphery.” Drawing both on traditions of Argentine and Yiddish literatures, Gerchunoff’s Jewish GAUCHOS are a complicated hybrid.
Scholarly research on the hybridity of LOS GAUCHOS JUDÍOS has largely focused on its interaction with the GAUCHESCO form. Los GAUCHOS JUDÍOS has been seen as a reflection of the exigencies of an assimilating immigrant group facing an environment of growing xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Such studies have criticized it as a sentimental miming of GAUCHESCO, grateful pandering to a host nation who opened its doors to a beleaguered people.
I posit that in addition to GAUCHESCO, Gerchunoff also makes use of the Yiddish SHTETL story, a genre of Yiddish literature that dramatizes SHTETL life, constructing of it a symbolic space in which questions of Jewish identity, authority, and territoriality are played out, written by an author who has left the SHTETL for a similarly distanced readership.
By framing LOS GAUCHOS JUDÍOS as a departure from two already-peripheral literary heritages of both the Argentine GAUCHESCO and the Yiddish SHTETL story, I argue that LOS GAUCHOS JUDÍOS is both and neither: Gerchunoff constructs the Jewish colony as an intermediate SHTETL-like third space in which Jewish-Argentine hybridity is posed, celebrated, and complicated. Taking Moretti’s triangulation model as a point of departure for conceptualizing the interaction between centers and peripheries, LOS GAUCHOS JUDÍOS tests its plasticity, reconfiguring centers and peripheries locally and circumventing hegemonic centers. Through his merging of and departure from these forms, Gerchunoff argues for Jewish territoriality in Argentina, presenting life in the Jewish colonies of the pampas as a usable past for a largely urban population of Argentine Jews.

Author

• Rachelle Grossman, Harvard University