IN HIS 1934 OBITUARY of Shalom Aleichem, Argentinian writer Alberto Gerchunoff includes a rare personal reflection on his own life as a cosmopolitan Buenos Aires Jew:

While Gerchunoff yearns for life in the ghetto—a yearning he himself describes as morbid—he depicts a lively, relocated Jewish life in Buenos Aires. This is not unusual in itself, but as his writing gained national attention he felt pressure to sever his local, ethnic ties. In 1934 he was working full-time in one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country in addition to being appointed to the National Academy of Letters and enjoying intellectual celebrity status as a bestselling author. Despite being in the national spotlight, he defiantly maintained his ties to Jewish community life. He was seen almost every night in the cafés on Corrientes Street in Buenos Aires—the centre of cultural life at the time—sipping tea with young Jewish students as a mentor, sharing dinner tables with the most prominent contemporary Argentinian intellectuals, and entertaining European and Latin American writers.

In 1910 Gerchunoff's book Los gauchos judíos became an instant best-seller and in 1955 was translated into English as The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (Gerchunoff 1910; see Aizenberg 2000). Depicting an idyllic Jewish life in the Argentinian countryside, it was published with the official sponsorship of the government in celebration of the first centenary of the May 1810 revolution and Argentina's independence. In a series of vignettes Gerchun off showed that in working the land Jews had returned to a biblical way of life and had finally come home. His text received attention not just for its powerful narrative of immigrant Jews making a home in Argentina but even more for the way in which it claimed Argentina as a Jewish homeland.