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When the Judeo-Argentine writer Alberto Gerchunoff published his Los gauchos judíos in 1910, he never imagined what an afterlife the modest book would have. The collection of short vignettes, one of the first written by a Jewish immigrant in Spanish rather than Yiddish, was published in honor of the magnificent celebration of the centenary of Argentina's independence, colorfully reimagining the life of early 20th century Jewish agricultural settlers on the pampas, in colonies established by the philanthropist, Baron de Hirsch. Gerchunoff, showing the newcomers learning how to cultivate the land and to interact with their gaucho neighbors through good times and bad, joined in the festivities intended not merely to mark independence, but also to extol and to thank the southern republic as a prosperous and liberal motherly refuge where hard-working immigrants, among them poor Jews, a harried minority escaping from Russian czarist pogroms, had found a bountiful homeland of meat and grain, if not milk and honey. Two major motifs derived from the complex ur-work remained constant-Argentina as a utopia (or not); and Argentina as a (substitute) patria. The power of these topoi was such that in a seemingly unlikely, contra-factual inversion at just about the centenary of Los gauchos judíos, the topoi crossed oceans, more languages and more countries, to reach the original Zion, and to be recreated by a writer in the very Jerusalem Gerchunoff s gauchos knew they hadn't reached in 1910. This latest Gerchuoffian incarnation is Israeli author Eshkol Nevo's Hebrew-language novel Neuland (Newland, 2011) (yes, a Hebrew novel, but well peppered with Spanish), in which, believe it or not, settlers from Jerusalem, carrying Los gauchos judíos in hand, contra-factually go to Argentina to revive the Latin-Jewish utopia-cum-homeland sung to in 1910.
