Alberto Gerchunoff
Alberto Gerchunoff · Arts & Literature
Author of The Jewish Gauchos (1910), founding work of Latin American Jewish literature
1er janvier 1883, Proskourov, Empire russe (auj. Khmelnytskyï, Ukraine) — 2 mars 1950, Buenos Aires, Argentine
Moisés Ville, Buenos Aires
Alberto Gerchunoff is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Author of The Jewish Gauchos (1910), founding work of Latin American Jewish literature
Origins and early life
Alberto Gerchunoff was born Abraham Gerchunoff on 1 January 1883 in Proskurov, in the Russian Empire, into a practicing Ashkenazi Jewish family. In 1889 the family joined the great agricultural migration to Argentina organized for Jews fleeing the pogroms, settling in the colonies — his father was murdered in Moisés Ville in 1891, and the boy grew up herding and plowing among gauchos. From that childhood he drew his masterpiece: Los gauchos judíos, The Jewish Gauchos, published in 1910 for Argentina's centenary — the founding work of Latin American Jewish literature, and by the Encyclopaedia Judaica's account the first modern Spanish text by a Jewish author to describe the Jewish immigration to the New World, a book that claimed for the Jewish farmer a place in the Argentine national story.
Later years
For more than forty years he wrote for La Nación, one of the great newspapers of the continent, becoming a master of Spanish prose, and in his last years he put that pen at the service of the movement for a Jewish state. He died in Buenos Aires on 2 March 1950.
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Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/gerchunoff-alberto
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Author of The Jewish Gauchos (1910), founding work of Latin American Jewish literature
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/gerchunoff-alberto
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