Cycling Through the Pampas: Fictionalized Accounts of Jewish Agricultural Colonization in Argentina and Brazil

My comparative study focuses on the negotiation of national, regional, religious, and ethnic identity in the works of four Latin American Jewish authors: Argentines Alberto Gerchunoff and Rebeca Mactas, and Brazilians Frida Alexandr and AdÌÄå£o Voloch. Each author uses collections of independent but interrelated short stories, or short story cycles, to fictionalize his/her experiences as a child growing up in Jewish agricultural colonies in Latin America in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I reevaluate the literary legacy of Gerchunoff, the father of Jewish Latin American literature, by showing how his canonical Los gauchos judíos (1910; translated as The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, 1955) offered a structural and thematic template for works by Mactas, Alexandr, and Voloch.