Jewish Latin American literature in Spanish begins with The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, a series of vignettes about shtetl life in Argentina first published in 1910 and now available for the first time in an English-language paperback edition as the inaugural volume in the new Jewish Latin America series. Praised for its depiction of how two entirely different cultures could coexist in a symbiotic relationship, Jewish Gauchos was written about a decade after Jewish immigration to Argentina began in earnest. The author, a major figure in Argentine literature, was a great influence on Borges.
"Alberto Gerchunoff was an indisputable writer. . . [He] handled with equal ease the oral and written languages; in his books one finds the fluidity of the good 'conversador,' and his conversation (I can still hear him) is marked by generous and infallible literary precision."--Jorge Luis Borges