Jewish Gauchos

In the last decades of the nine­teenth cen­tury, almost 200,000 Jews emi­grated from Russia and Poland to Argentina. Life in the Jewish com­mu­ni­ties of both coun­tries, under the domin­ion of the Czar, was unbear­able. Except for a brief respite in the early years of the reign of Alexander ii, which began in 1855, Jewish life was lim­ited by cul­tural, social and com­mer­cial laws. Above all, the pogroms, dur­ing which the gen­tile pop­u­la­tion was allowed to turn on the Jews, loot­ing and killing with com­plete impunity, forced the Jews to con­sider ways of escape.

The major­ity of Jews in nineteenth-century Russia were arti­sans or small busi­ness­men in towns and vil­lages. There were also Jewish farm­ers, but these were more rare. Few Jews owned land, since forced reset­tle­ment and Czarist real estate laws made it very dif­fi­cult for Jews to pur­chase prop­erty. Alexander i had allowed them to live in small colonies far to the east of Moscow, in Siberia, “to check the self­ish inter­ests of the Jews.” My great-great-grandparents on my mother’s side were among both the arti­sans and the new set­tlers. One was a mat­tress maker from the out­skirts of Moscow; another worked as a sort of gar­dener or land-keeper on the estate of a Russian princess some­where near St. Petersburg. I never knew the princess’s name because my grand­mother referred to her, with nos­tal­gic rev­er­ence, sim­ply as “die Prinze.”

After Alexander ii was assas­si­nated in 1881, a wave of anti-Semitism swept through­out Russia. Only a few Jewish intel­lec­tu­als had been involved in the ter­ror­ist plot, but the Russian aris­toc­racy encour­aged the new Czar, Alexander iii, to blame the Jews for the mur­der. Pogroms of extra­or­di­nary vio­lence exploded through­out the Russian ter­ri­tory, so ter­ri­ble that they elicited protests from both the American and the British gov­ern­ments, and caused Alexander to issue a restrain­ing edict. Unfortunately for the Jews, the edict made mat­ters worse by forc­ing them to reset­tle within the con­fines of a strip of land called the Pale of Settlement, estab­lished ear­lier by Catherine ii, extend­ing from Latvia to the Ukraine. Only by spe­cial per­mis­sion were Jews allowed to live out­side this crescent.

Even in this seem­ingly des­per­ate sit­u­a­tion, Jews believed in the promise of the home­land, Zion, the land of Israel. The polit­i­cal and intel­lec­tual stim­u­lus behind this hope came largely through the Hungarian leader Theodor Herzl, founder in 1896 of the world Zionist movement.

For those who did not believe in or care about a home in Palestine, there were other options, of which the United States was the most tempt­ing. I’m reminded of a scene in Mordecai Richler’s novel Barney’s Version, in which the anti-hero’s grand­par­ents, Moishe and Malka Panofsky, come to be inter­viewed at the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society in Budapest in 1902. 

“We want the papers for New York,” says the grand­fa­ther to the jaded official.

“Siam isn’t good enough for you?” the offi­cial asks. “India you don’t need? Sure, I under­stand. So here’s the phone and now I’ll ring Washington to tell the pres­i­dent, ‘You short of green­horns there on Canal Street, Teddy? You need more who can’t speak a word of English? Well, good news. I’ve got a cou­ple of shlep­pers here who are will­ing to set­tle in New York.’ If it’s the gold­ene med­ina you want, Panofsky, it costs fifty dol­lars American cash on the table.”

“Fifty dol­lars we haven’t got,” the grand­fa­ther answers.

“No kid­ding? Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m run­ning a spe­cial here today. For twenty-five dol­lars I can get you both into Canada.”

To set­tle abroad, wher­ever the des­ti­na­tion — the gold­ene med­ina (land of gold), Canada or Argentina — was expen­sive. This seem­ingly unavoid­able obsta­cle moved one of Europe’s lead­ing bankers to devise a scheme of assis­tance to Jewish immi­grants. Baron Maurice de Hirsch was born in Bavaria, into a very wealthy fam­ily, whose for­tunes he expanded by invest­ing wisely in Turkish, Russian and Austrian rail­roads. A man of deep social con­cerns, he saw in immi­gra­tion a way to change the piti­ful con­di­tion of Europe’s Jews. In 1891 he cre­ated a char­ity known as the Jewish Colonization Association with an ini­tial cap­i­tal of 2 mil­lion pounds ster­ling, which he later increased to 8 million.

“What I desire to accom­plish,” wrote Hirsch in the North American Review in July 1891, “what, after many fail­ures, has come to be the object of my life, and that for which I am ready to stake my wealth and my intel­lec­tual pow­ers, is to give a por­tion of my com­pan­ions in faith the pos­si­bil­ity of find­ing a new exis­tence, pri­mar­ily as farm­ers and also as hand­i­crafts­men, in those lands where the laws and reli­gious tol­er­ance per­mit them to carry on the strug­gle for exis­tence as noble and respon­si­ble sub­jects of a humane government.”

Hirsch’s orga­ni­za­tion bought land in Canada, the United States, Brazil and Argentina. Argentina was a prime des­ti­na­tion, since Hirsch felt that because of the com­par­a­tively small pop­u­la­tion, the offi­cially declared belief in free­dom of reli­gion and the reported absence of racial prej­u­dice, Argentina would be a splen­did haven for the Jews of Europe. Because of an eco­nomic cri­sis, land was fairly cheap.

The early set­tle­ments took place in 1891 in the province of Santa Fe, where the first colony, Moisésville, was founded. Hirsch rejected an offer from the Argentine gov­ern­ment to pur­chase land in El Chaco, an unhealthy jun­gle area, and instead bought land in Entre Ríos, the so-called Argentine Mesopotamia. This is where my fam­ily first settled.

To help the Russian Jews, Hirsch had offered the Czarist gov­ern­ment a dona­tion of 50 mil­lion French francs, which was turned down because Hirsch had spec­i­fied how it should be used: to fund Jewish schools of trade and agri­cul­ture. However, the gov­ern­ment cer­tainly was inter­ested in a plan to remove the Jews from the Russian ter­ri­tory. An agree­ment was reached by which Hirsch would trans­port the Jews from Russia and the Russian gov­ern­ment would pro­vide them with pass­ports, which until then they had been denied. Hirsch wanted to reset­tle 25,000 Jews a year; because of the red tape and moun­tains of mis­in­for­ma­tion, only 2,500 Jews set­tled in Argentina in the first year. 

My grand­fa­ther was then a young man, still an ado­les­cent, and my grand­mother even younger. How exactly they man­aged to become part of Hirsch’s scheme I don’t know, but in 1907 they found them­selves in Constantinople, ready to board a steamer that would take them to that unpro­nounce­able, far­away place, Buenos Aires. My grand­fa­ther had worked on a coun­try estate and knew a lit­tle about farm­ing, so when he was asked to name his pro­fes­sion, he declared he was a “farm labourer,” which in Argentina means gau­cho.

The colony in which my grand­par­ents set­tled was in the province of Entre Ríos, a fer­tile land between the rivers Paraná and Paraguay. It was called Colonia Clara and it had been founded in 1908, the year they arrived in Argentina. Colonia Clara com­prised three agri­cul­tural vil­lages and func­tioned very much like a small Jewish state. Schuls were built in the style of the locals, and orange groves, with a fair num­ber of cat­tle for which Argentina was famous and which the new set­tlers rounded up with cries in their native Yiddish. Soon the Jewish set­tlers began to dress as the gau­chos did, in baggy black trousers, wide belt that on fes­tive occa­sions was dec­o­rated with coins, white shirt and sleeve­less black jacket, ker­chief and brimmed hat. The diet also changed: tzimmes became puchero, latkes turned to crusty bread, and meat entered their reg­u­lar diet in spite of kosher restric­tions, either as bar­be­cues of the whole ani­mal (asado) or steaks (chur­rasco). Mate replaced Russian tea. No mat­ter where they had orig­i­nally come from, all immi­grant Jews became known as Russians, the rusos.

Intellectual life emi­grated as well. Either in the colony itself or in large urban cen­tres such as Buenos Aires and Rosario, Yiddish news­pa­pers flour­ished—Der Vogenblatt, Di Pampa, Unzer Vort—as well as impor­tant presses (these only in the cities), where much of the early twentieth-century Yiddish lit­er­a­ture from around the world was pub­lished. Jewish the­atres sprang up every­where. My grand­fa­ther, always inter­ested in world affairs, would read the papers out loud to my grand­mother. Years later, when she was liv­ing with us in Buenos Aires, we took her to see Fiddler on the Roof and she rec­og­nized the plot as the sto­ries of Sholem Aleichem, which my grand­fa­ther had read to her from Unzer Vort.

The colony had its heroes. The young son of a recent immi­grant cou­ple had been sent, after much parental sac­ri­fice, to study in Buenos Aires, the big city. The boy had lived in the back room of his uncle’s house and duti­fully attended school, until one day his uncle announced that he could no longer keep him, since he was sell­ing his busi­ness. Desperate to fin­ish his stud­ies and ashamed of return­ing home defeated, the boy asked for assis­tance from the pres­i­dent of the Republic, Irigoyen him­self. He walked over to the Presidential Palace, some­how got through the guards and, just as he was about to go into the president’s office, was arrested by the cus­to­di­ans. Since these were the days of Russian ter­ror­ism world­wide, and the threat of nihilists and anar­chists was in everyone’s mind, the young man was threat­ened with prison. Neither his looks nor his accent spoke in his favour. As this was going on, President Irigoyen hap­pened to ask what all the com­mo­tion was about and, upon being told, ordered that the pris­oner be brought to him. The boy explained his sit­u­a­tion. Sensing a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity for good pub­lic­ity, which pres­i­dents every­where always seem to need, Irigoyen ordered that a schol­ar­ship be set up to help this “coura­geous young Argentinian” in his endeav­ours. News of the boy’s achieve­ment trav­elled all the way to my grand­par­ents’ colony, and my grand­mother told me that from that day onward, the fam­ily was treated with the respect owed to those blessed by fate. The boy became known in Colonia Clara as “the president’s scholar.”

Other heroes had less limpid rep­u­ta­tions. A cer­tain cat­tle rustler and con man, famous for hav­ing stolen cat­tle from the local judge and then sold them back to the judge’s brother-in-law, and for hav­ing lit­er­ally won the shirt off the rabbi’s back in a poker game, was known to the com­mu­nity as Shmilkel the Gaucho. Imbued with nineteenth-century Russian polit­i­cal ideas, Shmilkel was also an anar­chist philoso­pher and some­times, dur­ing a holdup, he lec­tured his vic­tims on the evils of pri­vate prop­erty. Shmilkel came to a sad end: he was shot down in the street of another colony by an out­raged chicken farmer to whom he had sold a machine that could report­edly col­lect and box eggs and instead turned the farmer’s prof­its into a vast un-kosher omelette.

The intel­lec­tual hero of the Jewish set­tlers was a writer by the name of Alberto Gerchunoff, who cel­e­brated the immi­grant life in a book of short sto­ries that quickly became a clas­sic of Argentine lit­er­a­ture: The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, pub­lished in 1910. Gerchunoff’s par­ents, like my grand­par­ents, were among the early immi­grants who trav­elled from Russia to Argentina at Baron Hirsch’s expense. Gerchunoff was six years old when his fam­ily set­tled in the newly founded Colonia Moisésville: a few years later he moved to Entre Ríos, to the Colonia Rajil, not far from my grand­par­ents’ Colonia Clara. In 1895 he set­tled in Buenos Aires and became a writer and jour­nal­ist, describ­ing life in the colonies in many books, from his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, pub­lished in 1914, to My Country, Entre Ríos, in 1950. He was one of the lead­ing jour­nal­ists of his time and worked for many years for the news­pa­per La Nación, a paper that still claims to be the country’s most impor­tant daily. One of the mem­bers of the edi­to­r­ial board at the time was a vio­lently anti-Semitic Hungarian count­ess. One day she came across Gerchunoff in the paper’s offices and stopped him with a ques­tion: “Gerchunoff,” she said. “I hear you’re Jewish?” Without miss­ing a beat, Gerchunoff answered: “Yes, madam. And when­ever you wish I can put the proof in your hands.”

Gerchunoff wrote sev­eral other books, but The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, a won­der­ful series of snip­pets of colo­nial life, is his most famous. Less short sto­ries than anec­dotes, and less anec­dotes than nos­tal­gic sketches, the book is a kind of fam­ily album. One of the sketches opens as a Jewish gau­cho is pray­ing in his room on a Friday evening. Suddenly he hears a thief climb in through the win­dow and then escape with the sil­ver can­dle­sticks. Outraged, the gaucho’s wife comes in and berates him for not hav­ing done any­thing when he heard the thief. “I tried,” says the good man. “I tried. I told him he mustn’t break the Shabbat but he took the can­dle­sticks all the same. May God for­give him.”

The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas por­trays a com­mu­nity dis­lo­cated and reassem­bled, held together by the imag­i­na­tion of a tra­di­tion and the com­mon bond of being per­se­cuted. In the new Eden of the Argentine land­scape, they return to ances­tral cus­toms now tinged with exotic fea­tures, new senses and new vocab­u­lar­ies. They fall in love with gen­tiles and fol­low the laws of their adopted coun­try. They suc­ceed and they fail, some­times on their own terms and some­times on terms bor­rowed from their neigh­bours. They must, in a pro­found sense, be trans­lated into the other place that fate and Baron Hirsch have allowed them, and their small, every­day avatars con­sti­tute the bulk of Ger­chunoff’s book. The Jewish gau­chos are, in the eyes of their fel­low Jews, gau­chos, and in the eyes of their fel­low gau­chos, Jews. Wherever and who­ever they are, they con­tinue to be displaced.

Not every­thing was idyl­lic in the colonies. Life could be hard, prej­u­dice still existed, anti-Semitism made its grotesque appear­ance here as every­where. The Jewish gau­chos were accused of not assim­i­lat­ing, of pre­fer­ring their own kind to their gen­tile neigh­bours, of not help­ing non-Jews, of being inef­fi­cient farm­ers, of being dirty, of being dis­hon­est, of engag­ing in petty trade in the cities. Writing in 1926 for the American Geographical Society, the soci­ol­o­gist Mark Jefferson, in a report titled “Peopling the Argentine Pampa,” was moved to declare: “Direct obser­va­tion … shows that the Jews are per­son­ally just as clean as the [locals] about them, while their houses are cleaner. No doubt num­bers of them have been true to Jewish instinct and left their farms for trade in the cities, and there have aroused intense hos­til­ity and gained much busi­ness by sell­ing for much smaller profit than other tradesmen.” 

“Jewish instinct” — this is the undy­ing notion, what­ever it might actu­ally mean, that made a fel­low stu­dent accuse me, almost fifty years ago, of hav­ing a father who “liked money.” Over the clichés, the labels and the prej­u­dices, the assumed iden­tity of my ances­tors — of these Jewish gau­chos — casts its inef­fec­tual mov­ing shadow. They were will­ing to adapt to the new land, to start over yet again, to be some­thing that would not seem for­eign to oth­ers. In that, as in the for­eign land of Egypt so long ago, they sadly failed. 

Click to read about The Jewish Gauchos Legacy: a film that recalls Argentina’s immi­grant colonies