Abstract
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 Adão 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.
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