Parricide on the Pampa? presents a radical rereading of Alberto Gerchunoff’s classic immigrant saga, Los gauchos judíos (1910; The Jewish Gauchos). This collection of stories about the early twentieth-century agricultural colonies founded by persecuted Eastern European Jews on the pampa has been both praised and damned –praised as Argentine Jewry’s citizenship papers and damned as a sellout to Argentine xenophobia.

In this new study and translation, Aizenberg reassesses the linguistic and ideological importance of Gerchunoff’s book. Using the insights of genetic criticism and current translation theory, she grounds her rethinking in her discovery of significant variations between Gerchunoff’s original 1910 text and his 1936 revised edition –the one on which subsequent editions and evaluations are based. Reading between versions, Aizenberg unearths a much more complex, agonistic, multilingual und ethnically-aware Gerchunoff. Her study is a major contribution to the contemporary pluralization of Latin American literary scholarship.

Edna Aizenberg is Professor of Spanish and Chair of Hispanic Studies at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She has published extensively in the fields of contemporary Latin American letters, African narrative, and postcolonial literature and theory. Her critical books and articles on Jorge Luis Borges, and on Alberto Gerchunoff and other Latin American Jewish writers, have received wide recognition, including Mexico’s Fernando Jeno Prize. One of the pioneers of contemporary Latin American Jewish literature studies, Prof. Aizenberg has served on the board of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA), and has taught and lectured on the subject at universities in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Israel. Her previous books include The Aleph Weaver (1984), Borges and His Successors (1990), and Borges, el tejedor del Aleph y otros ensayos (1997).