Rutas transnacionales de la biografía: Alberto Gerchunoff

Abstract

This article emphasizes the importance of a transnational emphasis when writing biographies of Jewish intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century focusing on the case of the Argentinean writer and journalist Alberto Gerchunoff. Born in the Russian Pale in 1884, Gerchunoff, who died in Buenos Aires in 1950, had a very active participation in the Latin American cultural world. He was a journalist in the reputed newspaper La Nación and he wrote novels, short stories, biographies, and literary criticism. He was active in national politics in Argentina as well as in the organized Jewish institutions of the country. The Jewish question was a central concern throughout his whole life, and it became his obsession after the 1930s when antifascist militancy first, and direct involvement in the campaign for the creation of the State of Israel later, threw him into the international political arena. A bridge figure between different traditions, Gerchunoff was multilingual and multicultural and hence can be better understood if studied at the intersections of these different languages and cultures. I study Gerchunoff’s complete oeuvre hoping to resituate him within his intelectual milieu that includes the cultural world of Buenos Aires as well as international cosmopolitan networks of publication and literary endeavors in Spanish, English, and Yiddish. Gerchunoff’s life is a vantage point from which to analyze the Argentinean cultural world of the first half of the twentieth century, the cultural exchanges between Argentina and other countries in the Americas, and also the poetic, artistic and historic turning points that defined the intellectuals of the period.