Return to a promise land on the Pampas.

• Author: Goodman, Joshua

Was the Jewish gaucho more myth than reality? today, his descendants in rural Argentina are reviving their forgotten history and forging links to the urban needy

Vila Dominguez has the charms of many a small town in rural Argentina--the crumbling railroad station, the abandoned cinema, the bare-bones schoolhouse. But it didn't take long to realize that this wasn't just another ghost town testifying to Argentina's former prominence as the world's breadbasket. Although my arrival wasn't preannounced, the unfamiliar sight of my rented Daewoo Tico was enough to galvanize the welcoming committee. As I stepped out of the car, an elderly man clad in typical gaucho dress--shin-high rubber boots, baggy trousers known as bombachas, and a brown, beret-like boina--was hollering hello from across the main drag and frantically making a beeline straight towards me. "Kenz redn Yid?," he eagerly asked, inches from my face and a few decibels too loud. "Can you speak Yiddish?"

My bewildered expression must have been a good enough answer because before I was able to utter a response I was being pushed inside a corner building, the town museum, I later discovered, and barraged with a laundry list of facts and figures all told with encyclopedic precision. "My father and mother were born in Amdur in the region of Grodno near Lithuania. On May 12, 1895, they boarded the Bismark for Argentina. The ticket cost 2,000 rubles per family. With him came the Weiners, Agerneszkins, Tevelezs, and Kovals--390 families in all. On June 22, 1895, they arrived in Argentina. Each was given fifty hectares [124 acres] of land to cultivate. Everyone suffered a great deal at first, but nobody complained. We were here to make America."

So much for introductions. Not that I needed one. By the time my jumpy new friend slowed down enough for me to get his name, Alejandro Efron, and record his age, eighty-six, I already knew I was in the presence of no country yokel. As if transported through time to a bygone era, standing before me was an authentic, modern-day version of the mythical character I came to Dominguez in search of--the Jewish gaucho, that rare breed of cowboy who fled persecution in Europe to carve out in Argentina's fertile pampas his own version of the promised land.

But later, after Efron tired of my ignorant interjections and I of his delightful but frenzied and long-winded responses, the town took on a new hue. Left to my own devices, a wide array of incongruous details became apparent--in replacement of the customary four-cornered, Spanish-designed plaza was a round-shaped one, from which eight diagonally oriented streets emanated like spokes on a wagon wheel. Further, nowhere in sight was the ubiquitous Catholic church. And the street signs, which in Argentina typically carry the names of the country's founding fathers, instead bore Slavic-sounding ones like Yarcho and Sajaroff.

Later these subtle clues were reenforced by more obvious landmarks: a grove of palm trees planted in the shape of a Jewish candelabrum, the ceremonial entranceway to what was Latin America's first Jewish hospital; a synagogue built in 1923 with Torah scrolls brought from Russia; lofty, rusting grain silos that belonged to the Jewish-owned cooperative, one of Argentina's first; all relics from the days when Dominguez was the vibrant hub of a Borscht belt of over fifty surrounding Jewish agricultural settlements.

Sadly, though, other than these decaying physical reminders, little of the town's former glory remains. Of Dominguez's nineteen-hundred residents, today only seventy are Jews, most of them senior citizens, their sons and daughters having migrated long ago to Israel or Buenos Aires. And its serene-looking synagogue now opens just twice a year, for the high holidays, and only then after a rabbinical student is shipped in from Buenos Aires (Dominguez's last rabbi left decades ago).

Meanwhile the local economy is depressed. Ever since the co-op closed for good...