The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote
gaucho-cover
The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote
by Margarita Meklina

Loosely based on the biography of the Russian-born writer Alberto Gerchunoff, who became famous for his portrayal of Jewish gauchos living on the Argentinean pampas, the story of Naftali follows the adventures of a twelve-years old boy who escapes the Russia of the 19th century and moves with his family, under the sponsorship of the philanthropist Baron Maurice Hirsch, to a Jewish colony in Argentina, in the hope of finding a life free of the Russian Tsar and anti-Semitism. Along the way Naftali befriends a local eccentric with a dog so old that it has to be pulled on a platform with wheels; a boy who collects maps and uses them to travel in his imagination in defiance of the Pale of Settlement; a book peddler who introduces him to Cervantes’s Don Quixote; and young gauchos who teach him how to ride a rhea. Naftali’s story becomes a full-blown account of the childhood of a future writer who, possessed by dreams of Don Quixote and haunted by the murder of his father, overcomes the difficulties of immigration and grows infatuated not only with Don Quixote but with everything related to books. The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote covers not only the panorama of life in the Russian empire and then in Argentinean pampas as seen through a boy’s eyes, but also episodes of Cervantes’s novel that the sensitive and inquisitive young mind compares to his seemingly boring and uneventful life in Russia, imagining for example that Baron Hirsch is Don Quixote in disguise. The novel ends with an image of a mature Naftali who recounts his ordeal during a flood, when he is saved by another “Don Quixote,” a kind and mysterious gaucho, and decides to write a book about Cervantes and his creation. Naftali is well-read, goes to a Jewish school, and meets another original character, Favel Bavilsky, a poet who loves to weave romanticized stories. The novel is peppered with historical vignettes from the Jewish life and the far away past.

Also on our Bookshelf:

by Osip Mandelstam

This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.

by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

 

by Mark Budman

Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)

by Victor Enyutin

A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor  Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.

by Nina Kossman

A collection of poems in Russian. Published by Khudozhestvennaya literatura (Художественная литература). Moscow, 1990.

by Anna Krushelnitskaya

This collection of personal essays by a bi-national Russian/U.S. author offers glimpses into many things Soviet and post-Soviet: the sacred, the profane, the mundane, the little-discussed and the often-overlooked. What was a Soviet school dance like? Did communists go to church? Did communists listen to Donna Summer? If you want to find out, read on!