SOURCE: Kandiyoti, Dalia. “Comparative Diasporas: The Local and the Mobile in Abraham Cahan and Alberto Gerchunoff.” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 1 (spring 1998): 77-79, 95-122.

In the following essay, Kandiyoti compares two works of Jewish immigration fiction: Abraham Cahan's Yekl and Alberto Gerchunoff's Los Gauchos Judios, and with the section on Gerchunoff, she considers how regional politics and nationalism influenced his writing.

Recently proliferating theories and politics of migration and diaspora have focused on issues of assimilation, nativism, and nationalism without sufficient consideration of one important concept: the discourse of place as a generative source of culture, and, significantly, the role of place in the experience of displacement and immigrant identity.¹ This is a curious gap in critical thinking, especially since the current border crises and immigration panics are about constant redefinitions of place, territory, and frontiers. Even the postmodernist stress on theories of “the local” and the politics...