By Donald H. Harrison

OCEANSIDE, Calf.  — When Lillian Swerdlow, 84, was growing up on the other coast of the United States, in Fall River, Mass., it was during that pre-television era when family members entertained each other. As far as she was concerned, there was no better time than when her father, Adolfo Krell, told stories of his boyhood as a little Jewish gaucho on the pampas of Argentina.

Swerdlow set about retelling her father's stories following her retirement in 1987 as a public health nurse in a clinic at Northam Elementary school in La Puente, Calif., and subsequent  relocation to Oceanside, about 40 miles north of San Diego.  Recently, the Jewish Braille Institute of New York City sent to her a tape recording of her booklet, The Little Jewish Gaucho, that had been made for blind children to enjoy. She is hopeful the story someday also will be published for sighted children.

Baron Maurice Hirsch of Austria had been given permission by Argentina in the late 19th century to establish a Jewish colony on the pampas. Swerdlow's great-grandfather, Rabbi Isaac Krell, was among a group of Lithuanian Jews who helped found  the Algarrobos (Carob trees) community in the Colonia de Mauricio Hirsch (Maurice Hirsch Colony) in the township of Carlos Casares. 
  
Lillian Swerdlow

When Adolfo was just 5-years-old,  his father, Gershom, died. His mother, Eva, brought him from Buenos Aires to Algarrobos, in the province of Santa Fe, where her father-in-law, the rabbi, had a farm.  Eva felt that she had to take a job and that Adolfo would be better off being raised in the Jewish Argentine community until she could get on her feet.  The farm and ranch hands were gauchos, who adopted the child as one of their own, teaching him to ride horses, care for cows and dress gaucho-style in the wide baggy pants known as bombacha, a ristra belt,  botas (boots),  espuelas (spurs), a red scarf, and a wide sombrero (hat.). Admiring Adolfo in that ensemble, they dubbed him un pequeño gaucho judio, a little Jewish gaucho.

Swerdlow's  book, written for juvenile readers,  tells of the day Adolfo was presented with his very own pony,  which he named Pinto, and another day when he attended at the birth of a calf which had purple spots over its body—a calf the boy soon adopted as a pet and named Violeta.

Adolfo lived in a multicultural world in which he would switch effortlessly  from the Yiddish of his grandparents, to the Spanish of the gauchos, to the Italian of his neighbors, absorbing not only the languages but the cultures of each.  In such a world, his zaddie (grandfather) and bubbie (grandmother) might serve him such Jewish desserts as  kichelah (cookies) or such Argentine trreats as dulce de leche, a sweet made with milk.

He also would accompany his grandpa, the ruv (rabbi) on errands throughout the colony, sometimes to perform a marriage, or a brit milah (ritual circumcision); other times to hear and settle disputes between neighbors.  Eventually, the far-flung communities decided they should have a central synagogue in the town of Carlos Casares, about 35 miles from Algarrobos, and under Ruv Isaac's leadership Sociedad Israelita was constructed.  

When Adolfo was 10, he received a letter from his mother telling him that she had remarried, and that he now had a new brother and sister.  The letter said that his mother and his new father would be soon be arriving in Carlos Casares, and as he drove with his grandfather on a surrey to meet them at the railroad station, Adolfo felt great anxiety.  Would his step-father like him?  Would he like his step-father?

Although the story is about her father, Swerdlow was able to tell it from the perspective of a 10-year-old boy—aided, no doubt, by the quarter century she spent as a nurse and administrator at a public health clinic serving elementary school children in La Puente.

Shortly after her retirement, Swerdlow traveled to Algarrobos and to Carlos Casares to visit the land that her father had so loved as a boy.  Her visit to the area, where the Jewish population had dwindled to a handful, attracted considerable attention.  Her family was well remembered, with one city council member in Carlos Casares  telling her that her great-grandfather also had once served on the township's city council. 

An elderly  Jewish woman made a point of telling  Swerdlow and the cousin with whom she traveled, Sara Krell, that she remembered the rabbi very well; in fact he had done a wonderful job performing her son's circumcision.  The cousins laughed at the woman's enthusiasm, speculating later that if the poor son had been there at the time, the mother might have made him drop his pants to show off the rabbi's handiwork!

In an interview at her home, Swerdlow said after her father returned to Buenos Aires with his mother and step-father, he was graduated from school and was drafted into the Argentine military. He was given leave in Philadelphia after his ship made a port-of-call there on New Year's Day 1918.  He made a fast trip to New York to find his uncle, who persuaded the youth to stay with him, and get a job, rather than returning to the ship.  Thus, said Swerdlow, her father entered the United States illegally, and it was not until many years later that he became an American citizen after being granted amnesty.  He initially worked as a  mechanic in a sewing factory in New York City.

Adolfo married  Swerdlow's mother, Esther, in New York City. Both of them loved to dance, especially the tango, Argentina's national dance. Swerdlow was born in 1922, with the family moving to Fall River, Mass.,  about the time she was 7, so her father could work in a mill.  Later they moved on to Holyoke, Mass., where her father took another industrial job. Following graduation from high school, Swerdlow went to New York City where she was trained as a nurse at Mt. Sinai Hospital.

Jimmy Doolittle, who already was famous for his air raid on Tokyo, appealed for more military nurses during a visit to the hospital and Swerdlow applied and was accepted for a commission as a second lieutenant. She arrived in England on June 6, 1944—D-Day—and was assigned to a hospital in the British midlands, which treated American casualties arriving from the European war theatre.

Near the end of the war, she attended services at the West End Synagogue in London that featured Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and former New York Gov. Herbert Lehman in an appeal for funds to help Jewish victims of the Holocaust to get to Palestine.  Even more memorable was VE (Victory in Europe) Day when, amid all the excitement, an Air Force sergeant whom she first met while touring Edinburgh Castle, proposed marriage.  She and Leonard Swerdlow, now deceased,  were married in Brooklyn in 1946.

In addition to raising three children, Swerdlow went to Columbia University to receive advanced training as a public health nurse.  The couple moved to California during the 1960s and her parents followed.  Like their mother, the three Swerdlow children— Michael, Barbara, and Ellen—grew up on Adolfo's stories of his life as a little Jewish gaucho.