A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile - Couverture souple

Agosin, Marjorie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1558611762 ISBN 13 : 9781558611764

Editeur : Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1997

Synopsis

Book by Marjorie Agosin

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

Human-rights activist Agosin (Spanish/Wellesley Coll.; Always from Somewhere Else, 1998, etc.) explores divergent veins of cultural identity in the face of brutality and alienation in a rhapsodic and provocative memoir. As a young Jewish girl whose family had fled the Holocaust, Agosin was keenly aware of her difference from the surrounding Chilean society: The overwhelmingly Catholic populace reacted to her faith with nonplussed bigotry. Within her separate community, though, her difference became a fount of sensual delight and inspirational faith, fueled by familial closeness. Her childhood seems to pass in an alternation between a lushly idyllic genteel poverty and the hard anti-Semitism endemic among citizens of a country that covertly supported the Third Reich. Agosin is a densely allusive writer, but underneath the poetic prose often lurk ideas that are stark and direct: "My mother played in a vanished world of things and objects lost in time." In 1973, when Pinochets junta assassinated President Allende (a friend of Agosin's family), her family fled Chile for Georgia, where linguistic and cultural displacement and the staring incomprehension she inspired as a Jewish Latina further traumatized the adolescent Agosin. In reflecting the adolescents yearning for what she has lost, her narrative here turns spookier: Her outcast friends resemble a family of crazies; the obese patrons of a Southern amusement park become a horror show. Finally, she rediscovers herself in the secret democracies of books and language, finding through writing in both English and Spanish the power to re-create what politics and exile have stripped from her. Throughout, Agosin's language returns to explorations of color, natural bounty, and minute recollections of lost foods, environs, stimuli, and ritual. Though clearly rooted in Latin American veins of magic realism, particularly Neruda, her formidible prose also evokes contemporary detail-oriented fantasists like Grace Paley and Stuart Dybek. Agosin's courage in tackling thorny topics - Jewish diaspora, cultural estrangement, Latin American fascism - renders a highly personal narrative powerful and appealing. --Kirkus Associates, LP.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Flung from Vienna to Chile by war or love, a group of Jewish families settle in a remote corner of the world and try to adapt to their new home. Magical images of childhood appear alongside the painful memories of a sensitive Jewish girl growing up amongst Nazi colonizers. In this unique memoir, renowned poet, fiction writer, critic, and activist Marjorie Agosin writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, the daughter of European Jewish immigrants, living in Chile in the years before, during, and after World War II. Frida recounts stories from her family's Jewish/Chilean history: of her father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who came to Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great grandmother, an immigrant from Odessa, who learned to speak Spanish in Chile and loved the language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Frida's stories of the past soften the realities of present times, when some immigrants from Germany still display portraits of Hitler m their homes and Jews still remain, after two generations, strangers in their own land. These stories are permeated with the shadow of faraway war in Europe, which haunts Frida's dreams and is a vivid presence in the everyday life in this Chilean town. For Frida the cross and the star of the title come to define two worlds that are for her distinct, yet inexorably entwined. Agosin's poetic reflections reveal a culture and a landscape little-known outside of her native land, explore the boundaries of "voice", and create a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and of words.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Feminist Press at The City University of New York
• Date d'édition: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1558611762
• ISBN 13: 9781558611764
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 179