An eleven-year-old's world is upended by political turmoil in this "lyrically ambitious tale of exile and reunification" (Kirkus Reviews) from an award-winning poet, based on true events in Chile. Celeste Marconi is a dreamer. She lives peacefully among friends and neighbors and family in the idyllic town of Valparaiso, Chile--until one day when warships are spotted in the harbor and schoolmates start disappearing from class without a word. Celeste doesn't quite know what is happening, but one thing is clear: no one is safe, not anymore. The country has been taken over by a government that declares artists, protestors, and anyone who helps the needy to be considered "subversive" and dangerous to Chile's future. So Celeste's parents--her educated, generous, kind parents--must go into hiding before they, too, "disappear." Before they do, however, they send Celeste to America to protect her. As Celeste adapts to her new life in Maine, she never stops dreaming of Chile. But even after democracy is restored to her home country, questions remain: Will her parents reemerge from hiding? Will she ever be truly safe again? Accented with interior artwork, steeped in the history of Pinochet's catastrophic takeover of Chile, and based on many true events, this multicultural ode to the power of revolution, words, and love is both indelibly brave and heartwrenchingly graceful.

"This collection is a testimony of hope and endurance through the power of writing. The experience that unites us and that we want to share with you is the experience of exile, of belonging neither in Chile nor the United States: our experience of existing between two cultures and not feeling comfortable in either of them, of choosing the path of political activism and uniting our destiny with that of the voices of marginalized women." --Marjorie Agosin "I am convinced that [these letters] should be made public as a testimony of the life of women in Latin America, and of the Latina immigrants who live in the United States. The histories interwoven in our correspondence are not exceptions, they are the norm. These episodes from the lives of Marjorie and Emma are part of a voluminous tome of common histories that have been lived and continue to be lived by Latin American women, from our grandmothers to our daughters. --Emma Sepulveda

This collection of letters chronicles a remarkable, long-term friendship between two women who, despite differences of religion and ethnicity, have followed remarkably parallel paths from their first adolescent meeting in their native Chile to their current lives in exile as writers, academics, and political activists in the United States. Spanning more than thirty years (1966-2000), Agosin's and Sepulveda's letters speak eloquently on themes that are at once personal and political--family life and patriarchy, women's roles, the loneliness of being a religious or cultural outsider, political turmoil in Chile, and the experience of exile.

I only wanted to write about them, / Narrate their fierce audacity, / Their voyages through the channels of the Mediterranean. So begins a poetic journey through the islands of the Mediterranean that served as homes and refuge for the Sephardic Jews after the Alhambra Decree, which ordered their expulsion from Spain. Inspired by her own journey to Salonika and the Greek Islands, Rhodes, Crete, as well as the Balkans, Marjorie Agosin searches for the remnants of the Sepharad. Presented in a beautiful bilingual Spanish-English edition, Agosin's poems speak to a wandering life of exile on distant shores. We hear the rhythm of the waves and the Ladino-inflected voices of Sephardi women past and present: Paloma, Estrella, and Luna in the fullness of their lives, loves, dreams, and faith. An evocative and sensual voyage to communities mostly lost after the Holocaust, The White Islands offers a lighthouse of remembrance, a lyrical world recovered with language and song, lament and joy, longing and hope.

Marjorie Agosin is an award-winning poet, essayist, fiction writer, and activist, as well as Professor of Spanish language and Latin American literature at Wellesley College. The United Nations has honored her work on human rights, notably for women's rights in Chile. Professor Agosin has won many important literary awards and in this book she, once again, uses her evocative poetry and distinctive voice to illuminate a hidden history of Venice that so richly deserves to be recorded and remembered. "The Guardian of Memory" chronicles the meetings between the author and Aldo Izzo, the eponymous "Guardian of Memory," a man who has tended the Venetian Jewish cemeteries for over 30 years. However, this work goes far beyond a mere homage to Aldo Izzo's tireless work and becomes a sensory journey through the ancient city of Venice that is interleaved with memories and stories of those who have gone before. Venice, perhaps the most liminal of cities, serves a backdrop to this meditation on the profound aspects of human existence. The elemental contrasts of light and dark, water and land, past and present, life and death, are enhanced by the atmospheric black and white photographs of Samuel Shats to provide an unforgettable and unique insight into the mysteries of the city. As the book progresses, so the strange and, at times, ominous aspects of this history of Venice unfold, thus making this book so much more than a mere walk through the ancient streets of La Serenissima.

This new edition of The House of Memory: Stories by Jewish Women Writers of Latin America revisits the meaning of heritage and home, exploring the experience of losing the familiar to embrace the unknown. While often painful in its examination of antisemitism, this collection of essays embraces the belief that hope and love can triumph over adversity and racism. This collection contains over thirty stories from internationally acclaimed writers, such as Clarice Lispector and Margo Glantz, as well as new voices, with some appearing for the first time in English translations. Although many of the stories are rooted in the Jewish experience and tradition, there is a universal resonance that transcends place, race, gender and religion to speak of matters that are still ever-present to all of us.

In this evocative and emotional work, the poet, novelist, and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin pays homage to her great-grandmother, Helena Broder. As a young woman, Helena escaped Vienna to seek refuge in Chile, leaving shortly after the Night of Broken Glass in 1938 when the Nazi regime unleashed a campaign of violence, terror and destruction against the Jewish population. This book takes readers on Marjorie's journey through time and space, and across thresholds between life, death and dreams, to discover Helena's lost voice. This is not a linear journey, but one that braids together the past, the present, and the future, allowing Marjorie to give Helena, an exiled woman, a third home in the liminal space of memory and literature; a safe haven where she can be complete rather than fragmented, a place where her "exhausted suitcase" can finally rest. This touching collection of poems, in Marjorie Agosin's native Spanish together with Alison Ridley's delicate English translation, is accompanied by images from the Chilean photographer Samuel Shats, as well as poignant memorabilia of Helena herself.

All caregivers are called upon to recognize both the pain and beauty in this world and to help move society towards an “Ideal City”. Beauty is the aesthetic by which healers can care for their patients. The book proclaims three manifestos for healing: • Healing a Violent World. Healers of every type are called on to reduce the pain of human suffering by working towards a non-violent, empathetic world. • Healing the Healer. Those who give care to the suffering patient in turn suffer themselves, and this manifesto asks that healers recognize their vulnerability, and to engage in conversation to help them towards diminishing the pain that they feel. • Healing Power of Justice. Justice needs to be recognized as the pathway to healing. Justice is a powerful force for human and social transformation and its pursuit is both intense and often tragic. These three manifestos, together with the sentiments of poetry that intersperses them, are published here to awaken your sense of healing. This book is published in partnership with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma (HPRT) which has pioneered the health and mental health of survivors of mass violence and torture, refugees, and traumatized communities worldwide over the past four decades.

Anne Frank was a young Jewish girl forced into hiding with her family by the Nazi regime that occupied the Netherlands in the Second World War. No one would have known of her, her family or their fate had it not been for the survival of the diary that she kept during this time, a book that has long been an inspiration to the poet and writer Marjorie Agosin. In her quest to introduce more young people to this tragic tale of the irrepressible Anne, the author provides a lyrical and engaging imagining of Anne's world. Through Anne's eyes, the reader is taken on the family's journey: their flight from Hitler's Germany, the excitement of a new start in Amsterdam and their eventual confinement in a small set of hidden rooms where they lived in fear of discovery, transportation and likely death.

"Our century has become marked by the distinct, bitter tinge of nomadism and emigration." The sixteen essays in this book are by writers from diverse parts of the world recalling their experiences and emotions of what is meant by the concept of Home. Each essay is written with evocative and often lyrical tones of great beauty as well as lucidity. Many of the essays describe homes that exist no longer, and homes that have changed or disappeared through time. Yet the power of place is real: each author understands that Home belongs to the landscape of the imagination, with a power to recover and to transform. It is perhaps no coincidence that all of the contributors make their home in the USA, a nation that has defined itself by its emigrant imagination and a nation that has allowed its immigrants to be Americans while also holding on to who they were in the past. Through their experiences, the authors are both outsiders and insiders. They carry their dreams of homeland wherever they settle, for Home is never lost but real in its evocation and the power to remember.

This book gathers a collection of multidisciplinary essays written by distinguished scholars, visual artists, and writers. The common thread of these essays addresses the ways in which fiber arts have enriched and empowered the lives of women throughout the world. From Ancient Greece to the Holocaust, to the work of grassroots organizations, these essays illustrate the universality of fiber arts.

The relationship between historical or traumatic events and the memories created by them are examined in this selection of essays by writers who have been affected by the social and political upheavals of Latin America during the past four decades. Recognizing the impact these events have had upon both collective and individual memory, these essayists also recall hard times living through the McCarthy era and the AIDS epidemic as well as the effects of living in exile from Chile and the bicultural reality around the U.S. border with Mexico. Contributors include Nancy Barra, Claudia Bernardi, Julio Cortazar, June Carolyn Erlick, Eduardo Galeano, Maria Rosa Lojo, and Peter Winn.

On the impulse behind Cartographies, Marjorie Agosin writes, ""I have always wanted to understand the meaning of displacement and the quest or longing for home. In these lyrical meditations in prose and poetry, Agosin evokes the many places on four continents she has visited or called home. Recording personal and spiritual voyages, the author opens herself to follow the ambiguous, secret map of her memory, which ""does not betray."" Agosin's journey begins in Chile, where, before her family left in the early days of the Pinocher dictatorship, she had spent her childhood. Of Santiago Agosin writes, ""Day and night I think about my city. I dream the dream of all exiles."" Agosin also travels to Prague and Vienna, ancestral homes of her grandparents, and to Valparaiso in Chile, which received them as immigrants. Kneeling among the yellow mounds at the Terezin concentration camp, where twenty-two of her relatives died, Agosin places ""small stones, shrubs, the stuff of life on graves I did not recognize."" And then on through the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Americas...Everywhere, she is drawn to women in whose devotion and creativity she sees a deep vein of hope.

The Chilean coup d'etat of 1973 was a watershed event in the history of Chile. It was also a defining moment in the life of writer Marjorie Agosin.
This collection of prose vignettes and free verse draws upon her experiences as a child in Chile, an expatriate abroad, and a minority Jew--even in the land she calls home--to create a striking portrait of a life of exile. The tone of the book varies as it lyrically explores the geography of Chile and weaves into it the themes of exile and oppression. At times the words become hymns to the physical beauty of her country, evoking the grandeur of this land extending to the southernmost tip of the world. At times they are intimate and melancholy, exploring personal and familial history through miniature portraits that reveal the pain of being different. Finally the tone becomes angry as she denounces the injustices committed against her friends and against the families of the disappeared during the seventeen-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Combining themes of memory, childhood, minority issues, Judaism, and political oppression, this collection contains some of Agosin's strongest work. "Of Earth and Sea" is a poetic autobiography that explores the world of Chile with eyes that see both despair and hope.

In these lyrical meditations in prose and poetry, Marjorie Agosin evokes the many places on four continents she has visited or called home. Recording personal and spiritual voyages, the author opens herself to follow the ambiguous, secret map of her memory, which ""does not betray."" Through Agosin's memories and reflections on exodus, migration, and moving beyond the familiar we learn what can be found when we journey with openness, as approachable to strangers as we are to ourselves.

In "Taking Root," Latin American women of Jewish descent, from Mexico to Uruguay, recall their coming of age with Sabbath candles and Hebrew prayers, Ladino songs and merengue music, Queen Esther and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Jewish immigrant families searched for a new home and identity in predominantly Catholic societies. The essays included here examine the religious, economic, social, and political choices these families have made and continue to make as they forge Jewish identities in the New World.
Marjorie Agosin has gathered narratives and testimonies that reveal the immense diversity of Latin American Jewish experience. These essays, based on first- and second-generation immigrant experience, describe differing points of view and levels of involvement in Jewish tradition. In "Taking Root," Agosin presents us with a contemporary and vivid account of the Jewish experience in Latin America.
"Taking Root" documents the sadness of exile and loss but also a fierce determination to maintain Jewish traditions. This is Jewish history but it is also part of the untold history of Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and all of Latin America.

In this classic memoir that explores the Nazi presence in the south of Chile after the war, Marjorie Agosin writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, who grew up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants in Chile in the World War II era. Woven into the narrative are the stories of Frida's father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great-grandmother from Odessa, who loved the Spanish language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Agosin's A Cross and a Star is a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and words. This edition includes a collection of important new photographs, a new afterword by the author, and a foreword by Ruth Behar.

Latin America has been a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution from 1492, when Sepharad Jews were expelled from Spain, until well into the twentieth century, when European Jews sought sanctuary there from the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. Vibrant Jewish communities have deep roots in countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, and Chile--though members of these communities have at times experienced the pain of being "the other," ostracized by Christian society and even tortured by military governments. While commonalities of religion and culture link these communities across time and national boundaries, the Jewish experience in Latin America is irreducible to a single perspective. Only a multitude of voices can express it.

This anthology gathers fifteen essays by historians, creative writers, artists, literary scholars, anthropologists, and social scientists who collectively tell the story of Jewish life in Latin America. Some of the pieces are personal tales of exile and survival; some explore Jewish humor and its role in amalgamating histories of past and present; and others look at serious episodes of political persecution and military dictatorship. As a whole, these challenging essays ask what Jewish identity is in Latin America and how it changes throughout history. They leave us to ponder the tantalizing question: Does being Jewish in the Americas speak to a transitory history or a more permanent one?

"This anthology adds strength and credence to the struggle for women's human rights. It reinforces the conviction that no society can prosper and no new world be born until the rights of women are fully protected and realized."-William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, USA "The devastating commonalities and startling differences in women's oppression and activism around the world are keenly explored in this excellent anthology. Agosin's collection provokes a powerful reexamination of the human rights field."-Jacqueline Bhabha, Harvard University "This moving anthology, masterfully compiled by poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin, is a must for scholars, students, and human rights workers; it also will captivate the general reader."-Elena O. Nightingale, scholar-in-residence, National Academy of Sciences "Essential reading, Women, Gender, and Human Rights argues forcefully and convincingly that the elimination of gender-based violence and discrimination, so often ignored by governments and aid organizations, must be at the center of the struggle for social justice and human dignity in this new century."-Eric Stover, author of The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses the credo that all human beings are created free and equal. But not until 1995 did the United Nations declare women's rights to be human rights, and bring gender issues into the global arena for the first time. Women, Gender, and Human Rights is the first collection of essays encompassing a wide range of women's issues, including political and domestic violence, education, literacy, and reproductive rights. Most of the essays were written expressly for this volume by internationally known experts in the fields of government, bioethics, medicine, public affairs, literature, history, anthropology, law, and psychology. Recipient of the Henrietta Szold Award by Hadassah (2001), the Gabriela Mistral Medal of Honor (2000), and the United Nations Leadership Award (1999), Marjorie Agosin is a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. Among her books are A Map of Hope: Writings on Women and Human Rights and The Alphabet in My Hands (both by Rutgers University Press).

Gabriela Mistral is the only Latin American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even so, her extraordinary achievements in poetry, narrative, and political essays remain largely untold. Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler explores boldly and thoughtfully the complex legacy of Mistral and the way in which her work continues to define Latin America. Edited by Professor Marjorie Agosin, Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler addresses for the first time the vision that Mistral conveyed as a representative of Chile during the drafting of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration. It depicts Mistral as a courageous social activist whose art and writings against fascism reveal a passionate voice for freedom and justice. The book also explores Mistral's Pan-American vision and her desire to be part of a unified American hemisphere as well as her concern for the Caribbean and Brazil. Readers will learn of her sojourn in Brazil, her turbulent years as consul in Madrid, and, finally, her last days on Long Island. Students of her poetry, as well as general readers, will find Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler an insightful collection dedicated to the life and work of an inspiring and original artist. The contributors are Jonathan Cohen, Joseph R. Slaughter, Veronica Darer, Patricia Varas, Eugenia Munoz, Darrell B. Lockhart, Ivonne Gordon Vailakis, Santiago Daydi-Tolson, Diana Anhalt, Ana Pizarro, Randall Couch, Patricia Rubio, Elizabeth Horan, Emma Sepulveda, Luis Vargas Saavedra, and Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier.