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

Agosin, Marjorie

3.28

29 ratings by Goodreads

9780826315731: A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826315739 ISBN 13: 9780826315731

Publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr, 1995

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"In Osorno, Chile, the Nazis were the great feudal lords of the south and being Jewish was like possessing a savage and dangerous scar." The author thus describes the backdrop for this memoir of growing up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants to Chile in the years before and after World War II. Speaking through the voice of her mother, she says, "I write these sometimes intermittent and true memories with the voice of an adolescent and then of a woman. . . . I wish to talk about my life in an unseemly and noisy house in southern Chile and about a town with fifty Nazis and three Jewish families. Everything I tell you is true and this is why I write so that it will be even more certain."
This beautifully written story offers glimpses of cultures and landscapes little known outside of Chile. The narrative weaves back and forth through time offering the stories of the narrator's family: her father who had to leave Vienna around 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer, her paternal grandmother who came to Chile in 1939 with a number tattooed on her arm, her mother's family from Odessa, and numerous aunts and uncles. The narrator returns to Osorno in 1993 and notes how little has changed. The Germans still display portraits of Hitler in their homes and sell Hitler memorabilia.

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About the Author:

Marjorie Agosin is associate professor of Latin American literature at Wellesley College.

From Kirkus Reviews:

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. (8 b&w illus.) -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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