Marjorie Agosín – författare

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), AgosÍn's and SepÚlveda'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.

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?

The first international anthology to explore women’s human rights from a literary perspective.More than half a century after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, women throughout the world still struggle for social and political justice. Many fight back with the only tools of resistance they possess-words. A Map of Hope presents a collection of 77 extraordinary literary works documenting the ways women writers have spoken out about human rights issues.Writers young and old, known and unknown, explore the dimensions of terror, the unspeakable atrocities of war, and the possibilities of resistance and refusal against all odds. Their poems, essays, memoirs, and brief histories examine issues that affect the condition of women in war, prison camps, exile, and as victims of domestic and political violence.A Map of Hope presents diverse women writers who have created a literature of global consciousness and justice. Their works give a face, an image, and a human dimension to the dehumanization of human rights violations. The collection allows readers to hear voices that have decided to make a difference. It goes beyond geography and ethnic groups; writers from around the globe are united by the universal dimensions of horror and deprivation, as well as the unique common struggle for justice and solidarity.

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 that women’s rights to be human rights, and bring gender issues into the global arena for the first time. The subordination of indigenous and minority women, ethnic cleansing, and the struggle for reproductive rights are some of the most pressing issues facing women worldwide.Women, Gender, and Human Rights is the first collection of essays that encompass a global perspective on women and a wide range of issues, including political and domestic violence, education, literacy, and reproductive rights. Most of the articles 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.

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 Jeweven 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.

On the impulse behind Cartographies, Marjorie Agosín 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, Agosín 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."Agosín's journey begins in Chile, where she spent her childhood before her family left in the early days of the Pinochet dictatorship. Of Santiago Agosín writes, "Day and night I think about my city. I dream the dream of all exiles." Agosín also travels to Prague and Vienna, ancestral homes of her grandparents, and to Valparaíso in Chile, which received them as immigrants. Kneeling among the yellow mounds at the Terezin concentration camp, where twenty-two of her relatives died, Agosín 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—from Julia, keeper of the synagogue at Rhodes, to the women potters in the Chilean town of Pomaire.Agosín writes of diaspora, exile, and oppression, yet only to highlight the dignity and valor of those who find refuge in their humanity and their art, in community and tradition. Cartographies shows us what can be found when we journey with openness, as approachable to strangers as we are to ourselves.

In this classic memoir that explores the Nazi presence in the south of Chile after the war, Marjorie Agosín 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. Agosín'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.

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 Agosín 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, Agosín 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.

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 Agosín, 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, Verónica Darer, Patricia Varas, Eugenia Muñoz, Darrell B. Lockhart, Ivonne Gordon Vailakis, Santiago Daydí-Tolson, Diana Anhalt, Ana Pizarro, Randall Couch, Patricia Rubio, Elizabeth Horan, Emma Sepúlveda, Luis Vargas Saavedra, and Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier.

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.

Every American is a descendant of either a Native American, and enslaved person, an immigrant, or a refugee. This book is devoted to the fourth category. The essays in this volume will study the concept of refuge as well as historical forced displacement and statelessness, trying to provide potential lasting solutions to the many problems associated with this situation. This volume is not only timely but expansive, as it moves from the pressing crisis of refugees to the crisis of humanity that seeks to find refuge.From refugees to asylum seekers, from climate change to war, from historical uprootedness and displacement to today’s crisis of refugeeism, these topics are mobilizing humanities scholars to think about refugees with a new sense of urgency. This book demonstrates how interdisciplinary cultural approaches grounded in the humanities can transform refugee conversations so often dominated by political science, economics, and other disciplines. In doing so, the collection sets up far more inclusive refugee discussions and urges humanities thinkers to respond by taking the lead in the face of environmental and sociopolitical uncertainties.

This intriguing group of travel journals reveals the voices of women who travelled in Latin America during the nineteenth century. From French nuns who left their homelands to establish convents in Latin America to well-bred English women who accompanied their husbands on business travels, these women discovered a world beyond anything they had known or expected and recorded it in their diaries. Includes previously unpublished work, as editor Marjorie Agosin found some of these diaries tucked away and forgotten in a musty convent library in Santiago, Chile. All entries show us the private thoughts and indomitable spirits of women who dared to move beyond the safety of hearth and home and in doing so, discovered not only new lands, but also themselves.

Over the past decade over 350 women around the city of Juarez, Mexico, have been raped and murdered. The remains of these brutalized young women continue to be found scattered in the parched desert, vacant city lots, and roadside ditches. Others are never found. In Secrets In The Sand, Agosin through her words and images invites her readers to bear witness to the reality that the grieving families of the disappeared and murdered young women face every day. As a poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin has dedicated her life's work to the search for justice and human dignity.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Marjorie Agosín è una poetessa pluri-premiata, saggista, narratrice e attivista, oltre che docente di Lingua Spagnola e di Letteratura Latino Americana al Wellesley College. Il suo lavoro sui diritti umani, in particolare sui diritti delle donne in Cile, ha ricevuto il riconoscimento da parte delle Nazioni Unite. La Professoressa Agosín ha vinto molti importanti premi letterari in Cile e in questo libro usa ancora una volta la sua poesia evocativa e la sua voce ben distinta per puntare le luci sulla storia nascosta di Venezia la cui ricchezza ben merita di essere registrata e ricordata.Il custode della memoria racconta gli incontri tra l’autrice e Aldo Izzo, il “Custode della Memoria,” del titolo, l’uomo che si è preso cura del Cimitero Ebraico veneziano per più di 30 anni. Quest’opera tuttavia va molto oltre il semplice omaggio all’infaticabile lavoro di Izzo, per divenire un viaggio sensoriale attraverso la antica città di Venezia, nel quale si intrecciano le memorie e le storie di coloro che ci hanno preceduto. Venezia, forse la più liminale tra le città, fa da sfondo a questa meditazione sugli aspetti profondi dell’esistenza umana. I primordiali contrasti tra luce e tenebre, acqua e terra, passato e presente, vita e morte, vengono esaltati dalle atmosfere delle fotografie in bianco e nero di Samuel Shats, che regalano uno sguardo indimenticabile e unico sui misteri della città. Con il progredire del racconto, gli aspetti insoliti e talvolta inquietanti di questa storia di Venezia si svelano, rendendo il libro molto di più che una semplice passeggiata attraverso le antiche calli della Serenissima.