Amazon.com Review
English is Ilan Stavans's fourth language, but you'd never know it from the elegance of his prose. Indeed, he claims in this fascinating intellectual memoir, he now thinks of himself "as having been born into Yiddish and Spanish and then having been lured away by English... [I] found my true self the moment I spoke Shakespeare's tongue." The grandson of Jewish immigrants, he never felt truly at home in Mexico, though he adored Spanish: "It is far easier for me to think of my birth as having occurred in the tongue of Quevedo, Cervantes, Borges, and Octavio Paz than to perceive myself as un mexicano hecho y derecho." He was thrilled to experience Hebrew (his third tongue) as a living language, but Israel proved only a way station for the writer, who eventually discovered that "the only place I feel I truly belong is New York." Certainly the inhabitants of America's polyglot, multicultural cities will feel the strongest affinity for Stavans's memories of his grandmother, who never again spoke a word of Russian or Polish after she emigrated to Mexico, and of a sense of self that shifted depending on the language he spoke. More personal in tone, though still firmly linked to his themes, are portraits of his father, an actor whose fluency with words of emotion and affection slightly overwhelmed Ilan, and of brother Darian, who compensated for a severe stutter by communicating through music but never quite outran his personal demons. The luminous closing section, "The Lettered Man," sums up the book's primary preoccupation: identity formation through language and literature. "Sometimes I have the feeling I'm not one but two, three, four people. Is there an original person? An essence? I'm not altogether sure, for without language I am nobody."
--Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
The prolific Stavans, author or editor of 18 books (including The Hispanic Condition and The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories) tries to elucidate his ethnically overdetermined condition as a Mexican Jew of Eastern European origins (his family's name originally was Stavchansky) who now lives in the U.S. This beautifully written memoir is the tale of a search for a homeland, for a language and for a calling. The last was perhaps the easiest to find. Infatuated with drama as the son of a successful stage and TV actor, he long imagined his future in the theater or in film. But in his 20s, he discovered literature. In writing his first novel, for the first time he "felt truly human... yes, literature was the answer my promised land." But if literature was a "portable" homeland, where was his concrete one? Stavans describes his efforts, after growing up in a fairly self-contained Jewish community in Mexico City, to be fully Mexican, involving himself in Marxist politics on his college campus. When that failed, he went to Israel and Spain, but neither place answered his need. And as for language, neither his native Spanish nor the Yiddish and Hebrew he learned as a schoolboy felt quite right. At last moving north, Stavans believes he may have found his place: "... to become an American writer of sorts. Could I ever?... I was a wandering soul, inhabiting other people's tongues." But he chose English as the language for his memoir and a fluid, natural English it is. Refreshingly, the memoir is not totally self-focused Stavans's search takes readers through the lives of others: his tough immigrant grandmother; his elusive, ever-changing actor of a father; his musically gifted but emotionally unstable brother. (on-sale: Aug. 27)Forecast: This tale of learning to live in translation should resonate with Americans of many ethnic backgrounds, not only Jewish and Latino.
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