A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) [Paperback]

Marjorie Agos­in (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series | Publication Date: September 1, 1997

Jewish life in Latin America is explored through a "passionate, fantastical, poetic" literary sensibility.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Review

"So many images stay with me from this book: the chocolate that grows on trees, the eiderdown quilts hidden from the Nazis . . ." -- Ruth Behar, author of

"[Her] poetic voice in one breath captures the astounding beauty of the southern tip of the world and the painful memories of a sensitive Jewish girl . . ." -- Isabel Allende, author --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558611762
• ISBN-13: 978-1558611764
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,217,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Independent Reviews Site ..., February 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) (Paperback)

Poets seem to have a knack with memoir. There's alreadysomething very baring about much contemporary poetry that is similarto what many memorably brave and direct memoirs possess. There's also something even more immediate about translation. Works translatedinto English often have a stunning directness, which can owe itself tothe difficulty of effectively bringing the idioms and cadence ofanother language into our own. These tendencies, like any elements ofwriting, can be effective and they can also be overused. InMarjorieAgosin's A CROSS AND A STAR: MEMOIRS OF A JEWISH GIRL INCHILIE, they are both. Luckily, the effectiveness of the writing outweighs the repetitiveness of certain phrases and elements. The brevity of the book, 179 pages which include 30 pages of photographs, serves it well. Agosin is writing in the voice of her mother, so the book becomes a sort of autobiography by association, and as such the stories are simple and powerful. If the book had been any longer, the simplicity of its thematic basis, and the overly-direct style of the translated prose, would have begun working against it. As it is, the collection effectively evokes the beauty and wonder of Chile, the destructive power of hatred in the lives of one family, and the power of people who choose to help, rather than hurt, each other. The tales in the collection span decades, and many have survived only due to oral storytelling traditions by which Agosin's predecessors maintained their connections with each other even in the face of the overwhelming tragedies of the Holocaust. Most evocative are thestories dealing with specifics of lives torn apart by having to leaveeverything behind in order to avoid being taken to concentrationcamps; the details of these stories, the choices made by theseindividuals, are compelling. Agosin's accounts, too, of the mixture ofbeauty, fear, peace and isolation that came from living at thesouthern tip of the world amidst Nazis and natives is fascinating. Theonly places where the narrative falters is in the repetition ofaccounts of verbal abuse which the Agosin's mother endured. Thereare only so many times you can be told that she was called "dirtyJew" or "Christ killer" before those moments have lost their power amid the lush prose and captivating details. One of the most striking aspects of the memoir is the way in which it seems to flow back and forth between pure realism and a kind of "Magic Realism." This is in keeping with the events of the book, taking place at the bottom of the world, as well as the ways in which people can alter their perceptions of reality to deal with incredible adversity. Since the narrator is recalling childhood for the bulk of the book, simple desires are often stated with great grandeur, such as Agosin's mother's wish for the beauty and safety of a Catholic guardian angel. Much of the narrative's power comes from the unaffected wants and needs of a girl growing-up surrounded by a mixture of overwhelming hatred and beauty, societal spurning and familial love. It is a mixture that works well. This book is an effective, and highly readable collection of survival tales that sing of natural beauty and spiritual strength, of the wonder of children and the resolve of adults, and of the incredible value of memory and language.

4.0 out of 5 stars beautifully written, December 5, 2009

By 

Leslie (California, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) (Paperback)

This book seemed to be more of a poetic description of life as a Jew in Chile than a story. Either way I can't complain the author grew up in a Poetic country:) Beautifully written.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cross and a Star by Agosin, May 26, 2009

By 

Marielina Figueroa "msmare" (LA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series) (Paperback)

The book speaks about survival and how trauma affects your memory for the rest of your life. It is also about family love and hope. It is beautifully written.