Books by Marjorie Agosin

Helena Broder fled from Nazi Vienna to Chile. Her great-grand-daughter, poet, novelist, and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin, takes us on a journey through time and space, and across thresholds between life, death and dreams, to discover her great-grandmother's lost voice.

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 Agosín. 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.

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 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 writes of Diaspora, exile, and oppression.