Over a three-year period, award-winning Chilean poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin interviewed nine Jewish women immigrants who arrived in the US from Europe and Latin America between 1939 and the 1970s. Some came as children, others as adults; some were well-off, others refugees. These conversations reveal diverse experiences of exile as well as multiple attitudes toward North American politics, people, and culture. What I found most amazing as I grew to know these women, Agosin writes, was that despite such profound differences, we all shared something greater: the experience of exile and the quality of being foreign. Arranged chronologically, with the older women speaking first, each conversation opens with a short introduction that provides context for each woman's life. These uncertain travelers -- so named to highlight the possibility and difficulty of their journeys -- discuss food, friendship, work, language, writing, anti-semitism, and politics, in familiar language. Angry, affecting, and disturbing, the conversations unfold as they do in life, inviting the reader to share an extended meditation on how writing, speaking, and memory join to restore a personal and collective past.
- ISBN10 0874519454
- ISBN13 9780874519457
- Publish Date 1 August 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 February 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Brandeis University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 300
- Language English