A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile.
Lindstrom, Naomi
A Cross and a Star is Marjorie Agosin's reworking of episodes
and scenes recounted by her mother. In the early passages her mother is
the child of one of three Jewish families in Osorno, a town in the south
of Chile. In these far southern reaches, the landscape is beautiful, but
the presence of a substantial German community that retains its loyalty
to Hitler makes life unsettling. Later the family moves to a less remote
locale, the port city of Valparaiso. Agosin, a Chilean-U.S. poet and
critic born in 1955, tells the story as if she were her mother and had
herself undergone the experiences she narrates; only the ending portions
of the volume feature Agosin in her own voice. The resulting vicarious memoirs appeared in Spanish in 1994 under a somewhat different title,
Sagrada memoria: Reminiscencias de una nina judia en Chile. The present
English version by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman was published in 1995 by
the University of New Mexico Press. The 1997 edition is a paperback
reissue with a new foreword by the Peruvian novelist Laura Riesco.
At first the situation in Osorno may seem too simple to be
interesting, since the struggling and colorful Jewish settlers provoke
empathy and the anti-Semites are bad. Greater complexity is added by the
representation of Indian girls and women. Jewish and Indian girls attend
public school together and are both excluded from the German and
Catholic schools. While their shared exclusion gives rise to solidarity,
the two groups are not equal in status. Women of native ancestry also
work as servants in Jewish homes, and the heroine is sharply aware of
the preferential treatment she receives as a blue-eyed child with curly
blonde hair.
A Cross and a Star offers more themes than ethnic relations and a
memorable, good-hearted Jewish family. Agosin is also concerned with
creating passionately vivid images of the southernmost parts of South
America. Her special talent for fascinating readers with emotionally
charged descriptions is successfully deployed in these scenes of
isolated splendor. Children's and adolescents' discovery of
sexuality is a theme Agosin has often mined. In Cross the heroine
recalls with winning candor her and her brother's glimpses into
this forbidden realm. Longtime Agosin readers will recognize many
elements from her earlier books, such as the grandfather who was forced
to leave Vienna after falling in love with a non-Jewish cabaret dancer,
and certain phrases, such as the quotation "toward the splendid
city," that seem to haunt the author over the years.
A Cross and a Star should interest students of Latin American Jewish
narrative and readers who are following Agosin's work.
Naomi Lindstrom University of Texas, Austin
