Agosín Marjorie - Among the angels of memory = Entre los ángeles de la memoria

M arjorie Agosn is a critically acclaimed Jewish Chilean-American poet, editor, and human rights activist. The author of over two dozen hooks, she is the Luella Laneer Slain Professor of Latin American Studies at Wellesley College. Agosn is the recipient of numerous honors for hoth her writing and her activities on behalf of oppressed peoples around the globe.

Agosns grandmother, Hlelena Broder, fled the Holocaust in 1939. Among the Angels of Memory documents Agosns physical and spiritual search for fragments of her grandmothers life in Vienna and Prague. According to the Kabbalah, any book can be an angel of memory. Thus the writing process itself becomes the vehicle for this exquisite poet to reach through time and touch the ghosts of her own familys history.

Diana Anhalt, in 7 The Texas Observer, describes how Agosn blends visions and recall her own and Others into a harmonious whole. She speaks to us of women in hats, cousins herded onto trains, and of Helena Broders sou, forced to crawl through Viennas streets scrubbing cobblestones. Her work is permeated with the musty scent of old photographs and lilacs.

Indeed, Among the Angels of Memory is a book that almost defies description. A work of reverie and remermbrance, it is also an unforget-able indictment of mankinds inhumanity. A work that relentlessly seeks for traces of a single Jewish woman, it is also brilliantly multicultural, bridging languages and cultures on three continents.

Marjorie Agosn has been called a one-woman literary movement. She has written and edited collections of poetry, essays, and fiction on a fascinating array of topics, from the mothers of the desaparicidos protesting in the Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires to the Chilean weavers who sew their memories of attrocities into their small tapestries Or arpilleras; from the Holocaust to the Jewish immigrant experience in America to Latina poets to Vincent Van Gogh.

For the past decade, Agosn has focused on a series of multi-genre, critically acclaimed memoirs of her family. As often as not these might qualify as magical realism, hut Agosns work goes beyond that shopworn term. As Elena Poniatowska writes, Agosn could well be the creator of a new fantastic literature in Latin America.

Still, more than anything else, Agosn is a poet of the heart, who writes exclusively in Spanish.

A dedicated human rights activist, Agosn is a recipient of the Jeanetta Rankin Award in Human Rights, the Good Neighbor Award from the Conference of Christians and Jews, the Girl Scouts Leading Women of 2000 Award, and the United Nations Human Rights Award. Almost all of her works reflect her deep) concern for human rights.

Agosns numerous literary awards include the Letras de Oro Prize and the Latina Literature Prize.

Among the Angels
of Memory

Entre los ngeles
de la memoria

The Angel of Memory by Natalia Nakazawa

Among the Angels of Memory / Entre los ngeles de la memoria
2006 by Marjorie Agosn

Introduction 2006 by Robert Bonazzi

Cover painting, Tricorn, by Yevgenia Nayberg. Used by permission.
Frontis illustration, The Angel of Memory, 2005 by
Natalia Nakazawa. Used by permission.
The translation of Entre los ngeles de la memoria into English was
made possible in part by a generous grant from Wellesley College.

Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-916727-13-0
ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-060-6
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-061-3
Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-062-0

Wings Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Agosn, Marjorie.
Among the angels of memory = Entre los ngeles de la memoria /written by Marjorie Agosn; translated from the Spanish by Laura Rocha Nakazawa.-- 1st Wings Press ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-916727-13-0 / 978-0-916727-13-0
I. Title: Entre los ngeles de la memoria. II. Nakazawa, Laura Rocha. III. Title.
PQ8098.1.G6A76 2006
861.64--dc22

2005034339

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