In this unusual collection, poets rub shoulders with historians, a painter evokes memories that memory strives to forget, and researchers cut through the cant of politicians and the obfuscation of official records to get to the root of the disasters that have overtaken Jews in Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Editor Kristin Ruggiero brings together thirteen insightful interpreters of the Latin American Jewish experience - historians, sociologists and artists who re-create the particular Fragments they have lived. Whether writing as an émigré returning to Cuba, a Mexican savoring his Yiddish legacy, or a desaparecida surviving in an Argentine prison by reciting poetry to herself, each memoirist presents fresh and original ideas. Individual essays, grounded in significant historical research, reorient our thinking about racial identity in Brazil and the forces behind terrorist bombings in Buenos Aires. To a remarkable degree, the writers succeed in conveying the quality of their experience, its distinctive coloration and aroma and historical weight. Drawing the link between Nazism and the policies of Latin American dictators, the essays make plain and undeniable the hostile context for Jewish life on that continent. Dimensions of the pain caused by oppression are expressed in poetry, through ellipsis, con cariño, with love. These Fragments of Memory - of alienation, identity, and resistance - contribute significantly toward a phantom reconstruction of the multifaceted Latin American Jewish experience.
Since the 1970s, the Latin American Jewish Diaspora has been recognized as a unique phenomenon in diasporic studies, due to the development of new ways of thinking about internationalism and globalization. Important works of the 1980s and 1990s established the critical role of Jews in Latin America. This collection moves the field forward by providing an interdisciplinary and comparative view of Jewish experiences through history, literature, painting, anthropology, poetry, sociology, and politics.
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