Book Club: Poems from Jewish Latin America

I Am of the Tribe of Judah: Poems from Jewish Latin America, ed. Stephen Sadow, introduction, Ilan Stavans

Host Rick Chess in conversation with Stephen Sadow, Ilan Stavans, and Marjorie Agosin.

Stephen Sadow is a professor emeritus of Latin American literature and Jewish studies at Northeastern University in Boston. His books included the National Jewish Book Award-winning King David’s Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers (UNM Press).

Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast “In Contrast.”

Marjorie Agosín was raised in Chile, the daughter of Jewish parents.Heeding rumors of the coup that would install Augusto Pinochet, Agosín’s family left the country for the United States, where Agosín earned a BA from the University of Georgia and an MA and a PhD from Indiana University. In both her scholarship and her creative work, she focuses on social justice, feminism, and remembrance. Agosín is the author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. Her collections include The Angel of Memory (2001), The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life (2000), Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of my Chilean Jewish Father (1998), An Absence of Shadows (1998), Melodious Women (1997), Starry Night: Poems (1996), and A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (1995). Agosín has received numerous honors and awards for her writing and work as a human rights activist, including a Jeanette Rankin Award in Human Rights and a United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights. The Chilean government honored her with a Gabriela Mistral Medal for Lifetime Achievement. Agosín is the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American studies and a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.

From the back cover of the book:
“The first anthology of its kind for English-speaking readers, I am of the Tribe of Judah: Poems from Jewish Latin America brings together poetry from the Mexican border to the tip of South American. Originally written in Spanish, Portuguese, Yiddish, Ladino, Casteidish, and Hebrew, these poems have been translated into English, many for the first time, by a group of prize-winning translators.