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.

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’ 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.”

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.