Dr. Marjorie Agosin, professor of humanities and Spanish at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, will speak about “A Family Memoir Growing Up in Chile” during a Zoom presentation at 3 p.m. Thursday.
The event is sponsored by Taubman Endowed Symposia at UCSB. The Taubman Symposia is intended to enrich understanding of Jewish history and culture among students, faculty, and community members alike.
Dr. Agosin is a poet, a human rights activist, literary critic, interested in Jewish literature and human rights in the Americas, women writers of Latin America, migration, identity and ethnicity.
Among her many books are “Dear Anne Frank: Poems” (1998); “Invisible Dreamer: Memory, Judaism and Human Rights” (2015); “Home: An Imagined Landscape” (2016); “Miriam’s Daughters: Jewish Latin American Women Poets” (2001); “Stitching Resistance: Women, Creativity and the Fiber Arts” (2014); and “A Cross and A Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile” (2022).
Dr. Agosin has authored two memoirs about her mother’s and father’s life during the turbulent years of 1938 to 1945. She will explore the process of writing about her family history and the voices that emerged as she explored her mother’s life growing up in the south of Chile in a community with five Jewish families and former SS Men.
In her father’s memoir, “Always from somewhere else,” Dr. Agosin will explore issues of belonging and identity and what it is like to be a foreign minority co-existing in a Catholic society. This talk will present a meditation on memory and oblivion as well as the power of narrative as a path for truth.
email: mmcmahon@newspress.com
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For more information, visit taubman.ucsb.edu.
