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A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. In Nuestra America, eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz traces his grandparents' exile from Eastern Europe to South America. At the same time, the book is a pretext to explain and analyze theworldview, culture, and spirit of countries such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, from the perspective of educated Jewish emigrants imbued with the hope and determination typical of those who escaped Europe in the 1920s. Lomnitz's grandparents, who were both trained to defy ghetto life with the pioneeringspirit of the early Zionist movement, became intensely involved in the Peruvian leftist intellectual milieu and its practice of connecting Peru's indigenous past to an emancipatory internationalism that included Jewish culture and thought. After being thrown into prison supposedly for their socialist leanings, Lomnitz's grandparents were exiled to Colombia, where they were subject to its scandals, its class system, its political life. Through this lens, Lomnitz explores thealmost negligible attention and esteem that South America holds in US public opinion. The story then continues to Chile during World War II, Israel in the 1950s, and finally to Claudio's youth, living with his parents in Berkeley, California, and Mexico City.

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9781635420708

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This book is a search for the author's intellectual and spiritual sources in his family history. It includes the story of his grandfather, and how through a life of (often forced) emigration, between seven countries on three continents, speaking eight languages, he forged his own universalist variant of the remarkable secular Jewish humanist tradition--one part of a legacy that clearly lives on in the perceptive insights and wide sympathy of the grandson's ethnography. It's a really fascinating book! --Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age and recipient of the Kyoto Prize Nuestra America: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation is a remarkable book--part family history, part intellectual autobiography, part eyewitness account of World War II, the Holocaust, the kibbutzim, part reflections on exile. With narrative mastery, Claudio Lomnitz leads us on an unsuspected journey from the outskirts of Bessarabia to Latin America and the United States, with pit stops in Israel and the Berkeley campus. A must-read for those intrigued by the vagaries of 20th-century history, with its diasporas, migrations, settlements, and resettlements. --Ruben Gallo, Princeton University, author of Freud's Mexico and Mexican Modernity Here, the author and the book make each other. By producing archives previously unbeknownst to him, Claudio Lomnitz enters into conversation with his own book to investigate himself and his family while building a theory of history: if this book puts the family as the center of that theory of history it is not just because Claudio is an anthropologist; it is not just because he was invaded by unbearable nostalgia; it is not just because he has suffered the loss of members of his family; it is not just because. It is also because the family as a random dynamic of people linked by consanguinity and affinity--that is, not as an institution, because institutions are elective, optional structures--is an impossible actor of historical events; its members are unpredictable, they wander around intimacy and distance, they cannot judge why despite being such perfect strangers they are so much alike. --Jesus R. Velasco, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Yale University and author of Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages

Author Information

Claudio Lomnitz is an anthropologist, historian, and critic who works broadly on Latin American culture and politics. He is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Lomnitz's books include Death and the Idea of Mexico and The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Mag n, among many others. As a regular columnist in the Mexico City paper La Jornada and an award-winning dramaturgist, he is committed to bringing historical and anthropological understanding into public debate.

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