To continue with the occupation of their lands violates the spirit of Israel as a vibrant democracy. “Unfortunately Israel continues to suppress the Palestinian people that deserve the right of self-determination. “My mother’s story explains what’s it like to be a minority in south of Chile when the Nazi’s arrived–how Chile denied and marginalized its minorities and its indigenous people,” Agosin wonders why vast majority of Chile’s Jewish community stood in silence against Pinochet’s atrocities as she explores human rights abuses from Latin America to the unfair partition of Israel which offered a refuge for the Jewish people displaced by the Holocaust–and in process displaced the Palestinians. Her blond, blue-eyed mother could only attend an impoverished rural school–not a Catholic school because she wasn’t baptized, nor the German school run by the Nazis.

He became a medical doctor in Chile and later emigrated to the U.S., becoming a foreigner once again. Her father, as an infant with chickenpox, was hidden, crossed the ocean and was named Moisés. In A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (Feminist Press, 1997) and Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean Jewish Father (Feminist Press, 2000) –Agosin meets her parents at history’s crossroads. “I’m at home in sacred places, from mosques to churches to synagogues.”

“I’m home in books, poems, writings, friendships, history, travels–in places where Jews lived, and among trees and nature–human beings are not exiled from the beauty of the world,” Agosin immerses herself in her seacoast Maine home–which reminds her of Chile– surrounded by her garden dotted with quaint alcoves that invite the visitor to stop, rest, and embrace nature. Like Celeste, Agosin is not totally at home in Chile. Celeste goes into exile to Maine and returns years later to find her country scarred by the brutality of dictatorship, and is determined to find her displaced classmates, re-build and heal her town and country. Her peaceful life, extended family, deep ties with the sea and the pelicans of the hill-town of Valparaiso unravel with the political shift to dictatorship. And its sequel, The Maps of Memory: Return to Butterfly Hill (Atheneum Books 2020 ), Agosin recreates her happy childhood in Chile through the 11-year-old Celeste Marconi’s life.

Fire from the Andes by Marjorie Agosín