A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series)

"I wish to talk about my life in an unseemly and noisy house in southern Chile and about a town with fifty Nazis and three Jewish families..."

In this unique memoir, Marjorie Agos­n writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, who grew up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants in Chile in the World War II era. Woven into the narrative are the stories of Frida's father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Chile later with a number tattoed on her arm; and of her great grandmother from Odessa, who loved the Spanish language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Agos­n's memoir is a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and of words.