NUESTRA AMERICA: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation

Eminent anthropologist and founding director of Columbia University's Center for Mexican Studies, Claudio Lomnitz, takes readers on a heart-wrenching journey to uncover his family’s tumultuous past, Here, Lomnitz traces his family’s extraordinary voyages across Romania, Peru, Colombia, Israel, California, Mexico, Chile, and beyond. Weaving the stories of Jews like them, who fled Europe to South America, with the complex web of Latin American history, NUESTRA AMERICAadds to the cannon of indelible narratives on exile, immigration and family memoir, yet skillfully transcends all genre to reveal the complex and subtle connections between South American radical movements and Jewish emancipation and exile in the early 20th century. Lomnitz also simultaneously presents a unique, compelling snapshot of this epoch and grants voice to the human beings caught in the middle, fighting for survival, too often reduced to statistics.

“An autobiography in which we Latin Americans all recognize ourselves.”

—Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

About the author: 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 Magón, 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.

NUESTRA AMERICA: Claudio Lomnitz