Ilan Stavans has been described by The Washington Post as “Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast.” And the Forward calls him “a maverick intellectual whose canonical work has already produced a whole array of marvels that are redefining Jewishness.” This new anthology contains fiction, memoirs, essays, and poetry from twenty-eight writers who span more than 150 years. Included are Emma Lazarus’s legendary poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty; the hypnotizing prose of Greece-born, Switzerland-based Albert Cohen; Nobel—Prize winner Elias Canetti’s ruminations on Europe before World War II; Albert Memmi’s identity quest as an Arab Jew in France; Primo Levi’s testimony on the Holocaust; and A. B. Yehoshua’s epic stories set in Israel today.
When read together, these explorations offer an astonishingly incisive collective portrait of the “other Jews,” Sephardim who long for la España perdida, their lost ancestral home, even as they create a vibrant, multifaceted literary tradition in exile.