Uncertain Travelers

Conversations with Jewish Women Immigrants to America

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by Marjorie Agosin

University Press of New England

Due/Published October 1999, 300 pages, cloth

ISBN 0874519454

Over a three-year period, award-winning Chilean poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosín interviewed nine Jewish women immigrants who arrived in the US from Europe and Latin America between 1939 and the 1970s. Some came as children, others as adults; some were well-off, others refugees. These conversations reveal diverse experiences of exile as well as multiple attitudes toward North American politics, people, and culture. "What I found most amazing as I grew to know these women,” Agosín writes, “was that despite such profound differences, we all shared something greater: the experience of exile and the quality of being foreign.”

Arranged chronologically, with the older women speaking first, each conversation opens with a short introduction that provides context for each woman’s life. These uncertain travelers—so named to highlight the possibility and difficulty of their journeys—discuss food, friendship, work, language, writing, anti-semitism, and politics, in familiar language. Angry, affecting, and disturbing, the conversations unfold as they do in life, inviting the reader to share an extended meditation on how writing, speaking, and memory join to restore a personal and collective past.

"In this richly woven tapestry of recollections, both bitter and sweet, Marjorie Agosín, poet, scholar, and social activist, brings to life the different voices and experiences of nine women. The result is a lively and rewarding journey for the reader, who will travel across generations and continents, through a variety of mother tongues, to share in the conversational worlds of these compelling stories."--Froma Zeitlin, Princeton University