Marjorie Agosín, the editor of Memory, Oblivion and Jewish Culture in Latin America, is a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. She has assembled 15 essays from a variety of authors; historians, literary critics and political scientists. Agosín herself is a writer, poet and human rights activist from Chile. Her own diverse academic pursuits are mirrored by the authors she has chosen.

A native of Valparaiso, Chile, whose own family escaped the Nazis by fleeing from Vienna, Austria, in 1939, Agosín grew up surrounded by a unique Jewish-Latino culture that amazed her. With this work, she seeks to share this hidden culture and probe its formation.

Agosín has chosen to focus on the memory of Jewish culture in Latin America and as such devotes two essays to language and the role it has played in preserving those memories. For the nearly 14 centuries that the Sephardim lived in peace under the emir of Cordoba in Al Andalus, a new Jewish language was forged. Known as ladino in Spain and Israel, Judezmo in the United States and Turkey, and Judeo-Spanish to romance language scholars, the language became sacred as it was the language used to communicate with God.

The roots of ladino are in archaic Castilian Spanish with Greek, Turkish and Arabic influences found throughout. Keeping these archaic forms of Castilian in use, ladino has helped preserve the Spanish castellano language as well. The formation of ladino in the Iberian Peninsula was very similar to the formation of Yiddish in Eastern Europe. Sepharad was the ladino word for the Iberian Peninsula, and thus the speakers of ladino were known as the Sephardim.

During the Reconquista of Spain there was a loose religious freedom, and communities had Spaniards of all three monotheistic faiths. However, with the Reconquista complete in 1492 when King Ferdinand and Isabella captured the last Muslim state of Granada, non-Catholics were no longer welcome on the

Iberian Peninsula.

The Sephardim who settled in the new world following the expulsion from Spain in 1492 largely became conversos, with Jewish customs preserved. The collection of essays then largely jumps forward in history nearly 300 years. Noticeably absent are the scores of Crypto-Jews who continued to practice Judaism in secret. The remainder focuses on contemporary Jewish communities in Latin America, the majority of which came not from the expulsion from Spain, but rather late 19th and 20th century immigration from Europe.

There are several essays tracing the Jewish exodus from anti- Semitic and Nazi Europe, in fact. And that is where the overall theme of the collection becomes apparent, examining how a new Latino Jewish identity was shaped and came into being. The main question answered is “What has it meant to be Jewish in Catholic society”? There are two essays toward the end that cover the modern Jewish community in Buenos Aires and how the destruction of the Argentine Jewish Center and Synagogue was handled by the community. For U.S. readers the most useful aspect of this collection is the manner in which it shows differences with the U.S.-Jewish experience and community, and how Latino culture helped shape a unique Jewish experience in Latin America.

University of Texas Press, paperback, $25, 248 pages