July 2000

Fragmenting the Memoir Lines: Marjorie Agosín's

     Interspersed throughout A Cross and a Star are black and white family photographs. Such photographs are standard in autobiographies and memoirs. But there is little else about A Cross and a Star that is standard. In her portrayal of a family history of ostracism and alienation in the anti-Semitic climate of Osorno, Chile, preceding World War II, Agosín does more than tell us a story of immigrant struggle: she challenges the boundaries of genre, language and memory.

     The most striking departure from convention that Agosín engages in is that this memoir is actually about her mother, and for most of the book, told through a voice that the author adopts as her mother's. Her technique recalls the mastery of voice over "realism" successfully shown by James McBride in the memoir of his mother, The Color of Water. It seems when writing about racial alienation, such slippage becomes a marker of the very slippery nature of identity, and in Agosín's case, of the slippage of memory between mother and daughter.

     While in The Color of Water the separation of the son's voice from the mother's is clearly demarcated, in A Cross and a Star the voices of mother and daughter flow in and out of each other, calling into question authorial voice and any finality of mother--child separation. The first three chapters set up the blending of voice in such a way that it is easy to lose track of who is speaking, and I became so entranced with the poetic voice of the narrator that any confusion over who was speaking did not seem to matter as much. The story told by the mother (Frida) thus becomes the daughter's story, too, and neither narrator is sure "if I tell what I invent or if I invent what I tell," only that the story is about "a mythical and myth-making country" (1). Agosín writes: "Sometimes," her mother's voice "rolls up like my own in order to confuse itself with the language of love" (4).

     Repetitions mark the subsequent slippages; it seems in retelling the same stories, which she does frequently, Agosín refracts the pieces of her mother's story, prism-like, through the lens of her own. Agosín was born in the United States, and spent most of her childhood in Santiago, emigrating to the States in 1972, before the legacies of Pinochet began. Her experience was markedly different from her mother's, yet with a poetic sensibility, a vast capacity for empathy and imagination, and a desire to be true to her family's history, she captures the full life, longings, and love of her mother as a Jewish girl in Chile in the early part of the twentieth century.

     Frida Halpern grew up in Osorno, Chile, the daughter of Jewish immigrants. Osorno at this time was dominated by Catholics and German borns; Frida's was one of only three Jewish families in the city. Frida is acutely aware of her difference and isolation growing up, naming herself as one of those Jewish girls who was not allowed to wear First Communion dresses because "they were the daughters of the devil with horns in their foreheads and tails in their behinds, because they possessed the scent of sacrifice and sadness" (46). This specter of herself and her family is linked to an attraction to and repulsion from fear. She recalls moments with her brother, when they embraced next to coffins, "defying the waves of death and eating with the dead" and "in the fear of darkness and light." The undercurrent of fear manifests in nightmares, when Frida dreams of "incinerated grandmothers, barbed wire fences, and screams where no one paid attention to the voices that implored the right to asylum" (66). Agosín here weaves together what she knows of what will come later--the Holocaust, the concentration camps, and the large--scale terror against Jews in Europe--with what Frida knows has already come to pass in the places her relatives have fled and in the increasingly hostile anti-Semitic climate where she grows up.

     Racism is not the only legacy of fear, however. Frida's mother had five miscarriages, "legends blackened in coagulated blood" (34). Anxiety of the body is revealed further in stories like that of her Aunt Lucha's hip, which after surgery takes nocturnal strolls. The superstitions, stories, and larger-than-life characters like Agosín's nanny, Carmen Carrasco, who survived an earthquake and was a "translucent soul," ally Agosín with other Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende and with the language in which she writes, Spanish. Spanish for Frida is the language of love, while German, the language spoken by her grandparents, is connected for her with incineration and horror.

     In contrast to the fluidity of voice throughout the memoir, the book is divided into five sections, and subdivided into many very brief chapters. The brief chapters are jarring for the reader at first as it seemingly jumps around among histories, narratives, stories, and imagery. It becomes clear, however, that the fragmentary nature of the memoir is a more faithful attempt at a narrative re-creation of memory than the traditional, linear, coming-of-age story, showing how our lives are made up of disparate pieces rather than of a cohesive and knowable narrative. These fragments are what Agosín pieces together and makes into a lyrical, beautifully moving tapestry, weaving in concrete, powerful images like mannequin legs and eiderdown quilts, faithful to the self only as "a fragment of history within the larger histories of life" (153).

Paperback edition 1997 published by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York. Foreword by Laura Riesco. Translated from Spanish by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman. Originally published by University of New Mexico Press, 1995.