Messengers across dimensions.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

The Angel of Memory / El Angel de la memoria, by Marjorie Agosin. Trans., Brigid A. Milligan and Laura Rocha Nakazawa. San Antonio, Texas: Wings Press, 2001. [Bilingual]

Memory is an angel, a messenger that communicates across dimensions. Memory bridges past and present; it connects one continent to another. In her latest collection of poetry, Marjorie Agosin conjures the Angel of Memory in order to recover a past that fanaticism and prejudice tried to obliterate. The book is a hymn to her great-grandmother, Helena Broder, a German-speaking Jew who fled Austria and arrived in Chile in 1939, and to all those Holocaust victims who would be lost to oblivion, were it not for the Angel of Memory.

Broder refused to speak Spanish (although the maids swore she was perfectly capable of cursing in that language), yet she built a new life for herself in South America. Her Spanish-speaking progeny faced new challenges and new exiles. Agosin, who in a sense relives her great-grandmother's deracination, continues to write in Spanish despite years of living in the United States.

Angel of Memory traces Broder's life from Nazi Vienna to Chile, where she settled, raised her children, and lived the rest of her days. Agosin, who was only eight years old when her great-grandmother died, pieces together Broder's existence through reminiscences, stories, letters, photographs, and flights of the imagination. In the year 2000 Agosin and her mother visited Vienna and Prague in an effort to recover the essence of bygone times, of men and women--both Jews and non-Jews--lost in the Holocaust. Broder, whom Agosin calls Omama (a combination of the German oma, or grandma, and the Spanish mama), is the real Angel of Memory, for she remains a living presence in the poet's mind, evoking a past saturated with blood and horror, but also with laughter and beauty.

Like memory, poetry communicates through snippets. A fleeting image can sometimes evoke emotions more powerfully than detailed narrative. Agosin is a master artisan, arranging verbal snapshots in such a way that they force the reader to participate in the act of remembrance. A small girl's abandoned travel bag, smiling soldiers fastening doors, forests of dead butterflies, an old woman soothing her great-grandchild in German while the little girl whispers the Hail Mary, learned from servants, in Spanish--these are images that pierce the reservoirs of our repressed collective memories, images that unleash a deluge of...