Braided Memories (Paperback)

In this evocative and emotional work the poet novelist and human rights activist Marjorie Agosin pays homage to her great-grandmother Helena Broder. As a young woman Helena escaped Vienna to seek refuge in Chile leaving shortly after the Night of Broken Glass in 1938 when the Nazi regime unleashed a campaign of violence terror and destruction against the Jewish population. This book takes readers on Marjorie s journey through time and space and across thresholds between life death and dreams to discover Helena s lost voice. This is not a linear journey but one that braids together the past the present and the future allowing Marjorie to give Helena an exiled woman a third home in the liminal space of memory and literature; a safe haven where she can be complete rather than fragmented a place where her exhausted suitcase can finally rest. This touching collection of poems in Marjorie Agosin s native Spanish together with Alison Ridley s delicate English translation is accompanied by evocative images from the Chilean photographer Samuel Shats as well as poignant memorabilia of Helena herself.