by Ruth Behar
It is with a broken heart that I sit down to write this obituary to remember and praise my friend, the renowned poet and writer Marjorie Agosín. Just a few months ago we were speaking on the phone about waiting to retire until turning 70, and she said that afterward she didn’t want to travel, she just wanted to stay home and write.
Marjorie died on March 10, 2025 at the age of 69, just three months shy of her 70th birthday, at her home in Wellesley, MA. She suffered from cancer for close to a year, courageously choosing to keep her illness a secret that she shared only with her husband. She kept writing until the end of her days.
Anyone familiar with the vast corpus of Marjorie’s work will agree that we have lost a literary giant in the field of Latin American Jewish Studies. Without a doubt, she stood out as the most eloquent, knowledgeable, profound, and prolific Latin American Jewish woman poet and writer residing in the United States.
Hers was an essential voice in redefining the border between America and América in ways that challenged all presuppositions.
She was a key founder of the field of Jewish Latina writing and escritura judía latinoamericana, connecting homelands and diasporas in original ways. Long before it became commonplace, she called attention to the unique hybridity of “Jewtina” identity and built a literary community for women writers who shared this mixed heritage.
In her many impressive roles as a poet, storyteller, editor, scholar, educator, and activist in the field of human rights and women’s rights, Marjorie shone as a creative writer and brave thinker and a woman of integrity, passion, generosity, and brilliance.
She offered inspiration, strength, and a model of how to be a Latina in the academy who took pride in her Jewish heritage. She believed in the power of writing as a means of seeking justice and was recognized for her work in a rare and prestigious award from the United Nations, which presented her with a Leadership Award in Human Rights.
Born in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1955, Marjorie Agosín grew up in Chile, where she returned at the age of three months with her Jewish Chilean parents, Moisés Agosín and Frida Halpern, to live amid their extended Jewish family in Santiago and vacationing in el Quisco, a village near Isla Negra, where Pablo Neruda once resided. Marjorie, together with her sister, Cynthia (b. 1952) and younger brother, Mario (b. 1963), spent her childhood and early adolescence in Chile in the 1960s, studying at the Hebrew Institute of Santiago de Chile.
In 1971, when she was sixteen, Marjorie moved with her family to Athens, Georgia. Her father, a doctor and a biochemist, took a job as a professor of chemistry at the university, not realizing how long they would be staying. After Augusto Pinochet staged a military coup, overthrowing the democratic government of Salvador Allende, the family knew they could not return to Chile.
Marjorie felt out of place in the United States, where she had to continually explain her identity to people who could not understand how she could be blonde, speak Spanish without looking Latina, and also be Jewish.
She wrote letters to her girlfriends in Chile, reminiscing about flowers, fragrances, all she had lost, and realized when she took up writing as her vocation that she was an exiled writer, for whom “memory becomes her most precious ally, as well as her most disturbing obsession,” as she put it in her book of essays, Ashes of Revolt (1996).
She received her B.A. in Philosophy and Spanish Literature from the University of Georgia in 1976. She then obtained her M.A. and PhD in Latin American Literature from Indiana University in 1982.
She began teaching in the Spanish Department at Wellesley College in 1982, offering courses on Jewish women writers and on Latin America, as well as creative writing, eventually being named an Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities.
She enjoyed teaching small seminars at Wellesley and getting to know her students. Yet she never stopped returning to her beloved Chile, which awarded her the Gabriela Mistral Lifetime Achievement Award.
Marjorie wrote in Spanish. Always in search of home, a topic that informed all of her writing, it was in her native language that she felt most truly at home, though she heard Yiddish growing up and was fluent in Hebrew and spoke a musically accented English. She chose for her work to be translated into English for her North American readers. She wanted to be known in translation, to be a translated woman. As she put it in The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life (1999), “I am a Jewish writer who writes in Spanish and lives in America.”
She wrote in many genres, from poetry to memoir to essays to fiction to children’s literature. Her voice was lyrical in whatever genre she wrote in and so poetry was indispensable. In her poetry she explored the themes of memory, history, loss, and exile. She frequently focused on the desires and dreams of women.
She didn’t shy away from hard topics, such as the horror of tortures, disappearances, dismemberments that took place in Chile and the awareness of her own survivor’s guilt. In Zones of Pain/Las zonas del dolor (1989), she wrote about a desaparecida, a disappeared woman, who said of herself: “I had no witnesses/to my death,/Nobody carried out rituals, wrote epitaphs…/and when they call my name/I will appear/because I never went to my/own funeral.”
Marjorie saw a connection between the genocide committed by Latin America’s dictatorships in the ‘70s and the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide.
This theme comes up in her writing about Anne Frank. She grew up gazing at a little photograph of Anne Frank passed on to her by her grandfather José, a Viennese Jew living in Santiago de Chile. When she wrote the poems in the volume, Dear Anne Frank (1994), she became the girl she’d spent so much time gazing at: “I am Anne Frank/I am thirteen years old/but I am also thousands of years old./I smell of smoke and old age/covering the faces of fear.”
Feeling a spiritual bond with the exile of the Sephardim, she wrote a series of dreamlike poems in The White Islands/Las islas blancas (2016) that lament the expulsion of the Jews from Spain while also celebrating the remembrances that remain.
She drew on conversations with descendants who found a home in Salonika and the Greek Islands, Rhodes, Crete, as well as the Balkans, places to which she traveled, learning the stories of many who perished during the Holocaust.
“I only wanted to write about them,/Narrate their fierce audacity,/Their voyages through the channels of the Mediterranean.” Marjorie loved the seas of the world and was aware of the sorrows they held. She wrote, “They took all the Jews of Rhodes/On a sunny day like all of the gentle days of the Aegean Sea.” And she asked herself, “What is there beyond the words?/What are you gazing at beyond the horizon/Where the sea meets the sky?”
Then, when it wasn’t possible to travel during the Covid 19 pandemic, she found the presence of mind to write Beyond the Time of Words/Más allá del tiempo de las palabras (2022), to give solace to readers and offer a sanctuary of poems. She captured the desperation of that time in these haunting lines: “Only absence dwells in me,/Everything that was and that will not be,/Things snatched away and forgotten./I possess the soul of a castaway/Who longs for everything.”
Close to her heart always were the voices and stories of her ancestors, among them her great-grandmothers who had escaped Vienna and Odessa, and found a new home in Chile.
Sadly, the antisemitism they fled followed them across the sea, spurred by German colonists who settled in southern Chile, as well as Nazi war criminals who arrived after World War II.
Marjorie also wrote about many other family members, her grandparents, her aunts and uncles, whose stories were etched in her memory. Her memoirs, A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile (1997; 2022) and Always from Somewhere Else: My Jewish Father (1998), are moving accounts of the life stories of her mother and father.
In these works, she sought to express the crucial importance of bearing witness to Jewish trauma as well as Jewish resilience. In A Cross and a Star, told in fragments that mirror the ebb and flow of remembrances, she gave voice to the weight of inter-generational fear carried by her mother and other family: “In nightmares, Jews dream about train stations floating in the mist and about doors shutting against the ashes.”
Amid the demands of teaching and her own writing, she was committed to bringing a wide range of Latin American Jewish women’s writing to the attention of U.S. and international readers.
The many anthologies she edited are a testament to her efforts to build communities of writers and understand the stories of Jewishness told in different Latin American settings. The House of Memory: Stories by Jewish Women Writers of Latin America (orig. 1999; 2022) was the first anthology of its kind to be published in English, and brought together thirty stories from Jewish writers of many nationalities, including Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Cuba. A volume focusing on poetry, Miriam’s Daughters: Jewish Latin American Women Poets (2001) followed, introducing readers to a stunning variety of poetic voices.
She was curious about the life stories of fellow Jewish women writers and carried out interviews for her book, Uncertain Travelers: Conversations with Jewish Women Immigrants to America (1999). I had the honor of being interviewed by Marjorie and enjoyed becoming the subject of her anthropological gaze.
More recently, she sought to create anthologies that crisscrossed borders and addressed immigrant and exile voices from a wider geographical area. In the volume, Home: An Imagined Landscape (2016), she brought together writers from a range of places, including Greece, Hungary, Jamaica, and Egypt, each addressing the unique journey that led them to build a new home in the United States. Ever aware of how homes are both real and imagined, she noted, “Home is an ever-traveling ship that arrives yet also takes sail in the harbors of our imagination.”
In the last phase of her career, Marjorie dove into young adult literature, producing the beautiful novel, I Lived on Butterfly Hill (2012), for which the American Library Association awarded her the Pura Belpré Medal for a work that celebrates Latina/Latino identity. She later brought out a stunning sequel to this novel, The Maps of Memory: Return to Butterfly Hill (2020), that takes on the complex subject of political trauma as it affects a range of young people trying to make sense of the past and the present in Chile. Just before her death, she completed the manuscript of the third novel in the Butterfly Hill series.
Marjorie was immensely spiritual in her approach to life. Though not religious in the traditional sense, she was unwaveringly Jewish while being open to the interconnectedness and fluidity of faiths. As she noted in The Alphabet in my Hands (1999), she remembered Passover in Chile being part of the mix of Jewish and Catholic cultures with which she grew up: “Everything about Passover had the fragrance of violets and then Easter week would arrive and we would eat fish from the Pacific that, like unleavened bread, had come from the heavens.”
Marjorie Agosín is survived by her husband, John Wiggins, whom she met at the University of Georgia Library in the spring of 1973, her son Joseph Wiggins Agosín, her daughter Sonia Wiggins Agosín, her brother Mario Agosín, and sister Cynthia Agosín, and her extended family in Chile. She is also survived by a vast network of friends, colleagues, students, and readers who love her writing and are grateful for the world she brought into being with her imagination and her words.
Years ago, Marjorie wrote a poem, “Más que la paz” (More than peace), in Zones of Pain that suggests what she perhaps wished for once she passed. May all of us who miss her deeply be able to wish her the peace she described with such clarity:
No quiero nombres
ni tumbas
para mis muertos
ni compartir cementerios
con huesos
extraviados
solo denme
mi colchón
de hojas
sólo déjenme
regresar a mis
bosques
I want neither names
nor tombs
for my deaths
nor to share cemeteries
with bones
gone astray
just give me
my pillow
of leaves
just let me
go back to my
forests.
*
For a list of her selected works and awards, see the entry for Marjorie Agosín in the online Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.
Conversations Between Marjorie Agosín and Ruth Behar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WK1tKnHpk0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIxTaComdEo
Selected Works of Marjorie Agosín
Novels
- Las arpilleras: Una historia con hilo y aguja. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Mis Raices, 2021.
- The Flowering Tree. Illustrated by Francisca Yanez, translated by Alison Ridley. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Mis Raices, 2018.
- El arbol florido. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Mis Raices, 2018.
- Ana Reimaginando: El Diario De Ana Frank. Santiago, Chile: Das Kapital Ediciones, 2015.
Young Adult Novels
- The Maps of Memories: Returning to Butterfly Hill. New York: Simson & Schuster, 2020.
- I Lived on Butterfly Hill. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Memoirs
- Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000. With Emma Sepúlveda.
- The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
- Always from Somewhere Else: My Jewish Father. New York: Feminist Press, 1998.
- A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile. New York: The Feminist Press, 1997; United Kingdom: Garnet Publishing, 1997; Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, paperback edition, 2022 (with a foreword by Ruth Behar).
- The Guardian of Memory: Aldo Izzo and the Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Venice. Dorset, England: Solis Press, 2023.
Books of Poetry
- Mollica, Richard, and Marjorie Agosín. A Manifesto: Healing a Violent World. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Solis Press, 2019.
- The White Islands / Las Islas Blancas. Translated by Jacqueline C. Nanfito. Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2016.
- Harbors of Light / Puertos De Luz. Translated by E. O. O’Connor. Buffalo, NY: White Pine, 2016.
- The light of desire. Chicago: Swan Isle Press, 2009.
- At the Threshold of Memory: New and Selected Poems. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2003.
- Noche estrellada. Santiago, Chile: Lom Ediciones, 1996; Miami, FL: University of Miami North South Center, 1996.
- Dear Anne Frank. Washington, DC: Azul Edition, 1994.
- Circles of Madness. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1992.
- Zones of Pain. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1989.
- Brujas y Hogueras: Mexico: Antología Poética, La Máquina Eléctrica, 1988.
Anthologies Edited
- A Sea of Voices: Women Poets of Israel, an International Anthology. Santa Fe, NM: Sherman Asher, 2009.
- From Chile to the World: 70 Years of Gabriela Mistral’s Nobel Prize: De Chile Al Mundo: 70 Años Del Premio Nobel De Gabriela Mistral. Edited by Marjorie Agosín, Gloria Garafulich Grabois. New York: Gabriela Mistral Foundation, 2015.
- Home: An Imagined Landscape. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Solis Press, Kent, 2016.
- Writing towards Hope: Human Rights in Latin America. New Haven: Yale University Press 2006.
- Memory and Oblivion: The Modern Jewish Culture in Latin America Today. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004.
- Miriam’s Daughters: Jewish Latin American Women Poets. Santa Fe, NM: Sherman Asher Publishing, 2000.
- Uncertain Travelers: Jewish Women Emigrants to the Americas. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.
- The House of Memory: Jewish Stories from Jewish Women of Latin America. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.
- A Map of Hope: Women Writers and Human Rights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
- A Map of Hope: Women Writers and Human Rights. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
- These Are Not the Sweet Girls: 20th Century Latin American Women Poets. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1993.
- A Gabriela Mistral Reader. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1993.
- Surviving Beyond Fear: Women, Children and Human Rights in Latin America. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1993.
- Landscapes of a New Land: Short Stories by Latin American Women Writers. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1989. Second edition, February 1993.
