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Claudio Lomnitz is an anthropologist, historian, and critic who works broadly on Latin American culture and politics. He is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Lomnitz's books include Death and the Idea of Mexico and The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Mag n, among many others. As a regular columnist in the Mexico City paper La Jornada and an award-winning dramaturgist, he is committed to bringing historical and anthropological understanding into public debate.
This book is a search for the author's intellectual and spiritual sources in his family history. It includes the story of his grandfather, and how through a life of (often forced) emigration, between seven countries on three continents, speaking eight languages, he forged his own universalist variant of the remarkable secular Jewish humanist tradition--one part of a legacy that clearly lives on in the perceptive insights and wide sympathy of the grandson's ethnography. It's a really fascinating book! --Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age and recipient of the Kyoto Prize Nuestra America: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation is a remarkable book--part family history, part intellectual autobiography, part eyewitness account of World War II, the Holocaust, the kibbutzim, part reflections on exile. With narrative mastery, Claudio Lomnitz leads us on an unsuspected journey from the outskirts of Bessarabia to Latin America and the United States, with pit stops in Israel and the Berkeley campus. A must-read for those intrigued by the vagaries of 20th-century history, with its diasporas, migrations, settlements, and resettlements. --Ruben Gallo, Princeton University, author of Freud's Mexico and Mexican Modernity Here, the author and the book make each other. By producing archives previously unbeknownst to him, Claudio Lomnitz enters into conversation with his own book to investigate himself and his family while building a theory of history: if this book puts the family as the center of that theory of history it is not just because Claudio is an anthropologist; it is not just because he was invaded by unbearable nostalgia; it is not just because he has suffered the loss of members of his family; it is not just because. It is also because the family as a random dynamic of people linked by consanguinity and affinity--that is, not as an institution, because institutions are elective, optional structures--is an impossible actor of historical events; its members are unpredictable, they wander around intimacy and distance, they cannot judge why despite being such perfect strangers they are so much alike. --Jesus R. Velasco, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Yale University and author of Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages
