cover image The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi

The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi

Michael R. Molnar. Rutgers University Press, $25 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-8135-2701-7

An activist who has received a U.N. Leadership Award for Human Rights, Agos n--who is also one of the foremost Latina writers in the U.S.--relates in this intensely poetic memoir how she found her voice. The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who fled Nazi persecution and ended up in South America, Agos n was born and raised in Chile, where she remained--not counting brief stints in Israel--until the middle of high school. Hers was a happy childhood, ""caught in the languid rhythm of each day's passing."" It was also full of delightful contradictions: the family celebrated Passover while the maid in the kitchen ""sang the Ave Maria and made the sign of the cross for the sake of the heretics she served with love."" Her aunt Liesl celebrated Easter as the ""Feast of the Rabbits,"" leading the neighborhood egg hunts; her nana, Carmen, spent each St. John's Eve literally beating the trees. Following the assassination of Salvador Allende (once a boyfriend of her grandmother), the family fled to Athens, Ga., where Agos n finished high school. The second half of the book is a highly insightful portrait of life in exile, which she describes as ""like being a single tributary of a confused and turbulent river."" Now a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College, Agos n movingly reveals how her writing and her activism allowed her to reclaim a heart ""stolen"" by dictators. (Jan.)