The Sephardic population in the Americas is formed by a large number of small groups, divided according to the communities of origin in the Iberian Peninsula, the Middle East, and North Africa, and dispersed among English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French-speaking societies. While the emigration from the Ottoman Empire that began one hundred years ago resulted in the fragmentation of Sephardic communities, their dynamism allowed them to adapt and survive, striving to retain the old yet gesturing continually to the new. On the threshold of the twenty-first century, these communities became...

In this bold study, Edna Aizenberg offers a much-needed corrective to both Latin American literary scholarship and popular assumptions that the whole of Latin America served as a Nazi refuge both during and after World War II. Analyzing the treatment of the Shoah by five leading figures in Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean writing--Alberto Gerchunoff, Clarice Lispector, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa--Aizenberg illuminates how Latin American intellectuals engaged with the horrific information...