My America: Claudio Lomnitz

Claudio Lomnitz speaks about his new memoir, Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation.

Eminent anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz, the founding director of Columbia University’s Center for Mexican Studies, discusses his heart-wrenching new memoir Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation. Lomnitz traces his family’s extraordinary voyages across Romania, Peru, Colombia, Israel, California, Mexico, Chile, and beyond. Weaving the stories of Jews like them, who fled Europe to South America, with the complex web of Latin American history, Nuestra América adds to the canon of indelible narratives on exile, immigration and family memoir, yet skillfully transcends all genre to reveal the complex and subtle connections between South American radical movements and Jewish emancipation and exile in the early 20th century.