Beyond the Banality of Evil

Nuestra América is a captivating book, regardless of how you approach it: a memoir, a family history, an intellectual history, or a Jewish diaspora study. With arresting prose, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz tells the story of his Jewish ancestors in an increasingly harsh antisemitic Europe at the crossroads of Romania and Ukraine, going on to describe their forced exile, settlement, and lives in Peru, Colombia, Israel, France, and the US. Whereas most of these displacements were forced and entailed painful separations, incarceration, deportations, and memories of pogroms, Lomnitz weaves a narrative in which resilience, affection, friendship, intellectual life, community, and family bonds prevail. And, even though his is a global history—his mother was born in Paris, “stateless,” his father in Germany; they met in Israel, and he himself was born in Chile—America remains a center. The book’s title is a wink to Cuban José Martí’s 1891 celebrated homonymous essay, “Our America,” intimating the allusion is specifically to Latin America. It can also be taken to mean home, urge, and belonging. “Our America, the America of my family, was a necessary place that one must inhabit and defend,” claims Lomnitz (18).

Allusion · Diaspora · Intellectual history · Judaism · Latin Americans · Narrative · World history · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America