By Donald H. Harrison 

What might be called a sub-genre of autobiography—the stories of how immigrants adjust to their new environments—has yet another modern wrinkle: stories of people who have changed their country more than once.

Professor Steve Weiland of Michigan State University recently told a small audience in San Diego that he found a common thread in the stories of three Latin American-influenced Jewish writers,  Leo Spitzer, Marjorie Agosín, and Ilan Stavans. In a Jan. 31 talk sponsored by San Diego State University's Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies, Weiland traced some of the commonalities in these writers' experiences.  

Spitzer, today a history professor at Dartmouth University, immigrated as a child before World War II from Austria to Bolivia, later moving onto the United States. The title of his book, Hotel Bolivia, reflects the temporary nature of the family's refuge in the South American country, where as the family continued to speak German at home, while he learned Spanish in school.  

There is a photograph in the book of the Spitzers happily posing after World War II  in the folk costumes of Austria.  It prompted Spitzer to ask why in the post-Auschwitz era his parents would want to wear such clothing.

Spitzer concluded that dressing in such a manner served as a declaration of defiance and triumph. He noted that during the Nazi regime, the wearing of such national costume was forbidden to the Jews—so this was a subtle way of proclaiming the defeat of such ideology, Weiland said.

Grappling with his identity, Spitzer traveled to Austria to a place near where his grandmother had lived.  He found the Jewish cemetery littered by local picnickers, tombstones knocked askew, and some toppled over and overgrown with weeds. Tripping over one tombstone so buried,  he pushed back the weeds and found the name "Spitzer." During that shuddering moment, Spitzer realized that while he had returned to the land of his ancestors, in no way had he come home.

From Bolivia, the Spitzer family moved on to New Hampshire, and for Leo, the question with which he grappled was who was he—an Austrian, a Bolivian, or an American.  Eventually, Weiland suggested, Spitzer became a student of his own marginality.

Turning to Marjory Agosín's Alphabet In My Hands, a book of short essays and poems, Weiland found another story of transplantation.  Her grandparents immigrated from Russia via Turkey and France to Chile, where the grandmother kept a worried watch on the  family losing its Russian-ness.

The family identified themselves as "Jews in Chile," rather than as "Chilean Jews," and, anticipating that someone at some time would say to them, "you Jews," adopted the preemptive strategy  of saying to those of their host country, "you Chileans," according to Weiland.

Although Eastern European in origin, the family found comfort in a Sephardic Jewish congregation in Santiago—Agosín treasuring childhood memories of reciting kaddish with her father.

But when the Pinochet dictatorship replaced the liberal Allende government, her father decided  it would be prudent to immigrate to the United States. They settled in Athens, Georgia, near the university there.  Like  Spitzer, Agosín wrestled with her identity, eventually being drawn to the field of literature.  "My voice is a mooring line beyond the silences," she wrote.   

Her family never felt so comfortable in Latin America as in North America.  They were "grateful for the ports of entry, but underneath the bed we always kept a suitcase," Agosín commented.  Nevertheless, while she continues to live in the United States, she feels a real sense of commitment to Chile.

Islan Stavans autobiography, On Borrowed Words, also deals with identity and displacement, Weiland said.  A Mexican of European origins, who moved to the United States after a stopover in Israel, Stavans knows Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish and English.  

After studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Stavans switched over to Columbia University and today is a teacher at Amherst College.  He has quipped that memoirs tend to be manipulative pieces of literature "driven by our objective of improving our prospects in human memory."

While embracing American identity, Stavans still remains "Mexican enough," according to Weiland.  

As a result of the process of immigration and dislocation, the three writers are—in the phrase of critic Alfred Kazin—improbable hybrid beings."