Marjorie Agosín. Dear Anne Frank. Washington, DC: Azul Editions, 1994; 155 pp. Paper $11.95. Available at local book stores.

Marjorie Agosín is the descendant of European Jews who escaped the Nazi Holocaust by settling in the southern part of Chile. After the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, Agosín left Chile and came to the United States. In addition to being an internationally acclaimed poet, a human rights advocate, and the recipient of prestigious awards, she is a professor of Spanish literature at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Agosín grew up, beside "the voices of her great-grandmothers" from Europe who taught her the importance of memory and remembrances. Among the many photos that her family brought from Europe, there was also a photo of Anne Frank. From the time Marjorie was a young girl living in Chile, she started an internal dialogue with Anne Frank, whom she knew from this one photo and from her writing. "I wanted to speak with Anne Frank from an almost obsessive desire to revive her memory and make her return and enter our daily lives. I needed to ask: What would we have done if Anne Frank came to our door and asked us to hide her, asked us to lodge and feed her for one night or ten years?" (8).

Agosín’s bilingual poetry book Dear Anne Frank is more than a reflection of one person’s life. Rather, it is a dialogue that keeps the question open, how would we have reacted then and how do we react today to the human beings in need of shelter, of protection and of food and support?

Common to the condition of the majority victims of violence from the gas chambers of Auschwitz to the torture facilities in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala or Chile, is their lack of resting places and graves where the surviving family members could pay tribute. Like Paul Celan’s metaphor in his poem of 1948 "wir schaufeln ein Grab in the Lüften" (we dig a gravesite in the winds) to express the inexplicable of the slaughter of six million Jews, Agosín’s poetry, too, speaks for the victims of violence and slaughter whose voices can no longer be heard and whose graves cannot be found in a physical location.

This reevaluation of the past in view of our present is what makes these poems to a Holocaust victim also electrifying and extraordinary. These poems speak about our obligation as human beings today. As someone who carries the memories of Holocaust persecution within her family’s tradition and as someone who has first-hand knowledge of the Chilean Junta’s brutality after the overthrow of the Allende government, Agosín’s poetic voice is one of strong conviction as well as fervid compassion and love. Would we stand the test of time to help someone in need - be it in Bosnia, Rwanda, Algeria, New York or Portland? Would we dedicate our resources to those in need or would we be indifferent to victims of nationalism, manliness, machismo or ‘pure race’?

Agosín dedicates her poems to those, "who open their doors to all the Anne Franks" in this world. One of the poems from her collection reads:

Anne Frank turned up
worn to the bones at your house
made of stone
she wanted to sit
at your table,
to drink tea with the departed
or, perhaps, to meet your
children, but
you didn’t
open
your door.
You fled
from a Jewish girl,
safeguarding a menacing silence,
a silence filled with fears,
when they took her
away
on the railroads of certain death.

("Dear Anne Frank" p. 21)

Viktoria Hertling