ABSTRACT
Ilan Stavans, a native of Mexico, is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Hispanic Condition (1995), Art and Anger (1996), and The Riddle of Cantinflas (1998), and editor of Tropical Synagogues (1994) and The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998). In 2002 Routlege published The Essential Ilan Stavans, an anthology of essays and stories that includes pieces on the Subcomandante Marcos, Alberto Gerchunoff, Walter Benjamin, and Jewish memory. The following personal essay is from On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001), in which Stavans reflects on the role that language and identity played in his Mexican-Jewish education. His fragment is from the second chapter, entitled "The Rise and Fall of Yiddish." In Yiddish the boundary between comedy and tragedy, and between fact and fiction, is always a thin and wavering line. —Irving Howe
