ABSTRACT
An émigré intellectual and Distinguished Professor at Duke University, Ariel Dorfman is best known for his Broadway play Death and the Maiden (1992), which was directed for the silver screen by Roman Polanski. Dorfman, a poet, essayist, and novelist, is the author of numerous books, among them How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1975), Widows (1981), The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1987), Some Write to the Future (1991), The Nanny and the Iceberg (1999), and Blake's Therapy (2001). The essay that follows comes from his memoir Heading South, Looking North(1998), in which Dorfman chronicles his bicultural, bilingual education—part in Spanish, part in English—in a Chilean Jewish family with strong leftist views. This is Chapter 2: "Dealing with the Discovery of Life and Language at an Early Age."
