Desperate to escape the increasingly vehement persecution in their homelands, thousands of refugees from Nazi-dominated Central Europe, the majority of them Jews, found refuge in Latin America in the 1930s. Bolivia became a principal recipient of this influx — one of the few remaining places in the entire world to accept Jewish refugees after the German Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Some 20,000 refugees arrived in Bolivia, more than in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa — the leading British Commonwealth countries — combined. In Bolivia, the refugees began to reconstruct a version of the world that they had been forced to abandon. Their own origins and social situations had been diverse in Central Europe, ranging across generational, class, educational, and political differences, and incorporating various professional, craft, and artistic backgrounds. But it was Austro/German Jewish bourgeois society that provided them with a model for emulation and a common locus for identification in their place of refuge. Indeed, at the very time when that dynamic social and cultural amalgam was being ruthlessly and systematically destroyed by the Nazis, the Jewish refugees in Bolivia attempted to recall and revive a version of it in a land thousands of miles from their home: in a country that offered them a haven, but in which many of them felt themselves as mere sojourners. Hotel Bolivia explores an important, but generally neglected, aspect of the experience of group displacement — the relationship between memory and cultural survival during an era of persecution and genocide. Employing oral histories, family photographs, artistic and documentary portrayals, it considers the Third Reich background for the emigration, the refugees’ perceptions of past and future, and the role of images and stereotypes in shaping refugee and Bolivian cross-cultural communication and acceptance. It examines how the immigrants remembered, recalled and reshaped the European world they had been forced to abandon in the institutions, culture, and community they created in Bolivia. In documenting life stories and reclaiming the memories and discourses of ordinary persons who might otherwise remain hidden from history, Hotel Bolivia contributes to a major objective of contemporary historical studies. But it is also directly concerned with theoretical issues, increasingly evident in historical writing, focusing on the contextualization of memory and the interdependence – and tension – between memory and history. In reflecting on remembered experience, over time and between people, the ultimate objective of this book is to contribute to the historical study of memory itself. “A curiously inspiring corner of Holocaust history: the story is of how culture and memory survive, and change, in the shock of new surroundings.” — Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost “A form of doing history that offers fresh intellectual insights while touching the heart.” — Ruth Behar, University of Michigan, author of The Vulnerable Observer andTranslated Women “It is rare that a scholarly book reads like a novel. Leo Spitzer’s compelling Hotel Bolivia not only is beautifully written but changes the way we think about history... This groundbreaking book will become required reading in numerous fields, including Latin American studies, Jewish studies, diaspora studies, immigration studies, and ethnic studies.” — Jeffrey Lesser, Brown University, author of Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question “Evocative, thoughtful, and otherwise impressive... Vividly introduces readers to a little-known aspect of refugee history during the Holocaust.” — Kirkus “A searing account of the Jewish refugees’ checkered experience... Part memoir, part oral history, Spitzer’s eye-opening study uses interviews with surviving refugees (now widely dispersed around the world), plus letters, photographs, family albums and archival documents to explore the trauma of displacement.” — Publishers Weekly

A theoretically grounded interdisciplinary study of "cultural memory" in sites ranging from Chile, Bolivia, and South Africa to Germany and the US.

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.

In the Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the 'Vienna of the East' under the Habsburg empire, this Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after WWII - yet an idealized version lives on. This book chronicles the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory.

On 13 December 1948, a small ship carrying 347 Estonian refugees fleeing Soviet rule arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax. In Photography, Memory, and Refugee Identity, anthropologist Lynda Mannik analyzes the refugee experience through the photographic record of those who made that harrowing voyage across the Atlantic more than sixty years ago. Drawing on a collection of photographs taken during the voyage and at the Pier 21 detention centre, Mannik asks surviving passengers to describe their migration, their reception in Canada, and their feelings about the terms refugee and boat person. She explores to what extent the photos reflect the passengers’ experiences as they remember them and how those experiences compare with representations of refugees in news media, in government rhetoric, and at the Pier 21 Museum in Halifax. Ultimately, Mannik demonstrates that the photographs in the SS Walnut collection bear witness to the refugee experience even as the meanings attached to them have changed over time and in shifting contexts.

A comparative study of immigration and ethnicity with an emphasis on the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabs who have contributed to Brazil's diverse mix.