This is a book with a purpose. After several years spent interviewing Chileans of Jewish descent, Maxine Lowy wove their memories into a narrative that goes along with primary and secondary documents related to the abuses of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The stated goal of the book is to “harness the latent memory of both Jewish and Chilean history” (5) as a way to start healing past wounds. Specifically, that means publicly recognizing the ways in which the Jewish community remained quiet during the Pinochet dictatorship, thereby accepting human rights abuses. Lowy argues that those memories are suppressed, with too many people reluctant to acknowledge them. It is a compelling and, of course, sobering read.
Lowy first traces the Jewish experience of exodus. A trickle of Jewish immigrants arriving in Chile at the turn of the twentieth century accelerated in the 1930s. Fleeing Europe, many had never heard of Chile, or even knew where it was. And why Chile? It was sometimes as simple as Chile's affording the only viable visa, or perhaps its willingness to allow immigrants to bring more belongings. Sometimes it was just a well-placed bribe. Once in Chile, many Jewish leaders feared the rise of Salvador Allende and considered the military coup a welcome event, turning away from the evidence of torture, death, and disappearance. As with many other Chileans, that has complicated the process of remembering.
At the time, Jewish community leaders “made known their support for the new regime from the early days following the military coup and throughout the duration of the dictatorship” (45). That even went so far as making donations and rejecting claims that the dictatorship was anti-Semitic. There were exceptions, however. For example, Rabbi Ángel Kreiman secured the release of many prisoners, even going straight to judges, or even to Augusto Pinochet's office. Lowy documents how many others risked their own well-being to hide the persecuted and get them out of the country. Yet, those humanitarian impulses worried others in the Jewish community, who wanted to maintain positive relations with the dictatorship.
That is the essential tension of the book. Despite their own past experiences, many people remained quiet even when presented with irrefutable evidence of persecution. But those accounts also come with empathy, even from people whose family members were arrested. They do not excuse the silence, but they seek to understand its origins. Often it was tied to fear.
Fear is woven throughout the narrative. It was the currency of the dictatorship. Lowy details the many Chilean Jews who were arrested, imprisoned, and sometimes killed by the military regime. At the end, she lists the names of people of Jewish origin who were forcibly disappeared or summarily executed. Some of those, moreover, were Chileans because their own parents had fled the Nazis. Lowy shows so many parallels, even noting the echoes of Anne Frank. There were, in fact, “Annes of Chile.”
Lowy hopes that memory can create meaning, and prevent the same from happening again. I highly recommend reading her effort to do so. She is a journalist, not an academic, but I believe nonetheless that her book would have benefited from at least a short historiographical discussion of previous scholarship. There are numerous works in both English and Spanish on the Jewish community in Chile, but Lowy does not tell us where her work fits within them. She wants to make an impact on Chileans to be sure, but the book has an even broader academic audience than that.
