Errant Destinations: (Jewish Women in the Americas)

Errant Destinations is a collection of nine literary chronicles in which contemporary Chilean- Jewish author Andrea Jeftanovic reflects on travel in its multiple variations, with reference to diverse fields of study, including references to cinema, literature, and the visual arts. This The interdisciplinary approach enhances the contemplation of historical, social, political, and cultural issues in contemporary society. Jeftanovic transforms travel into an art form, inviting the reader to participate in literary and geographical encounters in foreign places such as the tunnel that unites Sarajevo bombarded during the Balkan War; the diffuse maritime delineation between Chile and Peru; an organization for relatives of victims of the Palestinian-Israeli War; the hidden corners of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s characters; the hotel room in Cienfuegos where Castro stayed in two distinct historical moments; and California of the 70’s, where the author endeavors to find Janis Joplin. Combining chronicle with fiction and testimony, the author employs written text is interspersed with photographic images, and narrated with a perceptive and personal gaze that reveals an extraordinary capacity to explore and reveal the many facets and recesses of the human psyche.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Sarajevo Underground Chapter 2: California Naked Chapter 3: Watanabe’s Eye Chapter 4: The Rivers of Clarice Lispector Chapter 5: Doors and Ellipses Chapter 6: The Intimate Palestinian-Israeli Circle Chapter 7: From a Bookshelf of Middle Eastern Texts Chapter 8: Birds of Steel Chapter 9: Nevertheless, Cuba

About the Author :
Andrea Jeftanovic is an author and professor of Latin American literature at the University of Santiago, Chile. Jacqueline C. Nanfito is a translator and professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Case Western Reserve University.

Review :
Errant Destinations by Andrea Jeftanovic is a force to be reckoned with as a new cornerstone of contemporary thought and narrative. Robustly translated, edited, and introduced by Jacqueline Nanfito, with a preface by Marjorie Agosín, this volume of creative non-fiction engages questions of identity, migration, travel, empathy, and memory, during an era of unprecedented global displacement. Anyone reading contemporary writers from Chile, the Americas, or frankly, any part of the world, must read this book. In Errant Destinations, Andrea Jeftanovic productively complicates the travel narrative, with special emphasis on the stretches of each journey carried out on foot. These nine essays artfully portray a diversity of locales while taking on such difficult topics as the long-term aftereffects of repressive régimes, the struggle to find common ground between Israelis and Palestinians or the Jewish and Palestinian communities in Chile, and the relation between the fictional version of places and the real-world originals on which they are modeled. Jeftanovic brings her unobtrusive erudition, ironic eye, and writerly skill to these evocative texts, in which every detail observed is saturated with significance.