Margo Glantz

Margo Glantz Shapiro (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈmaɾ.ɣo ˈɣlants]; born January 28, 1930) is a writer, essayist, critic and academic who lives in Mexico. She has been a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua since 1995. She is a recipient of the FIL Award.

Interview (2020)
Translated by Jenna Tang


 * Zoom and other outlets deform our images, making us lose our actual bodies, and with the possibility of contacting each other this way—we become holograms, or ghosts like Justine from Bioy Casares’s great novel, The Invention of Morel.


 * One of the first things that occurs in totalitarian regimes, as we saw with research, such as Hitler and Stalin et al., is the act of abhorring culture, of banning and burning books.


 * In Y por mirarlo todo, nada veía, I tried to show how the meaningless proliferation of news and the almost endemic impossibility of ranking and practicing irony contaminate and disable us in our efforts to keep a healthy mental distance.

The Family Tree (1981)
Original Spanish title Las genealogías, translated into English by Susan Bassnett (1991)


 * All of us, no matter whether noble or not, have our own family trees. (Prologue)


 * Perhaps what attracts me about my Jewish past and present is an awareness of its vividness, its colour and its grotesqueness, the same awareness that makes real Jews a minor race with a major sense of humour, with their ordinary cruelty, their unfortunate tenderness and their occasional shamelessness. (Prologue)


 * my brother-in-law says I don't seem Jewish, because Jews, like our first cousins the Arabs, hate images. So everything is mine and yet it isn't, and I look Jewish and I don't and that is why I am writing this- my family history, the story of my own family tree. (Prologue)


 * Time is a space marked out and filled with the ceaseless chanting of prayers by which a devout Jew measures his life.


 * It doesn't matter much whether you're a Jew or not, what matters is whether you're willing to fight against the herd instinct. (13)


 * Living with someone probably means losing part of your own identity. Living with someone contaminates (36)


 * Is the pleasure of remembering somehow debilitating? Maybe memory gets weakened by being handled and stretched so much. Memories return so often and we stay hooked onto some event or other... (37)


 * There is no such thing as a race without its own cooking. Or even without its daily bread. (43)

Quotes about

 * A dearth in published literature exists despite the multitude of noteworthy female authors who share the Latin American Jewish identity; writers like Angelina Muñiz, Clarice Lispector, and Margo Glantz. The long-time omission of these authors from anthologies likely reflects how they have historically been afforded less recognition and renown than their male counterparts.
 * Marjorie Agosín Introduction to the second edition of The House of Memory: Stories by Jewish Women Writers of Latin America (2022)


 * Along with a funny and enchanting memoir of her Jewish family's migration to Mexico, Margo Glantz has given us in The Family Tree an exploration of what it means to belong to two worlds and how it can enrich our own identity if both of these worlds intertwine.
 * Ariel Dorfman included as a blurb to The Family Tree (1991)