“I only wanted to write about them, / Narrate their fierce audacity, / Their voyages through the channels of the Mediterranean.” So begins a poetic journey through the islands of the Mediterranean that served as homes and refuge for the Sephardic Jews after the Alhambra Decree, which ordered their expulsion from Spain. Inspired by her own journey to Salonika and the Greek Islands, Rhodes, Crete, as well as the Balkans, Marjorie Agosín searches for the remnants of the Sepharad.

Presented in a beautiful bilingual Spanish-English edition, Agosín’s poems speak to a wandering life of exile on distant shores. We hear the rhythm of the waves and the Ladino-inflected voices of Sephardi women past and present: Paloma, Estrella, and Luna in the fullness of their lives, loves, dreams, and faith. An evocative and sensual voyage to communities mostly lost after the Holocaust, The White Islands offers a lighthouse of remembrance, a lyrical world recovered with language and song, lament and joy, longing and hope.

Marjorie Agosín is professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. She has written several books of poetry, essays, and criticism, among them The Light of Desire. Jacqueline Nanfito is professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Case Western Reserve University. Michal Held is professor of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) literature and culture and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

— Edward Hirsch, author of Gabriel: A Poem, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

— Ruth Behar, author of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys

— World Literature Today

— Bárbara Mujica, Washington Independent Review of Books

— Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas

— Jewish Book Council