Gaby Brimmer: An Autobiography in Three Voices (HBI Series on Jewish Women) - Tapa blanda

"Gabriela Brimmer moved her big toe to craft poetry and moved the world to defend the disabled. Elena Poniatowska bends the rules of journalism to tell her story in a polyphonic memoir that brims with determination. Humbling and admirable!" ILAN STAVANS, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, Amherst College"

This is the remarkable autobiography of Mexican-Jewish disability-rights activist and writer Gabriela Brimmer. This English-language translation of the autobiography of Gabriela Brimmer (1947-2000) tells an amazing story in three voices. Gaby, who had cerebral palsy, communicated largely by typing with her left foot on an electric typewriter, and also by using that foot to point at letters and numbers on an 'alphabet board' at the base of her wheelchair. She gained admission to Mexico City public schools, attended the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico, and became a key figure in launching Mexico's disability rights movement. Brimmer was raised by her parents, Austrian Jews who fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, and a devoted Mexican caregiver, Florencia Morales Sanchez. Renowned writer Elena Poniatowska structured this text by alternating Gaby's voice with those of her mother, Sari, and Florencia. Memorable not just as the memoir of an extraordinary woman, but as a unique and imaginative form of autobiographical writing, the volume opens with a foreword by Judith E. Heumann and Jorge Pineda, and features a new introduction by Lauri Umansky and afterword by Avital Bloch providing additional context about Gaby's life and writing, as well as disability, women's, and Jewish/Mexican history.