Generation Exile: The Lives I Leave Behind

“If you ever sing those songs again, they will kill your daddy,” the boy’s mother warned him after he continued to sing one of the hymns of the Chilean revolution in public. Rodrigo Dorfman, the son of prominent dissidents, was six years old when his family fled Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship a month after the CIA-backed coup in 1973.



In his fascinating memoir, Dorfman writes about his experiences as an exile and a migrant. He was dragged away from his homeland, “seduced by the t...