"Truly fine travel writing looks both out and in, and Ilan Stavans' The Seventh Heaven is a book of that rare sort. From Jewish stand-up comedy in Buenos Aires to the Montevideo grave of the mysterious Mr. Chouchani, we follow Stavans' journey through Jewish Latin America with fascination and delight. But the journey is also a restless personal search for home, for wisdom, for imaginary happiness, and Stavans renders this journey both idiosyncratically his own and, at the same time, about us all."
–Martha C. Nussbaum, The University of Chicago