Arts&Life books
To Cuba, L With Gratitude
ast December, Ann Arbor resident Ruth Behar returned to Havana, her place of birth, to put the finishing touches on her newest novel, Letters from Cuba. She stayed in the same apartment building where she lived her first five years until 1961 — when her family left the island two years after Fidel Castro took over. During her visit, the author worked in the nearby park In a new book, local author she went to as a child, using public Wi-Fi to go over final Ruth Behar recalls the island editorial changes. The neighas a haven for Jews. borhood is just a half-block from Temple Beth Shalom, MADELINE HALPERT CONTRIBUTING WRITER also known as the Patronato Synagogue, a major hub of the Jewish community built just years before Behar’s birth. She said the nostalgic location for the visit was intentional. “I wanted to feel the island right before my book went to press,” said Behar, a writer, anthropologist and the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the first Latina to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. “I wanted to be there in Cuba again as I was letting the book go,” she said. For Behar and her family, Cuba is not only a place of birth, but a site of refuge. Her TOP: Agramonte Street in Havana, Cuba. great-grandfather Abraham Levin journeyed Baby Ruth with her grandparents in there from Poland in 1924 during the rise of Havana. CENTER: Goworowo map from Memorial Book. antisemitism in Europe. He lived in the rural Cuban village of Agramonte. Behar’s Letters from Cuba, geared toward middle-grade students, was inspired by the
true story of her maternal grandmother, Esther, a Polish Jew who journeyed by ship alone at age 17 in 1927 to join her father in Cuba. There, she helped make enough money to bring over the rest of her family from Poland, on the eve of the Holocaust. The book features fictional letters from Esther to her younger sister, Malka, and imagines the experience of Esther as a young Jewish immigrant in a foreign country. Behar said that fiction became the perfect outlet for a Jewish immigration story that history does not have much record of. Instead, she used details heard in family stories, like the bread and bananas her great- grandfather sustained himself on upon arrival. “That was a clue to how these new immigrants were taking care of themselves,” Behar said. “It showed how they were gently immersing themselves, trying the fruit of this new culture, while still trying their best to follow the kosher traditions of the old country.” In addition to her grandmother’s story, Behar said she was motivated to write the book by the climate of hostility toward immigrants exhibited by the Trump administration. She saw connections between her family’s migration patterns and current events. “It brought the past and the present together for me,” said Behar. “I thought, ‘My own family went through this.’” In the 1920s, when Behar’s family was trying to escape persecution, the U.S. continued on page 36 OCTOBER 1 • 2020
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