by Ruth Behar
Havana in the west and Santiago de Cuba on the eastern end of the island had the largest number of Jews. In those cities, there were synagogues, Jewish schools, Yiddish theaters, and Sephardic associations. But it’s not generally known that there were many Jewish immigrants who also lived in the countryside, far from fellow congregants. Baba and her family settled in Agramonte when they first arrived in Cuba and were the only Jewish family in the town. Though called “los polacos,” they felt they’d found a safe harbor on the eve of the war. So safe that once reunited in Agramonte, my great-grandfather Abraham had the peace of mind to write down all that he remembered of his youth in Poland in an old accounting book. This memoir, handwritten in Yiddish amid the swaying palm trees of Cuba, spoke nostalgically of the Jewish world he had lost. In a sense, my great-grandfather never arrived in Cuba; he left his heart in Poland.
But Baba fully and absolutely embraced her new Cuban life, which is why I chose to write from her point of view. Listening to her stories about Agramonte when I was growing up lit a spark in me. I knew I’d have to see Agramonte with my own eyes one day. The story that made an especially strong impression was about the real Doctor Pablo, who lived in Agramonte and was a friend to Baba and her family. In the late 1930s, Baba said, he organized a group of women and taught them first aid in case the Nazis invaded Cuba. Baba, of course, was proud to be one of the women who would assist Doctor Pablo, if called upon, and I was struck by how the impending sense of Nazi terror even reached Cubans living seemingly far away in the countryside. We were all tied together in the knot of history. That realization stayed with me and found its way to the heart of this book.
In addition to being a children’s author, I am a cultural anthropologist, and so I felt compelled to do some fieldwork and historical research in the town of Agramonte. Luckily, there are excellent ethnographers and local historians in Agramonte who are keen to preserve their history and culture. That was how I learned about and visited the house with a fountain of water inside its walls that is dedicated to the deity of Yemayá. I went to see the sugar mills in the area, all abandoned today, and asked about the lives of the people who were once workers in the cane, among them many descendants of enslaved people. Haunting legends recalling the days of slavery took root among the people of Agramonte and nearby villages, a region known as Cuba’s Little Africa. There is a bembé for San Lázaro every year, and I’ve been privileged to attend a few times, hear the ancient batá drums, and see the weeping ceiba tree with the chains around its trunk.
As I wrote this book, the different stories meshed—the Jewish-Cuban immigrant story and the Afro-Cuban post-slavery story. I tried to do justice to both and to conjure the thoughts and dreams of a young Polish Jewish girl landing in a town in the Cuban countryside that had preserved so many African traditions. Through my research, I learned there were Chinese Cubans living in Agramonte as well and realized that to tell this story, I had to include their voices too. I hope I did that with the sensitivity it deserves.
Although the Esther of this book is a fictional character, she represents many real young people of the past and the present who have crossed borders and shouldered responsibilities that only an adult should have to take on. As Esther states in one of her letters, “In times of emergency, a child must rise up and act older than her years.” Today, there are brave young people from many places rising up on behalf of all of us, not just to make the world a better place but to be sure the world continues to exist.
While not precisely my grandmother Esther’s story, I tried to capture her curiosity and passionate need to understand others. The vibrant spirit of Cuba, the kindness and generosity of its people, and the resilience of its culture gave her a newfound sense of freedom and hope for the future. My grandmother became Cuban before she became American, and I did too, thanks to her. I am forever grateful she chose to go to Cuba. There she learned to love life after losing so much. Her memory is a blessing to me. May it also be for readers of this book.
The author as a child in Cuba with her grandmother Esther, the inspiration for the book, and her grandfather Maximo.
RESOURCES
I HAVE BEEN fortunate to be able to spend many years researching the stories of the Jews of Cuba. To write this novel, I also drew upon inspiration and historical insight gained from the work of many scholars and writers. Here are a few recommended titles for further reading.
CHILDREN’S NOVELS
Margarita Engle, Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (New York: Henry Holt, 2009).
Alan Gratz, Refugee (New York: Scholastic, 2017).
Karen Hesse, Letters from Rifka (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).
Lois Lowry, Number the Stars (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989).
CUBAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE
Alan Astro, ed., Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).
Ruth Behar, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
Margalit Bejarano, The Jewish Community of Cuba: Memory and History (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2014).
Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl: A Novel (New York: Atria Books, 2016).
Robert M. Levine, Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).
Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
Joseph M. Murphy, Santería: African Spirits in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
Fernando Ortiz, Defensa cubana contra el racismo antisemita, por la Asociación Nacional Contra las Discriminaciones Racistas (Revista Bimestre Cubana 44, no. 3, June 1939): 97–107.
Leonardo Padura, Heretics (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017).
Felicia Rosshandler, Passing Through Havana: A Novel of a Wartime Girlhood in the Caribbean (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983).
JEWISH HISTORY
Gur Alroey, Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011).
Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).
Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York: Schoken Books, 1983).
Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman, Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LETTERS FROM CUBA exists thanks to my extraordinary editor, Nancy Paulsen. A year and a half ago, in the spring of 2018, I told her the story of my brave and stubborn grandmother Esther, who helped her father, my great-grandfather, bring the family from Poland to Cuba on the eve of the Holocaust. Without a moment’s hesitation, Nancy said, “There’s your next book.” I was thrilled to be given that assignment. But could I write it? Knowing Nancy wanted the story gave me the atrevimiento, the chutzpah, to try. Somehow, in a whirlwind of teaching and travel, this book got written. Nancy was the kindest, most thoughtful and meticulous editor, sharing every moment of the journey with me. I am in awe of Nancy’s work as an advocate for children’s literature and feel so blessed to have been graced by her wisdom.
I am equally blessed, hugely blessed, to have Alyssa Eisner Henkin as my agent. Her loving support gave me the strength to stay focused during moments when the writing became overwhelming. I am grateful for her generosity, her vivaciousness, her willingness to hop on the phone and talk things through. I feel very lucky to be working with her and the expert team at Trident Media. Thank you to Alyssa for her faith in my storytelling and for helping me fulfill a dream I’d almost given up on—of being a writer. It’s truly never too late to start, an
d having someone as brilliant and caring as Alyssa be your guiding spirit is pure joy.
Writer-friends whom I hugely admire were there for me, and I thank them with a full heart. Thank you: To Ann Pearlman for reading an early draft and giving me hope. To Reyna Grande for incisive comments that pushed me to go deeper into the relationship between Esther and her mother. To Marjorie Agosín for her compassionate reading. To Richard Blanco for poetry, friendship, and laughter. To Sandra Cisneros, who read what I thought was a final draft and showed me where it still needed work, teaching me respect for the written word that I will always be grateful for.
A group of amazing friends who are Cuba experts read earlier drafts and gave me comments that helped make this book better. Thank you: To Teofilo Ruiz for illuminating the history of Cuba. To Margalit Bejarano for sharing her knowledge of Jewish immigration to Cuba. To Jesús Jambrina for a profound literary reading. To Alfredo Alonso Estenoz, a native of Agramonte, for opening his home to me there many years ago and connecting me with his wonderful family, as well as for his insightful comments. To Eduardo Aparicio for making sure the Spanish flowed smoothly in the text. To Martin Tsang for crucial comments on the representation of Chinese Cubans and Santería rituals. To Lucía Suárez for a sensitive reading that helped me feel confident about the ending of the book. To Rosa Lowinger for caring about this story.
As a cultural anthropologist, I need to experience places, not simply imagine them. This book found inspiration in a 2006 trip to Govorovo (Goworowo in Polish). My former student, Erica Lehrer, a superb scholar of Poland, kindly accompanied me on this trip, opening my eyes to a country that had once been home to my grandmother and many other Jews. During that trip, thanks to the monumental research of Anka Grupinska for Centropa, I had the good fortune to meet Yitzhak Grynberg, a native of Govorovo living in Warsaw, who remembered my family and shared insights about what life had been like there before the war. Later I was fortunate to learn about the work of Stanley Diamond, who founded Jewish Records Indexing–Poland and, together with other devoted scholars, has unearthed extensive information about the Jews of Govorovo and neighboring towns and villages. I was fortunate to be able to turn to Mikhl Yashinsky for lyrical translations from the Yiddish of the Govorovo memorial book, which helped me to enter into the poetics of a disappeared Jewish world.
I went to Agramonte for the first time over twenty-five years ago, curious to see with my own eyes the place where my grandmother and her family lived after arriving in Cuba from Govorovo, the place also where my mother and my aunt Sylvia spent their early childhood years before moving to Havana. Growing up hearing all the stories of Agramonte, I expected it to be a mythical town, and indeed it is. Agramonte is an anthropologist’s dream, filled with friendly people who take pride in their cultural heritage. I want to offer a special thank-you to Carlos Félix de Armas Samá, Rosa Arencibia Estenoz, Vitalia Arencibia Estenoz, Yoan Landa Arencibia, Suleidis Sanabria Acosta, and Tania Teresa Sanabria Fernández.
It was a delightful surprise to learn about Jill Flanders-Crosby’s research on Arará social memory in Agramonte and Périco, thanks to my correspondence with Jonathan Mark (JT) Torres. He put us in touch, and I thank him for that act of kindness as well as for his moving writing about this historic region. I am grateful to have traveled to Agramonte in 2017 with researcher Melba Nuñez and her husband, Miguel, sharing with them the experience of the San Lázaro/Babalú-Ayé rituals. Finally, I offer my deepest thanks to book-artist Rolando Estévez, who has taught me so much about the region of Matanzas (Bellamar, as he prefers to call it), both the city and the province, through his poetry and art and years of conversations. I feel blessed for my friendship with Estévez, which has led me to return many times to the red-earthed corner of Cuba where I have roots.
In Havana, the city of my birth, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the large-hearted woman who was my childhood nanny, Caridad Martínez Castillo. She died last year at this time. I wish she could have read this book. She welcomed me to Havana when I began returning years ago and made me feel like Cuba was still my home. I am grateful for the warm welcome I always receive from Consuelito Azcuy Díaz, my parents’ old neighbor in Havana, and her daughter, my childhood friend Cristy Hernández Azcuy, and their lovely family. I want to thank historian Gerardo Hernández Bencomo, who knows everything about the history of our beloved Habana. Thank you to Adriana Hernández Gómez de Molina, who shared her knowledge of 1930s attitudes toward Jews in Cuba. Many dear friends have shared their Havana worlds with me over nearly three decades of return trips. Warm thanks to poet Nancy Morejón and artist Rocío García. And a big thank-you to Adela Dworin, who safeguards the memory of the Jews of Cuba.
Working with the book-loving team at Penguin Random House is an honor, and I am grateful for all the support I’ve received from everyone in the educational and marketing departments. Many thanks to Cindy Howle, Carla Benton, and Allyson Floridia for excellent copyediting. Special thanks to Elyse Marshall for being an amazing publicist. And a warm thank-you to Sara LaFleur, always a pleasure to work with, for expert assistance during every phase of the bookmaking process.
Thank you to all the librarians, teachers, booksellers, and young readers who opened their hearts to me as a writer and motivated me to write another book.
Thank you to John Parra for the beautiful cover artwork. The image conveys perfectly the hope and lightness of heart that Jewish immigrants felt when they set foot in Cuba as conditions grew very dark in Europe.
Thank you to the University of Michigan for supporting my work throughout the years and for providing funding for research trips to Poland and Cuba.
Thank you to PJ Our Way for an Author’s Incentive Award, which provided support for my writing at a crucial moment.
Thank you to Petra Moreno in Ann Arbor, who sews gorgeous tango outfits and gave me wonderful pointers on how dresses are made so I could better understand Esther’s sewing wizardry.
After choosing the title for my book, I learned that two previous nonfiction books, from 1844 and 1906, had used the title Letters from Cuba, and that the playwright Maria Irene Fornes had written a play also titled Letters from Cuba that premiered in 2000. I acknowledge these previous works and am glad to be in their company.
This story is in memory of my maternal grandmother Esther. I owe so much to Baba. If even a touch of her personality breathes through these pages, I will be content. As the oldest grandchild, I was privileged to get to know her well and loved her dearly. But she was a beacon for my entire maternal family, and I thank them all for keeping her in their memories.
A big thank-you, of course, to Mami y Papi, my parents, who have never forgotten about Cuba and our history on the island and have shared so many of their stories with me.
I am infinitely grateful to my husband, David, who’s there for me always, besides being an incredible in-house fact-checker. My son, Gabriel, I cannot thank enough for all the joys and blessings he has given me. I thank Sasha, his wife, for joining our family and bringing more joys and blessings to us. Having two young artists in the family is a huge inspiration and has helped me to be a better writer.
And Cuba . . . Can you thank a country? As I was about to turn in the final version of this book, I felt a huge need to be in Cuba. I was fortunate to be able to finish Letters from Cuba in Havana, emailing with my editor, Nancy Paulsen, from a park bench a few blocks from where I grew up, connecting to the public Wi-Fi while birds sang and children ran around playing tag. To be back at the source of this story, in the place that gave my family the chance to survive, the chance to be alive, was such a beautiful gift. Gracias a la vida. To life, to life, l’chaim. Gracias, Cuba.
Ruth Behar
December 17, 2019
(Día de San Lázaro)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruth Behar, the Pura Belpré Award-winning author of Lucky Broken Girl, was born in Havana, Cuba, grew up in New York, and
has also lived in Spain and Mexico. In addition to writing for young people, her work includes poetry, memoir, and the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy, which explore her return journeys to Cuba and her search for home. She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, and other honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and being named a "Great Immigrant" by the Carnegie Corporation. She is an anthropology professor at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
(Twitter: @ruthbehar / Instagram: ruthbeharauthor / Facebook: Ruth-Behar / Websites: sites.lsa.umich.edu/ruth-behar; ruthbehar.com; Carnegie Corporation, 2018 "Great Immigrants Honoree": carnegie.org/awards/honoree/ruth-behar)
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