CANR
WORK TITLE: Across So Many Seas
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.ruthbehar.com/
CITY: Ann Arbor
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 266
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 12, 1956, in Havana, Cuba; immigrated to the United States, 1962; naturalized citizen, 1986; daughter of Alberto and Rebecca Behar; married David Frye, June 6, 1982; children: Gabriel Frye-Behar.
EDUCATION:Wesleyan University, B.A., 1977; Princeton University, M.A., 1981, Ph.D., 1983.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, assistant professor, 1986-89, associate professor, 1989-94, professor of anthropology, 1994—; director and producer of film Goodbye Dear Love, Women Make Movies, 2002.
AWARDS:MacArthur fellowship, 1988-93; Excellence in Education Award, University of Michigan, 1991, 1997, 2006; Guggenheim fellowship, 1995-96; Distinguished Alumna Award in Recognition of Outstanding Achievement and Service, Wesleyan University, 1997; named one of fifty Latinas who made history in the twentieth century, Latina magazine, 1999; American Psychological Association award, 2002; Fulbright award, 2007; grants and fellowships from University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins University, council for International Exchange of Scholars, Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, Florida International University, American Council of learned Societies, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and Guggenheim Foundation; Pura Belpre Author Award, 2018, for Lucky Broken Girl; Newbery Honor Book, American Library Association, 2025, for Across So Many Seas.
RELIGION: Jewish.WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Little Havana Blues: A Cuban-American Literature Anthology, Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women, The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Jewish-American Writers; Wáchale: Poetry and Prose about Growing Up Latino in America; Burnt Sugar/Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish; Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios; The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature; The Female Body: Figures, Styles, Speculations; Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters; King David’s Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers; How I Learned English, and Sephardic American Voices: Two Hundred Years of Literary Legacy.
SIDELIGHTS
Educator and author Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised by Eastern European and Sephardic Jewish grandparents who had immigrated there after the passage in 1924 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (through which the United States sought to limit Jewish immigration). This background led to her interest in anthropology; her academic home for the past several years has been the University of Michigan’s anthropology department. Though she has also written poetry and edited a literary anthology of Cuban writers, Behar has become known for her anthropological works, which blur the line between social science and personal involvement with the people she studies, including the well-received 1993 book Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Behar explained her philosophy of the “involved participant” in anthropology in her 1996 collection of personal essays, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart.
Behar’s first long anthropological work was Santa Maria del Monte: The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, published in 1986. In this generously illustrated volume, Behar examines a Spanish village that had remained in isolation from modern Spain longer than most settlements. By the time she wrote her book, however, the village was finally becoming encroached upon by a nearby development of holiday ‘chalets.’ The people of the village of Santa Maria in the province of Leon, Spain, felt “the presence of the past” and had a long tradition of literacy; thus Behar was aided in her study by well-kept village records dating back to the eighteenth century.
Behar’s chronicle portrays what Sandra Ott in the Times Literary Supplement describes as “long term cultural continuity” rather than the more fashionable anthropological depiction of modern social and economic change, and includes the conventions of inheriting private property as well as some methods of control by the “concejo” (village council) over communal property. D.D. Caulkins, reviewing Santa Maria del Monte in Choice, noted that “this admirable work sets a high standard for historical ethnography.” Ott greeted it as “a welcome step forward in Iberian anthropology.” Similarly, James S. Amelang in the New York Times Book Review complimented it as “an impressive foray into historical ethnography.”
Translated Woman began when Behar was working on a very different project—archival records of women affected by the Mexican Inquisition. She went to a cemetery near the town of Mexquitic and attempted to photograph a Mexican-Native American woman placing flowers on the graves of her children. The woman, to whom Behar assigned the name Esperanza, questioned her about what she was doing. The two struck up an acquaintance, and Esperanza bargained with Behar. If Behar and her husband would serve as godparents to one of her living children, Esperanza would tell her story to Behar and provide the anthropologist with intimate details of the life of women in Mexquitic.
Esperanza’s story appears in Translated Woman, and it is a tale of suffering and abuse. Her first memory is of her father beating her mother; later, she herself is battered by her own first husband. Esperanza credits the rage this produced within her with spoiling her breast milk, and thus causing several of her infant children to die of malnutrition. When her husband—who is not only abusive but an adulterer as well—is suddenly and mysteriously stricken with blindness, Esperanza is labeled a witch by the rest of her community. She is already somewhat on the outside of society because of her poverty and her Native American heritage, but the suspicion of witchcraft places her further outside the circle of community.
At the end of Translated Woman, Behar provides an autobiographical chapter, comparing her own life to Esperanza’s and claiming outsider status as well—as a granddaughter of Jewish immigrants in Cuba, as a Cuban refugee in the United States, and as a woman difficult to classify in academia. This has proven the most controversial section of the work. Victor Perera in the Nation cautioned that “it is disingenuous to compare the suffering Mexican village society inflicts on Esperanza for rebelling against its strictures with the ordeal of having to accept tenure at a prominent university,” while Nancy Scheper-Hughes in the New York Times Book Review determined that “the metaphor is contrived and the lesson is clear: the lives of anthropologists are rarely as rich and fascinating as those of their subjects.” Conversely, Louise Lamphere in the Women’s Review of Books observed that “the difficulties of articulating the connections between the American woman academic and Mexican female street peddler, the sense of contradictions in tension, and the lack of an easy resolution are perhaps, paradoxically, the most satisfying aspects of Behar’s book.” Emma Perez in the Journal of American History observed: “Behar has offered a gift. … Rarely do academicians engage their contradictions so honestly.”
On the value of Translated Woman as a whole, critics were clear. Perez predicted that “the book will become a model for ethnographers, historians, and other scholars crossing disciplines to reconstruct life histories.” Lamphere held the volume up as “postmodernist writing at its best,” while Scheper-Hughes offered appreciation for the fact that “Behar has broken many taboos and inhibitions in writing an experimental ethnographic text that has for its subject a poor native Mexican woman who refuses to be a pitiful victim, or a saint, or a Madonna, or a whore, or a Joan of Arc.” Perera praised Translated Woman as “a ground-breaking Latina feminist ethnography” and a “powerful and brilliant study.”
Reviewing The Vulnerable Observer in Salon.com, Sally Eckhoff explained Behar’s new method of anthropological study: “Combine traditional fieldwork with a researcher’s personal experience … and you come up with a mode of study that informs the intellect as it grips the emotions—without smashing the delicate subject(s) flat, the way conventional research often does.” Eckhoff went on to report that Behar structures The Vulnerable Observer in such a way as to first explain and defend her position, then illustrate its benefits with specific essays that have resulted from her method. Included in this section is a piece about studying elderly villagers in Spain while simultaneously worrying about her own elderly grandfather’s decline in Miami, Florida. Diane Cole, discussing The Vulnerable Observer in the New York Times Book Review, congratulated Behar on the “insight, candor and compassion” of “her vision.”
Again combining the personal and the scholarly, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba is Behar’s account of her journey back to her homeland to document the history of the Jewish community in Cuba, and the diaspora that brought her own parents to the United States. The book includes material from numerous interviews with Cubans whose Jewish ancestors had arrived on the island as refugees from Nazi Europe. There they opened small shops, learned Spanish, and settled down to raise families, creating a vibrant community that, by the late 1950s, numbered some 16,500 people. But Castro’s rise to power caused a massive emigration of Cuban Jews to New York City and Miami. To her surprise, Behar discovered in researching the book that a small Jewish community has survived in Cuba; though highly assimilated, this community still retains strong Jewish roots.
An Island Called Home includes Behar’s descriptions of places and scenes that figured in her own family’s story, and accounts of her meetings with various individuals, as well as black-and-white photographs by Havana photographer Humberte Mayol. Reviewing the book in Library Journal, Paul Kaplan observed that readers would be “charmed and enthralled by [Behar’s] deeply felt tales.” Similarly, a writer for Publishers Weekly commended the book as an important document that “preserves in memory the people and places that make up Cuba’s Jewish history.”
Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys is a series of vignettes written in response to pictures in the author’s family photograph album. Behar discusses her heritage as a child of Sephardic-Ashkenazi-Cuban parents, who moved with the author from Cuba to New York City when Behar was a small child—and just months before the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The family settled in the Ashkenazi section of Queens, eking out a living selling small notions. Behar, whose identity was forged as that of an outsider and an exile, was thrust into school, even though she could not speak English. She wanted an education, however, despite resistance from her authoritarian father, so she eventually became a cultural anthropologist, using her ability to speak Spanish to conduct field work in Spain and Mexico. She always felt drawn to Cuba and was able to make several journeys back to her native land as a visiting scholar. Further, she was able to attend a worldwide reunion of the Behar clan in Béjar, Spain, which had been home to a large Jewish community prior to 1492. The book also examines her Polish roots through a memorial book her grandmother gave her. The book originated from a small town near Krakow that was destroyed by the Nazis in World War II. The book also includes an unpublished memoir written by her grandfather. Throughout, however, it is clear that the author’s first and primary love is Cuba. As Jane Shmidt remarked on the Bookslut website: “While Behar investigates all potential lost homelands, Cuba is the true object of her lovesick obsession. … The Cuba Behar visits is not the country of her childhood, not the country of memory, which exile has erased. She describes the island before the revolution as a ‘safe haven,’ an ‘enchanted world’ for the Jews—an Eden, if you will. This is the Cuba which Behar’s family is forced to abandon, and she is nostalgic for that mirage.”
Critics responded to Traveling Heavy with enthusiasm. Shmidt went on to note: “Through the act of composing a memoir about her search, she writes the lost homeland and the lost self into existence.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the author “a stylish writer” and the book “a heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience.” Olga Wise, writing in Library Journal, commented that “readers will be impressed by [Behar’s] honest, direct discussion of difficult topics” and concluded by characterizing the memoir as “a moving story of finding oneself through a lifetime of travel.”
The volumes Behar has edited or coedited have attracted critical notice as well. Bridges to Cuba = Puentes a Cuba contains literary contributions both from writers living in Cuba and from writers living in exile from that nation. Women Writing Culture, which Behar edited with Deborah A. Gordon, contains essays by women anthropologists and discusses important contributions to that field by women whose works have been often overlooked.
Kate Gilbert, holding forth on Women Writing Culture in the Women’s Review of Books, protested “the way some contributors, largely successful in academic anthropology, rush to claim outsider status,” but she found most of the individual essays to be useful contributions to the field. C. Hendrickson in Choice, however, concluded that “this lively and important book … challenges readers to rethink ethnographic traditions in the face of experimental feminist writing.”
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Behar turned to children’s literature with Lucky Broken Girl, a middle-grade coming-of-age novel based on her own life. Behar and her family immigrated from Cuba and settled in New York City, just like the character of Ruthie in the novel. The novel showcases Ruthie adapting to her new home, as she learns English and becomes a hopscotch champion. Then, however, she is involved in a horrific car accident that leaves her in a body cast for a year, which happened to Behar when she was nine and ten years old. Ruthie must learn to become more observant and look to the future even as she struggles to learn to walk again. Although Behar has acknowledged basing some of the characters in the novel on real-life friends and family, she has also described on her website that she revised the past “a little” so as to “make Ruthie’s life unfold with a sweetness I wished for in my real life when I was growing up.”
Critics were impressed with Behar’s transition to children’s literature. Alma Ramos-McDermott, in Horn Book, called it an “unflinchingly honest first-person narrative” that shows how Ruthie (and Behar) was able to “turn her ‘brokenness’ into wholeness.” A reviewer in Children’s Bookwatch called the novel “deftly written” and predicted that the novel is “certain to be . . . enduringly popular.” Meghann Meeusen, in Voice of Youth Advocates, described the book as a “touching story about friendships and losses, forgiveness and fear.” Meeusen noted that teens may enjoy the novel as much as younger readers do. A writer in Kirkus Reviews was the most enthusiastic of all, praising the book for its “lyrical and rich language” and the story for being “remarkably engaging.” The result is a “poignant and relevant retelling of a child immigrant’s struggle to recover from an accident and feel at home” in her new country. Lucky Broken Girl went on to win the Pura Belpré Award.
Letters from Cuba is an epistolary novel aimed at late elementary and middle school students. The story takes place at the dawn of World War II, and Esther’s father has saved enough money for her to leave Poland, where things are looking dangerous for Jews like her, so that she can join him in Cuba. When she gets there, she is surprised that he is not a shopkeeper but instead just a peddler who goes from house to house. There is much about Cuba, however, that she loves, including her new job as a dressmaker, and she relates all of that in letters back to her beloved sister in Poland. The novel is loosely based on Behar’s own family history, but she was inspired to write it by the way immigrants were being treated in the United States. As she stated in an interview with Book A&S with Deborah Kalb, “I wondered what I could do to speak out against the cruelty of our government’s anti-immigrant stance.”
“Warmhearted cross-cultural friendship” is how a writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book. They called it “both necessary and kind.” Krisfin Unruh, in School Library Journal, appreciated how Behar is able to “craft a vivid experience of Cuba’s sights, sounds, and culinary delights.” Unruh predicted that “readers will not want to part with this story of resilience.”
Tía Fortuna’s New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey expands Behar’s portfolio into picture books. The book is structured around a child listening to the stories her elderly aunt tells her, especially about the aunt’s time of growing up in Cuba. The story particularly emphasizes their Sephardic Jewish heritage and objects and food related to it. The illustrations by Devon Holzwarth use a combination of gouache, watercolor, and colored pencil.
Stephanie Cohen, in Booklist, praised Behar’s “eloquent multilingual storytelling” and how it fits with the “peaceful” illustrations that will “bring pleasant nostalgic memories to readers of all ages.” According to Cohen, the book’s welcome theme is that “you can take the feeling of home with you no matter where you go.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews also used the word “nostalgic” to describe this book for young children and their parents. They called it a “heartfelt intergenerational story” that “illuminates a lesser-known facet of Jewish American immigration.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly enjoyed the “warmhearted storytelling” that testifies to a “legacy of faith, hope, and resilience.” They also appreciated the illustrations and how they fit with Behar’s text.
Behar’s next middle-grade novel, Across So Many Seas, goes back much further in time, starting in 1492 and covering four generations of a Sephardic Jewish family. The narrators are four different twelve-year-old girls, one in 1492 and the other three somewhat less distant (1923, 1961, 2003). Again, Behar has used her own family background to ground this fictional story of daughters being forced to move and make new homes for themselves.
Critics were especially enthusiastic about this outing. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly called it a “moving tale” and an “enlightening read.” They particularly liked how Behar uses “painstaking period detail and lush language.” The result is a “stunning portrayal of immigration and Jewish culture and religion.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews agreed, describing the book as “powerful and resonant.” They also noted that Behar’s historical research “shines through this story of generations of girls who use music and language to survive.” A reviewer in Children’s Bookwatch praised the book as “original, deftly crafted, absorbing, entertaining, memorable.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2021, Stephanie Cohen, review of Tia Fortuna’s New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey, p. 58; May 18, 2024, Caitlin Savage, review of Across So Many Seas, p. 62.
Children’s Bookwatch, May, 2017, review of Lucky Broken Girl; February 2024, review of Across So Many Seas.
Choice, October, 1986, D.D. Caulkins, review of Santa Maria del Monte: The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, p. 346; June, 1996, C. Hendrickson, review of Women Writing Culture, p. 1649; October, 2009, E. Hu-DeHart, review of The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World, p. 401.
Horn Book, July-August, 2017, Alma Ramos-McDermott, review of Lucky Broken Girl, p. 125.
Journal of American History, September, 1994, Emma Perez, review of Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story, p. 836.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2013, review of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys; February 15, 2017, review of Lucky Broken Birl; June 15, 2020, review of Letters from Cuba; December 15, 2021, review of Tia Fortuna’s New Home; August 1, 2023, review of Pepita Meets Bebita; December 1, 2023, review of Across So Many Seas.
Library Journal, November 1, 2007, Paul Kaplan, review of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, p. 75; March 15, 2013, Olga Wise, review of Traveling Heavy, p. 120.
Nation, September 20, 1993, Victor Perera, review of Translated Woman, p. 290.
New York Times Book Review, September 28, 1986, James S. Amelang, review of Santa Maria del Monte, p. 27; September 5, 1993, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, review of Translated Woman, p. 22; May 23, 1997, Diane Cole, review of The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart.
Publishers Weekly, September 24, 2007, review of An Island Called Home, p. 60; November 1, 2021, review of Tia Fortuna’s New Home, p. 83; November 6, 2023, review of Across So Many Seas, p. 52.
School Library Journal, August, 2020, Krisfin Unruh, review of Letters from Cuba, p. 70.
Shofar, spring, 2009, Lois Barr, review of An Island Called Home.
Times Literary Supplement, January 16, 1987, Sandra Ott, review of Santa Maria del Monte, p. 64.
Voice of Youth Advocates, April, 2017, Meghann Meeusen, review of Lucky Broken Girl, p. 55.
Women’s Review of Books, May, 1993, Louise Lamphere, review of Translated Woman, p. 14; June, 1996, Kate Gilbert, review of Women Writing Culture, p. 21.
ONLINE
Book Q&lAs with Deborah Kalb, https://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (April 27, 2017), author interview; October 14, 2020, author interview; January 22, 2022, author interview; November 4, 2023, author interview.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (May, 2013), Jane Shmidt, review of Traveling Heavy.
Boston Globe, http://www.bostonglobe.com/ (May 7, 2013), Judy Bolton-Fasman, review of Traveling Heavy.
Compelling Stories: Jewish Lives Lived, http://compellingjewishstories.blogspot.com/ (February 16, 2011), Toby Anne Bird, review of An Island Called Home.
From the Mixed-Up Files, https://fromthemixedupfiles.com/ (March 11, 2025), author interview.
Geeks Out, https://www.geeksout.org/ (September 13, 2023), Michele Kirichanskaya, author interview; September 13, 2024, Michele Kirichanskaya, author interview.
Ruth Behar website, http://www.ruthbehar.com (March 11, 2025).
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (April 15, 1997), Sally Eckhoff, review of The Vulnerable Observer.
Society for Cultural Anthropology, https://culanth.org/ (August 15, 2019), Beth Derderian, author interview.
Somatosphere, https://somatosphere.com/ (November 29, 2022), Natashe Lemos Dekker, author interview.
University of Michigan website, http://www.lsa.umich.edu/ (March 11, 2025), faculty profile.
About My Life and Work
ruth-biofamilyI was born in Havana, Cuba, and when I was five I came to live in the United States with my parents and my little brother. My grandparents had left Poland and Turkey for a better life in Cuba and had to uproot not once but twice. Settling in Queens in New York City, I grew up in the sixties and seventies in crowded rental apartments, a long subway ride from Manhattan’s bright lights. My parents longed to buy a house with a front yard where my mother could plant petunias. But we were refugees and short on money. And in the back of their minds, my parents thought we’d return to Cuba someday. Like so many other Cuban immigrants of that era, my parents thought our stay in the United States was only temporary. Surely we hadn’t lost Cuba forever. But it turned out we had.
Being bedridden in a body cast for an entire year, when I was nine going on ten, changed my life. After I came out of the cast, slowly learning to walk again, I became a nerdy girl who enjoyed nothing better than sitting still and reading a book. I never went anywhere without a book, to the irritation of my gregarious salsa-dancing family who thought I was too serious. I liked to write and jotted down poems and stories in a diary and kept notes of the books that I read.
I grew up speaking Spanish with my parents and our extended family. Spanish was the language of home and sweet lullabies. I had a hard time learning English. But I knew I had to master my adopted language or I wouldn’t get out of “the dumb class.” English was the language of my aspirations—to be smart, independent, and unafraid of the world.
ruth-biobeachI studied Spanish literature as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University. Even though I won a scholarship, my parents had to pay for many of my expenses. I felt bad about the financial strain I was placing on them, so I took summer courses and finished my B.A. in three years. In my last semester, I wandered into a class in cultural anthropology and felt certain I had found my calling. I went straight on to graduate school at Princeton University, where I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology at the age of twenty-six.
During that year I couldn’t leave my bed, I dreamed of one day being well enough to travel to distant places. Becoming an anthropologist, I hoped, would give me permission to travel as much as I wished. Anthropology is a profession that requires that you spend long periods of time getting to know people in other places. I decided to focus on Spanish-speaking countries since I loved speaking Spanish. Over the last 35 years, I have gone back and forth to Spain, Mexico, and my native Cuba, writing about my experiences in books and stories. In all these places, I have been lucky to experience the kindness of strangers. It’s often been difficult to say goodbye. I now understand that I come from many places and feel at home in many places. But I am always happy to return to the peace of my house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is easy to spot because it’s painted in Caribbean colors. There I can sit quietly at my desk, stare out at the trees, and write about what I learned from my travels.
Being a cultural anthropologist has been an important part of my journey as a writer. My respect for diversity, my passion for sharing and preserving cultural heritage, and my joy at listening to other people’s life stories and passing them on, come from years of immersing myself in different worlds as a cultural anthropologist. I was an immigrant child and I grew up to become a traveler, a professional nomad, living with a suitcase by my bed.
ruth-bioporchAnd yet I’ve always recognized that Ruthie, the girl who spent a year in bed in a body cast, reading books and creating art and beautiful stories from her imagination, is very much alive in me. There is a side of me that can get lost for hours in the hypnotic rhythms of a poem. I find it thrilling to put words in the mouths of imaginary characters; I enjoy telling stories, not about how things happened, but how I wished they could have happened. During all the years I have been traveling to real places and writing about real people, there has been another Ruth who, without fanfare, has written poems and short stories.
I always dreamed of being a fiction writer. I tried and gave up many times, until one day I began to write about the car accident and about Ruthie, the girl I had been. It started as an autobiographical story, but as it grew, the writing became a mix of what I remembered and what I wished could have been. The more I wrote, the more the characters came alive and spoke to me like real people, and made me laugh and cry and sing. I began to feel the magic, the exhilaration, of writing a story without having to pack a suitcase, traveling only with my heart and my mind, and the vast power of words. At last, I realized, I was writing a novel. Letting Lucky Broken Girl be born, and letting me be reborn as a fiction writer, is a dream fulfilled, for which I am deeply grateful.
ruth-biochildQuestions for Ruth
flowersWhen were you born?
November 12th.
Where were you born?
Havana, Cuba.
How old were you when you came to the United States?
I was five years old.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Queens, the most diverse borough in New York City. When I turned eighteen, I went off to college, expecting to come back, but I ended up traveling for many years to Spain and Mexico, and then settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But I visit New York as often as I can and am always grateful I got my start in a city where you find people from all over the world trying to fulfill their dreams.
Where did you go to school?
P.S. 117, Stephen A. Halsey J.H.S. 157, and Forest Hills High School, all public schools in Queens, New York. I received a B.A. in literature from Wesleyan University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Princeton University.
Do you have brothers and sisters?
I have a younger brother named Mori, who is a jazz musician in Philadelphia. He’s great at telling jokes and makes me laugh a lot. I wish I were funny like him. But being the older sister and also the oldest of the grandchildren and the cousins, I had to be the responsible one among all the kids in the family.
What music do you like?
I love the Cuban cha cha cha music of the 1950s, the era when my parents were young. And I love Argentine tangos, especially the music of Astor Piazzolla. Like my brother Mori, I love jazz. I never tire of listening to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debbie” and I love Billie Holiday songs.
flowers2Do you have any kids?
I have a son named Gabriel. He’s all grown up and makes his living as a photographer and filmmaker in Brooklyn. I have a passion for photography and I used to take lots of pictures of Gabriel when he was growing up. Now he takes pictures of me. I can count on him to make me look a lot better after he whisks away my wrinkles with Photoshop.
lbginbed
Illustration by Penelope Dullaghan
Is Lucky Broken Girl based on your life?
Yes, it definitely is. Like Ruthie in the story, I too was in a car accident and ended up in a body cast and had to learn to walk all over again. Many of the characters in the book are based on real people – family and friends I grew up with. But naturally I didn’t tape record and film everything that happened to me as a child, so I had to use my imagination and try to recreate that time in my life. I took the liberty to revise the past a little, making Ruthie’s life unfold with a sweetness I wished for in my real life when I was growing up.
Why did you decide to write your first novel for kids?
Years ago, I wrote an autobiographical essay about the car accident and my experience being in a body cast. I told the story as a woman looking back at the girl she had been. I thought I was done with the story, but then Ruthie began to speak to me. I realized she had never had a chance to tell her story. By some act of magic, I found myself back inside the heart and soul of the girl who was bedridden. Once Ruthie was the one telling the story, rather than the grown-up Ruth, the writing took off. We all have turning points in our lives, when one door closes and another opens. My life changed course after the car accident. I had to find the courage to become a different person than the one I had expected to be. I’ve written Lucky Broken Girl to honor that time when I felt so fragile and to give permission to all young readers to open up about their own losses.
Ruth Behar
James W. Fernandez Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Anthropology
rbehar@umich.edu
Office Information:
228-A West Hall, 1085 S. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107
hours: Tuesdays, 4:00-6:00pm
Sociocultural ; Anthropology
Education/Degree:
B.A. College of Letters, Wesleyan University; M.A. Ph.D. Anthropology, Princeton University
About
Research Areas(s)
Concepts of home, diaspora, displacement, immigration, travel
Life stories, narrative approaches, ethnographic memoir
Photography and film, visual anthropology
Feminist ethnography
Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Latinas/os
Sephardic and Latin American Jewish communities
Affiliation(s)
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Latina/Latino Studies
Women’s Studies
Judaic Studies
Award(s)
MacArthur Foundation Fellows Award
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award
Fulbright Senior Fellowship
Institute for the Humanities, Hunting Family Faculty Fellowship, University of Michigan
Wesleyan University, Distinguished Alumna Award in Recognition of Outstanding Achievement and Service
Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
Across So Many Seas: Author Interview with Ruth Behar
Ruth Behar headshotRuth Behar’s lyrical and moving historic tale, Across So Many Seas, touched my heart, so I’m thrilled to be able to welcome her to our blog today. Thank you for being here, Ruth. We have so many questions for you. I’d like to start with when you were young.
Did you have any childhood dreams for when you grew up? If so, did they come true?
I dreamed of traveling, and especially of going to different places where Spanish is spoken. I was enchanted by the Spanish language since I was a child. And I dreamed of writing stories that let me see the world in new ways and that might eventually become books that others might want to read. I am glad that these dreams have come true.
What advice would you give to your eight-year-old self?
I’d say to jump, run, dance, sing, play a lot of hopscotch, and be fearless.
Did you love to read as a child? Can you tell us some favorite books?
I did love to read as a child. I read mysteries, adventure stories, and Greek mythology. I read Nancy Drew books and Edgar Allen Poe short stories and Robinson Crusoe. I read poetry in Spanish, and liked poems by the Cuban poet José Martí. When my parents got the World Book Encyclopedia, it felt like the hugest gift ever. I remember spending hours in pure enjoyment, reading the entries letter by letter of the alphabet.
What was an early experience where you learned that written language had power?
I was bedridden in a body cast for close to a year when I was ten and couldn’t do much besides read. That was when I discovered that I could forget about my sorrows by immersing myself in the stories in books.
ruth headshot c1966
Ruth as a young girl
When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
From the time I was in high school I knew I wanted to be a writer. I was writing poems and short stories then and kept a notebook filled with reflections about my life.
Have you had any careers besides writing?
I am also a cultural anthropologist. I have spent many years getting to know the stories of strangers in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba, where I was born.
Why do you write?
I write to remember – to remember those who came before, parents, grandparents that I knew and loved, and ancestors I didn’t know but try to imagine. And I write to gain an understanding of how we connect as individuals and communities. I write to cross borders so I can learn about the lives of strangers and see what we have in common.
We’re fascinated by your new release with its four stories interwoven into one story of music and poetry, heart, and soul. What sparked the idea for Across So Many Seas?
I had written Letters from Cuba, a novel inspired by the story of my maternal grandmother, and decided I should write another novel inspired by the story of my paternal grandmother. My grandmothers had different backgrounds but both found their way to Cuba and started new lives there. I thought their stories would be interesting to read side by side.
Like the girls in the stories, you also moved from your homeland. How did your own childhood, moves, and travels influence your writing?
I feel a deep empathy for immigrants and people who have been displaced and I think that comes from having been an immigrant child. I remember vividly what it was like to struggle to learn a new language and not fit in and be viewed as a foreigner. When I became an anthropologist, I realized I was seeking a profession that allowed me to experience again and again the sensation of feeling lost and having to find my way. Both my childhood and my travels influenced my interest in writing about immigrants and how people of different cultural backgrounds can find points of connection and unity.
How did you choose the years and historical events for each of your 4 characters?
I knew I wanted to start in 1492, the year of the expulsion of the Jewish community in Spain, since that is the moment in history from which many Sephardic Jews trace their identity and the beginning of their journeys across so many seas. The first protagonist, Benvenida, is experiencing the expulsion from Spain and the profound pain and sorrow it is causing her family and community.
I decided the story would then jump to the contemporary period, the twentieth and twenty-first century, to see what memory traces remain from five-hundred years ago. I chose 1923 for the next part, because it is the year that Turkey becomes an independent nation, a time of revolutionary change, which coincides with the year the character Reina is sent away by her father to Cuba. She never sees her family again, but stays connected to her heritage, bringing on her journey an oud on which to strum old Spanish songs.
oud
Oud
We go on to the third part, in 1961, the year of the literacy campaign in revolutionary Cuba, in which Alegra is joyfully participating. But her bubble bursts when she learns that she will have to leave her homeland because her family is in jeopardy with the new regime. Then 2003 seemed like the ideal moment when the fourth protagonist, Paloma, would be aware of all the history she carries on her shoulders and what it means. In that year, Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, passed away, and Paloma is with her Afro-Cuban father at her memorial, connecting with the Cuban community through the memory of the singer who sang only in Spanish, always loyal to Cuba, though she wasn’t allowed to return because she spoke out against the regime. Paloma also connects with her Sephardic heritage through her grandmother Reina, who is passing on to her the melancholy Spanish love songs.
The book spans 500 years and covers 4 generations. Can you tell us how you did such extensive research for each of the eras?
I’ve been traveling over the years to Spain and Cuba and Miami and had also traveled once to Turkey, so I had gotten to know the places where the stories of the four girls are set. I read as much as I could about the different historical eras, surrounding myself with stacks of library books and doing online research as well. There is a lot of historical research on the Inquisition and medieval Spain, but hardly any information exists about young people in this era.
I had to use my imagination to fill that gap and put myself in the shoes of Benvenida, a smart and curious girl who had the good fortune to be taught to read and write. For the part on Turkey, I drew on my grandmother’s story, and read oral histories of Jewish Turks who grew up in the same era, and that’s how Reina was born. For the part on Cuba, I was familiar with the history of the Cuban revolution and the literacy campaign, which is a topic I often teach about. But in investigating further, I found it fascinating that young girls from Havana were very involved in going to the countryside to teach people how to read and write, as is the character of Alegra. For the part on Miami, I drew on the stories of Cuban immigrants I’ve met over the years, and that’s how Paloma came to me. Then for the ending, which takes place in Toledo, Spain, I based it on my encounters with Spaniards who are working hard to preserve the traces of the Jewish heritage that still remain even after more than five hundred years.
That is amazing. What a journey, including armchair traveling, for you and for us. So, once you had the research, you had to construct each girl’s story. The stories are written in first person. How did you drop into each character’s mind to make her personality come alive?
I wanted each of the characters to be fiercely independent in her own way. I tried to imagine what was possible for a young girl to experience in her historical moment – who could she be and not be, what might she dream of, what would be her sorrows, what would be her joys, and how might she push against the barriers that limited her.
Is your past woven into the girls’ stories?
I think there’s a part of me in each of the four girls’ stories. Some of the family dynamics of my childhood is woven into the stories, especially how the mothers seek to comfort their daughters as they suffer from being displaced while the fathers are more concerned with attending to survival. My love of reading and writing, my passion for poetry and music, which were an important part of my youth, found its way into the stories too.
Do you have a favorite of the four girls? Perhaps one who most closely resembles you?
Ruth's grandmother
Ruth’s abuela (grandmother) c. 1936
I can’t choose a favorite, I love them all, but I will say that Reina, in being a combination of my grandmother and me, landed on the page quicker than the other girls.
Although the four girls are separated by time and location, common threads connect their life stories. How did you choose those threads and why?
The four girls share a common heritage that goes all the way back to Spain in 1492. Their identity is important to them, though they are open to influences from other cultures. Three out of the four (Benvenida, Reina, and Alegra) experience the loss of a home and the search for a new home elsewhere. The last girl in the quartet, Paloma, inherits the memories of loss, and she is the one, being the dove of peace, who brings them all together. The common threads of home, loss, and memory-keeping allowed me to keep returning to the theme of the presence of the past in their life stories.
You did a beautiful job of weaving them together. I love how each of your protagonists relies on music and poetry to connect with their heritage. How important have music and poetry been in your life and in relating to your family history?
Music and poetry have been important in my life since my childhood. I remember my parents listening to Cuban music and at every family gathering there was always a conga line and lots of salsa and cha-cha dancing. At the same time, I heard the songs from an older tradition, the Sephardic songs sung in Ladino. This is the Spanish mixed with other languages, including French, Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew, that is the unique creation of the descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492. I also loved poetry from an early age, and as a teenager, encouraged by a wonderful high school teacher, I wrote poems in Spanish, and played violin and Spanish classical guitar.
Because music plays an important part in the stories, could you share a few phrases from a favorite Sephardic song?
Here are a few lines from a Sephardic song that ties the four stories together, a song that symbolizes the quest of each girl for freedom–
En la mar hay una torre,
en la torre una ventana,
en la ventana una hija
que a los marineros llama.
In the sea there is a tower,
In the tower there is a window,
at the window a daughter
who calls to the sailors.
All the songs mentioned in the book can be found in the Playlist on my website.
What a delight! That adds so much richness to the story. Thank you for sharing this.
In your author’s note you mention that much of the Sephardic Jewish history is found in the food. Do you have any favorite recipe and/or food traditions you’d be willing to share?
In the book, I mention the tradition in Toledo of making marzipan, known as mazapán de almendra, from almonds and honey, and how the town smells of the sweetness of this dessert. In bakeries today, you will often find marzipan shaped into miniature fruits. Marzipan is part of the Sephardic food tradition of making desserts from different kinds of nuts, usually walnut, pistachio, or almonds. A dessert I love, which is eaten at Passover, is called tishpishti, and it’s a nut cake drenched in honey syrup. Aside from being delicious, and gluten free since it’s a Passover dish, the word tishpishti (pronounced teeshpeeshtee and meaning “quick quickly”) is so delightful to say!
Thank you for a glimpse into not only the food and music, but into the culture and traditions. With the events going on in the world today, how do you see your book contributing to a better cultural understanding?
My book reflects my perspective that it is possible for people to preserve their history and identity while being open to, and respectful of, the history and identity of others. We see this perspective in the stories of each of the four girls and I hope that might contribute to a better cultural understanding in our world today.
It certainly does, and we’re grateful you’ve written it. As part of that journey of understanding, your novel delves into some bleak situations as it exposes antisemitism and other forms of prejudice. Yet, its overall tone is uplifting and hopeful. How did you balance the two as you wrote?
Even in the worst of times, there is good-heartedness in people, there is poetry and song, and there is hope for justice and peace. I tried to keep all that in mind as I wrote.
Do you have any message or advice for the teachers and parents who will be sharing your book with their students and families?
I’d love for my book to open conversations about how a heritage is preserved and passed on from generation to generation, even when there is adversity.
For teachers, we have a wonderful Educator Guide.
The teachers and parents will appreciate that. And for our younger readers,
what do you they will take away from your stories?
I hope young readers will find in my stories examples of young people like themselves who lived through hard times and found the strength to act with kindness toward others and to accept kindness from others as well.
Book cover: Across So Many SeasAcross So Many Seas is your third book. All of them share some common themes and seem to draw from your profession in anthropology. How do all these novels tie together?
I think my three novels, Lucky Broken Girl, Letters from Cuba, and Across So Many Seas, share an interest in how people of different backgrounds and faiths can coexist and be tolerant of one another and supportive of each other’s cultural uniqueness.
Can you share what you’re working on now?
I am working on a verse novel for middle-grade readers that takes place in the present, so it’s a departure from my historical fiction. I am also working on a picture book inspired by a beautiful act of love by my three-year-old granddaughter.
We’ll be looking forward to seeing both of those. Thank you so much for generously sharing your time and talent with us. Your books have made the world richer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruth Behar, the Pura Belpré Award-winning author of Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, was born in Havana, Cuba, grew up in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. Her work also includes poetry, memoir, and the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy. 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. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Drawn from research and imagination, sorrow and joy, loss and resilience, Across So Many Seas is a haunting journey into the passage of time and how personal and collective memory connects us to the past, allows us to live in the present, and gives us hope for the future.
In 1492, during the Spanish Inquisition, Benvenida and her family are banished from Spain for being Jewish and must flee the country or be killed. They journey by foot and by sea, eventually settling in Istanbul.
Over four centuries later, in 1923, shortly after the Turkish war of independence, Reina’s father disowns her for a small act of disobedience. He ships her away to live with an aunt in Cuba, to be wed in an arranged marriage when she turns fifteen.
In 1961, Reina’s daughter, Alegra, is proud to be a brigadista, teaching literacy in the countryside for Fidel Castro. But soon Castro’s crackdowns force her to flee to Miami all alone, leaving her parents behind.
Finally, in 2003, Alegra’s daughter, Paloma, is fascinated by all the journeys that had to happen before she could be born. A keeper of memories, she’s thrilled by the opportunity to learn more about her heritage on a family trip to Spain, where she makes a momentous discovery.
Though many years and many seas separate these girls, they are united by a love of music and poetry, a desire to belong and to matter, a passion for learning, and their longing for a home where all are welcome. And each is lucky to stand on the shoulders of their courageous ancestors.
Interview with Ruth Behar, Author of Across So Many Seas
By: Michele Kirichanskaya
Sep 13, 2024
Ruth Behar, the Pura Belpré Award-winning author of Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, was born in Havana, Cuba, grew up in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. Her work also includes poetry, memoir, and the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy. 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. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I had the opportunity to interview Ruth, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome back to Geeks OUT! For readers who might not be familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m a writer of books for young readers and have written middle-grade novels and picture books. Key themes in my books are immigration, identity, and the search for home. I’m also a cultural anthropologist and have written several books about my travels in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba.
What can you tell us about your latest book, Across So Many Seas? What was the inspiration for this story?
Across So Many Seas is a story about four generations of a Sephardic Jewish family. It is told from the point of view of four twelve-year-old girls, Benvenida living in Spain in 1492, Reina living in Turkey in 1923, Alegra living in Cuba in 1961, and Paloma living in Miami in 2003. The stories of the four girls connect, but you have to read to the end to find out how. It’s a puzzle that comes together piece by piece until the last piece is found in the place where the story began, in Toledo, Spain. I’ve been reflecting on the Sephardic story of displacement and nostalgia for a lost Spain for many years. I have written poems on the subject and made a documentary about the Sephardic Jews of Cuba. And now, more recently, I began thinking about my paternal grandmother’s story and felt I should write a novel inspired by her life. She was sent from Turkey to Cuba by her family and never saw her parents again. I wondered how it felt for her to start over in a new place as a young person. She brought an oud and sang old Spanish songs. I was so touched by that and it became the inspiration for the book.
Were there any books/films/music/etc. that inspired you while writing your latest project?
I listened to a lot of Sephardic songs while writing my book and these songs are an important part of the book. You can find them on the playlist on my website.
As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, especially middle grade fiction and historical fiction?
I’ve always been fascinated by history. I am curious about how people lived in the past and I am drawn to the traces that remain of the past in the present, in the form of artifacts, architecture, literature, stories, and songs. As an anthropologist, I did a lot of work in oral history and loved collecting people’s stories. So writing historical fiction feels natural to me. I realized I could be a middle grade fiction writer when I wrote Lucky Broken Girl, my debut novel, from a ten-year-old girl’s perspective. I felt at home in that voice and being that age again. This young girl still lives in me and has many stories to tell.
How would you describe your writing process?
I would say that I tend to be slow and dawdling at first and then I start writing faster and with more momentum as my deadline approaches. I work from a brief outline and then have faith that the writing will happen if I sit down and let the characters speak to me.
What are some of your favorite elements of writing? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or difficult?
The favorite element of writing for me is the magic of storytelling. I love how the unexpected happens in the course of writing and how you have to surrender to things you didn’t realize you were going to say. I think the frustrating or difficult aspect of writing is self-censorship. It’s not good to judge your writing too soon and yet we all have that tendency to be harsh with ourselves. You have to let the writing unfold and take you on paths that seem uncertain and even scary, so that you can find your way to telling hidden truths, which are the necessary truths of the story.
Aside from your work, what are some things you would want others to know about you?
I’m now a grandmother – and I still like to dance salsa and bachata.
What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers?
I once asked this question to the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz, who I had the good fortune to meet in Havana when she was in her nineties, and she said “Read more, write less.” I think that’s good advice. I’d also add, “Listen more, speak less.” Reading and listening are the foundation for writing.
Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?
I’m working on a verse novel now as well as a picture book. More details coming soon!
Finally, in reference to Across So Many Seas, what Cuban and/or Jewish books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
I highly recommend the beautiful new memoir, Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair, by my friend, Rosa Lowinger, who is Cuban Jewish and an extraordinarily talented writer and art conservator. I recommend the stunning novel, Kantika, by Elizabeth Graver, a Sephardic saga inspired by her grandmother’s story, which explores the lives of women with great sensitivity. And I want to be sure to mention a classic Sephardic memoir and historical chronicle, The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey, by Victor Perera, as well as the gorgeous Sephardic poems of Marjorie Agosin in The White Islands/Las islas blancas.
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Q&A with Ruth Behar and Gabriel Frye-Behar
Ruth Behar and Gabriel Frye-Behar are the mother-son authors of the new children's picture book Pepita Meets Bebita. Ruth Behar's other books include Tía Fortuna's New Home. She teaches at the University of Michigan. Gabriel Frye-Behar, who is also a filmmaker and photographer, teaches in the drama department of NYU Tisch.
Q: What inspired the two of you to collaborate on Pepita Meets Bebita, and what was your collaboration process like for this book?
A: Gabriel’s daughter and Ruth’s granddaughter was born in late December 2020, and we started writing the book in early January 2021, in the midst of the Covid lockdown.
It had been a saga for Ruth to travel from Michigan to New York to meet the baby, and she knew she wanted to celebrate that miracle in a special way. She had been toying with the idea of writing a picture book as she waited for the baby to be born.
Gabriel Frye-Behar
Once she met the baby and realized how much had changed for both her and Gabriel, she asked Gabriel if he’d collaborate with her.
Gabriel comes from a background in film and creative writing, and is used to thinking about the relationship between words and images. Ruth comes from a background in anthropology and understanding vulnerability and empathy.
Together we felt we were a good team and could support each other and be open to the vision we had for the book and not fret when we revised, cut, rewrote each other’s words.
We passed the manuscript back and forth to each other until we felt we had a version we were both happy with. Then our editor also offered comments and we revised some more.
A moment finally came when we realized that it was time to let the story go and find its own path in the world.
Q: What do you think Maribel Lechuga’s illustrations add to the story?
A: We love Maribel Lechuga’s illustrations and think her representation of Pepita is adorable and so akin to the real dog she’s based on.
We think she did a great job of showing the familia of Mami and Papi and Pepita, and how they and Abuela and Abuelo respond to the arrival of the baby, the bebita, and the struggle to calm her and make her feel at home.
The color palette Maribel chose, with soft beiges and pinks and greens, creates a beautiful glow as Pepita and the family transition to a new stage of their lives.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it a “heartwarming reminder to embrace change.” What do you think of that description, and what do you hope kids take away from the book?
A: We think that’s a very apt description of our book. Pepita, like an older sibling, has to accept that her role in the family has changed, while coming to realize that she is still loved and cared for and appreciated.
She has not lost the cariño – the love – of her familia; rather, she comes to see that the heart is big and there is room to love all the members of a growing family, both human and animal. We hope kids will take away that message.
Q: How did you create the character of Pepita?
A: Pepita is inspired by a rescue dog that Gabriel and his wife adopted in New York six years ago when she was 10 weeks old and who they named Eloise. When their older daughter was born, they’d had Eloise for three years and she had been their first baby.
Ruth also knew Eloise very well and was close to her, because she’d been in New York when they adopted her.
And so when Gabriel became a dad and Ruth a grandmother, we noticed that our sweet Eloise was looking very confused as to why she wasn’t being given all the attention she was accustomed to.
We started to wonder what she was feeling as a dog losing her special place in the family. That’s how the character of Pepita was born.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: We have another picture book completed that we also co-wrote and that we look forward to announcing soon. It has found a publisher and we are very excited to have worked together again.
Ruth has a new middle-grade novel, Across So Many Seas, coming out on February 6, 2024. Gabriel is at work on a novel based on his MFA thesis.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Pepita Meets Bebita is also available in a Spanish edition, under the title Pepita y Bebita.
Thanks so much for the interview. We appreciated your thoughtful questions.
For further information about Pepita Meets Bebita and upcoming events, our websites are @ruthbehar.com & gabriefryebehar.com and you can find us on Instagram -- @ruthbeharauthor & @gabrielfryebehar.
Interview with Ruth Behar and Gabriel Frye-Behar, Authors of Pepita Meets Bebita
By: Michele Kirichanskaya
Sep 13, 2023
Ruth Behar is an acclaimed author of adult fiction and nonfiction, and Lucky Broken Girl–winner of the Pura Belpre Award–is her first book for young readers. She was born in Havana, Cuba, grew up in New York, and has lived and worked in Spain and Mexico. Her honors include a MacArthur “Genius” Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, and a Distinguished Alumna Award from Wesleyan University.
Gabriel Frye-Behar is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker and photographer. He has a BFA in Film & TV Production from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. He currently teaches in the Drama Department at NYU/Tisch. This is his first picture book and he and his wife can’t wait to share it with their own lovely pepita and bebita.
I had the opportunity to interview Ruth and Gabriel, which you can read below.
First of all, welcome back to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourselves?
RB and GFB: Ruth is a cultural anthropologist and writer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Gabriel is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn.
What can you tell us about your latest project, Pepita Meets Bebita? What was the inspiration for this story?
RB and GFB: Pepita Meets Bebita was a joy to write. We wanted to celebrate a beautiful transition in our lives – becoming a grandmother and becoming a dad. This was in late 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, so being able to relish our happiness and welcome a new little one into our lives was very special. But someone was being left out of all the excitement and that was Gabriel and his wife Sasha’s beloved pup, Eloise, who’d been the baby of the family until the new baby arrived. Eloise seemed confused about what was happening and of course still wanted her own individual attention (much like a human baby). That was when we realized we had to tell the story from the pup’s perspective.
As a mother-son writing team, what does it mean for you two to both be working on this book together?
RB and GFB: Writing as a mother-son team was such a great experience. We’ve always greatly valued each other’s opinions on storytelling and for years and years we’ve enjoyed discussing books and films. As a filmmaker, Gabriel has an understanding of how to create momentum when telling a story and has such a strong visual imagination, and is focused on keeping the story tight and trimming extraneous material. As a writer, Ruth has a tendency to imagine and world-build, and develop more material than can ultimately fit in a single book, so as writers in collaboration our skills actually fit together remarkably well. On a deeper level, working on this book together gave us a chance to think about stories we want to pass on to the next generation. We worked hard to weave in our Cuban/Latino background that is so much a part of our lives. We chose to integrate Spanish words into the text, as well as Cuban food, and traditions like pinning an azabache on to the baby’s clothes for good luck.
Ruth Behar
Headshot by Gabriel Frye-Behar
How did you find yourself getting into storytelling, especially picture books? What drew you to the medium?
RB: I’m drawn to the visual arts and a lot of my friends – especially in Cuba – are visual artists. My house is filled with art and I love pictures of all kinds. One of my friends, Rolando Estévez, who was a book artist in Cuba, made handmade books that inspired me for years, and I think he played an important role in turning me toward writing stories that would need to be illustrated. I also love the poetic conciseness of picture books and the challenge of telling a story with very few words that will appeal both to a young child and to the adult reading the story to the child.
GFB: As a filmmaker, when I had kids, I immediately found myself in love with reading picture books to them and seeing their world and imagination expand through the imagery and storytelling of the medium. Picture books felt familiarly cinematic, but also like something new that I hadn’t explored myself in a creative fashion. When I started daydreaming about what stories I might want to tell through the lens of a picture book, and how it might create something tactile and tangible that my own kids could experience and enjoy, I got so excited that I had to try and make Pepita’s story come to life.
(For Ruth Behar) As a writer, you’ve been known for writing among a wide range of genres from non-fiction to picture books to middle grade. What do you think inspires you to be so fluid with your writing and would you say there’s a certain freedom to writing so widely?
RB: I love different kinds of writing – history, travelogues, novels, memoirs, fairy tales, poetry. I have found myself wanting to try my hand at all of them. And I adore books that defy genres and blur genres, like verse novels, autofiction, and autoethnography. This inspires me to be fluid and to feel free to write in different voices and for different audiences. It’s been so wonderful to write stories that children and young people read and respond to. I also like the idea of writing books that appeal to people of all ages. I’ve been thrilled when adults write to me to say they’ve enjoyed reading my middle-grade novels. Having taught in a university setting for a long time, I’ve encountered students who feel trapped in their writing, convinced they can only, should only, write conventional academic articles. I tell them to give themselves permission to pay attention to their sensibilities and vulnerabilities and to write with heart and urgency. And so I give myself permission to do the same.
(For Ruth Behar) In various interviews, you’ve stated how your background as a Cuban-Jewish American has inspired your work, such as Lucky Broken Girl, Letters from Cuba, and Tía Fortuna’s New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey. As the child of Jewish immigrants myself, I would love to hear your thoughts on what it means to see yourself exploring these identities in your work?
RB: In my work as a cultural anthropologist, I have explored the history and the stories of the Jews of Cuba. I’ve been listening to the family stories since childhood and I’ve traveled to Cuba many times to understand my identity and my community. I always dreamed of creating Cuban Jewish characters and delving into the fictional worlds of those who were born into this unusual way of belonging in the world. I began with Lucky Broken Girl, telling my own story, and also that of my immigrant family, then continued with Letters from Cuba, telling my maternal Ashkenazi grandmother’s story, and honoring the journeys of the Jews who found refuge in Cuba on the eve of the Holocaust. Writing my debut picture book, Tía Fortuna’s New Home, I turned to my paternal Sephardic side to imagine how I’d pass on that heritage to young children through the symbol of the key to a lost home. Now I have a new forthcoming novel, Across So Many Seas, which goes deeper into that Sephardic heritage, moving between the lives of four young girls whose stories come together in the final pages of the book. I feel so blessed to have been able to give voice to all these different layers of my identity through storytelling.
Gabriel Frye-Behar
In general, how would you describe your creative process? What are some of your favorite parts of the writing process? What do you find to be some of the most difficult/frustrating?
RB: I start with a general idea of a story I want to tell – usually there’s a character who’s finding their way through a challenging or painful situation. I usually don’t know more than that. I have to write to discover what their journey will be, who they’ll meet along the way, what they’ll feel, and think about, who their friends will be, who they love, and what they fear. It is wonderful to experience that discovery process in writing and the surprises you encounter. Magic happens. What I find difficult is when the writing gets interrupted because of work or obligations or travel or too much time on social media. Then it’s a struggle to return to the world of my characters. When I’m deep into the writing, I try not to leave my desk for very long, so my characters will keep speaking to me.
GFB: My writing process virtually always has to start with a character. Once I have the central character or characters in mind and I can start to hear their voice or sense of how they might react to the world around them I try to allow them to lead me to the story I should go on and tell. In the case of Pepita Meets Bebita, I had so much fun working out what the arc for Pepita should be, how could she both be changed in a positive and meaningful way, but also still be herself at the end of the story. The challenge with writing for me is always simply… time. I can write fast if I have to, but once I’m emotionally invested in a project I tend to write slowly, and free writing time with, now two young kids, is a rare and precious thing.
As a creative, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration?
RB: I am inspired by people’s stories and have always loved being a story-listener. And I am inspired by the arts – visual arts, folk art, music, dance, fiction, poetry, children’s books. My travels to Spanish-speaking countries have been very inspiring. Whenever I go to Spain, I stop at the Prado Museum to see the work of Goya, whose paintings I’ve been drawn to since I was nineteen. In Mexico, I love the textiles, the embroideries, the filigree jewelry, the hand-painted clay pots. In Cuba, the beat of the drums used in religious rituals can be heard in the streets and that’s something that’s stayed with me. My house is filled with souvenirs of my travels and that gives me energy to write. I have books everywhere – on overflowing shelves and piles wherever I can stash them. I live in a house of words and memories. That’s a great source of inspiration to me, though I know to others it may seem I live amid too much clutter!
GFB: I’ve been influenced by so many different writers and filmmakers from when I was a child in Michigan, through film school in New York, and then through getting an MFA in Creative Writing. From Elmore Leonard’s hyper-naturalistic Detroit-centric low-level mobsters, to Wong Kar-Wai’s gorgeously poetic and painterly masterpieces of art house cinema, to ultimate classics of world literature like Brothers Karamazov, I’ve been inspired to try and continually distill the ideas in my head into what my own individual creative voice is at a given moment, and then find the right mode of expression to bring those ideas to life.
Many authors would say one of the most challenging parts of writing a book is finishing one. What strategies would you say helped you accomplish this?
RB and GFB: We were both motivated to get Pepita Meets Bebita done in a timely fashion while the story was still fresh and being lived by the two of us and our sweet pup, of course. We experimented with a few different endings until we felt we’d found an ending that brought the story to a close for the time being and left open the possibility of a sequel.
Aside from your work, what would you want readers to know about you?
RB: I love to dance salsa and bachata. And I love the tango too, though the tango doesn’t always love me; it’s a difficult dance but the music enchants me and sometimes brings me to tears.
GFB: I’m a big sports fan, probably watch a little too much reality TV, and am an aspiring (now almost fully converted) vegetarian.
What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?
RB and GFB: No one has asked us if it’s too late to start writing books for young people. And the answer is it’s never too late. Start whenever you can. We began when Gabriel’s daughter was born making us a grandmother – an abuelita – and a dad, and we didn’t know what was coming but went on the journey and wrote a book together.
What advice would you give to other aspiring writers?
RB and GFB: Write because you have a passionate need to tell a story that only you can tell. Write with love and compassion. Remember that writing and publishing are different pursuits. You will write much more than you will ever publish. Be prepared to throw away a lot of writing, or to put aside a story that isn’t yet ready to be told. Find a writing buddy who will read your early drafts and give you honest feedback without destroying you. And then persevere and write whenever and wherever you can. If you’re stuck, go to the library, or to your favorite independent bookstore, and find inspiration and light among the authors who’ve come before you.
Are there any other projects you are working on or thinking about that you are able to discuss?
RB: As I mentioned above, I have a new middle-grade novel, Across So Many Seas, coming out in February 2024.
GFB: And… we have co-authored another mother-son picture book! We are very excited about it, but that’s all we can say at the moment. I’m also at work on an adult novel.
Finally, any books/authors would you recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?
RB: I love the work of Catalan author Mercé Rodoreda, especially her novel The Time of the Doves, that takes place during the Spanish Civil War. In children’s literature, one of my favorite books is The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes, with illustrations by Louis Slobodkin. I keep it next to my desk so it’s always within reach. I also am blessed to have as friends two amazing writers, inaugural poet Richard Blanco, who has a new collection of his poems coming out soon, Homeland of My Body, and Sandra Cisneros, well-known for The House on Mango Street, who has a new book of poetry, Woman Without Shame.
GFB: Two good friends of mine are writers who have published amazing work recently. Brigit Young, who has written three absolutely beautiful middle-grade novels, Worth a Thousand Words, The Prettiest, and Bright, and David Leo Rice, who has written several brilliant novels and an incredible book of short stories, Drifter Stories. They’re both well worth checking out!
Writing Life (no. 21): An interview with Ruth Behar
Post author
Natashe Lemos Dekker and Ruth Behar
Post date
November 29, 2022
This article is part of the following series: Writing Life
Image 1: One of Ruth’s writing spaces filled with family and childhood photos, art and objects that inspire her and that are filled with memories.
On the laptop screen in my home in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in a Zoom call, Ruth Behar turns on her camera. In the background appear the bookshelves of her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, as we start our conversation about home, connection, anthropology, and writing.
I became inspired over a decade ago by Ruth Behar’s reflexive writing about traveling, returning, and goodbyes, about home and homesickness, and about the need for empathy and emotions in research and writing. It represented the kind of anthropology I fell in love with, and connected to my own experience of migrating while growing up, traveling back and forth, and building a home in different places. The dynamic of leaving and creating new homes in other places has been at the core of anthropological research, but how can we begin to put this experience on paper? What is the place of home in anthropological writing?
Natashe Lemos Dekker (NLD): How do you go about writing about home?
Ruth Behar (RB): Hmm, writing about home, well the question is, what is home? We would have to start there, home can mean so many things. We can think of home as a concrete place, we can think of it as a country, a nation, a place with specific borders. It can be the place where we reside, or the place where I am talking from now, where I am surrounded by my books. That’s home, but would home be anywhere where I would be surrounded by my books? Home in language, do we find home in our writing? Does our writing become our home? So, it means so many things.
As a person who came to the United States as an immigrant child from Cuba, I often think of Cuba as home, because it is where I was born and where I spent the first few years of my life. But from an ethnographic perspective, when I think of home, Cuba may be my original home, but I have a lot of other homes that I have acquired since. I spent many years living in Spain, and many years living in Mexico, and they also became home. So why is Cuba more home than those places? I guess because it is saturated with so much memory and so many stories. And I have a family legacy as well, and the pictures of the family in Cuba, which show a sense of “we were home in this place for a while”.
So I guess if we go with Cuba, then we have the complex dynamics of my traveling to Cuba. Not only traveling to Cuba, but always knowing that I can leave. So is it really home? If it is a place that I can leave? But it is a place with very complex dynamics for me because of the politics of the place, and the complexities of going there as a Cuban, who is part of the Cuban-American community. When I go, I have the complexity of being in a place where I no longer live but where I still feel connected and where after a few days I feel more Cuban. After a few days I start to speak Spanish with a different accent, and tempo and musicality, and everything. But there is also the sense of privilege and knowing that because my family chose to leave, I have certain options that people there don’t have.
So it’s a place that is very fraught. When I go back I can feel tremendous joy and happiness, but then, I can also feel tremendous sadness and sorrow about not being there anymore on a permanent basis, because I have another home somewhere else. So how do I write about this place and the people there, and do justice to their stories? And how do I do that without either claiming a superiority for myself, or over-romanticizing the life that they experience there? So, I would say, in terms of writing, it’s always very complex to write about those places that you are connected to. I think that’s a way to start answering your question.
NLD: What you are saying resonates also with my own experiences as I came to the Netherlands from Brazil when I was 6 years old. Now, I started working on this project for which I could have gone anywhere in Brazil, but I chose to go back to where my family lives in the South of Brazil. And I was thinking to myself, what is it that pulls me back, now that I can go anywhere I want? But perhaps it is a form of writing as a way of keeping the connection, of giving meaning to that longing. And at the same time, indeed the privilege, and the guilt, and the confrontation with that part of you that no longer belongs there.
RB: I definitely identify with all of that, and I think the word that you used, longing, is a very important one. We have a longing for something that we don’t know if we will be able to recover it, but that’s why we make the journey.
NLD: So, then, when writing about home, how do you write about people who are close to you?
RB: I think, if you are going to write very honestly about someone else, then also write very honestly about yourself. So write, and implicate yourself in the story. If you are going to bring something into the public about someone else, also do that about yourself. I try to write in terms of relationships. That the relationship is partly what is being explored, and not just the other person in isolation.
NLD: That’s a very interesting way to look at it. I am currently writing about ageing and loss and I grew up partly with my grandmother, and she is getting older. So there are all these family dynamics happening, to provide care for her, in which I myself am also implicated. And I am wondering if I should bring this into the project or leave it, and how to go about that?
RB: Yeah, those are good questions. I mean, it never hurts to go ahead and write. You can aways take things out. Sometimes you just have to go ahead and try it and see how it looks on the page. Maybe you question yourself, “how do I feel writing about this?” and maybe you write that. And maybe you use it in your text, and maybe you don’t. But it’s there for you to think it through. I think writing is a process of thinking. You don’t always know your thoughts until they are down on paper. I really suggest, write more and you can always cut.
NLD: Are you then also in a sense saying: write, to discover what we are thinking, but also to see what we are feeling?
RB: Yes, definitely. Thinking and feeling are very interconnected. Sometimes we start with the feeling, but there is just no way to put it into words, whether it’s sorrow or grief, rage or some combination of complex feelings. But then, when you start writing and creating a story out of it, you can see, “oh, that’s what I felt, I feel anger, or uncertainty, or hurt, or that something is missing.” So writing really helps. As humans, we also keep evolving, changing and thinking in new ways. And I think writing allows you to evolve, for your thinking to evolve at different times, and enables you to reflect back to see who you were.
Talking to another person sometimes can be very helpful too. To talk through ideas and then sitting down and writing it. I think that that truly is one of the ways to understand what is going on. You are trying to understand, who are these people? What are they going through? What is upsetting them? But also, what is the situation where the story is unfolding? Are you in the bedroom with your grandmother, or are you in the kitchen? Thinking of all of that, and how you are going to tell that story, can be a great way to think about everything, to think about the feelings and thoughts too.
NLD: I also find it much easier to talk first and then to write. There is sometimes the fear of the blank page, and by telling it to someone you just start. You don’t have the confrontation that the story is not there yet.
RB: Right, I call it the kitchen table talk. You just imagine that you are at the kitchen table of a friend, and that’s how you should try to write. Not as if you are up on a podium or at a lecture hall. You should write, as if you were at the kitchen table telling a friend, well this is what happened to my grandmother the other day.
NLD: Do you feel that the audience influences your writing? If you are at the kitchen table, or at a AAA meeting?
RB: Absolutely, I mean we write in different genres. One thing is to write a lecture that you are giving to an academic audience, another thing is to write a fictional story, or a poem, or an op-ed for a newspaper. But at the same time, in a larger sense, I think when you write, you should forget the audience. Also because if you get too conscious about the audience and start asking, “who is going to be reading this, are they going to like it or not?” that can really limit you creatively. Sometimes I encourage students, when they get stuck, to write as if they were writing a letter to a specific person. It can be very helpful, just knowing that there is one person that is going to listen to what you write, and you are writing for that one person.
NLD: Also because it will bring about things that you would otherwise perhaps not say.
RB: Exactly. Particularly if you want a more intimate kind of writing, you can write to someone that you are close to, but you could potentially also write to someone you dislike. It can be used in different ways. And it can be very helpful, to think with my audience of one. A writer friend once said to me that when she writes, she tries to imagine an audience that is the most different from her own culture. How am I going to communicate the story to somebody for whom everything I am saying is so foreign? That is another helpful way to think about audience too.
NLD: Which is also interesting because it means we have to make explicit the cultural things that we take for granted.
RB: Exactly, and then you have to figure out, as we do in anthropology, how much do we need to translate of what we know? Things that seem obvious to you about Brazil, how much do you need to explain, translate, explore, give definitions? Anthropology is all about connecting. Finding ways to connect and understand each other.
NLD: Definitely. The possibilities we have as anthropologists to establish deep and meaningful connections with people and have the time to listen to their stories, that’s often the best part of the work that we do.
RB: I agree. It’s all about moments of listening, sharing and trust. That somebody trusts you with their story. Sometimes we work with people for years and have these long-term relationships, but then other times, it’s urgent and you only have a few hours and maybe you will never see the person again but in that moment you establish a deep tie. I have done both when I was working with the Jewish community in Cuba. There were people I had known for 20 years, and sometimes I would only talk to a person one afternoon and write about that, based on that meeting. I feel that with ethnography we do a combination of those things.
The writing does bring you closer to people and I think that that is what writing is about. That we write to connect with others and that is why we do anthropology. And the beautiful thing that happens when total strangers become people that you are close to. You are embarking on this project of conversation together, to understand something about life, something about a ritual, or an event that happened. So I feel that with writing, it’s about connection.
NLD: And if we think about connection and change over time, do you feel that the longing for Cuba or for other homes has changed? How has that influenced your writing?
RB: I write a lot about Cuba so I feel that even when I am not there I am thinking about Cuba, but I think of myself as a person who has multiple homes and can be in multiple places. I also think you can carry home. Maybe that happens once you get older, when you realize that home is something that’s transportable. You take it with you in your memories as well. So memory is an important part of it.
I just wrote a children’s book, a picture book called Tia Fortuna’s New Home. You would find it interesting because it is about an ageing woman who has no choice but to leave her home because her building will be demolished to create a luxury building, so she has to leave. Her niece Estrella comes to help her say goodbye to her little house on the beach, and then she is going to a senior retirement home. And that’s the new home, Tia Fortuna’s new home. The story is for young children but it’s meant to be very bittersweet. She is a person who carries home with her and she is packing up a suitcase and Estrella is asking her, “Oh is that all you are bringing?” And she says, “Well, but I have a suitcase right here, I don’t need to bring that much,” and she points to her head, because it’s all the memories she’s taking with her. And then, as a gift, she gives Estrella the key to the cottage on the beach, so Estrela will have this key to remember this home that has been lost.
So I think of home as also being rooted in memory and in story. And the key is an important symbol of a lost place. I think, at different stages of our lives, home can become more transportable. And in other phases you are still figuring it out, the connections, the back and forth and the in-between, neither here, nor there.
NLD: Something that you write about in Traveling Heavy, is that sometimes you need to have distance in order to be able to write about a place. I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more about this?
RB: I think it’s kind of the basic rule of ethnographic writing, that you go some place and that you depart from that place, to be able to write about it. I think it’s the way places become familiar to us, once we are in them. Its sense of difference all stands out to you at the very beginning, but then after a few months it becomes normalized, and you don’t notice things that you noticed at the beginning. I think that’s why this notion of distance is important. Once you leave a place, and you look back and rethink what you went through, you see it a little bit more clearly, because you are not totally enmeshed in it. I think it is that sense of separating for a little while which is needed to then be able to reflect. Because with reflexivity, it’s always about looking back. That looking back is a very important process.
For me, ethnography is always a kind of memoir writing because it is always about looking back and reconstructing what happened with your notes and interviews. Digging deep into what happened, because with ethnography, you are trying to understand ‘what happened’? We are continuously writing down the experiences that we have had, what we witnessed. And as witnesses we must write, and tell the stories of what we saw and heard and felt and remembered, and painful as it may be, what we tried to forget and couldn’t.
Image 2: Natashe’s writing space in Amsterdam
Natashe Lemos Dekker is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her research focuses on death, dying, and end-of-life care, and dynamics of time and future-making in The Netherlands and Brazil. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Amsterdam and has published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry among others. She is a board member of the Medical Anthropology Europe Network.
Ruth Behar is the James W. Fernandez Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Born in Havana, Cuba, she has lived in Spain and Mexico and returns often to Cuba to build bridges around culture and art. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Carnegie Corporation “Great Immigrant,” and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her acclaimed scholarly books include The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, Translated Woman, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy. Other works include a bilingual book of poems, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé; a documentary, Adio Kerida; the prize-winning young adult novels, Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, and Tía Fortuna’s New Home, a children’s book on Sephardic Cuban heritage.
Saturday, January 22, 2022
Q&A with Ruth Behar
Ruth Behar is the author of the new children's picture book Tía Fortuna's New Home. Her other books include Letters from Cuba. She is an anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, and she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Q: What inspired you to write Tía Fortuna's New Home, and how did you create your characters Tía Fortuna and Estrella?
A: Many different experiences inspired me to write Tía Fortuna’s New Home. I have been fascinated by Sephardic history and culture since my youth and am now involved with different groups interested in celebrating this legacy and reviving Ladino, the language spoken for centuries by Sephardim or expelled Spanish Jews. I was inspired by the challenge of finding a joyful and poetic way to share this knowledge with children.
I was also watching Miami change over the years, a place that seemed magical to me, with its warm ocean and palm trees, when I was a young person. Growing up in New York, we’d visit Miami for a week or two in the summer. For my family, it was the closest thing to going back to Cuba, the beloved home they’d lost.
Now Miami is an international city and humble seaside buildings and cottages are being demolished to make way for luxury residences and hotels. I was inspired by the idea of depicting that changing reality and how it is affecting elders and others of humble backgrounds.
Tía Fortuna was inspired by a real-life Sephardic aunt who lives in Miami Beach and serves me borekas and other delicacies whenever I visit her. Though she is only about 15 years older than me, I always feel like a little girl around her and that inspired the character of Estrella. But both are fictional characters and the story is fictional too.
The book is sprinkled with words in Spanish. My aunt and I always speak in Spanish. That is the language of home for my entire family. Spanish is an inspiration to me as a writer. I am so happy the book is also available in a Spanish edition under the title El nuevo hogar de Tía Fortuna, translated by Yanitzia Canetti.
Q: What do you think Devon Holzwarth's illustrations add to the story?
A: I love Devon’s illustrations! She makes the close relationship between Estrella and Tía Fortuna come alive, beautifully showing how their intergenerational bond nurtures both of them.
The symbols of Sephardic culture are gorgeously represented, with hamsas, evil eye ornaments, and keys, as well as Tía Fortuna’s lucky eye bracelets, filling the pages. And the Miami setting, with memories of Cuba and other lost homes woven in, is conjured in rich detail.
The story takes place during the course of a single day and Devon captures the flow of time, from bright sunshine on the beach in the morning to the orange-pink glow of sunset fading away and the first star shining in the sky in the evening.
Q: The Publishers Weekly review of the book says, “Behar’s warmhearted storytelling turns the past, present, and future into a confluence of connections as Estrella realizes her role in a legacy of faith, hope, and resilience.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s a lovely, generous description of the book. As a creative writer, I don’t work from an explanation of what I’m doing, I use intuition more than anything to craft a story. Now that the book is done, I realize I was trying to create a living history in which Estrella, though a young child, can find her place. So yes, past, present, and future do come together “into a confluence of connections.”
Sephardic identity can seem so melancholy, with stories about departure and weeping for all that was lost. I wanted to give children a less sorrowful image of this heritage.
I also thought about how we tend to view an elder’s move to a “home” or an assisted living as a sad end to a life. But what if it’s another stage of living, and you find new friends that feel like old friends?
This all somehow came together in my imagination. I feel that “a legacy of faith, hope, and resilience” is a nice way to weave together the positive qualities I tried to share.
Q: What do you hope kids take away from the story?
A: I want kids to treasure their relationships with wise elders and to cherish the stories and traditions passed on to them. I also want kids to learn to see each day as precious and unique and to take in all the beauty we’re surrounded with in the world.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on a new middle grade novel that in many ways builds on Tía Fortuna’s New Home. The novel focuses on four 11-year-old girls from different generations of the same family. The girls share a Sephardic heritage, their family driven out of Spain in the 15th century because of their faith.
Each girl lives in a different revolutionary time. The story moves from Spain to Turkey to Cuba to Miami. Each must find her own way to rally courage and learn what it means to stand on the shoulders of ancestors who chose exile rather than compromise their values.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: In terms of my life, the most important news is that I've become an abuelita! That has given me a whole new perspective on writing for children. Now that I'm officially an elder, I feel even more drawn to intergenerational stories and hope to tell more of these stories in years to come.
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Q&A with Ruth Behar
Ruth Behar is the author of Letters from Cuba, a new middle grade novel for kids. Her other books include Lucky Broken Girl. She is an anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, and she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Q: You write that Letters from Cuba was inspired by your grandmother's story. Why did you decide to focus on those experiences in your new book?
A: When I began writing Letters from Cuba, I was thinking about the immigrant crisis. It upset me to observe the criminalization and demonization of immigrants in the U.S. I was horrified that children were being separated from their families and placed in cages. I wondered what I could do to speak out against the cruelty of our government’s anti-immigrant stance.
It occurred to me that my family was part of this story. My four Jewish grandparents hadn’t been able to enter the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s because of a racist immigration policy that imposed quotas on Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Unwanted here, they went to Cuba instead. That led to my parents being born in Cuba, and I too.
Curiously, we came to the U.S. two generations later, when our family fled communism. Then we were welcomed with open arms in the same country that had closed the door to us in an earlier era. I am now a Latinx writer because of the twists and turns of the racial politics around immigration.
Of my four grandparents, my maternal grandmother Esther had a dramatic story that I had heard, and been entranced by, since I was a child. Esther was the first of seven children to take a ship across the ocean to meet up with her father, who was already in Cuba struggling to make a living.
He had saved enough money to only bring one of his children to Cuba and wanted to choose his older son. But my grandmother, the eldest of all the children, begged him to let her be the first to go, promising that she’d help him bring the rest of the family to Cuba. She kept her promise and thanks to her work and sacrifice, she saved her family.
I was drawn to my grandmother’s bravery and faith as well as her unwavering commitment to reunite the family. She found a home in Cuba, a place where she felt she could start anew, where she came into contact with people of other cultures and religions. I loved the idea that you could hold on to your identity and traditions while making room for those of others, and decided to explore that theme in Letters from Cuba.
Even though my grandmother’s story unfolded almost a century ago, it’s not so different from the stories of young immigrants today. They too are escaping poverty and discrimination and want to help their families prosper while finding ways to belong in a new land.
Q: Why did you choose to write the novel in the form of letters from Esther to her sister?
A: I love letters as a genre. It’s a democratic genre, open to everyone and anyone. Who hasn’t written a letter at some point in their life?
I had come across old letters, written by immigrants, collected in historical anthologies and found them fascinating. Letters were essential in an earlier era, when they were the main form of communication among separated families.
And then I read Karen Hesse’s novel, Letters from Rivka, about a Jewish girl’s immigrant journey from Europe to the United States, via Ellis Island, and thought it was beautiful. I was inspired and thought I’d follow Hesse’s example and write a different, lesser-known Jewish immigrant story about Esther’s letters to her sister Malka as she embarks on a new life in Cuba.
I always like to know who is listening to a story, who needs to hear the story that’s being told. Esther writes only to Malka, because her younger sister is special to her and it’s painful to be separated. There’s a magic force to the letters. If Esther keeps writing letters to Malka, then Malka surely will come to Cuba one day to read them.
It’s as if the letters have the power to draw Malka to Esther. Like a magnet, the force of the words will reunite them one day. The letters become a symbol of hope.
Writing the book as letters made it a little easier to write the novel. Whenever I’d sit down and worry that I didn’t know how to move forward, I’d say to myself, “All you have to do is write a letter. That isn’t so hard.” I tricked myself into writing the book this way.
Q: Did you need to do much research to write the book, and if so, did you learn anything surprising?
A: The book is based on years of research in Cuba. In my other life as a cultural anthropologist, I’ve traveled to the island several times and researched the history of the Jews in Cuba and also learned about the African roots of Cuban culture.
Cuba has preserved an impressive amount of West African culture – religious, musical, dance – and it’s been said that people come from Nigeria to witness rituals that their ancestors once performed.
In the course of my travels, I’ve gotten to know Havana very well, where I was born, a city of eclectic architecture and breathtaking flamboyans, scented by the sea mist. I’ve traveled around the island and visited Agramonte, where the novel is set, the sugar-growing town in the province of Matanzas where my grandmother and her family lived.
Agramonte is a historic hub of Afro-Cuban culture and I’ve been fortunate to witness important rituals performed there with the sacred batá drums. The sense of place is so important in Letters from Cuba and I feel grateful that I was able to draw on my firsthand knowledge of the island.
Researching the World War II background to the story, among the surprising things I learned was that there were Nazis in Cuba. Though they were few and far between and didn’t sway the majority of Cubans, who were tolerant and open to Jewish immigrants, they nevertheless existed and caused severe harm.
They played a major role in preventing the St. Louis vessel in 1939 from disembarking over 900 German Jewish passengers who were sent back to Europe, many to die in concentration camps.
In counterpoint to this, I also learned that the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz organized an association to fight anti-Semitic racism in the 1930s. Fortunately, it is Ortiz’s sensibility that ultimately won out among the Cuban people.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from Esther's story?
A: I think about all the young people today who are standing up and speaking out and trying to make the world a better, more just, more livable place. The voices of youth are so important and must be heard. In reading Esther’s story, I hope that young people today will look back and understand how the brave acts of young people in the past can help to shape the struggles of the present.
And I hope that adult readers will find in Esther’s story a way to more deeply and compassionately understand and support the dreams of young people.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I just completed a picture book about a little girl in Miami and her relationship with her elderly aunt, who is leaving her home on the beach for a new home. It is being illustrated by Devon Holzwarth and will be out with Knopf in 2022. I am excited to see how the illustrations are bringing the story to life.
I’ve started a new middle grade novel, working again with my amazing editor Nancy Paulsen, and hope to have more to say about it soon!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thank you so much for the interview. I appreciate your kindness in supporting my writing and that of many other authors.
Anthropologists as Public Intellectuals: Ruth Behar in Conversation with Kristen Ghodsee
Photo by Janita van Dyk.
By Beth Derderian
August 15, 2019
Transcript
[Anthropod theme music plays]
Kristin Ghodsee [00:00:13]: My name is Kristen Ghodsee and I'm really excited today to be on AnthroPod with Ruth Behar, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. And Ruth, thank you so much for agreeing to do this podcast.
Ruth Behar [00:00:28]: It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
KG [00:00:31]: I want to tell you a little bit about what my thinking about the idea and the role of the public intellectual is before we jump into the conversation. . . Which is that, of all of the other anthropologists sort of working today, I'm really so impressed by the breadth of your academic and creative work. So you've published in so many different genres lots of different work that's really not traditional for a garden variety academic. And I think in some ways that you're the paradigmatic case of a successful public intellectual. So because I have just published my own first book with a trade press, the first time I've done anything with a non-university press, I've been thinking a lot about the challenges of speaking to general audiences and speaking to even scholarly audiences outside of the discipline of anthropology. And I realized that there really aren't a whole lot of role models of people out there who manage to seamlessly blend different aspects of their scholarly and creative selves. So I really wanted to speak to you about your own experiences. And I was reading this 2017 article on public intellectuals in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the author had this wonderful quote that I'm just going to read. She says that some faculty members hang on tenaciously to the notion that speaking exclusively to the fewest smartest people is evidence of thinking the deepest best thoughts, unquote. So just to get us started, can you talk a little bit about why you decided to try to speak to audiences outside of anthropology and outside of academia more generally?
RB [00:02:01]: Sure. Well thank you for that lovely introduction and it's so nice to be here and having this conversation with you, and I'm so honored that you thought of me as someone who could speak to this issue of being a public intellectual. And I should just say just in response to the quote itself, it clearly must not have been a quote that an anthropologist wrote! Because I think you know the idea of anthropology, at least the way I view it, is that everybody has something important and interesting to say and that we're all kind of intellectuals of our own lives and our own cultures. And the pursuit of anthropology—I think has always been about talking to ordinary people and giving ordinary people a voice right in our work, not that they don't have a voice already. So I think it's interesting this idea that the fewest and the smartest
KG [00:02:50]: Yeah [laughing].
RB [00:02:52]: Are the ones that we want to speak to. So it just kind of goes against the grain of how I think about intellectual life. And I think my most basic answer is that, I come to academia being both an immigrant and growing up in a working class community, I guess I could say, so being an immigrant child from Cuba, you know arriving in New York, not knowing English, just being thrown into a public school first grade class and having to figure out how to speak how to communicate. And then neither of my parents were college educated, and I was the first college educated person in my family and definitely the first PhD in the family so to me I had to learn several languages.
RB [00:03:38]: I guess you could say, I had to first learn English. That was not my first language. And then eventually I had to learn how to speak as an academic how to be in academia and all of that was fairly challenging for me and yet I was very determined to master those languages. But it also involved a certain degree of alienation for me, and I kept thinking I'm getting further and further away from being able to speak to my parents and particularly to my mother, you know, the more I got invested in academia particularly in graduate school. I just kept thinking, well this is now I'm going to be writing things that my mother won't understand. And somehow that was important to me that I not lose, you know I use that as a symbol that I not lose my connection to family, to community, that I be able to produce work that that they could understand but that would also be respected in academia. So I think for me, the way I think about this is that, from the beginning I was really trying to find a way to have a foot in each place—like a foot in academia that I could be respected as a scholar because that was very important to me. But then I could also be understood by those outside of the academic world, kind of understanding that not everybody might be able to make it into academia for a variety of reasons. But that didn't mean that they couldn't understand or that I couldn't produce work that they could understand. So, so for me I think those whose origins are very important. But then I think the other thing is is that I always loved writing and the arts, and I continually have surrounded myself with people who are writers and artists. And creativity is very important to me and so I think being surrounded by people that are really amazing communicators made me want to be a great communicator too, and to constantly be searching for the best genre to communicate what I was feeling or what I was thinking or what I was seeing or what I was witnessing.
RB [00:05:43]: And you mentioned that I've worked in all these different genres and I have and sometimes I say to myself, oh my god to done all these things that I've probably done them all badly. But it's come from this desire to, to express myself in different ways. You know I'm trying to get at an emotion that's a little articulate, that's a little inchoate, but so strong and well maybe that requires a poem and so I'll sit down and write a poem but if I'm trying to tell the life story of you know of a village person in Spain well that's going to require ethnography and figuring out how to tell an ethnographic story. So I think I think I've been kind of always looking for genres that are going to help me tell whatever story it is I'm trying to tell at a particular moment.
RB [00:06:28]: Also to me being a public intellectual I think is just being able to share intellectual ideas with a wide public, some of which, some of that public might be in academia. So you might be trying to communicate anthropological ideas to somebody in the English Department or somebody in the theater department—so they may be equally an academic but they have a different way of communicating and their disciplines. So I think being a public intellectual starts with being interdisciplinary and being able to speak between and across disciplines. I think that's like maybe the first hurdle to get through, and then I think the next step is in being a public intellectual is just speaking to generally educated people. And I think our society or our contemporary global society is a very educated society many more people have college education now than they did, say fifty years ago. There are many people writing out there. There's many people reading you know, despite all the fears that, Oh my God we're not reading anymore. But in fact people are reading a lot and all again and all these different formats and genres. And so I think we have generally speaking, a much more educated society. And so it makes sense to be a public intellectual, because you're trying to speak about things that you know that others may also know something about in a different way you know.
RB [00:07:53]: If I'm speaking about Cuba, for example which I know intimately and I go to Cuba several times a year and I'm up to date on everything that's going on and I've tried to read everything that's out there about Cuba, but maybe I'm talking to somebody who went to Cuba for a week you know? And saw a little bit of the island and they know something too. They may not know all the things that I know but they know things too and you know, why should I put down whatever knowledge that person has who maybe hasn't done the full study. But they're interested, they're curious. They-they found some things quirky about Cuba and I come in and give a lecture about it. And I want that lecture to be interesting to that person and to be interesting to the person who's never heard of Cuba, never gone there. You know so, I think it's about trying to speak to as many people as possible but understanding that they are as smart as you that maybe they have focused on something else. Maybe I'm talking about Cuba to a neurologist or to a corporate lawyer. Obviously they're going to be equally smart but they have specialized in something else, but that doesn't mean that I should speak in a way that is so convoluted that they're not going to understand me. Or that somebody like my mother, who worked for many years in the diploma department of NYU, checking the spelling on people's diplomas. . . Why shouldn't she understand what I'm saying and what I think is important? So I don't know, for me I think it comes maybe from a deep sense of democracy, that our knowledge should be available to all and that as as those who produce knowledge we should try to make it available as we can to all.
KG [00:09:28]: I mean that's an amazing perspective. And I keep thinking about everything that you're saying in the context of sort of, the critiques that I hear often about quote unquote public intellectuals or intellectuals or academics who sort of make this more public facing turn. And obviously when you're talking to a corporate lawyer or a neurologist or you know somebody who's checking diplomas at NYU, like, you have to not use the kind of jargon that we use in academia you can you can't use the specific terminologies that we share. And so if you write an op ed for the New York Times or you write a little piece for the Washington Post or you do something that is really truly a kind of democratic engagement with society a lot of times what happens, is your colleagues or other people will say, oh but you haven't substantiated your claims or you haven't fully dived into the literature or you haven't cited the right people. I mean there seems to be this tension in some ways between the kind of evidentiary and rhetorical standards that we have in academia which many academics struggle to uphold—and the ability to as you say communicate with this wider audience. And so I'm really fascinated by the fact that you've done more popular academic books. You've done documentary films. You've written a memoir most recently. You've written a novel, I understand you're working on another novel and so I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how working in these different genres and communicating with these wider audiences, how it complements maybe your more traditional academic work, and then further, like how you deal with the criticism of, when you do speak to these wider audiences and you're not using the correct jargon or the correct language or you're not citing everybody. How do you balance the need to be the appropriately you know rigorous academic with the desire to have this more democratic form of communication with the broader public?
RB [00:11:24]: It's a challenge and then sometimes you know, you don't do it as well as you would like to. But you use the word balance and balance is what I have always searched for. I—you know I love scholarly work and I love doing it and I love reading it and I love being in scholarly conversations so it's just something that, that I adore. And I've definitely worked very hard to to be part of the scholarly community. At the same time there's an artist inside me, or I think there is, and that artist also needs to express herself.
RB [00:11:57]: And so sometimes there are poems or lately now there's been fiction that has been coming out of me and it's it's it's complicated. I think the first thing to be aware of, and I often say this to my students when they're concerned, like I want to do all the things you've done. I'll go, Well you can do it too, you just can't do it all at once. You're going to have a career. A career means that you know, hopefully you'll be lucky and you know you'll have many many years to nurture all these different sides of yourself. And so you know you're starting out in scholarship, you know you want to get a PhD in anthropology, well then you know you've got to work at that, you've got to know the literature, you've got to do your research, all the things that we need to do to be good scholars you need to do them. You need to go to the archive. I mean whatever it is that you need to do to really be a fantastic anthropologist, you're going to do that. So maybe it's not the best moment to be doing all the other things you want to do. Maybe you also want to write a novel. Maybe you also want to write a collection of poetry. You will be able to do that. Maybe you want to paint. I mean I've had a lot of visual artists. I had a student who was also a musician and an anthropologist. And so you know it's—I think you can do it all but you have to organize your time and kind of organize your life and sort of know that you can do things one by one right.
RB [00:13:12]: You can't write ten books at the same time, but you can't write ten books over the course of a long career right? So maybe you write one and then four years or five years later you're on to the next book. So you have to have a certain kind of patience with yourself, which is really hard because I'm a very impatient person actually. But having you know having that patience with yourself and kind of knowing, OK there's all these things I want to do but right now I'm going to concentrate on this project. This story, this article, you know whatever it is, you're going to put your all into that one thing and do it as well as you can and then move to the next. This is not to say that you can't multitask on the other hand, because you can, because sometimes you can. So when I was working on my documentary film in Cuba, I was also doing some other work because—you know documentary uses a certain part of your mind right. I mean you're you know you're there, you're trying to find people to interview, you know, you finally get them on camera. You interview them. Then you've got, like, all of this material to sort through in the editing room. You can't possibly use it all because otherwise your film would be twenty hours long.
KG [00:14:27]: Yeah.
RB [00:14:28]: So you can't use all the material you have, and so you sit there editing and shaping and you know crying, Oh my God I'm not going to be able to use the story where oh this is so terrible. So you go through the process of creation with everything that you do, but with something like the documentary, it involved a certain part of my mind, a certain kind of attention that I had to give that work, and so that allowed me sometimes to do other things too. Okay I can write a few poems in the midst of this because poems are short and I can write some ideas down I sometimes get an idea for a poem. . . Believe it or not, during a faculty meeting.
KG [00:15:09]: [laughing] that's a good use of a faculty meeting.
RB [00:15:10]: Sometimes Sometimes, I'll be like, oh wait a minute I just got an idea. You know I'll just be staring into space and you know, I just thought of an image. So you can multitask. So you can also multitask and do different things and I've always believed that different kinds of intellectual and creative work can nurture each other. So if you need to write the poem because a poem just came to you, there's something you know, deep that you need to say and you write that poem. Because you've got the poem down, then that might free you to go back to your ethnography, or back to your documentary film because you've got that poem out. . . That maybe it's about a loss in your family or a death or somebody that you just remembered in the midst of other things and you know, you put that down. And then that frees you or charges you up in such a way that then you can go back to maybe the more intellectual the heavier work, in some way. So it is a question of balance and sometimes you can multitask. And then it is a question of also being aware that you're going to have time over the course of a career to do different things. You gain respect for the intellectual work you've done, or at least I hope I have, and then that frees me up to, OK well I've done a number of ethnographies, maybe I can write a novel now and people won't be too upset [laughing].
RB [00:16:33]: I have written some ethnographic studies so maybe now I take some time and I write a few novels. And the novels in some way connect to my work as an anthropologist because they're about similar cultures and similar concerns. They have to do with immigration. They have to do with cultural intersections or you know themes that in fact are in my ethnographic work but now get carried over into a different genre. And I always had this idea and I think again, it's because I'm first generation in the academy. . . You know I used to feel like, well maybe one day they're going to kick me out of academia, they're going to go oh sorry you're doing too many things that just don't correspond to what you're supposed to do. And I used to have those thoughts you know they're kind of innocent and maybe somewhat childish, and I would think, OK well I guess if they do that, I have some other talents. I could be a photographer you know, I could maybe work in publishing. So I would kind of console myself and say well you know cause. . . I read a lot about the inquisition I sort of have this—
KG [00:17:36]: Right.
RB [00:17:37]: This inquisition is going to kind of get together, this inquisition, real committee. No no this is heretical what you're doing, get out. So you know the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. So I think they'll expel me and then I'll have to go to some new intellectual country and start all over again. So I think I had those thoughts, definitely when I was younger, and a feeling that you know, you needed permission to do things that I think as I got older I just started feeling, well I'm just going to do what I want to do and you know . . . and if, if I get expelled, Well I will find a way to survive. I think I always had that kind of quirky notion at in the back of your mind.
KG [00:18:19]: Which leads me to my next question, which is about the reception of your work among your academic colleagues. Have you ever faced disapproval or lost opportunities because of your decision to produce work for a broader audience? I mean you're talking about the Inquisition, the academic inquisition, I can just imagine them in their robes with their hats and everything, you know telling you, you know, you're publishing too much fiction! Or this poetry isn't academic enough! But I think that obviously, you know on some level it's it's, we all suffer from a little bit of imposter syndrome, we're always afraid. I think many people talk about being found out but it's also real. I mean there there are these tenure and promotion committees, there are these grant committees, as academics we're constantly being evaluated often anonymously by people we don't know, and so I think that people are quite afraid. I think fear is actually quite paralyzing for a lot of people who might want to write ethnographic fiction or ethnographic poetry or who might want to branch out and do a novel or a documentary film. So can you talk a little bit about your own personal experiences with that, sort of maybe not just imagined disapproval but perhaps maybe real pushback that you might have gotten from your colleagues or different forces within academia over the years?
RB [00:19:34]: Thanks for asking that, and I know certainly there there is there are real consequences to be paid when you move beyond what's academically acceptable. For sure. Back when I published Translated Woman, you know many years ago, more than twenty years ago, there was a lot of disapproval about the final chapter, "The biography in the shadow," that was just about nineteen pages long. And most of that book is is a study of one woman's life, a Mexican street peddler who I got to know very very well and spent lots of time with her and interviewing her and transcribing and translating interviews and talking with her about them and what she agreed upon to publish. I mean, it was a very very long intense project that I put a lot of my self into. And that book incorporates a final self reflexive chapter about the impact that working with Esperanza had on me and how I felt that my own life changed in the course of doing this ethnographic work with her. And I talked about my family and kind of coming into academia and all of that was discussed in that chapter. And a lot of people viewed it as provocative. A lot of people really hated it.
RB [00:20:45]: A fellow anthropologist who reviewed the book, in the New York Times Book Review in fact, was very negative about that chapter and basically said, you know the life of the anthropologist is never as interesting as the life of our research subjects. You know we didn't really need to hear about you you're not that interesting.
KG [00:21:05]: That's brutal. New York Times Book Review, ouch.
RB [00:21:08]: Yeah. So that was painful. . . And I heard from students too that the book would get assigned in courses and the professors would say to their students will don't bother reading that last chapter it's totally unimportant. Or students would read it naturally because if you're told not to read something that's taboo it's going to be a lot more interesting so I heard that from people. So, so there was definitely, you know, some serious criticism there. Not everybody liked the book. And that you know that was painful. That was definitely painful. And I think also, at an earlier point in my life, when I was considering other job possibilities, you know, I never really was able to find other positions beyond Michigan. I also had at some point decided this was really the place where I wanted to stay and that I had kind of a wonderful foundation here and I didn't need to go anywhere else. But at one point in my career, I was contemplating moving and I felt that people didn't quite know how to read me. They didn't quite know, perhaps, if I was anthropologist enough, if I was maybe doing, like you say like too many other different kinds of things. And I think a lot of people in our discipline feel uncomfortable with those of us that like to write and that, you know, get involved in our writing as writing. I think that's less true now. But I think there was a moment when people were uncomfortable with that and felt that we shouldn't be thinking about writing, that we should be thinking about our research subjects, our-our topics of interest or our—
KG [00:22:37]: Theory. Yeah.
RB [00:22:38]: Theory yeah. How could I forget theory. . . theory in particular—that that was what mattered and even though, you know ethnography is one of the things that we, you know, put so much emphasis on—you know and that's presumably the focus of our discipline. In fact the theory is so important to so many and then maybe I didn't come across this as theoretical enough in my work. And so I think I did feel that at a certain point years ago, probably twenty years ago that well that you know, that maybe not everybody liked what I was doing. They didn't know how to place me. But what I have found is how much the discipline has changed and how much my colleagues have changed. Like some of my most, what I would think of as my most hard line theoretical academic colleagues, some of his colleagues have now wanted to write more personal creative work and they've come to me for advice. They've come to workshops that I've taught at the American Anthropological Association meetings. They've actually come to those workshops. They've asked me for blurbs—like people that I thought really disapproved of my work about twenty years ago. And now like the grad students come to me, and they'll say, oh we want to put together a workshop on anthropology and poetry. Do you think you could offer the first workshop? You know, you go what? The grad students today, they are looking for ways to think about writing and creativity and how can they write better? How can they tell stronger stories? And so I feel like, because I've been in anthropology now so long, it's like come full circle. You know like, I passed through that period of disapproval and now this kind of this period of, the students you know want to know like what possibilities are there for our writing? And they want to at least explore. You know maybe ultimately they won't do the things that I do for example, but but they at least want to explore. They have an open mind. They want to know about this, You know, this way of doing ethnography or this way of bringing other kinds of writing and other kinds of thinking into ethnography. So I would say that yes, there have been some very hard moments and sad moments and definitely moments where like I wept about losses and you know the things I didn't do or the people that disapproved of me or certain fellowships I didn't get or you know those sorts of things.
RB [00:24:57]: There have been disappointments I know. I wouldn't want to say that there haven't been; they have been there. But at the same time I, I've tried to kind of cushion myself a little bit and and always try to just think of, what is the next project I want to do? What is it that I want to do? And not, not get involved in in those kinds of politics that I think ultimately could hurt you. I think I just cushion myself a little bit and I'll just go, you know, what matters now? What do I have to do next? In the time that I have left, what what would be worthwhile to do? What do I care about? So I try to, I try to always go back to that thought and remember my mortality and remember that there's only a certain amount of time to do things and what are the most beautiful and worthwhile things I can do. And so that's what I do when I feel hurt or when I feel that I haven't been understood. I think really, ultimately, I feel that I've been very fortunate and that the people have actually been—in the end, the majority of people I think—have been very open to what I do. And I think of anthropology as a discipline where there's space to do so many different kinds of things. We have such a broad spectrum of possibilities right from the most scientific, taking blood you know and using that to, you know to understand hormones or you know whatever it is, to you know, to to writing a poem and I think we've we've always had that spectrum and anthropology has always been this amazing discipline that unites the arts, the humanities and the sciences. And so I think it's a very very broad spectrum and I think ultimately I feel very fortunate that I have been able to do all the things that I've done and that people have been supportive. So for example you know, I wrote this children's novel Lucky Broken Girl, and I've been so touched that so many of my colleagues in the Anthropology Department at Michigan come to me and they'll say, Could you autograph this book for my daughter or for my son? So, so they know about it and they're not being critical, they're like giving the book to their kids to read. It's so touching and so sweet and so I think that you know that maybe, we're just becoming kind of more holistically human in how we think about things which is really what we should be doing as anthropologists, and kind of being open to all these different ways of expressing ourselves.
KG [00:27:26]: First of all I want to say that, I think you're a little too humble because I think that you played a big role in this coming full circle in anthropology. I think you were really a trailblazer and I know for me personally when I first read The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart, it was a kind of an epiphany. And I don't remember exactly what it was, I think it might have been 2014 at the American Anthropological Association meetings, but there was a panel in honor of you and your work and I remember sitting in the audience and really thinking, wow you can do everything! You can combine the artistic and the creative with the ethnographic and the theoretical. And you can be this much bigger thing than the boxes that we often, I think especially in academia with hyper-specialization, we put ourselves in. And so I think you deserve a lot of credit for opening up that possibility and also you know just being a role model to a lot of younger scholars. What I remember about that panel were a bunch of your former students and some of your mentors and you know just the discussions around the impact of, I think it was called the stew, in anthropology. It was beautiful and so personal I just want to say that I think that there's always been this incredible spectrum of work possible within anthropology. But I also think that it has taken certain people to burst through some of these barriers to actually talk, you know subjectively about their position within the work, and in relation to their subjects, and to talk about what it means to be a vulnerable observer. And I think that was very brave of you and I realized that you know, sometimes you're protecting—you said you're an artist as well as an academic and so this comes from a place of wanting to express yourself and be true to this larger artistic vision. But it's also really incredibly inspiring for those of us who read that work and who, kind of, you know, starting to think about the possibilities of, you know, thinking outside of the academic box, really. Okay I want to write a novel, I want to write a short story, or I want to write poems or I want to do documentaries or I want to write op eds or whatever. That it's really important I think that more anthropologists speak about these different possibilities of presenting our work to these broader audiences. Because I want to emphasize something that you said earlier in our conversation, which is just fundamentally more democratic—to reach out beyond the ivory tower to these wider communities that are interested in some ways and what we're doing and so that brings me to my next question. So I've also talked to anthropologists and you know I've also run workshops at the American Anthropological Association where I hear from anthropologists that they want to speak to wider audiences but they don't know how. And so I was wondering—and you said you have run workshops as well. Can you talk a little bit about the process of learning how to reach these non-academic audiences? Like how did you learn? Because you didn't learn in graduate school right, how to write nonfiction. So how did, how did this knowledge come to you? Or you sort of auto-didactic or did you really kind of cultivate different fields of knowledge as you were coming up, you know, how did you carve out the space for your artist self?
RB [00:30:43]: Thank you. That's a great question and thank you for the kind words you said as well. I'm really honored by everything that you said. You know as you were speaking, I was thinking I have to add that I have worked really hard—
KG [00:30:56]: Yes you have.
RB [00:30:58]: —At my writing, at my writing. And I do want to say, in terms of the how to do it, that it is a long process and there's a lot of revision involved. And I have taught workshops. But I also attend workshops and I attend writing workshops frequently and have done so over the years. And I have writing buddies that I share my work with, who are all writers. You know so I never got my MFA in Creative Writing which was something that throughout the years I was thinking about Oh my God I should get an MFA. And I was actually trying to figure out how to do that and be a professor at the same time and I couldn't figure it out now. Now people do it. I've known a couple of people who actually get their MFAs while they are working as professors and do those low-residency type of degrees. And I was seriously contemplating that you know about thirty years ago, going, OK I should really, you know I should really be getting my MFA and working on this but it didn't happen. I couldn't do it. It was just just too busy. So instead I, as I said, you know, I've always had friends who were writers and artists. So part of it was connecting with Latino writers like Sandra Cisneros, who I'm a very good friend of, and other Latino writers. And we would get together at first very informally, and then that became an annual writing workshop. So every summer I was bringing work, you know to be criticized and workshopped very very seriously. In Ann Arbor where I live, over the years I've had a writing buddy that I get together with. She's a writer and a psychologist and we have been exchanging work for many many years. And the nice thing about having either a writing buddy or a workshop is that you know that these people are expecting to read some of your work. Like they're going to give you work and you're thinking, well I'm going to have to read their work. I want them to read some of my work!
KG [00:32:53]: [laughing] Yeah.
RB [00:32:55]: So you push yourself. This is what would happen with my writing buddy, it was just a one on one thing and she is much more prolific than I am. So you know in the time that it took me to write Lucky Broken Girl she wrote three novels. So I'm working on one, like over and over and over but it's OK. You know that, that was I was a slower writer. But just knowing that I was going to be meeting with her forced me even at my busiest moments—you know full-time teaching and traveling and lecturing, I would find the time to at least write five pages so that I can give her something of mine to read. So having a workshop or having a writing buddy is really fundamental: somebody that you trust that you can show those first drafts of your writing to. That is really really important.
RB [00:33:39] The other thing, and I wrote a whole article about this in what used to be called Savage Minds and now is called Anthrodendum, I wrote a piece called "Read more write less."
KG [00:33:49] Write less, yes.
RB [00:33:50] That was advice given to me by this Cuban poet that I adore, who I got to know she was in her 90s. And I got to know her the last last few years of her life. And when I went up to her and I said, you know, I read some of my poems to her. And I said, Oh what advice do you have for me you know to keep writing poetry? And she said, Read more write less. Leer mas, escribe menos. So that's the other part of your training. And you know it it is a bit autodidactic but to be reading, you know, you really have to read in the genre that you want to write in. So if you want to write you know in a creative nonfiction style, you want to write in a travel writing style, whatever it is that you're trying to write. You really have to learn that genre. You have to read as much as possible in that genre and kind of see what people are doing, like see what all the possibilities are. Oh you know so I can tell, I can tell the story in first person. Or I can tell it in third person. I can even tell a story in second person. You know you're reading others and going, wow this is amazing. And so for me reading is often a learning experience. I often read a book first just to read it, like what is what is the story here. And then I'll go back and go, what were the things I liked about this book. You know, what were the techniques? What was what was the language? Or were there long sentences or short sentences? Were there paragraphs that went on for pages and pages? How did the writer manage to do this and not, not bore me? So I'm always reading kind of strategically. And I have books that I read over and over and over there's authors that I go back to and they never tire me and I learn from them. So there's that and then I like to read the new new work that's out there. The novels that are getting attention and so on.
RB [00:35:40]: So I think reading is really fundamental and I know it's hard for us to find time to read because we have to read so much work for our courses, and it's not always the reading that we need to do for our own writing. So one thing that's happened to me more recently, is that I teach courses where I can incorporate a lot of books that I want to read: either books I haven't read yet or books I have just read and I'm trying to understand them. So I'm able to incorporate books that are going to really nurture me as a writer, and then if I incorporate them into a graduate seminar or an advanced undergraduate seminar, I'm going to be sharing them, these books with like twenty really smart students. This is going to help me ultimately as a writer. So that's the way that in recent years I've been able to really make the teaching and the writing and the learning kind of all flow together for me so that it's, so that it's actually very inspiring and very efficient at the same time. So so I guess to sum up what I'm saying: I would urge fellow anthropologists and anthropology students to take workshops, to, to read as much as possible in the genres that interest them, and also to do some reading in other genres.
RB [00:36:56]: So you know maybe you think, Oh poetry that's that's not really me, I'm not never going to need poetry. I'm just going to do ethnography. What do I need to read a poem for? The Poetry Foundation has this thing where they send you a poem a day. Sign up and you know, while you're going scrolling through your emails, there's, you know there's a poem there and you can go ahead and read a poem. And poems are great because they force you to think about language, they force you to think about the arrangement of words on the page, pauses and spaces and how to compress ideas you know into into the most efficient precise form. So that's always helpful. And there's images and metaphors and poems and so that can also help inspire you in your writing. So, so I think looking for inspiration is really important. Like now that it's summer time you know this is the time when I read a lot of novels. You know I watch TV series, I just like you know just like, indulge in lots of different kinds of stories. And I think that nurtures me and makes me think about, OK how can I, how can I tell the next story I want to tell? Maybe I can experiment with, you know with the way I'm going to tell it. Like up to now you know I've only written in like a first person voice . . . Maybe this next project I'm going to try to write it in two or three voices and see what happens. But then maybe I need to read some books that do that to see how you pull that off.
KG [00:38:20]: That sounds great. So I would love to come back and talk a little bit about Lucky Broken Girl which is your novel. It was published with Penguin Random House and it won 2018 Pura Belpré Award, I believe. It's been pretty successful. And so can you talk a little bit about the challenges of writing that novel and maybe even writing for children? Because that's a very different audience than maybe a wider intellectual public. But you're really speaking to young people and trying to communicate these various cultural experiences.
RB [00:38:54]: One thing I've come to realize as I've gotten older is that I've really been an educator all my life. You know I received my PhD very young. I was like 25, 26 years old when I got my PhD, took a few years to live in Mexico, but then you know came back in my thirties and I was already teaching. So I started out very young and I've been an educator all these years and I think as I thought about that writing for children wasn't that much of a challenge because now my undergrads feel like children.
KG [00:39:27]: Right. [both laughing]
RB [00:39:30]: I'm writing from kids who were ten or eleven or twelve. So that's not so different from teaching classes to 18 to 20 year olds. Oh.
KG [00:39:37]: Yeah that's true, that's one of the things with academe. Like we keep getting older but they stay the same age.
RB [00:39:44]: Yeah. Exactly. So, so I think it didn't seem like so like incredible to be speaking to this younger age group or to be writing for this younger age group. But Lucky Broken Girl, I mean really, was a lucky book because I didn't know I was going to write it. I was trying to write actually another novel: an adult novel, a complex novel, that one in three points of view and I just couldn't get it to happen either—a novel that I've been working on probably for 20 years. Like every summer I pull it out and work on it again and I just couldn't get it to happen. It was—you know that was probably my MFA—was that novel that's probably never going to be published. But trying to write that novel was how I learned to write fiction. So that one has been shelved. It frustrated me and I, and I put it away and I just—I don't even know how it happened, but I started writing kind of the first vignette of Lucky Broken Girl.
RB [00:40:40]: Lucky Broken Girl is is a semi autobiographical novel based on my childhood in New York, coming from Cuba and just trying to adapt and assimilate into life in the United States. And then how that story then meshes with another story, which is also true—that shortly after we arrived from Cuba, my family and I were in a terrible car accident in New York on the Belt Parkway and I ended up in a body cast for a year. And that happened when I was 10. And of course it was a very traumatic moment. It was horrible. You know my mother had to attend to me. I couldn't get out of bed for all that time and then I finally recovered. But then once the cast was removed, I found it very hard to walk again because I'd gotten used to being in bed. I was terrified of going out. I was afraid my legs wouldn't hold me up. I went through a terrible time. Finally, I began walking again and then I had a terrible limp that went on like an entire year after the cast was removed. So it was a terrible time in my life. But at the same time I think of that as a pivotal moment. And I think we all have turning points in our childhoods where we kind of become already as children what we're going to be as adults. I think we have those moments where decisions get made, or something happens in your life that you know you take a certain turn and it's going to shape who you become. And for me that that moment the broken leg, the body cast: that was the moment. Because since I couldn't move, I couldn't play hopscotch, I couldn't go outside, I was reading all the time. And my public school sent a tutor to our house and that was when we said, Oh my God we're really in America, our—you know, my public school cares enough that they're going to send a tutor to teach me because I couldn't go to school for a year. And I had this tutor who would come to my bedside and bring me books and teach me math, and my English improved. And I started reading and becoming this little girl who liked to read books. I'd been a very active, kind of frenetic girl before and I became this very very different child: a much more contemplative quiet shy child. An observer you know? Because I had been in bed for year, right.
KG [00:42:53]: Yeah.
RB [00:42:54]: So it was a pivotal moment, that pre-teen moment. And so it was a moment that I never forgot. I wrote about it in an essay in The Vulnerable Observer. There's an essay I wrote about it and kind of wrote about it as an adult woman looking back at that experience in the way it shaped—and how later in life I went through a time of terrible panic attacks and agoraphobia where I was reliving that, that year in bed. And so I wrote about that and how ironic it was that I became an anthropologist, thinking of how anthropologists or people who are always on the move, right? We're always going someplace, we have to be mobile. That's kind of almost the definition of of our profession and thinking of that time when I was immobile. And how perhaps that immobility you know set me on this path to be, to be mobile. So I wrote that essay for The Vulnerable Observer and then let it go. And then so many years later, you know four or five years ago when I started Lucky Broken Girl, I just wrote down my first vignette of kind of arriving from Cuba and you know who we were as immigrants. And I realized that after all these years of writing reflexively and personally and writing about Cuba that I had never written about the immigrant experience. About our immigrant experience and what it had been like for my parents and my family to recreate their lives you know in Queens New York, and you know in this very working class immigrant neighborhood in Queens New York. And all of that, all those memories started flooding back and just remembering like, what was my mother like? Well what was my father like? The rest of the family, my Baba, my beloved maternal grandmother. I just started thinking about everybody, and how we lived, we all lived in the same apartment building on different floors of the same building and how we were these immigrants. And of course we all have immigrants very much on our minds right now with everything that's going on, and the horror of the wall and the cages and everything that's going on with immigrant children right now on the border . . . and I had all of that somewhere in my mind and was thinking about us and how I had been an immigrant child, and just all those memories came back and and somehow this voice this voice emerged on the page this 10-year-old girl Ruthie who was me and who wasn't me. Because I mean, do I really know what I was like when I was 10? You know at this stage of my life.
KG [00:45:20]: Right.
RB [00:45:21]: I mean can I remember what was you know when I was 10, and I would see 10 year olds or 11 year olds or 12 year olds and go, Oh my God I was a child just like that. I was a child that size you know with thoughts, with hopes, with ideas. One of my friends at the time had had a daughter about that age, and I just thought Oh my God I was a child just like this. And I went through this experience and all of that. I don't know. I can't even explain it as well as I would like to. But but that time just came back to me and in the voice of this child, it was almost like, I don't want to say that it was like, You know, I was transcribing the story. But it almost felt like this child was whispering in my ear and telling me her story and that child was me and it wasn't me. Maybe it's the child but maybe she was just more amazing than I was and braver and smarter and more thoughtful. But I put all of that into, into the voice of this child and it kind of just emerged. And when I finished it, I said you know, I think this is a book for children because I'm telling it from the 10-year-old girl's perspective. And I wanted to keep it kind of innocent, like this child who's like trying to understand how this happened to her, and what could she do, and who does she need to pray to. And you know just like trying to imagine what it was like to be that age. You know and—it was an experience that in a way I didn't take seriously enough because my family was so exasperated with me.
[00:46:48]: And I understand them now, it's like they just wanted me to get better and it was so exasperating to see me in bed during all that time and then the cast came off. And then I didn't just like automatically start walking and jumping and running. I was having a hard time and they were all very exasperated with me. And so I think I wanted to just put that experience away and then you know, 50 years later it came back so strongly. So I finished it and then I said, Well let me see what I can do with this. And I began to send it out to agents and got lots of rejections. Every time I would get a rejection, I would rewrite it, and I would revise it and go, Well maybe this part needs to be better. Maybe this part needs to be better. And I just kept going and going and I would get a rejection and work a little bit more. Rejection and work a little bit more. And then finally I sent it to this amazing agent who had represented an author that I really admired and I said okay well let me try. It's probably gonna be a no, but let me just try. And you know the essence of finding an agent is writing a perfect query letter.
KG [00:47:50]: Mmhmm.
RB [00:47:51]: The query letter is the five paragraph email letter that you send with, you know, what is this about, who are you, you know, why should this be published. And you hopefully get the person who likes you query letter and I did. And she said, No, send it to me right away. And I did. And then, two three days later, she said I want to represent you. I said, great, you know, this is this is perfect.
KG [00:48:14]: Wow that's fantastic.
RB [00:48:14]: It was fantastic. It was, it was amazing and I had never ever worked with an agent in all these years of writing. I had published two books with Beacon Press and Beacon is part trade, part scholarly press. So I guess I'd had that experience. But I'd never worked with any of the big publishers and I'd certainly never had an agent up until this novel. And so then, I had the agent you know she—you know agents you know are wonderful because they're enthusiastic about your work. And they want to get, you know, your—your writing out there. And then, so then, it was a matter of getting the book out to editors. And again, just to share this with everybody, to be totally honest about how the process works: again there were several rejections among editors. And these were editors that my agent was convinced were going to love the book. And they were like, No it's interesting, but it's not quite for me . . . you know they had different reasons, you know. I mean it's so complicated. Sometimes it has to do with, you know, do they already have a Cuban author or whatever. It's like all of these issues that have really nothing to do with you and your writing. So again it's it's patience, you kind of hang in there and then there was an editor that I had come across who had, who had edited a book that I loved called Brown Girl Dreaming by Jackie Woodson. It was a book I adored. It's an autobiographical verse memoir. And I loved it and I look to see you know who was the editor? And that's a secret that we all know—you look in the acknowledgements, and find out who people's editors and agents are and so on.
RB [00:49:48]: And so I saw who the editor was, and I said oh well, if I could just possibly have this editor, it would be so wonderful. And I know I found the editor online; I had her picture up on my computer and look at her picture, oh please, it would be so nice of you to work with me. And I stare at her picture on my computer. And then that editor—again it was one of those things where, you know it, just immediately, like within a day or two she said, yes I want this. And it's like wow. And so that was so wonderful. So so it was a very happy process in the end though, like I said, you know, it took a lot of work. It took a lot of revision. It took a lot of rejection. And then once the editor took on the book and we decided to work with her, then there was more revision involved because . . . This is one of the nice things about working with an editor who who is with Penguin Random House, is that she really combed through the work word by word and we went back and forth about four times. And the curious thing is she said to me, oh that wasn't that much. She, she said to me, your work was practically ready to be published. I said, really? because you know I revised it four times after she got it. She said, No sometimes you know we go through ten passes with some books. So that's the level of of attention that the work gets because you know, you're getting an advance you know. You know all of that and so. So there's some. So there's some money on the table. There's some stakes. And I think that all of that has something to do with the level of attention that you get. And I think sometimes with university presses—I mean there's some great editors and I've published with Rutgers University Press and Duke University Press, the University of California Press, they've all been wonderful but sometimes the university press editors don't have the, time to give that kind of editorial support to the writing. So I think that's, that's something that I discovered so late in my career working on this novel, that you know, the editor gets really deeply deeply involved in reading and commenting and and then responding to you as well. When I was working on the ending of Lucky Broken Girl I had about twenty different versions of the ending. You know I could—
KG [00:52:06]: Wow that's a lot of versions.
RB [00:52:07]: I have a lot of versions. I go through lots of versions. You know I thought well, she would be happier? No should it be more realistic? Should it be sad, or should she be walking again without a limp? Or should it end with her still walking with a limp? And you know just like let the reader contemplate what's going to happen: is she ever going to walk normally quote unquote again. So there were all of these different scenarios in my mind of how it could end and that's why it was very very helpful when I finally came up with the scenario that I thought was best—to be able to say to my editor, what do you think I think, I think this is finally it. And she said yes. Now you've got it. You know so it was nice. So you get that—you need, you sometimes need that confirmation from somebody that you really trust in that process and that was something that I was just so grateful for.
RB [00:52:57]: And then afterwards you know there was a whole team of people, helping to get the book out there to readers, to children, to librarians, to teachers. And so what I've enjoyed so much about now being a children's author is that I've gone to many schools and I've spoken to kids—10-, 11-, 12-year-old kids, you know groups of them. And sometimes small groups. Sometimes it's a book club. Sometimes it's a whole class. Sometimes it's the whole auditorium of kids. And it's amazing. You know I think they are a tough audience because you know you can lose them very quickly if you become boring.
KG [00:53:37]: Yes.
RB [00:53:38]: So talk about being a public intellectual.
KG [00:53:41]: That's a really high standard.
RB [00:53:44]: Yes, to get kids to stay with you and to you know and to be interested in what you have to say. It's really amazing. But I think children's literature is so fascinating now I really would urge more anthropologists to write for kids because the whole field of children's literature has changed. I mean there's a lot of concern now with having diverse literature, having diverse protagonists, you know, so like more Latino protagonists. More Muslim American protagonists. Protagonists that we didn't see in children's literature when all of us were growing up you know. I mean I read Nancy Drew mysteries. There weren't like a whole lot of other different protagonists. There certainly was no like Cuban Jewish protagonist that I could read about in literature. And so children's literature has expanded now to include so many different kinds of voices, so many different kinds of backgrounds. And the idea that sometimes if a child isn't reading, it's not because that child can't read or isn't smart enough to read . . . but that child isn't finding a book that is speaking to him or her. And so now you know there's just this effort to get, like every possible—just the voice of disabled children and just like, so many different voices are out there now in children's literature.
RB [00:54:59]: And so to me, I do find it an extension of my anthropology, because I often end up talking about diversity, about multicultural environments, about speaking between and across cultures, you know things like that with kids, You know on a kid level. And you know even speaking about things like bullying, I mean that has a lot to do with anthropology: speaking about cultural difference, about class differences. All of those issues are now being treated and discussed very intensively at the elementary and secondary school. And of course high school level. So children's literature is not, just Dr. Seuss books or something like that. I mean it's a very fascinating complex literature. There's a lot of historical novels. The next novel that I'm working on, that's coming out next summer, is a historical novel that takes place in Cuba in 1938–1939. And I did a lot of research on that period for that novel. So it's it's a really fascinating field and you feel that you can communicate with children at a moment in their lives where they are very very malleable and very very open to ideas and to kind of being turned into a better person. I mean, that's really the time when you can make a child into a truly holistic human being who cares, you know, who cares about other people, and cares about other societies and cultures and other religions. You know, I think it's really that time of great openness in a young person's mind. So, so I don't I don't view this as something very very different from my anthropology. I view it as you know as part of it. Like I'm communicating anthropological ideas in a certain way to young readers.
KG [00:56:50]: Yeah. About what you're saying, I've been thinking about this quote that's often attributed to Ruth Benedict, that the purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences. And as we conclude, I'm thinking about the role of a public intellectual within anthropology. I mean, maybe the ability to speak to these wider audiences, using these different genres—whether it's fiction or poetry or documentary film or more public writing . . . maybe the idea of taking anthropological knowledge and repackaging it and communicating in this much broader democratic way is ultimately making the world safe for human difference and celebrating the diversity of humanity. And I just was thinking about you talking about how young children are looking for books that speak to them and their experience, and how they're at this moment when they can empathize with a much broader view of humanity than maybe they've been raised with . . . And you know maybe it's not just children! Maybe it's all of us that needs this moment of absolute hyper–political polarization, maybe what we need is a little bit more of an attempt to try to get people to see and celebrate the diversity of human experiences. It's something that I think about a lot in my own work and I think that, you know, writing in all sorts of different genres and in all sorts of different registers is—it's sort of a kind of a central question that I think we need to continue grappling with. Would you agree?
RB [00:58:15]: You're saying this so well. I mean, yeah. I don't think I could add more. I think I think I love that. I mean the repackaging idea and I think making making the world safe for human differences—I think that that's a beautiful quote from Ruth Benedict. And yes, I really think that that is what it's about. And I think each of us can find ways to do that: ways to be a public intellectual or to basically do outreach. I guess that's another word that's used often. And I think for each of us it's different. I mean you know for me, it so happened that I wrote a children's novel. I wasn't planning on it but it happened. And I think, you know, I think to allow that serendipity into how we do our work is, is useful so that maybe, you know, you're writing your ethnographic work and then you know, the possibility opens up for you to do a documentary film . . . Because maybe maybe you have videotaped interviews, right, in order to do your ethnographic work or maybe you have just tape recorded people. And maybe you create, you know, some sort of soundscape which is another fun thing that ethnographers are doing now as well as creating these multi-modal soundscapes, different kinds of things. And so maybe the opportunity presents itself for you to play with a different genre. Maybe you do a book trailer, you know that was another fun thing that I did when I when I wrote traveling heavy. When I wrote Traveling Heavy, my son is a filmmaker and I said, Oh I've always dreamed of you know having a book trailer. I think book trailers are so much fun. And he helped me put together a very humorous book trailer.
KG [00:59:43] I loved that trailer. It's very funny. Hysterical Yeah.
RB [00:59:49]: For Traveling Heavy . . . And that's thanks to to my son, you know who, like, he knew how to edit it so it would be really funny. So I think each of us can kind of you know if we want to—I mean this is the other thing, I want to say that nobody is forced to do any of this. If you want to just do your theoretical classical ethnographic work that's totally fine. But you know if you do want to explore a little bit, or you know give yourself a chance to play a little bit and share your work potentially with with more people, then I think, yeah trying something out and again it can be very small . . . It might be, you know, something that is already part of your work and you haven't even realized that you could use it to create something in a different genre, right? Or maybe you have a very strong opinion about something and that's a part of your ethnographic writing. But maybe you can pull out something and make it an op ed essay, right. So so there's all these different ways to to reach people, and I think everybody is so hungry to sort of, to understand the world, and to, and to hear a good story, you know, about those other lives—
KG [01:00:57]: Absolutely.
RB [01:00:57]: And how how people are living their lives today you know. I think we all want to know that. And you know, and as anthropologists, we're in such a great position to, you know, to be able to speak to that issue from so many different points of view and from so many different parts of the world. I mean how how many professions allow for that? And so I think, we, if no one else, should really be sharing so much of what we know, and so many of the amazing experiences that we've had and the knowledge that we are so lucky to acquire—thanks to people who are willing to speak to us and share their lives with us. So I think passing that on just seems to be a very natural thing for us to be doing.
KG [01:01:37]: Wonderful. Well, I think that's a great place for us to end this interview. Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me, and to AnthroPod for allowing us this opportunity to talk about what it means to be a public intellectual in anthropology in the year 2019. Thanks so much.
RB [01:01:54]: Thank you. Thank you Kristen, this was great. Thank you.
Beth Derderian [01:02:07]: [AnthroPod theme music plays] And thank you for listening. Today's episode was executive produced by Beth Derderian. Special thanks to Kristen Ghodsee for proposing this episode and Ruth Behar for joining us. For more episodes or to learn more about Anthropod, please check out our website at culanth.org
Ruth Behar
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ruth Behar
Born Cuba
Nationality American
Alma mater Princeton University
Wesleyan University
Scientific career
Fields Cultural Anthropology
Institutions University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Ruth Behar is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer.[1] Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the Belpré Medal.[2]
Life and work
Behar was born in Havana, Cuba to a Jewish-Cuban family of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry. She was four when her family immigrated to the US following Fidel Castro's gaining power in the revolution of 1959. More than 94% of Cuban Jews left the country at that time,[3] together with many others of the middle and upper classes. Behar attended local schools and studied as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, receiving her B.A. in 1977. She studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University, earning her doctorate in 1983.
She travels regularly to Cuba and Mexico to study aspects of culture, as well as to investigate her family's roots in Cuba. She has specialized in studying the lives of women in developing societies.[4]
Behar is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.[1] Her literary work is featured in the Michigan State University's Michigan Writers Series.[5] A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry and fiction, Behar focuses on issues related to women and feminism.[4]
Lucky Broken Girl
Lucky Broken Girl (2017) is multicultural coming-of-age novel for young adults, based on the author's childhood in the 1960s. Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro's Cuba to New York City. Just when she's finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English –and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood's hopscotch queen – a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined to her bed for a long recovery. As Ruthie's world shrinks because of her inability to move, her powers of observation and her heart grow larger and she comes to understand how fragile life is, how vulnerable we all are as human beings, and how friends, neighbors, and the power of the arts can sweeten even the worst of times. Writing for Cuba Counterpoints, Julie Schwietert Collazo writes, "Behar, without fail, always seems to be writing with the goal of honoring her own history, experiences, and feelings, without ever denying or excluding those of others, and in Lucky Broken Girl the achievement of this goal is evident on every page."[6] Professor Jonda C. McNair also highlights the importance of Ruth Behar using her personal experience as a Cuban American of Sephardic Turkish, Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry to write stories that are culturally authentic.[7]
Traveling Heavy
Traveling Heavy (2013) is a memoir about her Cuban-American family, descended from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in Cuba, as well as the strangers who ease her journey in life. Her probings about her complicated Jewish Cuban ancestry and family's immigration to America explore issues about identity and belonging.[8] Kirkus Reviews described her book as "A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience."[8] Behar studies the revitalization of Cuban Jewish life as an anthropologist, but her personal journey back to the island she left as a little girl is the heart of this "memoir I snuck in, between journeys."[9]
An Island Called Home
An Island Called Home (2007) was written in Behar's quest for a better understanding of Jewish Cuba and particularly her family's roots.[10] She noted, "I knew the stories of the Jews in Cuba, but it was all about looking at them as a community".[10] Traveling the island, Behar becomes the confidante to a host of Jewish strangers, building connections for further anthropological research. Conducting one-on-one interviews, combined with black-and-white photography, she builds readers an image of the diasporic thread connecting Cuban Jews to one another.[10]
Beginning with Jewish immigrants of the 1920s, who fled unrest in Turkey, Russia and Poland, she moves on to stories of later immigrants, Polish and German Jews who fled to Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s in order to escape persecution and the concentration camps of the Nazis. In Cuba immigrants opened mom-and-pop shops, peddled, and gradually adopted Spanish while still speaking Yiddish, settling into Latino life in La Habana Vieja. In the early part of the century, many Jewish immigrants worked in the Cuban garment industry.[3] More than 94% left during and after the 1959 revolution.[3][11] As her family was among those who left Cuba, Behar intertwines her personal thoughts and feelings with her professional, analytical observations of the current society.[10]
The Vulnerable Observer
The Vulnerable Observer recounts Behar's passage to integrating subjective aspects into her anthropological studies. Suffering her grandfather's death while on a field trip to Spain to study funeral practices, she decided the ethnographer could never be fully detached, and needed to become a "vulnerable observer".[12] She argues that the ethnographic fieldworker should identify and work though, his or her own emotional involvement with the subject under study.[12] She strongly critiques conventional ideas of objectivity.[13] She suggested that the ideal of a "scientific," distanced, impersonal mode of presenting materials was incomplete.[13] Other anthropologists, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Devereux, and Clifford Geertz, had also suggested that the researcher had to claim being part of the process more openly. Behar's six personal essays in The Vulnerable Observer are examples of her subjective approach.[12]
Behar's grandparents emigrated to Cuba from Russia, Poland and Turkey during the 1920s. In 1962 they fled Cuba to escape Castro's communism.[13] At the age of nine, Behar suffered a broken leg from the crash of her family's car. She was immobilized for a year.[12] The experience and recovery period led her to the recognition that "the body is a homeland" of stored memory and pain.[13]
Translated Woman
In 1985, Behar was working in Mexico when she befriended an Indian witch working as a street peddler.[14] Townspeople said the witch, Esperanza Hernandez, had used black magic to blind her ex-husband after he regularly beat her and then left her for his mistress.[14] Behar's portrayal of Esperanza's story in Translated Woman suggests she alienated her own mother, inspiring Behar to portray Esperanza as a feminist heroine.[14] Esperanza claims she found redemption in a spiritualist cult constructed around Pancho Villa. She blamed pent-up rage about her husband and life as the reason for the deaths in infancy of the first six of her 12 children.[14] Esperanza's rage led her to beat up her husband's lover, throw her son out of the house, beat a daughter for refusing to support her, and disown another son for having an affair with an uncle's ex-mistress because she considered it to be incestuous.[14] Behar reflects on her own life and begins to think that her Latina-gringa conflicts result from a feeling of loss after having tried to model herself according to the American Dream, thus losing some sense of her Cuban Jewish family's past in that island nation.[15] Esperanza's odyssey examines physical borders, margins and separations.[15] Translated Woman contributes to the feminist argument that studying women in anthropology has been undervalued due to traditional academic prejudices that view women-centered analysis as too personally biased.[16]
Awards and honours
In 1988, Behar was the first Latina woman to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship.
In 2011 she gave a Turku Agora Lecture.[17]
In 2025 her book Across So Many Seas won a Newbery Honors Award.[18]
Selected bibliography
Books
The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa María del Monte (1986)
Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (1993; second edition, Beacon Press, 2003 ISBN 978-0-8070-4647-0)
Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba, editor, University of Michigan Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-472-06611-7
Women Writing Culture Editors Ruth Behar, Deborah A. Gordon, University of California Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-520-20208-5
The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, Beacon Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-8070-4631-9
An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, Rutgers University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8135-4189-1
The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World, Editors Ruth Behar, Lucía M. Suárez, Macmillan, 2008, ISBN 978-0-230-60477-3
Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys, Duke University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-8223-5720-9
Lucky Broken Girl, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2017, ISBN 978-0399546440
Letters from Cuba, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2020, ISBN 978-0525516477
Tia Fortuna's New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey, Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2022, ISBN 978-0593172414
Across So Many Seas, Nancy Paulsen Books, 2024, ISBN 978-0593323403
Film
Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love): A Cuban-American Woman's Search for Sephardic Memories (2002)
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Q&A with Ruth Behar
Ruth Behar is the author of a new novel for older kids, Lucky Broken Girl, which is based on her own childhood. Her other books include Traveling Heavy and An Island Called Home. She is a cultural anthropologist, and she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Q: You've said that you first wrote the story of your childhood accident and its aftermath from the perspective of an adult looking back. What made you decide to write it from a child's viewpoint?
A: I had the idea in the back of my mind for a long time to write the story from a child’s viewpoint. As a young woman, I wrote short stories with magic and myth woven into them. But I gave up that writing to become a cultural anthropologist, always drawing on my rational mind to write essays and books for adult readers.
In recent years I’ve come back to fiction. I tried writing an adult novel, but was unhappy with the result. I set it aside and sat down and started writing the story of the accident with the child as the narrator. Memories came flooding back.
What I wished had happened otherwise, I took the liberty of inventing and making sweeter and more magical than in real life.
And the child’s voice came easily. I surrendered to that voice, which I found refreshingly honest and bold. It was a voice, as the expression goes in Spanish, “que no tiene pelos en la lengua,” which literally means “not to have hairs on the tongue.”
When I finished the book, I felt so grateful to have been able to tell a story I’d carried around for 50 years.
Q: How did you remember all the details you recount from the 1960s? Did you need to conduct additional research?
A: I have vivid memories of the long months I spent in the body cast as well as the long months of learning to walk again. I drew on everything I could recall—and the lingering trauma that still exists in my body—to write Lucky Broken Girl.
I had been the kind of child, and later became the adult woman, who was obsessed with the family history. Throughout the years I collected stories, old photographs, and memorabilia from my grandparents. I built up a huge archive that helped me conjure the cultural context and the Jewish-Cuban diaspora history that informs the book.
And I have traveled to Cuba, gaining a strong sense of the home we lost and feeling the weight of the nostalgia of those who left, like my family, with little more than a suitcase to start a new life in the United States.
One of the most concrete ways I put myself back in the era of the 1960s was by drawing on popular music, recalling how I loved the song, “These Boots are Made for Walkin’.” Sure enough, those go-go boots from the song became an important symbol in the book.
Q: How did you come up with the book's title, and what does it signify for you?
A: My original working title for the book was “The Accident,” but it was vague and didn’t convey Ruthie’s experience. I then thought of “The Broken Girl,” but that didn’t feel right either.
It occurred to me that Ruthie was a girl who was both broken and lucky. She couldn’t leave her bed, but she got to go on an amazing journey of self-discovery during the year she was a convalescent.
I started calling the book “Lucky Broken Girl.” I realized it was an unusual title and didn’t expect it to last. I’d heard that most authors don’t get to make the final decision on their book titles.
But my editor loved the title, as did everyone on the marketing team, and it stuck. I’m glad I got to keep it. I love how it’s contradictory and makes you wonder from the start how it’s possible to be both lucky and broken.
Q: You and your family had arrived in the United States from Cuba, and much of the book deals with the experience of being an immigrant. With the current focus today on immigration issues, what do you hope readers take away from your story?
A: At this moment in history, we are experiencing a disturbing rise in anti-immigrant sentiment. We need to counter this trend by building more bridges between individuals and communities. The stories of immigrants, all immigrants, need to be told and heard, so our shared humanity can rise above the misperceptions.
Lucky Broken Girl is an immigrant story but it isn’t limited to my own Cuban immigrant story. There are intersecting immigrant stories, shown through Ruthie’s friendships with a boy from India, a girl from Belgium, a neighbor from Mexico, and a physical therapist from Puerto Rico by way of the Bronx.
She also has a close relationship with Baba, her Polish Jewish grandmother who finds refuge in Cuba on the eve of the Holocaust and then has to uproot again to the United States. All these immigrants are finding their way in the United States and are contributing to the moral and cultural fabric of the country.
I hope readers will take away new understandings of the immigrant experience and develop greater empathy toward the plight of those who, at great emotional cost, must leave an old home to create a new home somewhere else.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a new middle-grade novel that takes place in Cuba. I’m afraid to say too much about it just yet, except that I’m very excited to be writing fiction again.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: The fact that it took me such a long time to write a novel about my childhood accident will, I hope, give other writers the push they need to get going on telling the stories they’ve been carrying around.
It truly is never too late to write a story that’s from the heart. If you’ve been contemplating writing a novel about your childhood story, sit down and get started today!
To learn more about Lucky Broken Girl and the other writing I’ve done through the years, please visit my website.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Across So Many Seas
Ruth Behar. Penguin/Paulsen, $17.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-593-32340-3
Behar (Lucky Broken Girl) delivers a moving tale about four generations of a Sephardic Jewish family navigating cultural and societal upheaval from 1492 to 2003. When the Spanish Inquisition forces 12-year-old Benvenida and her family to flee from Toledo, Spain, the religious refugees settle in what is now Istanbul. In 1923, an act of defiance sees Benvenida's descendant, 12-year-old Reina, banished by her father from Turkey to Cuba. Subsequent years follow Reina's daughter Alegra who, in 1961, teaches literacy in the Cuban countryside, until political unrest prompt her to emigrate to Miami. And in 2003, Alegra's Afro-Cuban daughter Paloma unravels her ancestors' history during a trip to Spain. Divided into four parts, this enlightening read depicts one family's determination to embrace and preserve her Jewish identity and offers glimpses into the long history of Jews in Spain. Behar crafts each included era with painstaking period detail and lush language, delivering a stunning portrayal of immigration and Jewish culture and religion that expounds upon the importance of remaining true to oneself, explores themes of prejudice and racism, and exposes the harm that bigotry can inflict on both individuals and society. The author includes English translations alongside songs and words in Ladino; concluding source notes add further historical context. Ages 10-up. Agent: Alyssa Eisner Henkin, Birch Path Literary. (Feb.)
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"Across So Many Seas." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 45, 6 Nov. 2023, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A773694940/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f2bdff86. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Behar, Ruth ACROSS SO MANY SEAS Nancy Paulsen Books (Children's None) $17.99 2, 6 ISBN: 9780593323403
Four 12-year-old Sephardic Jewish girls in different time periods leave their homelands but carry their religion, culture, language, music, and heritage with them.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella's expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 sends Benvenida fleeing from Toledo with her family, though she promises to remember where she came from. In 1923, Reina celebrates Turkish independence with her longtime friend and neighbor, a Muslim boy, causing her strict father to disown her and send her to live with an aunt in Cuba as punishment. Reina brings her mother's oud with her and passes it on to Alegra, her daughter, who serves as a brigadista in Castro's literacy campaign before fleeing to the U.S. in 1961. In Miami in 2003, Paloma, Alegra's daughter, who has an Afro-Cuban dad, is excited to travel to Spain with her family to explore their roots. They find a miraculous connection in Toledo. Woven through all four girls' stories is the same Ladino song (included with an English translation); as Paloma says, "I'm connected to those who came before me through the power of the words we speak, the words we write, the words we sing, the words in which we tell our dreams." Behar's diligent research and her personal connection to this history, as described in a moving author's note, shine through this story of generations of girls who use music and language to survive, tell their stories, and connect with past and future.
Powerful and resonant. (sources) (Historical fiction. 10-15)
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"Behar, Ruth: ACROSS SO MANY SEAS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A774415047/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ca23d97c. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Across So Many Seas
Ruth Behar
Nancy Paulsen Books
c/o Penguin Young Readers Group
https://www.penguin.com
9780593323403, $17.99, HC, 272pp
https://www.amazon.com/Across-Many-Seas-Ruth-Behar/dp/0593323408
Synopsis: In 1492, during the Spanish Inquisition, Benvenida and her family are banished from Spain for being Jewish, and must flee the country or be killed. They journey by foot and by sea, eventually settling in Istanbul.
Over four centuries later, in 1923, shortly after the Turkish war of independence, Reina's father disowns her for a small act of disobedience. He ships her away to live with an aunt in Cuba, to be wed in an arranged marriage when she turns fifteen.
In 1961, Reina's daughter, Alegra, is proud to be a brigadista, teaching literacy in the countryside for Fidel Castro. But soon Castro's crackdowns force her to flee to Miami all alone, leaving her parents behind.
Finally, in 2003, Alegra's daughter, Paloma, is fascinated by all the journeys that had to happen before she could be born. A keeper of memories, she's thrilled by the opportunity to learn more about her heritage on a family trip to Spain, where she makes a momentous discovery.
Though many years and many seas separate these girls, they are united by a love of music and poetry, a desire to belong and to matter, a passion for learning, and their longing for a home where all are welcome. And each is lucky to stand on the shoulders of their courageous ancestors.
Critique: Spanning over 500 years, author Ruth Behar's epic novel, "Across So Many Seas" is comprised of the interlocking personal stories of four girls from different generations of a Jewish family, with a majority of them sharing the experience of having been forced to leave their country and start a new life elsewhere. Original, deftly crafted, absorbing, entertaining, memorable, "Across So Many Seas" is especially and unreservedly recommended for elementary school, middle school, and community library Epic Adventure fiction collections of young readers ages 10 and up. It should also be noted for personal reading lists that "Across So Many Seas" is also readily available in a digital book format (Kindle, $10.99).
Editorial Note: Ruth Behar (www.ruthbehar.com), the Pura Belpre Award-winning author of Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, was born in Havana, Cuba, grew up in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. Her work also includes poetry, memoir, and the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy. 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.
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
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"Across So Many Seas." Children's Bookwatch, Feb. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786467214/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=66712ba9. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Across So Many Seas. By Ruth Behar. Read by a full cast. 2024. 6hr. Listening Library, DD (9780593820841). Gr. 5-8.
Spanning oceans and generations, this book tells stories of displacement, injustice, struggle, and strength through the girls in a family of Sephardic Jews, each at 12 years old. Religious persecution during the Spanish Inquisition forces Benvenida's family to flee to Turkey, where Benvenida's descendant Reina lives in 1923. Though a dutiful daughter, Reina longs for more freedom than what is afforded women. A small act of tween rebellion results in her father disowning and banishing her to Cuba. Her mother, with whom she shares a deep love of traditional music, sends with her a beloved oud. In 1961, Reina's daughter, Alegra, shares her mother's love of their ancestors' lyrical songs, and also longs for more freedom in Castro's Cuba. Now 2003, Alegra's daughter Paloma is tying together threads from the past on a trip to Spain. Behar has a deep family connection to these well-researched stories, and a full cast recording breathes in passion and life, especially through the haunting melodies shared by each generation. Middle grade readers of gripping historical fiction like Veera Hiranandani's The Night Diary (2018) or Mitali Perkins' You Bring the Distant Near (2017) will find a lot to love here.--Caitlin Savage
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Savage, Caitlin. "Across So Many Seas." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 18, 18 May 2024, p. 62. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804017598/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4c26279e. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Behar, Ruth PEPITA MEETS BEBITA Knopf (Children's None) $18.99 9, 12 ISBN: 9780593566985
A dog who belongs to an expecting couple adjusts to home life as a new baby arrives.
Pepita, the family pet, is beloved and still so little they call her Bebita (baby girl). But Pepita's world is changing as her Mami and Papi await the arrival of a baby. Pepita is used to being spoiled "with treats and tummy rubs and my favorite fluffy pillow .But lately, things have been changing." As the home gets new additions like a crib and gifts from the grandparents, Pepita feels left out, no longer the center of attention. Once the baby arrives, Pepita tries to adjust but is kept up at night by crying and doesn't get playtime like before. But Pepita's sweetness shines through as she finds ways to help out and bond with the new baby. "I feel so proud to be the big sister," she concludes. The book is sprinkled with Spanish phrases, reflecting that Pepita is part of a Latine household; readers unfamiliar with Spanish will find the glossary helpful. Illustrations are warm and cuddly throughout, and the story is highly relatable; soon-to-be big siblings fretting over a new arrival will find it especially comforting. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A heartwarming reminder to embrace change. (Picture book. 4-8)
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"Behar, Ruth: PEPITA MEETS BEBITA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758848879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a9d55200. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Behar, Ruth TÍA FORTUNA'S NEW HOME Knopf (Children's None) $17.99 1, 25 ISBN: 978-0-593-17241-4
A young Cuban American girl learns the real meaning of home in this poignant story drawing on the real-life history of Cuba's Sephardic Jews.
Estrella loves to visit her aunt, T�a Fortuna, in her little pink house at the Seaway in Miami. T�a Fortuna once lived "on the other side of the sea, in Havana," Cuba. When she "had to leave" her home (a closing author's note pinpoints the Cuban Revolution as the cause), she took only a suitcase of old photographs, her mezuzah (prayer scroll) from her doorpost, and "a key to a home gone forever." Now, years later, she must move once again, this time to an assisted living facility. While Estrella spends time with her aunt at the seaside and helps her pack, she listens to her life stories, learns about the cultural and religious significance of her most prized possessions, and ultimately learns that, like her ancestors, she can find hope wherever life takes her. This heartfelt intergenerational story illuminates a lesser-known facet of Jewish American immigration. Ladino (i.e., Judeo-Spanish) words are seamlessly integrated into the dialogue between aunt and niece, and Behar weaves Sephardic symbols and traditions into the narrative. For example, T�a Fortuna wears a lucky-eye bracelet (a Sephardic Jewish talisman) and serves borekas (a Sephardic Jewish pastry). Detailed paintings, rendered in gouache, watercolor, and color pencil with digital finishing, skillfully move the visual narrative between the past and the present. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A nostalgic glimpse at a little-known but rich culture within the broader Jewish American community. (glossary) (Picture book. 5-8)
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"Behar, Ruth: TIA FORTUNA'S NEW HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686536562/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=08c07c71. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Ruth Behar, illus. by Devon Holzwarth. Knopf, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-59317-241-4
Estrella's elderly aunt must leave her longtime home, a pink Miami Beach casita--the place where, as a Sephardic Jewish refugee fleeing from Havana she brought "nothing but a suitcase of old photographs and the mezuzah that hung on her doorpost and a key to a home gone forever." As Tia Fortuna prepares for a new life at what she calls "La Casa de los Viejitos," she and Estrella say goodbye to the beach and eat a plate of homemade borekas that the woman tells her niece are filled with "potatoes and cheese and... esperanza." Behar's (Letters from Cuba) warmhearted storytelling turns the past, present, and future into a confluence of connections as Estrella realizes her role in a legacy of faith, hope, and resilience. The text's lyrical mood is well supported by Holzwarth's (Papa, Daddy, and Riley) mixed media illustrations. Tia Fortuna's colorful dress, warm smile, and swirl of bright white hair exude energy and resolve, while the compositions' curvilinear lines and embellishments of Sephardic Jewish and tropical motifs speak to a life well lived-with plenty of joy still ahead. Back matter includes an author's note and Spanish-toEnglish glossary. Ages 4--8. (Jan.)
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"Tia Fortuna's New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 44, 1 Nov. 2021, p. 83. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A681946739/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c838eef3. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Tia Fortuna's New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey. By Ruth Behar. Illus. by Devon Holzwarth. Jan. 2022.32p. Knopf, $17.99 (9780593172414). Gr. 1-3.
Young Estrella's Tia Fortuna is no stranger to moving, thanks to Cuban roots and her Sephardic family's voyage from Spain to Turkey to Cuba to Miami. Through the curious and poignant perspective of a child, Behar s story follows Tia Fortuna's latest move from her beautiful pink casita in the Seaway, her long-time apartment building, to an assisted-living facility. Eloquent multilingual storytelling couples with peaceful artwork as Estrella learns that change can be OK and that keeping your traditions and culture alive is even more important. Tfa Fortuna embarks on her new chapter with optimism and grace, reminding Estrella through her delicious Jewish Cuban cooking and her stories and mantras in Ladino that you can take the feeling of home with you no matter where you go. Holzwarth's seaside illustrations will no doubt bring pleasant nostalgic memories to readers of all ages, and the book's positive message is supplemented by a glossary of multilingual terms and an author's note on the inspiration behind this Sephardic Jewish tale.--Stephanie Cohen
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Cohen, Stephanie. "Tia Fortuna's New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 7, 1 Dec. 2021, p. 58. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A698823782/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d851fdb8. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Behar, Ruth LETTERS FROM CUBA Nancy Paulsen Books (Children's None) $17.99 8, 25 ISBN: 978-0-525-51647-7
In 1938, a Jewish refugee from Poland joins her father in small-town Cuba.
After three years abroad, Papa’s saved only enough money to send for one of his children. Thus Esther boards the steamship alone even though she’s not quite 12. Cuba is a constant surprise: Her father’s an itinerant peddler and not a shopkeeper; they live as the only Jews in a tiny village; and she’s allowed to wear sandals and go bare-legged in the heat. But the island is also a constant joy. Nearly everyone Esther meets is generous beyond their means. She adores her new trade as a dressmaker, selling her creations in Havana to earn money to bring over the rest of the family. In glowing letters to her sister back in Poland, Esther details how she’s learning Spanish through the poems of José Martí. She introduces her sister to her beloved new friends: a white doctor’s wife and her vegetarian, atheist husband; a black, Santería-following granddaughter of an ex-slave; a Chinese Cuban shopkeeper’s nephew. Esther’s first year in Cuba is marked by the calendar of Jewish holidays, as she wonders if she can be both Cuban and a Jew. As the coming war looms in Europe, she and her friends find solidarity, standing together against local Nazis and strike breakers. An author’s note describes how the story was loosely inspired by the author’s own family history.
Warmhearted cross-cultural friendship for a refugee on distant shores: both necessary and kind. (bibliography) (Historical fiction. 8-11)
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"Behar, Ruth: LETTERS FROM CUBA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A626451746/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=271d43ef. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
BEHAR, Ruth. Letters from Cuba. 272p. Penguin/Nancy Paulsen Bks. Aug. 2020. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9780525516477.
Gr 3-7--Pura Belpre Award winner Behar's newest story is based on her own grandmother's immigration journey. Eleven-year-old Esther bravely travels to Cuba from Poland to help her father earn enough money for the rest of their family to join them, including her mother, grandmother, three brothers, and cherished sister Malka. The narrative is told in a series of letters from Esther to Malka, chronicling her journey across the sea and her experiences in this new homeland. As a means to earn money for her family's travel arrangements, Esther puts her sewing skills to good use by making custom dresses for many islanders. Throughout the story, readers learn that many Jewish people are arriving in Cuba, trying to escape the Jewish persecution in Europe, despite Nazi sympathy infiltrating the island. Readers dive into the story headfirst as they get to know Esther, her family, and her newfound friends. Esther's first-person descriptions of people and the island craft a vivid experience of Cuba's sights, sounds, and culinary delights. VERDICT Readers will not want to part with this story of resilience. A World War II refugee tale that spotlights dedicated hard work. A must-have for public, elementary, and middle school libraries.--Krisfin Unruh, Siersma Elem. Sch., Warren, MI
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Unruh, Krisfin. "BEHAR, Ruth. Letters from Cuba." School Library Journal, vol. 66, no. 8, Aug. 2020, p. 70. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632298821/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=210aa1ab. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Lucky Broken Girl
by Ruth Behar
Intermediate Paulsen/Penguin 237 pp. g
4/17 978-0-399-54644-0 $16.99
In this novel based on the author's childhood, Ruthie is just ten years old in 1966 when she arrives in Queens from Cuba with her little brother and parents. Because she only speaks Spanish, she is placed in the fifth-grade "dumb" class. Over the next eight months Ruthie's English improves, she becomes the neighborhood hopscotch queen, and she's ready to move out of the remedial class. Life is looking up, but then everything comes crashing down when she breaks her leg in a car accident, requiring a full-body cast. Immobile in bed for almost a year, Ruthie is dependent on her mother for everything, and as the months pass, feelings of anger, loneliness, and despair fill her heart. When her nextdoor neighbor introduces her to drawing and painting, her attention refocuses and she begins to heal emotionally. As she attempts to learn how to walk again, Ruthie finds that friends, family, and the ability to look beyond the present into the future can help turn her "brokenness" into wholeness. Through an unflinchingly honest first-person narrative, readers are taken through a traumatic period in the author's life (an appended note provides more context and encourages readers to "speak up. Tell your story"). Effectively scattered Spanish phrases lend authenticity, while period references evoke the 1960s setting. ALMA RAMOS-MCDERMOTT
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Ramos-McDermott, Alma. "Lucky Broken Girl." The Horn Book Magazine, vol. 93, no. 4, July-Aug. 2017, p. 125. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A500260351/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6d0a692c. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Lucky Broken Girl Ruth Behar Nancy Paulsen Books c/o Penguin Young Readers Group 345 Hudson Street, 15th floor, New York, NY 10014 9780399546440, $16.99, HC, 256pp, www.amazon.com
Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro's Cuba to New York City. Just when she's finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English (and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood's hopscotch queen) a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined her to her bed for a long recovery. As Ruthie's world shrinks because of her inability to move, her powers of observation and her heart grow larger and she comes to understand how fragile life is, how vulnerable we all are as human beings, and how friends, neighbors, and the power of the arts can sweeten even the worst of times. "Lucky Broken Girl" is a deftly written, multicultural, coming-of-age novel that is based on author's Ruth Behar's own childhood in the 1960s as a young Cuban-Jewish immigrant girl is adjusting to her new life in New York City when her American dream is suddenly derailed. Compelling and ultimately inspiring, "Lucky Broken Girl" is very highly recommended for ages 10 to 16 and certain to be an enduringly popular addition to school and community library General Fiction collections young readers. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "Lucky Broken Girl" is also available in a Kindle edition ($10.99). Librarians should be aware that "Lucky Broken Girl" is available as a complete and unabridged audio book (Listening Library, 9781524755058, $40.00 Trade, $22.72 Amazon).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
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"Lucky Broken Girl." Children's Bookwatch, May 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A495742705/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7ec9b378. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Behar, Ruth. Lucky Broken Girl. Nancy Paulsen/Penguin Random House, 2017. 256p. $16.99. 978-0-399-54644-0.
Ruthie Mizrahi faces challenges big and small--from trying to convince her New York teacher that she should be in the "smart class" despite her difficulty with English as a Cuban refugee to her passionate desire for go-go boots, which will help her look glamorous among her friends. But, when a car accident leaves Ruthie bedridden in a body cast for nearly a year, she starts to see the world differently. She makes heartfelt connections with incredible people, such as her friend Ramu, who must return to India when his brother dies in a tragic accident, or her "flower-power" tutor, who inspires her with stories of Nancy Drew, Jose Marti, Martin Luther King Jr., Frida Kahlo, and others. Just as adjusting to the small island of her room is challenging, so is finding the courage to rejoin the larger outside world and embrace the life in front of her.
Based on the author's own experiences, Lucky Broken Girl is a touching story about friendships and losses, forgiveness and fear, vulnerability and determination, prayer and patience. Short chapters describing Ruthie's interactions with an exceptionally diverse case of characters and perspectives are interspersed with letters, addressed at first to God, but eventually to Shiva and Frida, as Ruthie seeks to unpack her experience, forgive those who caused the accident, and overcome her fears of the future. At times, the text's tone and style seem directed toward young readers, but teens will likely find the many lessons Ruthie learns to be valuable and often insightful.--Meghann Meeusen.
QUALITY
5Q Hard to imagine it being better written.
4Q Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses.
3Q Readable, without serious defects.
2Q Better editing or work by the author might have warranted a 3Q.
1Q Hard to understand how it got published, except in relation to its P rating (and not even then sometimes).
POPULARITY
5P Every YA (who reads) was dying to read it yesterday.
4P Broad general or genre YA appeal.
3P Will appeal with pushing.
2P For the YA reader with a special interest in the subject.
1P No YA will read unless forced to for assignments.
GRADE LEVEL INTEREST
M Middle School (defined as grades 6-8).
J Junior High (defined as grades 7-9).
S Senior High (defined as grades 10-12).
A/YA Adult-marketed book recommended for YAs.
NA New Adult (defined as college-age).
R Reluctant readers (defined as particularly suited for reluctant readers).
(a) Highlighted Reviews Graphic Novel Format
(G) Graphic Novel Format
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
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Meeusen, Meghann. "Behar, Ruth. Lucky Broken Girl." Voice of Youth Advocates, vol. 40, no. 1, Apr. 2017, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A491949464/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=56d500e7. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
Behar, Ruth LUCKY BROKEN GIRL Nancy Paulsen Books (Children's Fiction) $16.99 4, 11 ISBN: 978-0-399-54644-0
In the 1960s, Ruthie Mizrahi, a young Jewish Cuban immigrant to New York City, spends nearly a year observing her family and friends from her bed. Before the accident, Ruthie's chief goals are to graduate out of the "dumb class" for remedial students, to convince her parents to buy her go-go boots, and to play hopscotch with other kids in her Queens apartment building. But after Papi's Oldsmobile is involved in a fatal multicar collision, Ruthie's leg is severely broken. The doctor opts to immobilize both legs in a body cast that covers Ruthie from chest to toes. Bedridden and lonely, Ruthie knows she's "lucky" to be alive, but she's also "broken." She begins collecting stories from her Jewban grandparents; her fellow young immigrant friends, Belgian Danielle and Indian Ramu; her "flower power" tutor, Joy; and her vibrant Mexican neighbor, Chicho, an artist who teaches her about Frida Kahlo. Ruthie also prays and writes letters to God, Shiva, and Kahlo, asking them for guidance, healing, and forgiveness. A cultural anthropologist and poet, the author based the book on her own childhood experiences, so it's unsurprising that Ruthie's story rings true. The language is lyrical and rich, the intersectionality--ethnicity, religion, class, gender--insightful, and the story remarkably engaging, even though it takes place primarily in the island of Ruthie's bedroom. A poignant and relevant retelling of a child immigrant's struggle to recover from an accident and feel at home in America. (Historical fiction. 10-13)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Behar, Ruth: LUCKY BROKEN GIRL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A480921787/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3ff96466. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.