36 | OCTOBER 1 • 2020 

CUBA continued from page 35

Immigration Act of 1924 set 
quotas on how many people 
could come to the country from 
Southern and Eastern Europe.
“My family was unwanted 
here, so our American lives 
began in Cuba,
” she said. 
After Communist revolu-
tionary Castro seized power 
in 1959, Behar said 94 percent 
of the Jews in Cuba left. Until 
her immediate family could 
obtain American passports, 
they spent a year in Israel living 
on a Spanish-speaking kibbutz. 
The family then immigrated 
once more to join her maternal 
grandparents in Queens, N.Y. 
“I can actually remember 
looking out [the] ship’
s window 
and seeing the Statue of Liberty 
when we arrived,
” Behar said.
There, they joined a sizeable 
community of Jewish Cubans, 
and Behar worked hard to learn 
English. Still, she held onto her 
love of Spanish, and eventually 
pursued a career that allowed 
her to engage with her passion 
for language and diversity.
“
As a cultural anthropologist, 
I have this intellectual passport 
that not only allows but encour-
ages me to connect with the 
places I write about,
” she said. 
As part of her anthropologi-
cal research and writing, she has 
lived and worked in Mexico and 
Spain. She has also made many 
return trips to her native Cuba. 
“I do research there on the 
Jewish community, art and liter-
ature, and try to reconnect with 
the place I was born,
” she said.

HAVEN FROM THE HOLOCAUST
Now, Behar enjoys a home base 
in Ann Arbor, where she teach-
es courses on Cuba and its dias-
pora and the concept of home 
at the University of Michigan. 
For herself, the concept of home 
evokes feelings of gratitude. She 
recognizes Cuba as the sanctu-
ary that saved her family from a 
possible death in the Holocaust. 

In Letters from Cuba, Behar 
aims to repaint this picture of 

the island as a center of wel-
come for many Jews. She said 
when it comes to Jewish migra-
tion to Cuba, scholars focus 
on the story of the SS St. Louis, 
a German luxury ship that 
carried more than 900 Jewish 
refugees from Nazi Germany 
in 1939. Only a handful were 
allowed entry into Cuba upon 
arrival. Behar believes this trag-
edy is out of character for the 
diverse country. 

“I wrote this book in contrast 
to those stories,
” Behar said. “I 
wanted to show that Cuba did 
offer sanctuary to very many 
Jews, that the majority, in fact, 
did find refuge.
” 
Behar also hopes the book 
will fill a gap in children’
s learn-
ing, to deliver them the diverse 
kind of anthropological material 
she teaches to her students at 
the University of Michigan. 
“They’
ve read a lot of World 
War II stories,
” Behar said. 
“They’
ve read a lot of immi-
grant stories. But they don’
t 
know the stories of Jews who 
went to Cuba.
”
In sharing this history, she 
believes the novel will teach 
young readers to have compas-
sion toward other immigrant 
children and hopefully make 
her readers better citizens of the 
world.
Perhaps most integral to 
Behar’
s newest literary adven-
ture, however, is remembrance. 
As remaining Holocaust sur-
vivors pass on, and as Behar 
worries about what she sees as 
a new climate of fascism, the 
author wants to make links 
between past and future trau-
mas. 

“We have to do everything 
we can to bring this histori-
cal memory into the present 
so young people can see it in 
relation to the contemporary 
struggles occurring,
” she said. 
“We have to be able to connect 
all these things and understand 
how past and present are always 
in relation to one another.
” 

LOTS OF PREMIERES
The new season of Saturday 
Night Live begins Oct. 3. Five epi-
sodes will air this October. All will 
be filmed, live, on stage, in front 
of a small audience. The first 
episode features a sketch about 
the presidential election. Host Jim 
Carrey will play former VP Joe 
Biden. Of course, Alec Baldwin 
will play President Trump. Maya 
Rudolph, 48, will play Sen. 
Kamala Harris, the Democratic 
VP nominee. Rudolph portrayed 
Harris in three SNL sketches 
last year and just won an Emmy 
(guest actress, comedy) for one of 
those sketches.
Last month, I briefly noted 
that the Showtime documentary 
series The Comedy Store would 
premiere in October. But, that 
was not absolutely certain. Now, 
it is certain: The five-part series 
will start 10 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4. 
The director and main writer is 
Detroit native Mike Binder, 62. 
Binder, a sometime actor, was 
a former stand-up comedian 
himself. The series features nev-
er-before-seen footage of famous 
comedians. Interviewees include 
David Letterman and Howie 
Mandel, 65.
Mitzi Shore (1930-2018) 
co-founded The Comedy Store, a 
Los Angeles nightclub, in 1968. 
She had a truly great eye for 
young talent and is credited with 
giving many great comics their 
start or big break (a partial list: 
Robin Williams, David Letterman, 
Andy Kaufman, Jay Leno and 
Garry Shandling). Mitzi was the 
real talent in the family. She effec-
tively ran the club from its incep-
tion because her husband and 
club co-founder, “so/so” comedian 
Sammy Shore, was usually on 
the road. Mitzi became the club’
s 
sole owner after she and Sammy 
split in 1974. Their son, comedian 

Pauly Shore, now 52, had a mini-
burst of fame in the ’
90s. 
Monsterland is an original Hulu 
series that begins streaming Oct. 
2. It is an eight-episode anthology 
series (each episode stands alone) 
about “broken” people who have 
encounters with mermaids, fallen 
angels and other strange beasts. 
Jonathan Tucker, 38, who has 
many film and TV credits, co-stars 
in the first episode. Tucker, whose 
mother is Jewish, will also co-star 
in the NBC sci-fi series Debris, 
which will premiere sometime 
early next year. The seventh 
episode of Monsterland co-stars 
Michael Hsu Rosen, 30ish. He 
is just breaking into TV/film work 
following years as a ballet danc-
er and stage actor. His father is 
Jewish. His mother is Chinese. 
The Good Lord Bird, a 
Showtime series, starts Oct. 4. 
The focus of the series is the 
(fictional) relationship between 
famous abolitionist John Brown 
(who was real) and Onion, a fic-
tional slave he frees. Onion rides 
with Brown and his followers 
as they violently battle (1856) 
pro-slavery forces in Kansas. 
The series’
 climatic moment 
comes when Brown leads a 
famous raid (1859) on a Virginia 
federal armory. 
Hamilton star Daveed Diggs, 
38, has a large role as Frederick 
Douglass (1818-95), a famous 
African American leader who was 
an ally of Brown. Wyatt Russell, 
33, appears as J.E.B. Stuart, an 
American army officer who helped 
repel the armory raid and later 
became a famous Confederate 
general. Wyatt’
s mother is Goldie 
Hawn, 74. 

Arts&Life

celebrity jews

NATE BLOOM COLUMNIST

Maya Rudolph

