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