 OCTOBER 1 • 2020 | 35

To Cuba, 
With 
Gratitude

In a new book, local author 
Ruth Behar recalls the island 
as a haven for Jews.

MADELINE HALPERT CONTRIBUTING WRITER

L

ast December, Ann Arbor resident Ruth 
Behar returned to Havana, her place of 
birth, to put the finishing touches on 
her newest novel, Letters from Cuba. She stayed 
in the same apartment building where she 
lived her first five years until 1961 — when 
her family left the island two years after Fidel 
Castro took over.
During her visit, the author 
worked in the nearby park 
she went to as a child, using 
public Wi-Fi to go over final 
editorial changes. The neigh-
borhood is just a half-block 
from Temple Beth Shalom, 
also known as the Patronato 
Synagogue, a major hub of 
the Jewish community built 
just years before Behar’
s birth.
She said the nostalgic loca-
tion for the visit was inten-
tional. 
“I wanted to feel the island right before 
my book went to press,
” said Behar, a writer, 
anthropologist and the Victor Haim Perera 
Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the 
University of Michigan. She is the first Latina 
to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.
“I wanted to be there in Cuba again as I 
was letting the book go,
” she said.
For Behar and her family, Cuba is not 
only a place of birth, but a site of refuge. Her 
great-grandfather Abraham Levin journeyed 
there from Poland in 1924 during the rise of 
antisemitism in Europe. He lived in the rural 
Cuban village of Agramonte.
Behar’
s Letters from Cuba, geared toward 
middle-grade students, was inspired by the 

true story of her maternal grandmother, 
Esther, a Polish Jew who journeyed by ship 
alone at age 17 in 1927 to join her father in 
Cuba. There, she helped make enough money 
to bring over the rest of her family from 
Poland, on the eve of the Holocaust. 
The book features fictional letters from 
Esther to her younger sister, 
Malka, and imagines the experi-
ence of Esther as a young Jewish 
immigrant in a foreign country. 
Behar said that fiction became 
the perfect outlet for a Jewish 
immigration story that history 
does not have much record of. 
Instead, she used details heard 
in family stories, like the bread 
and bananas her great- grandfa-
ther sustained himself on upon 
arrival. 
“That was a clue to how these 
new immigrants were taking 
care of themselves,
” Behar said. “It showed 
how they were gently immersing themselves, 
trying the fruit of this new culture, while still 
trying their best to follow the kosher tradi-
tions of the old country.
”
In addition to her grandmother’
s story, 
Behar said she was motivated to write the 
book by the climate of hostility toward immi-
grants exhibited by the Trump administra-
tion. She saw connections between her fami-
ly’
s migration patterns and current events.
“It brought the past and the present togeth-
er for me,
” said Behar. “I thought, ‘
My own 
family went through this.
’
”
In the 1920s, when Behar’
s family was 
trying to escape persecution, the U.S. 

continued on page 36

TOP: Agramonte Street in Havana, Cuba. 
Baby Ruth with her grandparents in 
Havana. CENTER: Goworowo map from 
Memorial Book.

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