An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (review)

An Island Called Homes: Returning to Jewish Cuba, by Ruth Behar. Photographs by Humberto Mayol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 297 pp. $29.95. Anthropologist Ruth Behar was born in Cuba in 1956. Her family left two years after the Castro Revolution. Her first return trip to Cuba in 1979 was as a graduate st udent. She hoped to do her doctoral research there, but the doors closed once again to visitors. Her visits resumed in the nineties when Castro attempted to bolster sagging morale and a sinking economy by allowing the U.S. dollar and God (p. 21) to make a comeback. Usually limited to fourteen-day stays, she got intimate glimpses of the did not leave. She traveled back as often as she could to stand side by side with who were learning how to be Jews (p. 15) but not to use them for her fieldwork until she realized that being an anthropologist was her passport to return. She teamed up with photographer Humberto Mayol in 2002 and over the next four years they traveled throughout the island documenting what they saw. The book offers a brief historical introduction and an excellent chronology that teU why and how from aU over Europe and the Middle East flocked to Cuba in the early years of the twentieth century. These ethnically divergent immigrants (lumped together as polacos or turcos by the Cubans), came to number around 16,000, created separate institutions and contributed to social change in the years leading up to Castro's revolution. Although they did have fledgUng institutions, the twenties and thirties were uncertain times for as waves of xenophobia influenced laws and Nazi rhetoric tainted the press. But in the forties and fifties these immigrants, began to estabUsh themselves in businesses and professions, were joined by entrepreneurial born in the United States coming to make their fortunes on tropical soil. Together they built schools, synagogues, and social clubs. The triumph of Castro in 1959 caused an abrupt rupture in Jewish Ufe. In a very brief span of time over 90 percent of the community left. The stayed were spUntered, impoverished, isolated, and demoraUzed for many years. Only after constitutional changes in the nineties have been able to practice their faith openly. With the help of outside institutions - the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Lubavitchers, the American Joint Distribution Committee, the Conservative Movement, and many others - the of Cuba have reconstituted themselves, refurbished their synagogues, learned their history and rituals, reaffirmed their connections to the faith in conversions and communal marriage ceremonies and, in some cases, made Aliyah. The first order of business for Behar are the ghosts left behind. In Blessings for the Dead she seeks and finds the tomb of a cousin died just before his bar mitzvah in 1954. Then Elisa Behar 's grave in Guanabacoa puzzles her for years. …

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