Days of Awe

Reviews

A Refugee's Emotional, Ethnic Awakening in Her Native Cuba

By Achy Obejas
Ballantine $24.95, 384 pages

By PAULA FRIEDMAN, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Two years after the revolution, Cubans began leaving the island on anything that would float--less terrified of Castro's communism, novelist Achy Obejas intimates in "Days of Awe," than they were of the persistent rumors that an invasion and a terrible war would follow. As Obejas' narrator, Alejandra explains it, Cubans feared that their country would be besieged by "another one of those bloody skirmishes the U.S. periodically undertook in Latin America." With much sadness, but little hesitation, Alejandra's parents shipped out in April of 1961 with their 2-year-old daughter in tow, stopping first in Miami, but finally settling in Chicago, where Lake Michigan provides the family with a bit of watery solace that reminds them of their homeland. As Alejandra grows up, she begins to grasp her parents' passionate attachment to their home country, learning as well about their all-but-dormant Jewish roots. Obejas takes the novel's title from the English translation of the Hebrew "Yamim Nora'im," the time between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, those religious "days of awe." But Obejas wisely holds back this explanation until late in the novel after the reader has ample time to absorb the process of awakening that Alejandra undergoes about her own nationality and faith. While both her parents, Nena and Enrique, were born to Jewish families, neither was raised Jewish. Both of their families had turned from their Jewishness as anti-Semitism swept Cuba during and after World War II. Later, in Castro's Cuba, it was simply better to claim no religious faith at all.

An interpreter and oral translator, Alejandra makes her first trip back to Cuba in 1987 for professional reasons, working for a group of progressive Chicago politicians and activists. But her parents' response to her travel plans leaves her unsettled: "My parents are not fanatical refugees, they do not assume everything about the revolution is hideous. As much as they may be alienated in the U.S., they've made peace with the difficult decision to leave Cuba. Yet, when I said I was going back to the island, they paused as if they needed a moment to adjust their antennas, to rearrange their sense of disbelief into something coherent and civil. Then they kicked into exile-style paranoia.

"'Be careful--don't talk to just anyone,' my mother warned me about my upcoming visit. 'You will get them into trouble if you talk to them.' ... 'You could get yourself in trouble,' my father said. 'You could wind up in jail."'

Waiting to go through processing in the Havana airport, Alejandra realizes that she hadn't been entirely honest with herself about her reasons for visiting Cuba. The truth was that this trip marked for her a "return to the Land of Oz" she'd conjured in her dreams. With subtlety and grace, Obejas depicts Alejandra's intensifying awareness of her own identity, as a Cuban, a Jew and a woman.

Visiting family and friends, Alejandra encounters a range of attitudes about Castro's revolution, with some believing the man no more than a scoundrel, and others seeing him as merely a flawed revolutionary. Given her own parents' fear of the government, Alejandra is surprised to find the various ways in which Cubans have made peace with their lives under Castro. It would be easier for her to let go of her homeland and return to America, the land where she was raised, she muses, if she could see the world in blacks and whites.

Through Moises Menach, Enrique's childhood pal, Alejandra learns about the complexities of life in modern Cuba, and she also learns about her parents' ambivalent ties to their own Jewishness. Obejas has created a true wise man in Moises, a man who possesses vision, compassion and the fortitude to carry on, despite hardship.

With Moises' son-in-law Orlando (permanently separated from his wife, Angela), Alejandra experiences a profound erotic awakening, feeling herself deeply in love for perhaps the first time in her life. Obejas masterfully links identity with place, language and the erotic life, without ever descending into sentimentality.

Her descriptions render her characters' emotional lives with a precision that precludes exotic stereotyping. But the novel yields further delights, as Obejas allows Alejandra to meditate on the cultural and philosophical differences reflected in language.

We learn, for example, that in Spanish, it is simply not possible to speak of love for an object with the same word used to speak of human love. This focus on language accounts for one of the novel's most enchanting riches, revealing a capacity to neatly articulate in Spanish the concepts that English and other languages have no words for.

Publishers Weekly

Born the day Castro came to power, the protagonist of this thoughtful novel comes with her mother and father to the United States when she is two, but cannot ignore her tangled Cuban roots. Alejandra San José and her parents, Nena and Enrique, settle in Chicago, where Enrique works as a literary translator and Nena grows roses and sunflowers. Their neighborhood is predominantly Jewish, and as Ale grows up she picks up on small signs that her family has something in common with its neighbors. It is not until she is an adult, however, working as an interpreter, that she discovers that her father is Jewish, the grandson of a flamboyantly Jewish hero of the Cuban war of independence; her mother, though devoutly Catholic, has Jewish ancestors, too. On a series of trips to Cuba, Ale comes to know her father's oldest friend, Moisés Menach, and through him learns her family's history. In her stays with the Menachs, and her charged friendship with Moisés's son-in-law, Orlando, she learns about contemporary Cuba and gradually comes to terms with her own identity. The searching narrative digs deep into questions of faith, conversion, nationality and history, exploring philosophical issues in human terms. Though sharp, cleverly observed details bring Havana and Chicago to life, the novel is richer in ideas than in depictions of place. Obejas (Memory Mambo) is concerned most of all with relationships between Ale and her lovers, male and female; between Ale and her secretive father. If the near-plotless narrative drags in places, it is redeemed by Obejas's clear-eyed, remarkably fresh meditation on familiar but perennially vital themes.

Library Journal

Obejas's (Memory Mambo) second novel may be the first in the subgenre of both Jewish American and Cuban American fiction: the Jewish-Cuban-American novel. In this well-considered and heartfelt examination of exile and return, two-year-old Alejandra San Jos has left Cuba in 1959 with her parents. Her father is Jewish, though he hides it, even breaking a window in anger when his daughter and her friends spy him praying in his basement office in Chicago. Her mother is both Catholic and a sometime believer in the Santer!a gods. Ale's visits to Cuba in 1987 and 1997 lead her to extraordinary discoveries about herself, her cultures, and her family, as she slowly learns of her great-grandfather's and father's clinging to a religion whose Cuban adherents have become scarce over time. Her own sexual experiences, more vivid in Cuba than in the United States, help her recognize that Cuba, Judaism, and tropical eroticism make up a complex personality, which Ale bears on her back like a Bedouin. With intelligent, intense writing, Obejas approaches, in ambition, the heady climes of Cuban American stalwarts Oscar Hijuelos and Cristina Garcia. Highly recommended for collections strong in Latino and Jewish American literature.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York

Booklist

*Starred Review*

Obejas has chosen the vocations of her protagonists with care: Enrique is a translator, and his daughter, Alejandra, is an interpreter. Their occupations take on a spiritual dimension as they find themselves dwelling on the threshold between two worlds as defined by Spanish and English. This linguistic duality is but one of many dichotomies that shape Alejandra's life. Born in Havana on New Year's 1959, the very day Fidel Castro comes to power, she is raised in Chicago after her parents' daring escape. She returns to Cuba in 1987, where she's ambushed by the island's material poverty and sensual wealth, all but adopted by the family of Enrique's boyhood friend, and galvanized by the complexities of her family history. It seems that their Catholicism is camouflage: her father's ancestors were conversos, Jews forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition. As Alejandra, who comes to realize that she is not only bilingual and bicultural but also both the bounties and paradoxes of bireligious and bisexual, struggles to come to terms with her boundary-crossing existence, Obejas relates the compelling and disquieting history of Judaism and anti-Semitism in Cuba amidst evocative musings on exile, oppression, inheritance, the unexpected consequences of actions both weak and heroic, and the unruliness of desire and love. A journalist as well as a novelist, Obejas is also concerned with the biases and selectivity of history, politics, and the news. Richly imagined and deeply humanitarian, Obejas' arresting second novel keenly dramatizes the anguish of concealed identities, severed ties, and sorely tested faiths, be they religious, political, or romantic.
-Donna Seaman

The Advocate

Achy Obejas's new novel, Days of Awe, is a soulful, erotically charged, and densely woven meditation on public and private identity. As she dives into the struggle of her main character, Alejandra--who wants to understand who she is as a Cuban-American, closet Jew, and intuitive bisexual--Obejas conjures a world of great historical reach and emotional detail. She effortlessly pulls the reader from the 15th century, when the Inquisition forces Spanish Jews to convert or be expelled from Spain, to Alejandra's birth on the day of Cuban revolutionary forces' triumph in 1959. Then it's on to the present and the dense psychological and sexual template of her immediate family, who have half-hidden their Jewishness for centuries.

Days of Awe is an impressive, almost magical-realistic exploration of Cuban culture, the meaning of exile, and the many roles the closet plays in the history of human identity. In a contemporary society like ours, where everything is either black or white and we're aware only of the recent past, Obejas's deft historical eye for the infinitely subtle gray scale of race, religion, and sexuality is a triumph.

--Tim Miller

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