Ruth Behar
Across So Many Seas
New York: Nancy Paulsen Books, 2024, ISBN: 978-059332-3403
Reviewed by Christina Karageorgou-Bastea1
Benvenida, Reina, Alegra, and Paloma are the protagonists of Ruth Behar’s latest fictional creation. The reader follows them as they cross different seas for reasons that, whether personal or political, are somehow related to their Sephardic identity. Toledo, 1492, marks the point of departure, the home from which Benvenida’s family is uprooted, first in the direction of Naples, and later with the goal of the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
Four centuries later, another twelve-year-old girl, Reina, is in Silivri, a town close to Istanbul, where, in October 1923, the Proclamation of the Republic is taking place. Despite her father’s order to stay at home, Reina meets with her Muslim neighbor, Sadık, and other boys on the seashore to watch the fireworks. For such disobedience, she is cast away to Cuba and to an arranged marriage.
The third story unfolds in Havana in 1961. Alegra is a twelve-year-old school girl and a brigadista. She is Reina’s daughter, and the first of the three young girls whose diasporic fate the book narrates to follow her heart. Against her father’s will, Alegra participates in the alphabetization campaign launched by the Cuban Revolution with the purpose of eradicating illiteracy, rampant in the rural areas of the island. While she is in rural Melena del Sur teaching, her father gets in trouble with the Castro regime because he wants to keep his small peddler’s business. For this reason, the family decides to send Alegra away to Miami to protect her from persecution.
The last protagonist of the novel is Paloma, the daughter of Alegra. She lives in Miami, in 2003. Paloma is Sephardic and Afro-Cuban. Her circumstance is not characterized by historical changes, but by a family trip to Toledo, during which Paloma witnesses the merging of the different narrative threads that run through the novel.
Ruth Behar strives to differentiate the discursive tone used by her characters, adapting their words and qualms to their different historical contexts. Words in Spanish and Judezmo interrupt the flow of English and add to the Sephardic flavor of the book. The most tender, yet least verisimilar historical moment is presented by Benvenida. The twelve-year-old girl is charged with the task of transmitting the beginning of an exilic destiny, and of denouncing the trauma of diaspora. Many times, her insights and maturity run against the otherwise realistic narration of moments in history and living conditions in the society of late fifteenth century Spain. Benvenida is exceptional in many ways: she is a gifted reader of poetry and a poet herself, plays the oud and sings Sephardic traditional ballads. It is through her first person narrative that the reader perceives the transcendence of the historical crossroads at which her life of family and community stand. The untarnished life of Benvenida’s family and community in Toledo, on their way to Valencia, and from there to Naples and beyond, creates a monolithic historical panorama, whose stiffness deepens because of the high moral quality of Jews, Muslims, and Conversos vis–à-vis Catholics presented through and through as villains.
The societies depicted in the novel are multicultural. Linguistic syncretism characterizes the lives of the protagonists. The co-existence of groups differing in religion, age, social class is a desire that permeates the events that take place in Reina’s Istanbul, where Jewish, Muslim, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox groups partake harmoniously in the modern Turkish nation state. The atmosphere between ethnic groups in 1923-Silivri is idyllic vis-à-vis the proximity to historical events such as the 1919-1922 Greek-Turkish War, the burning of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian quarters of Izmir in 1922, and the exchange of populations under the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. In Alegra’s Havana, multiculturalism is heightened by the presence of Afro-Cubans, who keep the faith their enslaved ancestors brought from West Africa while Sephardim hang on to their Magen David, albeit inconspicuously, and illiterate compañero-peasants express their support to the secular Revolution. The orchestration of differences crystalizes in Paloma who is both racially and linguistically diverse as Jewish, Afro Cuban, African American, and a native speaker of Spanish and English.
While women live mostly in solidarity, especially mothers and daughters, fathers are ambiguous characters in Behar’s world. They are honorable and protective, but they represent an authoritarian limit for the freedom of those around them, especially women, whether these are wives or daughters. The historical characters of King Ferdinand, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and Fidel Castro are symbolic fathers, at times benevolent, but in the end always to be feared as the face of the power behind the expulsion of the Jews, the implementation of monolingual education in Turkey, and the oppressive and exclusionary practices of the Cuban Revolution. The most salient of the paternal figures is Samuel Cohen, Reina’s father, who sends his daughter to exile because she dares challenge his authority in what he considers a matter of honor. Opposite him stands Rolando, a caring and complicit figure, who accompanies his daughter Paloma in the quest for her place in the family, the society, and history.
In addition to the sea crossings, the novel’s narrative coherence relies on the strong female characters who, through music, poetry, love for books and art, and deep empathy for those around them, are the keepers of memory and the fighters for the right to freedom. Behar’s female characters show how being Sephardic relies on negotiating identity. In Benvenida’s world, Sephardism is attached to concrete cultural practices, linguistic definition, and religious life. In the twentieth century and the new millennium, within the context of secularization, multiculturalism, interracial and interfaith crossings, Reina, Alegra, and Paloma become emblems of the social struggles of women for access to the public space. Benvenida sings at home, because she knows that the forum of the synagogue is a forbidden space for her. Reina breaks into the public space and for that she becomes an outcast. Alegra decides to become a brigadista and confronts the will of her father.
The novel comes full circle in Reina Cohen Toledano’s family trip from Miami to Toledo, where three generations of Jewish women go in search of the imagined Sepharad of the origins, as a symbolic home. Their quest culminates in a visit to the Sinagoga del Tránsito, converted to Museo Sefardí (Sephardic Museum), that opens the way for personal discoveries. Written and oral voices from the past, charged with emotion, compel the three Sephardic women to think and affirm their history and their present. At the end of the narration, the stories of diaspora have a homecoming through poetry and affect. With a pleasant writing style and a set of compelling female characters, Behar composes a moving story where history and fiction mingle. She positions herself in front of the historical vicissitudes of Sephardim and makes part of their diaspora accessible to a broader public, while she ties it to contemporary social issues.
1 Christina Karageorgou-Bastea is Professor of Spanish, at Vanderbilt University. She specializes in modern poetry from Mexico and Spain. She is the author of Beyond Intimacy. Radical Proximity and Justice in Three Mexican Poets, (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023), Creación y destrucción del Imperio: nombrar en Tirano Banderas de Valle-Inclán (Ediciones Clásicas/Minnesota UP, 2013), and Arquitectónica de voces: Federico García Lorca y el Poema del cante jondo (El Colegio de México, 2008). She has written extensively on Jewish-Mexican women writers Myriam Moscona and Gloria Gervitz.