Behar, a UM anthropology
professor, last lived in Cuba in 1961 when she was a child That year her family,
which is Jewish, immigrated to Israel. The family was repatriados--"repatriates."
Fidel Castro allowed Jews to repatriate to Israel and many from Cuba's Jewish
community did so with most eventually going on to live in the United States,
as did Behar and her family. Others stayed because they believed in la Revolución,
or in Cuba, the place itself.
Behar's film
is about the rending of the small community of Sephardic Jews in Cuba and the
United States. It is a search for history and identity among "Jews who
are Latinos and Latinos who are Jews," she says. She takes its title, Adio Kerida, or Goodbye, My Love, from a Sephardic love song. Sephardim
are Jews of Spanish or Portuguese descent who were expelled from Iberia in the
15th century, settled in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, and then in the
early 20th century emigrated throughout the world.
Only 1,000 Sephardic
Jews remain in Cuba today, about 10 percent of the population before the Revolution.
Behar, herself a Cuban Sephardic Jew, is one of many shining stars in the UM
Department of Anthropology, regarded as the best in the country by the National
Research Council and the American Anthropological Association. Behar has writen
on a range of cultural issues as a poet, essayist, editor, and ethnographer.
She was awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant" in 1988 at the start of
her career as an anthropologist and has been the recipient of many prestigious
fellowships for her work, including a John Simon Guggenheim award in 1995. Latina magazine named her in 1999 one of the 50 Latinas who made history in the 20th
century.
Her numerous
books cover the genres of anthropology, poetry, memoir, and fiction. A review
of her 1996 book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your
Heart, included this praise: "Ruth Behar is famed for her fieldwork
writing, and fieldwork writing is after all at the heart of anthropology."
This book also
foreshadowed Behar's current documentary that continues this interplay of her
professional and personal pursuits. With the medium of film, Behar has been
able to extend her written voice into the visual realm, by utilizing arresting
images of Cuba, her eloquent voice-overs, the folk music, and stories from people
in their own words.
What is clear
by watching this "personal documentary" is that the narrative of fiction,
the emotion of poetry, and the record of anthropology can work well in a skilled
hand. Adio Kerida is a powerful story.
What also becomes
apparent, as the viewer is given an intimate glimpse into the lives of these
Cubans in Havana and expatriates in the States, including Behar's own family,
is that much about being human is community -- however intact, however scattered,
that community may be.
"The fundamental
question in anthropology," says Behar, "the one that keeps getting
asked again and again, is 'What is home?'"
For the dwindling
community of Sephardic Jews in Cuba, and those like Behar who are now visitors
to their homeland, it is a bittersweet question.
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"Documentaries capture
Cuban-Jewish identity," Miami Herald, January 28, 2002. Review by
Fabiola Santiago.
(...) Adio Kerida,
titled after a popular Sephardic song, chronicles the many trips to Cuba of
anthropologist Ruth Behar, a University of Michigan professor and book author
who says she is "obsessed with going back and figuring out what my connection
is to Cuba." (...) For Behar, her many return trips to Cuba in the past
decade have been a quest for lost childhood memories she can never recover.
The author of
the essay collection, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your
Heart, Behar left Cuba with her family when she was 5. Her parents settled
in New York, her grandparents in Miami Beach.
Her parents
have often told her about the family's long walks along El Malecón, the famous
Havana seawall that wraps around the city's edge like an abrazo, an embrace
between long-lost loved ones. Certainly, there are photographs of Ruth, "a
happy child," in her Havana home.
Yet Behar cannot
remember her childhood nor the Cuba of yesterday.
"How I
wish I could recall something," she says in her wistful narration of the
90-minute documentary.
Some of the
most interesting aspects of Behar's story draw on the heritage of her [grand]parents,
who fled Europe in the 1920s and arrived in Cuba "at a time when the United
States was closing its doors." Cuba opened its doors, Behar says, because
the government wanted to "whiten" the island's population and so it
welcomed white European immigrants.
Her mother,
an Ashkenazi Jew, spoke Yiddish. Her father, a Sephardic Jew, spoke Spanish.
Their union was thought of as an "intermarriage."
Behar titled
the documentary in Sephardic, in a "misspelled" version of "Adiós
Querida" (Goodbye Dear Love) in Spanish, "because it's the way
Sephardic Jews write Ladino or Judeo-Spanish."
"Sephardic
Jews preserved the Spanish language during centuries of exile after their expulsion
from Spain in the 15th Century. They used the Hebrew alphabet to write Spanish.
At the turn of the 20th century, when they began to write Ladino or Judeo-Spanish
in the Roman alphabet, they used the "k" rather than the "qu"
of the Spanish language," Behar says. "By titling my film Adio Kerida, I wanted to call attention to the way Sephardic Jews connect to
Spain and the Spanish language, while at the same time being distinct as a people
because of their Jewish heritage and their longing for memory of the beloved
land they had to leave behind."
The documentary,
culled from four trips Behar made to Cuba between December of 1999 and last
year, is "a little bit of a friendly argument between me and my father,"
Behar says in an interview from her home in Ann Arbor.
"He doesn't
think we should look back. 'We live here now in the U.S.A.,' he says. My idea
is no, maybe there is some way to return, in memory, in sentiment," she
says.
The film, "a
peace offering to my father," also includes footage of interviews with
members of the Cuban-Jewish community in Miami, including Samy, the famous hairdresser
to the stars, whose [mother is] a Sephardic Jew.
But some of
the most touching scenes are filmed in Cuba as Behar visits people and places
once dear to her parents, as well as members of the dwindling Jewish community.
Only about 1,000 Jews remain on the island, and many are immigrating to Israel,
which is welcoming and sponsoring them, Behar says.
In one scene,
Behar meets a man also named Behar who used to be a childhood friend of her
father.
The man sends
Behar's father a warm greeting via the daughter's videotape.
In another scene,
Behar embraces and talks with Caro, the black woman who took care of her when
she was a child.
"I am Jewish
because I am Cuban," Behar says. "My family survived because Cuba
let them in. If Cuba had not, my family would have perished in the Holocaust.
I have this debt. I owe this to Cuba."
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"Cuban Jewish films
prove you can go back -- and move forward," Jewish Star Times, January
23, 2002. Review by Liza Brooke.
(...) The title of Ruth
Behar's Adio Kerida, a personal and poetic exploration of the filmmaker's
Jewish Cuban roots in post-Castro Cuba, is deliberately misspelled in Spanish
to represent the Ladino language of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in
1492, the year Columbus departed for what would become America. The phrase,
frequently intended as a bitter goodbye to an uninterested lover, refers to
the Jews' experience of farewell with their various homelands.
"I took
on this project as half poet, half anthropologist who can represent Sephardic
Jewish Cubans in a way that was personal, funny, intimate," Behar explained.
"I wanted to take my project very personally, to be involved, and as a
member of the Sephardic Jewish community community in the Diaspora, to somehow
help bridge the gap between the Jewish Cuban community in Miami and the Jewish
community that is still in Cuba. In reality, the two communities don't really
connect; they're separated by history and immigration, yet at the same time
they share a common heritage.
Even more personal,
my film is an argument--at times sad, at times playful--with my Cuban Sephardic
father, because he won't return to the Cuba he left behind. I go to Cuba for
him, to show him that there is still a Jewish presence in Cuba, that there are
still traces of the old Cuba he left and that the new Cuba is not antagonistic
to him."
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"Adio Kerida en el Festival de Cine." El Nuevo Herald, lunes 28 de enero del
2002.
RUTH BEHAR es
una cubana judía que emigró de su tierra natal cuando era una niña. En Estados
Unidos se convirtió en una reconocida profesora de antropología de la Universidad
de Michigan, poeta y autora.
Su primer documental
de 90 minutos, Adio Kerida, sobre la historia de los judíos sefarditas
en Cuba, es una odisea cinematográfica en búsqueda de sus raíces, de esa niñez
que no recuerda pero que a la misma vez no puede borrar.
En el filme,
Behar visita lugares donde vivió en Cuba, las sinagogas, las calles, los cementerios
judíos. compartiendo con personas que la conocieron a ella y a sus familia hace
décadas. El título del filme se deriva de una canción judía sefardita en el
idioma Ladino del siglo XV, que significa un amanta con el corazón contrito
diciendo adiós.
El documental
es un montaje audiovisual con comentarios por Behar, entrevistas con judíos
en la isla, Miami, Nueva York y Filadelfia, con sus dosis de humor, música sefardita
y cubana, y gran nostalgia por la cultura judeocubana.
Adio Kerida se presentará como parte del Festival de Cine de Miami.
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"Adio Kerida is about argument, reconciliation," Ann Arbor News, February 16,
2002. Review by Christopher Potter.
The Spanish
title of Ruth Behar's first-ever film, "Adio Kerida"--premiering locally
at the Michigan Theater Sunday evening--means "Goodbye Dear Love"
in English. Then again, it's not exactly Spanish, either.
"The title
is actually spelled in Ladino," says Behar, renowned University of Michigan
anthropologist turned moviemaker. "Ladino is an old form of Spanish which
the Jews of Spain spoke, and it's technically incorrect today because there's
no 'k' in the Spanish language. The word would be spelled 'qu.'"
Behar used this
deliberate misspelling to call attention to the Diasporic Jews who were expelled
from Spain in 1492, settled largely in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), and
many of whom eventually emigrated to Cuba in the early 20th century. These included
Behar's paternal grandparents, who hailed from Turkey, as well as her maternal
grandparents, who emigrated from Poland and Russia.
"I'm both
Sephardic and Yiddish," Behar says, adding the two different strains of
Jewish culture helped create unity more than disunity in her family. Born in
Cuba in 1956, she found herself uprooted along with her mother and brother by
her father, who had come to hate the Castro regime. "We got everything
into one suitcase and left the country," she recalls. The next stop was
New York City, where Behar's parents still live today.
She calls the
89-minute movie "basically an argument and also a reconciliation between
my father and myself. During the last decades I've been back to Cuba about 30
times, while he still refuses to go back." Adio Kerida is actually
a Sephardic song about saying goodbye to one's beloved, a very bitter goodbye.
"I used it to highlight the theme of goodbye and return, both among family
and country.
"My relationship
with my father went through many, many tough years. And I really wanted to make
this film as a peace offering to him."
More than a
memoir on familial strife, Adio Kerida explores the numerically reduced
but still active Cuban Jewish culture in Havana as well as Cuba's countryside.
"And it's not just a portrait of Jews still in Cuba. I also talk to Jewish
Cubans in Miami and in New York. And though most of them are anti-Castro, what's
interesting is that they did not leave Cuba because of religious persecution.
There has never been any discrimination or persecution against Jews in Cuba.
My family on both sides used to talk about how incredibly welcome they felt
there." (...)
In the late
1980s Behar won a MacArthur Foundatoin "Genius Grant," which she used
to fund her anthropological work. A recipient of many fellowships, she worked
in Spain and Mexico and had a fellowship at Johns Hopkins before arriving at
U-M in 1986. Her husband, U-M anthropologist David Frye, and son Gabriel have
gone to Cuba with Behar several times.
She admits visits
to her homeland have become a labor of love. "Spanish was my first language.
And even though I had no real memories of the place, Cuban culture has this
way of just taking people in, turning them into Cubans.
My hope is maybe
in the next few years to work out an arrangement where I can live half the year
in Cuba, and half in Ann Arbor. I've had poems published in Cuba, and I know
I can find my more spiritual side, my more artistic side, there."
Behar suspects
it's this relentless emotional pull that keeps her father--a major presence
in Adio Kerida--from going back. "It think it's less politics than
the emotional loss, and the fear that he would have to re-encounter his youth.
He's so Cuban, and he lost his country. For anyone who goes back, it's difficult
to psychologically confront one's past, a past that one loved."
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"Sephardic Film, Adio Kerida, Screened at Wilmington JCC," Jewish Voice, April 5,
2002. Review by Joel Glazier.
Dover Rabbi, Michael Godlberg,
commented to Ruth Behar, filmmaker, "You have provided a rare combination
of intellectual material with artistic excellence," after viewing the 90
minute film Adio Kerida. Author, anthropologist and recent award winning
filmmaker, Ruth Behar, presented her film about her own search for memory in
her native Cuba. The audience agreed with Rabbi Goldberg's characterization
of the fascinating film that combined a deep lesson about Jewish continuity
along with an in-depth look at the past and current Jewish community of Cuba.
A proud product of both
Ashkenazic and Sephardic grandparents, Ruth Behar has made several trips to
her homeland Cuba, from where her family fled after Fidel Castro took power.
"About one thousand Jews remain today in Cuba, and I wanted to see them
in action before they disappear," commented Ms. Behar. "However, they
are not a sad group of castaways or a forgotten remnant, even though at one
time there have been up to 30,000 Jews in Cuba."
The film includes intimate
interviews with Jews in Havana as well as some now living in New York and Miami.
"I'm Jewish because I'm Cuban," Behar boasts in her film, explaining
many of Cuba's Jews arrived there fleeing persecution in Europe in the 1930's.
The film points out that several Latin American countries admitted Jews readily
due to racist feelings. "In Cuba many white Cubans feared an increasing
population of Afro-Cubans, and European Jews, Sephardic or Ashkeanzi, were 'white
enough' to be welcomed."
Not only did the filming
teach Ruth Behar lessons about her own family but her frequent visits to Cuba
connected her deeply to the Jews who grew up with her family. We learn that
her parents and others took their house keys with them on their exile. Cuban
exiles in Miami established two shuls of their own there and the Jewish cemeteries
in Cuba are still maintained as are two of Cuba's Sephardic shuls. In the film
we get to know both exiles and current members of Havana's Jewish community.
One young man, after the death of his father, undertook his own self study of
Judaism and today is a Torah reader in Havana.
Jewish groups often visit
Havana in organized missions. It is learned that so many Jewish groups now visit
and bring food items and so many medicines that full time volunteers are needed
in the Jewish community of Havana to distribute it all, even to needy non-Jews.
Concentrating on her own family's history, it is learned that many Jews of Cuba
arrived from Turkey and 9 Torahs were brought with them in the 1920's. Those
scrolls remain in Cuba today.
On her several trips to
Cuba, Ruth Behar visits the family who has lived in her family's former apartment.
The original bedroom furniture is still in use and after 40 years, the apartment
seems familiar as not much has changed in her old neighborhood. The current
residents welcome Behar into their home and she also visits the former family
helper who helped raised her when she was a little girl.
Along with her parents and
brother, Mori (now a jazz musician in Philadelphia), the Behars are filmed on
a return visit to Queens, New York, where they lived from 1962-68 after leaving
Cuba. "Shalom" is the greeting they get there in Queens, as a Jewish
family from the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan are the apartment's occupants
in 2002.
"This was a lovely,
knowledgeable audience here in Wilmington. It was wonderful to have Latinos
and Jewish members communicating, learning and connecting together here,"
commented Behar after a long question/answer session following the film. Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love) has been screened at Latino and Jewish film festivals
around the United States and a Spanish language version of the film was shown
in Havana. The program here was sponsored by the JCC, Nuestras Raíces and The
Delaware Humanities Forum.
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"Adio Kerida," Detroit Jewish News, May 2002. Review by Kim Roth.
Like much art in progress,
the 90-minute documentary Adio Kerida took on a life of its own.
Ruth Behar, producer and
director, initially planned a "less ambitious project" to tell the
story of Sephardic Jews in Cuba. But it grew as she decided to incorporate other
locales--Miami, New York, Philadelphia--and her own story.
It makes its Detroit premiere
12:30 p.m. Sunday, May 5, in Commerce Township, followed by a discussion with
the filmmaker.
Behar was born in Cuba to
an Ashkenazic mother and Sephardic father. Her family left Havana for New York
when Behar was a child. She attended Wesleyan University, Princeton University
for her master's degree and doctorate, and today teaches anthropology at the
University of Michigan.
Woven among her academic
and literary accomplishments are dozens of trips to Cuba in search of memory,
understanding and identity.
The film incorporates words
-- in English, Spanish, Hebrew, Ladino -- and music and dance -- Jewish liturgical
music, Sephardic love songs, tango, bolero, flamenco, salsa -- with its footage.
Behar never hides behind
the camera as observer or interviewer. She's an active participant, sharing
her literal and metaphorical journey through "a unique Diaspora."
Scenes along Havana's malecón,
seaside walk, and within the city's homes and synagogues, give viewers a sense
not just of Behar's story but of the "living presence of Sephardim in Latin
America" and multiculturalism within the Jewish community -- precisely
her intention.
She talks with Miguelito,
a 7-year-old Afro-Cuban drummer about to make aliyah to Israel, about
his departure, and to Roberto Levy Cohen, Cuba's eldest Sephardic Jew, about
the importance of memory.
Stateside, she continues
her exploration through conversations with her brother, a musician in Philadelphia,
and a hairdresser in Miami, among others.
The film is a story, too,
of reconciliation of ideological differences. Like many others who emigrated,
Behar's Sephardic father won't return to Cuba. "I go for him," she
says. "He acknowledges that I need to go."
Through making Adio Kerida (the title is borrowed from a Sephardic love song), Behar has found some of
the answers she sought over the years.
"Everyone offered me
a model of how to mix one's identities together into something coherent and
vibrant, ways to express these identities through a connectedness to Jewish
tradition and to Cuban culture."
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