“No, I wasn’t. I was wide awake. I was waiting for you.”

Baba’s mother tongue is Yiddish, but we speak to each other in Spanish. She was born in Poland and immigrated to Cuba in 1927, at the age of 19, hoping to become a cabaret singer, but instead married my grandfather, my Zayde, and worked with him selling fabric to get her family to safety in Cuba before the dark night of the Holocaust. Then, after Fidel Castro came to power, the entire family came to the United States. Once again, she and Zayde worked selling fabric, this time in a little store in Queens that rattled all day from the vibrations of the number 7 train. Upon retiring, they moved to Miami Beach. Baba dreamed of living next to the ocean, but Zayde chose an apartment 16 blocks from the shore. Now, in her old age, the ocean feels infinitely distant.

“Do you have to go to Cuba tomorrow? Can you tell me what you lost in Cuba?”

“Baba, you know I have to go. I’ve told you before; I’m doing research for my book about the Jews who stayed in Cuba.”

Although just a child, I was part of the dramatic exodus of 15,000 Jews who left Cuba immediately after properties and stores were nationalized by the revolution. Only 1,000 Jews remained. Those of us who left were not supposed to look back. My mother warned me to be very careful around the Jewish Cuban comunistas. “They’ll brainwash you,” she said, “with all their pretty words.” But I found that the Jews in Cuba brimmed with excitement about their rediscovery of Judaism. They were “new Jews” who were reclaiming their roots with support from American Jewish philanthropists that had arrived after the return of religious freedom to Cuba, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was fascinated by their stories. Being with them fed my imagination, allowing me to wonder about the parallel life I might have lived as a Jew in Cuba, had we stayed.

“How many times can you keep going back? I don’t think you need to go back anymore.”

I try not to lose my temper with Baba. I’m only spending one night with her and I’ll be spending two weeks in Cuba. What she really wants to ask me, but can’t, is why for nearly a decade I’ve been spending so much time with strangers in Cuba when I could be – should be – spending all that time with her, my own grandmother?

We finally go to sleep. I stretch out as best I can on the ancient sofa bed. Baba returns to the bedroom next door where Zayde died 13 years ago.

The next morning Baba is at the door of her apartment, number 401, looking older than old, and trying not to cry. Baba shakes her head, watching me struggle to fit my bags into the tiny elevator.

It is the summer of 2000 and the new century has begun on a false note of hope. I have grown so accustomed to going back and forth to Cuba via a stop at Baba’s that I’ve come to think this itinerary is eternal. Going to Cuba will always entail saying goodbye to Baba, won’t it? But Baba’s health was on the verge of unraveling. A few months later, her body wracked by cancer, she’d be thin as a skeleton, awaiting death. That goodbye at the elevator was to be the last time she would urge me to give up Cuba for her.

“Te quiero, Baba,” I yell, as the door is shutting. “Vuelvo pronto.” Are they hollow, these words? Telling her I love her, telling her I’ll be back soon?

I think I can smell the ocean. It is 16 long blocks away, but I smell the ocean. Unmistakable. The smell of journeys without end.

2007, "A Room Named Ruth," Pakn Treger, Fall: 5767, 55. In PDF.

2007, "Cuba's Jews: People of a Solitary Star," Journal of the International Institute, University of Michigan, Fall: 4, 13. Part One. Part Two.