Ruth Behar (born 1956) is a
Cuban-American
Cuban Americans ( es, cubanoestadounidenses or ''cubanoamericanos'') are Americans who trace their cultural heritage to Cuba regardless of phenotype or ethnic origin. The word may refer to someone born in the United States of Cuban descent or ...
anthropologist and writer.
[Ruth Behar](_blank)
Michigan Writers Collection Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the
Belpré Medal.
Life and work
Behar was born in
Havana
Havana (; Spanish: ''La Habana'' ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of the La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center. ,
Cuba
Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...
in 1956 to a Jewish-Cuban family of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry. She was four when her family immigrated to the US following
Fidel Castro's gaining power in the revolution of 1959. More than 94% of Cuban Jews left the country at that time,
["Cuba"](_blank)
Jewish Virtual Library together with many others of the middle and upper classes. Behar attended local schools and studied as an undergraduate at
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University ( ) is a private liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the col ...
, receiving her B.A. in 1977. She studied
cultural anthropology at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
, earning her doctorate in 1983.
She travels regularly to Cuba and Mexico to study aspects of culture, as well as to investigate her family's roots in Jewish Cuba. She has specialized in studying the lives of women in developing societies.
Behar is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
in Ann Arbor.
Her literary work is featured in the
Michigan State University's Michigan Writers Series. A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry and fiction, Behar focuses on issues related to women and feminism.
''Lucky Broken Girl''
''Lucky Broken Girl'' (2017) is multicultural coming-of-age novel for young adults, based on the author's childhood in the 1960s.
Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro's Cuba to New York City. Just when she's finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English –and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood's hopscotch queen – a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined to her bed for a long recovery. As Ruthie's world shrinks because of her inability to move, her powers of observation and her heart grow larger and she comes to understand how fragile life is, how vulnerable we all are as human beings, and how friends, neighbors, and the power of the arts can sweeten even the worst of times. Writing for Cuba Counterpoints, Julie Schwietert Collazo writes, "Behar, without fail, always seems to be writing with the goal of honoring her own history, experiences, and feelings, without ever denying or excluding those of others, and in Lucky Broken Girl the achievement of this goal is evident on every page." Professor Jonda C. McNair also highlights the importance of Ruth Behar using her personal experience as a Cuban American of Sephardic Turkish, Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry to write stories that are culturally authentic.
''Traveling Heavy''
''Traveling Heavy'' (2013) is a memoir about her Cuban-American family, descended from both Askenazi and Sephardic Jews in Cuba, as well as the strangers who ease her journey in life. Her probings about her complicated Jewish Cuban ancestry and family's immigration to America explore issues about identity and belonging.
[: Ruth Behar, ''Traveling Heavy''](_blank)
''Kirkus Reviews'' Kirkus Reviews described her book as "A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience."
Behar studies the revitalization of Cuban Jewish life as an anthropologist, but her personal journey back to the island she left as a little girl is the heart of this "memoir I snuck in, between journeys."
''An Island Called Home''
''An Island Called Home'' (2007) was written in Behar's quest for a better understanding of Jewish Cuba and particularly her family's roots.
She noted, "I knew the stories of the Jews in Cuba, but it was all about looking at them as a community".
Traveling the island, Behar becomes the confidante to a host of Jewish strangers, building connections for further anthropological research. Conducting one-on-one interviews, combined with black-and-white photography, she builds readers an image of the diasporic thread connecting Cuban Jews to one another.
Beginning with Jewish immigrants of the 1920s, who fled unrest in Turkey, Russia and Poland, she moves on to stories of later immigrants, Polish and German Jews who fled to Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s in order to escape persecution and the concentration camps of the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in N ...
. In Cuba immigrants opened mom-and-pop shops, peddled, and gradually adopted Spanish while still speaking
Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...
, settling into Latino life in La Habana Vieja. In the early part of the century, many Jewish immigrants worked in the Cuban garment industry.
More than 94% left during and after the 1959 revolution.
As her family was among those who left Cuba, Behar intertwines her personal thoughts and feelings with her professional, analytical observations of the current society.
''The Vulnerable Observer''
''The Vulnerable Observer'' recounts Behar's passage to integrating subjective aspects into her anthropological studies. Suffering her grandfather's death while on a field trip to Spain to study funeral practices, she decided the ethnographer could never be fully detached, and needed to become a "vulnerable observer".
She argues that the ethnographic fieldworker should identify and work though, his or her own emotional involvement with the subject under study.
She strongly critiques conventional ideas of objectivity.
[M. L. DeVault, "Book Review: Behar/'The Vulnerable Observer'," ''Contemporary Sociology,'' 1998] She suggested that the ideal of a "scientific," distanced, impersonal mode of presenting materials was incomplete.
Other anthropologists, including
Claude Levi-Strauss Claude may refer to:
__NOTOC__ People and fictional characters
* Claude (given name), a list of people and fictional characters
* Claude (surname), a list of people
* Claude Lorrain (c. 1600–1682), French landscape painter, draughtsman and etcher ...
,
Georges Devereux, and
Clifford Geertz, had also suggested that the researcher had to claim being part of the process more openly. Behar's six personal essays in ''The Vulnerable Observer'' are examples of her subjective approach.
Behar's grandparents emigrated to Cuba from Russia, Poland and Turkey during the 1920s. In 1962 they fled Cuba to escape Castro's communism.
At the age of nine, Behar suffered a broken leg from the crash of her family's car. She was immobilized for a year.
The experience and recovery period led her to the recognition that "the body is a homeland" of stored memory and pain.
''Translated Woman''
In 1985, Behar was working in Mexico when she befriended an Indian witch working as a street peddler.
Townspeople said the witch, Esperanza Hernandez, had used black magic to blind her ex-husband after he regularly beat her and then left her for his mistress.
Behar's portrayal of Esperanza's story in ''Translated Woman'' suggests she alienated her own mother, inspiring Behar to portray Esperanza as a feminist heroine.
Esperanza claims she found redemption in a spiritualist cult constructed around Pancho Villa. She blamed pent-up rage about her husband and life as the reason for the deaths in infancy of the first six of her 12 children.
Esperanza's rage led her to beat up her husband's lover, throw her son out of the house, beat a daughter for refusing to support her, and disown another son for having an affair with an uncle's ex-mistress because she considered it to be incestuous.
Behar reflects on her own life and begins to think that her Latina-gringa conflicts result from a feeling of loss after having tried to model herself according to the American Dream, thus losing some sense of her Cuban Jewish family's past in that island nation.
[B. Sanchez, "Book Review: 'Translated Woman'," ''Hispanic Magazine,'' 1993] Esperanza's odyssey examines physical borders, margins and separations.
''Translated Woman'' contributes to the feminist argument that studying women in anthropology has been undervalued due to traditional academic prejudices that view women-centered analysis as too personally biased.
[E. Perez, "Book Review: Behar/Translated Woman," ''Journal of American History,'' September 1994]
Awards and honours
*In 1988, Behar was the first Latino woman to be awarded a
MacArthur fellowship
The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...
. *In 2011 she gave a Turku
Agora Lecture
The agora (; grc, ἀγορά, romanized: ', meaning "market" in Modern Greek) was a central public space in ancient Greek city-states. It is the best representation of a city-state's response to accommodate the social and political order of t ...
.
Selected bibliography
Books
*''The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa María del Monte'' (1986)
''Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story''(1993; second edition, Beacon Press, 2003 )
''Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba'' editor, University of Michigan Press, 1995,
''Women Writing Culture''Editors Ruth Behar, Deborah A. Gordon, University of California Press, 1995,
''The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart'' Beacon Press, 1996,
''An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba'' Rutgers University Press, 2007,
''The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World'' Editors Ruth Behar, Lucía M. Suárez, Macmillan, 2008,
Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys. Duke University Press, 2013,
Film
*''
Adio Kerida
''Adio Kerida: Goodbye my Dear Love'' is a 2002 documentary by American anthropologist Ruth Behar that follows her trip to Cuba, which her family left when she was four. She searches for memories from her past and investigates the dwindling Sep ...
(Goodbye Dear Love): A Cuban-American Woman's Search for Sephardic Memories'' (2002)
See also
*
Cuban American literature Cuban American literature overlaps with both Cuban literature and American literature, and is also distinct in itself. Its boundaries can blur on close inspection. Some scholars, such as Rodolfo J. Cortina, regard "Cuban American authors" simply as ...
*
List of Cuban-American writers
See also
* Cuban American literature
* List of Cuban writers
* List of Cuban women writers
* List of Cuban Americans
* Before Columbus Foundation
References
Bibliography
* (Anthology; includes writer biographies)
* (Anthology; include ...
References
External links
Personal website''Adio Kerida: A Cuban Sephardic Journey'' Official WebsiteGabriel Frye-Behar website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Behar, Ruth
1956 births
Living people
American anthropologists
American anthropology writers
Anthropology educators
Cuban anthropologists
American women anthropologists
Cuban women anthropologists
Cultural anthropologists
Latin Americanists
MacArthur Fellows
Wesleyan University alumni
Princeton University alumni
University of Michigan faculty
Cuban Jews
American people of Cuban-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Turkish-Jewish descent
American writers of Cuban descent
20th-century Cuban women writers
21st-century Cuban women writers
Cuban emigrants to the United States
Jewish anthropologists
American women academics
21st-century American women