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American Jewish Fiction obsessive-compulsive disorder, or in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), a best-selling novel written by Joanne Greenberg under the pseudonym Hannah Green that links the experience of anti-Semitism with mental illness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113pDays of Awe By Achy Obejas BALLANTINE, 2001. 370 PAGES. Traditional Passover seders always include the wish “Next year in Jerusalem,” which expresses the Jewish desire to arrive not in the terrestrial, beleaguered, and too often deadly city we know, but in a sublime and peaceful, unearthly place that has been redeemed by the coming of the Messiah—which is why the formula is recited even at seders in Jerusalem itself. Achy Obejas’s characters, Marranos and crypto-Jews, harbor similar messianic hopes, but instead of Zion they pine for Spain, Miami, and Havana, even if they already live in those places. Depending on their politics, they dream of a Cuba no longer under Fidel Castro’s thumb, or one in which his socialist revolution has finally triumphed over its detractors; more broadly, they aspire to live in a world in which they can openly express their identities, be they religious, ethnic, political, or sexual. A dense web of plotlines, histories, and family secrets, Days of Awe centers on a Cuban American woman, Alejandra San José, who was born in Havana on the same day as the Cuban Revolution. Having fled the island as an infant alongside her parents and a Holocaust survivor, Ale grows up in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. Her father, Enrique, translates great works of Latin American literature into English, and she in turns becomes an oral interpreter; like many bilinguals, they share an interest in “words that refused to convert from one language to another.” Though their relationship is an intimate one, Enrique never manages to communicate clearly with his daughter about their Jewish heritage and his own feelings about it. Ale learns that she is descended from Marranos—Jews who were converted to Christianity by the Spanish Inquisition but nonetheless maintained, in secret, Jewish rituals. The novel zigzags through Ale’s past and future, treating a handful of her love affairs with men and women in Cuba and the United States, and flashing back to the experiences of her greatgrandfather Ytzak, who grew up not far from the island’s future dictator, and whose encounters with American Jews awakened a sense of profound Jewish affiliation within him. Days of Awe’s plot concerns Ale’s trips back to Cuba and her slow discovery of her father’s secrets, and it can be dizzying, not surprising, given the complexity of the connections she juggles: she is a Jew, a Cuban, an American, a lesbian, a daughter, a lover, and an individual. Obejas packs in historical information on the origins and experiences of Cuba’s Jews—the novel comes complete with a 154 two-page bibliography—as well as quotations on exile, in her own translation, from Cuba’s José Martí and Judah Halevi, the great poet of the Jewish Golden Age of Spain. At times a heartrending tale of love and loss, Days of Awe offers insight into the diverse and cosmopolitan Jewish experiences that have been folded into the American Jewish community. Further reading: Obejas’s two previous books deal with Cuban and Cuban American life, but not with Jews. A journalist, she was part of a Chicago Tribune team that won a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2001, and she maintains a website at http://achyobejas.com. A lively and occasionally acrimonious debate has sprung up in recent years about the claims of indigenous peoples in the American southwest to be crypto-Jews, with books published on the subject by scholars such as Stanley Hordes (2005) and Janet Leibman Jacobs (2002). Other novels that consider the crypto-Jewish legacy in the Americas or the legacy of the Inquisition include Katherine Alcalá’s Spirits of the Ordinary (1997), Naomi Ragen’s The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (1998), and the great Brazilian Jewish author Moacyr Scliar’s The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes (1983, translated 1988). Debra Spark’s The Ghosts of Bridgetown (2001) explores the Jewish history of another island, Barbados. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114pParadise Park By Allegra Goodman DIAL PRESS, 2001. 360 PAGES. Allegra Goodman and the heroine of her delightful second novel, Paradise Park, are two sides of a coin. Goodman grew up in Honolulu and has lived much of her adult life in and around Boston, while the character, Sharon Spiegelman, raised in Boston...

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