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Chapter 2 A Sephardi Air Ruth Behar 12 I grew up within my mother’s Ashkenazi family, hearing Yiddish, eating ge¤lte ¤sh, and adoring passionately my Russian-born grandfather , who had pale green eyes and spoke so softly you could barely hear him. And yet, always, I was reminded by my mother’s family that I resembled my father’s Sephardi family. It was not only my dark curly hair, Frida Kahlo eyebrows, and large brown eyes that made me more like el lado turco (the Turkish side). I was told that my temperament— which consisted of a terribly strong will, a ¤erce rage that came from a source I could not begin to fathom, and an inability to forgive those who’d wronged me—was a Sephardi temperament. I learned early to believe that Ashkenazim were logical, rational, reasonable, and modern , and that Sephardim were moody, irrational, hard-headed, passionate , and ¤xed in their ways. What is more, I learned that no amount of time spent with my Ashkenazi family would ever quite rid me of the Sephardi body and soul I’d inherited from the turcos. If I angered my mother, she would yell, as if uttering a curse, “Eres igualita a tu padre!” (You’re just like your father!). But when we were happy, she’d sometimes run her thin ¤ngers through the curls in my You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. a sephardi air 13 hair(herown hairwasIndianstraight)orwatch megazingintothemirrorandsay ,“Tienesunairesefardí,unacosasefardímuybonita”(You have a Sephardi air about you, something Sephardi that’s very beautiful ). She recognized, in those moments of affection shaded with detachment , that she’d given birth to a female creature quite unlike herself, a young woman in whom she could see little of her own image. The union in Cuba, in 1956, of my mother, the child of immigrants from Poland and Russia, and my father, the son of immigrants from Turkey, was viewed, by both sides, as an intermarriage. The Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities that took root in Cuba in the twenties remained apart. They prayed in separate synagogues and lived in separate neighborhoods in Havana, and they settled in different regions of Cuba. My maternal grandmother, hearing of my mother’s plans to marry Albertico Behar, a turco, despaired, “But how will we talk to his parents? They don’t speak Yiddish.” Spanish, for my Eastern European maternal grandparents, was the language of the goyim, but for my paternal grandparents it was precisely the language of their Jewishness, a thread that wound its way back to Ladino, the ¤fteenthcentury Spanish that Sephardim have sheltered inside Hebrew letters . Little did my grandmother imagine that a few years later, with the coming of the Cuban Revolution, my mother’s entire family would depart for the United States, where both Yiddish and Ladino would be lost to new generations and the only language of comfort, love, and longing that would remain to us would be Spanish. My mother’s family was very close and tightly knit, both in Cuba and in the early years in the United States. In our ¤rst years in this country, we lived in the same apartment building in Queens, New York, as my maternal grandparents and my mother’s sister and her family. I had muchless contact with my Sephardi family, who resettled inBrooklynafterleaving Cuba.My father,ashamed ofhis family’spoverty in Cuba, drew away from his parents and the Cuban Sephardi community. In Cuba, he had studied accounting in night school while working days to support his parents and younger siblings. He was You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. ruth behar 14 ambitious, and there were more opportunities, both in Havana and later in New York City, to rise into the middle class through Ashkenazi business contacts. Yet he would always be the turco in that upwardly mobile world, just as he was in my mother’s family. Although my father was too charming ever to have been an outcast, I sensed that he was often treated as “other” in the Ashkenazi settings in which he tried to make something of himself. I wanted to...

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