Jubana! (3 page)

“What
was their whole problem?” I asked, dodging her Kool line of fire.

“Dat dey couldn't accept een dehmselv-es, ‘I AM MEEX-ED.'”

“Well,” I told her, “then that means
we're
mixed.”

“Das right,” Mami said. “But de deefehrehnce ees, we lohvee!”

 

Zeide Boris met Dora Baicowitz in Matanzas, the lovely Cuban province just east of Havana known as the Athens of Cuba. They married in 1929.

Baba (our Yiddish version of Grandma) Dora was a buxom, attractive, fair-haired woman whose round nose, pale skin, and pendulous breasts my mother and I both inherited. By the time Baba Dora and Zeide Boris had finished having their children, in the thirties and early forties, there were some twelve thousand Jews in Cuba, out of a then-total population of seven million. (Today it's more like eight hundred Jews and twelve million Gentile Cubans.) The Benes kids were Jaime (blond, low-key, and easygoing, with his father's Asian eyes), Mami (redhead, head-strong, tempestuous, attractive, narcissistic), and Bernardo (redhead, brainy, prone to inappropriate and very loud opinionated
emotional outbursts, visionary, narcissistic). They were officially Privileged People, high-ranking members of Havana's Jewish elite. Zeide Boris may not have been the wealthiest Jubano, but he was certainly among the top twenty wealthiest.

Mami was Zeide Boris's favorite. She was a serious child, didn't smile much, and watched everything around her very intensely. She took ballet classes (de rigueur for upper-class Cuban girls), loved music and pretending she could play the piano. When Tio Bernardo was born a year and four months later, he and Mami bonded like twins; they were close in age, appearance, and superior attitude.

Being a girl, Mami wasn't supposed to be good in math and science, so she wasn't. Besides, Zeide Boris never expected her to be the breadwinner once she got married. That's why, before tests and final exams, Zeide would always tell Bernardo, “Let your sister copy.” This created a trend that spread. During one particularly tough exam, Bernardo uncharacteristically got some stuff wrong, and everybody else in the class got it wrong, too, because they'd all copied from him.

“De professor was so puzzl-ed,” Mami recalls. “He was, like, ‘Maybe I taught eet wrong?'”

Later in life, when my two less intellectually inclined American-born brothers would be challenged with writing assignments that I could have nailed in my sleep, Mami would get incensed if I refused to do their work for them, particularly the essay portions of their college and med school and business school applications.

From Mami's point of view while I was growing up, if you worked hard without cutting corners, asking for favors, using your feminine wiles or your ethnic minority-ness, you were a sohkehr. When I was a schoolgirl and Mami saw me poring over homework for hours, she'd get a stricken, pained look and say,
“Ay mamita,
joor workeengh so
hard.”
As if making an effort for more than two minutes was akin to working on a lesbian chain gang in the Mississippi Delta heat: an unattractive, back-breaking, deadening thing. Way too masculine a pursuit for a girlie gal. That quintessentially Cuban position is violently at odds with both the typical working-class illegal economic immigrant position, which is to work like a mule until you're dead, as well as classic Judaic values, which stipulate that talent is beautiful, that it's good to be smart—and that applies to girls, too.

When you're bicultural, oops, make that TRIcultural (I'm American, too), not every message you're given by your family and Juban community is synchronized or harmonious. Sometimes they switch into Cuban expectation gear, other times only the Jew 'tude will do, and at other times a nonethnic North American performance and persona is what's called for. Wouldn't
you
be a Messopotamia trying to integrate all that? It's one thing to be fluent in Spanglish, which I obviously am. But being triculturally fluent, now that's an art form unto itself.

Which self was I supposed to be, and when, exactly?

My family's apprehension and cluelessness about my aspiration to be a professional writer seem slightly odd, since Mami, who from birth bucked trends, has always been a professional. That was a huge big fact in the fifties, when most upper-class Cuban women didn't work. My mother certainly didn't have to. Her parents were filthy rich, and my father was doing great as the general practitioner co-owner of Centro Médico Nacional, his private hospital in Havana. But Mami wanted to work. Bored easily, she needed a lot of different kinds of stimulation, much more than running a household and raising a little baby girl could offer. She earned her master's degree in social work from La Universidad de la Habana, and took a position at the Ministerio de Bienestar Social, Cuba's social welfare department. When it
comes to work, my civil servant mother has always been a driven, disciplined, competent, energetic, multi-award-winning achiever.

In Cuba, all her newlywed girlfriends were upset when she “abandon-ed” them for an office job. They even offered to pool their considerable financial resources to pay her salary so Mami would quit and go back to playing cards with them in the afternoon. But like me, Mami has always been on a different wavelength than the people around her (she also looks light-years better than her coworkers and makes it look effortless). The difference is that Baba Dora supported Mami's differentness, whereas my differentness has always been something that Mami
deals with
—what choice does she have?—but does not exactly celebrate.

“My mom joost to tell me how happy chee was dat I had a profession an' dat I work-ed,” Mami says. “Chee said dat her generation deedn't have dat choice, an' dat chee would have lohv-ed to have had de opportuneety to do de same.”

However, Zeide Boris's ideas about getting ahead in life—“Let your sister copy”—stuck with Ana and Bernardo. Mami was and remains deferential to Bernardo, whom she calls
“un genio,”
a genius. She has a blind spot when it comes to his
mishigas.
This has created friction, because I don't. That abrasive, macho, finger-snapping
“Tráeme un café AHORA”
—Bring me a coffee NOW—attitude compels me to verbally electrocute him. This outrages him. Tio Nano can be very hyper and domineering, especially around females. This subspecies of
Homo jubano
brings out the
Homo jubana americana ovaria
strap-ons in me every time. As for Zeide Boris, Mami likes to say that he was “a lion” when it came to defending his children. She remembers her father as being creative and hysterically funny. I remember a big, sad, elegant Russian bear of a guy who bought me all the
Archie
comic books I ever wanted.

Mami's impressions and recollections are her right, though
they do not always jibe with the facts. My former psychoanalyst, Marvin L. Adland, says that when it comes to memory and perception, what you
believe
is true is more important than what
is
true. That must be the case in my family.

 

Okay. I'm out of Mami and home in my beautiful new hand-painted, imported crib, canopied with a
mosquitero,
mosquito netting, to prevent errant flies from getting anywhere, God forbid, near
la niña,
the little girl. I've got a huge dresser with hand-painted knobs and baby bears in assorted pastel colors, bulging with adorable outfits. I've got two very wealthy, young, movie star–gorgeous parents. I've got a
táta,
a nanny, named Panchita; a
cocinera,
a cook, named Carmen; and a
criada,
a housekeeper, named Candita, who is Panchita's sister. I've got four grandparents—two dominant babas, two semiwhipped zeides—and one glamorous godmother living nearby, who all think I'm the cutest thing alive. I've got hundreds of aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and parties. I have a zillion fantastic dolls, stuffed animals, books, and assorted toys imported from FAO Schwarz, and accountrements from El Encanto, The Enchantment, Havana's version of Bergdorf Goodman. I've got my own air-conditioning in my bedroom. My hair is full of Violetas, my pierced ears sport tiny cultured pearls, my wrists are bejeweled with pearl and 18-karat rose gold ID bracelets, my pima cotton T-shirts, jumpers, and dresses are pinned with an
azabache,
a jet-black semiprecious stone said to ward off the evil eye, and I get endless sterilized bottles full of heavily sugared warm milk every single time I cry.

“Mi heredera,”
Mami whispered to me. My heiress.

I gazed up adoringly at her beautiful freckled face framed in mosquito netting as she stroked my chubby pink cheek with her long, cool, pale, tapered, perfectly manicured fingertips. Her
green irises were flecked with gold, sun rays that ringed her pupils like petals. The girl with sunflower, not kaleidoscope, eyes.

“¡Tafetán!”
Mami murmured.
“¡Vamos, mamita, dí tafetán!”
Taffeta! Come on, little mama, say taffeta!

Since I was clueless
and
toothless, this was clearly not gonna happen.

“Champán,”
Mami added.
“Tafetán color champán.”
Champagne-colored taffeta.

It took about a year of hearing this bizarre mantra over and over before I was old enough to finally understand what the fuck my mother was talking about: the color and fabric of my wedding dress.

 

In the 1950s cha-cha-cha Cuba was the center of the Jubanite universe. Mami says that back then, Cuba had all the modern technology and conveniences of the United States, coupled with the Old World charm, grandeur, culture, and romance of Europe and Africa. It was simultaneously sophisticated and bohemian. Look at the black-and-white photographs from that era, my family's, anyway: Nobody looks unhappy, hungry, ugly. Our
comunidad Jubana
was
muy bonita,
beautifully dressed and beautiful.

Yet we were hardly
arrivistes,
historically speaking. Sephardic Jews were on the
Santa Maria
alongside el Almirante Cristobal Colón, Admiral Christopher Columbus, when they marched en masse out of the soft blue waves through the sugar-white sands of the Cuban beach in October 1492 to claim the island for España. The Jews were Spaniards called
conversos,
or Maranos, Jewish converts to Christianity. They were fleeing those outrageous anti-Semites Ferdinand and Isabella, and the king's close,
personal, sicko
amigo,
Tomas de Torquemada, the Inquisition's twisted
coordinador.
One Marano, Luis de Torres, was Columbus's interpreter, being fluent in Hebrew, Spanish, Aramaic, and Arabic. De Torres is especially dear to my heart—and lungs—because he first observed and recorded tobacco smoking on the island. He wrote of seeing “many people, women as well as men, with a flaming stick of herb in their hands, taking in its aromatic smell from time to time.”

Columbus found Cuba, which he called the pearl of the Antilles, the most beautiful place human eyes had ever seen. That's what he reported to his wacky Jew-hating patrons back home in Madrid.
La tierra mas fermosa
(it's really
hermosa,
but in old Spanish they didn't use H's)
que ojos humanos han visto.
The most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen.

What must my then-teenaged Eastern European and Russian shtetl-reared grandparents, aunts, and uncles have been feeling and thinking, pulling into Havana harbor? Were they apprehensive? Happy? Frightened? Dazzled? Lonesome? Relieved? Completely weirded out? All that fierce tropical beauty and shimmering heat, so far removed from the cold, bleak
Schindler's List
grayness of home. Here was a bird of paradise dreamland in blinding Technicolor, like Dorothy Gale falling asleep in black-and-white Kansas and awakening in colorful Oz. In Cuba the air was steamy and salty, and through it flew tiny
colibrís,
hummingbirds, and
cotorras,
parrots. There were palm trees and coconuts, plantains and
fruta bomba,
papayas. (In Cuban Spanish, the word
papaya
is slang for vagina, so we call the actual fruit
fruta bomba.
Which sounds good for vaginal slang, too, come to think of it.)

Maybe it was Eden, as dreamlike and foreign as Hieronymus Bosch's
Garden of Earthly Delights.

Unreal.
That's what my ancestors thought.
We're on a different planet now.

 

In my parents' and grandparents' time—roughly from 1920 through 1961—Cuba was, for the most part, religiously and racially tolerant. My family never spoke of experiencing much anti-Semitism. My father's parents, the less well-to-do Leon and Zelda Andursky, hailed from Poland. In Cuba, the slang word for Jews of any nationality was
polaco,
Polack.
Oye polaco, ¿qué pasa?
It was a term of endearment among ourselves, but definitely off-limits for non-Jews. (It's like blacks calling one another nigger. They can, you can't.) Gentiles would call us
los hebreos,
the Hebrews, never
los judios.
My Andursky
abuelos
never changed their surname, but Papi did, to Anders, when he began practicing medicine. At the Centro Médico Nacional, he'd overheard hushed comments about “Cuba is for Cubans” and
“el médico polaco.”
Papi didn't like it. I love Anders. I think it's a great name. It sounds like Switzerland. In German, the word actually means “different” or “otherwise.” Plus Anders is the perfect neutral foil for Gigi. It tempers the bubble-bath/poodle/rhinestone connotations, not to mention it beats the shit out of Gigi Andursky as a byline.