Writer Spotlight Revisited: Ruth Behar

Musicality, handmade books, a suitcase by the door, and bebita: Ruth Behar enjoys her dance with children's books

Charlie Barshaw coordinates our regular Writer Spotlight feature and interviews writers of SCBWI-MI. In this piece,  revisit cultural anthropologist, poet, and children's book author, Ruth Behar. 

We interviewed four years ago. One of your memorable quotes (among many) still moves me to this day: [On switching from recording the fact-based research of Cultural Anthropology to writing middle grade fiction] “I had the power to embellish reality and make it sweeter than it really had been. I had the power to invent things that never happened and make them seem utterly true. Words I had wished had been said to me could be said at last and make my heart so happy.”

Ruth in Havana, photo courtesy of May Reguera

No question. Just, wow!

 

When we last communicated, you were contemplating an epistolary novel based on your grandmother’s life of resettlement from Poland to Cuba. Since then, that book has been published to much acclaim. Did you have some of your grandmother’s letters to work from?

Yes, that book, Letters from Cuba, was published in 2020 with Nancy Paulsen Books and in paperback in 2021. I actually didn’t have any of my grandmother’s letters to work from. I only had a few postcards from Cuba with her youthful photo on one side and a brief message in Yiddish on the other side, but that was all. So I had to imagine the letters she might have written. I did draw inspiration from published letters by immigrants who found their way to the United States. I hope one day the letters of immigrants to Cuba will be collected and published.

Lucky Broken Girl and Letters From Cuba were based on your life and heritage, but they are works of fiction. How do you know when and where to leave the actual events and explore the essence of the thing?

With both Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, I turned from actual events to fiction when there were gaps in the historical record or gaps in my memory, or if I simply wanted to imagine what might have been. Writing dialogue for my characters is another moment when I need to lean into my imagination. In anthropological writing, I’m drawing on transcripts of recorded interviews. For my novels, I work with the words I’m hearing in my head. I have to listen closely to these words to arrive at what I think my characters would say if they were real people.

Tia Fortuna’s New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey is your first picture book. You’ve written scientific papers and novels for most of your life. How did the constraints of the limited word count and vocabulary of the picture book genre change your writing style?

It definitely was a challenge to write a picture book! You have to make every word sing, like in a poem, so that the story can come alive in unison with the illustrations. Tía Fortuna’s New Home went through several revisions as I added and trimmed, added and trimmed, over and over, until the story flowed and I was able to compress all the action into a single day. 

On this one day, Tía and her niece, Estrella, are saying goodbye to Tía’s beloved seaside casita and getting Tía settled into her new home at a retirement center where the sea is far but there are banyan trees and butterflies. I read aloud everything I write before letting it go, but with the picture book I realized the story had to not only make sense when read aloud but it needed a strong sense of musicality. 

Tía Fortuna’s New Home is a bilingual book; I incorporated the repetition of words in Spanish, so that kids could enjoy saying them aloud and learning those words if they’re not Spanish speakers.

When Tía Fortuna is leaving her casita, she says goodbye to the palm trees that respond with “adios, adios, adios.” In turn, when she arrives at her new home she greets the banyan trees, and they respond with “hola, hola, hola.” 

I hadn’t used this kind of repetition in my novels, so this was an enjoyable departure from my usual writing style. When I read the book aloud to groups of children, we repeat the Spanish words together and they love that so much; it feels as if we’re singing.

You have published a volume of poetry: Everything I Kept/ Todo lo que guardé in English and Spanish. (You are your own translator.) But you also have a number of your poems bound in rare and valuable “homemade” journals. Can you talk about those, and the amazing artist who creates them with you?

I am fortunate to have worked with Rolando Estévez, the amazing Cuban artist who crafted handmade books, some in small editions and others completely unique and one-of-a-kind. Estévez and I met when I began to travel to Cuba in the 1990s to get to know my native land and engage in projects creating bridges between Cubans who live abroad and Cubans who live on the island.

I dared to tell him I was writing poems about the emotional experience of returning to Cuba after growing up in the U.S. and he insisted I write them in Spanish as well as English, which I did. He was an amazing reader and encouraged me to keep writing poems. Many of those poems ended up in his beautiful handmade books.

These books incorporated elements of the Cuban environment, such as seashells, leaves, and rocks, as well as things like antique cigar labels, and bits and piece of lace, and even a kiss from an author, imprinted with lipstick onto the page.

In the book you mention, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé, the original handmade version has a three-dimensional suitcase on the cover. Inside, it is lined with sand from Varadero Beach, where my parents honeymooned, and the suitcase opens and closes with two little pieces of Velcro, which had to be brought from the United States since it’s impossible to find in Cuba.

I owe so much to Estévez and I am sorry to say that he passed away on January 17 of this year. We were planning to travel together to the Library of Congress for an upcoming exhibition of treasures from their collection that will include a poetry dress that Estévez made to fit my measurements, an astonishing work bringing together forty-five poems by Cuban and American women writers. 

Sadly, we won’t be able to go together, but I hope to be there to celebrate his memory and the love of books that he shared with me and the world.

Readers can learn more about Estévez’s books on my website: https://www.ruthbehar.com/writings/poetry-handmade-books/

To experience the awe of the poetry dress, formally entitled Otra piel para otra entraña/Another Skin for My Insides, have a look at this video:

https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-10510/

Your maternal grandparents emigrated from Poland to Cuba, and your paternal grandparents from Turkey to Cuba, where you were born. But after the Bay of Pigs incident, your family moved to an Israeli kibbutz until ultimately moving to New York City. You said that traveling was one of the allures to becoming a Cultural Anthropologist. This wanderlust must affect your view of the world, and of “home.”

It is true that I had a lot of wanderlust as a young woman and wanted to travel, especially to Spanish-speaking countries. Cultural anthropology gave me the passport I needed, allowing me to spend extended periods of time among strangers who kindly took me in and shared their life stories with me. 

Every place I went became “home” for a while, and even after leaving, the memories of my experiences stayed with me, and continue to do so to this day. So “home” for me is in many places. I’ve lived with a suitcase by my door, awaiting the next journey. Because I was an immigrant child, I think I’ll always have a nomadic soul.

Photo by Gabriel Frye-Behar

New York is where your son Gabriel now lives. A celebrated filmmaker and writer, Gabriel is now collaborating with you in writing some children’s stories. What is it like working with your little-boy-turned-grown-man?

Curiously, Gabriel now lives in New York where I grew up, while I still live in Michigan where he grew up. I’ve loved being his mother and it’s been wonderful to enter this new phase of our relationship where we’re writing children’s stories together. 

We’ve always enjoyed talking about books and watching and discussing movies, so being a writing team is a natural outgrowth of those experiences. Gabriel helped me make the book trailers for Lucky Broken Girl, Letters from Cuba, and Tía Fortuna’s New Home, so we’ve been collaborating for some time on projects relating to children’s literature, but now we’re writing books. 

He’s a terrific editor and has a great ear for dialogue, which come from his filmmaking experience, and I learn a lot from him and feel immensely proud that he is as passionate about storytelling as I am.

With Gabriel, you co-wrote the upcoming (Fall 2023) picture book, Pepita Meets Bebita. Please tell us a little about the story, and how you came to work with your son.

We are both so delighted about our upcoming picture book, Pepita Meets Bebita! The story emerged from the big change that took place in our lives when Gabriel became a dad and I became a grandmother in 2020, an event that brought light and hope to our family in the midst of the pandemic. But it also brought some confusion to the sweet little dog that Gabriel and his wife, Sasha, had treated as their “bebita” before they had a human baby girl.

I noticed that Pepita was looking rather sad once the baby arrived; they could no longer give her the same attention she’d received before because the baby took up all their time and energy.

It seemed there was a story to tell about transitions and rites of passage as a family integrates new members. I asked Gabriel if he wanted to write that story with me from the point of view of the dog, Pepita, and fortunately he said yes, and that’s how our collaboration came to be.

Here’s a blog post we wrote together about the experience of writing the book:

https://nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/2023/04/05/pepita-meets-bebita-how-this-mother-son-picture-book-came-to-be-by-ruth-behar-and-gabriel-frye-behar/

You also have a WIP middle grade Sephardic novel. It sounds very ambitious: four different characters from four different time periods, and from four different countries. How goes this project?

I am happy to say that this Sephardic novel, Across So Many Seas, is done! I feared I wouldn’t be able to write it but somehow I did. As you note, it takes place in four different time periods and in four different countries (Spain, Turkey, Cuba, and the U.S.) and is told from the point of view of four twelve-year-old characters, Benvenida, Reina, Alegra, and Paloma. 

You need to read to the very last page to see how it all comes together. My agent, Alyssa Eisner Henkin, says it’s like Alan Gratz’s Refugee (a book I love) but told entirely from the perspective of girls. The novel will be out in February 2024 with Nancy Paulsen Books.

One big reason I wished to reconnect was to examine your journey into children’s literature. Back in 2019, you were an acclaimed and published poet and anthropologist dabbling in middle grade fiction. Today, you have three titles published, with more in the pipeline. You have fully embraced the kidlit world, and it has embraced you back. What have you discovered since we last met?

Young Ruth 1996

I’ve discovered that I still have so many kidlit stories to tell and feel immense gratitude that I have been embraced by the kidlit world. Finding the child’s voice in my fiction has been a gift, a totally unexpected, beautiful gift. I marvel that children read the books I’ve written and find life lessons that uplift them. There’s nothing more amazing than having a young reader ask for sequels to my books because they want to continue being in the world of Ruthie in Lucky Broken Girl or Esther in Letters from Cuba.

I’ve witnessed firsthand how children experience the stories in books with such intensity, with the fullness of their hearts. I guess that’s why some adults want to ban books, because they can’t bear to see children engage with books so deeply. But that experience is one of the sacred wonders of childhood. I hope as a society we’ll find ways for children to read widely and diversely so they feel at home in our big wide world.

As a certified non-dancer, I am fascinated by those who lose themselves in the music. From that traumatic car accident which left you in a body cast for a year (from which arose Lucky Broken Girl), you worried that you might break your leg again. But you found the cha-cha and tango to be exhilarating. What is dancing to you?

Dancing is pure joy. Moving to music that I love allows me to forget all my worries and fears. In partner dancing, there is the beautiful trust that develops with another person, where you agree to move together through space for the length of a song. It’s magical when you and your partner understand each other and communicate without saying a word; at most, you both sing aloud the words to the song you’re dancing to. I am grateful for those moments. I feel I find that girl I was before the car accident, the girl who’s still intact, the girl who never broke a leg.

Please share any social media links:

Twitter: @ruthbehar

Instagram: @ruthbeharauthor

FB: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100058128067412 [official author page]

FB: https://www.facebook.com/ruth.behar/  [personal account]

 

Writer Spotlight: Ruth Behar Finds Herself

Charlie Barshaw coordinates our quarterly Writer Spotlight feature and interviews writers of SCBWI-MI. This month's writer is Ruth Behar.

Writer Spotlight: Ruth Behar Finds Herself

You were born in Havana, and your family emigrated to New York City when you were young. Learning the English language was difficult, especially since Spanish was primarily spoken in your home. Second-language students were shuttled to the “dumb class,” but you and your character Ruthie found a way to become “the smartest kid in the class.” Was it like throwing a person in deep water to teach them to swim?

The experience of being placed in the “dumb class” when we arrived in New York City was something I could never forget. That you could actually be penalized for speaking a different language seemed unjust to me even as a child. Learning to navigate a new language and a new culture is, indeed, like being thrown in deep water and figuring out how to swim. You’re drowning until you learn to keep your head above water. That’s what it’s like for most immigrants, who don’t have time to go to school. They learn English, as my parents did, by repeating words and phrases they hear at work, on TV, and on the street. But when you’re a kid, you want to learn English quickly so you can stand up for yourself in school. I remember how hard I studied until I was moved into a regular class. As happened to me, and as happens in Lucky Broken Girl, Ruthie becomes “the smartest kid in the class” because she’s had a year to think and read and study with a tutor. Though she suffers being stuck in bed, she improves her knowledge of English, math, and reading. Something good comes from something bad. Most important, she gains wisdom about life and death, learns to be compassionate toward others, and realizes she wants to be a writer and artist when she grows up.

Your life was changed irrevocably when your family was involved in a horrific car crash. Was anyone else injured in the accident?

Everyone suffered injuries in the accident. My father and brother needed stitches for wounds to their heads. My mother was scratched up from head to toe. My grandmother was so traumatized she had to take tranquilizers. I was asleep when the accident happened. I wasn’t able to brace myself and that may be why my leg fractured.

Your leg was fractured so severely that the doctors put you in a body cast in the hope that both of your legs would continue to grow at the same rate. The year you spent immobile changed your life. Can you explain?

After fleeing Cuba and starting a new life with my family, it was terrifying to suddenly not be able to move at all. What if another catastrophe struck? How would I get away? What would become of me? I had a great fear of abandonment, a huge sense of my vulnerability. I felt I had become a burden to my nomadic family and especially to my beautiful mother who had to take care of my needs while I was bedridden. That we all survived the experience was amazing. In the process, my life changed completely. I had been an active girl, always playing hopscotch. Afterwards I became a shy bookworm. I spent long periods alone, reading or daydreaming, as I had done when I was in bed for a year. My family worried about me; they thought I was too serious, too quiet. I was afraid to run, play sports, scared of breaking my leg again. I lived in my head and fantasized about one day being able to travel and have adventures—something I had longed for when I was immobile. That may be why I eventually became a cultural anthropologist.

Although Lucky Broken Girl is based on your life, the fiction allowed you to sculpt the details. Most importantly for the plot, you were able to introduce kind neighbor Chicho, who helps Ruthie to walk again through the magic of dance. After decades of writing anthropological facts, how did it feel to have your writing be constrained only by your imagination?

It was liberating and wildly exciting and healing to be constrained only by my imagination in writing Lucky Broken Girl. I had always heard about the power of fiction writers. It was only when I experienced it for myself that I finally understood the great magic that can be wielded by the pen. I had the power to embellish reality and make it sweeter than it had really been. I had the power to invent things that had never happened and make them seem utterly true. Words I wished had been said to me could be said at last and make my heart so happy.

You chose to go to Wesleyan University, even though your parents had a more traditional view of a young woman’s future in mind. Were you headstrong, or did you know in your soul that your future held more than raising a family?

I was headstrong and I also had a bit of faith I was going to do the things I dreamed of – write, travel, read a lot of books, and have a house of my own filled with books, art, and sunflowers.

I love the visual of a young freshman Ruth striding across campus grasping a guitar case, and adorned “in silky white blouses, wavy skirts, tall boots and wide-brimmed felt hats.” Had you found your identity in this new environment?

Thank you for reminding me of this! I love that visual too. Back then I was intensely into flamenco guitar and had spent a semester in Spain and had a very dramatic image of myself, nurtured by reading Lorca’s tragedies. I had found an identity I much preferred to the dutiful daughter I had been until then. I had left home and was on my way to becoming the educated and free-spirited woman I wanted to be.

You’ve had many mentors in your life, from the home-school tutor while you were bed-bound, to the Spanish couple in college, to the poet in Cuba, to the storied Dulce Maria Loynaz. Do you see yourself as especially blessed, or are you simply more aware and responsive to the influential people who touch your life?

Maybe I am always looking for teachers. I am restless and always trying to reinvent myself. Teachers have played a central role in my life since the days I was bed-bound to the present moment, when I’m trying to write fiction in my old age.

You despaired at writing poetry, met artist and poet Rolando Estevez, then edited a book of poetry and wrote the lyrical Everything I Kept. You’ve loved to read fiction while writing non-fiction, but broke through with the middle grade Lucky Broken Girl. Your character Ruthie would initially respond “I can’t” to challenges, but then do it. Is that your arc, too?

Now that you put it this way, I think the answer is yes. Everything is impossible until it’s possible.

As a young girl in a crowded New York walk-up apartment, you found your private space at the bottom of the long staircase. Now, after traveling the world, you make your home in Ann Arbor. How did Michigan become your home?

Michigan was a big surprise in my life. I came on a fellowship, married and pregnant with our son. I thought we’d be in Michigan for just three years. Then I was offered a job at the university in Ann Arbor and stayed and now it’s my home. But I’m always careful to say I’m not “from Michigan” but rather I live “in Michigan.” Even after more than thirty years in Michigan, I feel that people need to know I’m an immigrant in Michigan—an immigrant from Cuba and from New York.

In one of your blog posts, you describe the range of emotions that “Home” affords.

Home is that place to which you want to keep returning.

Home is that place to which you never again want to return.

Is home that complicated for you?

Yes, home is that complicated for me. Here I’m thinking of home as birth place and for me that is Cuba and it is complicated in that way – it’s a place I keep going back to, wanting to reclaim a home my family gave up, and it’s a place I sometimes think I should leave behind because it has caused so much sorrow to all of those who have left.

How fortuitous that you stumbled on a cultural anthropology class during your senior year. Luck or fate?

Maybe both? I was looking for an intellectual framework that could help me understand all the deep issues that were important to me – identity, belonging, and the search for home. I tried studying philosophy but was told I would never do well in that field because I lacked an analytical mind. I was devastated. Then I stumbled into a cultural anthropology class that questioned the universal truth of philosophy. The simple idea that there were a diversity of peoples and cultures in the world, with competing claims on the meaning of the truth, set me on my path as a traveler and writer.

You produced the documentary film Adio Kerida, and now your son has settled in New York as a filmmaker in his own right. How do you feel about the full circle of your life and his?

I think it’s a blessing that our lives are interconnected as mother and son and as thinkers and artists. He lives in New York where I grew up and I live in Ann Arbor where he was born. I look forward to the books he’s going to write and the films he’s going to make.

The accident changed your life. You still fear driving a car, and you found it difficult to trust your repaired leg for physical activity. Yet you’ve embraced dancing, especially salsa and cha-cha. What is it with dance that gives you such joy?

When I was growing up, there was dancing at parties, bar mitzvahs, and weddings. We were Cuban, after all! I was surrounded by lots of people who loved to dance. But after the accident I felt clumsy and was embarrassed to dance. When I was in my thirties, I finally began to do some dancing as part of an aerobics fitness class. That led me to take dance classes. I learned a Cuban style of line dancing called rueda de casino, which is so much fun, and learned the cha-cha, which had been a favorite dance of my parents. I also took up Argentine tango, which is filled with the saddest and most beautiful nostalgia. I adore the music of these dances and enjoy singing along to the lyrics as I dance. When you dance with a partner you have to communicate with each other without saying a word and that is magical. Being able to move around in space following the rhythm of the music is the closest I get to feeling like a pelican gliding over the sea waves.

You’ve mentioned in various interviews that you plan to keep mining your personal history for future children’s books. One was to be an account of your grandmother’s solo trip from Europe to Cuba, another a cousin’s emigration to the U.S. during the Castro revolution. What are you working on now?

I have just completed the book based on my grandmother’s solo trip from Europe to Cuba. It is an epistolary novel and tells the story of Esther, a Polish Jewish girl working with her father to make enough money to bring her four siblings, her mother, and her grandmother to Cuba in the late 1930s as conditions are worsening in Europe on the eve of the war. The story is an immigrant journey that takes place in an unusual setting, showing how penniless Jews searched for their America in Cuba at a time when the door to the United States was closed. I loved writing this novel in the form of letters and can’t wait to share it with kids. The book will be out in spring 2020 with Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. I am currently working on my first picture book, which is about a young girl’s love for a great-aunt who must leave her home by the sea.

Ruth Behar is an award-winning cultural anthropologist at the University of Michigan. Her published works include Translated Woman, Traveling Heavy and An Island Called Home. 

She won the 2018 Pura Belpre Award for Lucky Broken Girl. (For her You Tube video about receiving the winning phone call, click HERE. For her website, click HERE and for her blog, HERE).

Charlie Barshaw, pictured here with his wife, also Ruth, is a member of the SCBWI-MI Advisory Committee, is a proud contributor to The Mitten, and occasionally revises his YA novel.




Coming up on the Mitten blog: Our new Ask the Editor feature, more tips for Painless Self-Promotion, and interviews with our two mentors for the upcoming 2019-2020 Picture Book Text Mentorship Competition.

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Art by Dorothia Rohner