It’s a song that Ruth Behar has never been able to shake from her mind. A Sephardi lyricist writes a lament for a way of life left behind and a woman’s soulful voice sings the sad, angry truth of separation and loss.
As the melody completes its travels up and down a bitter minor key, the unknown songwriter’s words are simple: “Adio, Kerida.” (“Goodbye, my love.”)
The songwriter has given a voice to homesickness by imagining home as a lover.
Expressing this yearning for home and memories has been a big part of Behar’s life work — a search she finds mysterious, frustrating and inspiring.
She displays her emotions in her new documentary film, “Adio Kerida,” which was screened Thursday at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael during the sixth annual Bay Area Latino Film Festival. The film may also appear as part of next year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
“Adio Kerida” records Behar’s journey to rebuild her family’s connections with Cuba — the island where she was born and then left while still a small child.
“Adio Kerida” (not to be confused with the Bosnian film of the same name) is Behar’s first documentary, and one especially close to her heart. With no memory of the Cuba she left, Behar has been forced to recreate those memories on her own.
Born to parents of mixed Jewish descent (her mother was Sephardi, her father Ashkenazi), Behar was whisked away to New York City in the early ’60s, as part of a larger movement of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
With a sense of displacement, Behar became an anthropologist and now teaches anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has built a distinguished career as a poet, essayist and ethnographer, receiving a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Guggenheim award.
In between, Behar has made dozens of trips back to Cuba. “I have a whole fantasy of the parallel life that I might have had in Cuba,” says Behar, a life that would have been full of curious contradictions.
The island’s first wave of Jewish migration came in the mid-1920s, as tens of thousands of European Jews arrived in Latin America.
While many industrialized countries, including the United States, were closing their borders to Jews, or enacting quotas, many Latin American leaders were hoping to “whiten” their populations with Eastern European blood — which, ironically, brought in many Turkish Sephardim to Cuba.
Cuba’s Jewish population peaked in the 1940s at around 20,000. Many earned a living in the thriving business world the communist regime sought to dismantle. When Castro took power, an estimated 90 percent of Cuba’s Jews fled.
Like all faiths in Cuba, Judaism suffered under a ban against organized religion during communism’s first three decades. Synagogues fell apart, lifecycle events were overlooked and holy days went unacknowledged as Jews put their energies into uniting with the Cuban mainstream.
The air began to clear in the late ’80s, as Castro recognized the important role that religious identity could play in bringing aid to the island and opening borders. Since then, with the help of Jewish aid groups such as B’nai B’rith, the Canadian Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish community in Cuba has begun a painstaking rehabilitation.
Today about 1,500 Jews remain in Cuba, the majority living in Havana, where four synagogues serve as the community’s central sites and the renovated Conservative El Patronato serves as a sort of community center.
But after four decades of yielding to the greater glory of state politics, publicizing one’s Jewish identity doesn’t turn many heads in Cuba. Most locals couldn’t care less.
On her early visits to Cuba, Behar has found this lackadaisical approach to identity politics refreshing — especially considering her ambivalence about Judaism.
“I wanted simply to be a Jew in Cuba and not have to explain my identity to anyone,” she says. “I found that the combination of Cuban pluralistic tolerance and revolutionary secularism made it easy to be a Jew in Cuba. I could openly say I was Jewish to any and every Cuban.”
As she began production on “Adio Kerida,” Behar planned to focus on Cuba alone. But it soon became clear that she needed to expand her focus to tell the full story of her family’s past. Eventually she added footage of Cuban Jews in Miami and New York, including her father, who initially refused to participate.
Among the other characters in “Adio Kerida” is Miguelito, a street drummer who bangs a makeshift drum kit and yearns to go to Israel. Behar captures his anxiety when the opportunity to make aliyah eventually arises. With his dream at hand, the thought of leaving Cuba is terrifying.
Behar also puts herself in the film and records many of her own emotional reactions to her exploration. As a postmodern anthropologist trained to avoid cultural exploitation, she brings a refreshing honesty to the current bumper crop of Cuban cultural exports.
Former Cuban residents are now permitted to return once a year to provide humanitarian assistance. Faith-based organizations enjoy the same privileges.
Whether Behar will return permanently to Cuba, it is still too soon to say. Her repeated visits have certainly made her feel more at home on the island, and her father’s acquiescing to a role in “Adio Kerida” was a substantial breakthrough. But some wounds take longer to heal than others.