According to Gigi Anders, when you're a Jubana in America, or a Cuban Jewess in the U.S. of A.!, you have to know you're heading straight into the mondo-bizarro jaws of cross-cultural hell -- 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. It's enough to make a Jubana hurl herself onto the couch of the nearest psychoanalyst.
As the granddaughter of Eastern European and Russian shtetl-reared grandparents who immigrated as teenagers in the early 1920s to the fierce tropical beauty of Cuba, Anders is heir apparent to a legacy of transatlantic alienation. With dazzling wit and hilarity mined from the depths of loss and yearning, Anders chronicles her journey from beach baby to ostracized exile to vibrant intellectual, along the way balancing her obsession with killer outfits and zaftig, orgasmic Cuban meals with the more serious pursuits of love, sanity, and lipstick in perfect siren red.
Whether dealing with her larger-than-life Mami Dearest, her youthful obsessions with Twiggy and Nancy Sinatra, the specter of Fidel Castro's role in her destiny, or her time at the exclusive and Waspy Sidwell Friends private school in Washington, D.C., Anders leads readers on a trip through what it means to be truly unique and just what lengths people will go to in order to be accepted.
Jubana! is ultimately a bittersweet, quirky, feminine story of bicultural acceptance and fusion, written with warmth, vivacity, and finally layered with the thoughtful sensitivity of a woman who has kept herself, like a great piece of jewelry, pure and brilliant -- through all that life throws at her.
It's the classic Latina position: Be pretty, get married, and shut the fuck up.
I am not a classic Latina.
I am a Jubana, a Cuban Jewess.
And when you're a bride-to-be Jubana, you have to know you're heading straight into the mondo bizarro jaws of crosscultural hell. Especially if, like me, you're an only child (which I am, except for my two American-born younger brothers). My mother, Ana, also a Cuban-born only daughter with two brothers, was treated by her indulgent parents like the quintessential Jewish Cuban Princess (JCP) she was and would always be, Fidel Castro's revolution be damned. The princess royal's parents, Boris and Dora, had emigrated as destitute teenagers from Russia and Lithuania to Cuba in the early 1920s. And just like my Polish-born paternal grandparents, Leon and Zelda, they spoke Yiddish and Hebrew with Cuban accents, Spanish with Yiddish accents, and English with Yiddish-Cuban accents.
Boris, born Boruch Benes, was a self-made man and Reform Jew. He started out selling handkerchiefs, bolts of lace, and fabrics, and eventually became the wildly prosperous owner of Camisetas Perro (literally translated, Dog Undershirts -- it sounds way better in Español), sort of the Victoria's (and Victor's) Secret of its day. He and Dora threw their only daughter the grandest marital bash of that winter season. At my mother's 1954 December wedding in Havana there were 750 guests. That's muchos silk undies. (Think wedding in Goodbye, Columbus, only everyone sounded like Ricky Ricardo or Ricky Ricardo with a Yiddish accent.) Mami's only job on that day was to show up in perfect makeup; a heavy, white, hand-embroidered velvet dress; smile; and do whatever she was told. Which she did. She agreed to have virtually zero input but her attractive presence and choice in groom.
But I've examined Mami's hand-tinted bridal portrait in my parents' Silver Spring, Maryland, living room. I know what really lies behind the twenty-one-year-old bride's crimson-colored smile.
"I'm goheengh to get joo, sohkehr."
The "joo" would be . . . who? My father? Well, that was a given.My father, David, has never been able to say the word no to mymother. Indeed, that was a very strong selling point to get him onher short list. Because in case of doubt, worship works on JCPs.
Was I the sohkehr she was gonna get? Probably, though Iwasn't born yet. Mami always said that until she had me, shecould wear bikinis. Thanks to me, she, who was otherwise beautifuland perfect, was deesfeegur-ed with ugly, permanent stretchmarks, and forever relegated to maillots.
That is hard-core guilt. That is the classic Jewish way. Bealive and be guilty -- over what exactly, no one knows and it reallydoesn't matter anyway. Just be it.
As a result of the disfigurement and due to the presence of my vulva instead of (the infinitely more desirable, powerful, valuable, and superior) penis, I was subjected -- just as Mami had been back in her day -- to control and guilt, the respective Latin and Jewish mega-bullies. Not that any of us are bitter or anything.
Now, intellectually, we all in my family realize we've been out of Cuba, our homeland, for well over forty years. We understand things have, you know, changed. Today's typical bride is well past twenty-one and is the primary choreographer of her own damn wedding. The parents' primary contribution is to pay for some or all of it and to consider that payment a gift.
Under normal circumstances, with at least seminormal parents (i.e., parents who aren't the children of Cuban Jews and didn't experience in their own lives yet another generation of political/emotional/geographic dislocation at a tender age, and who, as a result, are terminally...
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