Jubana! Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
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    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