XXXIX

The next day is surprisingly beautiful, not a cloud in the sky, the temperatures mild, the blue breeze from the ocean refreshing. I peer out the window of the barbacoa, wishing I was leaning out the balcony from my old family home instead. I glance up at it but its ledge is still troubled, the boards across its door still in place. From one floor down, I envy the panoramic view I know so well of Havana from there, alive with noise and sex, commerce and play.

In the distance, there’s the sound of laughter and the drone of airplanes coming in from Ottawa and Madrid, Kingston and Miami. Toni Braxton and the gentle sway of an early version of Compay Segundo’s “Chan Chan” compete for airtime from taxi-bound tape players and boom boxes placed on windowsills, entertaining the whole neighborhood. Laundry flaps from every window, white flags of worn cotton and the occasional pastels.

The man who sings tangos every night across the street from the Menachs emerges with his granddaughter from their home, each of them freshly showered and powdered. They look up, using their palms as protection against the sun, then wave in my direction. I motion back and watch them disappear down the lane, headed in the direction of the Malecón and its spicy spray.

On a sunny corner, a few adolescent boys approach anyone they don’t recognize, slyly asking them the time as an opening line. When the foreigners bite, asking in their stunted Spanish what they said, the boys descend, suddenly English-fluent (or not), volunteering themselves as guides, quickly offering to take them to a nearby home restaurant out of sight of the authorities, or just outright begging.

After a bit, I turn my attention next door again, focusing on a beaten old van just arrived. From its passenger side, a large, brawny man appears, his gestures tentative, while a roly-poly rust-colored woman jumps from behind the wheel and, after much effort, produces a folded up wheelchair from the back. I know immediately that the man is David, the man living in my family’s old apartment, and find my heart racing. He plops down in the wheelchair, smiling and gesturing to the neighbors who spill out to the street to welcome him from Trinidad. The rust-colored woman hovers shyly nearby, bunching the material of his shirt at the shoulders as she holds on to him. Everyone shakes her hand, kisses her cheek, or hugs her.

As bursts of light pop around the scene, I notice a young woman—Medusa-haired, caramel-kissed skin, her lips a perfect Cupid’s bow—snapping at the happy scene with an Instamatic. At one point, she looks up, almost as if she recognizes me at the window, but just as she’s about to wave—I’m stunned, I’m frozen in time—I hear behind me the impatient knocking of Moisés at the mouth of the barbacoa.

“Alejandra,” he yells up, “we have to go.”

“Go? Go where?” I ask, confused, rattled.

His hand reaches up, wraps itself around my wrist, and pulls until my face is positioned above him and Orlando, who is jangling a set of old and heavy keys.

“Now,” the old man says, his eyes as clear as I’ve ever seen.

In Cuba, there’s never much of a chance that sunset will catch anyone by surprise. It’s a long, poetic process, as if each hazy line of color on the horizon demands its own contemplation, its own verse. By the time night clamps down, it’s already late, midnight around the corner, epic.

But on the way into Old Havana in Orlando’s clean blue Moskvitch—Moisés uncharacteristically taking the passenger seat next to his son-in-law and forcing me into the back—all he can talk about is how important time is today, and how so much is still before us before night falls. I try to catch Orlando’s eye in the rearview mirror, but he avoids me, just the slightest smile drawing his generous lips.

When the car finally stops, no one needs to tell me where we are. I know instantly that the dilapidated storefront on the narrow old-world street of the colonial quarters is Chevet Ahim. We disembark and Orlando struggles with the set of keys at the rusty and giant shuttered door, then finally pushes it open with a shove from his shoulder.

In truth, Chevet Ahim is only the second floor. The first floor may have been a private residence once, it’s hard to tell; it disappears behind the large, imposing stairway that leads up, above the high ceilings so typical of early-twentieth-century Spanish architecture. The walls were once whitewashed a blush of rose or yellow, but they’re now streaked and chipped. When we reach the top—we climb with only a bit of small-talk, all of us suddenly afflicted with a curious timidity and embarrassment—we find ourselves in front of a long counter that looks suspiciously like a bar.

“It’s exactly what it seems,” says Moisés, reading my mind and spinning slowly to survey the area. “We used to sell cold beer here. There were also rocking chairs, and tables on which to play dominoes. Of course, it’s a bit disagreeable, on your way to worship, to pass by people drinking. But it wasn’t always like that, only later, when we needed to make a little money in order to keep up the place.”

He continues down a narrow balcony on which the metal railing is green with mold and looks like it could fall apart with a breath. His pants legs flap against his bones as he walks, his steps uneven, threatening to miss and throw him from the balcony. Orlando and I follow him unsteadily, past a couple of doors that look like offices and an open-air kitchen, then finally we come to what was the first synagogue in Cuba.

“Look, no foreigners!” Moisés says with a certain bitterness. He turns to me. “Imagine, if you will, this space as a place of prayer. The bima was at the center, with wooden chairs all around, and an oil lamp above. The men would sit around the bima, the women to one side, raised a bit from the floor and separated by a little wooden banister. The ark would be here,” he says, standing just off where the hazzan might have once stood, his voice soaring in ancient song. “There’s no place else like it in Cuba. I suppose, in a way, that it echoes medieval times, maybe Spain, maybe Palestine. I don’t know. Whenever I came here, I always felt transported.”

As he speaks, the afternoon light streams through dusty stained-glass portals on the walls. Moisés turns his face to its warmth, letting it bathe his brown cheeks, the ashen pools under his eyes. Orlando looks at his shoes, then at the ceiling, everywhere but at us.

“Services here were in Hebrew,” Moisés continues, remembering with a sad smile. “Although, of course, all the community bulletin announcements were in Spanish. A few ritual songs were occasionally sung in Ladino, but much less so after your great-grandfather Ytzak died.”

“These songs . . . how did . . . they were passed down . . . ?” I ask, amazed at Ytzak’s persistence, at the inheritance I might have lost. In the background, I hear Orlando now rummaging through one of the other rooms.

“Oh, no,” Moisés says with a laugh. “He might have known maybe a couple growing up but, you see, after he found out . . . after he came to Havana, he went through everything. He read, he studied. He was voracious. He could have been a rabbi, he was so ardent about it all, but it was mostly new knowledge—indeed, I think that was part of his zeal. To be honest, Alejandra, I’m not sure he knew for a fact he was Jewish growing up, just different somehow. It all clicked for him here, when he met some American Jews.”

About then, Orlando appears with a pair of wooden chairs and sets them up for us in the center of the room. “Here,” he says humbly, then steps back and away. “I’ll wait downstairs,” he adds, raising the keys to show us he’s still got them.

Moisés extends his hand in a gentlemanly fashion, suggesting I sit down. When I hesitate, he forgoes chivalry and settles himself in the other chair. He lowers his eyelids slowly, then raises them again with that regal patience.

“Sit, sit,” he says in a whisper. “I’ve got a story to tell you.”

According to Moisés Menach, when my great-grandfather Ytzak arrived in Havana in 1932 with my father in tow, it was a much changed city since his last stay. There was a dictatorship, there was an official brutality. Since most of the anti-Machado terrorism exploded in and near Old Havana, the traditionally Jewish neighborhood, repression there was especially savage. The American Jewish community tended to stay away, conducting their own services, concerned mostly with their own situation, embarrassed by the natives.

Hurt by their indifference but undaunted, Ytzak went about the process of Judaizing young Enrique. He enrolled him at the Teodoro Herzl school, and took him to see plays and recitals at the Kultur Farain. They not only went to Shabbat services but to morning prayers. Young Enrique, it turned out, became more versed in Jewish prayer and rite than the vast majority of Jews in Cuba.

“He had a pretty good working knowledge of Hebrew,” Moisés says. “I don’t know if you knew . . .”

“No, no,” I answer from my haze, “he never said, I never knew.”

Later, for fun, Ytzak signed him up for the Asociacíon Deportiva Macabí, a Sephardic sports club.

“My father?” I ask, surprised. “Moisés, my father hated athletics. Are you sure?”

“They had a chess club,” he says with a chuckle. “He was on that team.”

According to Moisés, these were the years of the Great Depression, a global economic crisis that seriously affected the island. In response, Cuba implemented a series of xenophobic labor laws that eventually served as a foundation for a fierce and increasingly dangerous anti-Semitic campaign.

“Wait a minute . . . what I’ve always heard is that Cuba has always been tolerant of Jews . . .” I say.

Moisés nods. “Sure, the average Cuban, yeah. But not in the thirties, not when your father was in Havana as a boy. I’m certain you never heard him say Cuba was tolerant. I’d be shocked if you had.”

I think long and hard. I try to imagine him here, in this holy space where we’re sitting, but I realize immediately this is another one of those long stretches in his life my father never talked about.

“In the thirties, just about every newspaper in town, except Ortiz’s Ultra, was on an anti-Semitic campaign,” says Moisés, “especially the Diario de la Marina. I don’t know why, what prompted the gentleman who ran it to write the things he did, but he was adamantly against Jewish immigration, and he was constantly threatening that a Jewish presence in Cuba undermined national sovereignty and native culture. It was a nightmare.”

It didn’t help that when Jews established themselves in business, they were often competing in the same trades and neighborhoods as the old Spanish guard in Cuba, much of which had Fascist tendencies. In 1936, sympathizers of Spanish fascism founded the Cuban Falangist Party; two years later, the Cuban Nazi Party was born with the tacit approval of Batista, who held the reins of power extra-officially as head of the army. (The Cuban population as a whole, however, was much more impassioned about the other side, sending more than a thousand volunteers to fight in the anti-Franco ranks.)

“The Nazis had a daily radio show,” remembers Moisés. “It was an hourly anti-Jewish tirade every single day, which would then get repeated in the papers. Every day you could find this idiot—his name was Juan Prohías—passing out anti-Jewish pamphlets by the Malecón. There was lots of espionage in those days, too. Eventually, a German spy was uncovered, and because Batista had joined the war on the American side by then, he had him shot by a firing squad. You can imagine your father, though. I mean, I loved him but he was, you know, a timid sort, easily frightened.”

For Ytzak, it was all too much. This was his city, his Zion, his place of salvation. And he had waited so long to return, to have a chance to discover and be himself. He had yearned for too many years to just back away now—just because of these ugly, ignorant thugs. He was determined to not let them stop him, not let them intimidate him.

He decided to answer the taunts by throwing his Jewishness in everyone’s face, just in case anyone had any doubts. When invited to dinner, he would loudly explain why he couldn’t eat so that even the neighbors heard about kosher laws. When asked out on Friday nights, he would submit his friends to long, overwrought explanations of Shabbat celebrations and their importance. On the streets, he didn’t just respond to insults, he could also be alarmingly provocative. He matched every jeer by Nazi sympathizers, who were growing quite bold in the city in those days. After a while, he wore a yarmulke and tried to get Enrique to do the same, but the boy resisted.

One day, walking in Vedado, they walked past a house displaying a red-and-black Nazi flag, and to my father’s horror, the old man pulled it down off the pole and had just begun to unhook it when the residents of the house—burly German immigrants with ham hocks for arms—proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him.

“And my father?” I ask, dreading his answer.

“They got him, too,” Moisés says. “He was sixteen or seventeen then, I don’t remember. They were just punks, really, but there were so many of them. Your father ended up in a coma in the hospital. I know this because he almost died. Ytzak had no choice but to send word to Oriente. I came with your grandparents to the city, because they were just falling apart and couldn’t really do anything for themselves.”

Suddenly I remember my father’s face the day the Berlin Wall fell, how the young neo-Nazis had caused him to tremble in fear. My own hands are shaking now. I tell Moisés I can’t hear any more, I can’t process the information.

He reaches up to my cheeks, which are wet from tears, and cradles my face in his hands. “You have to,” he says. “I don’t have much time to tell you the rest before it gets dark.”

As the light changes, the multicolored portals aim beams at the western walls of Chevet Ahim. Moisés plucks the photograph I gave him from his shirt pocket.

“Who is she?” I ask impatiently.

He shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think your father even knew her name.”

“What . . . ?” I’m so confused, I get up, start pacing. My footsteps echo in this ancient place. “Then . . . ?”

He tells me that in 1939, after my father and Ytzak had recovered from the thrashing at the hands of the local Nazis, the Cuban Jewish community was undergoing a massive transformation. Hundreds of European refugees were landing almost weekly in Havana, jamming cruise ships from Hamburg and other German ports and using usually illegally acquired permits to gain entry to Cuba.

My great-grandfather Ytzak had become involved through his beloved American Jewish friends—finally awakened to the need to do something—in helping spring the interned refugees from Tiscornia, Cuba’s answer to Ellis Island, and assisting them in finding housing and temporary, usually under the table, jobs (one of the conditions of their stay was that they couldn’t work, potentially stealing a position from a native Cuban). Needless to say, he’d recruited a reluctant Enrique, then a strapping eighteen-year-old but shy and even a little slow in many ways, into the cause.

“You have to understand, Cuba was very corrupt then, but it was a corruption that was saving lives, so nobody said anything, everybody just went along,” Moisés explains. “And then, well, then there was the St. Louis.”

“Yeah, I’ve read about it,” I tell him as I try sitting down again. “There’s a book, Voyage of the Damned, and a movie, too, one of Or-son Welles’s last.”

“So you know what happened—how Cuba refused to let the refugees disembark; how the Cubans suddenly couldn’t be bribed, there wasn’t enough money in America to satisfy these bastards; and how the ship had to wander from port to port, eventually being forced back to Europe. Many of the passengers ended up in concentration camps where most of them didn’t survive the war.”

I take the photo from his hand. “Is this girl from the St. Louis?”

Moisés nods. “When the ship was docked here—it was out on the bay for almost a week—your father was helping with mail and taking papers out there and stuff. He’d row a boat out and, with the passengers’ relatives who were already here, he’d toss up cans of food, that sort of thing. One day he managed to get about a half dozen pineapples up to the ship, a real delicacy for the Europeans. He was very proud of himself. The girl was someone he saw there, someone, I think, who noticed him, someone he had a fantasy about. Maybe you could call it love; he did, he kept telling me he was in love. It was the first time I ever heard him say such a thing.”

She might have been pretty, I think as I look at her in the blurry photograph. She might have been smart and funny, someone with whom he could laugh, with whom he could find comfort. “They never spoke?”

“Not that I know of,” says Moisés.

A few passengers were able to get off the St. Louis in Havana— some had legal permits, others had mysterious connections (it’s said that the influential crypto-Jewish Maduro family saved its relatives but that’s never been proven)—but most were defenseless, waiting and waiting for help that never came. During the ship’s stay in Havana, it became unbearable for many; at least two passengers tried to commit suicide. When the ship finally pulled up its anchor, a great wail came from the ocean liner as well as the shore.

“Your father followed the journey on the news, listening to the radio for every report,” Moisés says. “When the ship got to Miami Beach—they said the refugees were so close they could see the beach, could wave to the sunbathers on Fourteenth Street— he thought for sure they were saved. He’d managed to get a copy of the passenger list and he sat patiently waiting for the Americans to announce who got to stay—he was sure maybe a couple of hundred of the nearly one thousand passengers would get in. But instead, the Americans sent out the Coast Guard to make sure nobody jumped overboard, and to keep the ship sailing along.”

“This explains so much,” I tell Moisés, recalling our own arrival. I imagine my father’s young heart broken, his alienation, all his fears simmering on the surface. “Cuba was such an open wound to him . . .”

“Hmm . . .” says Moisés as he gets up and stretches. He’s so thin, he seems like a brittle skeleton inside his clothes. “But there’s something else. And this one’s a little harder to tell.”

He steps outside the worship area, breathes deeply, then leans on the balcony’s railing for a second, but when it begins to give, he lets go. Pebbles echo as they land on the courtyard below. I sit and wait for him to come back, rubbing his palms together, running his fingers through what’s left of his once raven hair.

“Please . . .” I say, “just tell me . . .”

After the St. Louis sailed back to Europe, my father was despondent. He was also enraged, feeling betrayed at every turn. Why had Ytzak brought him to Havana? How could he have thought that being a Jew could possibly be a good thing? If he loved him so much, how could he have exposed him to so much hatred and pain? Enrique and Ytzak fought constantly, arguments full of bitterness, nasty words, and recriminations. Maybe his parents, back in the blameless wilderness of Oriente, had had the better idea after all.

“Long after the St. Louis incident—long after the war—there was a lot of international condemnation, a lot of guilt, really,” Moisés explains. “But the Cuban authorities never apologized, they never looked back. And that gave confidence to the Nazis, who began to appear in the Diario de la Marina ’s society pages, well-appointed men and women stupidly giving the Nazi salute for the cameras. I’ve always wondered how they imagined they fit into the Nazi plan . . . if they were so deluded they really didn’t realize that, eventually, they’d be joining the Jews in the gas chambers.”

One day in December in 1939, just six months after the St. Louis debacle, Enrique was wandering down Trocadero to just where it became Tejadillo at Prado, which was full of noise and people shouting. Distracted by the beautiful shimmering blue of the ocean nearby, he was swallowed by the mob, realizing much too late that the gathering was a demonstration by Cubans and Spaniards snapping their hands in the air to the rhythm of a sharp Nazi beat.

Bewildered and terrified, Enrique stumbled and fell, only to be yanked back on his feet by a flushed-faced young man who laughed good-naturedly at his clumsiness. Then a speaker boomed something through a megaphone that caused the young man who’d helped him to stiffen and hurl a salutation to the Führer. Like the others around them, he was wearing a swastika on his bicep. As soon as he relaxed his arm, he noticed Enrique’s panicked expression.

“What’s the matter with you?” the young man said, giving Enrique a light shove that thrust him against another young Nazi.

The second young man turned around, his face distorted and cruel as he looked down at the skittish Enrique, whom he shoved right back. “Weakling,” he hissed. “As soft and gawky as a Jew!”

That was all the crowd needed to hear. Immediately, they began circling a shaking, sweat-drenched Enrique. “No, no,” he protested in meek defense. “I . . . I’m not . . .”

But just then, the speaker spewed forth another forceful declaration and the Nazi boys turned away for just a second, their arms like javelins. “Heil Hitler!” they screamed, their mouths red, the veins on their heads threatening to burst.

And then my father, in a moment of complete desperation, threw his own arm toward the fiery tropical sun and joined in the chorus: “Heil Hitler!” he shrieked, then ran and ran through the streets of Old Havana, down Amargura and Luz and Inquisidor, his throat burning, hating himself, eventually swooning in the doorway of the kosher cafeteria on Muralla Street run by Moisés’s uncle.