I HAVE BEEN fortunate to be able to spend many years researching the stories of the Jews of Cuba. To write this novel, I also drew upon inspiration and historical insight gained from the work of many scholars and writers. Here are a few recommended titles for further reading.
CHILDREN’S NOVELS
Margarita Engle, Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (New York: Henry Holt, 2009).
Alan Gratz, Refugee (New York: Scholastic, 2017).
Karen Hesse, Letters from Rifka (New York: Henry Holt, 1992).
Lois Lowry, Number the Stars (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989).
CUBAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE
Alan Astro, ed., Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).
Ruth Behar, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
Margalit Bejarano, The Jewish Community of Cuba: Memory and History (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2014).
Armando Lucas Correa, The German Girl: A Novel (New York: Atria Books, 2016).
Robert M. Levine, Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).
Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
Joseph M. Murphy, Santería: African Spirits in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
Fernando Ortiz, Defensa cubana contra el racismo antisemita, por la Asociación Nacional Contra las Discriminaciones Racistas (Revista Bimestre Cubana 44, no. 3, June 1939): 97–107.
Leonardo Padura, Heretics (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017).
Felicia Rosshandler, Passing Through Havana: A Novel of a Wartime Girlhood in the Caribbean (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983).
JEWISH HISTORY
Gur Alroey, Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters from Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011).
Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).
Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York: Schoken Books, 1983).
Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman, Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).