Hotel Cuba by Aaron Hamburger
This novel is an odyssey of a kind, focused on the women of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe – a bit of Russia that transformed into a bit of Poland by means of bloody conflict – who make their way in ones and twos across the ocean to America. Pearl, who incarnates this story, is forced to choose to travel with her sister Frieda to Havana when their trip, already underway, has to be aborted or transformed due to changes in immigration law in the United States. Much of the novel takes place in a kind of Yiddish Cuba, in which Pearl survives in a community of other immigrants. Cuba here has become a halfway house to America, full of anxious exiles desperate to make their way into Florida. The real story is Pearl’s transformation from a frightened girl to a woman made of bedrock, one who fears little and faces change after change while setting her sights on a future in which she is free. She is no more certain what that means than we are today, but she is sure that she will recognize her freedom when she finds it. The writer’s prose is as good as anything I’ve read, and the story is a quiet, steady, transformational delight. The book evokes Cuba in the twenties, prohibition New York, and young Detroit with equal ease and detail, and the historical aspect of the fiction is sure-handed and convincing. Best of all is the nuance of Pearl, the loving portrait of the author’s grandmother, pulled from family stories and written with wonderful authority. This is one of those reading experiences I can treasure for a while before moving on to the next.