ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question:  What did the rabbis encourage the women and children to do as they were leaving Spain for exile in 1492?

Ruth Behar is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She was born in Havana, Cuba to a Jewish-Cuban family of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry, and was five when her family immigrated to New York. She received her B.A. in Letters from Wesleyan University and then went on to receive an M.A. and PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton University.

Aside from her writings in anthropology, Ruth’s work includes poetry, memoir, and the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy.  She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and her other honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and being named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation.

Ruth has also written a number of books for young adults.  The first of these, Lucky Broken Girl, won the Pura Belpré Award in 2018. It was followed by Letters from Cuba and Across So Many Seas. She has also written two picture books for young children: Tia Fortuna’s New Home and Pepita Meets Bebita.  While all of these are fiction, they also have an important cultural component, so even the youngest children–and those who read to them–can learn about Sephardic food, customs, and even some words in Ladino.

This week we are speaking with Ruth about her latest book Across So Many Seas, which tells the story of four girls from different generations of a Jewish family, across five centuries and four countries. Although she wrote it with young teens in mind, it is also a captivating read for adults.  The Author’s Note and section on Sources at the end of the book give the reader additional historical and cultural background information, which supplements what we read about in the story itself.