Traveling Heavy

Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba. She and her family moved to New York City when she was five. In the years since, she has become an internationally acclaimed writer and the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of many books, including An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba; The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart; and Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In addition to her work as an anthropologist, Behar is a poet, a fiction writer, and a documentary filmmaker. She wrote, directed, and produced Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love), a film that has been shown at film festivals around the world. Behar has been honored with many prizes, including a MacArthur "Genius" Award.

"Traveling Heavy is the product of a poetic mind, and the work itself can be regarded as prose poetry. Behar has not recovered from her ‘interrupted childhood’ in Havana, and it is this tragedy that makes her who she is, that shapes the ghosts she pursues, that has guided her steps as a subjective anthropologist; and that is able to offer the reader a smorgasbord of literary delights." - Marion Fischel (Jerusalem Post) “A heartfelt witness to the changing political and emotional landscape of the Cuban-American experience.” (Kirkus Reviews) “A moving story of finding oneself through a lifetime of travel, this will be a terrific addition to memoir and Judaica collections.” - Olga Wise (Library Journal) “All those intrigued by their ancestral story will be moved by the personal quest and also by how-with the help of computers as well as the kindness of strangers-the lost can find their way home.” - Hazel Rochman (Booklist) “So much of Ruth Behar’s life story resonates with me. My mother is Cuban, and to paraphrase Winston Churchill, I may be half Cuban and half American, but there are so many times I feel completely Cuban. When I finally went to Cuba last fall, it was like returning to a place to which I had never been. I am the Cubana that Ruth Behar describes in her fascinating new memoir, Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys,’ one that is part of an ‘intensely diasporic people.’” - Judy Bolton-Fasman (Boston Globe) “In writing, the distance between the world and the self collapses, and the latter becomes a medium through which the former can be understood; the world becomes a function of the self. Thus, writing becomes the solution to the search for identity. Like Kafka, Behar takes part in self-creation. Through the act of composing a memoir about her search, she writes t  Add  he lost homeland and the lost self into existence.” - Jane Shmidt (Bookslut) “Ruth Behar’s latest work, Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys, is a book filled with grace; it is anthropologically contoured text that has legs.  It has breadth, for its compelling narratives will attract a diverse audience of readers who will pour through the pages, delighting in the poignant details underscored by Behar’s life as a person who travels with burdens of past and present.  It also has depth, for Traveling Heavy is a book that will remain open to the world, a work that will be savored for many years to come.” - Paul Stoller (Anthropological Research) “Cuban-American anthropologist Ruth Behar avoids the polarizing politics so typical of Cuban exiles to write an affecting memoir about how notions of home and displacement in relation to the Cuban revolution have shaped her life, and describes the experiences of finding her 'own' Cuba, a version of the island that differs from that of her parents and their generation of exiles. Behar’s memoir will be of particular interest to Jewish readers, as she recounts her family’s search for safety and home in Cuba and the changing identity of Cuba’s own Jewish community over the years since the revolution.” - Julie Schwietert Collazo (The Guardian) "Traveling Heavy is an engaging read whether you’re approaching it as a memoir of the influential storyteller and anthropologist Ruth Behar; a set of vignettes about belonging while living through hybridity as a Jewish Cuban American woman whose family emigrated from Spain and Poland; or a place-based ethnography teasing out the everydayness of moving through space . . . . For academics, and for feminist geographers in particular, it is one of those books that makes you think about how space and place are implicated both in the way we journey through the world and the way we think about it. If you think about any of these things, Traveling Heavy is well worth the read." - Pamela Moss (Gender, Place & Culture)

• Part One: Family The Key to the House Learning English with Shotaro El Beso A Shepardi Air The Book The Day I Cried at Starbucks on Lincoln Road A Tango for Gabriel A Degree in Hard Work La Silla Part Two: The Kindness of Strangers From Those Who Don't Forget You A Gift from the Women of Mexquitic The First World Summit of Behars Unexpected Happiness in Poland Part Three: Cuban Goodbyes The Freedom to Travel Anywhere in the World Cristy Always Prays for My Safe Return An Old Little Girl Acknowledgments