The Harry Spindel Memorial Lecture Presents Ruth Behar: "Jewish Latina Pilgrimages: Searching for the Past and Writing for the Present”
 

Meshing autoethnography, chronicles, poetry, and reflections on fictional stories, Ruth Behar will examine the theme of pilgrimages and the perpetual search for home that have characterized her journeys as a cultural anthropologist and a creative writer. Being a Cuban Jewish immigrant child in the United States, she was aware from an early age of exilic identity, but it was the discipline of anthropology that gave her a passport to go on exilic pilgrimages. This made it possible for her to engage with the world in the manner that exiles do—obsessively aware of impermanence and grateful for moments of connection. Behar will discuss her journeys to Spain, Mexico, and Cuba, as well as how the need to displace herself continues now in the world of the imagination, in the fiction that she is writing for young people on questions of history, culture, identity, and the poetics of home. 

Ruth Behar is an anthropologist and creative writer who is acclaimed for the compassion she brings to her quest to understand the depth of the human experience. She was born in Havana and has dedicated her scholarship to the Spanish-speaking world, carrying out research in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba that has yielded pioneering writing across disciplines and genres. She is the author of several books about her travels, including The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy, as well as a bilingual volume of poetry, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé, and an award-winning documentary, Adio Kerida, about the Sephardic Jews of Cuba. As a writer of fiction for young people, she has won acclaim for her middle grade novels, Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, and her picture books, Tía Fortuna’s New Home and Pepita Meets Bebita, coauthored with her son, Gabriel Frye-Behar. Her newest middle-grade novel, Across So Many Seas, a Sephardic story spanning five hundred years, has been described as “a moving historic tale that treats every word used as if it is a fleeting and impossibly beautiful note in a song that can never be forgotten.” The first Latina to be named a MacArthur “genius,” Behar has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Distinguished Alumna Award from Wesleyan University, and the Carnegie Corporation’s Great Immigrant Award. She is the James W. Fernandez Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Sponsored by the Harry Spindel Memorial Lecture Fund.

For more information, contact Jenn Berube at jberube@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3928.

Open to the public free of charge.

Livestream of this talk will be available on the Bowdoin Talks website.