A Conversation With Felicia Rosshandler
Sarah Frank:
Your novel Passing through Havana: A novel of Wartime Girlhood in the Caribbean, published in 1984 by St. Martin’s in New York, is currently out of print. Could you talk a bit about the history of the novel’s publication and reception, both in the United States and Cuba? Any current plans to put it back into print?
Felicia Rosshandler:
When I think back, I realize that I was fortunate in l984 to catch the tail end of publishing as it used to be, a time when the industry was still a cross-eyed creature with one eye on literature and the other on profit. Today, I’m afraid, the latter holds sway and what doesn’t sell well doesn’t seem to have a right to exist. Perhaps publications like Otium are the new home for meaning.
SF:
As much of the drama in Passing Through Havana turns on Claudia’s conflicted relationship with her mother, Suze, so your piece, “Roberto Melendez A.K.A. Esteban Martinez,” reflects on your decision to eroticize her behavior. I’m wondering, when you first conceived of the novel, if that was an original premise. Did you say, okay, I’m going to write a novel about my mom, or did that conflict just come naturally? Also, was your mother’s reaction to the novel — either real or fantasized — something that ever entered into the calculus of writing it?
FR:
My publisher, St. Martin’s Press, made every effort to get Passing Through Havana widely reviewed and after that the book belonged to the reader as much as to the writer. Some saw it as a bildungsroman, others as a saga of Jewish wandering, still others as a portrait of ancient regime Cuba. Many were struck by the stunning portrait of the mother, others focused on the mother/daughter relationship. A few understood that the bittersweet love affair with Dieter dealt with “loving the enemy” and identifying with the conqueror. Others found this upsetting and rejected it as a manifestation of self-hatred. I want to believe that it is its polysemic nature that keeps the book alive today, twenty years later.
During a visit to Havana in 2003, Adelaida de Juan, who is also Jewish and the wife of the Cuban critic and poet Roberto Retamar, recalled that we had both attended St. George’s School in Havana. We talked about the old days and I told her that I had included them in my book. I also mentioned that The Jewish Center in Havana, “El Patronato,” owns copies of Passing Through Havana and circulates them around as it is the only book, as far as I know, that personalizes the Jewish European presence in Cuba during World War II. Back in the nineties, the film director Tomas Gutierrez Alea had seen in Passing Through Havana the possibility of presenting two worlds, the exile community and the rhythm of life before the Revolution which he and I, being contemporaries, had experienced. We found a producer and had a screenplay well underway when, sadly, Titon died and the project with him (for the moment).
Passing Through Havana is on the reading list at a number of American universities. Seen through the sensibility of a young girl, it offers students an oblique approach to the Holocaust as well as to the incipient Cuban Revolution. One of the book’s characters, Alejandro, could be Fidel Castro in his student days. In fact, Alejandro was Fidel’s nom de guerre.
SF:
The reference to The Phil Donahue Show in your piece, “Roberto Melendez A.K.A. Esteban Martinez,” reminded me of “The Promiscuous Self” chapter of Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book in which author Walker Percy pits an episode of Donahue as a “thought experiment” to reflect on the following paradox:
“Why is it that One’s Self often not only does not prefer Sex with one’s Chosen Mate, Chosen for His or Her Attractiveness and Suitability, even when the Mate is a Person well known to one, knowing of one, loved by one, with a Life, Time, and Family in common, but rather prefers Sex with a New Person, even a Total Stranger, or even Vicariously through Pornography”
Given the exploration of Suze’s affairs in Passing Through Havana, and your decision to appear on The Phil Donahue Show, could you comment on Mr. Percy’s paradox? This might hinge on whether Donahue really did zoom in on the “sensational” drama in the novel?
FR:
You know, the turn of the book, in exposing the paradoxes of such a primal mother/daughter relationship, took me by surprise as well. Above all, I wanted to bear testimony to those who, while “saved” from extermination, suffered loss and dislocation as a result of Hitler’s devilish scheme. In describing Claudia’s double alienation, through adolescence and uprooting, I wanted to speak for all those who escaped the holocaust only to wash up on strange shores, be it in Shanghai, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, Dominican Republic and, of course, Cuba. Many lives were shattered by these forced migrations, others, like mine, were perhaps also enriched.
I saw the novel as my story, not fully aware how overwhelming my mother’s presence had been in my youth. The central personal drama, as I conceived it, was Claudia’s need to distance herself from the horror of Europe by joining the bittersweet Latin tempo of the island. The adolescent love for the German boy Dieter could be seen not so much as a rejection of Judaism as a rejection of victimhood.
As the story developed, I uncovered the magnificent complexity of Suze’s character and let it run free. When my mother read the book, she saw only the word “hate” and could not understand its flip side, which is true love. In Melendez/Martinez I further pursued this paradox and encountered the surprising nature of reality, which is fact seen with the contradictions of a fiction writer.
No, Phil did not zoom in on the “sensational” parts of the novel. On the contrary, the show was conducted with so few indiscretions that it now seems like something from another era. I remember that we touched on the lingering effects of the past and that we commented on the fact that I had been reunited with Edmundo Desnoes, who had been my first love in Havana.
I appreciate your association with Walker Percy; Melendez/Martinez is as much about history as about fiction and the way the writer uses his experience to decipher the contradictions of our lives. Percy surely understands that the grass is always greener, that we are not a reasonable species, that we destroy the things we cherish most.
SF:
You also note in your piece that “Passing Through Havana takes up where the little war memoir I had written for Professor Helmreich left off.” Could you comment on your decision to fictionalize the rest of the story while also preserving the first person POV, rather than write it as straight memoir? Were these decisions you made initially or did they evolve?
FR:
I worked as a journalist for many years. Then, when the children came, I turned to occasional feature writing, including columns for French and Japanese newspapers — contacts I had kept from before. As my children grew older and needed me less, there came a desperate need to move beyond the cocoon of family and go further, beyond reportage. I yearned to let the imagination take me to metaphors and epiphanies. To my soul. The transition was difficult. The little war “memoir,” which wasn’t really a memoir but more an early attempt to describe what I had lived through, was too literal. Since I did not want to rewrite, I went on to Cuba, the land of my adolescence. Out of habit, I began in the third person but soon moved to first because only then was I able to connect to my character’s conflicting identities.
SF:
In dialogue with our Jewish Latin American Literature class this past quarter, for which your novel was assigned reading, you cited German, French, Spanish and English as your
“formative languages…all learned in childhood, each one acquired in a different cultural environment. It has made me somewhat schizoid, though people say I hide it well. I suspect that a certain amount of energy I could have had better use for has gone into controlling the lack of cohesion in my personality. The German me is somewhat harsh, the French is intellectual, the Spanish is emotional and intense, the American me is optimistic and active. I juggle these personalities as best I can.”
I’m curious what triggers or has triggered these shifts in personality? Do you have, say, the equivalent of Proust’s madelaine for each culture? Might cornflakes and bananas, for example — the “American” breakfast that Claudia loves to eat yet can’t digest — make you feel optimistic?
FR:
Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don’t. As a parent, I was sometimes authoritarian with my children, which I attribute to my European upbringing.
The cultivation of self-assertion and independence in American children is unsettling to me to this day. By the same token, I tend to get excited in discussing ideas to the point of using excessive facial expressions which is frowned on in Anglo Saxon culture. I try to control it but in the end I am more Chirac than Blair. In Latin company, I find myself possessed by a totally different chemistry, I sense an unguarded human connection which is emotional and rewarding. The many languages, the many personalities survive so strongly in me not only because I was marked at an early age by many cultures, including the German and the French, but because I also thought in these languages. My memories are highlighted in language, released by language.
When it comes to Proustian triggers, the sweet tart lime has to be it. Maybe because so many fruits seem to have lost smell and flavor, the brave green lime stands out all the more. It has remained constant and can immediately bring back the Cuban street with its fruit peddlers slicing the pale green flesh to show off aroma and quality. Limes would also appear at our Havana table to flavor sea food and steaks and just about everything else and, above all, their flavor would possess the glorious frozen daiquiri, that cross between sherbert and cocktail, that gave me my first floating high. Yes, the lime brings back the Caribbean and that helium moment on the verge of womanhood.
SF:
You identify with Vladimir Nabokov because, like you, he lived in different cultures but chose to write in English. Do you feel that English is “a language of precision?”
FR:
That’s a good question. I suppose I write in English because I have lived the better part of my life in an English speaking country. I suspect that Nabokov did it for the same reason. English precision could well be a criterion if you are using the language for commerce, but not if you are using it for transparency. Sometimes the multiple images of a Neruda poem are more precise than a simple direct naming. For those of us writing in an adopted language, each word rings fresh and new. I have always sensed an elegant originality in Nabokov which, I believe, comes from this distancing.
SF:
Your website says “Images are as important for [you] as words.” How so? Can you talk a bit about your career as a photographer, perhaps as a reflection of this idea?
FR:
When I was young I worked as a reporter for LIFE magazine in an atmosphere permeated by the world’s best photographers. When I composed words they were meant to complement the images on the page and I learned to think visually as well as verbally. As a person of the twentieth century saturated by photographs, cinema, and advertising, it was inevitable that I should think in images.
Over the years, I have accentuated one art form or the other at different periods of my life. Some years ago, I did extensive photographic essays based on the naked Barbie doll figure. Right now, I am focusing more on writing, though the camera is always nearby. Words trigger images, images trigger thoughts; it’s hard to separate the two.
SF:
I understand that you have an extensive Barbie doll collection. I’m curious if you connect this hobby to the American dream and/or your photographic work.
FR:
Barbie dolls are my models: they pose for me, I highlight their shiny vinyl flesh, I chronicle their blond journey through life, they are the Venus of America! I do not collect them in the traditional sense but rather pick up old, child-abused models at flea markets and garage sales. I believe Barbie represents the American dream pretty much the way young virgins were idealized in the Renaissance, as symbols of eternal youth. I have photographed Barbie from coast to coast, with Lincoln in Springfield, in the Canyons of Colorado. She never disappoints me and has been a splendid conduit in my quest to understand the vulgar contradictions of the consumer society.
I have been criticized for using an idealized version of beauty, one that no woman can live up to. Yet the history of art has been dominated by the unobtainable; the Renaissance virgins and the Pre-Raphaelite beauties are as much an ideal as Barbie, yet no one questions them because they are established and consecrated.
SF:
You have mentioned that because you lack a mother tongue you have to be careful choosing the right tone when you speak. Could you give a working example from your profession of when and how this might happen?
FR:
After college, I chose to work as an interpreter and translator for a large bank. It was shortly after World War II and New York harbored linguistic refugees who, like me, felt comfortable in a multi-cultural environment. Again, when I began my career as a journalist, I gravitated towards international publications. I find myself unwilling or unable to engage in the banter of the American workplace where the serious is so often transformed into the lighthearted. I am not at ease staying on the surface yet I don’t like being perceived as a “heavy.”
SF:
Could you comment on the play on the word “passing” in the title “Passing through Havana?” How does lacking a “mother tongue” create its own kind of exile?
FR:
I am particularly disoriented by Anglo word-play. Puns, crosswords, and double meanings use language as a game and tend to create a distance. I feel more at home in the absolute clarity of Cartesian French or in the emotional power of Spanish.
Strong mimetic qualities have enabled me to assimilate the behavior and appearance of others. That keen sense of observation, developed perhaps as a survival tool, has allowed me to “pass” superficially as the all-American girl, wife, mother. I know exactly how to dress and move and consume the right products. I did it in Cuba, I have done it here, I can do it in Europe when I visit. As I grow older with less to lose, I am less vulnerable to the pressures of my environment, a tad more spontaneous, a little more outrageous. But in the end, literature is my refuge, the only place where I can find myself.
SF:
What about a mother food? Maria Melendez Deschenes wrote as a postscript to her letter to you, “I remember so well that [your] mother taught us to braid bread!” What dishes did your mother make? How has inhabiting so many cultures affected how you eat and what you like to eat?
FR:
Ah, food! There you have touched on something very real and strong. I was raised on my mother’s extraordinary Austro-Hungarian cooking and baking. The aroma of goulash and sauerbraten and schnitzel and sweet and sour cabbage will never leave me. No dish was ever served without a well-simmered sauce, a few browned onions, a well-buttered potato. Her sugar cookies, her linzer torte, apple cake, chocolate babkas, need I go on...yes, I do have a very strong sense of the foods of childhood. Above all, my mother passed on an attitude towards food as social ritual and source of great pleasure. In this day when cooking has gone out of style, except perhaps as a hobby, I refuse to give it up. The tactile activity is the perfect balance to the abstraction of the computer. When all is said and done, there is nothing more civilized than a leisurely meal with good conversation. If you are what you eat, and how you eat, I may be my mother’s daughter more than I ever thought possible.
SF:
Passing Through Havana is richly dramatized but there is also a self-revelatory cadence to the work that lends it an incredible suspense. I was struck by the following passage where Claudia reflects on her mother’s storytelling:
Yes, she [Mother] had gotten us out. She had saved our lives, and yet her pride in retelling these stories infuriated me. I, who had all these years so delicately trod the fine line between deception and candor, to the point of even deceiving myself, would now be crassly unmasked by my mother the storyteller. Marieta, help me! But how could I tell her that we had fled, diamond-lined suitcases in hand, because we were Jews decreed for extermination? How could I tell her if I would not tell myself?
In this context of Suze’s brazen recounting of her exploits and Claudia’s denial, how do you see the stories we tell ourselves complicating truth and memory?
FR:
The events of the mid-twentieth century cast a cataclysmic shadow over Claudia’s European childhood. To be able to grow up she needed to find a way to convince herself that someday she could have a place in a safe world, marry, have children, lead a normal life. Suze’s pride in re-telling the stories about their persecution and escape from the Nazis interfered with that dream scenario. There was nothing left but to turn to denial and disappear into the comfortable world of the Cuban bourgeoisie.
In the epilogue, Claudia, by then in her forties, reveals, even emphasizes, her identity as a Jewish refugee. Ironically, the assembled Miami Cubans are only mildly interested; they always knew she was foreign, they didn’t really care much about the rest. Significantly, the epilogue tells that Claudia works as a UN interpreter, never married, and has no children.
SF:
While in Cuba, Suze embraces Judaism as a way to “affirm [the family’s] survival” yet in chapter ten of Passing Through Havana, Claudia manifests some trepidation about her religious identification.
“Isn’t it in Matthew that we are taught to love our enemies?” I said, my voice so faint I wasn’t sure Don Andres would hear me. I wanted to take the “we” back as soon as I had uttered it. Stop trembling. It’s just one little word, a pronoun at that.”
In dialogue with our class, you mentioned that you “considered yourself [a] product of the Enlightenment and free of religion.” Could you comment on your decision to end your piece “Roberto Melendez A.K.A. Esteban Martinez” with a quote from Matthew 6:3 — “When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth” — one with the pronoun thou?
FR:
For Suze, the Nazi threat was a rude awakening. Before the war, she lived a totally secular life, like so many assimilated Jews. Most Western Europeans in the Twentieth Century believed that religion belonged to a more primitive past, to the world of their fathers and grandfathers. True, Suze had briefly played with Zionism as a young girl, but that was a trendy flirtation and did not last. She chose to live her life in a world that was modern, where science ruled and religion was considered backward.
Suze perceived Hitler’s attacks on the Jews as a personal affront. “I’ll show him,” she would say. It was after that that she became active in Jewish affairs and began celebrating the major holidays. Max always doubted the sincerity of her involvement in the Cuban WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization) because the only passion he understood was for business. But that is neither here nor there. Suze’s actions should speak for themselves. They tell us that she believed that the time had come to stand up for the survival of her people.
The two quotations from Matthew are a coincidence. In Passing Through Havana, Claudia uses it to guiltily dissimulate and appear Christian in front of Marietta’s family. At the end of Melendez/Martinez, it is quoted because it reinforces a point I was making about charity. For my generation, religion is part of our cultural past, not a practice in search of salvation.
SF:
During class questions, the following things you said about writing struck me as really true. Could you comment on each? One, “You think you are writing a book, yet you could say that the book writes you…”
FR:
Who really knows how the brain works? Associative thinking has always been one of the great mysteries. I think very differently when I speak than when I write. I can put things down on paper that surprise me to no end when I read them the next day. Inspiration then means making connections, which is different from letting the unconscious take over. Writing at its best is done, I would say, in a semi-conscious state.
SF:
Two, “You become extremely guarded and observant; stuff that comes in handy for a writer.”
FR:
Either you fill a space, or you watch others fill it. If you are guarded, shy, modest, thoughtful, unsure, you will always observe what’s going on around you, not just out of curiosity, but to keep yourself safe. Eventually, especially if you want to recreate more than just your inner world, observation becomes an essential habit for a writer, especially if it suits his/her personality.
SF:
Three, “When writing we sometimes think we are making things up only to find that they actually happened.”
FR:
Yes, as I said above, association of events, ideas, emotions is key to creating characters. I can’t explain why made-up things often turn out to be surprisingly true except to say that we take in much more than we think we do. We don’t really forget, we just misplace. When it comes to “true,” there are, as I see it, two types. One is literal: such and such actually happened, such and such was actually said. The other is metaphorical: it reveals true feelings and helps experience bloom.
SF:
When she first moves to Cuba, Claudia cannot digest the American breakfast she romanticizes: the banana and cornflakes available there. As the Otium staff is particularly attached to the banana — we baked a banana pizza once — we are curious, is indigestion still the case and how do you feel about banana more generally?
FR:
My mother was a great fan of Josephine Baker and one of my earliest memories is of her singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas Today.” She expected women dressed in banana skirts à la Baker to greet us when we landed in Cuba. In Havana, I learned to eat bananas every which way, sweet and salty, fried and boiled, cold and sliced, and, at the Woolworth on Galiano street, in a scrumptious Banana Split with a cherry on top. We ate apple-flavored platanitos manzanos, finger-sized ones called ciento en boca, extra sweet ones called Johnson plus, of course, the large green plantains for cooking. Nowadays, shopping at Banana Republic in New York, I am curious about the clothes, yet offended by the name. I could go on and on. Bananas seem to be everywhere. And yet, sometimes a banana is just a banana.
SF:
Thanks so much!
FR:
I’m delighted to converse with Otium in the spirit of ease and creative idleness which I believe, entre nous, comes with age, or at any age if you are lucky. As you might know, business in Spanish is negocio and both words are somewhat identical. In English it obviously means being busy, in Spanish it is not being idle.
Otium
