Days of Awe, by Achy Obejas
  ACHY OBEJAS was born in 1956 in Havana, Cuba, a city that she left six years later when she came to the United States with her parents after the Cuban revolution. She grew up in Michigan City, Indiana, and moved to Chicago in 1979. An accomplished journalist, Obejas has written for The Windy City Times, The Advocate, High Performance, and The Village Voice. Her novels include We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994) and Memory Mambo (1996), both published by Cleis Press. Memory Mambo won a Lambda Award, and her third novel, Days of Awe (2001), also won the 2002 Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction.
DAYS OF AWE recounts the story of Alejandra San José, born in Havana, entering the world on New Year's Day, 1959, through the heart of revolution. Fearing the turmoil brewing in Cuba, her parents take Ale and flee to the shores of North America-ending up in Chicago amid a close community of Cuban refugees. As an adult, Alejandra becomes an interpreter, which takes her back to her homeland for the first time. There, she makes her way back through San José history, uncovering new fragments of truth about her long-lost relatives who struggled with their own identities over years of turbulence. For the San Josés, ostensibly Catholics, are actually Jewish. They are conversos who converted to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition. As Alejandra struggles to confront what it is to be Cuban and American, Catholic and Jewish, she translates her father's troubling youthful experiences into the healing language of her own heart. Hailing DAYS OF AWE as, "An ambitious work", the Miami Herald proclaims that Achy Obejas displays, "A deft talent whose approach to sex, religion, and ethnicity is keenly provocative."

Reviews of Days of Awe Include:

Reading Group Discussion Guide:

1. Days of Awe deals with the tensions between public and private identities. What, specifically, are some of the characters' conflicts between their public and private lives - especially in the cases of Alejandra, Enrique, Nena, Ytzak, Sima, Barbarita, Olinsky, Moises, Orlando, Leni, and Celina?

2. Each of the San Joses - Ale, Enrique, and Nena - have their own way of worshipping. How would you describe these ways? How do these characters find balance? What is the role of faith in the story?

3. Much of the story also deals with exile. Many of the characters - Alejandra and her family, Olinsky and Ytzak - flee in order to change and, sometimes, save their lives. But others - Sima, Moises, Orlando, and especially Deborah - choose to stay where they are, almost in defiance. What does exile mean to the different characters?

4. What is the role of memory in Days of Awe? How does individual memory mesh with collective memory? What happens when memory is confronted by contradictory or conflicting facts?

5. The anusim - the descendants of Jews who survived the Inquisition by pretending to be Catholic - have a mostly hidden history. How does this play out in the story? What is the role or impact of history?

6. Many of the characters are also confronted with the challenge of assimilation and the emergence of multiple identities. Is Alejandra Cuban or American or both? How does Judaism play into her identity? How does Enrique balance being both Cuban and Jewish? How does that compare with Moises or Olinsky? What about Barabarita's affinity for her Chinese lover's culture and language?

7. Alejandra says: "What Leni and I really shared was a certain shame about belonging to oppressed minorities that had their own paradoxical privileges in the world." What does she mean?

8. Language and its mysteries is an integral part of the novel, and several of the characters are either translators or interpreters of some kind. How does the act of translating or interpreting serve as a metaphor for crossing cultural boundaries?

9. When Celina first appears, she's so bored with Alejandra's conversation and so insolent that she leaves the room. But by the story's end, she has established an eerie intimacy with Alejandra. How did this happen? What changed?

10. In the end, both Ale and Enrique return to Cuba, one way or the other. But Nena, Ale's mother, does not. Why not? Why is return possible for some but not for others in the story?

Glossary:

Anusim: (Hebrew) The coerced ones, forcibly converted Jews. Both anusim and converses profess Catholicism but practice Judaism covertly; the anusim are forced, the converses may or may not be.

Converso: Converted, forcibly or voluntarily; the polite word, along with New Christian, for Christianized Jews who continued to privately practice their ancestral faith. Both anusim and conversos profess Catholicism but practice Judaism covertly; the anusim are forced, the conversos may or may not be forced.

Criollo(a): Literally, Creole, but in fact it doesn't refer to race or racial mixing; what it means is Cuban-born, quintessentially Cuban.

Golem: (Hebrew) Literally, a lump of clay (or mud, tar, etc.), a mass crudely shaped like a human, sometimes gigantic in proportions. Also a mythical figure who was made from inanimate material but under a kabalistic spell has come to life. Can also mean a dummy, an idiot, the ignorant masses. In the Hebrew vernacular, it means fool.

Gusano: A pejorative used to mean Cubans exiled from the revolutionary government; literally means "worms" but actually refers to the shape of the bags used by the first wave of refugees, who left by planes or ferries.

Ladino: The liturgical language of the Sephardim, particularly those descended directly from Spain.

Other Titles by Achy Obejas:

Memory Mambo 1996
We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? 1994

Achy's Writing Has Also Appeared in:

Best Lesbian Love Stores 2004
Circa 2000: Lesbian Fiction at the Millenium
Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women 1998

 

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