In her presidential address at the 2009 American Folklore Society meeting, Elaine Lawless argued that we ethnographers must be mindful of our roots. Even when our memories of it are ambivalent, “home” undeniably shapes who we are and how we view the world. Lawless (2011) asks: How can we deem to study the cognitive and emotional maps of others if we are afraid to examine our own? She offers folklore as a way to confront “home” in all of its splendor, its ugliness, and its layered complexity.

Lawless’ meditation was inspired by Ruth Behar’s 2008 American Folklore Society plenary address (see Behar 2009), so it should come as no surprise that Traveling Heavy centers on her own life-long search for home. Behar was born in Cuba and moved with her family to New York when she was four. In this spare, beautifully crafted memoir, Behar, the granddaughter of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to Cuba in the first half of the twentieth century, reveals her journey to locate “home” within the strata of her family’s long history of displacement. “Call me an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness” (6), she admits.

Behar’s memoir is organized thematically, rather than chronologically. Like dipping into different parts of a moving stream, the reader gets a sense of Behar’s life story—her relationship with her parents, her discovery of anthropology, her search for identity in Cuba—without feeling tied down by a timeline. Part I: Family traces the author’s immigrant heritage, reveals her troubled relationship with her father, and tells of her son’s ACL surgery and Behar’s struggle to reconcile his immobility with her insatiable hunger for travel. In Part II: The Kindness of Strangers, Behar describes her earliest experiences of fieldwork, first in the home of a good-humored couple in the hardscrabble village of Santa María del Monte, Spain, and later in Mexquitic, central Mexico. Part II also depicts Behar’s quest for her roots as she joins those who share her name at the “World Summit of Behars” in Spain. Finally, in Part III: Cuban Goodbyes, Behar recounts repeated returns to Cuba and gives us the story of Danayda, the little girl who learned Hebrew at Havana’s Centro Sefaradí, who longed to emigrate to Israel, and in whom Behar catches a glimpse of a life she could have lived (174).

One of questions with which Behar wrestles in this book might be posed as follows: Who am I—traveler or immigrant? At first, she draws the dichotomy clearly: “Travelers are those who go elsewhere because they want to, because they can afford to displace themselves. Immigrants are those who go elsewhere because they have to. If they don’t displace themselves they’ll suffer… [the] journey is wrenching” (5). Her memoir is shot through with vivid images of her family’s displacement: the exile from Spain—evidenced in the Ladino spoken by her Turkish grandparents, an “old Spanish” that “made you think of gardens filled with pomegranates, yellow canaries singing in gilded cages on sunny afternoons” (25); the flight from Poland—recorded in her great-grandfather’s unpublished memoir of his struggle to move his family to Cuba on the cusp of the Holocaust; and her parents’ decision to leave Cuba, “when leaving was...a form of treason against the Revolution. “Gusanos, they called us, ‘worms’” (171). She began her life as an immigrant, but Behar now wrestles with the certainty of her anthropologist’s privilege to come and go at will, while the majority of the people she writes about are not at liberty to move. This question becomes more complicated when we remember Danayda – the little girl who made the aliyah (ascent) to Israel, in search of a life among fellow Jews, better economic prospects, and the freedom to travel—only to end up in the Dominican Republic after feeling marooned in Israel’s Negev desert, homesick for Cuba, subjected to the racism of Israelis and fellow immigrants who didn’t know how to read her brown skin.

Ruth Behar “travels heavy,” her suitcases swollen with the material things she cannot seem to do without. And while the question of her license to travel weighs on her conscience, it is perhaps her restless desire for belonging and identity that are her heaviest burdens. When she discovers the possibility of kinship and a homeland in Béjar, Spain, the author and her companions experience relief. “Now we could travel light,” she writes, “letting ourselves be blown back to our scattered destinations” (141).

Before becoming an anthropologist, Behar aspired to write fiction; indeed, her earliest fieldnotes were her most poetic, “full of the sense of enchantment, as if I’d fallen from the sky into a place unlike any other” (88). Sadly, that creativity was shamed out of her in graduate school (though notably not by her mentor James Fernandez). It was only later that she gathered the courage to “reshape anthropology...so it wouldn’t kill my soul” (89). In many ways, that is just what she has done, with groundbreaking interventions in reflexive writing, narrative ethnography, and feminist theory. For me, the most resonant passages in Traveling Heavy are its most ethnographic, like those that set the reader down on a balcony, “listening to the musical clatter of Havana’s unending street noise, inhaling the lush smells of cigars and sea salt” (201). Behar pairs anthropological detail with verbal economy to produce stunning results, like this sampling about a young woman’s long-awaited departure for Israel: “Danayda was waiting for the day she’d pack her things into a suitcase, like a tourist going on vacation, paint her nails silver, and dab perfume on her wrists...waiting for the day when she’d go to the airport dressed all in white...waiting for the day when, on the way to the airport, the afternoon sunlight would blind her eyes but she’d look ahead unblinking” (170).

Behar finds her professional worth in bearing witness to such lives, and in exquisite prose she relates experiences of generosity (such as this memory from Santa María) that will ring true for many ethnographers. “I remember that everyone in the village showed David and me kindness. People gave us tomatoes from their gardens that tasted like candy. They taught us how to read the landscape of the village like a book....They let me photograph them, even when they were sweaty and tired” (99). She acknowledges that all she has to offer in return is her respect and the promise of being the “memory-keeper” (187).

“‘¿Qué se te perdió en Cuba?’ Baba asked every time I stopped to see her in Miami Beach on my way to Havana. What did I lose in Cuba? She wanted me to forget Cuba, move on” (193). But the way forward for Behar is through memory and ethnography. Like Lawless, who tries “to recall images that might make up at least the skeleton of a mosaic of home that I could reclaim” (2011: 134), Behar collects fragments—sensory impressions, stories, and photographs (some of which inhabit the pages of this book)—to construct a mosaic of her home in the new Cuba.

Behar’s book opens with an account of her ritual of departure: “Before I go out the door, I drop my car and office keys on a side table....But I say to myself, ‘Take the key to the house. Don’t go anywhere without that key.’ The legend is that Sephardic Jews took the keys to their houses when they were expelled from Spain over five hundred years ago. Centuries later, living in other lands, they still had those keys in their possession” (3). Ruth Behar is absolutely right—and Elaine Lawless would agree, I think—we would all be better, more honest, ethnographers if we would just carry with us the keys to our own homes.

Works Cited:

Behar, Ruth. 2009. “Folklore and the Search for Home” (American Folklore Society Presidential Invited Plenary Address, October 2008). Journal of American Folklore 122: 251-266.

Lawless, Elaine J. 2011. “Folklore as a Map of the World: Rejecting ‘Home’ as a Failure of the Imagination” (American Folklore Society Presidential Address, October 2009). Journal of American Folklore 124: 127-146.

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[Review length: 1337 words • Review posted on May 28, 2014]