Ruth Behar Quotes

displacement has been a common path for Jews throughout history; they’ve always been displaced from one place to another, through diaspora, through a sense of expulsion, not being welcome anymore, being truly forced out.

I step out, legs trembling a little but my heart full, and set forth on the next journey, entrusting myself to the beauty and danger of life all over again. (Author's Note)

"I think if your dreams are small they can get lost, like trying to find a needle in a haystack...When a dream is big, you can see it better and hold on to it." (Ruthie)

Being alive is the best gift of all. (p139)

Pain is pain. Speak up. Tell your story. (Author's Note)

In my children’s fiction, I also want to teach them ideas. I don’t want them just to have a story: I’m giving somebody who perhaps knows nothing about Sephardic Jews a sense of that culture. Even if it is a preliminary sense, it’s an affirmation that this culture and these people exist. In that way, I’m bringing my ethnographic work even into a domain like the picture book.

“Why is it that bad things have to happen so you learn there are lots of good people in the world?" (Ruthie)

self-interrogation is a special quality of anthropological work, one that we don’t see enough of in fiction. Sometimes in fiction, authors hide or erase the work and interrogation that they may have done to be able to write their novels. But in ethnography, we often include that interrogation within our texts. And to me, that’s an inspiring part of our storytelling.

there are just a lot of stories that I hope won’t be lost. I want to be sure that this legacy remains, even though it’s a miniature community and maybe not of great interest to everybody in the world. Especially for writers like myself, who come from minority backgrounds—we’re trying to fill in absences or gaps. There was obviously no literature like Tia Fortuna when I was growing up. There’s this very large Jewish Latino community in Miami, but they’re just not represented in literature. I felt that was a gap that I could fill.

Healing is a journey and it takes its own sweet time. What a gift it is to get a second chance at life when the worst is past. (Author's Note)

When we lived in Cuba, I was smart. But when we got to Queens, in New York City, in the United States of America, I became dumb, just because I couldn't speak English. (first lines)

That is the magic of writing, and also the challenge of writing, not knowing what will happen until it’s on the page.

But wherever I go, I know I will feel most at home with the wounded of the world, who hold their heads up high no matter how broken they may seem.

“The only way to deal with fear is to treat it like an unwelcome guest. If you keep entertaining it, you’ll never be rid of it.” (Amara)

reading is one of our greatest human treasures, to be passed on from generation to generation, so the world might be a better place for everyone. (Acknowledgements)