'Across So Many Seas': Sephardi history from young adults - review

The young adult novel Across So Many Seas by Cuban-American anthropologist and writer Ruth Behar tells the stories of four generations of 12-year-old Sephardi girls in a single family over a 500-year period. Music, poetry, and food all play significant roles in the interwoven stories. 

The first character the reader meets is Benvenida, a 12-year-old Jewish girl living in Toledo, Spain, in 1492. An educated girl with an artistic soul, she can read and write in both Hebrew and Spanish. 

In a time when Jews had the choice to convert to Catholicism or leave Spain, Benvenida’s extended family chooses to accept conversion. However, even though his siblings became conversos, her father, a hazan (cantor), cannot abandon his faith or traditions. 

From Benvenida to Paloma

He therefore decides to throw in his lot with other Jews who prefer to lose their homes rather than their identity. Benvenida sets out with her family, traveling by foot for many days from Toledo to the port city of Valencia, where they board a ship to Naples, Italy, to rejoin other family members there. 

Her father dies in transit, but the Torah scroll he has carried with him throughout the arduous journey makes it to Naples. Within months, the situation for the Jews there turns hostile, and Benvenida and her remaining family are forced to flee again, this time to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in Turkey. 

In a theme repeated in all the stories, Behar emphasizes that Benvenida’s options are limited because she is a girl. Though the section of Across So Many Seas dedicated to her story highlights many Spanish songs and poems, including ones that she wrote, Benvenida is not permitted to sing. Neither can she join her brothers, who are taught to work at the family printing press.

In Part Two, set more than 400 years later in 1923, we meet Reina. She is 12 years old and lives in a suburb of Istanbul, where the Jews coexist peacefully with their Muslim neighbors. 

In 1923, Turkey elects a new president who is determined to modernize the country. Reina dreams that as part of that revolution, this new leader will give girls access to equal education. Her father considers her thinking to be fanciful and reminds her to “Just remember your place, hijica [my daughter].” 

Reina describes her family situation to a friend: “The truth is my father doesn’t want us to leave the house because we’re girls and getting older. Mostly, it’s because I’m 12 now, and if I act dishonorably, I will bring shame to the family.” 

Later in her story, Reina explains that “…in my religion, females can’t touch the Torah scrolls or sit near men at the temple.” 

The discerning reader will notice that calling the synagogue a “temple” is a clue that Behar is writing from a liberal Jewish perspective. Additionally, her emphasis on the status of girls is consistent with her humanistic approach to women and feminism in her work as a cultural anthropologist. 

At one point, Reina describes herself as “a girl who wants to be free.” This desire for freedom costs her dearly when she is sent away to Cuba with an older family member as punishment for going out to see fireworks one night after her father forbids it. In addition to being sent away, Reina has been promised to a male relative who, much older than she, has agreed to wait until she turns 15 before marrying her.

Part Three tells the story of Reina’s Havana-born daughter, Alegra, who is 12 years old in 1961 when Fidel Castro comes to power. Castro recruits 750,000 volunteers to bring literacy to Cuba. Over 100,000 of them are between the ages of 12 and 18. 

Alegra, recognizing that she has freedoms that her mother lacked, desperately wants to volunteer to help rural Cubans learn to read and write. Interestingly, Castro is painted as a hero who makes a plan to transform widespread illiteracy throughout Cuba in just one year.

Alegra’s father (the older male relative to whom Reina was promised when she was 12) is opposed to Castro’s Communist revolution and objects. Nevertheless, Reina gives her daughter permission, and Alegra becomes one of the youngest volunteers. She goes on to live a successful adventure as a literacy teacher in rural Cuba. But as the situation deteriorates in Cuba, she is sent across the sea to Miami, where she lives for three years until her parents are able to join her.

In Part Four, we meet Alegra’s daughter, Paloma, born in Miami and 12 years old in 2003. The family, including Reina and Alegra, travel to Toledo to visit the place where their family’s story of crossing “many seas” began in 1492. The book ends with a few sweet twists, closing the family circle. 

Consistent with her academic training, Behar provides an array of sources and background material on the time periods and historical events that frame the story, as well as an extensive author’s note. 

The writer is a freelance journalist and expert on the non-Jewish awakening to Torah, happening in our day. She is the editor of Ten From The Nations and Lighting Up The Nations.

• ACROSS SO MANY SEAS 
• By Ruth Behar
• Nancy Paulsen Books
• 272 pages; $10