KEEPER OF MY KIN

A historian explores the toll of immigration on her Cuban American family.

“With countless variations, versions of our story belong also to the million or so Cubans who have left the island over the last few years. It belongs to people from countless other places who trek across borders, climb onto perilous rafts, or simply board a plane to leave places they call home.” Ferrer, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for Cuba: An American History, focuses on her own family story, tracing the long-range impact of migration and separation on those who leave and those who stay. The story begins in April 1963, when Ferrer, 10 months old, departed Cuba in her mother’s arms to join her father in New York. Because the father of her 9-year-old half brother, Poly, refused to give his permission, the boy was left behind. So terrified was Adela of her son’s reaction to this that she left without saying goodbye, and it was almost a week before her sister, Niña, who would raise him to adulthood, told him the truth. Almost immediately the letters began, a near-daily correspondence that kept mother and son in close touch as he came haltingly of age, moving from one school to another, never progressing beyond fifth grade, yearning constantly for his mother. “I began reading the letters for the first time in 2023, exactly sixty years after Poly began writing them,” Ferrer writes. “They are excruciating.” The narrative documents the difficult course of Poly’s life, lived in parallel to the author’s own path through elite academic institutions, grants, beneficent employers, and friends. Eventually she comes to learn she has another half brother, and finds another trove of letters, this one between her father and his long-lost son, who in her words “fell in love” with each other when they met at 67 and 42. Love is everywhere in this book: the deep romantic bond between her parents, the author’s intense attachment to both of them and to other relatives, and to the troubled island country she lived in for only 10 months, yet became the center of her scholarship, her thinking, and her identity.

As heartbreaking as this story often is, it is equally heartwarming, filled with love of all kinds.