Background image: 1902 Cuban naturalization papers of my great-grandfather, Solomon Sucholieki.
Voice
Robert Sucholeiki
Robert Sucholeiki
|
My voice is a memory, a story in sound,
A comfort and warmth, Like the embrace of the Miami summer, Sitting by your side, along Calle Ocho, Sharing a dulce de leche as you’d recount your tales, Of the other life, the island across the water. Mi voz es un anhelo-- Tu recuerdo de las calles vivas de Habana, De tu casa amarilla al lado del almacén, De la cassava en el jardín, que fritabas para la familia, De las playas vírgenes, la belleza del mar: Paradiso perdido, la tierra de Cuba. My voice is a gift, an act of creation: The seeds you sowed, in exile, That now bloom like mariposas, Two tongues in confluence, together a testament Of the America that is, and the Cuba that was, And which still lives on in the wellspring of language. Mi voz es un legado, camino de generaciones, Español y Ingés, todavía en creación-- Creciendo en mi vida como creció en la tuya, En el tejido de estas líneas, y mientras hablo, Me siento cerca a ti, querida Abuela, Viviendo en mi memoria para siempre. |
Inspiration
Embedded below is a translated version of my poem with footnotes!
When I first began writing a poem as a facet of my project, I was particularly inspired by the work of an early 19th-century Polish Hasidic leader, Rabbi Tsevi Elimelekh of Dinov. Although Tsevi Elimelekh lived a hundred years before the earliest histories of my own ancestors, in a country across the ocean from the New World, his own profound negotiations with language resonate with other diverse Jewish experiences, including a Juban one. In his writings, Tsevi Elimelekh extolls Hebrew, spoken in prayer, as “a language of creation [...] a gift”. To Elimelech, language constitutes a wellspring of Jewish selfhood, a tie to sacred religious and historical tradition. Yet the Rabbi also expresses how language for Jews is not static but rather continuously negotiated in the present: “when Israel is cast out among the lands of their enemies [...] the holy tongue must be mixed into their language and tongue” (Elimelekh). For followers of Hasidism and millions of other Ashkenazim, Yiddish—a living, spoken language drawing from Hebrew, Aramaic, and German vernacular roots—embodied this ongoing creative force, a synthesis of tradition and new growth and expression.
Spanish and English are the languages of my own Judaism. Spanish is the language of my family, the bearers of a Jewish tradition that still richly informs my life today. My first ancestors that arrived in Cuba spoke Yiddish, but it was Spanish that was passed onto their children as they settled into this new home. For my grandparents and the thousands of other Cuban-Jews who immigrated to America, Spanish represented the continued memory of Cuba—both the longing for their old country and also solidarity in the growth of a new Spanish-speaking Jewish community in Miami. In several of the Spanish lines of my poem, I draw upon influence from Ruth Behar’s descriptions of Cuba as a “paradise lost”, while also capturing memories of the island from stories from my own family.
English is the language that my grandparents took on to build a new life in America. It was a language foreign to them, claimed out of necessity, yet two generations later English is now a familiar piece of my own identity. At family gatherings I will speak “Spanglish” with my older relatives, a patchwork of Spanish and English that is in some ways reminiscent of the lives that my grandparents built here, one foot in their old country and one in the new.
In writing a poem with alternating stanzas in Spanish and English, I hope to capture this duality of language, coalesced into a continuously evolving identity. Language in all its richness continues to shape my life, as it did for Tsevi Elimelekh, as it did for my own ancestors, a creative process living on in those who speak it today.
Spanish and English are the languages of my own Judaism. Spanish is the language of my family, the bearers of a Jewish tradition that still richly informs my life today. My first ancestors that arrived in Cuba spoke Yiddish, but it was Spanish that was passed onto their children as they settled into this new home. For my grandparents and the thousands of other Cuban-Jews who immigrated to America, Spanish represented the continued memory of Cuba—both the longing for their old country and also solidarity in the growth of a new Spanish-speaking Jewish community in Miami. In several of the Spanish lines of my poem, I draw upon influence from Ruth Behar’s descriptions of Cuba as a “paradise lost”, while also capturing memories of the island from stories from my own family.
English is the language that my grandparents took on to build a new life in America. It was a language foreign to them, claimed out of necessity, yet two generations later English is now a familiar piece of my own identity. At family gatherings I will speak “Spanglish” with my older relatives, a patchwork of Spanish and English that is in some ways reminiscent of the lives that my grandparents built here, one foot in their old country and one in the new.
In writing a poem with alternating stanzas in Spanish and English, I hope to capture this duality of language, coalesced into a continuously evolving identity. Language in all its richness continues to shape my life, as it did for Tsevi Elimelekh, as it did for my own ancestors, a creative process living on in those who speak it today.
Site Navigation
Expressing Spanish and English as Juban languages through poetry and textual connections.
|
Recounting family history through story and pictures and exploring relations to works from our course.
|
Food as a Juban heritage: Transcribing family recipies and cooking traditional Cuban dishes.
|
Biblography:
|
|