Reviewed by: Days of Awe Sharon Solwitz Days of Awe, by Achy Obejas. New York: Ballantine, 2001. 371pp. $24.95. Days of Awe, Achy Obejas’s second novel and third book of fiction, centers on its Cuban American protagonist’s discovery of her family’s concealed Jewishness. At twenty-eight Alejandra San Jose believes both her parents to be loosely practicing Catholics. When she visits Cuba for the first time as an interpreter, ignorant of her Jewish roots, she is also dismissive and somewhat embarrassed by her Cuban heritage, [End Page 123] clinging to her difference from the natives, her superiority as an American woman. She “could care less about Cuba,” which to her is no more or less interesting than other countries she hasn’t seen yet. She flaunts her perfect American English, using body language to show her preference for the American speakers. Being Cuban, for her, is “an accident of timing and geography.” Then she meets the Menachs, old family friends who enlarge the boundaries of the known world for her—with regard not only to religion but sexuality, nationality, identity itself. The book’s title and central image, Days of Awe—the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which the Almighty is deciding who will be written up in the “Book of Life”—is the darkest period in the Jewish year, with its focus on sin and atonement. It is this sense of sin and the quest for atonement that fuels the book. Even in the United States where Judaism can be practiced for the most part without undesirable consequences, Alejandra’s father won’t admit to being Jewish, while in his dark basement, in tallis and tefillin, he davens, weeping. Alejandra, who could live a comfortable American life, is increasingly drawn toward Cuba with its increasing poverty and hopelessness, where, in the face of her friends’ anger towards those who flee or who are free to come and go, she must continually justify herself. Obejas’s linkage of being Jewish with being Cuban is intriguing. As an escapee from Cuba, Alejandra is also an exile, just as Jews are eternal exiles in the countries in which they reside, since their original exile from the Land of Israel. The equivalence is borne out in language as well, Miami Cubans referred to as the “Jews of the Caribbean.” Likewise Spanish and Hebrew lack words for certain aspects of the divine. “I like to think that our inability to express heaven is simply a measure of our respect for a higher power; that, like certain Orthodox Jews who insist on never pronouncing or writing the word for god, we have a deeper understanding. . . .” A gift to the reader, this perception of likenesses. If there is a weakness in the book, it is that it seems more interested, in the end, in ideas than story. Characters momentarily fascinate only to disappear entirely for such long stretches we have to thumb back to recall who they are. Some of the most beguiling events aren’t even referred to let alone woven into the book’s causal fabric. Said one annoyed Amazon customer reviewer: “There did not seem to be any continuity, it was hard to get a feel for the characters because they were mentioned so infrequently.” It isn’t hard to find the source of this reader’s complaint. The book makes use of characters, events, and ideas, but there is little fusion, the ongoing transmutation of idea into scene that one expects of even an unconventional novel. Interesting, though, is what happens to reading when expectations are altered. Let’s say the book is not a “novel,” despite the word emblazoned on the jacket, but a [End Page 124] meditation, Alejandra’s earnest, impassioned quest for an identity so complex that it’s quasi-impossible to dramatize. As an imaginary memoir Days of Awe offers insights that, like all true mitzvot, repair the torn fabric of the universe. Sharon Solwitz Department of English Purdue University Copyright © 2003 Purdue University
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Jun 1, 2007
Daniel Kurt Ackermann 
Open Access