A Taste of Freedom: Hotel Cuba by Aaron Hamburger

BY SHAUNA MCINTYRE

Author of three award-winning novels Aaron Hamburger turned to historical fiction in order to tell the story of his grandmother’s life in Hotel Cuba (Harper Perennial, 2023).

Hamburger may not have set out to be a historical novelist, but he has certainly caught the research bug. “I loved diving into files at the National Archives in DC, where I live. I loved traveling to Havana, Key West, and Detroit, taking pictures and taking in the atmosphere, trying to imagine what Pearl (who’s based on my grandmother) might have felt in those places.”

This love of place is evident in the portrayal of Pearl Kahn and her younger sister Frieda as they navigate, first the horrors of shtetl life during World War I and the Soviet Revolution, to their unexpected detour in Havana, before finally settling in the boomtown of Detroit of the 1920s.

“As I researched the shtetl my grandmother came from, I was struck by how often the weather, particularly the ice and the mud came up,” Hamburger says. “In winter you were frozen in snow or ice, or then in summer you were buried in mud. It was everywhere and inescapable. Imagine the contrast of that to the sultry tropical landscape of Cuba! That was one of the first things that intrigued me about this book, the culture shock my grandmother must have experienced going from one setting to the next.”

Frieda blossoms immediately in the languid heat of Havana, but Pearl struggles to adapt to a city of extremes. As Frieda drifts and dreams, Pearl discovers not only a new talent for business and fashion design, but a glimpse of possibilities her sheltered life in Russia would never have allowed. Havana is full of bright colorful clothing, women wearing pants, and sensuality in everything from food to dance.

In fact, it is a dance with a Cuban woman that first awakens a new awareness and acceptance of her body, something that she deliberately avoided for most of her life. When she receives attentions from both men and women, her notions of sexuality are challenged and expanded, though we are never given full insight into her thoughts about the lesbian women she meets or their desire to include her as one. This was an intentional decision on Hamburger’s part. “I wanted to toe a very careful line here because Pearl would have had the same feelings that a bisexual woman of today would have, but not the same language or the same concepts about identity that we would use today. All that said, as I did the research into the period, I was surprised to stumble across so many gay people, even when I wasn’t intentionally looking for them. Several of the gay characters in the book are inspired by lives I came across as I was digging into the past. We’ve always been around, it seems.”

author photo by DC Event

After many delays, Pearl finally reaches New York only to find it almost as unbearable as home. When she follows her sister to Detroit, she finds an “… oasis of calm…” that nicely juxtaposes with the chaos of her life until that point. This experience was pulled from directly from Hamburger’s own grandmother.  “… she was so horrified by the way her sisters were living that she wanted to go back to Russia. I love how that contradicts what we might imagine as the classic happy ending of the immigrant tale, but also how that helps explain why she might move to Detroit.”

Although Pearl’s faith unravels over the course of the war, her notion of religion is more complicated. Growing up with a Cantor father and the tight-knit Jewish community of the shtetl has a potent influence on her identity, regardless of her beliefs about God. This comes to be a significant factor in the choices she makes for herself. Her strong desire to further her own professional goals is tangled with her notions of a woman’s place in the world.

Hamburger was very mindful of this influence while writing the book. He says, “it was important for me to bear in mind that Pearl comes from a religious background—her father is a cantor. Jewish identity and faith are not just important but overwhelming for her. She’s been taught that the chance to have a Jewish family of her own and a Jewish home of her own is the apex of existence. I think it would be very difficult to give up the chance to have those things, and the fact that she wrestles as seriously as she does with her decisions at the end of the book speaks to the enormous disruptions she’s gone through.”

Marriage is so often portrayed as a limiting factor in women’s professional careers throughout history and even today. It was particularly poignant that her sister Frieda’s marriage ends up as the sort that curtails freedom and opportunity, while Pearl’s has the potential to be the opposite. Sometimes a world of possibilities is less enticing than a particular place: a home.  In Pearl’s words, “for the cost of her freedom, she can finally be her own boss.”

About the contributor: Shauna McIntyre reviews and writes for the Historical Novel Society. She is working on her debut novel.