Days of Awe

Days of Awe is a 2001 novel by Achy Obejas; it is her second novel, following 1996's acclaimed Memory Mambo. It is a fictional memoir told from the point of view of narrator Alejandra “Ale” San José, a young translator from Chicago, whose trip back to her family's purported homeland, Cuba, reveals a few very unexpected things about her family history. Ale shares many things in common with Obejas herself, like her Cuban ancestry and work as a translator, but the novel is not autobiographical. The novel, which has an unusual form and is given to philosophizing, has received mixed reviews, with Kirkusreviews.com calling it “sincere but lifeless.” Several commentators have noted that its plot – which hops back and forth between the present and 1897 as Obejas tells the stories of different generations of Alejandra's family – is difficult to follow. Yet others have praised Obejas' fine prose and sense of the nuance of personal identity. The book's title refers to the ten days between the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a period focused on ideas of sin and atonement. It is during this time that God is said to decide who will be written into the book of life.

Alejandra San José was born on New Year's Day in 1959. Fidel Castro was about to take control of Cuba, and Ale's parents, fearing the chaos of regime change, fled to America. They fled on the very day of the Bay of Pigs. Once stateside, they planned to wait out what they hoped would be a short dictatorship before returning to their beloved island, but their stay ended up being permanent. Settled in Chicago, Ale's mother, Nena, is a devoted horticulturalist with a love of sunflowers and roses. She is also a devout Catholic woman. Her father, Enrique, is a renowned translator of literature. Ale has always sensed a strange, mysterious melancholy about him that she chalked up to his longing for his homeland. She too, as a child, is enchanted by the idea of Cuba; her interest reflecting her parents' longing. But after she reaches adolescence, Cuba begins to recede in importance to Ale.

Like her father, Ale loves the Spanish language, and follows in his footsteps, becoming a translator and interpreter in her own right. Eventually, her work gives her an opportunity to travel to Cuba. She takes it, but initially is not very excited about the trip; her days of romanticizing Cuba have long passed. When Ale arrives in Cuba, she is vain about her perfect American English, and looks down on many features of the modern Cuba she finds. She describes her Cuban heritage as a mere “accident of timing and geography.” But after reconnecting with old family friends, the Menachs, she makes an important and shocking discovery. As it turns out, her family, the good Catholic San Josés – are not Catholic at all. They are actually Jewish; more specifically, they’re conversos who turned to Christianity during the Spanish inquisition to escape torture and death. Her father is the grandson of an openly and well-known Jewish war hero from the Cuban war of independence. Perhaps even more surprising is that her mother's side too contains Jewish heritage.



Ale is profoundly moved by the new information. She develops an intense relationship with Moises Menach's son-in-law, Orlando, and he teaches her more about modern Cuba. Much of the novel is Ale searching for a sense of identity among the various threads, both known and newly discovered, of her family's history: Jewish, Cuban, Exile, Converso. Ale comes to know, eventually, that her father has never completely renounced his Jewish faith; that he has davened in secret, in the basement, for years, both defiant and afraid. Ultimately, Ale's journey is one of narration itself – of how to resolve the issue of identity by incorporating new, shocking, and traumatic experiences into a single, tolerable storyline of the self.

Days of Awe is not necessarily more concerned with ideas of identity than other novels, but it is more explicitly philosophical in its approach to them. This, as has been much commented upon, has resulted in a book that in many ways defies traditional novel form. It has a semblance of a plot, several characters, and is certainly very concerned with place – but it has fewer actual settings than most novels. That is, places like Cuba are frequently discussed but rarely coalesce on the page. The same is often true of characters, whose names and stories seem to float disconnectedly between tangents and abstract speculations. But it could also be argued that Days of Awe's challenge of the limits of traditional generic categories makes an apt formal parallel to its thematic concern with the shifting and subjective notion of identity.