Jubana!

According to Gigi Anders, when you're a Jubana in America, or a Cuban Jewess in the U.S. of A.!, you have to know you're heading straight into the mondo-bizarro jaws of cross-cultural hell -- not every message you're given by your family and Juban community is synchronized or harmonious. Sometimes they switch into Cuban expectation gear, other times only the Jew 'tude will do. It's enough to make a Jubana hurl herself onto the couch of the nearest psychoanalyst.As the granddaughter of Eastern European and Russian shtetl-reared grandparents who immigrated as teenagers in the early 1920s to the fierce tropical beauty of Cuba, Anders is heir apparent to a legacy of transatlantic alienation. With dazzling wit and hilarity mined from the depths of loss and yearning, Anders chronicles her journey from beach baby to ostracized exile to vibrant intellectual, along the way balancing her obsession with killer outfits and zaftig, orgasmic Cuban meals with the more serious pursuits of love, sanity, and lipstick in perfect siren red.Whether dealing with her larger-than-life Mami Dearest, her youthful obsessions with Twiggy and Nancy Sinatra, the specter of Fidel Castro's role in her destiny, or her time at the exclusive and Waspy Sidwell Friends private school in Washington, D.C., Anders leads readers on a trip through what it means to be truly unique and just what lengths people will go to in order to be accepted.Jubana! is ultimately a bittersweet, quirky, feminine story of bicultural acceptance and fusion, written with warmth, vivacity, and finally layered with the thoughtful sensitivity of a woman who has kept herself, like a great piece of jewelry, pure and brilliant -- through all that life throws at her.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.