“Authentic Masks” Narrating Jewish Refugee Transit to the Caribbean in Felicia Rosshandler’s Passing Through Havana

The flight of Holocaust refugees to the Caribbean has become a new focal point of historical scholarship. Less attention has been devoted, however, to literary representations of these journeys. Refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe feature prominently, for example, in Jamaican novelist John Hearne’s Land of the Living (1961) and Antiguan novelist Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter (2002). More recently, Haitian author Louis Philippe Dalembert’s novel Avant que les ombres s’effacent (2017) addresses refugee journeys to Haiti that remain largely unexplored in historical scholarship. Moreover, Jewish refugees have also written fiction and poetry inspired by their experiences of flight to the Caribbean. Such works reveal the refugees’ complex responses to the colonial environments in which they found themselves. These texts suggest how the refugees’ understanding of colonial racism was informed by their own experiences of persecution while also being shaped by European colonialist discourses and preconceptions. A case in point is Felicia Rosshandler’s autobiographical novel Passing Through Havana: A Novel of a Wartime Girlhood in the Caribbean (1984), which depicts her Jewish family’s flight in 1941 from Nazi-occupied Belgium to Cuba. Overlaying the refugee narrative with a narrative of adolescent sexual awakening that emphasizes the sensuality of the tropics, Rosshandler’s novel at times promotes a primitivist, exoticizing gaze. This article examines Passing Through Havana’s intertwining of the refugee narrative with a colonialist gaze and the larger tensions that the novel highlights with regard to Jewishness and race in the Caribbean.