Ruth Behar has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is Letters from Cuba.
Lucky Broken Girl
Summary
In this unforgettable multicultural coming-of-age narrative - based on the author's childhood in the 1960s - a young Cuban-Jewish immigrant girl is adjusting to her new life in New York City when her American dream is suddenly derailed. Ruthie's plight will intrigue listeners, and her powerful story of strength and resilience, full of color, light, and poignancy, will stay with them for a long time. Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro's Cuba to New York City. Just when she's finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English - and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood's hopscotch queen - a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined her to her bed for a long recovery. As Ruthie's world shrinks because of her inability to move, her powers of observation and her heart grow larger, and she comes to understand how fragile life is, how vulnerable we all are as human beings, and how friends, neighbors, and the power of the arts can sweeten even the worst of times.
©2017 Ruth Behar (P)2017 Listening Library
Traveling Heavy
Summary
Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether it's learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Béjar. Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last good-bye, she is obsessed with the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity. The book is published by Duke University Press.
©2013 Ruth Behar (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks
Letters from Cuba
Summary
Pura Belpré Award winner Ruth Behar's inspiring story of a young Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba while she works to rescue the rest of her family. The situation is getting dire for Jews in Poland on the eve of World War II. Esther's father has fled to Cuba, and she is the first one to join him. It's heartbreaking to be separated from her beloved sister, so Esther promises to write down everything that happens until they're reunited. And she does, recording both the good - the kindness of the Cuban people and her discovery of a valuable hidden talent - and the bad: the fact that Nazism has found a foothold even in Cuba. Esther's evocative letters are full of her appreciation for life and reveal a resourceful, determined girl with a rare ability to bring people together, all the while striving to get the rest of their family out of Poland before it's too late. Based on Ruth Behar's family history, this compelling story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit in the most challenging times.
©2020 Ruth Behar (P)2020 Listening Library