Refugee

Eleven-year-old Isabel is struggling to survive in Castro’s Cuba during 1994. Without the support of the Soviet Union, the economy is floundering, and people are starving. Isabel tags along with her father and grandfather when they go to Havana to collect the family’s food rations. She brings her trumpet, hoping to earn a little money as a street musician: “She listened now, intently, trying to hear the heartbeat of Cuba in her own music. What she heard instead was the sound of breaking glass” (11). This beat is called clave, and Isabel struggles to hear it.

Mahmoud lives in 2015 Aleppo, Syria. His country has become a war zone, and 12-year-old Mahmoud does his best to remain invisible to avoid danger: “To walk around getting noticed by the Syrian army or the rebels fighting them was just inviting trouble” (12). After the Arab Spring of 2011, conflicts between the government and insurgents, as well as Shia and Sunni Muslim fanatics, made everyday life a challenge.

In 1939 Berlin, Josef, his mother, and his little sister have boarded a train. They will meet Josef’s father at the boat that will carry them to safety in Cuba. The family is sequestered in a car reserved for Jews. Josef wonders if he could pass for an ordinary German, so he ducks into one of the regular passenger cars. While there, he’s caught by a youth in uniform: “He had done everything he could to avoid the Hitler Youth […] but now he’d handed himself right over to one—and all because he’d taken off his armband to walk around a train and buy a newspaper!” (24). Josef fears that he and his family will be sent to a concentration camp.

In 1994 Havana, Isabel is playing her trumpet in the marketplace when she hears the sound of shattering glass. A riot has broken out over the chronic food shortage, and Isabel’s father is being beaten by a policeman. She and her grandfather run to help her father get away as a cop warns that they’ll come back later to imprison her father. Isabel knows her father must leave Cuba that same night.

In 2015 Aleppo, Mahmoud and his family have just finished their afternoon prayers when a missile hits their apartment building. It tears out the entire front wall.

On the train bound for Hamburg in 1939, Josef is marched back to the Jewish car and let off with a warning by a Hitler Youth. Later, Josef and his family find his father hiding next to the ship they will take to Cuba. Josef’s father is gaunt and paranoid. He dashes up the gangplank, fearful that someone will keep the family from leaving Germany. Even though Josef is happy to be starting a new life, “[a]ll Josef could think about was what terrible things must have happened to his father to make him look so awful and act so scared” (39).

In 1994 Havana, Isabel and her family are debating how to get her father out of the country. Just then, Fidel Castro announces on television that anyone who wants to leave the island will be allowed to do so. Isabel mentions that the Castillo family next door has a boat: “It was an ugly blue thing cobbled together out of old metal advertisements and road signs and oil drums. It barely qualified as a boat, but it was big enough for the four Castillos—and maybe four more guests” (45). Señor Castillo needs a big, thick piece of cardboard to line the bottom of the boat, so he steals a giant poster of Castro. The boat has no gasoline, so Isabel trades her trumpet to a fisherman for enough fuel to get the craft to Miami. Everyone in the Fernandez and Castillo families will be able to leave together.

In 2015 Aleppo, Mahmoud and his family all flee their apartment building moments before it collapses. Mahmoud’s father returns from work just in time to see the destruction. He makes an immediate decision to drive them all to Turkey and eventually emigrate to Germany: “We’ve spent too much time talking about it and not doing anything. […] Ready or not, if we want to live, we have to leave Syria” (55).

Onboard the MS St. Louis in 1939, Josef befriends the other passengers. Everyone on the ship is Jewish, so no one is the target of discrimination. Josef is looking forward to his bar mitzvah, which is only weeks away. To pass the time, he and his friends play silly pranks on the other guests: “As Josef dried his eyes, he realized he hadn’t played like this, hadn’t laughed like this, for many years” (59). Josef wishes he could stay on the ship forever.

In 1994 Havana, Isabel and her family drag their boat to the beach where a crowd has collected to cheer all the departing emigrants. Even CNN reporters have arrived to cover the story. As the Fernandez and Castillo families launch their craft, two policemen chase them through the surf and board the boat. They turn out to be Luis Castillo and his girlfriend, Amara, who have both deserted the Cuban army. When a hail of bullets follows the deserters, Isabel grows worried: “All she could think about was the ninety miles they still had to go, and the water pouring in from the gunshot hole in the side of the boat” (65).