A heartbreaking memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family
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Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Cuba: An American History comes a heartbreaking yet redemptive memoir about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history.
In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer’s mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger story of a world historical revolution. Yet, in another more intimate family history, that choice was a crossroads, ultimately inseparable from who and what they all became.
In this beautiful memoir, Ferrer masterfully shifts between her roles as historian and family member, weaving a multigenerational tale that reaches into the past to understand the circumstances and choices that led to the present. We see key historical events through the eyes of the family: the grandmother who raised Poly after Ada’s departure, a Black woman born a year after the end of slavery in Cuba; Ada’s parents, forced to invent themselves anew in a foreign land; and two brothers left behind—Poly and another, once-secret brother named Juan José, both of whose lives were marked irrevocably by revolution and family separation. Moving between Cuba and the United States and then back again, the book unpacks the experience and emotion of migration, in the moment of separation and over the long-term, for those who left and those who stayed.
Using a treasure trove of letters written across the gulf of family separation and found after the death of Ada’s parents, as well as government documents acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests, Ferrer offers us a profound reflection on belonging, memory, and the lasting imprint of history.
Praise for Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter
“Love is everywhere in this book: the deep romantic bond between her parents, the author’s intense attachment to both of them and to other relatives, and to the troubled island country she lived in for only ten months, yet became the center of her scholarship, her thinking, and her identity. As heartbreaking as this story often is, it is equally heartwarming, filled with love of all kinds.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“A brilliant testament to the power of storytelling. A devastatingly human portrayal of the effects of migration, family secrets, and the history that binds and moves us, this book is a must-read for anyone who has ever loved. With enormous tenderness and an unflinching pursuit of truth, Ferrer writes her family into history, into memoir, into public record, into sunlight, where they—where we all—have always deserved to be.”
—Javier Zamora,
New York Times bestselling author
of Solito
“Powerful and eloquent, Keeper of My Kin explores love of family and love of place—and, for those who are forced to flee, what is left behind and what stays with them forever.”
—Jeannette Walls,
#1 New York Times bestselling author
of The Glass Castle
“[Ferrer] braids a clear-eyed account of recent Cuban history with an empathetic catalog of its effects on her family. It’s a memorable and heartrending achievement.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Ada Ferrer’s remarkable Keeper of My Kin is one of those memoirs you don’t just read, but one that you feel in your bones. It's both a fearless excavation of the past and a bold, compassionate attempt to understand the difficult choices embedded, sometimes buried, within every immigration story. I loved this book.”
—Daniel Alarcón,
executive producer of Radio Ambulante and
author of The King Is Always Above His People
“A gripping family memoir, Keeper of My Kin explores fraught relationships and secret pasts against the backdrop of big history. Here, Ada Ferrer, the ‘historian daughter’ and descendant of an enslaved Black maternal ancestor, tells the truths of her kin with an aching tenderness, revealing the traumas that come with the package of racism, war, revolution, and migration. In an intimate story lovingly told, memory, history, and emotional honesty combine in a beautiful act of retrieval.”
—Tiya Miles, author of
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack,
a Black Family Keepsake
“The Ferrer family will forever stay with you for theirs is the story of all Cubans in the last seven decades. If you read this tender and brilliant book as I did—drying tears and holding my breath—it’ll be yours to cherish as well. A triumphant memoir of love and loss.”
—Mirta Ojito, author of
Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus
“‘What country, friends, is this?’ asks Viola, washed ashore in Illyria at the beginning of Twelfth Night. Here, another island, Cuba, and the shores of America; another wine-dark, enclosed, estranging sea; other odysseys. Ferrer has written a history that is also myth: of those left behind, lost brothers, found families, old and new lives. Keeper of My Kin is exhilarating to read; I loved it; I loved knowing more about all the departures and returns, the losses and reparations, that have made the modern world.”
—Carolyn Steedman, author of
Landscape for a Good Woman
"A poignant tribute to the bonds of familial love across history, geography, and political and personal challenges."
—Shelf Awareness
