Keeper of My Kin
Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTELLER * Named a Best Book of Summer by TIME and Oprah Daily * A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2026
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Ferrer (Cuba: An American History) traces the impact of her family's migration in this wrenching account. In 1963, less than a year after Ferrer's birth in Cuba, her mother fled to Mexico City on the first leg of a journey to join Ferrer's father in New York. She left behind Ferrer's older half brother, Poly, because of a dispute with the boy's father. Though their contact was limited, Ferrer grew devoted to Poly, naming a doll after him and occasionally calling him on the phone. They were on different tracks, however: Ferrer enrolled at Vassar, while Poly struggled to finish grade school. After arriving in the U.S. in 1980, Poly came to live with Ferrer and her parents in New Jersey, but proved an angry presence who "got into fights, stabbed people, beat me" and "threatened to kill the whole family, his girlfriend, and then himself." Ferrer muses on the divergent paths their lives took—Poly died of hypertension in 2020 after being diagnosed with schizophrenia—without judgment or excessive psychologizing. Instead, she 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.
