Ruth Behar Glinsky; Rolando Estévez Jordán (illus.)
El Beso/The Kiss. Una Historia que Transcurre en Miami Beach, 2019
Bellamar, Cuba: Ediciones El Fortín
One of thirty-six copies. Signed by Estévez, the illustrator and publisher.
2861
Quarto. 24pp + six-panel foldout illustration showing a panoramic view of Miami Beach and two figures playing, cavorting, and kissing. A fitting vista, with fitting foreground, to match Behar Glinsky's...
Quarto. 24pp + six-panel foldout illustration showing a panoramic view of Miami Beach and two figures playing, cavorting, and kissing. A fitting vista, with fitting foreground, to match Behar Glinsky's recollection of her first kiss during a family trip to Miami. In addition to being a moment of sexual awakening, the trip offered Behar Glinsky a glimpse at a fuller Caribbean culture than what she was then experiencing among her immigrant family in New York, where they lived in a close-knit but idiosyncratic community of other Cuban Jews. Much of Behar Glinsky's work examines this often overlooked faction of Cuban identity, a tense but illuminating confluence of religious, immigrant, and island cultures, here with an especially unique glimpse at the differences between Caribbean migrants in New York and those in Miami, and between Cuban and Puerto Rican cultures. Presented in both Spanish and English. Title-spread illustrations show cupids, a Star of David, seashells, and flowers surrounding the entangled lovers, who are dressed on one side in bathing suits and on the other in actual fabric pasted on to the page. Bound in card wrappers painted blue, with onlaid illustration of lips with three-dimensional lock between them. Yarn along the spine leads to a small bag of sand. The rear panel has an onlaid label with hand-colored illustration showing the press's lighthouse motif adjusted to have lips and extended tongue. Expected rubs to paint at wrappers, else near fine. Housed in bag of woven plastic originally used for masa, with color illustrations pasted to both sides. Perhaps the scarcest book by Ediciones El Fortín, with no institutional holdings.


