Family, Displacement, and Culture Theme Analysis

All three of Refugee’s protagonists are forced to flee the only culture they have ever known, but Josef and Isabel in particular fear the erasure of their personal cultural identity, or a future inability to connect to the place they once called home. Gratz refutes the idea that they will lose this sense of culture, however, due in large part to the fact that Josef and Isabel remain connected to a family that shares their cultural heritage. Even though they are removed from their countries, their families enable a transplantation of that culture, allowing Josef and Isabel to remain connected to it. Thus, Gratz illustrates how the cultural identity that a family shares has the ability to create the sense of home, even in a new society.

Gratz uses Isabel’s connection to her trumpet and the clave, an irregular rhythm signature to Cuban music, to demonstrate her ability to find a new home in Miami with her family. At the beginning of the story, Isabel can’t hear the clave rhythm, even when she listens to her own trumpet playing. When she plays on the streets of Havana, she describes how “Try as she might, she had never heard it, never felt it. She listened now, intently, trying to hear the heartbeat of Cuba in her own music.” Isabel hopes and assumes that she’ll be able to learn clave as she grows up in Havana, illustrating her yearning for a connection to her home culture. Yet Isabel makes the decision that her family is ultimately more important than her connection to her home country, symbolized in her music and her trumpet in particular. This trade-off is made explicit when Isabel exchanges her trumpet for gasoline to power the boat that will take her and her family to Miami. She recognizes that family creates a sense of home more than a place ever could, and her fear of the danger in Havana—and the possibility of her father, Geraldo, being imprisoned—overshadows her desire to stay.

The anxiety over learning clave only amplifies, however, when Isabel and her family set off for Miami. On the boat, she worries to herself, “She had never been able to count clave, but she had always assumed it would come to her eventually. That the rhythm of her homeland would one day whisper its secrets to her soul. But would she ever hear it now? Like trading her trumpet, had she swapped the one thing that was really hers—her music—for the chance to keep her family together?” The fear that Isabel expresses demonstrates how important her cultural heritage is to her, as she considers it the only thing that truly belongs to her. The conclusion of Isabel’s story, however, argues that one can find one’s culture anywhere, as long as one remains connected to one’s family. When Isabel begins school at Miami, she receives a trumpet as a gift from Guillermo, a family member who already lives in Miami. Isabel tries out for the school band with a salsa version of the U.S. national anthem, and she realizes that she can finally hear the clave rhythm. She recognizes that she doesn’t need to be in Cuba to feel connected to her culture. In fact, being with her family has allowed her to be even more connected to her culture than she was in Havana.

Josef finds a similar sense of a transplanted home with his own family and other Jewish people aboard the MS St. Louis, emphasizing how one’s family, and a community at large, can preserve a culture more strongly than a homeland can. For Josef, the dissociation from his home becomes even more pronounced due to the fact that the Nazis are attempting to systematically eradicate the Jewish people and their culture. Whereas Josef always considered himself to be a German and believes that Germany is his home, he finds that his German identity is constantly being disputed, and his Jewish culture is undermined. He is made fun of in school for being Jewish, and others suggest that he is not a “real” German. Thus, Gratz shows how someone can be detached from their own culture even when one is still in the place that one calls home. Ironically, it is not until Josef leaves Germany and boards the St. Louis that he is able to reconnect to his Jewish culture, as the ship’s passengers are exclusively Jewish. Josef is able to attend synagogue and Rachel is able to organize his bar mitzvah, a Jewish ceremony representing his passage into adulthood. Because German Jews had been afraid to gather in public places since Kristallnacht, this represents the first time that Josef is able to connect openly with his Jewish identity in over six months. The memories of their traditions flood back to him, and Josef is able to recite from the Torah in Hebrew. With this ceremony, Gratz is able to illustrate how Josef does not need to be in Germany or even in a proper synagogue to remain connected to his culture; like Isabel, he simply needs his family.