Cuban-American Chronicles Life Between Cultures

Hijuelos has written eight novels exploring the Cuban-American experience. His latest work, a memoir called Thoughts Without Cigarettes, describes his early life in New York, where he was born in 1951.

Here, in his childhood neighborhood of Morningside Heights, Hijuelos can still remember the soulful Sicilian shoemaker in a green smock in the window of his repair shop; the row of tenement houses across the street where he used to play; his father, home from work, leaning against a basement rail, smoking cigarettes; the old "Freegent's" Pharmacy on the corner.

"There used to be a soda fountain just inside the window," Hijeulos recalls, "and candy counters, and a big telephone booth — you know the old kind, with doors you'd open up." Hijuelos' parents, who immigrated to the U.S. in the late '40s, didn't have a telephone until 1965. They'd come to the Freegent's phone booth to make and receive calls to the relatives still in Cuba.

Hijuelos stops in front of his childhood home, building No. 419. "This is where I was raised," he says. He points to a front window, once the family's living room. "As a kid, I spent so much time standing at that window ... I was sick as a child, so my mother wouldn't let me out all that much, so I sort of saw this life [on the street] exploding. I mean, it was such a lively block that it was very hard to feel lonesome. But somehow I could."

When Hijuelos was just 4 years old, he contracted nephritis, a kidney disease, during a summer trip to Cuba. He had to spend a year in a convalescent hospital in Greenwich, Conn., miles from his family.

Garcia is the author of five novels, including Dreaming in Cuban and The Lady Matador's Hotel. Garcia was born in Havana, but like Oscar Hijuelos, she was raised in New York. "I remember meeting Oscar," she says, "It was in '92 or '93, and I started speaking to him in Spanish and he answered me in English. I completely understood how you are one foot in the culture, and the rest of you out of it. Even the sense of being a fraud, because you're in the culture but you're more of an observer than a participant."

As a child, Hijuelos did plenty of observing from his apartment window. He eventually found a refuge in reading. His building was literally in the shadow of Columbia University across Amsterdam Avenue. He says his mother would find crates of books on the street.

"Since we had a bookcase, she wanted to fill the bookcase with books," Hijuelos remembers. "So she'd take these books from the street, and put them in our shelves. So I grew up, for example, reading things like about agriculture in the Midwest in the 1950s. Half a volume of Oliver Twist, I remember — the cover was still nice, but half of it was missing.