Jeanine Cornillot

Family Sentence is Jeanine Cornillot's tale of growing up with a father in prison. Growing up, Jeanine's world is sharply divided. There's the world she knows, the one where she lives in a house dominated by women in suburban Philadelphia where men are absent and foreign to her. The other part of her world is a little more uncertain. Summers, growing up, she spent with her Cuban grandparents in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. Most of her Miami relatives speak no English and Jeanine, despite being half Cuban, knows no Spanish. Despite having her cousins for interpreting, the language barrier and her decidedly un-Cuban looks make her own relatives a little foreign to her despite being bound by blood.

Jeanine's father, a self-professed Cuban revolutionary determined to free Cuba from Castro's rule, was in prison for all of the childhood she can remember for the crime of bombing an Air Canada ticket office. All that she knows of her father she learns from his infrequent letters and a few family trips to visit him in prison during her summers in Miami. All the rest, she makes up as she goes along. She worries and wonders about her father's life in prison, imagines a family reunion that she's certain will never happen while she's still a child, and she perpetrates tiny acts of terrorism in school hallways imagining the revolutionary blood that runs through her veins and bonds her to a father who she doesn't know and will never understand.

Family Sentence is a book about a girl growing into a woman and trying to piece together the disparate pieces of her identity. It's also the story of a girl trying to know a father who is distant and perplexing even when he volunteers answers to any question she might have. It's a story about reconciling the myth of a dad, who by his ideals and through a daughter's loving but ignorant eyes has become larger than life with a real person who has lived an imperfect life without the regrets readers would expect.

Cornillot tells her story with brutal honesty, painting the naive girl she was, desperate to look and seem more "Cuban" for a father who could barely be bothered to remember her when they were apart. She brings her young self to vivid life with many anecdotes of her young life complete with her girlhood imaginings and her childish quirks like her penchant for saying "that's a crime" about anything that seems slightly unjust. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems like the anecdotes get away from her, and that makes for the book's one flaw that it's easy to get lost in the individual anecdotes and lose track of where Cornillot is going with the larger narrative of her life with and without her father. However, the book seems to collect itself in its final chapters as Jeanine reunites with her father as a teenager and a young adult and all the myths and misconceptions she had about her father collide. Ultimately, Cornillot's is a compelling memoir that draws us into her life and tells a personal story that every kid who's ever idolized a parent only to grow up and discover a fallible human being can relate to.… (mehr)

Jeanine Cornillot was just a girl when her father sent her a letter from prison, comparing her to a half-wild, half-friendly cat: “Here in the prison, live many cats. They grow up by themselves. We only feed them occasionally - and never take them to our living quarters.” I wonder if she already understood his words were a harbinger. Her father Hector, a Cuban Revolutionary, was serving 30 years for political bombings, and he would go on to feed her only occasionally, buying her a coke in a prison yard, and never had the chance to show her where he slept. She was left to imagine his life in prison, and for the most part, who he really was. Cornillot’s portrait of her father was built from small moments spent together at Glades Correctional Facility, Raiford Penitentiary, or through letters he sent from inside those walls. Prison recollections are interwoven with the safer, warmer stories of life in Suburban Philadelphia with her mother. In Philadelphia, Cornillot’s family tried to go on with their lives without a father, attempting to make sense of his absence, and, likely, believing that he’d rather be home with them, too. A belief that would later lead to a surprising discovery. Meanwhile, Cornillot’s home in Philadelphia was led by women who cared about gentle things, and was so unlike the prisons she visited. The book is a journey through time, filled with incredible insight and humor, as Cornillot reflects on life searching for her father. I was struck by the pure honesty and nakedness of the book. Cornillot retells every visit to prison in intimate detail, even the time when she got her first period during a visit to prison. It’s fascinating when, in the end, her father sees each one of her visits so very differently. Every moment she holds so dear, seems to pale in comparison with her father’s recollection of his quest to live the life of a revolutionary. It’s a fascinating, beautiful read!… (mehr)

Jeanine Cornillot's memoir recalls growing up with a father in prison. Hector Cornillot spent decades in Florida prisons, sentenced for participation in an anti-Castro bombing in Miami. For his children, Cornillot became an enigma. Jeanine spent her childhood imagining her father fulfilling his parental duties to the best of his ability, within the confines of prison. Her imagination ranged from faith that he thought about his children regularly, to dreaming that he escaped from prison to return to his family. This tendency is exacerbated by Jeanine's mother's edict that that family remain silent on Hector's whereabouts. Jeanine upholds that code of silence, resulting in an even richer imaginative life. Her suppositions are based on a few, sparse visits to her incarcerated father, always undertaken when she visits her Cuban-Floridian grandparents. These do little to quell Jeanine's desire for information about her father; they seem to be cut scenes in the regular progression of her life. Ultimately we see that despite his physical absence, Hector Cornillot shapes his children's lives in many ways. Ultimately what I found most interesting about this book was Jeanine's discussion of struggling with her Cuban identity. She doesn't speak Spanish, when in Miami with her grandparents Jeanine relies on a cousin to translate. Her quotidian life in Philadelphia has little contact with Cuban culture, something that is certainly reinforced by the familial code of silence concerning Hector Cornillot. Many aspects of Jeanine's story duplicate those of thousands of other children with incarcerated parents- on that note I didn't necessarily feel like I was reading what I haven't heard before.… (mehr)