Kantika: A Novel

by Elizabeth Graver

Hardcover, 2023

Collections

Your library, Fiction

Genres

Historical Fiction

General Fiction

Fiction

Publication

Metropolitan Books (2023), 304 pages

Description

A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family's displacement across four countries, Kantika?"song" in Ladino?follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way?a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure, and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge?her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose feistiness equals her own and whose challenges pit new family against old. Exploring identity, place, and exile, Kantika also reveals how the female body?in work, art, and love?serves as a site of both suffering and joy. A haunting, inspiring meditation on the tenacity of women, this lush, lyrical novel from Elizabeth Graver celebrates the insistence on seizing beauty and grabbing hold of one's one and only life.… (more)

Media reviews

Jewish Journal

“Graver’s writing is beautiful, lyrical and the embodiment of the “kantika” — the song — of the title… [This] book is authentic, a piece of transnational, century-spanning Jewish history.”

— 2 more

Booklist

With great reverence and respect, Graver fictionalizes the saga of her maternal grandmother, Rebecca Levy, weaving a personal historical tale that follows the determined and courageous Sephardic young woman from her early high-class childhood in Istanbul to her family’s migration to Spain in the

late 1920s to a peripatetic adulthood that brings her to Cuba and New York in the 1930s as the world braces for the onset of WWII. Following an unsatisfying marriage that ends with the premature death of her husband, Rebecca and her two sons seize an opportunity to relocate to America via an arranged marriage to Sam, the widower of Rebecca’s best friend. Sam not only needs a wife, he needs a mother for his daughter, Luna, who suffers from cerebral palsy. Rebecca’s love for Sam is almost instantaneous. Her affection for the challenging Luna takes longer, but it blossoms into a deep maternal love that launches Luna into a full and vibrant maturity. Graver’s paean to resolve and resiliency paints a vivid portrait of spirit and grit.

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Publishers Weekly

Graver (The End of the Point) delivers a luminous story of a Sephardic family disrupted by wars and antisemitism. Rebecca Cohen has a happy early childhood in Constantinople, where she and her best friend Rahelika “Lika” Nahon thrive at a French-speaking Catholic school. The eruption of WWI,

though, interrupts this childhood idyll. The Turkish military takes over the Cohen family’s textile factory, and Rebecca finds work with a local dressmaker to help the family make ends meet. With antisemitism on the rise after the war, the near-destitute Cohens end up in Barcelona, where Rebecca’s father Alberto works as a caretaker in a synagogue. Rebecca dreams of living in the United States, where Lika has immigrated, but feels duty-bound to remain with her family. With her brothers’ encouragement she sets up a dressmaking business, which flourishes only when she hides her Jewish identity. Years later, after Rebecca has two children and becomes a widow, Lika dies in childbirth and her widower asks Rebecca to marry him, forcing her to make a series of difficult decisions and compromises. With elegant prose, Graver offers a memorable portrait of a self-reliant woman tied to faith and traditions.

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