A story of displacement and family love across four countries by Daniel Santacruz

Kantika, Elizabeth Graver, Metropolitan Books, New York, NY, 2023, 284 pgs. $27.99.

Kantika, a word meaning song in Ladino, sings of the joys and challenges of the author’s relatives, a Sefardic family, in four countries. It crosses the line between fiction and biography, recounting their compelling experiences.

As the author writes in the Acknowledgments section, she used the real names of several characters, including her grandmother, Rebecca (née Cohen) Baruch Levy, who inspired the novel and is a key character in it. We first meet her in Istanbul when she is eight years old and sings all the time, including Church hymns and synagogue Hebrew prayers, as well as Ladino, Greek, French and Turkish tunes.

Graver also made use of stories of other members of the family and photographs, which appear in the beginning of 15 sections. They were taken in the cities where members of her family lived between 1907 and 1950: Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, where the novel begins; Barcelona, Spain; Havana; and Astoria and Cambria Heights, in the New York City borough of Queens.

The author has a talent for describing those places in detail, as well as capturing the cadences of the languages the characters spoke: Ladino, French and Turkish.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, which changed the political and economic landscape of Turkey, the family (father Alberto Cohen, mother Sultana Camayor, and children Corinne, Rebecca and Isidoro) settles in Barcelona with the help of the Jewish Refugee Relief Committee, to the chagrin of Alberto.

Graver, who teaches at Boston College, includes a little-known fact of Jewish history to put the family’s move to Barcelona in context: the December 1924 Primo de Rivera law granting Spanish citizenship to Sefardic Jews living in he diaspora or, as they were called, protegidos españoles (protected Spaniards). Some Turkish Jews accepted it, but most weren’t interested.

It is in Barcelona that Rebecca’s life changes forever. She starts working as a modista (dressmaker), hiding her Jewish identity at her father’s request and changing her family name. Cohen was too much of a red flag in the workplace. Marie Blanko Camayor is more acceptable. For extra security, her nationality changes from Turkish to French. In a city short of Jewish bachelors, she weds a Sefardi, Luis, who dies, leaving her with two sons.

Rebecca’s next step is Havana, where she travels to meet a widower, Sam, her sister Corinne set her up with. From there the couple travels to New York City, where they will live for many years.

The author’s research to write the novel, peppered with Ladino words here and there and some French and Turkish, is as interesting as the book itself.

Its gestation began when the author traveled to Florida to visit grandparents Rebecca and Sam in 1985, and recorded them in two microcassettes.

Other relatives she interviewed were her uncles David and Albert Baruch about their experiences in Barcelona and New York. The author’s aunt, Luna Levy Leshefsky Liebowitz, Sam’s daughter from his first marriage, died before the novel was written.

To better understand her roots, Graver traveled to Havana, Barcelona, Istanbul and New York, and consulted several experts regarding the use of Ladino and Jewish life in twentieth-century Istanbul.

Along with Across so Many Seas, by Ruth Behar, and El Diario: The Daring Escape of Two Sephardic Jews from Turkey to America During World War I, by Gloria J. Ascher, both reviewed here, Kantika is a valuable contribution to understanding the American Sefardic experience.

The book is the winner of a National Jewish Book Award and an Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award, among others.

Fuente: kolsefardim.net