Coming of Age as a Sephardi Refugee

Ashkenazi writers have produced serious coming-of-age novels ranging from Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers to Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World, while North African Jews have given us such works as Albert Memmi’s The Pillar of Salt. But, writes Sarah Abrevaya Stein, nothing of the sort has captured the experience of the Ladino-speaking Sephardim of the Ottoman empire—until now.

Elizabeth Graver’s Kantika, a remarkable, lyrical work that conjures and embellishes the journey of the author’s maternal grandmother from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, is the novel that many of us have been waiting for. It is a beautiful work of historical fiction that tells the epic story of a modern Sephardi family with sensitivity, intimacy, and cultural responsibility.

Kantika’s protagonist, Rebecca Cohen, is the daughter of parents who are so prominent in the Istanbul Jewish community that they hobnob with foreign dignitaries. Her world is intensely Judeo-Spanish, but in the way of late Ottoman society, it is also socially fluid. She attends a Catholic, French-language school and her mother tongue, Ladino, is one among many that the family speaks.

[Yet] the Cohen family’s Istanbul idyll has a fatal flaw. Rebecca’s father, Alberto, once dignified and wealthy, has gambled away the family’s savings and become a drunk. He is now forced to approach the Jewish Refugee Relief Committee he once patronized as a supplicant, hoping they will help him take his family to France, England, or North America (he has no interest in Palestine and regards the Zionists as dangerous messianists). The community is financially depleted and focused on helping Jewish émigrés get legal papers to travel and find new jobs and lives abroad, not dissolute local millionaires who have squandered their fortune and good will. They eventually offer to help place Alberto in a position as a janitor of a tiny synagogue in, of all places, Barcelona.

And so, in 1925, Rebecca’s family improbably finds itself in the country that, five centuries earlier, expelled their ancestors.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Jewish literature, Ottoman Empire, Sephardim

The Mass Expulsion of Palestinians Is No Solution. Neither Are Any of the Usual Plans for Gaza

Examining the Trump administration’s proposals for the people of Gaza, Danielle Pletka writes:

I do not believe that the forced cleansing of Gaza—a repetition of what every Arab country did to the hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews in 1948— is a “solution.” I don’t think Donald Trump views that as a permanent solution either (read his statement), though I could be wrong. My take is that he believes Gaza must be rebuilt under new management, with only those who wish to live there resettling the land.

The time has long since come for us to recognize that the establishment doesn’t have the faintest clue what to do about Gaza. Egypt doesn’t want it. Jordan doesn’t want it. Iran wants it, but only as cannon fodder. The UN wants it, but only to further its anti-Semitic agenda and continue milking cash from the West. Jordanians, Lebanese, and Syrians blame Palestinians for destroying their countries.

Negotiations with Hamas have not worked. Efforts to subsume Gaza under the Palestinian Authority have not worked. Rebuilding has not worked. Destruction will not work. A “two-state solution” has not arrived, and will not work.

So what’s to be done? If you live in Washington, New York, London, Paris, or Berlin, your view is that the same answers should definitely be tried again, but this time we mean it. This time will be different. . . . What could possibly make you believe this other than ideological laziness?

Read more at What the Hell Is Going On?

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Palestinians