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

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF