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 on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/13900/coming-of-age-in-the-sephardi-diaspora/