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Published Apr 2023
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A dazzling Sephardic multigenerational saga that moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, exploring displacement, endurance, and family as home.
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.
"Graver delivers a luminous story of a Sephardic family. With elegant prose, Graver offers a memorable portrait of a self-reliant woman tied to faith and traditions. Fans of family epics will love this."
―Publishers Weekly
"Beautiful and lyrical. [Kantika] is a piece of transnational, century-spanning Jewish history. Graver's poignantly elegiac prose often soars. A straightforward family story written with a poet's sensitivity and flair."
―Kirkus Reviews
"Intimately imagined, lyrically written, and rich with historical detail, Kantika weaves forced displacement, wild reinvention and triumphant healing into a big, border-crossing family saga. Marvelous!"
―Gish Jen, author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon
"Both epic and heartfelt, Kantika belongs in the company of the great twentieth-century immigrant Jewish writers, such as Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and Henry Roth."
―Joshua Henkin, author of Morningside Heights
"Kantika is an acute and compassionate portrait of displacement and reinvention, and it sings."
―Michael Frank, author of One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World
"A gorgeous accomplishment. In intimate and inventive prose, Elizabeth Graver carries us to the vibrantly drawn streets of Constantinople, Barcelona, Havana and New York. We follow her remarkable characters through grief and hope, and into human connections as delicate as they are profound. This is a novel to get lost in."
―Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink
This information about Kantika was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Jo Eldredge Morrisey
Elizabeth Graver's fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose tumultuous and shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and finally New York.
Elizabeth's fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. The mother of two young adult daughters, she teaches at Boston ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Elizabeth Graver's Website
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