Elizabeth Graver

Lincoln author Elizabeth Graver and Judy Bolton-Fasman (author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets) will discuss Graver’s latest novel, Kantika, on Wednesday, May 17 from 7–8:30 p.m. in the Lincoln Public Library’s Tarbell Room. Kantika is a Sephardic multigenerational saga that moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, exploring displacement, endurance, and family as home, inspired by the story of Graver’s grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy. Copies of the book will be sold at the event by the Concord Bookshop.

Graver’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. Following is a Lincoln Squirrel Q&A with Graver.

Let me start by asking about your previous historical novels, The End of the Point and Unravelling. They have very different settings and time periods. What inspired them?

With Unravelling, I was in graduate school studying American studies and cultural history and read a book that made a big impression on me about the Lowell textile mills and ended up actually having a dream in which I, or some version of myself, was a mill worker. And woke up and had this voice in my head. The End of the Point was loosely inspired by a spit of land into Buzzards Bay where my husband’s family had, across some generations, a summer house. That one took me into the kind of things that Kantika is also interested in, which have to do with the 20th century and the intersections of big history with individual lives.

The End of the Point had a very tight lens. It covered a lot of time, but the place was really small. I was interested in what happens when a family owns property and can come back over and over and again across generations to the same small place. The place is almost like a crucible where a lot happens and it’s very distilled. I think I needed to write The End of the Point to have the confidence to write Kantika, which involved even more research — this time about lives, languages, and countries that are farther away from me, even though it’s my family’s story. I grew up in New England, but my mother was a first-generation American who grew up in Queens and my dad was second-generation American who grew up in the Bronx. This was an odd book in that I use real photos from my family and real names, and there’s a little girl towards the end called Suzanne, and that’s my mother.

What percentage of Kantika is factual versus fiction?

The central characters in the family are all inspired by real people with the proper birth orders, the main geographical events all happened, you know, the moves from Turkey to Spain to Cuba to New York. But all the interiority I had to make up — it’s fiction, right? There are the stories my grandmother narrated blow by blow on tapes that I have, and there are some things she told me that didn’t make it in, but it’s an incredible melange. There were so many different ways I was grabbing material. I interviewed people at the Sephardic Home for the Aged in Istanbul, and I read articles and I corresponded with scholars and I wandered the streets.

One of the characters I loved writing about, but who really surprised me in terms of my urge to take on his point of view, is Alberto, which was the real name of my great-grandfather, but I never met him, my mother never met him. He died a terrible death in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. I knew about four facts about him: I knew that he was a terrible businessman and loved to garden and was an intellectual and was much older than his wife. That’s about it. But that was kind of enough. In some ways, it’s almost easier to imagine a character when you don’t have too much because people are incredibly complicated. I initially thought of writing this book as nonfiction, but I didn’t have enough material. And I love writing fiction — I love emotion and psychology and inner life.

Writing can be so solitary, but the research for this book connected me to my own past and my own family. I did a lot of interviewing of not just my grandmother decades ago, and my uncles and my mother, but also lots of people who were preserving and making art out of this world, which has been really fun.

Did you learn any Ladino growing up?

Teeny little things at the beginning of a meal, but no, not really. My grandparents would speak it over my head. They were of that immigrant generation when assimilation was very much what needed to happen, maybe even especially for Sephardic Jews who were so different from the majority of other Jews in this country. My mother actually has memories of her father saying to her at one point, “You can’t call me Papa any more. You have to call me Dad.” And they wouldn’t let her pierce her ears because that seemed too foreign. My grandmother just didn’t care. She was so singular — she just was never trying to blend in exactly. But they were working very hard as first-generation immigrants to help their kids make it in American society.

From your standpoint, how did the Sephardic experience differ from the Ashkenazi experience in America?

My father’s family actually didn’t know what to make of my mother at first. They ended up adoring her, but she didn’t eat the same food as they did. She didn’t know Yiddish. Growing up, I was very struck by the differences. My father had a harder childhood as an only child whose father died when he was very young. My mother’s family didn’t have a lot of money [in America]; they had plenty of struggles, but it was a very, abundant family, filled with food and music and joy and very Mediterranean. The Sephardic culture has a lot more flow, from what I’ve seen. There weren’t the same sorts of ghettos. It’s not that it was easy — the Sephardim were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire after the Spanish Inquisition but they didn’t have full rights. So none of it is a totally rosy picture, but they also traveled a huge amount, which led to a quite expansive culture. Some of this was forced crossings around diasporic expulsion, but some of it wasn’t. Some of it was trade.

My Ashkenazi and Sephardic grandparents would spend some time together, and they became friends. And my grandmother, Rebecca, in my novel and in real life, was part of a Jewish community in Queens that was mostly comprised of Ashkenazi Jews. She became good friends with people at her temple, but I think she always felt a bit foreign. I have a scene in my book right at the end, where she’s doing a concert at her little synagogue, and one of the people who’s organizing it asks her to sing a song in Ladino because she thinks it’ll be exotic. In real life, my grandmother was kind of happy to take on that role —she was colorful, she liked attention, but at the same time I think there was a real sorrow and sense of not fully belonging.

It was complicated because there were significant Ottoman Sephardic communities in New York, but they were not of her social class. She started out rich and my grandfather, who was her second marriage, grew up very poor. He had quite a bit of family in the United States, but they didn’t much like her, and she didn’t much like them. I started to tease some of this out and turn it into fiction about the different ways in which people were connected or divided. And social class was one of them, which also really interested me in The End of the Point.

Rebecca wanted to own a house, she wanted to have a garden. They didn’t have a lot of money, so they ended up in the far reaches of Queens because that’s where they could do that. And she had a good friend across the street who was Cuban and Catholic, because she could speak Spanish with him. My grandmother in her old age in Florida became friends with a reverend. In Istanbul, she went to Catholic school. It’s funny because I teach at a Jesuit university. So she was really pluralistic in all these ways. And at the same time, she was deeply Jewish. She had her Star of David earrings and she always went to synagogue. And I was raised culturally very Jewish but totally secular.

How does Kantika track with your work as a professor of creative writing and literature at Boston College?

I’ve been teaching a paired course with a colleague and close friend of mine called “Roots and Routes: Reading Identity Migration and Culture.” That course is intended for advanced English language learners, so many of the students have their own really interesting migration stories. I’ve had them do things like interview an immigrant and often it’s a parent or a grandparent. I feel like everybody has a story and so I encourage my students to gather them, too.

I think I wrote Kantika partly in response to the worldwide refugee crisis and the fact that I was reading so much incredibly powerful literature and teaching by immigrants, so having this story intertwine or sit alongside some of those other stories feels important to me. I had a feeling that this is a story that’s rich and beautiful and painful and has many different pieces and has not been told as much as it might.