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Loading... Kantikaby Elizabeth Graver
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  tangledthread | Mar 30, 2024 |   After the first husband's death, Rebecca returns to live with her parents; her mother taking care of the boys while she works as a seamstress. As troubles start in Spain (the Spanish Revolution), the family feels she need to remarry. Rebecca's childhood friend who also left for America has now died and the father is left with a disabled daughter. Rebecca leaves for Cuba where he meets and marries Sam. When she arrives in New York, she finds the daughter is severely disabled and needy although very bright. Much of the story tells of Rebecca and Sam's life in New York, her seamstress business, Rebecca's work with Luna, the daughter, and the arrival of her two boys from Spain. The story ends with Rebecca singing at a Jewish Community Center in the Bronx (the word "kantika" means song in their ethnic language. The boys are grown, Luna has grown and has developed a life of her own. The story is based on the family of the author and there are family pictures included. A good read, believable characters, details that are touching. (  ) maryreinert | Mar 8, 2024 | This was a very moving book. It is set in the ears before WWII and WWII and involves a multi-generational Shepartic family as they move from Turkey, Spain, Cuba, and US. It's mostly about women, about displacement, ritual, and family. Published 2023. I found the story very moving. It is based on the author's grandmother's life. I listened to the audio version and really enjoyed listening to the languages in the book and the singing. The reader did a wonderful job. The reader was Gail Shalan. (  ) Kristelh | Dec 28, 2023 | HandelmanLibraryTINR | May 17, 2023 |
 “Graver’s writing is beautiful, lyrical and the embodiment of the “kantika” — the song — of the title… [This] book is authentic, a piece of transnational, century-spanning Jewish history.” With great reverence and respect, Graver fictionalizes the saga of her maternal grandmother, Rebecca Levy, weaving a personal historical tale that follows the determined and courageous Sephardic young woman from her early high-class childhood in Istanbul to her family’s migration to Spain in the late 1920s to a peripatetic adulthood that brings her to Cuba and New York in the 1930s as the world braces for the onset of WWII. Following an unsatisfying marriage that ends with the premature death of her husband, Rebecca and her two sons seize an opportunity to relocate to America via an arranged marriage to Sam, the widower of Rebecca’s best friend. Sam not only needs a wife, he needs a mother for his daughter, Luna, who suffers from cerebral palsy. Rebecca’s love for Sam is almost instantaneous. Her affection for the challenging Luna takes longer, but it blossoms into a deep maternal love that launches Luna into a full and vibrant maturity. Graver’s paean to resolve and resiliency paints a vivid portrait of spirit and grit. Graver (The End of the Point) delivers a luminous story of a Sephardic family disrupted by wars and antisemitism. Rebecca Cohen has a happy early childhood in Constantinople, where she and her best friend Rahelika “Lika” Nahon thrive at a French-speaking Catholic school. The eruption of WWI, though, interrupts this childhood idyll. The Turkish military takes over the Cohen family’s textile factory, and Rebecca finds work with a local dressmaker to help the family make ends meet. With antisemitism on the rise after the war, the near-destitute Cohens end up in Barcelona, where Rebecca’s father Alberto works as a caretaker in a synagogue. Rebecca dreams of living in the United States, where Lika has immigrated, but feels duty-bound to remain with her family. With her brothers’ encouragement she sets up a dressmaking business, which flourishes only when she hides her Jewish identity. Years later, after Rebecca has two children and becomes a widow, Lika dies in childbirth and her widower asks Rebecca to marry him, forcing her to make a series of difficult decisions and compromises. With elegant prose, Graver offers a memorable portrait of a self-reliant woman tied to faith and traditions.
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. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing AuthorElizabeth Graver is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers  
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.97)
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Wikipedia in English
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Rebecca then emigrates to Cuba to meet Sam, the widowed husband of her childhood friend from Turkey. They marry and return to his family in New York. The rest of the story is full of family drama as they raise a blended family with the handicapped daughter from Sam's first marriage. WWII ensues and the story ends in 1950 with the family of 6 children mostly raised. (