Episode 26: Elizabeth Graver
On Lost Worlds and New Doorways
Elizabeth Graver’s Five Books:
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Isola by Allegra Goodman
Kantika by Elizabeth Graver
The Five Books is a podcast that celebrates the role of books in Jewish culture. Through author interviews, we delve into Jewish identity and discover each author’s favorite novels. Join us every week for new Jewish book recommendations! Some of our episodes have included conversations with Rabbi Sharon Brous (Senior Rabbi at IKAR, and author of The Amen Effect), Yael Van Der Wouden (author of The Safekeep), and Dara Horn (author of People Love Dead Jews.)
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
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Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
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.
Kantika was awarded a National Jewish Book Award, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, and the Massachusetts Book Award.
Elizabeth Graver is the author of several novels, including The End of the Point, which was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction, and her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and Best American Essays. She teaches at Boston College.
In our conversation, we’ll explore the power of witnessing erased histories, Sephardic migrations, and the way historical fiction speaks to the present moment.
Other Books & Resources Mentioned:
The Postcard by Anne Berest
Transcript:
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to the Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, and today I'll be talking with Elizabeth Graver about her book Kantika, a fictionalized portrait of her Sephardic family and their migration across time and countries.
Elizabeth Graver:
Many Sephardic communities were in port cities. There was a lot of travel and it's an extremely multilingual culture. And so there is this kind of flow that spoke to my aspirations of the way I would like the world to be. More doorways and fewer walls.
Kantika was awarded a National Jewish Book Award, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, and the Massachusetts Book Award. Elizabeth Graver is the author of several novels, including The End of the Point, which was long listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction, and her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Essays. She teaches at Boston College.
In this episode, we talk about the way historical fiction is always in conversation with the present.
And that really interests me, sort of why a historical novel is being told now. And they're not trying, when I write them, to be a book of that time. That would be impossible, and in a certain way, not that interesting. I could just go read a book from that time. So you're always writing out of your own moment and in conversation with it, even if it's oblique.
We'll also discuss Beloved and 100 Saturdays and Kantika as stories shaped by silence and the power of witnessing erased histories.
What cannot be spoken? Like what evades history because it's been erased, right? Who can't tell their story and what does it mean to try to tell it for them while still respecting its silences?
All that and more coming up next.
Welcome to The Five Books, Elizabeth. I'm so delighted to have you here today. I read Kantika. It felt like stepping into another time, another place, but also felt so immediately familiar. It is just a luminous and layered novel. It tells the fictionalized story of your grandmother, Rebecca, moving from Istanbul to Spain, to Cuba, to New York in the early 1900s. It's a story that's deeply personal and also tells a much larger story.
Kantika means song in Judeo-Spanish or Ladino. The book has won numerous awards, accolades, including the National Jewish Book Award. It was on seemingly every list of best books of 2023. It was definitely at the top of my list. So thank you so much for joining me today.
Elizabeth Graver:
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk.
Terrific. So I'd love to hear a little more about what made you want to tell this story personally. But also I've read that you've said that you turned to telling this story and I think you began writing it about 10 years ago. And you said that you were thinking about refugees and antisemitism, which are obviously both extremely relevant right now. So I'd love to hear more about the beginnings of the book and also how those specific ideas were impacting you at the time.
Elizabeth Graver:
Sure. So kind of interestingly, the actual in some ways seeds of the book were much, much earlier. So I'm 60 now. So yeah, I guess I started the book when I was about 50. But when I was 21 in college and I had been doing summer internships as a journalist and I interviewed my grandmother telling stories and we just kind of sat there only for maybe a couple hours, but I had always both been very close to her and felt kind of drawn to her. She was extremely creative and we used to sew together and draw and paint together and sing together. And I felt this kind of kindred spiritness with her at the same time that she felt extremely mysterious to me. So my maternal side of my family is Sephardic. My father's side is Ashkenazi.
But I also knew that my grandmother was from somewhere else, that she would sometimes say she was Spanish, sometimes she would say she was Turkish. I knew that Judaism was at the center of her life. So anyway, long story short, I sat down with her and we had these incredibly moving conversations. And I think at that moment, I was very conscious as a young person of the fact that she was old and she died four or five years after that. And I wanted to hold on to her because I loved her, but also I think I sensed even then that this was an important story. But I also really wanted, which I think will connect us to at least one of the books we're going to talk about today, for her to have the experience of me listening to her and to kind of understand that she was important in some way. And on some level, she knew this. She was very dignified. She kind of had a healthy self-regard, but I remember I sat down and I said, okay, you know, grandma, I want you to say this is Rebecca Levy and I named the date. And she said, you want I should say my name? Like why, you know, and I was like, because like, this is your story. So that was then and then decades passed.
And so I think what took me so long was partly that the story felt both very close to home in a way that felt complicated and challenging to write about your family. And also it felt very far afield. I didn't speak the languages. I didn't, I grew up with a teeny bit of Ladino and with lots of yummy Mediterranean food, but I didn't know the world well. hadn't been to any of the countries except for Turkey and obviously the US where she lived. So there were a lot of things keeping me from it. So about a decade ago, I teach at Boston College. I was teaching lots of first generation students because I teach a course called Roots and Routes, reading migration identity and culture. And we purposefully enroll generation 1.5 students or international students. And so I was getting an incredible array of their stories and teaching a lot of immigration literature. So partly it was a kind of, there are just so many rich stories. I want to find mine, but then yes, I also did write this story through the first Trump presidency and was aware in ways that have only gotten obviously more complicated of antisemitism and of anti-immigrant ethos in general. And also a kind of, I think I was getting a glimpse of how countries can change.
So this notion of what America is and what it means to come here. And my grandparents were extremely grateful to be American, but I would look at like Turkey and Cuba, some of the other places where they lived, and just see how radically a country can turn from one thing to another. And so I'm always really interested in my work and increasingly, I think as time goes on in how these kind of granular, small personal emotional stories intersect with giant things like nations and religions and people trying to live together. And I was also interested in the ways in which, as I learned about Sephardic life in Turkey, it also provided a narrative that I think it's important to keep track of, which was that for quite a long time, Jews and Muslims lived quite well together in Turkey. Not without complications, and there were other minority populations and, you know, like the Armenian genocide, there's all kinds of complexities the way there always is in history. But I was really interested in that cross pollination and pluralism and kind of cosmopolitanism as ways to, as we're moving through our current moment, look for alternatives.
Book One: a Jewish book from childhood — Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley.
Elizabeth Graver:
So my parents were both born to immigrant Jewish families in New York. She was from Queens. He was from the Bronx. She was Sephardic and he was Ashkenazi. So it was almost considered a mixed marriage at the time. But they met at Berkeley where they had both gone to do PhD work and they were very much of their generation of kind of young left leaning intellectuals. So they weren't religious.
First my father and then eventually my mother both taught at Williams College. So I lived in this beautiful little green valley village town where there were not a lot of Jews. Most of us were faculty kids. I had no formal Jewish education. I went to Hebrew school for a couple weeks when I was 12 because I wanted to, but it was kind of a catastrophe. I was like put in Hebrew class with the six-year-olds, and, because I didn't know anything and like many people I think my parents' relationship to all of this was complicated and we grew up with, you know, the Jewish holidays and a very strong sense of cultural pride, but not practice. My mother was a feminist, is a feminist. My dad started out as an academic teaching all kinds of different things with nothing Jewish, which was probably partly a sign of the times. I mean, being Jewish at Williams College in the sixties was an anomaly. Like this was this preppy place. He'd never heard of it when he got the job. And then eventually he got really interested in Jewish American literature and he wrote a book eventually called An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer, Levin, and the Diary. And he at some point started teaching a course called Imagining American Jews. And I'm pretty sure that he introduced me to Grace Paley. And you know, my parents would give me I.B. Singer when I was little and Chaim Potok. We had a very, very rich literary world in my house.
Well, I guess I'm wondering what the kind of stories were that you heard growing up. Did you hear some of these stories of your grandmother's childhood or did you hear stories from your father's side about their immigrant experience?
Elizabeth Graver:
Very, very little from my father's for complicated reasons. His father died when he was 13 and they didn't like to talk about the past for a whole bunch of reasons. My mother's side, I had a much stronger sense because my mother is very close to her siblings. My grandparents on that side would kind of talk about the past and it was mostly in positive ways. I knew my grandmother loved Turkey. I knew she loved Spain, interestingly, because Spain's a pretty complicated place and they moved, quote, “back there” in the 1920s, you know, after their ancestors had been expelled hundreds of years before. She was a joyful person who always kind of managed to find joy in just about anything. But I wouldn't say they talked that much about the past, which is I think partly why I felt compelled to ask my grandma, Becca, who became the inspiration for Rebecca in the novel. But if she talked to anybody, it was to me. You know, it's very interesting. I see this sometimes with my students. I feel like often in a family, one person is kind of the questioner and the historian. And I don't know how you inhabit that role or what leads you to it, but for whatever reason, I was very curious.
She was unusual for a grandmother and for a woman of her generation in how full and explicit she would be. She would talk about sexuality. She was very kind of, I think you can see this in the book, kind of in her body. She was very frank and she treated me with this kind of lateral respect, almost of like, you know, you're a person and I'm gonna tell you this stuff. So, but it was still fragmentary. I mean, it was more sort of in terms of her past that I would see her, I would hear her accent. I would hear her singing. I would make phyllo dough, like little spanakopitas, burekas with her, you know, where you roll the dough. And so a lot of it was just kind of tactile and daily life where I would see some of these things. And then also I would see them in my mother. So there's a big strand of gardening in my family, which is in the novel. And my mother's a beautiful gardener. My mother can sew beautifully. I can't. Those are some of the ways in which some of it would come through, but a lot of it was in the moment. You know, it wasn't like anyone really was trying to alert us to our history, although I did have the sense always of being raised to understand how lucky I was to live in this stable family and to have access to an incredible college education, like for many people and many, many Jewish families, many immigrant families, the sense of what your parents and your grandparents went through is right there for better or worse, right? And so I think I was conscious of my good luck really and the fact that people had worked quite hard to kind of arrive.
Yeah. And what was it about Paley that made you choose this as something that had a big impact on you?
Elizabeth Graver:
Well, it's interesting because I still love Grace Paley, you know, and so my relationship to her work and actually to her, because I ended up getting to meet her a couple of times, has changed over the years. But I remember reading her as a teenager. So Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, I grabbed my copy, it's very old and filled with my writing, came out in 77, so I was 13. And I just remember being kind of beguiled by the voice, you know, like this energetic, very of the moment kind of irreverent voice that's right there in kind of the thick of life, taking care of children, organizing in the neighborhood, sitting in trees, you know, going to the library, doing very daily things, and then would just telescope out suddenly with this kind of wit and economy. Suddenly, she'd be talking about time’s passage or death, this kind of deep affection and admiration for the complexity of people. And then as time passed and I read more of her work and kind of followed her, I was also filled with admiration for the other things she did. She was an activist, she was a feminist, she was like a just deeply human person. And I had an incredible experience. I studied in Paris when I was an undergrad for a year. And I actually went to this event at a museum in Paris that was Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, and their translators. And I was remembering that because Toni Morrison's book, Beloved, was another book I chose for when you gave me this wonderful charge to come up with a list. And it was this unbelievable event. There were maybe 30 people there because, I don't know, it was like the 80s and it was Paris and maybe they didn't publicize it, but there weren't very many people and it was this fascinating event where these two icons were up there and then their translators were up there talking about the challenges of translating this kind of New York-y, Yiddish-inflected English and Black English and what that was like. So I really had this feeling, I was very young, I was trying to write, but hadn't gotten very far, being, you know, with these two mothers of literature.
But I think her stories are incredible in a whole bunch of different ways for how they just move around and how much they cover and how concise they are and how funny they are and how steeped with questions of storytelling and history and Jewish history and wider histories. You know, it was interesting when I was looking back that in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, they're very New York stories and they're filled with Puerto Ricans and Asian families and Jewish families and everybody's just finding their way and kind of navigating their present moment and also their histories and the tensions and connections between them. For me, maybe the most powerful thing about what she was doing has to do with intergenerational communication and connection. So the story, “A Conversation With My Father”, there's just this extraordinary last moment where he says, “tragedy, when will you look it in the face?” Or there's another one called “Debts” where I have it right here. You know it starts, “A lady called me up today. She said I was in possession of her family archive. She heard I was a writer. She wondered if I would help her write about her grandfather, a famous innovator and dreamer of the Yiddish theater. I said I'd already used every single thing I knew about the Yiddish theater to write one story and I didn't have time to learn any more then write about it. There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”
So it's so great because she refuses. She's like, no, but then she tells somebody else's story. So she's kind of like, don't tell me what to do. So something about that dialogue, the fact that even inside the story, people are talking about telling stories and that there's this sense that everybody has one. I'm very drawn to writers who write about kind of the passage of time and you feel in her stories how fleeting things are and that you've got to just kind of look things in the face and grab onto them because you're not here for that long.
Yeah. You mentioned her activism and also just the environment of your household growing up. And she obviously was this fusion of political conviction and writing. And also you mentioned that just the current political climate was so much of an influence in deciding to write this book. I wonder, do you think writers have a responsibility to engage politically? And do you think there are limits or risks to that kind of engagement in politics?
Elizabeth Graver:
That's such a huge question. I almost think it's impossible not to engage if you live in the world. So it's a question of how you go about it. And I mean, I'm not Grace Paley. I don't, I remember I brought her to Boston College once to speak and she was like in a rush because she had to go to Washington to get arrested the next day. You know, that's not me. I would say people should kind of find their own path. I don't think there's any one way that literature needs to work and certainly dogmatic, pedantic literature usually fails. But I do, on the other hand, think that if you're writing about the world, even if you're not writing realism, questions of power and equity and war and peace and understanding complexity and understanding how people are formed by history and how countries rise and fall, all of that, if you're writing about the world, is part of it.
But I think there's a lot of ways to tell a story and that there's a lot of ways to look to the past as a way to understand the present. I would never tell anybody what to do, but I do on some basic level think that old adage, you know, the personal is political is just, it's just a fact really, right?
Absolutely. And so many of your books, they might not be written in the present, but the way that you tell them and the themes and the things that we're looking at obviously are so resonant into the present, it's impossible to read them without thinking about what's going on currently in the world.
And that really interests me, sort of why a historical novel is being told now. And it's not trying, I've written a bunch of historical novels. They're not trying, when I write them, to be a book of that time. That would be impossible and in a certain way, not that interesting. I could just go read a book from that time. So you're always writing out of your own moment and in conversation with it, even if it's oblique.
Book Two: a Jewish book from adulthood — 100 Saturdays: Stella Levy and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank.
We get to talk about 100 Saturdays. This is also one of my favorites.
Elizabeth Graver:
Yeah, I'm so glad. I love to hear that.
Tell me why you chose it.
So I discovered 100 Saturdays: Stella Levy and the Search for the Lost World by Michael Frank when Kantika was already coming out, should I describe the book a little bit?
Yes, please.
Elizabeth Graver:
If people haven't read it? So Stella Levy is, I think, now over 100 years old, and she was born in 1923 in the Sephardic community on the isle of Rhodes in what's now Greece. It was under Italian protectorate for a while, and then the Nazis came, but it's essentially a Greek island. And then she was, as a young woman, deported to Auschwitz and survived. And Michael Frank is a really wonderful writer who I eventually got to know when both our books came out at around the same time. So we've done a bunch of events together. He, I think, is somewhat like me in that he likes to talk to people and he likes to talk to old people.
I mean, interestingly, this has been true for me. I as a teenager would go to the nursing home and interview people. So where does that come from? I don't know, but he has it too. And he shared with me actually at one point that he never, his grandparents had very, very interesting stories and he never got to really talk to them because they died when he was too young to sort of take on a project like this. But he met Stella and they ended up striking up a conversation and he was interested in her life. And he said, can I talk to you? And so the book is structured around I think six years of conversations where he would go and sit with her and talk to her and learn about her story. And it, it fascinated me initially really because of the Sephardic echoes. So she, like Rebecca, was born into this very community minded world with lots of open doors and windows and people, lots of flow and people taking care of other people's children and song and kind of the very free expression of religion and really a kind of lovely world filled with many things that are disappearing like Ladino, right? Or Judeo-Spanish. And then, of course, everything completely fell apart. And so I was originally drawn to kind of all the Sephardic echoes, but the book is I think really incredible for a whole bunch of reasons. One, Stella is an amazing person and it's a really, really interesting example of both the kind of gifts of storytelling and the difficulties of storytelling. She's very resistant in certain ways and she says, you know, she doesn't want to be presented as a survivor. She's a very complicated person who's had a long, complicated, multifaceted life and she's got this terrible trauma at the middle and doesn't really want to talk about it. So those questions of silence and voicing, I thought that the narrator in the book, you know it's a nonfiction book, so essentially some narratorial version of Michael Frank, did this incredibly lovely job of sort of listening and respecting and gently inviting. And she's a really strong woman and won't be pushed around, but he kind of sits with her. There's this kind of patience. You know, it reminds me actually of a wonderful line in Grace Paley, in her story “Debt”, where she says, “there's a long time in me between the waiting and the telling.”
And you get the sense with Stella that if Michael hadn't asked her, she would have not told this full story, because it was hard and it was painful, but that he for really his own reasons wanted to hear it. And they became friends. And so there's this really beautiful relational quality to the whole thing. I think it would be really interesting for like the, I should ask my sister to read it, she's a psychoanalyst, you know, sort of what's happening there in those conversations. It's just a gorgeous, compelling story about one woman's identity. And, you know, in some of the ways we've been talking about, about what happens when history like steamrolls, you know, so there's obviously horror in the center, but it's also a book that is filled with resilience and joy. And there's these absolutely gorgeous illustrations. The artist, Mara Coleman, took photographs from Stella's archives and turned them into these quite whimsical, almost eerily childlike paintings.
Which I also thought was fascinating. Michael and I have talked about this a bit because in my book, which is fiction, I use photographs, which signal kind of the real, right? In complicated ways, but nonetheless, they're artifacts. And in his book, which is nonfiction, he uses these pastel drawings, which kind of both take you in and almost turn something into more of a story, maybe in a way that makes it more approachable because my book does have war in it, but it's not a Holocaust novel. So there is at the center of that book, you know, unspeakable horror.
Absolutely. I think your book and 100 Saturdays are like such perfect compliments to each other, both in the sense that they evoke this totally lost world. I mean, as you said, like if Stella hadn't sat down with Michael Frank, that entire world would have been lost to us. And it felt the same way reading about your grandmother's childhood in Istanbul. And I think the pictures versus the paintings is another piece of that, of like how you, you each kind of approached a real story, but then there's like an element of recognizing that it's not entirely going to be accurate in some way. So it's either, you know, the mixture of a fictionalized thing with the, with the real pictures or that inverse. It's so interesting.
Absolutely. Yeah, I thought that was just such an interesting flip, you know, that we were in different genres, but he was using a more fictional illustrative approach and I was using a more documentary one.
Both of these books are so beautiful. I was wondering if you had any, if there were new insights into Sephardic migration or memory or culture that you gained from his book that you hadn't known about in all of your research.
Elizabeth Graver:
I’m sure there were. I mean, I had finished my book when I read his, so it wasn't like I was... There were some moments where I thought, we researched the same thing. I think we have a fireman calling out, Yingen Var. We have a few things where I was like, we read the same thing, which was funny. And then I was a little anxious that he... Because I think my book hadn't quite come out. It was being printed and I was worried he would have thought I copied him. Really, partly it was just I didn't really... I didn't know much about Rhodes. I didn't know, for example, that when pretty much 90% I think of the juderia in Rhodes was deported, it was the longest journey both in terms of time and distance of any deportments and it happened really late. So that was a horrible thing to read about but something I felt was important to know. You know, my family's Sephardic history, doesn't intersect in a direct way with the Holocaust. It does in some more distant ways, because my grandfather had sisters and things. But my family's, on my mother's side, experience of that period was really their American son fighting in the Navy, which is a chapter in my novel. So a Jewish American immigrant Sephardic boy on a ship that's bombed in the Pacific. So a really, really different lens. And then I also was very interested in the ways in which Rebecca and Stella were both, I think they would have liked each other, but look at both their twinning and then the ways in which they're quite different. I wish they could meet.
Book 3: a book that changed your worldview — Beloved by Toni Morrison
Elizabeth Graver:
So Beloved, interestingly, was inspired by a real event. So there was a woman named Margaret Garner who Toni Morrison read about and she had been fleeing a slave catcher and in an effort to not let her child be brought back into slavery and essentially be owned by someone else, she killed her child. And so as I'm remembering it, Toni Morrison read about this in a newspaper article or some kind of account. I was interested when I taught Beloved years ago, so I did a bit of kind of background research, that she said she didn't want to know more than that at the time. But that was the seed. What does it mean to be in a situation that's that horribly restrictive where kind of your only choice is either you give your child up to not having autonomy or you end your child's life. And so out of this, she wrote this really, really incredible novel where Beloved comes back. She's a ghost. And the reason she's called Beloved is because she has no name. Her name has been lost.
So there's this very strong sense, now that I'm thinking about it next to Michael Frank's book, in some ways similar in some of these themes of what cannot be spoken. Like what evades history because it's been erased, right? Who can't tell their story and what does it mean to try to tell it for them while still respecting its silences. So Beloved’s this incredible character, she's really difficult and complicated, like she stirs things up in the book. And it's about a haunting, but it's also a book that taught me more and in a more kind of embodied and granular and moving way about slavery, which is of course one of the terrible legacies of this country, right, than I think anything I'd ever read. So I love reading fiction to experience history, a historical novel that actually imagines you inside these bodies and these kind of broken lives. And yet at the same time, because it's Toni Morrison, the prose is gorgeous. You know, each sentence is a poem and you feel, which is something I really tried to do in Kantika, that even as there's all these fissures and separations and tragedies and atrocities, people have this life force, right? So they're tending their gardens and they have fabulous names in the book and they're funny and they're striving and they're irritable and you know, they're just in the thick of things in a way that I thought was lovely. And then she goes back and you know, has this kind of Middle Passage ship scene that's just pure poetry and kind of one of the most beautiful things I've ever read.
I love the connections that you've brought in. One thing that I was thinking about when you said you were picking this book was the role of community in Beloved. There's this moment of incredible, powerful community where the women come together to help Sethé confront her pain. And I was thinking about in Kantika with this migration, especially when they moved to Spain, how cut off they are from all of their familiar webs of community and just, you know, how you think about the function or necessity of a spiritual or cultural community.
Elizabeth Graver:
So important and I was so interested in imagining and drawing on what I knew over the course of the story, which begins in 1910 and ends in 1950, in that question of how can people gather and support each other? Where literally do walls go up? My family, as I mentioned, moved, quote, back to Spain in the 1920s. And it was this very weird little moment when Spain very briefly was offering citizenship to Sephardic Jews, people with Sephardic ancestry, as they recently did. My daughter tried to get a passport, but that didn't work either. There are these sort of frail, pathetic attempts that I don't actually think have much to do with restitution. But that's a bigger topic. But they went there and my great-grandfather, Alberto, was the caretaker of a little semi-hidden synagogue. He'd been a very kind of upper-class man in Turkey. They'd lost all their money. And one of the things that my uncle David had told me was that his grandfather, Alberto, had put glass shards around the wall of the synagogue garden and that the children and my grandmother, Rebecca, had thought this was kind of paranoid, like, what's your problem? You know, he's an old man, he's kind of grumpy, he's, and it's not how you want to live, it's a terrible way to live, right? But at the same time, at least as I imagined him, because he was a character who really ended up having a point of view in the book for me and being very compelling, he's a man who's lived through a lot of history and he reads the paper and he sees what's happening in Germany and he sees the Spanish Civil War. But he was very walled and I was sort of interested in thinking about he's an old man, he's male, and then Sultana, who I was partly imagining but knew a bit about, my great grandmother, feeding the refugees and being friendly to the neighbors.
And so I'm interested partly in some ways in how gender sometimes plays out in these ways that it tends. I don't want to stereotype, but often, I think, I think you see this in Beloved. The women are connecting, right, they’re crossing even as in more traditional societies. They may be a little less aware of what's actually going on in the wider world in ways that might put them in danger. So I was very interested in flow, like where do the walls go up? How can you keep community? And then I was really interested in terms of my grandmother, who in real life also began in this family quite upper class, went to a fancy school, went to a French Catholic school, which is pretty interesting, and had aspirations to kind of be seen and to be in a certain kind of class position, had to give all of that up, but she was very robust and resilient and kind of community minded. And she did this amazing community theater when they eventually moved to Queens. But she made lots of friends. When I knew her in her very last year, she was in a place called the Menorah Nursing Home in Brooklyn and it was a Jewish nursing home. She was one of the only Sephardic people there. And some of her strongest connections were with the Latinx help, the people who worked there. She would sing with them and speak Spanish with them. So all of those ways in which she was kind of very permeable and flexible and some of that I did learn from my research, you see it also in Michael's book, is I think part of Sephardic culture. Many Sephardic communities were in port cities. There was a lot of travel and it's an extremely multilingual culture. And so there is this kind of flow. I mean, this is a kind of way in which, you know, the political and the personal intersect that spoke to my aspirations of the way I would like the world to be, which is more doorways and fewer walls and more crossings. And of course, look where we are, you know, this is a hard time to have those aspirations, but you have to keep having them, I think.
Book Four: the book you're reading now — Isola by Allegra Goodman.
Elizabeth Graver:
Yeah, so I just finished Allegra Goodman's book, Isola, which just captivated me. I actually went back and forth between audio and reading it because of my busy life, which was fun because the audio version is very lovely. But it's a book about a 16th century noble woman in France. And she ends up being kind of exiled to an island in what is now Canada, but was called New France at the time. And so you see the extraordinary changes of her life, but it's also a book with a really, really strong first person voice set way back in time and imagines a real person, but gives her this kind of interiority. And, you know, it's an interesting book for Allegra Goodman, who many of her books have strong Jewish themes, this book does not, she's Catholic, but she's wrestling with her faith in ways that you can see in some of Allegra's other books. It's also just a really, really good read because it moves from these kind of cavernous castles to craziness with like killing bears and you know, it's an adventure story. It was fun.
Book Five: the author's latest book — Kantika by Elizabeth Graver.
So now we get to talk a little bit more about Kantika. We've been talking about all of these incredible uncoverings of stories of Sephardic families and Sephardic history. Those stories have been sort of slower to appear, I think, on the American Jewish publishing scene, and there are fewer of them. Why do you think that is?
Elizabeth Graver:
It’s an interesting question. I mean there are fewer Sephardic Jews and there's less of a written record so the way that there's this kind of rich compendium of Yiddish theater and, you know, Ladino is, there's not as much of a kind of book past to all of it so that may be part of it. Part of it may just be the numbers. Part of it may be that there has been a kind of prejudice against Sephardic Jews I think. I mean it's complicated because there's also the Western Sephardim who came here really early, you know, founded like the synagogue in Newport who were very elite and thought they were better than the Ashken... You know, people are clannish and snobby basically, so you can find it in many directions. But, you know, I'm not so sure, but it is true that when I was doing research and kind of looking for antecedents and to learn more about the world, most of it was nonfiction and I did find some wonderful things. There's a historian called Sarah Abravia Stein who has a book called Sephardi Lives and another one called Devon Nahr at University of Washington, someone named Aaron Rodriguez at Stanford who I wrote to out of the blue because he's Sephardic and Turkish and a historian and said, can you help me? And he was incredibly nice and read chunks of my book. So I really was relying on historians. There's very, very few novels. I don't totally know why, and I'm hoping that there will be more. These were smaller communities and, you know, time is passing. Like it is true, in fact, that it's going to be hard to get these stories or it already, you know, my grandmother died in 1992. So the kind of record of these intact Sephardic communities that were really living in that way fully rather than kind of as part of a wider community or as kind of bits of custom are scarce.
Yeah. Did you know much about your family's history between the Spanish Inquisition and sort of where you found them in Istanbul?
Elizabeth Graver:
I really don't know that much. I mean, one thing that really interests me is, you know, they went to Barcelona, was that just chance because there was a job there? Or did they in fact, on some level, know that they had roots there? There were a lot of Sephardic Jews in Barcelona. And there's interesting echoes even between Catalan and Ladino and they call, Catalan people sometimes call themselves the Jews of Spain.
So that was a very full area, I don't know. No, I don't know. I mean, probably if, maybe if my grandmother had been alive when I was writing the book, she might have known. Like I know that in Istanbul, many of the synagogues had, back in the day when there were tons of them, had affiliations with cities in Spain. They'd be like, this is the one for the people from Seville. But of course, this was hundreds of years ago, the migration. And I don't know. No, but I do know that my grandmother felt very connected to Spain. It's again, a little complicated because she did live there for a decade in her twenties and early thirties. But, you know, she danced with castanets. She sang Spanish songs as well as Ladino songs. She didn't differentiate between Spanish and Ladino. She called it all Spanish. I've heard of Sephardic people who say nuestro Spanish, which is our Spanish, but she didn't even do that. So the kind of ways in which these, both languages and cultures kind of, it's like a little burr rolling through the world and it picks stuff up along the way.
We talked a little bit about how this is a fictionalized version of your grandmother's story. What was that process like of choosing what to fictionalize and what to keep as close to historical fact as possible?
Elizabeth Graver:
Well, basically, if I had any family history to draw on, it's in there. So it was really where I didn't know things or where I wanted to kind of go internally into someone's head, which you can't do in nonfiction. You don't have access unless it's about yourself, that I would fictionalize. But I tried not to change things. And I tried really scrupulously to get all the history right in terms of dates and times, migration patterns, and the reason the book took me so long is I did a crazy amount of research. If people are interested, on my website is a little five-minute video which has clips of the interview with my grandmother and I actually used, she was a good storyteller, I used her words, so often when I do events I share this video because I actually love that she gets to speak, to have a voice.
I know your previous book, your book, The End of the Point, you had written about your husband's family. I read an interview you did where you said about that book. I'm going to quote you back. “I wanted to portray a small place, but to go deep, to use a narrow lens to examine larger issues of social class, money and property, of parenting and caretaking, of what adults pass on both literally and figuratively to children. I look at how this kind of private seaside community can function as a protected contested space, isolated but never entirely as its boundaries are porous and the events of history are never far away. I realized part way through that I was also writing about a world whose ways are fast fading, a world on the way out for better or for worse, probably both." It seemed to so strongly echo what you did in Kantika. It, like, mirrored it exactly.
Isn’t that crazy?
So I wonder having done this complimentary exploration of your own family's history and attachments to place, how that's changed, how you see your own personal history or what you hope to pass on to your children.
Elizabeth Graver:
I'm so glad you saw that, you found that, because yes, there are echoes and as I was writing The End Of The Point, I had no idea I would write Kantika but at the end of The End Of The Point, which is much more fictionalized, it's actually less, Anne Berest who I know you've talked about on this podcast talks about a roman vrai or a true novel and Kantika is that, The End Of The Point is actually a novel. There's a lot made up, but the place is real and some of the people are sitting in for real people. In that novel at the very end, an in-law shows up named Rachel, who's like the Jewish in-law. And basically she's in my place. And at one point I say she's a child of diaspora. And so I was really interested in how these two stories took place really almost at the same time, but they're radically different. So my husband's family, he's not Jewish. His father was Swiss, but the other side of his family came over on the Mayflower. And they owned property. So they had this kind of almost really tight container for things to play out. My family was the complete opposite in that they had, I joke that like my cousins and my community is like our shared group chat, right? Like we don't have a place and we live all over and my grandmother's siblings ended up in Israel and in the US and in Spain. My mother has a first cousin still in Spain.
So that kind of, I have two daughters and I think it's actually really important to understand the diversity of those pasts in some ways. And those questions that I talk about in that quote there are true for any family, right? Like how do you sit inside history? How do you find community? But the Jewish story of, you know, the kind of wandering Jew or diaspora, it puts a lot of pressure on that story, I think, because how do you find continuity when you're moving all the time, right? So, and I think about that now in terms of where we are in this country in wider ways. What does it mean to be a country that welcomes immigrants or that deports them? So my older daughter read Kantika and wrote me this very, very beautiful text, of course, where she said, this was such a gift to me because something like it feels like it was so long ago. She's almost 25 now. And at the same time, it wasn't that long ago. And for me to kind of have this window just really opens things up in a beautiful way. And I took her to Cuba. I took my other daughter to Spain. So they've watched me on these kind of nutty forays where like, if you travel with me when I'm on book research, we have a great time, but I'm on a path. And my daughters are actually both young writers, so nothing is lost on them.
Yeah, that is, I mean, so special to share that experience together, but also it is such a gift to them, to give them this family history, especially in a situation for so many Jews, where, you know, it's cut off from us, it wouldn't necessarily be theirs without someone doing a lot of digging to find it. It's also a gift to all of us. I think it helps us understand the breadth of our culture and history in totally new ways. So this was a fantastic conversation. I'm so glad we had the opportunity to do this. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you. You're such a great reader and observer of all of this that it just makes it really fun.
Thank you. This was fantastic. I could talk to you for so much more time about so many more of these things. Are you working on something now that you can tell us about?
Elizabeth Graver:
I am. So I'm down another rabbit hole and I'm looking into my father and I think I'm going to write it as nonfiction, partly because in the last years of his life, we were extremely close. And as I mentioned, he was an English professor. So we shared a lot of love of literature, but he was quite ill in the last years of his life and I, in an effort to kind of engage him and cheer him up, I gave him little writing prompts. And although he wasn't a fiction writer, he was a beautiful writer. And so I have all these little bits that he wrote and some of them are about his past, which was a painful one in some ways in terms of his father dying when he was young and his father, I just got his father's FBI record, kind of very complicated story. I'm in fairly early stages still, but I'm doing similar things in some ways. You know, I went to the Bronx with my nephew and used these old censuses to go to the streets where the grandfather I never knew was born and where my father lived till he was 12 and, you know, climbed the stairs into one of the buildings and just sort of stood there trying to feel what was there now and what had been there before. So it's been really, really moving and also really hard and complicated. I always try, I think, with each book to do something I've never done before and writing, I've written essays, but writing a full nonfiction book is hard, you know, there's so much life. It's hard to kind of figure out a structure. And I also am kind of noticing how I'm, you know, when you do a book like a nonfiction book, you kind of have to be in it. And I'm actually, I like to be on the sidelines. So I'm interrogating that kind of like, what happens when I have to say I, you know, and fiction lets you get really deep into emotional and intense things without actually, you are revealing yourself, but you can feel like you're not. So I'm trying to be bold. Grace Paley, with Grace Paley kind of at my side.
I love that. Terrific. Well, we can't wait to read it.
Thank you. It'll be a while, but I'd love to come back on.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. Our guest today was Elizabeth Graver talking about her book, Kantika. You can find a link to the book and all the others Elizabeth discussed in our show notes. If you'd like an email reminder to keep you up to date with new episodes, plus links to all the books we discussed directly in your inbox, you can sign up in the show notes below or on our website, fivebookspod.org. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with your friends and family.
If you rate and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, it really does help new listeners find our show. You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team@five bookspod.org. You can find us on Instagram at five books pod or on Facebook at The Five Books podcast. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dina Friedman.
Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
