"Kantika"

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.

Graver applied the Page 69 Test to Kantika and reported the following:

From page 69:

“Blanko?”

“It’s what we call the orfes.”

Rebecca shakes her head.

“The huérfanos, the foundlings left at the door of the church.” And the lady makes the sign of the cross.

Rebecca has witnessed the motion hundreds of times but never made it herself, despite itching to—not in school at Sion, not even when playing at teacher-nun with Lika, though they made crucifixes out of twigs and tea towel habits for their heads. Now her hand inscribes the air from forehead to chest, left to right. How easy it is, the gesture graceful, prayerful. Will her Dyo forgive her? Will the Christian one, called “Dios” in plural by the Spaniards because he’s multiple, three-pronged, if he exists and takes notice of a girl like her? The sign of the cross comes almost too naturally to her, the practiced gesture of the Conversos who stayed in Spain, some of them living as Christians in the outside world but lighting their Shabbat candles in the cellar, out of sight. The Torah may consider the chameleon an impure animal, but God put chameleons on the earth for a reason, and Rebecca, who used to make a game with Lika of spotting the lizards in the garden in Büyükdere, has always been impressed by their ability to go from leafy green to stony gray to twiggy brown.

“Soy Marie Blanko Camayor.” She keeps her gaze steady. “De París, Francia.”

“Encantat.” The lady nods but does not extend her hand. “Do you have a job for me?”

“I am sorry, senyoreta. I do not.”

“But I do beautiful work. You said so yourself.”

“I’m sorry.” The dressmaker peers down the street and ushers her away. “I told you, there is nothing for you here.”

The Page 69 Test works like a charm here, dropping us inside a scene full of things that matter to Kantika. The setting is Barcelona, 1924. Rebecca Cohen, the novel’s central character, has recently moved from Istanbul to Spain following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when conditions deteriorated for Turkish Jews and her family lost its fortune.

Spain is a peculiar and unexpected destination for a family of Sephardic Jews since hundreds of of years prior, it’s the country that slaughtered or expelled their ancestors or forced them to convert during the Spanish Inquisition. The Cohens—whose migration path mirrors that of my actual family—end up in Spain because they have few other options, but they also have complicated ties to the country in the form of language, songs, and customs that have endured, if also taken on new forms, across centuries of diaspora.

In this scene, we find Rebecca looking for a job as a dressmaker and being told by a shop owner that she’ll never find work with a Jewish last name and should change her name to Blanko—as in white, blank, clean. Rebecca, raised in cosmopolitan lstanbul where she attended French Catholic school with Christian, Muslim and Jewish girls, is—by both character and necessity—a shapeshifter. She is multilingual, endlessly creative, and gifted at presenting herself in different ways. Here, she’s also desperate for work and getting her first glimpse of the antisemitic and fear-fueled sides of a country still haunted by its past and heading toward the Spanish Civil War and Fascism.

In this scene, we see Rebecca’s gutsiness and the lengths to which she’ll go to survive, even thrive, but also the considerable costs. “Kantika,” the novel’s title, means “song” in Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, Rebecca’s first language. On page 69, we get a multilingual almost-song, the prose tripping between Ladino, Catalan and Castillan (and, on nearby pages, also French).

We witness a trying on of selves, names and modes of dress that speak to a wider story fueled by a polyphonic set of reinventions, as well as by the need to hide and mask. At the center, a set of age-old questions, but funneled here, I hope, through a highly specific history and cast of characters:

Who am I? Where do I come from? Who, what, when, where is home?

Learn more about the book and author at Elizabeth Graver's website.

The Page 69 Test: The End of the Point.

--Marshal Zeringue