Books: “Kantika” by Elizabeth Graver
America is a nation of immigrants, and while our ancestors all have their stories of how they got here, few may be as intriguing as that of Rebecca Cohen Baruch Levy, the protagonist of “Kantika,” a novel written by her granddaughter Elizabeth Graver.
Most immigrants (mine included) came from a single country. Rebecca lived in three before she arrived in the US. The first was Turkey, where she was born and raised in the Jewish quarter of Istanbul in the early 20th century. Besides Turkish, the language they spoke was Ladino (aka Spanyol), a medieval variant of Spanish which her ancestors spoke before being banished from Spain in 1492 and emigrating to Turkey, among other countries.
Fearful of becoming an old maid, Rebecca marries Luis, a man she doesn’t really love, bears him two children, then discovers that like the father in “The Glass Menagerie,” he would fall in love with long distance. (Translation: he abandons them.) After WWI, her father Alberto, a successful businessman in Turkey, realizes the Jews’ days are numbered under Ataturk and is offered a chance to become a caretaker for a shul in Barcelona—irony of ironies, in the country that kicked the Jews out in the first place.
The next stop in Rebecca’s shape-shifting journey? She establishes herself as a dressmaker in Barcelona and is perfectly content to remain there until she gets an offer to marry a Turkish Jewish widower. He lives in Queens but has business that takes him to Cuba. They meet in Havana, decide the union could work, get married, and move to Astoria where they raise a blended family of his disabled daughter from his first marriage, her two sons from her first loveless marriage, and three kids from their latest union.
How she navigates this journey—as a minority (Sephardic) among the majority Ashkenazi—and learns to switch between Turkish, Hebrew, Castilian, Catalan, French and English seamlessly is fascinating.
Side note: “Kantika” is the Ladino word for “song” and like most beautiful songs, you don’t want this one to go unheard. So don’t. Rebecca Cohen Baruch Levy deserves your respect.
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