Kantika

Recently while attending a shiva I noticed a party rental truck pulling into the driveway of the mourner’s home. I assumed it was a delivery of more chairs. Shiva’s get crowded around here, extra seating is often needed, and there are community organizations that provide this service free of charge. I offered to help, but the bereaved simply smiled and shook their heads. “It’s not a delivery,” they informed me. “It’s a pick up. We had a cousins wedding a couple of days ago in the yard.”

This juxtaposition of marriage and death, the joy and the sorrow, encapsulated for me the relentless march of Jewish lifecycle events. Through our holidays, our brissim, bar mitzvah’s, weddings, and funerals we live our lives both individually and communally. No matter where we are, even if we are unsure if ‘home’ will still be safe next year, we move through these events together.

Kantika by Elizabeth Graver is a wide reaching historical novel, based on the true life story of the authors own grandmother, that displays this particular ethos. The main POV character, Rebecca, is born to an affluent Turkish family. Due to both political upheaval and various bad business choices the family is forced to relocate several times. This has a profound effect on Rebecca, whose options are thus severely limited, and who reflects on how she never achieves the life of privilege she was born and raised to expect. Still, she perseveres.

Rebecca is one of those people that always manages to come out on top, even if the outcome isn’t quite everything what she wants. She is fiercely independent, cheerful, loves the spot light, and even turns her appreciation for fashion into a full fledged business. She is no Pollyanna. She fully experiences each and every hardship life throws her way, and the reader vicariously does too, however she never gives up.

If in the very firs few chapters the voice tended to be too literary for my genre loving self- at times slipping into second person and using more metaphors and symbolism than I could follow – I tried to remember that writing the life of a child is a unique challenge for an adult. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to understand it all. Childhood, especially an idyllic one like Rebecca’s, is often remembered in a dreamlike quality by adults who remember more of the sweet than the sour. The narration reflects that innocence of youth of memory and distortion. Later, we get the full grit of Rebecca’s adult voice.

Rebecca’s chapters are held together by short interludes narrated from the point of view of her father, her mother, her eldest son and her step daughter Luna. Each of these viewpoints adds context to Rebecca’s ongoing story and allows the reader to delve deeper into the minds of those around her. It is particularly effective when it comes to Rebecca’s father and mother who we first experienced through child’s eyes. We can almost see Rebecca slowly becoming her mother, facing the same trials and tribulations, yet retaining her individual spirit.

Where I might have wished for more of someone else’s perspective is when it comes to Luna. Born with cerebral palsy and physical difficulties, Luna has an inquisitive and bright mind. Rebecca is both an advocate and an adversary – pushing Luna to achieve more than others ever thought possible for her. Watching her through Rebecca’s eyes is often painful, however it is unrelentingly honest. I was grateful we were allowed to see Luna from her own perspective, although I do wonder how much of these chapters would have changed if Luna herself (based on an actual relative of the author) had more input into the story.

In the afterword we learn that although Luna left behind a rich body of writing she had already passed away before the author began writing this book. The ending in particular, without giving away spoilers, struck me as indicating there was more to Luna’s story than we had space for in this book and that we had barely scratched the surface of her personality. By learning about her through Rebecca, we the reader see her mainly as yet another character in the cast of Rebecca’s life. Which maybe is exactly how we are supposed to feel. Even her abled children sometimes felt overshadowed by Rebecca’s bright star.

For fans of Ladino, there are some beautiful songs in the narration, and many of the characters describe Spanyol as their primary language. The glimpse into customs of Jewish Turkish residents in the early 20th century was particularly effective, as was the depiction of what it means to go into diaspora – yet again – from a place one finally thought of as home and how some never truly recover from this.

The book wisely ends on a life cycle event – I won’t tell you which – and thus brings the narrative full circle. No matter where Rebecca ends up her Judaism and El Dyo are always with her. Her family grows and changes, the wheel of fortune turns, but always at its core is a faith and an identity that will not be denied.

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