Kantika
I’ve always been fascinated by my family’s history — the lore, the movement from one place to another, the individuals whose quirks (either good or bad) become mythologized in some broad-brush kind of way. There’s nothing particularly dramatic or unusual about my history, but family stories are usually the first kinds that we hear as a child, so we internalize and memorize them and grant them a bit of tidy morality lesson. Maybe you’re this way too?
But then as an adult, maybe (hopefully?) one realizes the importance and magnitude of particular stories — stories, that, when given their proper due, become fully formed situations about actual people. (In other words, you start to think: What if that were *me* and this were happening *now*?)
Call me nosy (although, really, it’s just “interested”), but I’d probably be fascinated by your family’s history too. In fact, I texted two people over the past weeks about the novel Kantika by Elizabeth Graver because I thought they’d be interested in it given the little I knew about their own families’ roots.
Kantika, a multi-generational story of a Sephardic Jewish family and its eventual matriarch who moves out of necessity from Turkey to Spain to Cuba and then to the US as the specter of war arises, is strongly influenced by the author’s own family. Even though Graver “changed the facts to suit the story,” many characters share names with her ancestors, and photographs of Graver’s actual family members illustrate the novel. This is my first completed novel of 2024, and I plowed right through it. The accolades for Kantika are out there for everyone to note (Notable Book of the Year, Best Historical Fiction — both from the NYT — as well as a Best Book of 2023 [NPR] and other roundups), but I think what made this such a special book for me is the clear joy and care that the author took in elevating and illuminating her own family’s story.
(Can you imagine how much we’d learn if we were allowed entry to others’ histories like this?)
originally published on instagram