The Concord Free Public Library Corporation presents
Elizabeth Graver
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 New York. Elizabeth’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. The mother of two daughters, she teaches at Boston College.
Elizabeth Graver
Concord Free Public Library’s
150th Anniversary Celebration!
Friday, October 27
7:00 pm
an In-Person Presentation in the
Goodwin Forum
Concord Free Public Library
129 Main St.
Join the Concord Free Public Library Corporation for an evening with award-winning author Elizabeth Graver, in celebration of the library's 150th anniversary. Elizabeth will discuss her acclaimed new novel, Kantika (“song” in Ladino), a kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries. Kantika follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul, who is forced to move to Barcelona. When the life Rebecca fashions anew leads to a failed marriage, she moves from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage and faces her greatest challenge—her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose challenges pit new family against old. Exploring identity, place and exile, Kantika also reveals how the female body—in work, art and love—serves as a site of both suffering and joy. A haunting, inspiring meditation on the tenacity of women, this lush, lyrical novel from Elizabeth Graver celebrates the insistence on seizing beauty and grabbing hold of one’s one and only life.
“That careful attention to individual speech underlines ‘Kantika’’s kaleidoscope of languages, accents and dialects. Graver weaves together snippets of Ladino, Turkish, French, Castilian, Catalan, Hebrew and English like one of Rebecca’s hand-stitched dresses. Helpfully translated so as not to lose the reader, these fragments enrich Graver’s fiction while also stressing one of its central questions: whether a language can stand in for home.
’Kantika’ answers in the affirmative...Far from being a Pollyannaish tale of New World success, “Kantika” is a meticulous endeavor to preserve the memories of a family, an elegy and a celebration both.”
OTHER WORKS
