Kantika A novel

With great reverence and respect, Graver fictionalizes the saga of her maternal grandmother, Rebecca Levy, weaving a personal historical tale that follows the determined and courageous Sephardic young woman from her early high-class childhood in Istanbul to her family's migration to Spain in the late 1920s to a peripatetic adulthood that brings her to Cuba and New York in the 1930s as the world braces for the onset of WWII. Following an unsatisfying marriage that ends with the premature death of her husband, Rebecca and her two sons seize an opportunity to relocate to America via an arranged marriage to Sam, the widower of Rebecca's best friend. Sam not only needs a wife, he needs a mother for his daughter, Luna, who was born with cerebral palsy. Rebecca's love for Sam is almost instantaneous. Her affection for the challenging Luna takes longer, but it blossoms into a deep maternal love that launches Luna into a full and vibrant maturity. Graver's paean to resolve and resiliency paints a vivid portrait of spirit and grit.

Graver (The End of the Point) delivers a luminous story of a Sephardic family disrupted by wars and antisemitism. Rebecca Cohen has a happy early childhood in Constantinople, where she and her best friend Rahelika "Lika" Nahon thrive at a French-speaking Catholic school. The eruption of WWI, though, interrupts this childhood idyll. The Turkish military takes over the Cohen family's textile factory, and Rebecca finds work with a local dressmaker to help the family make ends meet. With antisemitism on the rise after the war, the near-destitute Cohens end up in Barcelona, where Rebecca's father Alberto works as a caretaker in a synagogue. Rebecca dreams of living in the United States, where Lika has immigrated, but feels duty-bound to remain with her family. With her brothers' encouragement she sets up a dressmaking business, which flourishes only when she hides her Jewish identity. Years later, after Rebecca has two children and becomes a widow, Lika dies in childbirth and her widower asks Rebecca to marry him, forcing her to make a series of difficult decisions and compromises. With elegant prose, Graver offers a memorable portrait of a self-reliant woman tied to faith and traditions. Fans of family epics will love this. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner. (Apr.)Correction: A previous version of this review misstated how many children the character Rebecca had. It also mischaracterized the type of work the character Alberto did at a synagogue.

Based on the life of the author's Sephardic grandmother, complete with real names and photographs, this generational saga traces a family's journey of exile. The novel is divided into three sections set in different places: There's early-20th-century Constantinople, where prosperous Jews, Christians, and Muslims intermingle easily and where Rebecca Cohen lives as a child; Spain, where her family reluctantly immigrates in 1925; and the United States, where Rebecca eventually settles but never feels at home. Rebecca's happy childhood ends abruptly in 1914 when the French-speaking Catholic school she attends abruptly closes and the previously oblivious 12-year-old becomes aware that war has broken out. Her best friend immigrates to America; Rebecca's family is increasingly less prosperous. Ten years later, her father is financially ruined, and his beloved Turkey has become as intolerant of Jews as of Armenians and Greeks. Offered a low-level job at a small synagogue in Barcelona, he moves Rebecca's family (minus an older sister who's left for Cuba) to Spain, the country their ancestors fled during the Inquisition. Rebecca builds a successful dressmaking business there but, afraid of spinsterhood, rushes into marrying the only Jewish bachelor available and suffers in a deeply unhappy marriage. Her husband dies shortly after the birth of their second son. Although world events remain mostly in the background, rising fascism casts its shadow. In 1934, Rebecca accepts an invitation from her older sister, now living in New York, to marry the widower of an old friend who'd died in childbirth in Queens and immigrate to America. Yes, this sounds like soap opera, or a somber The Brady Bunch, as Rebecca and her new husband blend her sons, his daughter, and the children they bear together into one family. This longer final section lacks the novel's earlier vibrancy, perhaps because writing about people she personally remembers constrains Graver. That's too bad, because in imagining places (including a dreamy Cuba) and people from earlier times, Graver's poignantly elegiac prose often soars. A straightforward family story written with a poet's sensitivity and flair. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.