Ottoman History Podcast - Kantika: from History to Fiction, a Sephardic Journey

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

with Elizabeth Graver hosted by Brittany White | Elizabeth Graver grew up knowing her grandmother Rebecca was from the Ottoman Empire and that her tumultuous, meandering life journey, like many in the Ottoman Sephardi diaspora, had taken her to Spain, Cuba, and finally, the United States. Like so many of us, she wanted to know more about her family history. Graver was twenty-one when she recorded her first interviews with her grandmother. Over the decades, this family history project would eventually become Kantika-—a historical novel inspired by the multigenerational story of Graver's family. In Kantika, she crafts compelling fiction from historical facts as she retraces her grandmother’s journey. Our conversation with Graver will explore familiar themes like migration, displacement, identity, and belonging after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And we’ll also reflect on the possibilities and challenges of writing intimate family histories as literature and how fiction can help us better conceptualize and understand the past. « Click for More »

Testing, one, two, three, testing. I'm Beverly Hills, Florida, December 1985. Interviews with Grandma Becca, Rebecca Levy. Bueno. What do you want me to say? I want you to describe coming to America. Coming to America in 19... what time I came to America? 1934? I think so, yes. Yes. And after a year, you know, I become a mother

from my son, Jack. And we have a wonderful time. In the meantime, I did not speak English. So, and I have two sons in Spain that the war started. That was Elizabeth Graver in conversation with her grandmother, Rebecca Levy, in 1985. Graver grew up knowing her grandmother was from the Ottoman Empire and that her tumultuous, meandering life journey, like many in the Ottoman Sephardi diaspora, had taken her to Spain, Cuba, and finally the United States. Like so many of us, she wanted to know more about her family history. Graeber was only

21 when she first recorded her grandmother, but over the decades, this family history project would eventually become Contica, a historical fiction novel inspired by Rebecca. In this multi-generational story, Graver crafts compelling fiction from historical facts as she retraces her grandmother's journey. Our conversation with Graver will explore familiar themes like migration, displacement, and identity and belonging after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, but will also reflect on the possibilities and challenges of writing intimate family histories as literature and how fiction can help us better conceptualize and understand the past. Stay tuned. And on the world's desire, all the strange discusions of my life I cast on, all the quatro leyes.

So thank you so much for spending time with me this hour to talk about your novel, Cantica. First question, what is Cantica about? Can you give us the novel's general story arc, its main characters and historical context? Sure. And thank you for having me. I love this podcast. So I'm very excited. So Kantika was inspired by my maternal grandmother, Rebecca's migration story. She was a Sephardic Jewish woman. She was born in Istanbul, we think in 1903. But because of kind of Hebrew calendars, we don't totally know. She wasn't always super truthful about her age and maybe some other things. But her journey took

her to Spain and then to the US by way of Cuba. And the historical contexts and locations of the novel hew pretty closely to her real life. But I also did make a decision to tell it as a novel, and we can talk about that later, I hope. So I'll give you just a little grounding. She was born into, both my character and my grandmother, were born into a privileged Jewish family in Istanbul. Her father, Alberto, owns a textile factory but prefers to read, gamble, and dig in his garden. and dig in his garden. And her mother, whose name is Sultana, has a lot of kids and raises them in a world that's, in interesting ways, I think, full of both kind of so-called modern things. The girls get a good education, they have access to Western medicine, and a lot of more traditional

things like evil eye beads she pins to their clothing for good luck, and a lot of kind of herbal remedies and traditional Sephardic medicinal practices, things like that. So in Istanbul, they have a quite nice life. They have lots of relatives around. They practice their religion openly. They belong to a big, beautiful synagogue, as Jews did in Turkey for centuries at the time. They're also on good terms with their Greek Orthodox Armenian and Muslim neighbors. Rebecca goes to a private French Catholic school and has friends from all these backgrounds. So it's very pluralistic. And then with the breakout of World War One, and the Armenian genocide and the collapse

of the Ottoman Empire, and the formation of the new republic, everything changes. And by 1924, Alberto has lost ownership of his factory. There's rising anti-Semitism. There's mandatory military service for Jewish young men, but bad conditions like no kosher food. And they're sent off kind of to the hinterlands to haul rocks. And a lot of changes that make being Jewish in Turkey more difficult. And for reasons I'm not totally clear about in real life, they lose all their money. So they're looking for a place to migrate. And rather unusually, they end up, my family and my fictional family, moving to Spain, to Barcelona. So this is interesting because, of course, it's the country that expelled the Sephardic Jews centuries

earlier during the Inquisition, but they go, quote, back, whatever that means. So the novel then follows them to Barcelona and there Alberto becomes the caretaker of a hidden synagogue. And Rebecca works as a dressmaker, disguising her Jewishness to get work and eventually marries and has two sons. And then I'll kind of stop summarizing there, I think, because I don't want to give away the whole story. But eventually, she moves on and ends up in New York, but I'll stop there. So why did you decide to name the novel Cantica, which means song in Latino or Judeo Spanish? Yeah, I love that question. Because it question because there's a lot of different reasons.

First, I will say that when I suggested the title to my editor, I thought she'd say no. I said, it's kind of a weird title. And she's great. Her name's Reva Hockerman at Henry Holt. And she said, I love weird titles. I was like, really? So I liked it for a lot of different reasons. I love that it's a word in Ladino, which is an expressive, beautiful language, also an endangered language. There's movements to keep it going that are actually really exciting right now, but there's very, very few native speakers at this point. So I love the idea of keeping it alive in a little way through my title. I was also actually quite interested in it being a word that some, a few readers would understand, but most wouldn't right away, because I'm really

interested in this book and questions of migration and language and what it means to be a language outsider, what it means to have to decipher. And I love the word cantica because although it's to have to decipher. And I love the word cantica because although it's spelled with a K, which is odd and a characteristic of the way a lot of people spell Ladino, it's also got echoes with canticle and cantar and chante. And so people can pick up, I think, something, but there's like a little bit of displacement, like, I'm not quite sure what that means. So I like that. And then it has a very literal meaning in the book, as I'm sure you saw, because Rebecca and her parents sing constantly, as my real grandmother did. And there's this really beautiful tradition of Sephardic songs being passed down in religious

ways and also in kind of maternal family lullaby-ish ways. And so there was a lot of song in my childhood. My mother sang to me a lot. Her mother, Rebecca, sang to her a lot. I think my grandmother, who never had a chance to have a kind of career that she might have wanted to in another world, would have loved to be a singer. She was very performative and had a beautiful voice and loved a crowd. You know, she just, she had a real charisma to her. So, and then I also love songs in terms of the way that when you migrate, you can't take much with you usually, but you can take a song, right? It's portable. It can be passed down. It's a piece of culture and language and history that can move through generations and across time and space.

And I guess, lastly, I'll just say, in some ways, I think of the novel as my song, a song without tune, I suppose. I'm not a good singer. a song without tune, I suppose. I'm not a good singer, but also in a funny way, almost as a duet with my grandmother because I interviewed her and she's no longer alive, but her story's here. And so I think of it, I'm very interested in language as a writer. I'm a novelist, but I really, I read out loud when I write. I love poetry. I'm really drawn to kind of lyricism. So the music of words and the kind of refrains and thinking of a novel is almost having like call and response or motifs. It's just sort of how I tend to conceptualize.

Now, did you grow up speaking any Ladino at all? No, just like, you know, tiny little things before you eat, things like that. But not really. It was my mom's first language. My grandmother had her just a couple years after arriving in the US. But then, you know, this was a time when people really were pushing to assimilate their children. So she remembers very strongly her father saying to her when she was about five, you can't call me Papa anymore. Like you need to call me Daddy. And she was upset. She's like, but you're my Papa. I never studied Spanish. So my grandmother

also spoke Spanish, because she'd lived there for a decade. But she spoke French, which I do speak. We sometimes played around with that. But I've learned a little bit of Ladino in writing this book, but no. You mentioned on your website that one set of your grandparents are Ashkenazi Jewish. When you were younger, did the differences in culture ever interest you? And what led you to say, oh, I think I want to interview my grandparents. I think a lot of us have grandparents and they eventually, you know, they pass away and we think, oh, I should have interviewed them or I should have talked to them about family history. But you did that. I did. And I teach college. I teach at

Boston College and I have my students do interview projects and I teach a lot of migration literature. So some of them have done these incredible interviews with their grandparents, if their grandparents were immigrants for this particular assignment. Yeah, I think I really did notice differences. And when I was quite little, I didn't know what to make of them, but they ate really different food. There was some Yiddish in my maternal grandmother's, I mean, paternal grandmother's life. You know, they ate gefilte fish, they kept kosher. It was really a rather different culture.

And I think when my parents first met each other and told their parents they were going to get married, my Sephardic side, my mother's parents were just happy. They were like, oh, because my mother was a bit of a rebel and intellectual. It's like, okay, thank God she found a husband. They were glad he was Jewish, you know. But the other side was like, is she Jewish? Like, they didn't really get it. Because the Ashkenazi culture is so much more dominant.

So they ended up adoring my mother eventually. But I think they really were quite different from each other. It was so funny. When I arrived from Spain, I'm jumping from one thing to another. And when I came to Spain, all right, after my sister rose me one year, if I want to get married, I said no. I don't want to get married. I don't know what kind of father they want to have the children. He said, I'm all right. I stay with mother and the children are having a good time. So that's enough.

So after she sent me another letter. I said, come on, marry him. Because he wants to have a Jewish girl. He don't want to marry with a Gentile girl. And the girl wants a mother. I was a kind of imaginative, artistic little girl. And I loved to make dolls with her and draw with her. And she would talk to me and she would

often talk to me in ways that were probably a little bit inappropriate like she would tell me things that were you know a little risque or things like that and I of course I loved it that's always fun when a grandparent yeah that's right, really, Grandma? Like she told me, for example, she met my grandfather through an arranged marriage in Cuba. She was a widow and he was a widow. They each had children. And she said to me that they, quote, did it before they got married. And she said, because I was so beautiful. You have no idea. I know that's right, Grandma. I was like, yeah, okay. That's fantastic. You know, what's not to want to listen to, right? It was just fun. And I'm not quite sure what made me record except that I think that even at 21, which was when I did these recordings, I knew I wanted to be a writer. And I have always, for whatever reason, had a kind of keen sense of the passage of time and of sort of the fragility of life. I don't know why it's neurotic probably, but I wanted to, I wanted to hold onto her, you know? So I, but I, I didn't record my grandfather on that side or my other grandmother.

So there was also something about her. I knew she had stories and I knew she'd had this life. She used to say, better to be born poor than to be born rich and lose everything. She would say these kind of hyperbolic things where I was like, really, you were rich? You're not rich now. What are you talking? So there were questions I had. Absolutely. And you said in a video that you published on your website that your grandmother's was very beautifully put, was an embroider of both fabric and reality. So in interviewing her and other people for this project, eventually when you return to it, how did you think about the relationship between history and memory, how people chose to narrate their lives against like these huge historical shifts? That's such a big and interesting question. I mean, I think I was always conscious of the gaps, whether in the historical record, and what's viewed as central or important by historians, record keepers, right? And in terms of the memories of the people I was talking to, because we're all subjective and

embroidering in certain ways, right? So I'm really interested in history, especially kind of social and material history. And I love learning from historians and nonfiction writers, particularly those who were kind of looking at daily life. So I think in some ways, what I was doing with my grandmother's story wasn't that different from what I was doing with the history, which was one, taking it all with a grain of salt, like, right, this is one point of view. And it's coming from one perspective. And it's going to have a whole bunch of things depending on that person's subject position and values and whatever that that inflect it. But I think I was also, so I was really drawn to some historians that I think have been on this podcast, people like

Sarah Abreva-Stein, who's done this incredible work around things like Sephardic herbs and really granular, interesting tracings of things that I could then put into my novel in various ways. But I was also really interested in the big history and had to really learn a huge amount about, you know, the Spanish Civil War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and World War II. And so it was daunting in a lot of ways. And I was always conscious of the gaps, both in the records I had from my grandmother, which were pretty minimal, and in the history itself. And the fact that at times I was looking at things that not very many people have written about. So particularly Jews in 20th century Spain, where I found some incredible historians and was in conversation with some of them, but I had to, I had to dig. And then there were plenty of moments when I couldn't fill it in. So that's

kind of where I made a decision like, okay, I'm gonna write fiction that I can fill it in, you know, while being very clear that that's what I was doing. This is not a historical record. And the other thing about fiction is that the embroidery is permitted, right? Like you can go inside someone's head and you're not transgressing because the genre opens the door. So maybe that's a little unfair, but. You mentioned that you recorded your grandmother's stories in the 80s. And then you said for about two decades, you just didn't return to it. I mean, at that point, you had written a handful of novels, two of which were also historical fiction, both set in New England. What made you say, OK, I'm ready to return to my grandmother's story in this particular

way and write about it? I think it was a few different things. I think, one, it was in the most personal way, it was feeling the passage of time more keenly. This book took me about a decade. I was kind of in middle, steadily in middle age. And my mother is now 86. My uncles, who I interviewed at length, spent days with both two of them, my Uncle David and my Uncle Al for the book, were getting older and have in fact have died since before the books coming out. So but they knew about it. So I had a bit of a

feeling of like, I want to tell this story while the generation above me is around both for me to gather information and kind of emotional reactions from, but also so they know about it. Like it felt like a kind of, I hope a gift to them. Of course, they could be furious at me, but no one seems to be yet. And then the other reason I think had to do with world events. So the refugee crisis, the Trump era, the fact that I was reading and teaching lots of immigrant lit, some Jewish, lots not Jewish. So people like Edwidge Danticat or Viet Thanh Nguyen, you know, immigrant writers often first generation American, but sometimes like myself, second or third. And it just the issues of kind of home and longing and displacement and the way they intersect with government policies and world affairs and who is allowed in and who's not and why just feel so urgent to me, I guess. My last book was a kind of sprawling narrative that covered a bunch of time. And I think I gained confidence.

I don't think I would have dared to take on something this big when I was 21. I just, it was too much work. Too much. Do you feel like it was the research that was overwhelming or the way of having to really, in a sense, like answer to your family and hope that they like the novel and hope that they're satisfied with the way that you rendered your family story or a combination of all of it? I think both those things.

And with the research, not partly it was getting it right in terms of my family, but partly it was getting it right in terms of history and historians, and also kind of the fact that I do feel really strongly that these are stories that matter in their reality, right? And that not that many people know. So there's just not, there are now some more really great books are coming out, but the Sephardic story is not one, certainly in fiction, that's been told that much. And so I did feel like you never know if you're getting it totally right. I'm sure I've made lots of blunders, but yeah, I felt some pressures on both sides. But I also, in some nice way, I think at this age, also kind of feel more willing to take chances. I wasn't in a rush. I have tenure, I have a good job. Like I'm not scrambling the way I was when I was younger. And I don't care if a book takes me a decade. Like I had so

much fun. It was so interesting. So I think I also at this age, I'm kind of like, I don't want to try it. Like, why not? You know? So tell us about your research experience. You conducted on-site research in Turkey and in Spain, and you found some really cool things that helped you fill in some of the gaps in your grandmother's story. I'd love to hear more about it. and your grandmother's story. I'd love to hear more about it. Sure. So yeah, my research was kind of three pronged. So it involved interviewing family members and drawing really endlessly on those two little tapes, taking every drop I could out of them. And then it involved a lot of reading and some kind of corresponding with historians who were incredibly helpful. So Aaron Rodriguez at Stanford helped me with Ladino. And there's a historian called Mikkel Friedman at Carnegie Mellon, who's written about early 20th century Jews in Spain. And the filmmaker guy in my novel, she helped me.

So there were a lot of nice kind of connections that I made, and I found people very generous. But in some ways, the kind of most interesting research in terms of surprises was either archival or oral history. So when I was in Turkey, I went to the Sephardic home for the aged. And I had written ahead and explained who I was and what I was looking for. And I think she was a very friendly social worker, had said, sure, we have some people you can talk to. I think she said we have four people. So I was like, this is so cool. I'm in Turkey. Like, here we go. I get there. She produces one person who's very elegant and very contained and tells me a whole bunch of stuff, most of which was familiar to me already. So it was fine, but it wasn't mind

blowing. So then I said, great, thank you so much. Like, who's my next person? And she said, oh, that's it. And I was like, wait a minute. I mean, I'm here for like five days. Like you told me you had four people. And she eventually, but she was kind of resistant, introduced me to another woman who and logical. But then she started doing things like pulling a necklace with garlic cloves out from under her dress. And I said to her that my family had moved back to quote, back to Spain. And she said, Why? Why would they do that? That's a terrible idea. And I said, What do you mean? And she said, You don't know the story? And I said, No, no, you know, tell me. tell me. And she told me the story that ended up in the novel in the character Gentile Nahon's voice about a Sephardic couple that goes back to Spain and is taken into a basement in 20th century Spain of a hotel and there's rugs and things on the walls made out of the skin of slaughtered Jews, you know, very, very disturbing and troubling, but also to me, extraordinarily moving and complicated, right? That like, here's this woman who, who this is the, you know, 21st century, and she still has, somehow she's carried this legacy forward. And so, I think the people at

the residence were a little nervous about this. But for me as a fiction writer, I was like, moved and fascinated, right? So, that was the sort of thing where you go and not even quite knowing what you're looking for. And I'm sure like the work you do as a historian, right? Like you go down a path and then suddenly you're on a different path. And sometimes people self-select themselves for an interview and they give you what they think you would like to hear

or a polished version of whatever story. And then sometimes you happen upon somebody else, you push a little bit and then you kind of get to the meat. That's right. And this woman was very vulnerable. You know, she was very, we really, I actually felt a stronger connection to her. Like I felt very sad for her in some ways, but she also, she was vibrant. She reminded me a little of my grandmother.

So your grandfather relocates, and your grandmother, Rebecca, relocate to Spain. My great grandfather. Your great grandfather, sorry., Rebecca relocate to Spain. My great grandfather. Your great grandfather, sorry. And Rebecca relocate to Spain. And in the novel, he does so, but he goes down to an office. Is it an employment office? Aid office. I can't remember exactly what I call it, but it's an office.

It's an office that helps refugees, Jews who need to leave. It might be the Ezra aid office. I can't remember. But that kind of helped people migrate. And so was this specifically for Sephardic Jews living in Istanbul at the time who needed to repatriate or emigrate somewhere else? Well, I made it up. Oh, you made it up. Oh, okay. But there were people.

I was so fascinated by it. Yeah, no, I made up that scene. I don't actually know. That was a gap, right? I don't know quite how they got there. But I do know, not from my family, but through historical research, that there was very briefly a law in 1925, in the late 1920s in Spain, that offered citizenship to Sephardic Jews. late 1920s in Spain that offered citizenship to Sephardic Jews. And I know that there were things like the Joint Distribution Committee and HIAS and the Ezra Society that helped, there still are, that helped Jews migrate and gave them aid and kind of helped them land. You know, HIAS was

originally, I think, a Jewish organization, but it helps lots of different kinds of refugees now. So you found this film in the National Center for Jewish Film Archives. It's a film from 1929, and it has a contained footage of your family that was unattributed to them at the synagogue in Barcelona. What did you make of the film? What did you make of Spain's campaign to repatriate Sephardic Jews after hundreds of years and this campaign to make Spain their homeland? And did anyone in your family ever come to view Spain as a homeland? That's another great question. So, I mean, my first reaction to

the film was just, oh my God, is that my family, right? It's got an image of a woman and with two little children, one of whom has a big halo of blonde hair, which my uncle Albert had, unlike anyone else in the family, somehow he ended up as blonde. And I thought it looked like her. And it said, you know, there's even a little Jewish oratory in Barcelona. So my first feeling was just, is it them? I sent it to my uncle David, I worked out the timing, I compared photos, I had photos of my great grandfather. And indeed, it was like we pinned it down. And my uncle was floored because he's, the film was from 1929. And he toddles in it, you know, he's, he's maybe three. So he was just like, called me back and

said, you know, where the hell did you come upon this? So that was just felt like a weird gift from the sky, you know. And then when I researched it, and this is where Mikkel Friedman's work came in. So the filmmaker turned out to be this man called Ernesto, I may be mispronouncing his name, Jimenez Caballero. And he, at the time, was a kind of young, quote, avant-garde literary guy. And he was part of this project to offer citizenship to Sephardic Jews. Mostly, they didn't really want them in Spain. So Spain had lost a lot of territory, and they had a lot of Sephardic Jews out in North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire who were trading and working in commerce.

And they were mostly speaking French or the languages of wherever else they were, right? Like Arabic or Turkish. And because there was an education system in French. So Spain was like, why is this happening? We want these people to essentially be doing work for us. I'm pretty cynical about it all from what I've read. I don't think it was a operation or effort to kind of reintegrate in any real way. Why'd they do it for the Jews and not the Muslims? You know, there's so many questions. But one of the reasons in terms of the little film, I'm really cynical is that Caballero then became a major serious fascist. And then he tried to set up Hitler with the sister

of the current dictator of Spain, this guy called Primo de Rivera. So he was going whichever way the wind blew. Okay. You know, but the film itself is really like weirdly fetishizing. So he, you know, he, and in a funny way, he likes the Jews in the film, right? He's like, here's a little family and here's an almond paste maker and here's a rabbi and here's, you know, in a problematic way, here's a man with Sephardic features, right? So there's a lot of messed up things around how he's handling all kinds of things, right? So there's a lot of messed up things around how he's handling all kinds of things. So there was this sort of sense of, let me show you these people. But it was also aimed at convincing Jews that Spain was their homeland.

So it's actually called Jews of the Spanish Homeland. And in my novel, I couldn't resist this. I was kind of like, what do I do with a filmmaker? It doesn't go in the book. But I had to bring him there. And the thought that he actually, this actual man had filmed my grandmother and my uncles and been in this basically secret synagogue. On the one hand, I'm so grateful for the film because there they are. Like, I can see the garden.

I can see them. Like, it's this incredible gift of kind of documentation. But it's also really chilling, right? Like, here they are. And so in the film, I have Alberto, Rebecca's father, based on my great grandfather, who I never met and know maybe 10 facts about, rather suspicious. You know, Rebecca's like, oh, cool, you want to film me? Like, I'm a pretty young woman. Like, she's into it. She doesn't know the context. But Alberto, who's pretty savvy and an old man, is kind of like, put your camera down,

you know, and eventually negotiates and is like, you want to film me? I want something from you. And so I was really interested in kind of having the two men almost embody positions in the history, even as they're also just two men, right? Did anybody in your family ever conceive of Spain as a homeland? I think your two uncles spent the most time in Spain. So I still have relatives in Barcelona. My grandmother had several siblings who stayed there. So two sisters, my grandmother and her sister, Corrine, who actually never went to Spain, went straight, went to France and then Cuba and then the US, became American. Several eventually went to Israel. But my grandmother's sister Elsa stayed in Spain, partly because there was another brother named Marco, who got horribly injured during the

Spanish Civil War, basically had his head bashed in, and ended up disabled in a psychiatric facility. And so my understanding of it is that Elsa didn't want to leave him. So I still have, my mother has a wonderful cousin there who I've gotten really close to and who helped me with the book. So I assume she thinks of Spain as a homeland, but it's not easy for her. She changed her name so it doesn't read as Jewish. It's a very odd country to be Jewish, and I think it's improving. And there are quite a few people interested now in unearthing the history. Again, sometimes in really good ways,

sometimes in ways that seem to have to do with like tourist dollars, you know, where like they're more interested in having like these little key chains that are supposedly the keys that the Jews brought with them to the Ottoman Empire. Oh, wow, that's tacky with them to the Ottoman Empire. Oh, wow. To their houses.

But like, they're made in China. And I don't think the Jews brought the keys to their houses. You know, my family didn't. So, but there are also people who are doing an incredible job preserving cemeteries or tracking the history or digging up books and finding old synagogues because there's so much there. It reminds me of, I don't know if you've ever heard of, a couple years ago, Ghana had the year of return. Specifically, they targeted Black Americans, I feel, to come back to Ghana and to spend a year and they had all types of events that they had going on.

And I kind of felt the same way. I felt like, well, okay, I know my ancestors were enslaved. Were they enslaved in what is now Ghana? I don't know. Would I like to go back and visit Ghana? Would I like to go and see Ghana one day? Sure. But do I want to do it as a part of this like really highly packaged tourist endeavor. Not so much, you know. Right, which may be just an effort to get Americans to come spend their money, right? Spend money, yeah. It's very interesting how modern states kind of prey on people's desire

to learn more about their past or to have some type of homeland or connection to a homeland when they're in diaspora. Absolutely. And to do it in a way that doesn't necessarily fully engage with the trauma of the history, right? Exactly. Exactly. que tú me amas y te esforzas a vestir lágrimas yo ya lo supe

que era por engañar este es un pacto que no puedes negar So switching gears a little bit, one of the things I really loved about your novel was your use of Ladino idioms and phrases, and also your use of photographs. I loved looking at the photographs at the beginning of the chapters. How did you think incorporating the Ladino language into the book enriches the texts and the characters? And then in terms of the photographs, how are how were they helpful in thinking about the histories of migration? And even though you choose to tell you chose to tell it as historical fiction, they're actually photos of your of your family. I think you already are kind of touching on how I intended them. I was really interested in lightly signaling that this

did have a nonfiction base. So partly, there they are, and they're, quote, real, right? There were real people in them, and here they are. So they immediately show a little bit of a seam. I originally had many more seams. I had like a granddaughter recording her grandmother and various other things that my editor was like, you don't need all these seams, like the photos are the seam. So I took them out, which I think was the right decision. One thing they do is signal that kind of hybridity, right? That this isn't quite your conventional novel. It's straddling. And then I was also really interested in them in terms of migration because of the different ways that they both serve and in some ways, maybe lie is too strong a word,

but hide or veil or misrepresent. So on the one hand, their connection across distance, like my grandmother had to leave her children, her two little boys in Spain when she came to Cuba in the US, and she had these pictures. And I have on the back of one of them, she wrote in English, but misspelled. She was just learning English. There in Spain, there spelled T-H-E-R-E, in Spain, my darlings, D-O-L-L-I-N-G-S, which is darlings with a New York accent, right? I was going to say a little New York accent, darling. I love that. And like I found on the back of another photo that it had been taken because I dug around

by it had an imprint and it had been taken by an Armenian photographer in Istanbul. Like you can just read them as objects. But then sometimes they were necessary. They were used as a passport or a citizenship photo. They were proof, right? were necessary. They were used as a passport or a citizenship photo. They were proof, right? And sometimes it seemed to me anyway that my grandmother was using them to kind of present in certain ways or pass in certain ways. Like sometimes in one, she's dressed almost in a kind of Roma costume, kind of very Turkish, very playful. And in another, she looks very Western,

sort of French stylish. She was a dressmaker. So she was really gifted. She could make herself... And she was beautiful. She could make herself look like whatever she wanted. And then they also interested me in terms of kind of female bodies and gazes and representation in that there's another character in the novel named Luna, who is inspired by my aunt Luna, who was my grandmother's stepdaughter, my mother's half sister, and she had cerebral palsy. And so I was really interested in exploring how this stepmother shows up, who's a piece of work, like wants to help her, but is really demanding, is really beautiful, looks in the mirror a lot, you know, is a little narcissistic. And then there's this passionate, bright girl

trying to figure out her own embodiment. And as she gets older, her own sexuality. So the photos interested me in terms of that representation. I also was interested, just quickly, in the way photos worked back then before the internet, right? Because now with migration, you can mostly be on WhatsApp. You can be sending back and forth. There's much more fluidity even as the distances are still terrible between like separated people. And back then you had to wait. Like you couldn't bring much with you, but maybe you'd have like your four photos and my family saved them. Like it amazes me how much we still have. And then the idioms? The idioms were just so much fun. They're beautiful.

They're strange. They're like the title. They carry a lot of kind of maternal passed down knowledge. So, and I was very lucky. There's actually someone named Gloria Asher at Tufts who was teaching a Ladino class. There aren't that many, although there's starting to be a few more. There's Suni Binghamton now has a program. Oh, excellent. Yeah. And I noticed that Worker's Circle in New York is teaching Ladino. But so I was interested in just learning some of it. And then I also thought the idioms were interesting in a lot of different ways. You can glimpse the culture, you can glimpse gender expectations, you can glimpse superstition, which I'm fascinated by. I was raised very secular, Jewish culturally, but I'm not religious. It was interesting seeing religious practices through

the Latino. And then I was really interested in the fact that I was writing the novel in English, but mostly until the end, people weren't speaking English in it, right? Yeah. So I wanted that. And as I said earlier, I teach a lot of literature by immigrants, and I'm interested in multilingualism, like what happens when you do translate or when you don't, or when there's a moment that the reader's a little unmoored, or there's a moment that the reader's a little unmoored or there's a moment when one person speaking one language and one person speaking another. So the Ladino was really fun, also really hard. And like, I think the copy editor and there's going to be an audio book, you know,

it's created some bumps for how do you deal with this? Because nobody speaks it. Do you have a favorite one? I mean, there's just so many beautiful ones that I'm not going to even try to say them in Ladino, but there's one where as a sort of goodbye, you say paths of milk and honey. That's so sweet. Yeah. So some of them are really sweet. They're beautiful lullabies, duerme, duerme.

And my grandmother used to sing those. You know, a woman is not a shirt that you change. Or life is like a candle, one breath, and it's extinguished. Oh, wow. That one's a little intense. And then some of them are much, much kind of funnier. And some of them really show sort of pressures on people to get married. They really just embody a lot of different values,

not all of which I agree with, but that really paint, paint a picture. Let me just see if I can find any other good ones. Yeah. Here's a good one. If you are garlic, I am the tooth that crushes you.

Oh, I love that one. It's also intense. They are. They're pretty intense in different ways. And then how, how do you think fiction can help us historians better conceptualize, understand, and write the past? What are the perils and possibilities of writing historical

fiction? I mean, to me, the gifts of fiction, whether historical or not, have to do with kind of subjectivity and emotion. You know, you can go inside people's heads, you can cross consciousnesses. And actually, as a writer, and as a teacher, to me, that's a really important thing to think about just in terms of thinking about empathy or understanding. What does it mean to try to stand in someone else's shoes to embody their body to think their thoughts? It's also, of course, really tricky, right? Because do you know enough? And is it your story? And there's all kinds of questions. So all of that, I think, I would think are things that historians think about too. For me, the perils of writing it in a certain way are pretty simple there that I'm

terrified of getting things wrong. And then the other peril, I guess, is that I do want it to read as a story where you're inside the spell of it. And so in some ways, it's all of the little gifts of things that I find that I have to be careful with, because I don't want it to read like a story where you can see like, oh, she Googled this, or she found this, or she got so excited about all of these facts that we're just going down a rabbit hole, right? So there's a sense of kind of, I want to learn and learn and learn, but then I almost have to set it aside. I remember Toni Morrison, who's one of my favorite writers, talked about writing Beloved, and she said it was inspired, the seed came from a woman

who I think was named Margaret Garner, who had taken the life of her child rather than hand the child over to a slave catcher. And Morrison said, I learned this, and I had this little nugget, I'm totally mutilating what she said. And I'm sure she said it so beautifully. In the way Toni Morrison says things. With that voice, right? This is the best I can do. That basically she had that, and then she totally set it aside and figured out who her character was and figured out the pulse of the story and the kind of heart of the story. And then she started doing research. So that dance of kind of back and forth, you have to kind of, as a fiction writer, have the heart of it be the people, right?

And their lives, which depend on the history and intersect with the history, but you don't actually want in a certain way to know too much at the beginning. So and then the question from the other lens, it's harder for me to say, I mean, what do you think as a historian, fiction can teach historians? I got into history really young through reading historical fiction. really young through reading historical fiction. So one, I was just really excited interviewing you for the podcast because I love history because I loved historical fiction first. And I think as a graduate student

and as an aspiring academic, sometimes you read a text and you're like, gosh, I wanna take a nap. It's dry. I wanna know more about the people. I wanna know more about their lives. And I get that sometimes that information is just not available in the archive or just wasn't available in the memories of the people that you interviewed. But for me, I think it's a

great exercise in terms of even if you don't ever publish a novel, you see something in the archive and write a story about the character. Explore some of your ideas that way. I think it's a very creative way to get in touch with the people who you're interested, the lives you're interested in. But that's my very biased opinion. If I'm not reading for grad school, I pretty much am exclusively reading historical fiction. That's great. And maybe you will. Maybe one day. Yeah, maybe one day I'll write my own. Yeah, but I'm also really interested in historians who are playing with some of this hybridity by kind of acknowledging where they're speculating or, you know, imagining lives in ways that are still the work of a historian.

They're not fiction, but they're kind of playing with the border. I think there's a lot of interesting things happening there. I agree. It's interesting. It's fun. It's exploratory. And I think it keeps the work as a historian, like refreshing,

at least for me. Yeah, that's great. I can't wait to see what you do. That concludes our interview with Elizabeth Graver about Cantica, out now with Metropolitan Books. If you want to learn more about Rebecca Levy and her story, just visit our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where you'll find a quick link to the book and other resources in this interview's bibliography. You'll also find tons of other episodes on the Ottoman Sephardi diaspora. That's all for now. I'm Brittany White. Thanks for listening.