Kantika: from History to Fiction, a Sephardic Journey | Elizabeth Graver

E544 | 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. Elizabeth Graver's fifth novel, Kantika (Metropolitan Books/Holt, 2023), was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul. German and Turkish editions are forthcoming. 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. She is a Professor of English and co-directs the Creative Writing program at Boston College. Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories. CREDITS Episode No. 544 Release Date: 13 May 2023 Recording Location: Boston / Charlottesville Sound production by Brittany White and Chris Gratien Music: Haim Effendi - A la una nassi io; Jack Mayesh - Missirlu Bibliography and images courtesy of Elizabeth Graver available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/05/kantika.html