THE WONDERFUL PEOPLE at Henry Holt & Co. have designed a set of images that pair photos from Kantika with quotes from the book; they will post them on social media as the April 18th publication date draws near. See below for a sneak peek.

Using family photographs in this novel was very important to me, even as it’s an unconventional choice and one that a few early readers balked at. I stuck with my impulse—it felt too important to ignore—and did everything I could to make it work. I wanted to blur the line between fact and fiction and invite the reader to think about the roots of the story, which in this case lie with a real family (mine!), even as I also wanted to take liberties by inventing scenes and inner life. Writing historical fiction for me is always a dialogue—between the past and the present, between facts and imagination, between the work of historians, my own wanderings (I traveled to Turkey, Spain and Cuba for this book), and the voices in my head.

Because Kantika has its origins in recordings I made of my grandmother Rebecca telling stories decades ago, the dialogue in this case was also literal. I think of this book, with its title that means “song” in Ladino, as a kind of duet between my grandmother and myself, though she died decades ago. I’ve used her real name, as well as the real names of several other relatives (with the permission of those still living). The photos offer glimpses of the real people—their features, how they dressed, how they held their hands, looked at the photographer, looked away—even as they also show artifice—or even lie. I’m interested in how they trouble the nonfiction/fiction boundary, but also in how they work as physical objects inside the novel, where they serve both as a way to hold on to family across the wrenching absences created by migration and as a kind of cold tender—legal proof, ways to snag a husband, pass a citizenship test. Get in.

It’s still astonishing to me that in the context of so many journeys and upheavals, my grandmother managed to preserve such a rich archive of family photographs. She must have held them close. In writing Kantika, I scrutinized them, their fronts but also their backs. One photo from 1907 Istanbul shows the insignia of a photography studio on Rue Pera, the photographer bearing an Armenian name. This turned into a scene in the novel and helped me think about the pluralistic, cosmopolitan nature of the city at the time and how it was headed—with the Armenian genocide on the near horizon and conditions worsening for Turkish Jews and other ethnic minorities—for drastic change.

In a 1934 photo of Albert and David, the young sons Rebecca had to leave in Spain when she immigrated to New York for an arranged marriage, the boys wear sailor suits with US patches that she must have sewn for them before she left. On the back, she wrote, “There in Spain my dollings,” her misspellings revealing both her brand new English and the way she would have heard “darlings” pronounced with a New York accent. So much effort it must have taken, to write it out in English. So much missing in those five small words.