I’m delighted to be able to share that Kantika has come out in Turkish from Everest Yayinileri, meticulously translated by Seda Çıngay Mellor. I had the pleasure of having a conversation with journalist Nese Binark about the translation process and my thoughts on having this novel, so close to my heart and with deep roots … Read more
One of the biggest challenges of writing my novel Kantika, with its story inspired by my endlessly unfurling family history, was figuring out where to begin and where to end. At one point, I had a chapter set in 1957 New York about my mom’s (true!) battle—as an idealistic, knowledge-seeking college student, the left-leaning child … Read more
I wrote a meditation for the 9/25/2024 “Writer’s Journal” column in The Boston Globe about looking for a grandfather I never knew… I GO LOOKING FOR MY GRANDFATHER, Louis Graver, who died in 1944, twenty years before I was born. He went by Lou, which is also my parents’ nickname for me, though it’s only … Read more
I’m thrilled to learn that Kantika has received the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction from the wonderful Massachusetts Center for the Book, with a ceremony at the State House on October 8th. I feel so lucky to live in a state with such a rich literary history and current scene and to be, with this … Read more
“Elizabeth Graver’s Kantika is uniquely an American Jewish novel centered around Eastern Sephardi immigrants to the United States. Moving around temporally and geographically—Istanbul, Cuba, Barcelona, New York—the novel is, as the title suggests, a song. It is both a lament for lost worlds but also a love song, a prayer for the future. This is … Read more
My beloved friend and literary agent (until his retirement in 2015), Richard Parks, died on April 23, 2024. Carrying his never-ending encouragement with me, I plucked some words out of the sadness and wrote this little remembrance, which I published at Literary Hub. To take some liberties with the ending of Charlotte’s Web, “it’s not … Read more
On April 15, I’m honored to be going to the University of Hartford to receive this year’s Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Kantika. My younger daughter, Sylvie, a college junior at Wesleyan University in nearby Middletown, CT, will be my date! Previous winners of the Wallant Award include many writers whose work I love, among … Read more
I had the huge pleasure of doing an event at the Jewish Museum in New York City last week, following two days of festivities and a panel for the Jewish National Book Awards (Kantika received the award for Sephardic Culture). Titled “Wandering Jews: Two Diasporic Journeys Out of the Ottoman Empire,” the 4/28/24 event was … Read more
The paperback of Kantika comes out in April 2024, with early copies making their way out into the world already! I’m excited for a number of events, both virtual and in-person, where I’ll have the chance to continue to share this story, so close to my heart, with readers, and have conversations with an amazing … Read more
When, a few days ago, I received the wonderful news that Kantika had won a National Jewish Book Award—the Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy—I was stopped short by the fact that Becky Levy shares a name with my grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy—the inspiration for and central subject of my … Read more
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