What a pleasure it was to get to talk about Kantika last week with Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, as part of the Sandra Seltzer Silberman Conversation Series. I had the gift of a fellowship at the HBI way back in 2014 when I was in the early stages of writing this novel. I’ll be forever grateful for the cozy space on the Brandeis University campus filled with feminist art and fascinating people, and for the mix of solitude and company, and for the opportunity to take a semester off from teaching to start on the long path of this novel. It was while I was at the HBI that I stumbled upon a 1929 film at the National Center for Jewish Film that contained unattributed footage of my family at an unmarked tiny synagogue in Barcelona (it’s called “Los judíos de patria española” or “Jews of the Spanish Homeland”; you can watch it here, and read a little essay I wrote for the Jewish Book Council about finding it here).
This talk was a wonderful experience for me both because of Lisa’s thoughtful questions and because the Zoom format allowed people to join from all over the world. Gloria Ascher, my Ladino professor at Tufts, was there, and Judith Cohen, a musician who performs and studies Sephardic music and whose work I admire, and people from Turkey and New Zealand and Boston and elsewhere, some of whom I knew (my cousin Rachel! my mom!), but most of whom were strangers with a connection, of one sort of another, to my book. It was oddly moving to talk about a story that crosses so many borders in this online format, where we could gather, as if by magic, in one (sort-of) room. You can watch a video of the conversation here.