“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 a novel about exile, about the diasporic nature of loss. As one character early on in the novel admits, ‘in addition to missing all the people and places she left behind…she is homesick for the one thing that is supposed to be portable and ever-present: her God.’ But so too, this is a novel about the rich intersections of cultures, languages—French, Ladino, Hebrew, English—and lives. Graver, in navigating worlds, temporalities, and generations, explores the possibilities for self-reinvention amid the turmoil of change, a story in which, as another character acknowledges, ‘One thing seems as plausible as the next.’ Indeed, this is a novel about storytelling and stories, ‘shape-shifting and unruly.’  The novel turns, unexpectedly, into the intimate story of a mother raising a disabled stepdaughter. Graver takes us into the consciousness of a child with a disability, and the stepmother who has to overcome prejudices to care for her, with such sharpness and insight that it made us want to recommend the book to everyone we know.”

Judges:

Victoria Aarons, Trinity University
Josh Lambert, Wellesley College
Avinoam Patt, New York University
Amy Weiss, University of Hartford