Elizabeth Graver's Blog, page 2
August 1, 2023
New Books Network Interview: Discussing Luna, Disability, Ladino & More . . .
I was so happy to get to talk about Kantika with author and podcaster G.P. Gottleib. She’s a wonderfully appreciative and perceptive reader, and she gave me the chance toward the end of the podcast to focus on the character of Luna, who was inspired by my wonderful aunt, Luna Leibowitz. Luna was born in 1927 in New York City to an immigrant Sephardic family. Her birthmother tragically died in childbirth a few years later, along with her newborn baby. In 1934, my grandmother Rebecca became Luna’s stepmother after she had an arranged marriage to my grandfather—Luna’s father—Sam, bringing into the marriage her own two children, who’d lost their father. They were a blended immigrant family with a history of deep loss. Over the duration, they formed deep bonds as well. In the photo above, taken at Jones Beach, Luna is on the far right, next to her stepbrother Albert. Rebecca sits in the center holding baby Suzanne (my mom!), with her son David to her left.
I won’t give away too much to readers who haven’t read the novel, but suffice it to say that Luna plays a vital part in the book, both in her own right as a smart, angry, passionate, full-of-life, disabled girl struggling to find her way in a world full of prejudice, and in terms of her relationship to Rebecca, who is both key to Luna becoming mobile and the source of a lot of tension. In real life, my Aunt Luna led an active and full life. She married twice, had a child, and worked in municipal jobs for the City of New York. She took up writing in her retirement in Florida, focusing on the retirement and disability communities there, as well as, occasionally, on her own childhood. She regularly published articles published in the newspaper The Sun Sentinel, realizing her lifelong dream to become a published writer (see this link to a story she wrote on retirees and dance fever!).
Luna sadly died before I started writing Kantika. She always followed my path as a writer with great interest. I wish she’d had a chance to tell her own full story, and I hope she would have given her blessing to my portrait of her in my book. May her memory be a blessing.
You can listen to my conversation with G.P. Gottleib here.
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July 13, 2023
“On Making a Novel Out of Life,” First Draft Podcast Interview with Mitzi Rapkin
I was delighted to get to have a substantive conversation about Kantika, my writing practice, weathering rejection, favorite words and more with the wonderful interviewer and reader Mitzi Rapkin, whose podcast, “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing,” I’ve long admired. You can get a taste of our conversation at this link at Literary Hub and listen to the hour-long episode on Spotify (where you can also subscribe to the podcast) here.
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May 31, 2023
“Writer’s Forum” Interview, WRBH Radio New Orleans
I had a wonderful conversation with Michael Tusa, who has a radio show on WRBH Reading Radio in New Orleans. I loved hearing about the station, whose mission is (to quote from the website) “to turn the printed word into the spoken word so that the blind and print impaired can receive the same access to current information as their sighted peers.” The station is staffed by over 150 volunteers, including Mike, who is a gifted interviewer. We spoke about my exploration of disability in Kantika and my rendering of Luna, a character inspired by my actual aunt, Luna Levy. Born into a Sephardic immigrant family in New York in the 1920s, my aunt had a life full of both enormous challenge and tremendous accomplishment, including, in her retirement in Florida, a stint as a freelance journalist who wrote about the local arts and culture scene and opportunities for disabled people. Unfortunately, Luna isn’t around to read my book or hear this interview, but I know she would have been a big fan of the station and its mission. Mike and I touched on many other topics as well—the place of music and song in my novel, the role of Sephardic history, language crossings, superstition (yes, I knock on wood!), old family photographs and more . . . You can listen to our conversation here.
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May 25, 2023
Moment Magazine Conversation with Debby Waldman
Debby Waldman is my beloved friend from long ago days when we were both grad students studying writing and literature at Cornell. Though we live far from each other and only manage to see each other every few years, we always start up right where we left off, our visits filled with talk talk talk—about writing and parenting, work and hobbies, the different ways we inhabit our Jewishness, travel, more writing, more kids, politics, the dogs. Debby is a wonderful writer of children’s books, creative nonfiction and journalism. Her personal essays manage to be both funny and heartbreaking, poignant and acerbic (see her website for a peek). When she asked me if I’d like to talk about Kantika with her for a piece in Moment Magazine, I said of yes, course, I’d take any chance to gab with you! This time, we talked over Zoom. I was in France, Debby in Italy, which, somewhat absurdly, meant that we were closer geographically than our usual Boston, Massachusetts/Alberta, Canada split. As always with Debby, distance evaporated once the words started moving back and forth between us, and we might have been sitting together in a room. Here’s our conversation, such a pleasure!
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May 13, 2023
“Kantika, from History to Fiction: a Sephardic Journey,” Ottoman History Podcast
I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Brittany White on the Ottoman History Podcast. Earlier episodes featuring the work of Ottoman scholars, among them Devin Naar, Sarah Abrevaya Stein and my Boston College colleague Dana Sajdi (who introduced me to the podcast), were wonderful resources to me as I researched and wrote Kantika, so it was a particular thrill to get to be on the podcast now that my book is out. You can listen to my 45 minute conversation with Brittany at this link: “Kantika: From History to Fiction: a Sephardic Journey.” Check out other episodes too. There are many fascinating ones across a range of topics.
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May 8, 2023
Video of 5/4/2023 Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Conversation About Kantika
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.
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May 2, 2023
April 19, 2023
The Story of My Grandmother That Took Me 40 Years to Write
I wrote an essay for Zibby Magazine about the process of writing Kantika—over a span of 40 years!! You can read it here!
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April 10, 2023
“Jews of the Spanish Homeland: Finding my Sephardic Family in a 1929 Film”
I wrote an essay for the Jewish Book Council on the quite extraordinary experience I had while I was doing research for Kantika of finding my family, unattributed, in a 1929 film I stumbled upon in the National Center for Jewish Film. You can read the essay here.
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