Kantika Quotes

“Kyen no rizika, no rozika. Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“He loves to stop on the corner and watch the ceramics fixer write numbers on the insides of the shards of a broken vase, drill tiny holes, brush the edges with egg white and secure them with wire, an act that gives him hope that anything shattered might, with enough skill and patience, be repaired. He loves the workshop of his music teacher, Oktay, on a narrow street deep in a Muslim quarter, the shop like a birdcage, hung with drying lengths of cane that Oktay fashions into neys, woodwind flutes whose sound—it was Rumi who said it—is not wind but fire.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“But we also want our children to have a future, and for our grandchildren to grow up safe and not feel ashamed.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“this the most corrosive sort of sorrow, the nearby faraway.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Is that how it works?” He laughs. “I’m the man of the house if I obey my wife?” “Of course. You didn’t know?”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“The more her circumstances are reduced, the more care she takes with her clothes, carrying an instinctual sense of them as both mask and portal, but she may as well be invisible to her father.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Is this what old age is, to believe in less and less?”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Love the sojourner for you were once sojourners in the land of Egypt.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Where are you going, where have you been?
Do you have children? How was the voyage? What is the news of the world? What can I do for you? Please, sit. Eat. She’ll give them the name of Villa Erna, the pension on Carrer del Modolell run by a Jewish family, and Café Cómico, where the Sephardim can learn about jobs, and for the Ashkenazim, the corner café on Còrsega, where they might find Yiddish speakers. Tell them you’ve been to us, she says warmly. Say you’re a friend of a friend.”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika

“Ken sos tu? I am Rebecca (Rivka, Rebekah) from my mother’s mother and the wife of Isaac in the Bible. The name means “to tie firmly” or “to snare,” which is why—or so her mother used to tell her when she struggled at sewing—she could, with practice, become skilled with a needle and thread. I am Camayor, from my mother’s father, Behor Camayor of blessed memory, and also Cohen, high priests descended from the sons of Aaron, a name
she feels she must live up to, though she’ll hide it as needed and may God forgive her. I am from the pomegranate tree my father planted at my birth, from my nuns in white habits, my staircase
with the worn ninth tread, the candlelight reflected in my fingernails. I am a gypsy girl, because to have no home place had once seemed romantic and she could do the dance, just as she could climb ropes at gymnastics, rising and lowering at will. Or was it actually that home, back then, was everywhere?”
― Elizabeth Graver, Kantika