Zibby Mag

By Elizabeth Graver

In 1985, when I was twenty-one, I taped my grandmother telling stories. I remember sitting down with her in the living room of the modest ranch house that she and my grandfather were so proud to have bought in Beverly Hills, Florida—to my eyes an arid retiree town with grid streets and a sour joke of a name, but to them a sun-soaked, low-crime purlieu where they could grow lemon trees that reminded them of their childhoods in Turkey. The day I interviewed her, my grandmother was, as always, dressed beautifully, in an ironed, embroidered Mexican dress, though her health, like my grandfather’s, was starting to fail; in the next few years, he would die, and she would lose her right foot to an infection.

But on that morning, the room was bright, the walls hung with her needlepoints: lions and tigers, an open rose, a rabbi at the Wailing Wall. I pressed the button on the microcassette recorder and watched the brown thread start to spool.

“Testing, testing,” I said.

My grandmother squinted at me. “Why you say testing?”

“To make sure it’s recording and that your voice comes through,” I explained. “Say, ‘this is Rebecca Levy.’”

“You want I should say my name? This is Rebecca Levy. Miskenika—” (“poor little one” in Ladino, her first language). She laughed, her gray eyes glinting. “You don’t know who I am?”

The truth was complicated. My grandmother had always been a vivid presence in my life. She was full of stories and songs, embroidery and drawings, with an elegance, almost a haughtiness, that seemed tied to the fact that she was born rich and then lost everything, as she was wont to remind me. I’d grown up knowing that she was from Turkey but was not exactly Turkish. She was . . . what? Jewish and Spanish. Was that right? Sephardic (my mother used the term, though I don’t think I ever heard my grandmother say it), but even that was confusing, because unlike most present-day Sephardim whose ancestors had fled Spain centuries ago during the Spanish Inquisition, she had actually lived in Spain for a decade, beginning in 1924.

I knew she spoke Ladino, Spanish, French, some Greek, Catalan, German, and Hebrew, and that for all her multilingualism and despite decades in the United States, she struggled with English, though I loved to hear her talk—the lilt of her accent, the delight she took in using certain packaged phrases: “Don’t be a wise guy!”; “Good morning, Meeese America!” when I walked, a hunched teenager with acne, into the room.

That day, I learned some things about her childhood in Istanbul, where she did Maccabi gymnastics, took a boat to school across the Golden Horn to Catholic school in French, and had a summer house. I learned about her marrying a man named Luis Baruch in Spain and having two children with him—my uncles David and Al—before Luis abandoned her, then died. I learned that her second marriage, to my grandfather Sam, had been arranged, and that she’d married him in Cuba to gain entrance to America. I learned that she had to leave her sons behind in Spain for nearly a year and was pregnant by the time they arrived. “What I had with everything!” she said. “You have no idea.”

She told a good story, adding sound effects and metaphors: “Aye, aye, I said to the lady! They were coming up the hill like black birds, like, howyoucallit, crows,” even as she jumped around in time and sometimes lost the thread. Combined with my general ignorance of the historical forces behind her migrations, her style of storytelling left me both riveted and unmoored. We filled two microcassettes that day. Her stories were by turn dramatic, joyful, moving, disturbing, and wrenchingly sad. I can still listen, decades later, to the tapes, converted now to digital files. Sometimes she stops to cough or catch her breath. Then, with a bueno, she begins again.

Looking back, I wish I’d filled more tapes, though I also wonder if the gaps and elisons were a kind of a gift, an invitation to make something of my own. Like my grandmother, I’ve always loved to fashion things from scraps. What happened next? Not much. The cassettes went into a drawer. When I moved, they moved, too, or spent time in safekeeping at my parents’ house. In 1992, my grandmother, who had moved back north to be near her children after her husband’s death, died at the Menorah Nursing Home in Brooklyn. “I’m going on a journey,” she told me calmly the last time I saw her. “Someplace far away.” I was in graduate school for creative writing by then. A few years later, I published a short story collection, where my grandmother was nowhere to be found. I taught college, got married, gave birth to two daughters, turned forty, wrote some more books. Over the years, my grandmother, who had worked as a dressmaker, showed up in my writing both obliquely and directly: In the New England farm girl working the looms in the Lowell textile mills in my first novel, and in her lover, who lost part of his leg; in an essay about visiting a bathhouse in Turkey; in a short story called “Three Mothers,” where my grandmother visited me (because she really had the night before) in a dream.

Her stories were by turn dramatic, joyful, moving, disturbing, and wrenchingly sad. I can still listen, decades later, to the tapes, converted now to digital files. Sometimes she stops to cough or catch her breath. Then, with a bueno, she begins again.

I turned fifty. By then it was 2014, the worldwide refugee crisis heating up. I’d just published a researched historical novel, The End of the Point, inspired by my husband’s family history in New England. I’d found the process—gathering oral histories, combing through archives—at once demanding and intoxicating, like time travel in a world where you’re both a (sometimes not entirely welcome) guest and a carpenter charged with holding up the walls. My mother and uncles were getting older. I was getting older; I felt the press of time. I told my mother that I wanted, finally, to try to write about her mother’s life, something she’d long encouraged me to do.

But how to tell the story? It was at once too close to home and too far afield. I’d grown up in a culturally Jewish but secular New England household and had almost no Jewish education. I didn’t speak Turkish, Spanish, or Ladino. I’d never been to Cuba or Spain, and most of our remaining Turkish relatives had moved to other countries or died. I’d need to learn about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Civil War, Ladino, U.S. immigration policy in the 1930s, and more, then work the magic of turning it all into a story not overstuffed with facts.

Over the next few years, I traveled to Turkey, Spain, and Cuba. I paid a visit to the house in Cambria Heights, Queens, that my grandparents had bought when my mother was four and where they’d raised a blended family of six children. I studied Ladino, interviewed relatives and strangers. I found treasures in the archives, including a fraught 1929 film about Sephardic Jews that contains unattributed footage of my family at the semi-secret synagogue in Barcelona where my great-grandfather was the caretaker. I listened, over and over, to the microcassettes, as if with repetition they might spill more secrets, but they never quite did.

Slowly, I began to imagine, and once I began, I couldn’t stop. Soon it wasn’t just my grandmother’s story, or my version of it, I was telling. I found myself inhabiting the consciousnesses of characters inspired by my great-grandfather, Alberto, and my great-grandmother, Sultana, and my Aunt Luna, who died before I wrote the book but left some writing about being a bright, disabled child of immigrants in the 1930s behind. It took me over eight years to find a way into this story and make it mine, in a kind of duet, an improvisation between fact, fiction, research, dreaming, texts, photographs, real names and invented ones, my grandmother and myself.

I called the novel Kantika—“song” in Ladino. My writing of it coincided with the Trump presidency, and, over the last few years, the Covid-19 Pandemic. These events don’t figure in the book—the story ends in 1950—but the drumbeat of the present was the background soundtrack to my exploration of one immigrant woman’s place inside a wider history marked by upheavals and prejudice, as well as some noteworthy examples of coexistence. “Deshame entrar y me azere lugar,” reads the Ladino epigraph of my novel. “Let me enter and I’ll make a place for myself.”

After she finished her novel Orlando, Virginia Woof wrote, “As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.” My mother remembers a pear tree that was planted by my grandmother in the postage-stamp backyard of the little house in Cambria Heights, Queens. The tree wasn’t there when we visited, but the current owner, Omar Mohammed, who immigrated to the United States from Trinidad, had built an arbor for his crop of gray-green, tubular squash, which hung pendulous and beautiful, over a foot long and almost glowing, like nothing I’d ever seen.

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Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose tumultuous and shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and finally New York. Kantika is due out in April 2023 from Metropolitan Books, with German and Turkish editions also forthcoming.

Elizabeth’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. The mother of two young adult daughters, she teaches at Boston College.