53 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth GraverKantika
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Song
Elizabeth Graver uses the motif of song to advance the theme of Cultural Preservation Amidst Change. The novel’s title is the Ladino word for “song,” and the author preserves pieces of the Sephardic community’s history and language by telling a fictionalized version of her family’s story. Although Rebecca is the protagonist, Graver uses third-person omniscient narration to give multiple members of her family a voice in the song. Kantika itself is like a song that preserves the Cohen family’s history and culture.
Within the story, music helps the characters hold onto their culture as well. The songs they sing are connected to the Cohen family’s resilient spirit, language, and faith. During the protagonist’s idyllic childhood, Rebecca, her mother, and her father all love to sing in Ladino, which is the mother tongue of their Sephardic Jewish community: “This, the time before thought, the world arriving not as lists or harkening back or future tense, but as breath-filled music—kantar, sing” (1). The family experiences significant changes when they immigrate from Istanbul to Barcelona. Although they cannot practice their faith openly in Spain, Rebecca preserves her culture by singing at the shop where she works. She later moves to the United States without her parents and shares the songs from her childhood with her own children.
In the final chapter, Rebecca performs a song in Ladino at her neighborhood’s Jewish center for an audience that includes her family and other refugees displaced by World War II and the Holocaust. The piece she chooses combines sadness and joy as if to show her children that preserving their culture means remembering how they have survived, not just what they have endured: “She sings to her children, to protect and instruct them but also to lift their spirits high, for while the lyrics are somber, the melody offers an upbeat counterpoint” (277). The protagonist learns that Luna is pregnant immediately after her performance, and this timing emphasizes the connection between song and the culture’s endurance. Rebecca’s songs celebrate the resilience of the Sephardic community and help to preserve their culture for generations to come.
Clothing
The motif of clothing develops the theme of Women’s Strength and Relationships With Their Bodies. Rebecca learns how to sew as a child because making clothing is traditionally women’s work in her culture. As she grows older, clothing offers the protagonist a way to project her inner strength and confidence despite her family’s financial hardships: “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” (62). As the Cohens’ resources dwindle, Rebecca must increasingly rely on her own strength, skill, and ingenuity. She supports herself and her children by working in the garment industry, and by 1934, she works her way up so that “she has her own atelier now and employs five girls” (140). Graver depicts the skill and effort that go into making clothing as she traces the often overlooked contributions women make in the everyday acts of love and labor that keep a family going.
Gardening
Gardening serves as a motif of Displacement and the Meaning of Home. According to the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, humanity’s first home was the Garden of Eden. Because Adam and Eve were driven from this paradise, gardens are associated with the original displacement. During the protagonist’s childhood in Constantinople, her father nurtures a majestic garden filled with “Alberto’s roses and Sultana’s herbs, and in spring, crocuses, tulips and grape hyacinths” (5). When the Cohens are displaced by a combination of World War I and Alberto’s business mistakes, he tries to take a piece of home with him by packing a suitcase “so overstuffed with bulbs, seeds and bundled roots that he had to gird it with a leather belt” (64). His reluctance to plant the seeds in the little synagogue’s “sunken courtyard garden” reflects his hesitation to put down roots in Barcelona (64). In Chapter 4, Sultana convinces Alberto to try to make the unfamiliar city a home by emptying the suitcase and planting its contents with him. Alberto sends seeds from his garden with Rebecca when she moves from Spain to the United States. By planting a flower box in the Astoria apartment and then cultivating a garden in Cambria Heights, Rebecca keeps a piece of home with her as she goes from one place to another. The motif of gardening illustrates the Cohen family’s efforts to cultivate a home for themselves and their descendants despite their displacement.
