Intersect Conversations: Elizabeth Graver

Okay, so my first question is that I noticed that you got your MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. So what insights, if any, do you carry with you from that experience?

That was a great experience. For me, it made sense that I didn't go straight from undergrad. I wanted to see if I would write on my own, if I had enough of an engine to figure out how to do it before I went back into school; I’d been a student for such a long time. So right out of college, I was a temp secretary — a very bad one, actually — for a year, and did some freelance writing, but I also started a writer's group and went to a writer's conference and just started to find my way. And then I taught high school in France for a year after that and found an Anglophone writers’ group there. 

Graduate school worked well when I went because I was ready. I was super appreciative to be back in school and happy to not have to scrabble to make a living. I followed the funding, so I didn't have to take out loans, and I had a stipend to live cheaply on. I had a strong enough sense of my own voice at that point –– which was helpful there particularly because I had some very good, but very strong-minded teachers. It was a good community with some really excellent teachers. 

“I worked mostly with the writer Stanley Elkin”

I worked mostly with the writer Stanley Elkin, but they also had short-term visiting professorships. I got to work with Angela Carter, which was amazing, and another writer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, whose work I’d been reading before I got there. They had all kinds of people coming through, and the students were really smart. I was interested in becoming a professor, so I did a pretty academic track. I was taking PhD courses along with workshops. And then I actually did two years of a critical PhD at Cornell, which I dropped out of. 

So that was the next phase. But I did enough coursework to learn more and figure out whether I needed that degree to get the kind of job I wanted. As you may know, for most full-time college teaching jobs in creative writing, you need an MFA plus a book. And I didn't have that then. But then halfway through my time at Cornell, my first book, a short story collection, was accepted. So I left.

Such is life. 

You don't know what's going to happen right? They were all good experiences, but the MFA was really great because it was one of the only times in my life when I could put writing solidly at the center—when it was the central thing I was supposed to be doing with my time. 

Do you still keep in contact with some of the other people from your cohort?

Definitely. I still have three friends [from Wash U.]. Two of them were from the PhD program, but one of them, my friend Juda Bennett, just published a memoir. Another, Ed Schwarzschild, became a really good novelist. And then I have a friend named Susan Bernofsky,  an incredible translator who teaches at Columbia. And a couple other people I'm in touch with. Not everybody went into academia. People went in other directions.

Let's see. So moving into Kantika… I noticed some major themes of the book, which other people have identified as well: diaspora, exile, collective memory. Did you set out to write about these themes or did they arise naturally from the story that you were telling?

So that's a complicated question. I think they arose naturally on the one hand— I never consciously set out to write about big themes, it's always a voice or a character. On the other hand, part of what led me to this book was what was happening in the current world and the fact that I started teaching a lot of first-generation students at Boston College. Also, I was teaching a lot of literature about migration and finding it both exciting and important, about human things that really matter. 

I wrote Kantika through the first Trump presidency and was very aware of what was happening in the wider world as I was writing it. In a certain way, I was in a kind of oblique conversation with current times, though the novel ends in 1950. I don't think it's a coincidence that I started writing it when I did, about some overlooked Jewish stories, partly, especially once I got into doing research for the book, but also a lot of other wider migration stories.

That's one of my go-to questions I always wonder about as someone who's tried creative writing as well. I took courses with Allison Adair and Suzanne Matson. And then I was involved in the Stylus [student literary magazine]. 

I have students who are editing it right now. For me, really, what started this book was that I'd interviewed my grandmother decades before. By the time I embarked on the project, I was very conscious of the next generation getting older. It had a lot to do with noticing the passage of time. I've been floating this voice around in my head for decades. And suddenly I was like: “Oh my God, I'm in my 50s. Everybody in the next generation is getting older.” I had a feeling of time accelerating and wanting to get people's stories. You can see this in my novel The End of the Point, too. I've increasingly become  interested in the intersections between individual lives and history and in how lives play out across generations and time. 

The End of the Point is set at almost the same time period, but it goes farther, ending in the 1990s. It’s set, like Kantika, during WWII, but it’s also set during the Vietnam War. I'm interested in staying very close to characters who don't fully understand at the moment what they're being moved around by. But we’re all living inside history, right? The End of the Point was inspired by my husband's family, part of which had deep New England roots and owned property in a coastal community in Massachusetts.  I was interested in the crucible of a really tight container and what happens over generations in one small place, but also in migration; here's a central character, a nanny to the family,  who's a Scottish nurse. She comes from outside, which always interests me, as do questions around social class. There’s this moment near the end of the book where a Jewish in-law named Rachel shows up. She clearly has something to do with me, although she's not a point-of-view character. And there's a kind of throwaway line where I call her a “child of diaspora.” 

“I had a feeling of time accelerating and wanting to get people’s stories”

It's fascinating to me that, at the same time in history, one family is in this tight place of both privilege and claustrophobia and then this other family, inspired by my own, is scattered to the wind, but they're all just human beings trying to make their way. So there’s a sort of weird simultaneity, the two novels are like two sides of the same coin, though they appear very different on the surface. It was fun to explore that and see the echoes and differences emerge.  

I recently taught a creative nonfiction workshop called “Writing the Family: Past and Present.” . [My students] say: “My grandparents came from Ireland… My grandparents came from Vietnam… my mother came from…. And if you find out the dates, you can make a timeline of American and global immigration history. Because it's like: “Who got in when? And why? What were they fleeing? What were they seeking?” These are individual stories, but they're being dictated in a lot of ways by all the stuff you're probably studying, right? By human movement and national movements and wars and often xenophobia — all the wider currents that make people move and flee and seek.

That's really interesting. I just read a piece in the New Yorker today about the Polish border and migration from Belarus into Poland.

That was Elizabeth Flock, right? She went to BC!

Oh, no way.

Yeah. I haven't read it yet, but she graduated in 2007. Very cool.

Great article. Really fascinating.

She's incredible.

Let's see. My second question you already kind of answered, because you interspersed Ladino words and phrases throughout the novel. How did you learn more about the language? Was it passed down within your family? Did you have to kind of go into the archives or go into research and figure it out?

I didn’t know much about Ladino going in. My mother, who is Suzanne in the novel, was of a generation when her parents desperately wanted her to assimilate. Her first language was Ladino because her parents were new to the U.S. When she was about five, [she recalls] her father saying: “That's it, you have to speak English, I need to improve my English, and you’re American.” So they really tamped it down. There wasn't a sense of like, this is a valuable thing. Ladino anyway is a language that, even in the Sephardic community in Turkey, where they were from, was considered a bit lesser than. They were educated in French. It was sort of the home language of women. It was devalued in various ways that I think are really interesting. And so my mother understands it and also understands Spanish and never quite knows the difference between Spanish and Ladino, because her mother also spent a decade in Spain and my grandfather lived in Cuba. 

I have cards from my grandmother that would go back and forth between Ladino and English, but mostly they spoke it over our heads when they didn't want us to understand. I spoke French with my grandmother sometimes. [For Ladino,] I audited one class at Tufts. There was a wonderful woman named Gloria Ascher who was teaching it. The undergrads were much better at it than I was because they were young, and because many of them spoke Spanish. I wasn’t a good student, but I picked up enough and she helped me. 

And  I relied on experts. I'm bold as a writer. I'll write to strangers and say: “Can you help me?” People are almost always willing. So I wrote to a historian at Stanford called Aron Rodrigue whose subject is Sephardic history, but he's also Turkish and Sephardic, from Istanbul. He helped me a lot. I’d just send him pages with Ladino. And Ladino is interesting because there’s a lot of variation in spelling. So there's actually some leeway in it. But I really care when I'm writing historical fiction that whatever niche group knows about the world I’m portraying won’t get tripped up by my errors. First of all, I love learning, so it's fun to get it right. But even though most of my readers don't speak Ladino, it matters to me to get it right for those that do, and because it’s a beautiful and historically important language.

Yeah. I think it's so interesting, the Sephardic history in the book, from Istanbul to Barcelona to Havana to New York City, just the migration. I actually used to live in Madrid, and while I was there, we got to go to Toledo which has some really cool synagogues. Because I feel like, in the U.S., we're more accustomed to Ashkenazi history, or much more accustomed to that, but it's a subset of history, [Sephardic history,] a kind of topic I think that a lot of people don't know about.

That's part of what's been really fun. There are people working on it both historically and in terms of a lot of beautiful music being made, but it’s an under-told story for a lot of different reasons.  That made going out with the book into different worlds really interesting. I've done a lot of talks at JCCs or synagogues, and even in those Jewish contexts, some people don't know much. And then the ones who do often have a lot of echoes with my story. Over the course of writing the book, I realized that many of the customs were not singular to my family at all, though  their going “back” to Spain in the 1920s after centuries in Turkey is quite unusual. Some Turkish Jews would say to me: “That's impossible. You made that up.” And I'm like: “No, no, actually, I did not. My uncles were born in Spain.” But what does that mean to go “back” to a country that expelled your ancestors hundreds of years before, yet you still speak a version of the language and have all kinds of customs and memories with roots in Spain? 

t was, in fact, a complicated place for them to land  because first there was the Spanish Civil War, which had direct, dire impacts on my family, and then there was the Holocaust, which was mostly not directly playing out in Spain but still, you didn’t't want to be Jewish in Europe at that moment.

In the process of the novel did you visit any of those cities that you mentioned?

I went to all of them, which was amazing. Boston College is partly to thank because I had summers to write and  some research funds.When I'm traveling for a book, I go in this very focused way where I have addresses to visit and archives to consult. I go looking. I don't actually always know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking very hard, if that makes sense. And not only looking for facts, but for smells and random encounters. I try to saturate myself in the place. So yes, I went to Turkey and also to Barcelona, which was incredibly moving. My mother has a first cousin there, Silvia, the daughter of her mother’s sister Elsa, and we really connected. My great-grandfather's grave is there, and I went with my mother. So these were very meaningful encounters. 

I took [my older daughter] to Cuba just very briefly, for five days. Often these excursions were both about my book and about being with someone in my family, whose stories these also are. I spent a lot of time with my mom and my uncles. It took me a long time to write and research Kantika, but it was really meaningful. 

Two of my uncles — David and Albert in the book (I used their real names, with their permission) remembered Spain. They remembered their grandparents, whom my mother never met, because they’d died in Spain. I was brought face to face with the terrible sadness of the fact that my grandmother left Spain for the US and never saw her parents again. The family was split by circumstance, not by intention, as is happening too often still, in our current times.

Was Rebecca your grandmother, a seamstress in real life? 

Yeah, I used all the real facts I had. And when I ran out of facts, I made stuff up. I went back and forth a bit, especially early on, about what genre the book should be. I thought: “Should I try to do this as nonfiction?” And I'm writing nonfiction now about my father. Maybe it inched me closer. With each book lately, I seem to get a little closer to nonfiction, but nonfiction with a lot of speculation and imagination in it. Kantika is hybrid in certain ways, but I decided I wanted interiority and I didn't know enough, and also I didn't want to be in it (though of course my sensibility is in every sentence). And I felt like it would be hard to not have the “granddaughter on a quest” if I wrote the story as nonfiction. That didn't interest me. 

I made a decision to signal the hybridity, so that's why I include real family photos. And if you read the acknowledgements, I say I use real names. I'm playing on that boundary, which, interestingly, a lot of other people are too. I wasn’t so aware of that when I was writing the book, but since then, there's a French writer I brought to BC, Anne Berest, who wrote a book called The Postcard that's doing very similar things. And I just reviewed a book by an Albanian writer called Lea Ypi that’s a very interesting mix of geopolitics and family. It's called Indignity, and she published it as a memoir, but every other chapter is essentially fiction. So it could have easily been published in another genre.

Yeah, I'm thinking especially now of the French author Annie Ernaux.

She's interesting. It's a little different, from what I've read of hers . . . . I loved it, but it's much more autofiction since she's at the center. I don't think what I'm doing is autofiction because I'm not in it. Anne Berest came up with a term— Roman Vrai, a true novel. It's a weird, slippery thing with a close relationship to real life, but it's not autofiction. Rachel Cusk, Annie Ernaux, or Knausgaard –– there's a lot of people doing autofiction. That's actually really quite different from what I'm doing. What I’m writing now is closer to my own experience — there are some moments when I write about my childhood — but it’s still not centrally about me because my father is the main focus. I don't like being at the center. I like to dodge! I’m finding nonfiction hard in terms of how exposed I feel. 

I've never tried writing autofiction. I don't know how they do it where they make, as Joyce said, the bread of everyday life into something grander.

It’s fun to read, but I don't actually have confidence that my everyday life is interesting enough.

Neither do I!

I sit at my desk…I teach a class…I sit at my desk. But Knausgaard kind of does it. I mean, have you read him?

I have, yeah. I've read the first two volumes of My Struggle.

I was fascinated sometimes, but also irritated at times. I was like: This guy's getting a lot of credit for making his kids lunch because he's a guy. So what? We all make our kids lunch, you know? 

There's an aspect of it that's really interesting, and there's an aspect of it that's also a little navel-gazing, I think.

That's the danger.

Yeah. I actually just talked to one of your colleagues, Professor Lehman, and I took a course with him on Beckett, Kafka, and Coetzee. 

I need to talk to him because I'm writing about Beckett. My father was a Beckett scholar. I've been talking to Andrew Sofer in our department, who wrote about Beckett.

I actually was supposed to write a thesis at BC on Beckett, and then I abandoned it in very Beckettian fashion!

Oh, my God. Look up my dad, Lawrence Graver. He also abandoned Beckett in a very Beckettian fashion — he never finished his big Beckett book — but he did publish on him at various points. Oh, so tell me what Rob had to say.

We were just talking about autofiction, and he said that the two authors that interest him most in that genre are Knausgaard and Rachel Kusk… So I end all these interviews that I've done with a variation on the same question which is: Do you have any migration narratives or books about immigration that you would recommend?

There's a book I love that's nonfiction but almost reads like a novel, called One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank. He met a woman named Stella Levi at an event at an Italian institute in New York and they started chatting. And it turns out that she was from the Isle of Rhodes, which is now Greece, but was an Italian protectorate at one point and was devastated by the Nazis. And she ended up being deported to Auschwitz, but she didn't want to talk about it at the beginning. 

She said: “That's not what defines me. I've had a rich, full life.” And so he, over time, spent a long time talking to her about her wider story. She's over one hundred now. It's a beautiful book about what it's like to just sit and listen to an older person and tease out the past, and bear quiet witness. Stella is a very feisty intellectual and lived through  harrowing times but has managed to preserve her dignity. Lea Ypi’s book, which I mentioned earlier, is also great. I reviewed it for the Times maybe three or four months ago. She's a political theorist at the London School of Economics. I think they asked me to review this book because her grandmother was from the same region as mine so there are some echoes with Kantika.

“There’s a book I love that’s nonfiction but almost reads like a novel, called One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank.”

Her family story is incredible, but she also is a really good writer. Her first memoir, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, is a gripping story about what it's like to grow up in communist Albania.  She gives you such a nuanced view. It's not that everything under communism was terrible, although  a lot was. Her family had to hide who they were in all kinds of ways she didn't understand as a child. And it's not that, after the fall of communism, everything was good. She captures how it’s never black and white. 

Sometimes I get asked to review books I’m kind of lukewarm about, and either I decline or push through to try to figure out how to do it in a way that's fair but not mean. But with Ypi, I was just like: “Wow, this is great.”  So it was a fun review to write. 

Other migration stories: I love the writer Edwidge Danticat… I teach her. I love the work of Min Jin Lee, who wrote Pachinko which is about Korea and also Koreans who moved to Japan, and I learned a huge amount from it. Anne Berest has a fascinating book she co-wrote with her sister Claire Berest about their great-grandmother, called Gabrielle. These are all writers who look at family history as it plays out inside wider histories. So that's a little list.

Yeah, that's a great list. For me as well, I didn't really know about Korean colonial history as much or the immigration from Korea back to Japan later on. That was a really good one.

She has a new book out. I think it's just out. Other writers I love, Michael Ondaatje, I don't know if you've read him. John Berger, who was British, but he writes a lot about France migrations from rural to urban [settings]. He has a trilogy, [Into Their Labours] that I think is extraordinary. Those are books I go back to.

Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother Rebecca, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and New York. Kantika was awarded the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and a National Jewish Book Award.  It was named a Best Historical Fiction Book of 2023 and Notable Book  of the Year by The New York Times, and a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Lilith and Libby, and translated into German and Turkish. She teaches at Boston College.