Qabbalat Shabbat with Carl Steinbaum Memorial Lecture featuring Author Elizabeth Graver and Wedding Blessing of Jacob Einsenberg and Ezera Miller-Walfish

Gather with us onsite or online for Qabbalat Shabbat. All are welcome to join this service full of prayer, meditation, and music!

We welcome guest lecturer Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika, for the 2024 Carl Steinbaum Memorial Lecture. She will take us behind the scenes of her novel Kantika, a story inspired by her Sephardic Turkish grandmother's migration from Turkey to Spain, Cuba and the United States. Graver will share a brief film that includes family photographs and audio clips of her grandmother telling stories. She will read short passages from the novel and offer glimpses of the journey she took to write it. A Q&A and book-signing will follow. 

Kantika was awarded the 2023 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Mimi S. Frank Award for Sephardic Culture from the National Jewish Book Awards, and was an Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book award winner. It was named a Best Historical Fiction Book and Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Lilith and Libby. Kantika has been translated into German, with a Turkish edition forthcoming. 

Register here to join us on Zoom, or log on via Facebook Live or Temple Israel’s livestream.

 

Questions? Call 617-566-3960 or email info@tisrael.org.

About Elizabeth Graver

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. 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, and Best American Essays. She teaches at Boston College.