Elizabeth Graver, an award-winning novelist and a professor of English and creative writing at Boston College, draws from her family heritage to craft Kantika. In particular, the book is based on the life of her maternal grandmother, Rebecca (née Cohen) Baruch Levy, who lived from 1902 to 1991. Graver was inspired by stories from Rebecca herself, interviews with her uncles, David and Albert Baruch, and the writings of her aunt, Luna Levy Leshefsky Liebowitz, all of whom appear in the novel under their real names. In addition, the author embarked on research trips to Turkey, Spain, and Cuba. The locations she visited include Rebecca’s childhood home in Istanbul and the synagogue where she and her family lived in Barcelona. Graver shares the fruits of her research by vividly describing the novel’s far-flung settings, placing actual family photographs at the beginnings of chapters, and writing a chapter about Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s 1929 film, Los Judíos de Patria Española, which contains footage of her family in Barcelona.

At the same time, Graver acknowledges that the book is not a biography, writing, “I changed facts to suit the story, imagined inner lives and invented liberally at every turn” (283). The title is the Ladino word for “song,” which conveys the essence of the author’s approach; in an interview, she shared, “I think of Kantika as a duet—between English and Ladino, fiction and history, the past and the present, my grandmother and myself” (Wolfe, Bill.