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.
Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Barcelona, 1934”
Lika dies, leaving behind her husband, Sam Levy, and her daughter, Luna. Four years later, Corinne suggests that Rebecca marry Sam in Cuba so that she can gain entrance to America. This arrangement would make it easier for the rest of the family to relocate from Spain to America, a move that seems wise given how Jewish people’s safety in Europe feels increasingly precarious.
Rebecca now owns her own atelier and employs five women. When she returns home, she learns that Alberto asked Corinne to help Rebecca find “a friend, a companion for [her] days” (145). He worries about his grandsons. David is seven, but he isn’t in school, because his brief experience at the Catholic charity school traumatized him. Sultana encourages Rebecca to meet Sam and tells her that she can always come back to Barcelona if she decides against the match for any reason. That night, Sultana sings to Rebecca and washes her hair.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Havana, 1934”
Rebecca, who is now 32, sells her atelier and sails to Cuba. The voyage is restful because she doesn’t have to work, care for her children, or look after her parents for the first time in years. Sam is so quiet when they first meet that Rebecca wonders if she’s being sold another “batch of damaged goods” (149). In her hotel room, the strong-willed woman sheds a few rare tears as she weighs the choice before her—marrying a stranger or returning to a place that has never felt like home. Sam gently touches her face and recalls their youth in Constantinople, telling her, “You were beautiful then and you’re beautiful now” (151). Rebecca and Sam sleep together.
The next morning, Rebecca hardly recognizes her reflection, and she asks for forgiveness from God and Lika. At breakfast, Rebecca is shocked when Sam eats bacon, but he has no objection to her insistence that her children be raised to follow Jewish dietary laws. Rebecca is fond of Sam despite the brief time they’ve known one another, and she prompts him to propose to her. Their honeymoon in Cuba is so beautiful that it feels like a dream to Rebecca.
Her bliss is interrupted by a bout of food poisoning, and Sam lovingly tends to her. Her fever breaks while he is out purchasing tickets to New York for them. She still carries fear and suspicion because of Luis’s behavior, and this motivates her to search Sam’s suitcase. She finds a letter requesting that he be allowed to leave Cuba right after the marriage because he has an illness that requires treatment abroad. Rebecca plans to annul their marriage because he told her that he’s an honest man and in good health. Sam explains that Cuba usually requires newlyweds to stay in the country for months while the union is publicized. He claimed to have an illness so that he could hurry home and provide for his family. His father abandoned his family when he was young, leaving Sam to care for his mother and his six siblings. Sam explains that his daughter, Luna, cannot walk and has difficulty speaking. He tells Rebecca, “Lika would have wanted you for Luna’s mother” (172). Rebecca makes Sam promise never to hide the truth from her.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Astoria, 1934”
Rebecca deeply regrets not bringing her sons to Cuba with her, because the Spanish bureaucracy is making it difficult to bring the children to the United States. When she first meets Luna, the girl’s contorted posture and difficulty forming words repel Rebecca, but she tries to conceal her unease. Corinne’s letter briefly mentioned that Luna has health troubles and said she has “a strong spirit and a loving temperament” (178). This feels like a deception to Rebecca and brings back the painful emotions she felt because Luis’s health problems were kept from her. When Rebecca confronts her sister about this, Corinne tearfully blames her father and her husband for painting a frightening picture of the situation in Europe and convincing her that she had to get her family to America.
Sam’s mother, Fanny, and his sisters, Rachel and Sarah, live with him. Fanny resents Rebecca because the Cohens used to be of high status. She is of a generally sullen disposition except with regard to her granddaughter, whom she energetically dotes on and defends. Luna is six years old and can read but is still in diapers. Recognizing the girl’s intelligence and willpower, Rebecca offers to help her learn how to walk and use the toilet so that she can attend public school. Sam is afraid of getting Luna’s hopes up, but Rebecca persuades him to let her try. Rebecca and Sam’s first child together is a boy named Jacob, who also goes by Jack.
One day, Fanny falls and breaks her hip while carrying Luna down the stairs. After that, she moves in with Sarah, and Rebecca steps up her efforts to strengthen Luna’s body. Luna rebels against this demanding training regimen partly because she is jealous of Rebecca, “a beautiful lady with beautiful clothes, a cold heart and Papa’s love, a wicked stepmother in a fairy tale” (195). Luna becomes especially distraught when Rebecca shows Luna her reflection for the first time for a linguistic exercise. Rebecca encourages Luna to cherish herself and want more out of life, and she compares Luna’s struggle to her own battle to express herself in English. Together, they discover that Luna can achieve things that she’s scared to attempt, like going down the stairs by herself, if Rebecca sings to her.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Astoria, 1937”
David has lived in America for three years. He longs to return to Spain, and he struggles to express himself in English. David feels that his mother shows favoritism toward her younger children, Al, Luna, Jack, and Suzanne. Sam manages a newspaper and candy shop, and he sometimes lets David watch the store by himself. One day, his fifth-grade teacher, Miss Hill, visits the store and asks him to be a soldier in the school play. David dreads public speaking, but he enjoys spending time with his peers. The boy realizes that his teacher sees potential in him, and he begins to do the same.
Rebecca has her own sewing business, which she runs from the family’s apartment, and she takes the children to the local synagogue on Saturdays. She sets aside a portion of her earnings for a fund to bring her family to America. In the spring, Spain is attacked by Italy and Germany. Rebecca receives a telegram: “Bombings Eixample STOP synagogue ransacked STOP all alive parents with Elsa STOP” (221). Rebecca tries to bring her family to America, but she’s turned away because her relatives are “too Turkish and not Spanish enough, or too Jewish or not Jewish enough, or too poor” (222). In June, Alberto dies of malnutrition. After his death, Rebecca feels distant from herself, her family, and God. She blames herself for not being able to help her family immigrate, and her appetite wanes. Still, she gets up each day and looks after her five children.
Eventually, Rebecca’s appetite and her interest in sex return. She becomes pregnant with her sixth and last child, Franklin Benjamin Levy. The family buys a home in Cambria Heights and moves in on September 1, 1939, the day that World War II begins. Rebecca plants tulip bulbs and rue from her father’s seeds in the garden. Sam opens his own store, and Luna enrolls in the local public school.
Chapters 7-10 Analysis
The novel’s third section centers around Rebecca’s second marriage and her complex relationship with her stepdaughter, Luna. The protagonist’s life undergoes major change in these chapters, but she preserves her Sephardic culture, illustrating the theme of Cultural Preservation Amidst Change. Her second husband is more secular than her, and she tells him right away, “You should know, Sam Levy, that it matters very much to me to raise my children inside the faith” (154). She follows through on her resolution by taking her children to the local synagogue in Astoria each Saturday. She is in her second marriage and this is the second time she’s had to start over in a new country, but her commitment to her culture and faith remains unchanged.
Rebecca’s relationship with Sam develops the theme of Women’s Strength and Relationships with Their Bodies. Meeting Sam in Cuba represents a courageous effort to secure a better life for her children and safety for her parents. To achieve this, Rebecca allows herself to be both emotionally and physically vulnerable and gives marriage another chance after her unhappy union with Luis. In these chapters, Rebecca experiences times when she feels attuned with her body and periods when she feels disconnected from it. She finds pleasure and connection in her physical intimacy with Sam during their time in Cuba. At the same time, this pleasurable experience is disorienting because it differs so greatly from the toil of her routine as a single mother in her thirties: “[W]ho is that love-mussed woman? Who is that squinting, wrung-out, chapped-lipped girl? She has lost weight on the journey and hardly recognizes herself” (153). In Chapter 10, Rebecca demonstrates strength by caring for her family after Alberto’s death: “Rebecca gets up. What choice does she have? Five mouths, ten hands, fifty sticky fingers reach for her” (227). As Rebecca heals, reconnecting with her body helps her to reengage with life: “The children return to school except for the littlest ones, and the sewing business picks up, and Rebecca starts to enjoy lovemaking again, a little, then a lot, returned to her body and the body of her husband” (228). Rebecca’s strength and her relationship with her body are tested in these chapters, but she ends the section feeling reconnected to herself, both physically and emotionally.
Luna has a vastly different relationship with her body than her stepmother, and Rebecca helps Luna channel her strength and improve this relationship. Rebecca’s first impression of Luna is that the girl is “trapped inside a cage of brokenness” because of her cerebral palsy (175). Rebecca’s perspective is influenced by ableism, but the metaphor conveys Luna’s frustration and lack of autonomy when she is introduced. The girl both loves and loathes her stepmother, and her relationship with her body is likewise complicated: “A familiar antipathy rises in her for her body, which is dead set against her even as it’s her closest companion” (193). Rebecca is more attuned to Luna’s physical needs and potential than Sam is. While she admires the way that he strives to cultivate his daughter’s bright mind, Rebecca reminds him that “she also has a body” (186). Rebecca’s training not only builds Luna’s physical strength but also allows her to develop autonomy and a more positive relationship with her body.
Chapter 10 develops the theme of Displacement and the Meaning of Home by depicting David’s struggles with identity and belonging. Even after three years in New York, he still thinks of Barcelona as his home. Names comprise an important piece of individuals’ identities, and the two pronunciations of David’s name reflect his feelings of displacement and fragmentation: “[H]e is always two boys, Dah-VEED and DAVE-id, the former at home in his skin, at home in Spain, the latter thick-jawed, stuttery and bent with nostalgia like an old man” (208). Much as Rebecca’s move from Turkey marks the end of her childhood in her memory, the comparison of David to an “old man” illustrates the disorienting breakage between childhood and adulthood that displacement induces. Rebecca strives to make a home for her children in the United States, but David, like his mother, still feels that he belongs in another country.
Each of the novel’s motifs appears in this section. In Chapter 7, Rebecca has grown her tailoring business and has several employees. This testifies to her determination and reinforces the novel’s connection between women’s strength and clothing. Song serves as a motif for Cultural Preservation Amidst Change. In Chapter 7, Sultana sings a Ladino lullaby to Rebecca the way she did when her daughter was young: “[S]leep sleep beautiful little daughter […] without worry or pain” (146). This tender moment takes place on the cusp of significant changes in all their lives. After Rebecca goes to Cuba and marries Sam, she never sees her parents again. The motif of gardening allows the protagonist to hold onto a piece of home after she is displaced to a new country once again. She plants rue from her father’s seeds and tulips at the family’s new home in Cambria Heights. This act keeps Alberto’s memory alive and represents Rebecca’s hope at the start of a new chapter for her family.
