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 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Cambria Heights, 1942”
Rebecca helps to open a synagogue in their neighborhood, and she strategically uses her charm and fashion to win clients for her business and Sam’s store. Although Luna earns good grades at Andrew Jackson High School, her time there is painfully lonely. She envies Rebecca’s beauty and the ease with which she makes friends. Rebecca tells Luna that she can be like the other girls in their neighborhood, but Luna feels that this goal is always beyond her grasp. At home, Rebecca continues to train her daughter’s coordination and fine motor skills, and Luna can now chop vegetables and stitch needlepoint patterns. She dreams of being a famous romance novelist, marrying “a handsome, doting, funny (normal) man” (236), and having children.
Luna’s aunt Rachel tells the family about a school in the Bronx where bright children with disabilities can study for free. She offers to let Luna stay with her and Fanny during the week to reduce her commute. Sam dismisses the idea, but David empathizes with how miserable Luna is at her current school and speaks up for her. This surprises Luna because she finds him harder to connect to than the rest of her siblings. She resolves to repay the favor by telling David that Sam doesn’t actually think he’s unintelligent despite his frequent comments and criticisms to that effect.
For most of her life, Luna has hated her reflection, but the 14-year-old is enchanted by her developing breasts. One day, Luna impulsively shows David and Al her bare chest, and Al grabs her. Rebecca shouts at the boys to get away and then slaps them both. The four of them decide not to tell Sam, partly because Rebecca still worries that he will send her away. However, she warns David and Al that she will inform Sam and the boys will be kicked out of the house if anything like this ever happens again.
A few weeks later, Rebecca encourages Luna to enroll in the school for students with disabilities because she deserves companionship. She sincerely believed that her daughter would be able to make friends at the public school, and she apologizes for expecting “too much, not from [Luna] but from the world” (251). Rebecca and Sam take a photograph of Luna as part of the enrollment process, and the girl chooses to remove her leg braces for the picture. Sam becomes excited about the prospect of his daughter attending the prestigious institution, but Luna is nervous about acclimating to a new neighborhood. The teenager finds it difficult to part from her father. Someone painted a swastika outside his store, and he seems older and wearier after that.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Cambria Heights, 1944”
Sultana dies after falling down the stairs when no one is home. Rebecca’s grief for her mother is deepened by her fear for David, who is fighting in World War II. She imagines a conversation between herself and her departed mother in which Sultana asks her to bathe and shroud her body according to their cultural customs and to sing her to sleep. In this dialogue, she tells her mother, “The world is in flames, I can’t be here without you” (257). Sultana is buried in a different cemetery than her husband because of the war, and her immigration to the United States is finally approved three months after her death.
Chapter 13 Summary: “USS Franklin, 1945”
David serves in the Navy aboard an aircraft carrier called the USS Franklin. His time in the armed forces offers him outlets for his anger and technical skills and gives him a sense of purpose. On March 19, 1945, the skies calm after hours of fighting between Japanese and American planes. Because it’s his mother’s birthday, David thinks of Rebecca, her singing, and how afraid she was when he joined the Navy at age 17. David’s instincts cause him to be above deck when the aircraft carrier is bombed without warning. The 18-year-old leaps overboard even though he doesn’t have a life jacket. In the water, he finds a pilot who shares his life jacket with him. The pilot’s legs were broken by an explosion, so he cannot swim. David tows the pilot toward a raft of survivors, who haul them out of the water. The USS Marshall takes the survivors aboard. The experience ends David’s faith in God and makes him realize, “I’ve got one life, that’s all, to use or piss away” (266).
The survivors from the USS Franklin are accused of desertion and threatened with court-martial, but the charges are eventually dropped. David invents a story about an officer covered in burns who emerged from the smoke and urged him to jump overboard. He later regrets this fabrication and says that his mother was with him on the burning ship.
The survivors’ families are told only that the ship was attacked and that the men are missing in action, but Rebecca is certain that God is watching over her son. A few weeks later, she prepares David’s favorite foods, such as Sephardic pastries called bourekas. She receives word that he is alive that afternoon. When he returns home, he is exhausted and anxious. Rebecca holds him close and tells him, “Nobody believed me, but I knew you’d come home” (269).
Chapter 14 Summary: “Cambria Heights, 1950”
David is attending college in Chicago, Al works as an X-ray technician, and Luna works a municipal job and is married to a man named Gene whom she met at her school in the Bronx. Rebecca spends her time gardening and helping Sam expand his business to include homemade confections. Although she considers herself fortunate that all of her children survived the war and that she and her husband still love one another, she doesn’t feel at home in the United States or speaking English. She still “believes in greeting the world with a smile no matter your mood” (272), but she feels aged by her grief over her parents and the Holocaust.
Now in her forties, Rebecca is an active member of the Beth Shalom Cambria Heights Jewish Center. When the center puts on a variety show, she sings a song in Ladino for the final act. Rebecca dedicates her performance to her mother’s memory. The song’s lyrics are a mournful dialogue between a mother and a daughter, but the melody is bright and cheerful. As the audience applauds Rebecca, Luna comes to the stage, presents her with a bouquet of carnations and baby’s breath, and tells her that she is pregnant. Rebecca feels a complex blend of emotions at the news. Part of her fears that the pregnancy may jeopardize Luna’s health. Another part of her feels wearily angry that Luna has never fully accepted her as her mother and that the young woman is commandeering her big moment in the spotlight. Setting aside these negative feelings, she joyfully takes Luna’s hand and announces to the audience, “My beautiful daughter, Mrs. Luna Leshefsky, and her husband, Gene, are expecting a baby! Come fall, mashallah, I’ll be a grandmother!” (281). Their family members give them a standing ovation, and the rest of the audience follows suit. The two women exit the stage arm in arm.
Chapters 11-14 Analysis
The novel’s final section continues to explore the theme of Cultural Preservation Amidst Change as Rebecca makes a home for her loved ones in Cambria Heights, and her family enters another generation. Major historical events, such as World War II, and family tragedies like Sultana’s death bring significant changes to the Cohen-Levy family in these chapters. Through it all, the protagonist works to preserve her culture for herself, her descendants, and her community. In Chapter 11, she helps to open a “little storefront synagogue” in her neighborhood (232). Like his mother, David seeks to preserve his people’s culture. As he serves in World War II, he has a sense that “the fate of the world, of the Jews, depends partly on him” (261). Although David’s experiences in the war cause him to lose his belief in God, he remains committed to his Sephardic culture.
Luna’s narrative arc in this section connects to the theme of Women’s Strength and Relationships with Their Bodies. Luna’s impulsive decision to show her stepbrothers her chest is a misguided attempt to boost her newfound positivity toward her body: “[S]he’d had an unruly urge to—what? Command their attention. Stop them in their tracks. See herself reflected back, made real” (247). Knowing how hard it has been for the 14-year-old to find pride and joy in her body, Rebecca carefully helps her regain her sense of dignity and says that Luna’s adolescent chest is hers “to save, a gift from God” (248). Rebecca encourages Luna to cherish her relationship with her body and to set boundaries for herself. The novel’s ending highlights how profoundly Luna’s relationship with her body has changed thanks to her and Rebecca’s strength. With her stepmother’s support, the young woman achieves a number of things that she was told were impossible: “Luna is pregnant. They said she couldn’t walk and (with Rebecca’s help) she walked, and then they said she couldn’t go to school and (with Rebecca’s help) she went to school [….] Now this” (279). Luna’s pregnancy emphasizes the confidence, autonomy, and love she has cultivated for her body with Rebecca’s unwavering belief in her potential. Although Luna times her announcement partly out of a desire to upstage her stepmother, the moment becomes a celebration of what they have achieved together.
Graver continues to use clothing to develop the theme of women’s strength in these chapters. Rebecca leverages her personal strengths, such as her charm and interpersonal skills, to grow her tailoring business: “There is care to it all, a strategy. Mother might slip a business card into the conversation—Rebecca Levy ~ Alterations, Curtains, Dresses ~You Dream It, I’ll Make It!” (232). In Chapter 14, Luna strategically selects her ensemble to project strength and beauty when she upstages Rebecca with the news of her pregnancy: “[S]he is wearing an unfamiliar navy-blue dress with gold sailor buttons, paired with a blue pillbox hat with a coy little net, and that she has on deep red lipstick, one might even say expertly applied” (279). The women in Graver’s story demonstrate their strength through the clothes they create and choose for themselves.
Gardening as a motif for Displacement and the Meaning of Home appears when Rebecca reflects on her life in Chapter 14: “She is not surrounded by family and has a perpetual sense of being not quite at home, no matter how many bulbs she plants and her pear tree growing taller every year” (274). Although Rebecca doesn’t feel at home in the United States, she literally and figuratively puts down roots and strives to create a beautiful, welcoming home for her descendants.
The motif of song figures prominently in the novel’s resolution. Like the protagonist’s life, the song she performs in the final chapter is a moving blend of joy and sorrow: “[W]hile the lyrics are somber, the melody offers an upbeat counterpoint” (277). She has experienced enormous changes over the course of the story, including living through two world wars, immigrating to two countries, and losing her first husband and her parents. Rebecca performs the piece at the Beth Shalom Cambria Heights Jewish Center and sings in her mother tongue, which underlines how the protagonist has held onto her Sephardic culture. The ending honors the Cohen family’s past while looking with hope and joy to the future. Rebecca dedicates the song to Sultana and shares her moment in the spotlight with the pregnant Luna. By becoming a mother, Luna joins Rebecca in preserving the family’s culture and passing it down to the next generation.
