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 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Barcelona, 1926”
Rebecca marries Mishon “Luis” Baruch “because he asks her to” (93). He is one of only a few Jewish bachelors in Barcelona. At the time, she is 23, and he is 29. Rebecca befriends Luis’s sister, Palomba, who married the owner of an auto repair business. The quiet and polite Luis woos Rebecca in style despite his limited means. Rebecca’s private tailoring business is doing well, but she has no dowry. Alberto’s mood is a little brighter now, and he plants some vegetables in the fall. He spends the equivalent of the family’s monthly budget on lilies, roses, and wine for the wedding. When Rebecca offers to contribute, he says, “This is my small gift to you […] God willing, Rebecca, you will only marry once” (98). Rebecca sews her wedding dress as well as the dress she wears for the civil ceremony and the wedding photograph. She dislikes how the photograph turns out because she’s staring into the distance while Luis’s gaze on her seems vacant.
After the wedding, Rebecca learns that Luis is ill from exposure to mustard gas in the Great War, has digestive problems, and struggles with reading and writing. He travels to Adrianople, the Canary Islands, and other unknown destinations, returning to Barcelona just long enough to give Rebecca a little foreign money and have sex with her. To keep up appearances, she tells everyone that her husband is looking to establish a trading business. Rebecca feels an intense desire for physical intimacy, but this disappears when she becomes pregnant. She sings to the baby, hoping she will have a daughter.
Corinne moves to New York and reconnects with Lika, who is now married to her cousin, Sam Levy. After Lika loses a child during pregnancy, Rebecca writes a few letters to Lika, but she stops because there is no reply. Rebecca gives birth and reluctantly names her son David after Luis’s father. Luis is absent at the time, and Rebecca moves back in with her parents. During the first year of David’s life, Rebecca throws herself into her work and grows distant from her loved ones. This includes her mother, whom David prefers to her. During Luis’s rare visits to Barcelona, he stays at his sister’s apartment, but Rebecca still sleeps with him out of a combination of a sense of duty and loneliness. One night, Luis earnestly proclaims that he is going to start a lace business, but he is unable to answer basic questions about this venture. After this conversation, Rebecca decides that she doesn’t want to have more children with him, because she fears that they will inherit Luis’s problems and that she will have to raise them by herself.
Despite her decision, Rebecca and Luis’s second son, Berto, is born 16 months after David. A nurse advises her that Luis may have multiple sexual partners, so she tells her husband that she has an illness that could render him impotent to make him lose interest in her. Rebecca’s pride and determination grow, and she declines Palomba’s offers of money. In December 1928, she receives a letter from Luis saying that he is feeling better and asking her to bring the children to Adrianople. Rebecca considers throwing away the letter, but her parents persuade her to give her husband another chance.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Adrianople, 1929”
When Rebecca and her sons arrive in Istanbul, relatives from her father’s side of the family gather to welcome her. Her uncle’s lavish home and her relatives’ pity drive home how much her circumstances have changed. She wonders if her own family could have remained in Turkey and prospered if her father had managed his business as well as his brother has. She resolves to give her sons a better future just as her uncle has provided for his daughters.
When Rebecca and the boys arrive in Adrianople, there is no sign of Luis. A kindly Turkish couple waits with her in the frigid train station for hours, and Rebecca sings to her children to pass the time. Eventually, she accepts that her husband isn’t coming and hires a carriage. During the ride, the sight of synagogues in plain view fills her with homesickness, and she wishes that she lived somewhere where she could practice her faith openly.
Luis’s cousin Oro is startled to see Rebecca and the boys because no one told her they were coming. On their fourth day in Oro’s humble home, a rabbi and a group of women tell Rebecca that Luis is already dead and buried after a sudden illness. Luis’s father tried to inform Rebecca of his son’s passing, but she was already at sea by the time his letter arrived in Spain. Rebecca ends up staying with Oro for several weeks. First, her departure is delayed by ice storms that make the roads impassable. Then, a cough afflicts David and her. After that, Berto needs time to recover from his circumcision. Luis’s cousin tearfully begs her to remain there forever: “What will I do all day long, says Oro, without your singing and your company[?]” (122). Luis’s parents also wish her to stay so that their grandchildren will be nearby. A local rabbi even offers to help her find a new husband. When he claims that it’s too dangerous for her to travel to Spain alone with two children, she answers, “We made it here, […] and we will make it home” (123).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Barcelona, 1929”
In November 1929, a Christian filmmaker named Ernesto Giménez Caballero comes to the little synagogue where Alberto works and lives with his family. Caballero has recorded footage of the Sephardic community in North Africa, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is under the impression that Alberto is a rabbi, but Alberto explains that he is the caretaker. He takes pride in what he has achieved during his five years in the position: “Every day he hates the place, and each day he improves it, by far the hardest thing he’s ever done” (126). The Spanish Ministry of State supports the filmmaker’s project, which aims to teach Sephardic Jews about their Iberian heritage and to teach the Spanish about “the national treasure of the half a million Spanish Jews abroad” (128). Alberto doesn’t consider Spain his homeland. He points out that the government still hasn’t revoked the Alhambra Decree that expelled Jews centuries ago and that his two grandsons don’t have Spanish citizenship even though they were born in Spain.
Alberto agrees to let Caballero film his family if he can get Barcelona’s government to allocate land for a Jewish cemetery. Caballero returns in mid-January with a letter of permission from the government and films a few minutes of footage with Alberto’s children and grandchildren. Alberto is proud of what he has achieved for his community. A few months later, Alberto and Sultana attend the premiere of Caballero’s film, Los Judíos de Patria Española, which is only 14 minutes long. Alberto feels “distressingly out of place, like a curiosity” at a museum (137), when Caballero introduces him to the elite guests as a local rabbi. Caballero later becomes a fascist and is demoted to a government post in Paraguay.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The novel’s second section focuses on Rebecca’s short and strained marriage with Luis. Their wedding connects to the theme of Cultural Preservation Amidst Change because the Cohens try to observe Jewish wedding traditions despite their reduced means. Unlike Corinne, Rebecca has no dowry, no mikveh, and no gathering of the community’s women to evaluate the match. Still, it is important to the protagonist and her family that she find a husband who shares her faith and culture. Indeed, the main reason that she marries Luis is that “Barcelona is in short supply of Jewish bachelors” (93). In Chapter 6, Rebecca preserves her culture amidst difficult and changing circumstances by singing Ladino lullabies to her children while they wait in vain for Luis and by having Berto circumcised in Adrianople because her community in Barcelona doesn’t have a mohel. Rebecca’s unhappy marriage illustrates the difficulties inherent in preserving cultural traditions; while she is able to share elements of her culture with her children, shared heritage alone is not enough to make her relationship with Luis successful.
Rebecca and Luis’s marriage advances the theme of Women’s Strength and Relationships with Their Bodies by bringing the protagonist her first experiences with sex, pregnancy, and motherhood. The protagonist finds great pleasure in physical intimacy but “does her best to banish such feelings,”(100) because she feels that there is something excessive and inappropriate about her enjoyment of sex. Although pregnancy causes her pain and nausea, she feels that it “restores her in some measure to herself, redrawing her boundaries. She wants to be touched by no one and nothing” (101). After Berto’s birth, Rebecca takes greater ownership of her body and protects herself from illnesses by inventing a story that ends Luis’s sexual interest in her. This marks a development from her previous belief that sex is “her wifely duty” and reflects her growing resolve and self-reliance (104). Rebecca’s work as a dressmaker offers another example of women’s strength and the motif of clothing. Because of Luis’s unreliability, Rebecca is essentially a single parent, and she supports herself and her two small children by building a private tailoring business. The protagonist is determined to protect and provide for her sons the way that her uncle has provided for his children: “Rebecca will do the same, she vows, despite being a woman and headed into the wilderness” (113). She demonstrates her strength and resolve by traveling from Spain to Turkey and back again by herself with two very small children.
Rebecca’s time in Adrianople causes her to reflect upon Displacement and the Meaning of Home. Being back in Turkey and seeing her uncle’s wealth makes her “acutely aware of this being a world no longer hers” (113). For her, home now means being in Barcelona with her parents. This is illustrated when the rabbi urges her to remain in Turkey, and she answers, “[W]e will make it home” (123). Although Rebecca misses her childhood in Constantinople and longs to practice her religion openly again, her time in Adrianople reveals that Turkey is no longer her home and increases her resolve to make a life for herself and her children in Spain.
Chapter 6 further explores the meaning of home by contrasting Alberto’s perspective with the Spanish filmmaker’s. The patriarch strives to make a home for his family in Barcelona, as represented by the “fig tree, vegetables, healthy greenery and blooms” in his garden (125). However, he will always see Turkey as his home. When Caballero claims that Spain is the homeland of all Sephardic people, Alberto answers, “At the risk of offending you, señor, we’ve made our lives elsewhere. Spain is hardly my patria—and I’ve come back here, unlike most of us” (128). Caballero’s film is funded by the Ministry of State and thus serves a political agenda. Through this piece of propaganda, the Spanish government exploits the idea of a homeland and encourages members of the Sephardic Jewish community to return to Spain. The government aims to improve its trade relations with regions like the Balkans, not to right the wrongs of history. This is evidenced by the fact that the Cohens don’t feel safe enough to practice their religion openly and by the government’s failure to grant Alberto’s Spanish-born grandchildren citizenship. Chapter 6 shows how meaningful the concept of home can be to individuals and how this idea can be exploited for political and economic reasons.
