I love this book and here are a few reasons: First of all
the pleasure of holding a well crafted book in my hand; the ridges of the book
jacket and the small size invites me to take it along, slip it in a coat pocket
and read it in short sweet bursts. And then the actual content had me from its
opening lines.
Djudio
Djudio is what the speakers of Ladino or Judeo-Spanish
called their mother tongue, their intimate language. This is similar to Ashkenazim referring to
their “mamaloshen” as Yiddish, its what Jews speak.
Cohen lays out his central animating point right at the
outset. He writes his Spanish friend in the language that was taken out of Spain
by his ancestors, almost returning it to life, to the cycle of dialogue of the
back and forth of conversation between native speakers even as there are words
that his friend, the artist Antonio Saura can never understand, words that
point to Djudio’s twisted path through history:
Karo Antonio,
Kyero eskrivirte en
djudyo antes ke no keda nada del avlar de mis padres. No saves, Antonio, lo ke
es morirse en su lingua. Es Komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo
da, komo ser sikeleoso sin saver porke.
Dear Antonio,
I’d like to write to
you in Djudyo before the language of my ancestors is completely extinguished.
You can’t imagine, Antonio, what the death agony of language is like. You seem
to discover yourself alone, in silence. Your sikileoso without knowing why. (Translation
by Raphael Rubinstein of Marcel Cohen’s own translation into French.)
Cohen includes a glossary at the back of the book to help his reader figure out the "foreign" words embedded in ladino. The glossary is more like an atlas of Sephardic wandering
and a collection of the little things which give color and scent to everyday lives. there are words for grilled meat and flowers and steam boats and for wise men and good
luck and for foolish looking foreigners.
These words Cohen leaves as they are and does not translate
them when he rendered his original into French and Rubenstein the translator of
the text into English follows the wisdom of this pattern. They remind the
Spanish reader of their distance from a language which they can nonetheless still enjoy.
I would like to hear Saura’s response to Cohen, at least his
response beyond the abstract drawings that separate the chapters of the book. Not
that Cohen directs any particular questions to him or is looking for a particular
response from his addressee. These are thoughts and memories that require an
addressee for them to be conjured up. They take shape int he act of dialogue, by sharing them with a particular reader,
especially one he respects and with whom he shares a bond, a bond to the soil
and streets of Spain and to the imaginings and re-imaginings of those places
and the people that lived there.
Cohen does a masterful job evoking the gradations and
textures of pain, of loss and of the cloud that fills the mourner and the
dreamer as they look back. He does this particularly well with his descriptions
of his uncle. He was a survivor of Auschwitz who would walk around the family
apartment on the outskirts of Paris in his underwear singing romanceros recounting the loves and
losses of kings and queens and sailors and knights and ardent maidens. Figures
that once lived in the imaginations of the woman folk of Castile, the women who
would chant these ballads while kneading dough or rocking a baby to sleep.
These songs were constantly re-worked by their singers and the Jews took them
with them to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean where they evolved into
the ballads that this dislocated man kept with him in his double or triple
exile.
Again I need to thank Peter Cole for gifting me this book
which he and his wife Adina Hoffman lovingly shepherded to print.
We read this book as our final text in my summer class, “The
Phoenix and the Fire: Sephardic reactions to persecution and expulsion”. The
students appreciated the way that so many of the big themes of the course
resonated and were reworked in this modern or post-modern essay. I decided to end the class with Yehoram Gaon
singing one of the most poignant of the popular Ladino ballads- Arboles Loran por Luvias- the trees cry
for rain, and the mountains for air, but I , but I what will come of me, I will
die in a foreign land. It is said that the Sephardim sang this song in
Auschwitz, longing for lost homes and lost loves.
