Friday, July 20, 2018




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.






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