Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora 9780804797498

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HOMELESS TONGUES

HOMELESS TONGUES Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora

M O N IQU E R . BA L BU E NA

STA N FOR D U N I V ER SIT Y PR E SS STA N FOR D, CA LIFOR N I A

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the University of Oregon’s Oregon Humanities Center, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, the Koret Foundation, and the Littauer Foundation. “Living Flame of Love” was originally published in ἀ e Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez Copyright © 1964, 1979, 1991 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln Road, N.E. Washington, DC 20002–1199, U.S.A. www.icspublications.org. Reprinted with permission. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Balbuena, Monique, author. Homeless tongues : poetry and languages of the Sephardic diaspora / Monique R. Balbuena. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-6011-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jewish poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Ladino poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Hebrew poetry, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Sephardic authors—Language. 5. Multilingualism and literature. I. Title. pn842.b35 2016 809'.88924—dc23 2015017616 isbn 978-0-8047-9749-8 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro

Para Bernardo e Daniel Aviv

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments







Introduction

ix 1

1 Minor Literatures and Major Laments: Reading Sadia Lévy

19

2 At the Crossroads: Greece, Israel, and Spain in Margalit Matitiahu’s Hebrew-Ladino Poetry

59

3 Archaeology of the Language / Archaeology of the Self: Juan Gelman’s Journey to Ladino Conclusion: Whither?

107 157

Notes

161



205

Select Bibliography

Index

231

AC K NOW L E D GM E N T S

Friends, colleagues, professors, and poets helped me at different stages of this project. In the beginning there were Robert Alter and Chana Kronfeld. Many years later, I am still grateful for their support and criticism throughout the original project. My thanks also for Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s pointed and helpful suggestions and for the fundamental support she offered at a critical moment in this ­project—and for helping me recognize that I could read and write about the poems as compelling and valuable in themselves. Margalit Matitiahu was very generous, sending me material on several occasions and discussing her work via e-mail or over coffee in Jerusalem. Catherine Benguy graciously granted me permission to reproduce her grandfather’s poems. Juan Gelman was equally generous with his poems. Guy Dugas, Haïm Vidal Sephiha, and Avner Perez shared documents and ideas and supported me in my project. I appreciate Leonardo Senkman’s friendship and honest and insightful comments. The same can be said of Saúl Sosnowski. Murray Baumgarten, Norman Stillman, Bluma Goldenstein, and Ben-Zion Gold: all were early discussants, whether they realized it or not, and helped me shape my ideas and early drafts into this book. Colleagues in several conferences helped me with their questions and their sharp observations. Thanks to Yael Halevi-Wise, Eloise Brière, Stacy Beckwith, and many others. Karen Grumberg and Adriana Jacobs helped me define or refine some of my translations, and Kate Jenckes read my Gelman chapter; I am grateful to all for their comments. Eliyah Arnon has been there all along for many years, and I cannot thank him enough for his continuous presence and for his professional and personal support. The original readers at Stanford helped me make this book a better one. Lazar Fleishman’s provocative comments encouraged me to revisit the project, and Haun Saussy’s suggestions challenged me further. Norris Pope backed this book project from the beginning, and I am most grateful to him for his

x  ACKNOWLED GMENTS

e­ nduring support. And I have to say the same of my editors, Emily-Jane Cohen and Anne Fuzellier Jain, whose patience I know I have tested. I am also grateful to my dean and colleagues at the Honors College for offering me a collegial setting that allowed me to complete the project. The ­Honors College staff have my gratitude for their invaluable help in the daily grind. In addition, I would like to recognize the Program of Judaic Studies at the University of Oregon, in particular, Judith Baskin, for her graceful mentorship in times of need. I received very good feedback at two workshops where I presented my work: “Francophone Jewish Writers in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” sponsored by Stanford’s Taube Center of Jewish Studies and organized by Aron Rodrigue and Olga Borovaya, gave me the opportunity to test some ideas with a very distinguished group, including Alan Astro, Maurice Samuels, and Scott Lerner; and a workshop sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, further challenged my work with commentary by Brett Kaplan, Bruce Thompson, and Michael Rothenberg. A seminar on “Sephardic Literary Studies and Comparative Methodologies in Iberia and the Americas,” organized by Sarah Casteel and Dalia Kandiyoti, gave me a very engaging chance to discuss my project with Ronnie Perelis, Laura Leibman, and Tabea Alexa Linhardt, among others. The Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard, the Oregon Humanities Center at the University of Oregon, and the Frankel Institute at the University of Michigan provided me with much needed time and stimulating intellectual atmospheres. As a Harry Starr Fellow at Harvard in 2003–4, I had the opportunity to work with Ruth Wisse, Avi Matalon, Ken Frieden, Hana Wirth-Nesher, ­Avraham Norvershtern, Yaakov Elman, Miriam Bodian, Michael Weingrad, and Jeremy Dauber. As a Frankel Fellow at Michigan in 2010–11, my colleagues were Anita Norich, Joshua Miller, Deborah Dash Moore, Yaron Tzur, David Bunis, Marc Caplan, Jonathan Freedman, Elliot Ginsburg, Benjamin Hary, Karen Auerbach, Ruth Tsoffar, Na’ama Rokem, and Hana Wirth-Nesher. I thank them all for their comments, questions, conversations, and critiques of my work in progress, but am solely responsible for any shortcomings. I could not have completed this work without the financial support of several institutions. I want to thank the University of California, Berkeley, for its Regent’s Fellowship, and also Brazil’s funding agency CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Nível Superior). I am equally grateful for fellowships from the Newhouse Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the

ACKNOWLED GMENTS  xi

American Sephardi Federation, and the Maurice Amado Research Fund for Sephardic Studies. At the University of Oregon I would like to recognize the Center for the Study of Women in Society, for its Faculty Research Support; the Office of Research, for its Faculty Research Summer Award; and the Oregon Humanities Center, for its Faculty Research Fellowship. I would like to thank the Koret Foundation for granting me early on a publication grant. I much appreciate the publication grant the Littauer Foundation also offered me. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Cleone, for always singing to me in many languages, and my father, Rubén, who, unbeknownst to him, made me appreciate accents and creative interlingual formations, and gave me the love of slicing and dissecting, if not, like him, eyes, then images and poems. I am also very grateful to my son Bernardo for growing up alongside me and filling me with joy and pride—he has been my companion, reminding me all too often that there is much more to life than academic work. My little ­Daniel Aviv already has to put up with long nights and shorter bedtime stories. I thank him for the light and happiness that he has brought me at this time in my life. My husband, Mathew, accompanied me through a long and challenging trajectory—I thank him for keeping a steady pace by my side. Parts of this book have previously appeared in Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, Romance Studies, and Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas.

HOMELESS TONGUES



INTRODUCTION In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed. Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico

In October 1978, a bilingual book of poems appeared in a run of 300 copies from a small press in France. This event in principle wouldn’t be surprising, but the genre and the languages of the volume were. Although published in France by the author of several French novels, this was a volume presenting poems side by side in vernacular Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, and English. Its title was Lus ojus las manus la boca, or Eyes Hands Mouth, followed on the title page by the informative subtitle “Sephardic poems by CLARISSE NICOÏDSKI with translations by KEVIN POWER.” The poems presented images and metaphors not seen before in Judeo-Spanish poetry. Allusions to modern poets, chief among them Federico García Lorca, announced that a new kind of ­poetry was making its way into Sephardic writing. The publication of this small volume proved to be an important moment in the literary life of the Sephardic language; it announced the presence of Judeo-Spanish in contemporary world literature. Revealing exchanges and connections with literatures in other languages, it showcased the poetic possibilities of the vernacular, and opened the door for a series of writers and composers around the world who would follow suit, writing original texts in Ladino. Despite the small edition, this bilingual volume of poetry can be seen as the founding moment of a literary revitalization of Ladino: it led both speakers and non-speakers to recognize the potential locked in the Sephardic language for a serious and important poetic contribution to the literary world. And the fact that this work appeared in the form of poetry is also telling of the role and relevance of the genre in Sephardic culture.

2  INTRODUCTION

The Sephardic Franco-Bosnian novelist Clarisse Nicoïdski, née Abinoun (1938–96), was an accomplished writer, the author of more than fifteen novels, two biographies of painters, an opera libretto, and a volume on women ­painters.1 All of her novels were written in French, and with the exception of a few poems published in a Spanish journal, the only poetry collection she released during her lifetime was Lus ojus las manus la boca.2 Nicoïdski learned Ladino as a little girl during World War II, while hiding with her family in Lyon during the Nazi occupation under the Vichy government.3 Following the end of the war, she and her family moved to Morocco, where they lived in Casablanca between 1954 and 1959. Nicoïdski’s decision to revert to her childhood sounds and to write in the language of her parents and grandparents, what they called el spaniol muestro (our Spanish) was prompted by the death of her mother.4 Nicoïdski took to writing one poem in Ladino for each novel she had written in French. Once she began, the shame she had long associated with the Judeo-Spanish language, for its “lack of noblesse [nobility], grammar, and literature,”5 was overshadowed, and eventually transformed, by the realization that the language was dying along with her mother, who, in her mind, metonymically stood for its speakers. The language “‘of the family,’ of ‘­secrecy,’ of fright and—perhaps—of shame”6 became the “lost language” in which Nicoïdski could now offer her mother a literary kaddish.7 As she said in an interview published in 1999, “I understood that [with my mother] a bit of this language from my childhood was disappearing and that for our generation, the death of our parents meant the death of a language.”8 Ladino resurfaces here in its feminine trappings, as the mother language and the language of the mother: “My mother’s love, our complicity and our laughter were all found in this language.”9 Ladino irrupts both as the site of memory and as that which can save memory, and as the mother’s language it marks and is marked by affection and pain. Ladino is, in Nicoïdski’s work, a language to recover the past, to claim an ethnic identity, and to reaffirm the links she maintains with the Sephardic Diaspora. And when Ladino forces its way out in Nicoïdski’s creation, it is in the form of a new genre: for the first time, she writes poetry. In her fiction—especially in the novel Couvre-feux (Curfews)—she had already treated autobiographical elements and developed themes of isolation, memory, and exile. Now, faced with the death of her mother, longing, memory, and displacement become ever more acute. Nicoïdski eventually combines her individual, personal severance and pain with the larger, communal loss and separation experienced by Sephardic exiles who see the marks of their culture

INTRODUCTION  3

gradually disappear. To speak of her mother’s death, she turned to poetry, and in changing genres, she also changed languages: in other words, when her text becomes poetry, her language turns into Ladino. There is no causation or chronology that can readily be identified here, but poetry and Ladino appear simultaneously, as though they were the ideal means with which to speak of death and combat death. Nicoïdski turns to poetry and to Ladino in order to speak of death—a personal, a collective, and a linguistic death—and of the impossibility of speaking. Her speaker’s aphasia finds a parallel in the general loss of language by Ladino speakers. And yet, even as she recognizes the disappearance of Ladino as a vehicle of oral communication and transmission, mourning its present condition as “silent writing,” Nicoïdski insists on writing. In so doing, she in some way holds off death, for not only does she create—and creation combats death— but by creating in Ladino she consciously claims a Sephardic identity, on the one hand, and gives Judeo-Spanish a renewed élan—an afterlife—on the other. Such a movement defines much of the recent writing in Ladino, which for the most part has appeared in the form of poetry or songs. I take Nicoïdski’s example as a point of departure because her trajectory as a novelist, then a poet, and as a French and then a Ladino writer, is representative of multilingual Sephardic writers who move from one language to another either to engage with their personal, familial, or people’s past, to question a present sociopolitical condition, or to claim a hybrid identity defined or expressed by language. In this process many of such writers end up calling into question notions of a homogeneous or monolingual national identity.10

. . . Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of minor literatures, which became so pervasive in cultural and literary theory, privileges the “minor,” treating it, not only as a positive value, but as an achievement. “There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor,”11 they claim in their study Kafka (1975, trans. 1986). The two main characteristics Deleuze and Guattari assign to “minor literature” are that in it “language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization,”12 and writers employ a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” “Deterritorialized writing” in their view corresponds, perhaps exclusively, to “oppositional writing” in a major language. “[A] minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language,” they assert.13

4  INTRODUCTION

In Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, multilingualism figures only as a metaphor, for multiple languages are never taken into full account, and the definition of the minor revolves around only one language, “one’s own language.” Chana Kronfeld has already pointed out that Deleuze and Guattari’s “monolingual construction of the minor-within-the-major” has a significant exclusionary effect, since it does not acknowledge the possibility of any “oppositional literature” written in non-major languages.14 It excludes, from the position of “minor,” literatures in languages that are not at the center of the Western world or the now mainstream modern canon, effectively defending an “Imperial monolingualism.”15 With this discussion in the background, having informed my initial thoughts on the poets I discuss here, I offer two counterarguments to Deleuze and Guattari’s position: first, I argue that minor literatures can emerge from multilingual contexts and social conditions, and second, that minor languages have the capacity to challenge and reinscribe dominant languages. My readings are guided by my own recognition of the role of minor languages in the makeup of major languages, and of the power that minor languages have in revitalizing major languages. The poets I read here—the Algerian Sadia Lévy, the Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, and the Argentine Juan Gelman—are significant on their own, and much more compelling as creators than as “an answer” to any theory. Indeed, together, Lévy, Matitiahu, and Gelman challenge the usual ­canons of Jewish literature and the general consensus on Jewish languages. But, in addition, they constitute counterexamples that effectively undermine ­Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the minor, each a multicultural and multilingual poet who writes from an oppositional or marginal position, and uses a threatened and minor language.

. . . This book is the first to offer a sustained literary analysis of contemporary Se­ phardic poetry. Although poetry has had a long life in Jewish writing, it has not received adequate attention from scholars of Jewish or cultural studies, who have mostly favored narrative to investigate nationalism and processes of identity formation. In studies of Jewish poetry and Jewish languages in general, little attention has been paid to the Sephardic contribution; when it has, it typically looks at the past, as if Sephardic literature (and general culture) were only a relic. Against this trend, I decided to focus on Sephardic literature. But my focus is not on the traditional Sephardic genres that were developed in ­Ladino,

INTRODUCTION  5

such as the midrashim in the Me’am Lo’ez, the coplas, the romances, proverbs, and tales. Instead, I would like to run à rebours, a contra-pelo, against the grain, and turn my attention to Sephardic poetry—contemporary, multilingual, transnational Sephardic poetry. Unlike other scholars of Sephardic literature— linguists and philologists who provide descriptions, lists, and encyclopedic catalogs, or historians, for whom literary (or cultural) texts are only interesting to the extent that they serve as historical sources, I am actually concerned with the aesthetic and literary value of the works. It was this literary concern, this interest in the degree of aesthetic information of a text, that guided both the definition of my corpus and my approach to it. In Homeless Tongues I thus • Focus on contemporary poetry • Emphasize multilingual creative production, also acknowledging the role of other vernacular languages in addition to Ladino • Privilege critical tools of literary analysis above the philological, historical, and ethnographic discourse that dominates the current understanding of Sephardic literature I read Jewish multilingual poets who are themselves positioned amid different languages—each language with a particular political and social status— and who engage in a more or less conscious process of construction of identity through the negotiation of languages and texts. I am not working within the domain of national literatures, but rather in a transnational context that integrates several of the so-called national literatures, and that crosses linguistic boundaries and textual practices. One could say that this is traditionally the context of “Jewish literature.” But I am also looking specifically at Sephardic literature, or rather, at textual constructions of different expressions of a Sephardic identity. The result is to integrate the study of Sephardic poetry into general discussions of poetics, minority languages, minor literatures, Diaspora and nationalism, in attempt to help bridge the gap that still exists between the current critical and theoretical discourse on these issues and the field of Jewish Studies. Homeless Tongues focuses on three little-known multilingual and multicultural Jewish poets who write from an oppositional or marginal position, using minor or threatened languages—Lévy, Matitiahu, and Gelman. Here and in my reading of Gelman I also introduce Nicoïdski. Each of these poets writes in more than one language, and uses at least a second language in opposition to her or his territorial or dominant language. In Lévy’s case, the dominant language is a colonial one, since he writes in French and Hebrew in Algeria. For

6  INTRODUCTION

the others, it is a national language: Matitiahu writes in Hebrew and Ladino in Israel, and Gelman writes in Spanish and Ladino in his exile from Argentina (Nicoïdski writes in French and Ladino). We come to see that it is through these very strategic choices of languages and intertexts that each poet expresses a Sephardic hybrid identity. In the process, their work challenges established notions of ethnic, literary, and linguistic identity. Each of the poets treated here is engaged in his or her own unique circumstances, and as such is exemplary. Each writes from a specific place, historical condition, and cultural tradition, shaped by the specific literary and extraliterary norms of the system of languages he or she uses. In order to respect the poets’ individual differences and better approach my object of study, I draw upon several theoretical grids, among them neoformalist readings, Benjamin Harshav’s concept of “frames of reference,” Joshua Fishman’s ethnolinguistics and his work on threatened languages, contemporary theories of translation and intertextuality, and accounts of nationalism and Diaspora. Since a crosscultural perspective is essential for understanding these artists, I combine stylistic analysis and cultural theory; I believe that a stylistic analysis that is sociologically and historically informed is the best approach to a body of text that is not only multilingual, but also thematizes the problem of language choice. These poets are examples of writers who present an underlying, unifying Jewish intertextuality, represented by the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries, combined with the diverse literary traditions that inform the linguistic systems within which they write: French literature, modern lyric poetry, Spanish literature. As they reveal cultural and literary affiliations when they manipulate languages and intertexts, these poets construct their identity as Jews in complex or ambivalent positions, where multiple identities overlap and forces of influence follow several directions. Their work and the identities they negotiate are the result of the interaction with Jewish and broader non-Jewish cultural systems. Ultimately, their voices emerge in multiple accents, accents that I want to hear and cherish.

Poetic Detour Part of my project is recognizing the Sephardic contribution to Jewish culture in general, and to its literary expression in particular. Poetry is perhaps the most important genre of literary expression in the Sephardic tradition. The most recognized genres are oral, such as ballads, songs, proverbs, and stories. The most traditional are poetic—coplas, romansas, cantigas. Many, such as the ballads,

INTRODUCTION  7

are Sephardic expressions of a characteristically Spanish popular genre. Several genres, however, developed in Ladino. The modernization and Westernization of Sephardic communities brought new genres that eventually became part of the Sephardic repertoire. Iacob Hassán calls these “adopted genres.”16 Here is a brief historical overview of the Sephardic literary genres: the famous and traditional orally transmitted romancero and cancionero developed from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Judeo-Spanish was mostly used in translations of the Bible and other Hebrew rabbinical and medieval literatures.17 The eighteenth century saw a surge in literary creation—much of it in the form of coplas, traditionally described as narrative poems written in stanzas with rhyme and rhythm. C ­ oplas are the most characteristic genre of Sephardic literature, and their authors generally belonged to the intellectual elite. Initially used to preserve religious knowledge, the coplas are typically associated with men, even though, eventually, they were transmitted orally by women. The eighteenth century is also marked by the appearance of the Me’am Lo’ez, an ambitious series of rabbinical commentaries on the Bible in “a foreign language,” that is, in Ladino, so that the masses could have access to biblical and religious texts. With the Me’am Lo’ez Ladino matured as a language for literary creation and also established itself as no longer “foreign,” but a recognized Jewish language. What is called poesía de autor (“autograph poetry”) appeared in late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the spread of Westernization. In the words of Paloma Díaz-Mas, it is “characterized by greater consciousness of authorship, abandonment of traditional metrical forms, Westernization of the language, and the appearance of new themes unusual in the old coplas.”18 Other genres also appeared as a result of the same modernizing impetus, such as plays, historical essays, narratives (romansos), predominantly adaptations and translations, and journalism. The latter became very important in the Sephardic world. The language of journalism, Díaz-Mas observes, “shows the evolution of Judeo-Spanish from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.”19 Poetry still retains its prominent place in this varied literary tradition. In Sephardic poetry, piyut (liturgy), shir (song and poem), and mizmor (chant, or melody) coexist, often breaking traditional dichotomies between lowbrow and highbrow, secular and sacred, oral and written, popular and erudite, mundane and spiritual. It is also via poetry that a resurgence of literature in Ladino can be observed, it being the genre of choice for those who create in Ladino today.20 Continuing this tradition, I have chosen to write about poets, observing their

8  INTRODUCTION

aesthetic value and their significance to the literatures in the languages in which they write, as well as their relevance to Jewish and cultural studies.

Sephardim and Ladino Ladino plays a significant role in this book, inasmuch as it is a language used by two of the poets discussed in it, Margalit Matitiahu and Juan Gelman. It is still spoken by over 200,000 people in Israel, Greece, Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Egypt, and North Africa, and by smaller numbers in the United States and Latin America. Marginal in relation to Yiddish, and even more so to Hebrew, Ladino is not generally well known. Here is a brief introduction.

. . . After the fall of Granada, which marked the end of the Reconquista, Catholic Spain’s seven-century-long struggle to wrest the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim control, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism from Spain. On March 31, 1492, nearly 200,000 Spanish Jews went into exile, leaving for Portugal, northern Europe, and countries around the Mediterranean basin. It was the end of a vibrant multi­cultural medieval kingdom, home to the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths, as evidenced by the trilingual inscription, in Castilian, Arabic, and Hebrew, on Ferdinand III’s tomb in the cathedral of Seville. The exiles became known as Sepharades or Sephardim, from the Hebrew name Sepharad, meaning Spain. They took with them their fifteenth-century Spanish, which included linguistic varieties such as Leonese, Aragonese and, principally, courtly Castilian. Laura Minervini explains that Judeo-Spanish is a koinē, or “common dialect,” arising from a sixteenth-century dialectal convergence in which Castilian is the basis. It “is seen not as the direct descendant of the language of the 1492 exiles, but as the result of long-term contact accommodations between speakers of different but mutually intelligible regional varieties,” she writes.21 The year 1492 also saw the publication of Europe’s first scientific grammar of a vernacular language, Antonio de Nebrija’s famous Gramática de la lengua castellana (Grammar of the Castilian Language). This work not only helped to consolidate and standardize Castilian usage, but also provides current-day linguists with a description of the characteristics that Spanish presented then, hence a basis with which to compare the various threads of Judeo-Spanish with

INTRODUCTION  9

fifteenth-century Spanish and thereby identify the changes that occurred following exile. There are conflicting theories as to whether there was a specific Jewish language in Spain before the expulsion, and there is an ongoing controversy about the name of the Judeo-Spanish language. What is certain is that JudeoSpanish has traditionally been written with the Hebrew alphabet, with eastern Sephardim (those who settled in various places in the Ottoman Empire) using a typeface called ketivad raši, or letraz de ezkritura, known in English as “Rashi script,” for printed material, and a cursive script named solitreo for handwritten texts. Very few people read or write solitreo today, and most of the few JudeoSpanish publications use the Latin alphabet, which—along with Cyrillic, in the case of Bulgaria—replaced the Hebrew alphabet in the early twentieth century. In Salonika, Jews used Rashi script until World War II, but in Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Pasha, better known as Atatürk, decreed in 1928 that the Latin alphabet should replace all others in his new republic. Difficulties of transliteration persist today, with three dominant spellings vying for an increasingly smaller readership: those of the Israel-based journal Akí Yerushalayim; of Vidas Largas, based in France and Belgium; and of Şalom and its supplement El amaneser, published in Turkey. Akí Yerushalayim’s tends to be the most usual transliteration system nowadays. The consecutive migrations of Spanish Jews—to Portugal, North Africa, and the Middle East, across the Ottoman Empire and into other Mediterranean regions—definitively shaped the language they carried with them from Spain. If regionalisms and Hispanic Arabicisms had colored Judeo-Spanish before the expulsion from Spain, after 1492 this language grew to incorporate Moroccan Arabicisms, Turkisms, Italianisms, Hellenisms, and Slavisms from the various host countries, reinforcing its character as a language of fusion. Haïm Vidal Sephiha says of modern Judeo-Spanish that “4 per cent of its loan words come from Hebrew, 15 per cent from Turkish, 20 per cent from French, 2 per cent from Ladino, etc., with all of these built on the foundation of the 15th-century Spanish substratum.”22 This motley composition takes into particular account the pervasive presence of French, aided by the broad currents of modernization and Westernization under the influence of the press (journalism) and, in particular, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which filled the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century with schools seeking to “civilize” the “backward Jews” of the region. One of the results was a new version of this evolving language, what Sephiha calls “Judéo-Fragnol,” or Judeo-Franco-Spanish.

10  INTRODUCTION

There is still much disagreement as to which name should be used when referring to the Jewish Spanish language. Among the many possible names of Judeo-Spanish are: espanyol,23 muestro espanyol (“our Spanish,” in opposition to espanyol halis, or “true Spanish,” from the Turkish), espanyolit (as used by Elias Canetti, a calque of the German Spaniolisch), espanyoliko (a variation of the former, but with the affectionate connotations provided by the diminutive Spanish suffix -iko), djudyo and djidyo (literally “Jewish,” a translation of the Turkish ­yahudice, a name given by the Turks to the only Spanish they knew), djudezmo (with a Spanish ending that usually marks nouns), jargon, a derogatory term used by the speakers themselves, haketía (the arabicized Moroccan variant of the language, but now practically recastilianized), and tetuani (the Algerian variety from the city of Oran, where the speakers originally came from ­Morocco). Finally, there is the option, now favored by academics, of JudeoSpanish (­djudyo-espanyol), which, in its dynamic evolution and contact with other languages has bred not only Sephiha’s “Judeo-Fragnol” (djudyo-franyol), referring to the Judeo-Spanish–French hybrid, but also his suggestion for the variety of Judeo-Spanish developing in interaction with Israeli Hebrew, “JudeoIsragnol” (djudyo-isranyol). The bevy of terms here reveals the complexities of characterizing this language. Though it is inexact, I use “Ladino” most often in this book to refer to both the formal and the vernacular incarnations of the language. I chose “­Ladino” because of its broad, popular use and because it is now widely recognizable. It is also the form acknowledged by the Library of Congress. Before we proceed, however, two caveats, in the hopes of warding off some of the confusion that has long plagued discussions of this language. The first caveat is that our term should not be mistaken for the other Ladino, a Rhaeto-Romance language still spoken in and around northern Italy, more specifically in the Swiss Canton of the Grisons, as well as in the Italian regions of Friuli and Molise.24 The second caveat is that at some points, as we shall see later, more specific terms are necessary. As the linguist Sephiha, a native speaker of what he terms Judeo-Spanish, reminds us, a single term may not suffice. He insists on multiple terms because he believes that Ladino is not a language that can be spoken. He defines “Ladino” as a “Judeo-Spanish calque,” that is, a liturgical and pedagogical language into which rabbis translated the Hebrew Bible in a literal manner, and which is a fusion of Hebrew syntax and Spanish vocabulary.25 In his words, “Ladino is only Hebrew clothed in Spanish, or Spanish with Hebrew syntax.”26 In the Middle Ages, “Ladino” referred to a “romance language,” that is, lan-

INTRODUCTION  11

guages derived from Latin, specifically, Spanish(es), as opposed to the “Arab language (arábigo),” according to the Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico.27 Denah Lida writes that “during the thirteenth century it designated a Moor who knew that language, that is, Romance.”28 “Ladinar,” the correspondent verb, meant “to translate into a Romance language.” And Sephiha adds that, “because one needed to distrust this moro ladino, who could understand everything, ‘ladino’ gained the meaning of astute and sly, which remains until today amid the hispanophones.” According to Sephiha, Ladino predates vernacular Judeo-Spanish, which would only have come into existence around 1620, as a koinē form of the many varieties of Spanish (from Aragón, León, Cataluña, Galicia, and, of course, Castile) brought with them by Jewish exiles following the 1492 expulsion.29 Because it was not influenced by the ongoing phonetic changes that occurred on the peninsula, it retained more archaic features, and began to be identified by Christian Spanish travelers as a characteristically Jewish language. The Judeo-Spanish language, or even the “Judeo-Spanish ethnicity,”30 according to Sephiha, only takes shape in the Ottoman Empire and in northern Morocco, and is therefore an exilic phenomenon. “Ladino” remains to linguists and philologists the calque language used for translation of Hebrew and Aramaic texts, but it has acquired a broader and more popular sense among its active speakers around the world. “The widespread view that the term ‘Ladino’ is only applicable to the ‘sacred’ language of the Bible translations and prayers, whereas the other names are reserved solely for the spoken language, seems hardly tenable,” Moshe Lazar remarks.31 In interviews with contemporary speakers, Tracy Harris and Arlene Malinowski found that 75 percent of their informants referred to their language as “­Espanyol,” and 23 percent used “Ladino.”32 The interchangeability of the terms “Ladino” and “Judeo-Spanish” is also apparent online and in writing about the language. For example, the web site of the diasporic Internet chat group Ladinokomunita proclaims itself to be “Un Sito Ande El Djudeo-Espanyol Bive” (“A site where Judeo-Spanish is alive”). 33 Interchangeable use of the two names can also be seen in scholarly articles.34 Even these variations do not exhaust the possibilities of categorization. To further complicate matters, modern Spanish speakers bring other denominations into the pool. In Central America, the term “Ladino” refers to a specific ethnic group, characterized by Guatemala’s Ministry of Education as “a heterogeneous population that expresses itself in the Spanish language as a maternal

12  INTRODUCTION

language, which possesses specific cultural traits of Hispanic origin mixed with indigenous cultural elements and dresses in a style commonly considered as Western.”35 The Oxford English Dictionary defines a Ladino [person] as “In Central America, a mestizo or a white person.” Spanish speakers tend to avoid the terms ladino and judío.36 Although Sephiha writes in French of the discipline of judéo-hispanologie (Judeo-­ Hispanology), it is unusual to hear Spanish speakers referring to the Spanish language of the Jews as judío-español or español judío. Rather, they will say ­sefardí or español sefardí. Juan Gelman, for one, refers to Ladino as sefardí, a name that can be confused with the Sefardí (Sephardic) ethnic group. The avoidance is because ladino is a common Spanish word, and for all practical purposes an unflattering one, having the sense of “cunning, shrewd, wily,”37 a development of the sixteenth-century “astute, clever, wise,” which we find among the Real Academia Española’s definitions. Denah Lida and Vidal Sephiha, as noted earlier, allude to this, and warn of the possible antisemitic overtones that the use of ladino might convey among Hispanophones. These meanings in fact seem to coincide with the perception many Ladino speakers have of the term’s understanding and usage by Spanish speakers, a problem that Jews who speak Ladino and live in Hispanic countries must confront. The poets I am examining here, Gelman and Matitiahu in particular (and Nicoïdski similarly), have nevertheless embraced the Ladino language for its maternal, nurturing, homey qualities. Eliezer Papo Yachanin calls it the “pedestal of the true mother language” (piedestal de lingua materna verdadera), “spoken by all as the language of the home.” It absorbed new elements from other languages, turned them into Spanish (eshpanyolizava), and “embraced all of them as a mother,” he writes.38 With its endearing sounds, its tendency toward vocal sounds and preference for diminutive forms, expressed by the suffixes –iko and –ika; its feminine endings that contrast with the masculine modern Spanish (nouns ending in –or or beginning with an unaccented -a, for example); and its speakers’ tendency to employ images and proverbs, Ladino offers an escape from the normative and normalized state language to a more delicate, affectionate, and yet oppositional language.

Multilingualism and Jewish Languages The multilingual experience of Jews living in the Diaspora is the main impulse for the formation of Jewish languages.39 The many migrations in the history of the Jews are inseparable from the many languages that form the linguistic rep-

INTRODUCTION  13

ertoire of Jewish communities—languages that contact and mingle, languages that are major, shared by the dominant group of that particular realm, and languages that are minor, deviating from whatever is spoken by non-Jews. Each language along this spectrum has a specific role. Over time, the new languages of fusion, birthed from the mingling of tongues, acquire their own symbolic values. A very important one is that the Jewish language of any given time and place becomes an identity marker. The existence of Jewish languages cannot be dissociated from the non-­ Jewish environment in which Jews lived. Such languages appeared in contact with non-Jewish languages, in addition and in opposition to them. It is therefore crucial to highlight the multilingual situation of Jews in the Diaspora, observing the productive, creative tensions between a Jewish minority and a non-Jewish majority, with its dominant language. In rare cases Jews did constitute the majority group in a given territory, and those few instances saw change in the dynamics among languages and the visibility and influence of their speakers. One such case is the enormous population growth of Jews in the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, where they formed a highly active and culturally productive majority across a network of small towns. Another is the unusual Jewish majority in the multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan city of Salonika— known as “the Jerusalem of the Balkans,” or “Mother of Israel”—at the turn of the twentieth century, and the ensuing position of Ladino as the dominant language in business and commerce. But whether the Jewish language is major or minor, multilingualism is prominent, shaping the existence of Jews across the Diaspora, looming large in their history, their texts, and their self-identity. The Israeli literary and cultural critic Benjamin Harshav narrates the history of what he calls “the modern Jewish revolution,” the radical transformation of Jewish existence as “shtetl Jews” in eastern Europe adopted European secular culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Together with the establishment of a network of Jewish social and cultural institutions, and the emergence of different political parties, Harshav identifies a thriving multilingual literature written in Yiddish, Hebrew, and the various languages of state and culture as fundamental factors in the process of Jewish nation-building.40 Harshav thus places multilingualism—and literature—at the center of his discussion of the modern Jewish experience. Tracing the history of multilingualism among Jews, he writes that it was “an essential multilingualism,” developed by Jews in the many places of their Diaspora, that “enabled [their] functioning . . . in a bifurcated existential situation.”41 Harshav’s “exuberant

14  INTRODUCTION

multilingualism” was also embodied by the Sephardic Jews of Salonika, who, living and operating in an industrious and cosmopolitan port city, were highly fluent in languages such as Greek, French, Turkish, Italian, and German, along with Hebrew and Ladino. “Modern Jewish culture speaks with many voices,”42 Harshav writes, seeking to emphasize the plurality of the experiences lived by Jews now in a secular world, and the various ways in which Jewishness can be expressed. He is of course referring to eastern Europe, Yiddish, the historical situation, and the cultural systems created and maintained by Ashkenazi Jews, which are the focus of his work. Harshav offers a simple explanation—statistics—to justify the standard identification of “the modern Jewish revolution” with the fate of the Ashkenazi Jews: We must keep in mind that by 1900, about 6 percent of world Jewry were Se­ phardic or Oriental Jews, while the overwhelming majority were Ashkenazim. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the majority of world Jewry lived in Russia and in other areas formerly belonging to Poland (Silesia, Posen, Galicia). The new Jewish communities in Central and Western Europe, including most of the so-called “German” Jews, consisted largely of East-European immigrants or their descendants. It is only when those masses joined the trend that a general change in the historical situation of the Jews occurred.43

But modernity also affected other Jews, and transformed their lives in ways broad and deep.44 Modernity, of course, had different meanings and manifested itself differently across geographies and political and economic contexts, and thus provoked different responses as well. The strikingly disparate numbers of Yiddish and Ladino speakers—between five and six million Yiddish speakers in the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century, compared to a quarter of a million Ladino speakers in the Ottoman Empire—did affect the future of these two languages. Besides being a much smaller number to begin with, the Ladino speakers of the Ottoman Empire suffered a significant setback in their social and economic position after the dissolution of the empire (roughly 1908–23) and the ensuing creation of nation-states. These Sephardim had no central organization or linguistic authority for their language, supplied fewer speakers, consumers or cultural activists for Ladino, tended to deride their own language, and as a group were older than the Yiddish speakers.45 But the modern experience of living in a changed world, in which the options afforded to Jews expanded beyond the religious framework, was just as

INTRODUCTION  15

much a part of the Sephardic experience. Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire also embraced western Europe and its secular culture, and tried to create new forms of cultural identification, producing, according to Sarah A. Stein, “a modernizing Ladino culture: albeit one that advocated the renunciation of this Jewish vernacular.”46 Such a culture was engendered in a multilingual society, in which French progressively gained favor, but many other languages interacted. Stein draws a comparison between Yiddish and Ladino newspaper readers, focusing on their equally multilingual situation, which defined and shaped so much of their identity and their response to modernity. In the extremely multilingual settings of eastern and southeastern Europe, it was not only unnecessary but also impractical to favor one language at the expense of others, especially before state-sponsored language policies were introduced in the wake of World War I. Thus many Jews in Russia read news­papers in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian. Similarly, many Jews in Ottoman Europe read newspapers in French, Hebrew, and Ladino (among other languages).47 If “modern Jewish culture speaks with many voices,” the voices of Sephardic Jews participate in the plurivocality of the modern Jewish experience, even if heard less. At the start of the twentieth century, Sephardic Jews, who carried with them their own texts and cultural practices in their multilingual journey in the Diaspora, would soon confront the monolingual forces that marked the building of the Jewish nation-state.

The Hallmarks of Diaspora: Multilingualism and Translation The term “diaspora” has become more inclusive and is now applied to a growing number of experiences of deterritorialization; but to many scholars the Jewish Diaspora is still the paradigmatic example.48 There are strong voices that rise up against any “notion of the uniqueness of the Jewish diaspora,”49 among them Robin Cohen’s,50 whose comparative treatment of the Jewish ­Diaspora and other diasporic formations has been answered with a fierce critique by William Safran.51 Others, including Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, stress the relevance of the Jewish Diaspora for contemporary theoretical discussions. Jonathan Boyarin criticizes theoreticians like James Clifford who are “wary of centering the term around its specifically Jewish associations, wary of ‘running the risk of making Jewish experience again the normative model,’” and, most forcefully, Stuart Hall, whose “hybridity . . . must be purified . . . of Jews,” since Hall publishes a statement that is “explicitly exclusive and dismissive of the Jewish experience of the diaspora.”52 Pointing to “how far ‘diaspora’ has been

16  INTRODUCTION

displaced from Jewish references”53 in recent critical discourse, ­Boyarin urges that “it is important to insist not on the centrality of Jewish diaspora nor on its logical priority within comparative diaspora studies, but on the need to refer to, and better understand, Jewish diaspora history within the contemporary diasporic rubric.”54 Recognizing the importance of the Jewish Diaspora model in critical discourses on the subject, I want to highlight that because of their cultural situation—in large part shaped by the Diaspora—Jews have long been an important focus for multilingualism, and Jewish writing has also consistently been marked by the manipulation of multiple languages. I look to stress the links between Jewish diasporic existence, cultural pluralism, and linguistic diversity. Jews have negotiated their identities, to a greater or lesser degree, amid major dominant groups occupying the same territory, since they have lived for two thousand years among different peoples, languages, and cultural traditions. The internal diglossic reality experienced by most Jews—in which Hebrew was the sacred language, used in study and liturgy, and another, vernacular language was the mother tongue, serving for family and communal communication, favored the acquisition of yet another linguistic system, used to relate to neighboring groups.55 The issue of language choice has been regularly present in Jewish life, since Jews had to select among the languages at their disposal, according to the contexts and demands of their surroundings.56 As historical conditions changed, and with them the social and political circumstances of the Jews, so did the statuses and roles of each of the languages the latter used. In the wandering of the languages themselves, the relationships established among them and their users are restructured, pointing to the historicity of the categories of “minor” or “major.” Such evolutions explain how Hebrew, in the case of the Algerian Sadia Lévy, can be dissonant, oppositional, the mark of the other, inscribing itself against the dominant colonial French. In Margalit Matitiahu’s case, more than three decades later and this time in Israel, it is the sanctioned, state-sponsored language that represents order and authority, in contrast to the diasporic, feminized, and orientalized Ladino. Historically speaking, Jews and their literatures and languages, in large part shaped by the Diaspora, have been as diverse as the places where they have lived and the cultures with which they have interacted. If we can discern any unity amid the plurality of Jewish literatures, it is precisely in m ­ ultiplicity. Across the Diaspora, another practice developed in tandem with Jewish multi­ lingualism, also as a matter of both survival and cultural experimentation

INTRODUCTION  17

and creativity: the practice of translation. Since antiquity Jews have translated their main texts, the Septuagint and the Targum Onkelos being the classic examples.57 Interacting dynamically with neighboring peoples, Jews built a tradition of translation that remains uninterrupted. They continued writing in many languages, making use of intertextual references and allusions to classical Jewish works, and establishing a dialogue among many of the newly created texts. Writing about Sephardic Jews in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, Howard Sachar observes: “No Jewish talent was more valued, however, than the little people’s historic vocation of translation.”58 In Sephardic history, translation was a fundamental way of studying the Torah and transmitting religious knowledge. The importance of multilingualism and translation among Sephardic exiles is confirmed, in part, by the vitality of the Sephardic press in several centers, producing works such as the 1547 Constantinople Pentateuch: a trilingual calque (or literal, word-by-word) translation of the Bible, with the Hebrew, Castilian, and Judeo-Greek texts printed side by side in three parallel columns. The value of translation itself, in the interrelation of different cultures, cannot be overstated. As Anthony Pym writes: “The simple fact of translation presupposes contact between at least two cultures, and does so in relation to language use, the social activity that perhaps most effectively and insidiously weaves relations of cultural identity.”59 Translation and intertextuality figure as central operations in the works of the poets treated here. Lévy translated the Psalms, and this work contributed to his understanding of rhythm and voice in poetry, besides providing several of the motifs of his own poetry. He also engaged in serious dialogue with French literary tradition, especially the Renaissance poets, and with classical Greek ­poetry. Matitiahu performs different types of translation in seeking to translate her mother’s memories into poetry and recurrently translates herself, in operations of autotranslation, since she writes bilingually (she usually offers two different versions of the “same” poem, one in Hebrew and one in Ladino). Gelman was a professional journalist and translator. His intense concern with language is marked by the echoes and resonances left by other languages (and earlier stages of the Spanish language) in his Castellano (i.e., Castilian), as modern Argentine Spanish is called. His work is filled with invented poetic personae and fictitious “translated authors,” and he unabashedly rewrites and translates other poets from a broad diachronic and geographical range. These three poets, we shall see, reveal language as a site of creation and contestation, a site that brings together texts, memory, trauma, and identity.

18  INTRODUCTION

My work is ultimately shaped not only by the understanding that multilingualism offers cognitive flexibility and creative and poetic possibilities, but also by the conviction, so urgent in the present political moment, that linguistic diversity is good for people and for democracy. This book is marked by plurality and diversity, for I believe that these two words, even as they begin to be overused and lose their meaning, truly represent Judaism, Jewishness, and Jewish literatures. Here I choose to confront and celebrate the multilingual complexity of Jewish writing. In this spirit, I look to address the position of Sephardic literature in the greater Jewish canon, inasmuch as I also present this study as a step toward correcting the failure to acknowledge the Sephardic contribution to Jewish cultural production. We need to rethink the canonicity of Jewish literature, or, to use a term I now prefer, we need to reexamine the Jewish literary repertoire: to observe its contours, mine its depths, fill in the missing spots. I have no desire to erase important voices that have already been recognized. But those voices are not enough. I know that only by embracing forgotten and marginalized voices will the canon reflect somewhat more accurately the cultural richness afforded by intra-Jewish differences. Only then will we do justice to the multiplicity of Jewish writing.

1

M I N O R L I T E R AT U R E S AND MAJOR LAMENTS Reading Sadia Lévy

Pour accorder l’instrument . . . À Gustave Kahn. Octobre 1928. In memoriam.

Amusons-nous, ce soir, Muse musicienne D’assembler en sonnet quatorze vers légers De ceux-là que flûtait la syrinx des bergers Aux temps arcadiens de l’églogue ancienne . . . Je n’ai qu’un instrument d’âme phénicienne! Cependant joie ou deuil, rire et pleurs mélangés, Je ne sais point d’accents qui lui soient étrangers Et par lui j’ai ma voix comme a chacun la sienne. Mystère d’atavisme en l’immense Athanor! Un psalmiste, un lévi m’a légué son Kinnor . . . Ce kinnor qui sonnait aux fêtes solennelles Des Hébreux dans le Temple élevé par Hiram, Je l’ai pris pour chanter mes tendres villanelles: Formosam Kehatus Ardebat Séfiram.

20   MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS

To Tune the Instrument . . . To Gustave Kahn. October 1928. In memoriam.

Let’s amuse ourselves tonight, musician Muse Crafting into sonnet fourteen light verses Of those the shepherds’ flute played In the Arcadian times of the ancient eclogue . . . I have but one instrument of Phoenician soul! Yet joy or grief, laughter and cries mingled, I know no accent stranger to it, And through it I have my voice, as each has his own. Mystery of atavism in the immense Athanor! A psalmist, a Levite has handed me his Kinnor . . . This kinnor which sounded during the solemn festivals Of the Hebrews at the Temple Hiram built, I took to sing my sweet villanelles: Formosam Kehatus Ardebat Séfiram. (my translation)

“Pour accorder l’instrument . . .” is a remarkable mixture of linguistic and literary references: it combines Latin poetry, marked by images from classical mythology, with Hebrew poetry, bearing its own linguistic and religious affiliations. All of this is done, not only in French, but in a sonnet written in alexandrines, a poetic genre and a verse meter most closely identified with French. The poem’s two primary references, Virgil’s pastorals and the Psalmist’s songs, merge in the “immense Athanor”—the alchemist’s furnace, the crucible of transmutations. The term “athanor” itself comes from the Arabic al-tannúr, “oven” (Hebrew tanur), adding yet another defining cultural strain to this voice to which no accent is a stranger. This sonnet indeed thematizes the gestation of an individual poetic voice, combining seemingly disparate elements, which constitute the prime matter of a complex, composite identity, just as the raw material in the athanor is the basis of the philosopher’s stone.

MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS   21

The sonnet reveals characteristics central to its author’s work and to my study, since it calls attention to multilingualism and a strategic choice of genres and intertexts. Using other and minor languages in a body of work written mainly in a major language, the poet problematizes the relation of minor and major languages, showing that minor languages have the capacity to challenge and reinscribe dominant languages, and also emphasizes the multilingualism of minority cultures. The poet in question is Sadia Lévy (1875–1951), an Algerian Jew who wrote in Oran in the early twentieth century, the symbolist author of hebraized latinate verses in French.1 Lévy’s work mixes poetic devices and combines languages and cultural discourses. The result is a radical, boundary-bashing, category-crashing taste of what poetry is capable of—indeed of what poetry is allowed to do—and a fascinating glimpse of how poetry can represent or express identity. It both reflects and exemplifies the very intricate cultural negotiations that Jews, in their complicated position, engaged in in colonial Algeria. In Lévy’s case, the issue of language is complicated by the Algerian context. Living in an Arab country under French rule, he chooses to write in the language of the colonizer. Not only does he adopt French, but he revels in both its expressive possibilities and its poetic traditions—an embrace that helps to explain why he has been consistently overlooked. Simultaneously, he chooses not to write in Arabic, the dominant language of daily life in Algeria, even if it then carried no political power. His French, however, is far from a mimicking of Algeria’s rulers. It is not only laden with the references of a classical French education—with sources from ancient Greece to the Latins and across the spectrum of European letters—but is also infused with Hebrew and some Ladino, languages that are most definitely minor whether in the Arabic or the French context. Because he is an Algerian Jewish poet writing in colonial Algeria, the discussion of Sadia Lévy’s work forces me to enter another controversial domain, since Lévy calls into question the boundaries of francophone studies and our understanding of the country’s relationship to “colonial” identity. The more we search, the more complex our assessment of this forgotten author becomes. His combination of Jewish and symbolist discourses, and the mixture of languages in his work, does far more than mine the colonial language; Sadia Lévy’s unique mixture reveals the poet’s simultaneous attraction to and ambivalence about France, and shows his efforts to establish poetically an original Jewish-Maghrebi identity.

. . .

22   MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS

Sadia Lévy was born in Oran, Algeria, into a bourgeois Jewish family that had arrived in Sidi Bel Abbés from Gibraltar and Tétouan. He lived there most of his life, excelling in the city’s lycée, except for a number of years he spent in Paris, where he studied at the École des sciences politiques and frequented the symbolist milieu. Besides French, his language of choice, Lévy knew Spanish, Hebrew, and the Judeo-Maghrebi dialects of Spanish and Arabic. He began writing poetry in 1894. In 1896, collaborating with the pied-noir (i.e., French Algerian) novelist Robert Randau,2 he published Rabbin,3 one of the first Algerian novels written in French (according to Guy Dugas, the first francophone work by an Arab Muslim author would appear only twenty-five years later).4 Described by Dugas as a “coarse depiction of the Moroccan Jewish community and its desires for emancipation,”5 Rabbin is a novel that discusses and reveals North African Jewish customs and social practices. It tells the story of a Moroccan rabbi from Tétouan, fascinated with France, who increasingly frenchifies himself; he slowly abandons customs, language, and religion, eventually leaving the mellah (Jewish quarter), and moving to Sidi Bel Abbés in Algeria. There he proceeds to adopt secular cultural practices6 and becomes a successful businessman. Randau described Rabbin as a novel depicting “the anguish and the conflicts of conscience of a Moroccan Jew extracted from his ethnic milieu, still half-savage, and taken to civilized Algeria, where the vibrant activity surprised him.”7 The novel’s plot introduces issues of modernization and acculturation then central to the lives of North African Jews. This novel presents a problem to the literary historiography of Maghrebi literature in French. Guy Dugas claims that, when published, it was not well received by the Jewish community in Oran, not only because of its negative portrayal of them, but also because it was written in French, a choice that appeared to be a deliberate attempt by the author to break away from his community. Linguistically, therefore, the novel appeared to emphasize its own controversial themes, reflecting the apparent tension between an old order, guided by religious principles and traditional communal life, and a new one, where the influence of French culture and ideals changed the manner in which Jews saw both the world and themselves. Commenting on the reception of Rabbin by the Jewish community in Algeria, Guy Dugas states: Writing, especially about oneself, means, in effect, to search for exile within the group, to try to extract oneself from it, to exorcise one’s link to his or her own, to the collective. Such a distancing is even more obvious when a writer decides to express him- or herself in another language, and to an audience who

MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS   23

are ­strangers to the original group. It is precisely because writing in a foreign language—and often for foreign publishers—was regarded in the interwar years as a desire for a break, that the still powerful Algerian Jewry reacted so violently to the publishing of novels such as Rabbin or Le sein blanc [by Elissa Rhaïs].8

But even though Rabbin came out in 1896, no account of “francophone literature,” “littérature maghrébine d’expression française,” “littérature indigène d’expression française,” or any of the other terms used to refer to literature written in French by autochthonous North Africans, will include Sadia Lévy or his pioneer novel. According to Dugas, “the first volumes [of Judeo-Maghrebi literature] are published in the beginning of the [twentieth] century, about thirty years earlier than those by Muslim Arab authors.”9 Dugas adds that Rabbin was also the first Jewish-Maghrebi work in French (“if we exclude a vaudeville [comic work] mimeographed in Constantinople in 1880”); the first book in French by a Tunisian author appeared in 1919, and the first by a Moroccan author, in 1925. Mildred Mortimer does not acknowledge Lévy’s novel and identifies Mohammed (Caïd) Ben Chérif as the author of the first novel written by an Algerian in French. His novel Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier [Arab soldier in the French army] (reprinted in Paris by Publisud in 1997) was published only in 1920. She mentions another early novel, the 1925 Zohra: La femme du mineur, by ­Abdelkader Hadj Hamou (Fikri), and the famous tales of Cagayous, written in 1894 by the European Auguste Robinet (Musette). Mortimer cites no Jewish Maghrebi work.10 In “Inscribing a Maghrebian Identity in French,” Farida AbuHaidar also comments on Ben Chérif ’s novel, erroneously considered “the first example of Francophone fiction by a Maghrebian” (18).11 Also ignoring Lévy’s Rabbin, Jean Déjeux agrees that Ahmed Ben ­Mostapha, goumier is “the first [novel] published by an Algerian” (19), and that Fikri’s Zohra: La femme du mineur is the second. Only Abdelkader Djeghloul refers to the Kabyle writers Mouloud Feraoun and Taous Amrouche, identified with the movement for independence in the 1950s, but he argues that in fact Algerian literature in French does not begin with them.12 According to Djeghloul, the first nouvelle was La vengeance du Cheikh, written by Rahal in 1891, but the first novel (roman) was Bouri Ahmed’s Musulmans et chrétiens, published in episodes ( feuilletons) in the newspaper El Hack in 1912. Djeghloul rejects the characterization of this literature in French by indigenous Algerian writers as “assimilationist,” calling that judgment “too quick and erroneous,” although it seems well accepted among scholars of francophonie.13 “Most of the time the critics only talk

24   MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS

about the authors who appeared during the 1950s, forgetting those who preceded them, either because their works are hard to find or, as it was written, because they had the ‘assimilated gaze’ [le regard assimilé],” Déjeux explains.14 Déjeux acknowledges Jewish participation in Maghrebi literature, but only in Tunisia and Morocco: “We don’t hold on to the authors of Jewish origin in Algeria: the 1870 Crémieux Decree turned the members of the Algerian Jewish community into Frenchmen.”15 He adds that it was in Tunisia, in 1919, that Jews first wrote stories about the hara, the Jewish quarter, citing names such as J. Vehel, Vitalis Danon, Rivel, and Benatar.16 This brief overview offers intriguing data. Since Algerian Jews were collectively made French citizens in 1870, scholars of francophone literature do not consider their literature “Algerian,” and most often do not consider it at all. If not necessarily in limbo, these works tend to be erased from the record. Mortimer acknowledges Auguste Robinet, who was a pied-noir. Somehow his French family and citizenship do not trump his place of birth or preclude his inclusion among the “Algerians,” a recognition not extended to the Jewish authors, even though the ancestors of most Algerian Jews had lived in the country for some two thousand years.17 The fact that Algerian Jews were granted French citizenship is the repeated argument, in Jean Déjeux’s words, for not “hold[ing] on to authors of Jewish origin in Algeria.” But Déjeux does not seem to see citizenship as an issue in the case of the “indigenous French citizen” (indigène citoyen Français) Hadj Hamou (Fikri), a member of the frenchified indigenous elite, whose Zohra he regards as “the second novel written in French by an Algerian.”18 Hadj Hamou was a Freemason, a professor of Arabic and vice president of the Association of Algerian Writers, founded by the “Algerianists.”19 Like Sadia Lévy, he co-authored a book with Robert Randau, in his case Les compagnons du jardin (1933).20 In a rare reference to Lévy as an indigène, Claude Lanziou employs the phrase “literary mixing” to explain the connection between Randau and Lévy and Randau and Fikri, saying: “This attention to the autochthonous population, this desire to depict its life and aspirations as truthfully as possible, explains why Robert Randau practiced literary mixing by writing some of his works with a Jew—Sadia Lévy—and a Muslim—Mohamed Fikri (Abd el-Kader Hadj Hamou).21 Generally, though, Lévy remains absent from accounts of Maghrebi writing in French or francophone literature. The criteria used to exclude Rabbin and its author, Lévy, but to include Cagayous and Musette and Zohra and Fikri, do not

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seem very consistent. The three authors were Algerian, all of them were French citizens; one was Jewish, one was Christian, and one was Muslim. Claiming the privileges of French citizenship as the reason to strip Jewish authors from their part in the cultural and literary makeup of Algeria seems to be an ideological choice. France granted and denied such privileges at whim, showing the precariousness of a title to citizenship that can be arbitrarily revoked. If colonial France decreed the Jews to be French, France likewise stripped them of French citizenship under the Nazi-friendly Vichy government, leaving them with none. No other group was neither French nor Algerian nor anything else—that is, stateless, literally without documents—a situation that revealed the essential fragility of their position, as Jacques Derrida has so insistently asserted.22 However, in this case, as I said earlier, the double standard is clear: inasmuch as he was a Jewish French citizen, Lévy and his Rabbin do not count as Algerian; since he was a Muslim French citizen, Fikri and his Zohra do. We shall return to this double standard later; for now, let’s continue to explore Lévy and his other works. Besides Rabbin, Lévy collaborated with Robert Randau on XI journées en force (1902)23 and the unfinished, unpublished novel El. He also co-edited, with René Ghil and Jean Royère, the Parisian journal Écrits pour l’art, publishing, among others, F.-T. Marinetti and Louis de ­Gonzague-Frick. Lévy was one of the principal contributors to the journal La Phalange, edited by Jean Royère, who published Apollinaire and ValéryLarbaud’s first verses to appear in print. Through their role as editors, these “marginal symbolists” served as mediators for symbolists, futurists, and cubists; their role, though rarely acknowledged, demonstrates the openness of the margins of such a movement to multiple and partial affiliations, allowing innovation to penetrate the center.24 Between March 1905 and February 1906, Lévy saw his new novel La geste éparse de Kehath ben Lévi: Faits et dits recueillis pour un essai sur le stylisme (­Kehath ben Lévi’s Scattered Action: Facts and Sayings Collected for an Essay on Stylistics) almost entirely published in installments in Écrits pour l’art.25 Its hero is an aesthete, living in isolation, surrounded by art and books and immersed in mystical thoughts. Quoting Edgar Allan Poe, Nietzsche and ­Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), among others, and using kabbalistic images and concepts, ­Kehath is a sort of Jewish version of Huysmans’s famous protagonist Des E ­ sseintes.26 “L’après-midi d’un styliste” (The Afternoon of a Stylist; echoing S­ téphane Mallarmé’s poem “L’après-midi d’un faune”), “La Bastille d’Ivoire” (The Ivory ­Bastille), and “Insomnie et la Vêprée” (Insomnia and Vespers) are the titles of

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some of the novel’s “episodes.” In La Phalange, Lévy also published “Quelques Psaumes,” his own “rhythmic translations” from the biblical Book of Psalms, which Jean ­Royère says in his preface to Lévy’s Abishag, “garnered the respect of Hebrew scholars and the admiration of a fervent admirer of the Bible such as the poet Francis Vielé-Griffin, among others. The critics were unanimous in lauding his new translation.”27 Around 1933, following a tracheotomy, Lévy published his notes on his aphasia in a book titled Sensations d’un égorgé.28 As a poet, he published the Parnassian-inspired volume Treize à la douzaine,29 but his most important poetic work is a collection entitled Abishag. Although it consists for the most part of poems written in the interwar years, because of growing antisemitism, the Vichy regime’s anti-Jewish laws, and Lévy’s own increasingly introspective, antisocial posture, Abishag wasn’t published during his lifetime, but collected and published only posthumously, in Monte Carlo, in 1957.30 Described by Jean Royère as a “breviary of worship of women,” and as singing “the wonders of the feminine body,”31 the volume is divided into two parts: the first includes forty-two poems addressed to the muse the poet calls “Abishag” and is predominantly marked by the metonymy of “breasts.” The second consists of five elegies to his daughter, who had died prematurely in 1928, and three memorial tombeaux. “Pour accorder l’instrument,” quoted above, belongs to the first part. “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil,” written in 1925, a poem I discuss later on, is the third tombeau and the last poem in the book. Although virtually ignored today, even among the ranks of the minor symbolist poets,32 Sadia Lévy was once part of the circuit that included the famous salons in Paris. He had his own salon, frequented by the likes of Max Jacob, René Ghil, Apollinaire, and Marie Laurencin. During his trips to Paris he also attended Mallarmé’s mardis, and was friends with Jean Moréas, Jean Royère, Marius and Ary Leblond, André Spire, and Gustave Kahn—the first vers-libriste (author of free verses), to whom “Pour accorder l’instrument” is dedicated. He was a regular at La Phalange’s banquets as well. Apollinaire and Lévy visited each other, and it seems that Lévy was Apollinaire’s “Jewish model,” since his red hair and other physical traits, referred to in personal letters,33 are evident in most of the Jewish characters in the poems in Apollinaire’s Alcools: in “Zone,” the Christ figure is referred to as “la torche aux cheveux roux” (the red-haired torch), and in “Larron,” the title character is described as “crédule et roux” (credulous and red-haired).34 In April 1903, reviewing XI journées en force for La Grande France, Apollinaire describes Sadia Lévy and his poetic style, point-

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ing at the role Hebrew words and genres played in his work. Lévy, he says, is “one of those pure and wise Magi from Gustave Moreau’s painting, so youthful that we might mistake them for princesses. When we read him, we admire the ornate spirit in which lie Hebrew words, heavy as tiaras, and lyric images from moallacas. It is possible to recognize in the brevity of his sentence and of his subtle art the concise and magic rhythm of the Psalms.”35 Lévy confesses his admiration for the pleiad of French symbolist poets. He writes of how Robert Randau acted as his guide throughout Paris, “not only in the glorious avenues of our [French] Belles-Lettres, but in all the meccas of beauty36 where, still alive, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Moréas, gave rise to the constellation of the Symbol.”37 And in Abishag’s “Puisque je suis jaloux” (Because I am Jealous), Lévy names “[his] masters and [his] gods”: “Edgar Poe and Villiers, Mallarmé, Baudelaire.”38 Lévy’s own influence and erudition were later to be recognized by Algerian poets such as Jean-Richard Smadja, Marcello Fabri, and the great Jean Sénac, considered one of the most important poets of independent Algeria, who in his unpublished Carnets intimes reveals a sort of veneration for Lévy.39 But it is Jean Royère who most effectively acknowledges Lévy’s part in a long tradition of French rhythmic poetry, which he calls musiciste: “Sadia Lévy is very old and he has many names, having been called Charles d’Orléans, Villon, Joachim du Bellay, Rémy Belleau, Voiture, Benserade, Maurice Scève, Gérard de Nerval and, lately, Mallarmé.”40 Against the grain of current scholarship, Yaël Even-Lévy assesses Lévy’s work as part of the francophone canon, while also recognizing the poet’s link, and place, in French literature: “Chronologically, when placed in French literary history, Lévy may be considered as a Late-French-symbolist. When taking into consideration that Algeria was Lévy’s native land and that much of his poetry was written there, Lévy’s poetry could be also considered as that of a Francophone-Symbolist.”41 Sadia Lévy’s attempt to inscribe himself in the canon of French literature was ultimately not very successful, as evidenced by how he is almost completely forgotten today. His omission from the record of Algerian francophone literature adds to his oblivion. He was almost forgotten by the time of his death in 1951, when his role among the symbolists in the early twentieth century was remembered by a few Algerian journals, such as L’Oran Républicain and A ­ frique, the Algerianist journal created in 1924. (Afrique, in fact, devoted a whole issue to Lévy upon his death, heralding him as “a pioneer of Algerian letters.”)42

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Lévy’s desire to achieve a place in the canon, however, reveals his deep connection to France. Lévy’s position as a multilingual Algerian Jew, writing mainly from Oran and combining universes of discourse and myriad cultural references, is an ambiguous one. The complexities only become more fascinating as we delve into the historical and political realm in which he wrote.

. . . The process of modernization that had begun in the eighteenth century among European Jews—marked both by the French Revolution’s emancipation of the Jews and by the advent of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and the Wissenchaft des Judentums, or Jewish Studies, movement in Germany—eventually reached the Levant, however late.43 During the nineteenth century, institutions were created in Europe to “educate,” “civilize,” and ultimately Westernize the seemingly uncouth Jews living in Muslim lands, significantly influencing their political, economic, and cultural life. Perhaps none was as influential as the ­Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), founded by French Jews in 1860, which in its “civilizing mission” became the main arm for the acculturation of Levantine Jews. French Jews, known after their emancipation as israélites,44 now enjoyed social upward mobility and better opportunities, which made them proud citizens of France and great believers in the values of the Revolution. They came to view France as “the first country in the universe” and the French as “the true savior[s] of the world.”45And as Michel Abitbol has observed, “[f]rom the French people as ‘saviors of the world’ to French Jews as saviors of the Jewish world, there was only one step.”46 To show their solidarity with their oppressed brethren in North Africa and the Levant, French Jews thus set out to bring them liberation, salvation, and “regeneration.” The AIU replaced the previous institutional situation in Algeria, which had been dominated by Algerian consistoires (Jewish religious administrations) linked to France.47 Created by a cadre of younger middle-class professional Jews dissatisfied with the consistoires and their policy of “changing institutions,” the AIU aimed to “change men”—training a generation to be useful, honorable citizens in society.48 Basing themselves on the principle of international Jewish solidarity, its creators looked to combat antisemitism around the world. The AIU thus sought to integrate Sephardic Jews in Muslim lands en masse into modern European civilization, and in order to do so, it worked not only to reform Jewish society and culture, but also to bring about Jewish legal emancipation. Its main work was the building of schools across North Africa and the

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Middle East, which transformed Jewish life, prompting intense cultural and linguistic changes in the Jewish world of these regions.49 After the arrival of the AIU in French colonial Algeria (1830–1962) and the French protectorates of Tunisia (1881–1956) and Morocco (1912–1956), French schools increasingly replaced the traditional Jewish elementary school.50 Taught by Paris-trained Jewish teachers, AIU curricula combined an essentially French education with subjects such as Jewish history, Jewish religion, and Hebrew. Contact with French culture on a daily basis encouraged the adoption of European values and practices. Younger generations of Jewish students thus increasingly identified with France and with the moral, secular, and philosophical values that French literature represented, leading to a radical shift in Jewish Maghrebi society. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Victor Hugo became revered figures in a new, rational secular order that fundamentally transformed a society hither­to structured in communal, religious, and ethnic terms. This French-oriented westernizing process had begun earlier—as we have seen, with the French Revolution. Because of its republican values, and because it effectively brought about the emancipation of Jews for the first time in Europe, the Revolution inspired Maghrebi Jews with a new respect for France.51 This admiration persisted even as younger generations, further removed from the Revolution, came to see the shortcomings of legal emancipation. France came to represent freedom and reason, concepts introduced by the Lumières— the Enlightenment—whose works gradually replaced the traditional ones in North African Jewish libraries. The impact of French culture progressively extended beyond the Jewish middle class, and tastes and habits across the Maghreb underwent significant changes. Most notably, with the progressive urbanization brought about by French colonization, Maghrebi Jews’ social structure underwent profound alterations, as did the cities of the Maghreb. Jews began to move away from the traditional craft industries into white-collar professions. Access to education also changed significantly, since girls and women were now allowed to attend school.52 Women joined the workforce in larger numbers, even if this was still, as a rule, limited to the period before marriage. Several levels in the lives of Maghrebi Jews were affected by French influence and the larger sociopolitical modernization of the Jewish Maghreb. From mundane details of daily life, from clothes through dietary practices, and up to the several life-cycle rituals that give rhythm to Jewish life, Jews experienced a significant change in the way they were used to living.

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This trend swept across the whole of North Africa, but it is important to observe what was unique to Algeria.53 The French conquest of Algeria in 1830 caused profound changes in the political, military, educational, and overall cultural landscape of the region. After 1848, Algeria was governed as part of France, as were Algerian Jews. Even before the AIU was established, Algerian Jews received a European education in the republican schools established during the decade following the French occupation. An 1845 edict determined that France would be responsible for the education of the Jews in Algeria, including their religious education.54 Once the process of secularization and the embrace of French moral and cultural values began, rationalism and individualism became cherished concepts. The fact that Jews in Algeria were able to attend the public school system very early on eased the process of their becoming French, which was among the fastest and most successful in North Africa. It also made the AIU’s educational and intellectual role less relevant in Algeria than it would be in the protectorate of Morocco—where AIU schools were basically the only ones attended by Jews—and even in Tunisia—where Jews could attend either AIU or Protectorate schools.55 Jews linked their chances of social mobility to education and accepted their role as intermediaries between the French—the economic, political, and cultural power—and the Muslims. This mediator role was further reinforced by the aforementioned Crémieux Decree, signed in 1870, which granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews.56 With this collective naturalization, which guaranteed them civil and political rights equal to those of the French—including the right to attend the secular, integrated French public schools—the Jews in Algeria were no longer considered indigènes—that term was now restricted to Arab and Berber Muslims. The status of Jews thus changed overnight from “colonized” to “colonizers.” They suddenly lived under the rule of French civil law and the jurisdiction of French courts, instead of the Mosaic law, decided in rabbinical courts, which had always arbitrated their lives. Their new role as part of the French electorate gave the Jews new political power, provoking resentment among the French and other European settlers, who de facto marginalized them, leaving Jews in a somewhat ambivalent position. Indeed, European antisemitism soon found fertile ground in Algeria, where pogroms and other violent anti-Jewish hostilities occurred with the connivance of the authorities and were often justified by the press.57 The most powerful vehicle of acculturation in Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa was the French language. French was the main instrument the

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AIU schools used to enlist the masses of Sephardic Jews into their ranks. 58 It was the language of modernization and the lingua franca of trade in the Levant. French allowed social mobility, and as the language of the republican and revolutionary values, it embodied the ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. The ethno-linguistic stereotype that defined French as the “language of culture” par excellence, did work in this context, especially in Maghrebi Jewish communities, where superstitious beliefs and practices held fast.59 To be sure, French was advertised as the language of culture, progress, and modernity. The French— including French Jews—were portrayed as bearers of the light that would redeem Maghrebi Jews from the darkness in which they were immersed. There is no doubt that this patronizing and prejudiced view shaped how Algerian Jews eventually saw themselves and the French.60 In the end, a true francophilie led to a more encompassing francophonie. Any francophone text is, by definition, inscribed in a plurilinguistic field.61 What makes the situation of Jewish writers in the Maghreb somewhat more complex is the fact that, not only do they write in an Arabic context, but their literary tradition is also informed by Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Ladino ­literatures.62 Within their own community, diglossia was the norm, with Jews speaking Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish (mostly Haketía, the Judeo-Spanish of northern Morocco) or Judeo-Arabic, and sometimes also Berber.63 Arabic itself is diglossic, with a hierarchy established between a literary Arabic and a series of spoken dialects. Nowadays Arabic is even considered hetero­glossic, since there are intermediary dialects (e.g., al-mutawasat). Judeo-Arabic is written in Hebrew characters, as are all the other Jewish languages. Literary Judeo-Arabic tends to be closer to a spoken Arabic, presenting several colloquial features of dialectal spoken Judeo-Arabic. Jews typically had a weak knowledge of written Arabic. In a linguistic context in which Arabic was considered the high, literary, and poetic language, and the Berber, Judeo-Spanish, Hebrew, and Judeo-­ Arabic languages spoken in the Jewish communities were scorned, French was a welcome tool for emancipation. It was accepted as a third alternative, one that might bring prestige to Jews. The Jews’ embrace of francophonie was a clear recognition that French, the language of high culture, and the bearer of “French civilization,” was not only a ticket to modernity, but could work equally well as a redeemer of the Jews in a Muslim Arab society that oppressed them.64 Such possibilities resulted in an acceptance of the colonial system and a certain identification with colonial powers—an identification that, after

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r­ epeated betrayals by France, was transformed, for the most part, into an identification with Zionism. It is important to remember the social position of Jews in the Maghreb. The legal status of Jews in the “land of Islam” (dar-al-islam) was that of dhimmi, or “protected people.” According to the Pact of Umar and Muslim canonical law, a dhimmi was the beneficiary of dhimma, “protection,” “the term used to designate the sort of indefinitely renewed contract through which the Muslim community accords hospitality and protection to members of other revealed religions, on condition of their acknowledging the domination of Islam.”65 Jews, then, were strangers to Islam, infidel “guests” to be protected, their lives spared if they recognized their submission as a religious minority to the Muslim Arab aristocracy. Such a protection offered some rights—person and possessions were declared inviolable, freedom of religious practice and autonomy were granted—but it came with a high price, literally, in the guise of two taxes: a land tax called kharaj, and a poll tax expressing subjection, the djizya, which determined the fiscal status of dhimmis. Legally and judicially, ­dhimmis were at a disadvantage. Symbolically, different restrictions were clearly designed to mark their inferior social status, resulting in what was perceived as a degrading, humiliating condition.66 French appeared to be the one alternative that could make the Jews citizens rather than dhimmis. It was the viable passport to the civil rights that their metropolitan “brothers” had obtained with the 1789 Revolution. Unlike Muslims, who saw France as the colonial oppressor that muzzled them, Jews saw in France an alternative and embraced the French, along with their language, culture, ­values, and colonial project. Since Jewish Maghrebi writers looked to the West during the late nineteenth century, French was seen by them as a choice, not an imposition. In contrast, Muslim Arab Maghrebi writers for the most part defined themselves in opposition to French colonialism, despite their use of the colonial language.67 Across the Maghreb the process of French acculturation was probably quickest and most successful in Algeria; by the 1930s, French had supplanted all other languages and had become the primary one in many Jewish homes.

. . . With this multilingual and multicultural history in mind, let us now return to the poem. What is most striking at first reading of “Pour accorder l’instrument” is the packaging of such novelty and originality into an exceedingly traditional form. A classical Petrarchan sonnet, following the regular rhyme scheme of

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abba abba ccd ede, the poem offers an interweaving of cultural and linguistic references that reveals a daring, innovative poetic stance. The initial alliterative and paranomasic verse—“Let’s amuse ourselves tonight, musician Muse”—places the poem in the realm of song. It stresses, from the outset, the poem’s musicality, not only in what it says, but also in the message it bears in its own repetitive mellifluous sounds.68 The emphasis on music is developed throughout the poem by associating instruments and genres of the Greco-Latin tradition—the flute and the eclogue—with those of biblical origin—the kinnor (a stringed instrument related to the lyre)69 and the psalm. In the end, the blending of these two sets of elements produces a traditional French pastoral genre, the villanelle,70 now a hybrid product in which Hebrew and Latin, “East” and “West,” conjoin and transform one another. When the poet suggests a collaborative creative enterprise to his muse— “Crafting into sonnet fourteen light verses”—he already proposes a mixture that accentuates the plurality of languages and traditions: choosing intertexts from Arcadian times to craft a modern sonnet to be sung accompanied by an instrument of “Phoenician soul.” The bucolic image of pastoral shepherds contrasts with the urban and commercial image of the sailors introduced into the text by mention of the Phoenicians. The combination of disparate elements is made explicit, indeed thematized, in the phrase “laughter and cries mingled,” which in turn introduces the poet’s uniqueness, as he affirms his own individual voice: “And through it I have my voice, as each has his own.” But the poet admits that his unique voice is a plural one, marked by many accents, since— like the instrument through which it comes—his voice comprehends different languages: “I know no accent stranger to it.” The choice of the word “Phoenician” to qualify the instrument’s soul enhances the composite nature of the poet’s voice and of the poem itself as it unfolds before us. At the same time, the word “Phoenician” offers a possible point of intersection among these multiple integrating strands, exhibiting as it does significant connections to both East and West. Following the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar, Jews are thought to have settled in Phoenician colonies in North Africa, where they lived under Phoenician rule, thus establishing a constant presence on the continent. The Phoenicians here allow the poet to claim an old link to African history and soil.71 Phoenician, which like Hebrew and Moabite belongs to the Canaanite group of Semitic languages, is related to both the Hebrew and Greco-Latin components of the poet’s voice. ­Hebrew is in fact written in what is still called the Phoenician alphabet, which, borrowed and

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transformed by the Greeks, was also the source from which Greek, Latin, and other Western alphabets derived. Ancient Phoenicia moreover corresponds to present-day Lebanon, the cultural center of the francophone Levant. All in all, this traces a surprising linkage between French and Hebrew. The “athanor” reference adds yet another component—the Arab—to the cauldron of languages and cultural formations interacting in the poem. More important, it also stresses the role of mixture and transmutation. Known by the alchemists as the “oven of immortal fire”—literally, the place where the “egg” containing the philosopher’s stone matter was placed and slowly burned—the athanor also symbolizes the location of physical, moral, and mystical transmutations.72 It is where all things are blended and transformed, where life gives rise to the new. Before introducing the most decidedly Hebrew strand of his voice, the poet first speaks of “atavism”: “Mystery of atavism in the immense Athanor!” In doing so he acknowledges a lineage, a common history, and characteristics shared with his ancestors. The image that represents this inheritance in the poem is the psalmist’s gift to him of a kinnor: “A psalmist, a Levite has handed me his Kinnor . . .” This line finds a parallel, as we shall see, in the reference to another stringed instrument, the gitit, in the last poem of the volume, “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil”: “The Menatzeah is dead but his gitit, although ­broken, / We don’t know the poet who has taken it, we don’t know!” This image of a poet bestowing his musical instrument on another reinforces both the speaker’s self-identification as a poet, in a parallel with the Arcadian shepherds at the beginning of the poem—for Levites were the psalmists, the poets/singers of the Temple—and the connection of poetry to orality and musicality, since the poem is to be spoken or chanted. As much as the poet claims Hebrew culture as a crucial element in his mélange, it comes marked by the presence of the other. It is not just a rhyme that makes Lévy include Hiram in the poem, for the speaker has already mentioned the “Phoenician soul” of his instrument, which we now know is a kinnor. Solomon, who dedicated seven years to building the Temple that his father David dreamed of, is not mentioned here. Instead, it is King Hiram of Phoenicia who figures as the builder of the Temple. According to the Hebrew Bible, this is factually true, but not entirely accurate. The Phoenicians were David’s and Solomon’s allies, and Hiram supplied timber, gold, carpenters, stonecutters, and on-site supervision for the Temple and other building projects. As a skilled bronze craftsman, Hiram was himself invited to Jerusalem to carve, among

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other smaller works, two great bronze pillars and capitals, together with the elaborate pomegranate and lily work atop the pillars.73 Lévy’s inclusion of Hiram valorizes the actual worker, the builder, the craftsman—perhaps in a somewhat Parnassian identification with the work of the poet, whose activity is linked similarly to the Hebrews through the Levites’ song. But Hiram also represents the other within, for he appears prominently at the very moment when the poet is claiming his own Hebrew heritage. Hiram’s role in the building of the Temple reminds us of the two peoples’ cultural and economic interdependence. The reference to his name is thus an acknowledgement of the role the other plays in the definition of one’s self—which once more reveals itself as multiple and plural. If “Phoenician” successfully encompasses the various cultural (or at least linguistic) traditions Lévy is claiming, the athanor complicates the idea of a possible “pure” beginning, an Ur-origin. It scrambles all, intersecting the various elements so that they become something other than what they were, retaining some of their unique characteristics but now collectively transformed into something new. The speaker of the poem affirms himself as a poet acknowledging all these combined heritages, and offers his new creation, in which Latin and Hebrew are identifiable but not fully recognizable as either language. In the final line, Lévy takes from the second of Virgil’s Eclogues the verse “The handsome shepherd Corydon burned for fair Alexis [Formonsum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexim]”). He transforms it into “Formosam Kehatus ardebat Séfiram,” where Kehath is the poet and Séfira, his wife. Kehath is the French transliteration of the Hebrew ‫קהת‬, which in English is Kohath, the son of Levi, leader of a priestly family, ancestor of Moses and Aaron.74 Séfira itself is a H ­ ebrew name, ‫( צפירה‬Tzefirah). Its French transliteration is the same as that of ‫( ספירה‬Sefirah), which in kabbalistic cosmogony is one of the many emanations of God. Lévy takes the Hebrew names and imposes the Latin declension upon them, making a textual representation of his multi-accented poetic voice—and an emblem of his identity. Pledging allegiance to two different classical traditions at one and the same time, Lévy reveals much of his poetic project through this hebraized Latin, an elitist pidgin of sorts. “Pour accorder l’instrument” is thus a strong example of Lévy’s attempt to forge a specific Jewish Maghrebi poetic identity that integrates diverse cultural references. Using the sonnet form and the alexandrine verse, Lévy is claiming his place in French poetry. With the emphasis on voice and music, he is rein-

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forcing his idea of poetry as rhythm, his symbolist musical values, as well as his repeated and Jakobsonian belief, avant Jakobson, in the “marriage of sound and meaning.” “Work and wordplay where the words make a song / Marriage of unanimous sound and meaning,” he writes in the poem “Hippocrène.”75 Combining several languages, elements of pastoral poetry, allusions to and citations of Latin poetry as well as biblical stories, Lévy is affirming himself as a multi­ lingual poet whose intertextual choices reveal different cultural affiliations in the combination of two universes of discourse.

. . . Sadia Lévy is positioned within this historical context of Westernization, acculturation, and frenchification of the Jewish Maghreb, and at the crossroads of the Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, and French languages and literary traditions. A Jew in Arab lands, shaped by both East and West, Lévy is a fascinating example who encourages us to consider the polylingual aspects of minority cultures. He is also an author who allows us to look at the development of modernism from a different angle. Writing away from the literary center, and yet connected to it in an ambivalent combination of conformity and resistance, Lévy identifies with symbolism, in itself a liminal movement between premodernism and modernism. He also invites us to look at modernism differently because of his privileged linguistic resources, and because of his use of traditional genres that tread a fine line between the popular and the erudite, the oral and the written, the secular and the sacred—perhaps his most unique balancing act. In addition, Sadia Lévy, as a Maghrebi writer, could change the standard Jewish historical narrative, destabilizing certain traditional views of Jewish culture, particularly about Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews.76 Throughout most of Abishag, Lévy writes in sonnets, generally in alexandrines, the prototypical twelve-syllable French verse. His work reveals his French education, deploying references that range from Greek and Roman antiquity to nineteenth-century prose and poetry, via Renaissance poetry and seventeenth-century drama and philosophy. In what seems like a deliberate attempt to etch his figure into the history of French poetry, Lévy fills his poems with allusions to sixteenth- and nineteenth-century poets. Various references to Rome and Greece, including their history and mythology, and their great poets, such as Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, give a Renaissance-influenced tone to Lévy’s poetry—perhaps in apparent connection to Jean Moréas’s École romane (Roman School), which attempted to combine “symbolist subtlety and classic

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rigor.”77 Latinisms appear in titles, subtitles, and within the poems themselves, a device customary in Renaissance poetry. Furthermore, there are several references to the “prince of the poets,” Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85). With a few other poets who had studied under the same Hellenist and Latinist, Ronsard formed a group, later known as the Pléiade, that sought to renew French poetry, breaking with earlier traditions. He was committed to the ideas of the Défense et illustration de la langue française (The Defense and Illustration of the French Language [1549]), a manifesto published by his fellow poet Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), defending French as a viable language of literary creation in lieu of Latin. Ronsard was thereafter forgotten for two centuries, however, and then rediscovered as a lyric poet by the romantics. In “Interlude,” Lévy writes, “And Cassandra and Marie in whom Ronsard had joy,” in a direct reference to Ronsard’s Les Amours, specifically, Amours de Cassandre and Amours de Marie.78 In “Pick the Roses of Life,” line 5 reads, “Cite Horace and Ronsard! Pick the present,” directing the reader to the thematic and words of sonnet 43 of the second book of Sonnets pour Hélène, where the last line reads, “From here on pick the roses of life.” The theme of the muse’s immortality, won by the poet’s verses, developed in the same sonnet for Helen, reappears in Lévy’s “You have given me your heart” (23), particularly in an allusion in the last two lines. Abishag’s focus on breasts is shown in references to Clément Marot’s (1496– 1544) two well-known blasons79 about breasts in his Epigrammes. Lévy refers to them in “Praise to Young Breasts” (50): “Princely breasts whose blason Marot transmitted to us.” He also alludes to them in the title “Another Blason about Breasts” (18). Yet another sixteenth-century reference is Maurice Scève (1501–64), one of the Renaissance authors rehabilitated and honored by the symbolists, whose dixains (or dizains), poems with ten verses, Lévy mentions. Scève wrote a widely recognized dizain in verses of ten syllables (decasyllables) titled “Délie, Object of the Highest Virtue.” “Délie” is an anagram of “l’idée” (“the idea”), and the work is a mixture of mystical symbols and lyrical confidences about the poet’s beloved.80 Abishag’s epigraph is from Scève’s Délie, dixain 12. In “Autumn Feeling” (49), Lévy writes in lines 7–8: “Muse, I have sung you . . . (For similar ends / Scève for Délie crafted three hundred dizains).” Louise Labé (ca. 1522–66) also appears in Abishag, as does François Villon (ca. 1431–63), who, long forgotten, was rediscovered in the sixteenth century after he was published by Clément Marot. Jean Racine (1639–99), Molière (1622–73),

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and Blaise Pascal (1623–62) also make their way into Lévy’s poetry, be it either by the explicit mention of their names or by allusions to their work. In the poem “Interlude,” for instance, the lines “The poet is the Eros who wants to suffer ­adding / to the luck of being a thinker that of being a reed,” allude to Pascal’s fragments 347 and 348 in his Pensées (Thoughts), written before 1658 and published posthumously in 1669: “Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”81 Lévy’s final lines conclude a poem where the figure of the woman is not flat or one-dimensional. The beloved woman is compared to Christ (first stanza), is imagined as one of the prostitutes found in Villon’s poetry, as Ronsard’s muses, and as the poet Louise Labé (second stanza). The poet then refers to Pascal, Spinoza, Racine, and Goethe, before finally evoking George Sand and Belgiojoso, the Italian princess Cristina Trivuelzio (1808–71). The Pascalian final lines develop the image of a poet combining passion and reason at the same time; a poet who, by loving her, transforms the beloved into a divine being (l.4). She is not deprived of physicality (l.5–6), but the poet admires her intellectual qualities as well: the references to Louise Labé, George Sand, and B ­ elgiojoso, all women who were thinkers and creators, say as much. But the thinker who embraces the suffering of a fragile reed also speaks to the poet’s keen recognition of his fragility in the world. However, if Pascal speaks of our fundamental weakness and balances it with an emphasis on our thinking capacity, our ability to perceive our condition in the world, and the dignity we can find only in thought, Lévy seems to twist this idea somewhat. The Algerian poet departs from the position that we think and try to comprehend the world—as if Enlightenment ideas were the default—and welcomes the fragility—the reed-like quality—that accompanies the aventure amoureuse. Greek Eros and romantic poet, Lévy warps the Port-Royal philosopher and theologian. These many literary and cultural references, combined and discussed as they are, make Lévy very French. They show off his French acculturation: by mastering them so well, he is, it seems, an ideal product of the French educational system in North Africa. The names that Lévy brings to his text from the nineteenth century are mainly those of symbolist poets and a few novelists, often co-existing in a poem with references to painters and composers of different eras. In “From here on pick the roses of life,” for example, Lévy sequentially refers to Frédéric Moreau and Marie Arnoux, protagonists of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education, Horace and Ronsard, Charles Baudelaire, Blaise Pascal and his abyss, Propertius and his Cynthia. In “Colloquium of a Socrates . . . ,” a poem the epigraph of which is taken from the “Sonnet d’Arvers,” besides the Greek philosopher, we

MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS   39

also find Dante and Beatrice, Abélard and Héloïse, Descartes and Queen Christina (41). “Edgar [Allan] Poe et [Auguste] Villiers [de l’Isle-Adam], [Stéphane] Mallarmé and Baudelaire” appear in “Because I am Jealous . . .” (40), whereas in “De la hart à la traque aux anges,” “Villon, Scève, Nerval, [Arthur] Rimbaud and then Mallarmé” form a pantheon together with Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, with an unexpected appearance of Patrice de La Tour du Pin (1911–75). Beethoven and Goethe, romantic icons, appear in “Despectus tibi sum” (“I despise you”), a poem itself titled after a Virgilian verse: “Young flowers, you need Beethoven or Goethe / To immortalize your summer perfumes . . .” (30). Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), the Spanish painter considered “the father of modern art,” also has his place in Lévy’s verse: in “Another Blason about Breasts” the poet compares his muse Abishag to Maja, the woman “depicted and promoted to History” (l.6) by Goya in two paintings depicting the same woman, dressed and nude, ἀ e Naked Maja (ca. 1800) and ἀ e Clothed Maja (1803) (18). Like Uri Zvi Greenberg, Sholem Asch, Marc Chagall, and other Jewish modernists, Lévy also appropriated the Christ figure. It is in Abishag, as EvenLevy has pointed out, that Christological motifs first appear in Judeo-Maghrebi poetry, mainly in the figure of the poet as Christ. For example, in “The Poet Remains” (44), “The poet has his cross in the Muse’s arms,” and in “Prelude” (19), the speaker/poet proclaims himself God’s “Christ, . . . prophet and . . . king.” Only in “Interlude” (24) does the figure of Christ represent someone other than the poet suffering for his beloved. In an inversion of roles, the muse Abishag is identified with Jesus Christ: the poet “imitate[s] Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar / To bring you myrrh and incense from the Bazaar / You who through love became divine”. All of these references reveal Lévy’s mastery of Western poetic, artistic, and musical sources, and the wealth of resources he employs in his poetry. If it is clear from the form, the language, and the dominant allusions in his work that Lévy wants to carve his niche in French poetry, other elements also vehemently affirm his allegiance to another tradition, beginning with the very title of his collection: Abishag. His muse, to whom the poet addresses the entire first part of the book, has a Hebrew rather than a Latin, Greek, or French name. Abishag is the beautiful maiden offered in his old age to the poet-musician king David (1 Kings 1:3), whom tradition identifies as the author of the Psalms,82 Na’yim zemirot Israel, “the sweet singer of Israel” (2 Sam. 23:2). By extension, David can figure as a metonymy for the poet.83 In addition, the speaker of Lévy’s poem usually refers to himself as Kehath, another Hebrew name.84 Since the protago-

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nists of XI journées en force, Kehath and El bear the same name, it seems that “Kehath” is Lévy’s poetic persona. Other Hebrew references include the use of “Eshett Haïl,” from Proverbs 31:10, as the counterpoint to the treacherous and deceitful woman, two poles of the traditional dichotomy representing women. “Eshet Hail celebrated by the Bible / The virtuous woman, incorruptible wife” replaces the saintly woman or the figure of Mary in his equally stereotypical, albeit hebraized, depiction of women.85 Another polarization—this time between fulfilled and virile sex and inaccessible object of desire, between the love of youth and the love of old age—is represented by two different women from King David’s harem. In “Because I am Jealous” (40), the poet addresses his muse: “Bathsheva of my days, Abishag of my nights.” The “Burning Bush” from Exodus 3:2 appears in “The Poet’s Bed”: “This monster, this human-faced burning bush.” Synagogues and a hazan are also mentioned, and Zion, as the mountain or the city of Jerusalem—a central and almost mythical site in traditional Hebrew poetry—figures side by side with Hippocrene, the mythological spring on Mount Helicon, considered a source of poetic inspiration.86 Furthermore, as we shall see below, the last poem in Abishag is a kinah (Hebrew for “lament” or “dirge”), articulating an explicit affiliation with a traditional Hebrew poetic genre. In the poem there are references not only to biblical characters and musical instruments, but also to the Kabbalah. Other non-Hebraic but Jewish elements also appear in Abishag, as, for example, in a poem titled “El Seloso” or “Recuerdos.” The title in Judeo-Spanish and the subtitle, “Coplas para guitarras,” make the genre quite explicit: it is a copla, which together with the romance and the canción lírica is one of the great genres of Sephardic poetry.87 The Muslim culture in which Sadia Lévy lived provides elements to his poetry as well. In different instances the poet refers to mosques, synagogues, and churches. In “Poet Remains,” the poet “watches / The city where he cannot tell Church from Temple / Where the Mosque . . .” (44). The city then appears as one that integrates elements of the three Abrahamic religions, where they share space and are regarded by the city’s inhabitants. Such a city, at this time, cannot be Paris or any other French city. French geography, however, is sung in several poems. One particularly remarkable poem combining French topography with Muslim and subtle Hebrew references is “­Autumn Feeling.” In it, the poet mentions “Saracen Alcazars” in a self-­descriptive and negative context: he is the “heir of rabbis chased by “Saracen Alcazars.” (49). He “suckled wisdom from the breast of the synagogue”—in a wordplay where

MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS   41

“au sein” can mean “amid,” “in,” or “at the breast” in the French “il tétais le savoir au sein des synagogues”—while in Île de France, in Paris, “An Aegipan sucked out the insight of the grapes (“Un Egipan suçait la clarté des raisins”).” Here, in the parallel between synagogues and wine, the poet establishes a clear relationship between himself and the Aegipan, or faun, straight from Mallarmé’s eclogue “L’Après-midi d’un faune” (The Afternoon of a Faun). Citing Mallarmé’s verse, “Ainsi, quand des raisins j’ai sucé la clarté” (l.57), marked by the italics in his text, Lévy contrasts himself to Mallarmé, if we take the speaker and the faun as metonymical representations of each poet: one is heir to rabbis and is in Algeria, learning in the synagogues; the other rewrites Greek mythology and is in Paris, learning “the divine transposition [that] goes from fact to ideal.”88 In this reference, Lévy reveals where Mallarmé’s text (in a pastoral genre that reworks Pan’s mythological story) stands in his personal canon, inasmuch as he calls it “éclogue des éclogues,” echoing here, in a perfectly French expression, the Hebrew superlative form found, for example, in the Song of Songs, Shir ha-Shirim. “Eclogues” rhymes with “decalogues” (“Neither from above fulminate my geste in decalogues”), which alludes to the Ten Commandments given to Moses at Sinai, albeit in an iconoclastic pluralization. The dialogue between Lévy and Mallarmé is revealing. It hints at the many facets of the tangled literary relationship between Algeria and France, and through it we can also accompany Lévy’s belated symbolism and the dynamics between center and periphery. Furthermore, in this dialogue we can witness the shaping of a canon where the Hebrew Bible and the symbolist Bible coexist harmoniously. Besides these references, in Abishag the speaker/poet once addresses his muse as “Houri,” one of the maidens offered to devout Muslim men in paradise (“Praise to Young Breasts”). Establishing a parallel between Abishag and Houri, Lévy creates a dynamic interaction between figures of two different religious and cultural systems. This intertwining, added to his Greco-Latin references, reinforces the idea that, perhaps because of his access to texts found in Middle Eastern cultures, and his position as a Maghrebi Jew, Lévy is open to both West and East.89 Furthermore, Lévy also implicitly points to the Mediterranean origin of Western culture—Greece and Rome. From this medley of sources and languages and references, Lévy explicitly positions himself in territory unprecedented within the Jewish Maghrebi community. Drinking from every spring, Lévy shapes his poetic path. He writes: Oint d’esprit par l’Abbé, les Rabbins et la Miss Encor adolescent, fleurant fraîcheurs d’enfance

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Ayant appris d’aimer dans le parler de France, J’allais, Muse, vers toi, velis plenissimis. With spirit anointed by the abbot, the rabbis, and the girl Still adolescent, with flowering fragrances of childhood, Having learned to love in the language of France, I went, O Muse, toward you, velis plenissimis [under full sail].

The poet is placed amid various cultures and gladly drinks from those different sources. Abbot and rabbis point to the Jewish and Christian textual sources and symbols that Lévy will engage in his poetry and remind the reader of the cultural plurality of Algeria. Phoenicians, Hebrews, Berbers, Romans, Vandals, and Arabs; saints and warriors, all had a part in the long and rich history of Algeria, and this diversity is at times summoned in linguistic and literary references. The poet thematizes language: he learned to love in French and embarked toward his muse, no longer in French, but in full Latin sail—velis plenissimis. This brief example reveals how Lévy eloquently expresses his position at the crossroads of various cultures through the use of multiple languages in his poetry. French is without a doubt the central language in his work—it is the language in which he “learned to love.” His French, however, is rare and refined, thoroughly marked by unusual words, neologisms, at times by shifts from the grammatical norm. Note the subtle license in “Encor adolescent” in the quatrain above, where the unstressed final “e” of “encore” is suppressed, perhaps in an attempt to make the two hemistichs, or six-syllable halves, of the alexandrine fall into place, and to emphasize the final assonant rhyme between them: adolesCENT and enFANce. Lévy’s French also receives borrowings from Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, and Hebrew. Latin enters Lévy’s text mainly via Horace and Virgil, and because of the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, even English is present—“Tell me that NEVERMORE is the cry of the raven,” from “I Dreamt That Night” being the most explicit citation (75). With his deliberate manipulation of languages Lévy produces a hybrid poetic idiom, epitomized by a Latin citation that latinizes Hebrew names: the line “Formosam Kehatus ardebat ­Séfiram,” which, as we have seen, is the hebraized Virgilian last verse of “Pour accorder l’instrument.”

. . . Abishag ends with the poem “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil” (Kinah on the death of René Ghil), following a series of five elegies dedicated to Lévy’s

MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS   43

daughter Liliane and two other tombeaux,90 one of which is dedicated to Guillaume Apollinaire. If the theme of death is common to all of them, “Kinah” is a significant departure from the form, the tone and the degree of Hebrew and Jewish references present in the remainder of the volume. Its singular position is initially expressed in graphic terms, since it is the sole tombeau with its own title page. The layout continues to create meaning: the title’s double layer combines Jewish and symbolist elements, hinting at Lévy’s novel and modern treatment of a traditional genre. KINAH pour la mort de René Ghil LAMENTATION sur le mode prophétique Hoï ! le Ménasséah’ est mort! Hoï ! sa guittith est brisée! Romps une corde de ton kinnor, Kehath, fils de Lévi Et déchire ton vêtement pour le deuil de ton ami Les dix mois du deuil prescrit pour le poète René Ghil. Il est mort, le Ménasséah’, le chantre à la voix rythmante! Nous n’entendrons plus son chant d’or qui maîtrisait la pensée, Jamais plus le son d’or de sa guittith à présent brisée. Futurs! Vous célébrerez le poète en vos jugements, Le créateur de paroles longues pour le cœur pensant Le souffleur de dires ovalaires pour l’esprit pulsant. Mais nul que son geste ait accueilli n’oubliera ses égards Nul qui sincère l’ait approché n’oubliera son regard: Ce sourire attentif tout luisant de naïve amitié. Hoï! Hoya sur nous parce que le Mennasséah’ est mort! Comment ce guibor est-il tombé? Quel effort l’a vaincu? Comment put-il être renversé le lion chevelu? Quelle foudre invisible et sans fracas l’a donc terrassé? (I)

Kinah: complainte. Ménasseah: chef des chantres dans la maîtrise du temple. Guibbor: vaillant, héros, homme fort.

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La force et la splendeur du Bahour étaient encore sur lui Jusques au passer de la soixantième année de son âge. Et sa tempe était pure ainsi que la tempe d’une vierge. Ni les frivolités brillantes de Paris fol et sage, Ni la faveur des puissants que l’on brigue en se méprisant, Ni les grisantes flatteries de la langue juvénile Ne l’avaient longtemps séduit du lent labour de son partage Où, parmi les sévérités de la loi qu’il s’était faite Il épousait, par éclairs, son seul azur, ses joies d’élite! Nord qui l’avez vu naître et Poitou qui l’avez vu mourir, Et vous qu’il chérissait molles collines d’Île de France, Dites comment fut déconcerté par l’ange sans visage Le hardi musicien, le héros du parler doux et rond. Hoï! le Ménasséah’ est mort! Hoï, pour sa guittith brisée! Emules d’Assaph et vous, descendants des fils de Korah, Toucheurs du Kittar, des néguinoth ou de la schéminith Elevez la voix et pleurez sur la mort de René Ghil! Elevez la voix et pleurez en hommes sur ce psalmiste Qui créait sa musique et son verbe et vous y contraignait. Elevez la voix et pleurez sur son Œuvre inachevée! Elevez la voix et chantez un schir pour l’un de vos maîtres. Toi, Kehath, fils de Lévi, et vous Séfira, sa choisie, Biddy-Lilian, leur fille, comme une harpe vivante, Doucement, sans élever la voix, vous pleurerez l’ami. Le Ménasseah’ est mort mais sa guittith quoique brisée On ne sait quel autre poète l’a prise, on ne le sait! Voici la Kinah pour les dix mois du deuil de René Ghil (II). SADIA LÉVY (1926)

Bahour: jeune noble. Schir: cantique. Guittith, Kinnor, Kittar, Neguinoth, Schéminith: instruments de musique.

MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS   45

KINAH on the death of René Ghil LAMENTATION in the prophetic mode Oy! The Menatzeach is dead! Oy! His gitit is broken! Break a string on your kinnor, Kehath, son of Levi! And tear off your clothes for the mourning of your friend The ten months of prescribed mourning for the poet René Ghil. He is dead, the Menatzeach, the cantor of the rhythmic voice! We shall no longer hear his golden song, which mastered thought, Never more the golden sound of his gitit now broken. Future ones! You will celebrate the poet in your thoughts, Creator of long words for the thinking heart Breather of oval sayings for the beating mind. But nobody welcomed by his gesture will forget his attentions No one who, sincere, has approached him will forget his look That alert smile of bright, naïve friendship. Oy! Oya to us because the Menatzeach is dead! How has this gibbor fallen? What has defeated him? How could he be overturned, the maned lion? What invisible and silent thunderbolt has struck him down? (I) The Bahur’s strength and splendor were still within him Until the passing of his sixtieth year And his temple was pure like the temple of a virgin. Neither the brilliant frivolities of wild and wise Paris, Nor the favors of the powerful one courts while spurning oneself, Or the inebriating flatteries of youthful language Were enough to seduce him away from the slow labor of his lot,

Kinah: complaint. Menatzeah: leader of the singers in the service of the temple, Gibor: valiant, hero, strong man. Bahur: noble youth. Shir: song. Gitit, kinnor, kittar, neguinot, sheminit: musical instruments.

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Where, among the strictness of the law he made for himself, He wedded, in sparks, his only azure, his elite joys! North that saw him born, and Poitou that saw him die, And you he cherished, soft hills of Île de France, Tell how disconcerted he was by the faceless angel The audacious musician, the hero of sweet round words. Oy! Over the dead Menatzeach! Oy for his broken gitit! Emulators of Assaph, and you, descendants of Korach’s sons, Players of the kittar, of the neginot, of the sheminit, Raise your voices and cry over the death of René Ghil! Raise your voices and cry all together over this psalmist Who created his music and his voice and forced them upon you. Raise your voices and cry over his unfinished Work! Raise your voices and sing a shir for one of your masters. You, Kehath, son of Levi, and you, Tzefira, his chosen one Biddy-Lilian, their daughter, like a living harp, Quietly, without raising your voices, you will cry for your friend. The Menatzeach is dead but his gitit, although broken, We don’t know the poet who has taken it, we don’t know! Here is the Kinah for the ten months of mourning for René Ghil. (II) (my translation)

The title of Lévy’s kinah is presented in two parallel sets of distiches, notes Even-Levy:91 the word “Kinah,” in capital letters, followed by the lowercase “pour la mort de René Ghil” on the next line, and then “Lamentation” in capital letters, followed by “sur le mode prophétique” in the line below. The manner in which these two sets are laid out on the page makes them equivalent to each other, as if one were looking to translate the other. Such a translation becomes more explicit in the juxtaposition of the meanings of “Kinah” and “Lamentation.” For a Hebrew speaker, the word kinah immediately evokes a traditional Hebrew poetic genre expressing mourning, pain, and sorrow. Haïm Zafrani writes with pronounced pathos: The kinah is the genre that best expresses the pain of the Jewish heart scarred by the historical tragedies over which we always weep, as well as out of daily

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distress. Currents of intense and deep emotion traverse its gloomy songs. We know of kinot that express a pathetic sadness, either calm and serene or echoing violent cries of pain and anger, all of them invariably ending on a note of hope.92

One of the earliest poetic genres, the kinah developed from a lamentation over an important dead person in the community (e.g., Gen. 23:2, Jer. 22:18, Zech. 12:10). It may or may not include acrostics forming the author’s name. Several kinot, or fragments of them, appear in the Talmud. But for many Jewish readers, the word kinah instantly invokes the liturgy and biblical poetry recited on the Ninth of Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jewish people. As Zafrani explains, The remembrance of these two catastrophes [the destruction of the First and Second Jerusalem Temples and the disappearance of the Hebrew State, with the resulting exile and dispersion] goes on living, obstinately in spite of [the passage of] time, in the hearts and memory of the Jews, particularly those from Orthodox and traditionalist communities who commemorate these tragic episodes of Jewish history, the Ninth of Av, with mourning, fasting, and a special liturgy in which the kinah dominates because it expresses, in its lamentations and complaints, the depths of sorrow and pain.93

The mere presence of the word kinah establishes both a particular atmosphere and a long-lasting literary tradition. In this tradition, the inscriptionlike title “pour la mort de René Ghil” focuses the theme of mourning on the death of a particular individual. Kinot about individuals are, according to ­Zafrani, an important source of biographical and historical documentation, and play a relevant role in funeral rites.94 Lévy’s kinah then may be seen as both an individual elegy and a spiritual eulogy for a personal friend. It is important to note that in Jewish literary tradition, the collective or communal character of the genre is not erased by the personal subject matter. Thus Lévy’s kinah mourns the tragedy that has befallen the community of poets with the death of René Ghil. The French translation, “Lamentation sur le mode prophétique,” recalls the biblical Book of Lamentations, and with it, yet again, communal suffering, for Lamentations (Eykha in Hebrew) is the book read on the Ninth of Av in synagogues all over the world. This “Kinah” is a radical departure from Lévy’s earlier works, for it is no longer a sonnet but a poem consisting of sixteen stanzas of varying length, divided into two main groups: monostichs followed by four stanzas each. The dominant verse is an odd syllabic one, with fifteen syllables. A significant change in form

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is no minor event to a poet. Connections between form and politics, or form and ideology, are recognized in the world of poetry. Poe, who is a model for Lévy, tried to break from the iamb, while still respecting metrical structures. In an American modernist rewriting of English tradition, and reacting against an English colonizing presence in the iambic pentameter, Ezra Pound sought to “break the pentameter” (Canto LXXXI). In Lévy, this eventual shift from the sonnet and the alexandrine—forms viewed as eminently French—can be perceived as a measured and calculated attempt to distance himself from a French national, colonial, and cultural identity. This poetic move allows us to perceive a degree of tension or ambivalence in his relationship with the distant “motherland.” Together with his experimentation with assonant rhymes and odd-syllable verses, and his embrace of Hebrew genres, it can also be seen as a further attempt to rewrite himself and, perhaps, figure in a different canon. “Free me from the sonnet’s strings!” the poet asks of his muse, Abishag, in an earlier poem titled “Free me!” The sonnet is now a straitjacket to Lévy, much as the iambic pentameter was to Pound. At the end of the collection, dominated precisely by sonnets, Abishag appears to have heard the poet and finally to have granted his wish. The poet is set free from the constraining sonnet, and his new work comes with the Hebrew mark of his muse: it is now a Hebrew genre, infused with Hebrew words and biblical references. Kabbalistic elements also make their way into the new form embraced by the poet. Even-Levy suggests that the fifteen syllables in each verse could be hiding one of the names of God, YAH. But if we again use the method of Gematria—one of the techniques of mystical speculation used by kabbalists and other exegetes in the interpretation of texts, where numerical values are assigned to letters—then it is also possible to see the Tetragrammaton (YHVH), God’s ineffable name, in the poem’s twenty-six verses.95 The monostich that makes up the first stanza introduces terms that immediately refer us to the Book of Psalms—associated with David, and hence Abishag as the poet’s muse. Many of the Psalms were originally sung in chorus, accompanied by instruments such as the tambourine, the harp, the trumpet, and the pipe. “Menatzeach” is the choirmaster, and a “gittit” is a string instrument that accompanied the Psalms sung in the Temple by the Levites. Such an immediate reference to the Psalms also inscribes the poem in musical and liturgical realms. The Psalms embody that primeval connection between poetry and music, stressing the relevant role of music in the elaboration of Hebrew prosody. Many psalms indicate the instrument that should accompany the

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verse in their line.96 Lévy’s line thus constitutes a direct paraphrase of one such instruction. Psalms 8:1, for example, reads: “To the chief player upon the gitit, a Psalm of David” [Le-Menatzeach al ha-gitit mizmor le-David.]” As in an antiphonic structure, this first monostich, together with the accompanying three, sound as the voice of the choirmaster, or in modern times, the leader of the prayer. At his prompting, the congregation follows his lead. The four stanzas between the monostichs represent the lines recited or sung by the congregation. The first tercet (three-line stanza) recalls another instrument, the ­kinnor, in the same sacred poetic context: “Break a string in your kinnor, Kehath, son of Levi!” This tercet clearly mentions the priestly family and service, and introduces the eulogized person, René Ghil (1862–1925), within the traditional practice of Jewish mourning: “And tear off your clothes for the mourning of your friend / The ten months of prescribed mourning for the poet René Ghil.”97 First, the poet addresses himself, or his poetic persona, as “Kehath, fils de Lévi.” Sadia Lévy’s Levitical status is clear from his name. The fact that he is a poet only enhances his identification with the Levites, for they were the poets, singers, and musicians of the Temple, who assisted in the priestly services. In fact, in some circles, Sadia Lévy was known as “Sadia, the poet”—a natural, functional translation or an epithet that juxtaposes name and vocation. Calling himself Kehath, using the French transliteration that follows the original Hebrew pronunciation,98 is no sign of modesty. In the stories of the Talmud, the Aggadah, K ­ ohath was one of the seven righteous men who helped bring back to earth the ­Shekhinah (the feminine manifestation of God, or the Divine Spirit), after it ascended into heaven because of the sins committed by previous generations. ­Kohath was the second son of Levi, and the clan of Kohatites was among the most important Levitical clans—aristocrats of the Levites, in charge of the most sacred objects. Only the Kohatites were allowed to serve in the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, and granted the privilege of carrying the Ark through the wilderness. Sadia Lévy includes himself in this noble lineage of poets, while simultaneously asserting the modernity of his use of the biblical and liturgical model. He rediscovers a filiation, and creates for himself a proper name, self-­inscribing himself into history by reactivating one of its lost moments.99 As much as his name choice might betray an inflated self-esteem, Lévy’s verses also include René Ghil among the psalmists—as a leader, no less; in fact, as the choirmaster. This role parallels Ghil’s position among some of his peers, since he was indeed considered a master by many symbolists,100 and as the leader of

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“L’instrumentisme.” Discussed by Mallarmé in his “Avant-dire au Traité du verbe,” where he advanced some of his own poetics, “Instrumentism” is a theory creating correspondences among vowels and consonants, colors and musical timbres, adding to the “internal meaning” of the words an “exterior meaning,” shaped by the letters that form such words and the corresponding orchestral sounds.101 The fourth stanza reveals a more evident spiritual and mystical level in the poem. Its first verse, while addressing future poets, offers messianic and apocalyptic allusions: the world to come, ha-olam ha-ba, the days to come, les jours futurs, and the Last Judgment: “Future ones! You will celebrate the poet in your thoughts.” Kabbalistic resonances may be heard throughout the kinah, particularly in the two perfectly parallel verses “Creator of long words for the thinking heart / Breather of oval sayings for the beating mind,” which endow the poem with some of Kabbalah’s fundamental concepts. The poet is “creator” and “breather”—Creation and cosmogony both lie at the center of kabbalistic preoccupations, and many of Kabbalah’s theories are founded upon language and its powers. In the image of God, the great Creator, the poet breathes life into his creation. The reference is to ruach, or spirit (see Gen. 2:7). The act of creation (physical, artistic) and the act of breathing are therefore intertwined. Similarly, “long words” can be coupled with “oval sayings.” The combination of utterance, words/sayings, and shape, long/oval—in which sight, sound and synesthesia are combined in the shape of the mouth and the utterance it emits—makes for an innovative geometric metaphor and multisensory experience. It is a theory of prosody as spatial form, much like Kandinsky’s and Klee’s geometric theories of color, but even more radical.102 Moreover, this parallelism enhances orality and the physical or mechanical enunciation of the words, something not only related to Creation in the Bible and the Kabbalah, but also to the theoretical production of André Spire, another Jewish symbolist poet and linguist, contemporary with Lévy.103 Lévy’s focus on orality and words, as expressed in this poetic juncture, is one aspect where the Hebrew sources of vocal musical expression converge with symbolist values. Despite the importance of musical instruments as they appear in the Psalms, it is the human voice that plays the crucial role in Hebrew liturgy. The midrash Shoher Tov on Tehilim emphasizes precisely this point: “The Lord, Blessed be He, said: ‘Even though you have glorified me with harps and lyres, nothing is more pleasant to me than the sound of your voice.”104 In an intriguing similarity, all of the symbolist poets’ experimentation with sounds

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and voice points to the centrality of voice in their poetics. Michel Butor asserts that Mallarmé “always considered that purely instrumental music could not be complete, that it could only find its full justification if it somehow exceeded its margins, established the true place of a text, that it absolutely needed to culminate in song.”105 The pair “thinking heart” and “beating mind” presents the oxymoron of a “thinking heart.” It stresses necessary conditions related to poetic creation: to feel while remaining reasonable, offering a vision of the poet as a whole, both emotional and rational. Intensity of feeling coupled with reason and a rigorous method, a merger of emotion and analytical precision, is a key tenet of Edgar Allan Poe’s, one of the heralds of symbolism and without a doubt an influential figure for Sadia Lévy.106 As for the “beating mind,” Lévy’s use of pulsant, “beating,” can be seen as another allusion to cosmogonical theories of the Kabbalah, in particular to the phenomenon of tzimtzum, in which God retracts himself in the process of Creation. The eight stanzas following the next two monostichs reflect strong biblical allusion, together with equally clear references to symbolist poets and poetry. The line “How has this gibbor fallen?” echoes David’s words in the prototypical kinah, his lament for the death of Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1:19–27: “How have the warriors fallen? [Eykh naflu giborim?].” Finally, this biblical and traditional context arrives in modern Paris, and the almost nervous repetition of “Ni . . .  / Ni . . .  / Ni . . .” (translated as “Neither . . .  / Nor . . .  / Or . . .”) creates the atmosphere of the “wild Paris” referred to in the poem, with its salons, its balls, and its many poets. However, the increasingly acute feeling expressed by this anaphoric construction also gives the impression of exaltation in prayer.107 Ghil is now praised, not only for his words, his “golden song,” or for his friendship, but even more for not indulging in the “frivolities of Paris,” or, as Lévy phrases it elsewhere, for refusing “the seduction of vanity.” The seriousness of such a poet’s mission is further emphasized by the use of the expressions “slow labor” and “strictness of the law,” which, à la Poe, advocate arduous work—rather than inspiration—rigor and precision. The word “law” is a junction: in a poem that mentions the Levites and their work in the Temple, it is possible to read the Law, that is, the halakhic injunctions of the Torah, in the “law.” The Torah also offers a set of prescriptions and commandments that are to be followed in the love and service of God. While “strictness” may be an applicable term, there is also “joy” in observing such commandments and in reaping the rewards that the faithful believe they extend.

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The Torah is also present, obliquely, in the verse that mentions the prophet Assaph and the “fils de Korah,” both of them presumed authors of the Psalms. Korah was also a Kohatite, but a rebellious one, who rose up against Moses, denied the divine origin of the Torah, and was punished with death, swallowed up by the earth.108 References to his name—even if his descendants agreed to abide by the Law—are a possible connection to the anti-establishment and insubordinate stance of poets, more specifically, in Lévy’s context, the symbolists’ rebelliousness. In connection with “labor,” in line 24, “law,” however, may be referring to the laws that govern poetic creation, the laws of “the particulars of poetry.”109 Through “the strictness of the law he made for himself,” Ghil’s discipline and austerity are emphasized. In the preface to Abishag, Jean Royère calls Ghil “[t]he great austere lyric, the inspired one who sought to bring forth a great poetry from abstraction and the evolution of the species” (9). The congregation of poets is marked in “his elite joys,” where “elite” is the operative word. This term might well refer to the symbolist poets, who saw themselves as a small group, an elite coterie of visionaries who shared a secret code and a common view of beauty. It might also refer to the Kabbalah and its teachings, which are meant to be passed on orally, among the select members allowed access to the secret doctrine. Symbolism and Kabbalah share a connection with the occult,110 the valorization of words and voice, the concern with Creation, and the elite status of their members. Other references as well as textual allusions to symbolism appear in the kinah. The importance attributed to music in poetry—an idea developed throughout the poem—is a critical symbolist value. In addition to “de la musique avant toute chose” (“Music above everything”), Verlaine’s preference “pour l’impair” (“odd-numbered verse”)111 is also evident in Lévy’s choice of the fifteen-syllable verse. Vocabulary favored by the symbolists, such as azur and Œuvre—which will become something of a Mallarmé trademark (note the capital letter)—are also prevalent in the kinah. Of course, Œuvre also alludes to the work of Creation, in a successful conjunction of symbolist and kabbalistic domains. An intense use of litotes and other Mallarmean devices is evident in the poem, and the poet Jean Royère speaks in the volume’s preface of the “mystical adoration” that he and Sadia Lévy had for Mallarmé, whose “disciples” they proclaimed themselves to be. And again, be it recalled, Lévy’s “Constellation of the Symbol” includes Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas.112 In addition, the isolation, the discipline and seriousness that Lévy admires in Ghil very much recall Mallarmé’s own life in poetry.

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As in every prayer, despite the grief that is pivotal to both poem and genre, words of relief and hope appear at the end of the kinah. In his discussion of the generic kinah, Zafrani affirms: “all of them invariably end on a note of hope expressed in the recurrent themes of the usual perorations of Jewish poetry: redemption, the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple, the restoration of the old city of Zion and the national glory of Israel.”113 Lévy follows the characteristics of the genre, but focuses on the poetic future, instead of the national one. Throughout the verses of Lévy’s kinah, the poet (as lyrical “I”) addresses other poets with exhortations, predictions about the future, and instructions to be followed. In line with the “prophetic mode” announced in its title, the kinah ends with the reassurance that poetry will continue. “We don’t know the poet who has taken it, we don’t know,” the speaker proclaims: Lévy is himself perhaps assuming the mantle of poet, Levite and prophet. But in the end, the poetical and genealogical lineage will not be broken, because the broken gitit is now in other hands. The song will not be interrupted, because another of the chosen poets has taken up the psalmist’s instrument and will use it to delve into the mysteries and works of Creation.

The linguistic diversity characteristic of Jewish-Maghrebi poetic life provides the cultural grid from which to read Levy’s “Kinah.” The juncture of the religious and poetic, the divine and metapoetic, is thematized throughout; indeed, we can say that the poem itself is the realization of this juncture. In addition, while in “Kinah” Lévy approaches the symbolist ideal of a suggestive, musical, and incantatory poetry, he also attempts to legitimize a minor popular and oral culture. “Kinah” is the expression of the encounter of symbolist poetic values and traditional Jewish poetic art, which feed and complement one another in the poem. The combination of two frames of reference or universes of discourse,114 encompassing Jewish/kabbalistic and symbolist elements, is a mark of Lévy’s modern use of a traditional genre, the revelatory heritage that he has left us.

. . . We have witnessed the great range of ingredients Lévy blends into his work. His use of symbolist devices, coupled with a return to genres and modes typical to Jewish cultural discourse, but previously used only in “dialectal literatures,” are a few significant ones. This combination of symbolist elements and Jewish dialectal genres is an original initiative—perhaps of an originality ­consciously

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sought after. It is also an expression of Lévy’s quest to affirm himself as a ­Jewish-Maghrebi modernist poet. Guy Dugas argues: If [Lévy’s] debt to the symbolist masters is constantly acknowledged, his poetry evolved, under the double influence of Jean Royère and André Spire, toward an “arrhythmic and novel dire,” with a Jewish tonality, liberating the meaning, the sound and the accent of every word,” and trying to make it new with rhythms of the traditional dialectal poetry.115

When he inserts liturgical Hebrew into French symbolist poetry, Lévy asserts his own hybridity, his liminal position at the crossroads of different cultures— each of which he claims as his own, seeing it as a legitimate, integral aspect of his poetic and cultural identity. This posture is expressed both by the genre and the languages he chooses. Throughout his work, poetry is charged with all the meanings that it has in the Hebrew language and tradition: it is piyut (liturgy), it is shir (poem and song), and it is also mizmor (chant, melody). Lévy’s work displays, in fact, a sustained tendency to legitimize any kind of poetry, erasing dichotomies and traditional poetic distinctions—insisting on a coexistence of the oral, the popular, the written, the erudite, the mundane, the spiritual, the secular, and the sacred. This openness is perhaps one of Lévy’s greatest achievements. Sadia Lévy’s quest for original poetic expression might very well be analogous to the more collective search for identity in North Africa. As a Maghrebi Jew he was a living mosaic of cultures, but the precariousness of his privilege and the fragility of his position as a Jew in Algeria were soon to be felt. The establishment of the Vichy regime in 1940 would, indeed, show Lévy and all other Jews who had so hopefully embraced her another side of France. The antisemitism of French colonial society was a hotbed for the anti-Jewish laws that Vichy would implement. If before the new regime the French settler population had marginalized the Jews and was hostile to them—despite their legal French citizenship—the new Vichy legislation officially authorized antisemitism and allowed it to run free. Persecution was unleashed, including both verbal and physical violence. According to the first Jewish Statute of October 3, 1940, Jews in mainland France and in Algeria were defined by race, following their grandparents’ religion. This law prohibited Jews from having any public post or participating in political activities: they could not teach in regular schools, only in Jewish ones, could not attend universities, and could not work for the government or the

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military or even hold positions in companies with public contracts. On October 7, 1940, the Crémieux Decree was abrogated, and Jews lost their French citizenship without gaining any other. They became stateless, without documents. On June 2, 1941, the Second Jewish Statute decreed that Jews were not allowed to have any occupation related to finance—so banking, stock market, and any trade were ruled out—effectively enlarging the scope of the first anti-Jewish law. Jews were forbidden to own or direct any business and were sacked from jobs in the media. Based on the newly established quotas, professions such as law, medicine, nursing, and architecture saw the number of Jews licensed reduced to only 2 percent. To Algerian Jews, who were the most assimilated, frenchified Jews in North Africa, this legislation and new historical situation changed their perception of France and of their own position in the social and cultural system. All the Enlightenment ideals that France had represented suddenly became alien. Democracy, secularism, and universalism were no more, stripped away with the Jews’ French citizenship; growing intolerance, racism, and xenophobia replaced them. Systematic oppression was felt daily both by children—insulted, expelled from school, and denied their share in “French culture”—and by adults—­denied jobs, rights, and property, since eventually Jewish properties were confiscated—with former friends turning their backs on them. In some cases Jews also suffered imprisonment, forced labor, and physical harm. What made things worse was the fact that the Vichy legislation was implemented in North Africa in the absence of German occupiers, and that, even after the Allies landed in French Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, conditions did not change or improve much. The installation of a new regime, led by Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle, was not enough to reverse the discriminatory antisemitic Vichy laws. It took more than six months for this to happen and when it did, it did not include the reinstatement of the Crémieux Decree—which only occurred on October 20, 1943, with the arrival of de Gaulle in Algiers. In other words, the French authorities, of their own volition, left the Jews stateless. This behavior hurt Algerian Jews deeply and changed their relationship with France. Regarded as a betrayal by most of them, the legislation imposed by Vichy and perpetuated by its immediate successors evoked a strong reaction and marked the memories of a number of young Jews, many of whom would become important intellectual voices—Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, to name only the most prominent. To be a Jewish French Algerian at this point

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meant to be “neither here nor there,” neither Algerian nor French, in a state of rootlessness, sharing exclusion and non-belonging. Such feelings were central in the lives of Algerian Jews and guided their search for personal and collective identity and their attempt to define where they stood. These convulsive times in Algeria affected Sadia Lévy and his writing. Rampant antisemitism drove him to join the Ligue international contre l’AntiSémitisme—of which he was an active militant for the last fifteen years of his life, responsible for the section in Oran.116 Political conditions and an increasingly reclusive temperament silenced his poetic voice for several years, a striking parallel to the physical aphasia resulting from a complication of his tracheotomy.117 Sadia Lévy was not a postcolonial writer. Indeed, one of the reasons he has been so widely ignored is perhaps that he does not fit the current scholarly insistence on highlighting artists who have resisted the shackles of the colonizer. Because of his unabashed francophilia, it is easy to see him as “nonoppositional”; his celebration of French letters may even make some a little uncomfortable, as if he were “selling out” to the French. To theoreticians on the Maghreb, because of his privileged position as a Jew in colonial Algeria, Lévy may not even be considered a Maghrebi writer at all. And yet he destabilizes his “privileged position” as a Jew in Algeria when he claims a different cultural identity, one that is not limited to “our ancestors, the Gauls,” but embraces “our forefathers, the Hebrews.” These forefathers enter the French text speaking Hebrew so eloquently that the intruding ancient language infuses the French with new allusions, images, and sounds, completely transforming its character. The complexities don’t end there. His forefathers spoke other languages as well, and in Levy’s work we can also hear the resonances of the multiple languages that were part of life in the Sephardic Diaspora. Sadia Lévy died in 1951, still under colonial rule, and thirteen years before Algerian independence. He never saw Abishag in print. As a Jew writing in French in colonial Algeria, he used poetry to define his self and to inscribe his place in history. In his choice of languages, genres, and intertexts, he revealed the multiple strands of his composite identity. But in his work—especially his later work, and even in his later, final silence—he also expressed both an attraction to and an ambivalence about France during a troubling and decisive historical moment for the Jewish Diaspora in Muslim lands. Once we reckon with the complexity of Lévy’s writing, our broader picture of Sephardic poetry, and of multilingual poetry in general, is changed. Sadia

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Lévy has been ignored or denied in a variety of ways—as a Jew, as an Algerian, as a French citizen, and as a francophone Jewish Maghrebi writer. The critical burdens that have so limited his posthumous renown are another of his essential contributions—the complexity of his cultural and literary identity exposes the political biases and the limits of our assessments. His inclusion in the Sephardic repertoire deepens our sense of Sephardic writing and culture, and it is my hope that if we see him through the more muddled but ultimately more revealing lens of Sephardic poetry, we can also finally concede him his rightful place.

2

AT T H E C R O S S R OA D S Greece, Israel, and Spain in Margalit Matitiahu’s Hebrew-Ladino Poetry The languages cannot meet, except inside me. Margalit Matitiahu

In 1986, only three months after her mother’s death, the Israeli Sephardic poet Margalit Matitiahu traveled to Greece with children of Greek survivors of the Shoah, the Nazi genocide of the Jews.1 It was the first time Matitiahu had visited her parents’ birthplace, the first time she had seen the life they left behind when they emigrated to Israel. Matilde Reytan, born Matilde de León, was nineteen when she left Salonika in 1930; Jack Reytan followed in 1933. Because of the couple’s Zionist inclinations, and their consequent emigration to Palestine, they did not perish in the Shoah, a fate that befell the rest of their families. Their daughter Margalit was born in Tel Aviv in 1935; she grew up speaking Ladino at home, though schooled exclusively in Hebrew. Fully bilingual, Matitiahu began writing poetry in Ladino at the age of seventeen, when a few of her poems appeared in the weekly Israeli political-literary journal El Tiempo. Her first four books of poetry, published between 1976 and 1987, were, however, entirely in Hebrew. Matitiahu describes feeling a strong connection to both her own and her parents’ past following her 1986 visit to Salonika. The impulse to return to her childhood language and to write in Ladino was rekindled by an overwhelming realization that her parents’ language had practically died with the Shoah. She felt “a great force that propelled [her] to write about the fate of the Greek Jews in the Holocaust, and [her] own memories and feelings.”2 And, she adds, “It all flooded in Ladino, which is for me the language of those themes and emotions.”3 Since that visit, she has published twelve books, seven in Ladino and five

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in Hebrew—her first Hebrew prose book appearing in 2011. ­Matitiahu claims both Hebrew and Ladino as “mother languages,” but in her book Vagabundo eterno (Eternal Wanderer) (2000), she explains that Ladino has stronger emotional and mystical ties for her: Ladino is my birth language, and this was my first and most important encounter with the culture and the literature in Ladino. I read novels, novellas, and texts written directly in Ladino, and others that were translated from English, French, and Italian. I live with two mother tongues, Ladino and Hebrew. To me, the first is the language that moves me, that takes me to the mystic side of my being.4

In fact, in a personal message (August 11, 2009), Matitiahu explains that not two but four languages were spoken in her home: “Espaniol,” her term for Ladino, the daily language of the home; Greek, also spoken and almost always accompanied by music; French, her mother’s reading language; and Hebrew, the school and national language. This early multilingualism would shape her later views about inclusion and exclusion in Israeli literature. As general secretary of the Israeli Federation of Writers from 1986 to 2008,5 Matitiahu worked with other writers whose mother tongue was not Hebrew; their limited presence in Israeli publishing, and their difficulty in having their writing translated into Hebrew, were a growing concern during her tenure. She came to believe that these writers, though writing outside of the state-sanctioned language, nevertheless had a place in the landscape of contemporary Israeli literature. She accordingly started promoting an annual three-day seminar where these writers could meet one another and “hear about Hebrew literature from different perspectives.”6 But though Ladino was Matitiahu’s mother tongue and the language of her own childhood, it lay dormant in her for years. Only in Salonika, standing before buildings and plazas once inhabited by a thriving ancestral community, did she acknowledge the force of her mother tongue. It was her physical presence in Salonika, the contact with that very specific landscape, that reminded her of stories and prompted her to reclaim her Ladino. Remarkably, words such as “soil,” “land,” and “landscape” appear in Matitiahu’s own account describing her return to the language, marking the link between geographic, spiritual, and linguistic return: Standing on the soil of that land, where my parents were born, where the horrors leading to death took place for the Jewish community, rekindled my ­Ladino

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writing. The contact with the landscape of my parents’ childhood and their stories merged within me. . . . My poetry was a return to them and to their memories.7

In the history of Sephardic exiles, Ladino has acquired an honored place. It bears the memories and longings for a lost culture, a past that today is almost idealized, and an attachment to a country—Spain—that is alternately exalted and cursed. In certain countries in North Africa and the Middle East, JudeoArabic became the dominant language, and it only retained few words in ­Ladino, witnesses to a distant past. As the Moroccan artist André Elbaz admits, most likely referring to haketía, the Moroccan variant of Judeo-Spanish: “From Spain, my parents kept only a little taste of the language, which they used to keep us in the dark about some of their conversations.”8 In other countries, Ladino continued to be the prevalent language in Jewish communities, but nowhere was it as pervasive as in the city of Salonika at the turn of the nineteenth century. There, not only Jews, but the broader community as well, used Ladino in their daily lives. According to Nicholas Stavroulakis, “Salonika, as late as 1920, was still a city in which Castillian [sic] Spanish was more often heard than Greek.”9 This was largely because Jews represented a large parcel of the general population and were a pivotal element in the city’s economic, social, and political decisions, but also because, as Aron Rodrigue reminds us, Salonika was long an Ottoman city, and had been under Greek control for only three decades before the Nazis deported its Jews to Auschwitz. Many families, especially the elderly and women, “did not speak Greek well, if at all.”10 Accounts of the death of Alexander the Great suggest that Jews have been a constant presence in Greece since at least 323 bce. Following the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews who left Jerusalem were then forced into the Roman world, and many went to Greece. The Greek-speaking Romaniotes are the oldest members of the Greek Jewish community. By the first century bce, Jews were well settled in mainland cities in Greece and on some of the islands. They were never a monolithic group, and included Hellenized Karaites, ­Italian-speaking Jews, Ashkenazi Jews (who variously spoke German, Hungarian, French, or Polish), Shabbetai Tzvi’s followers, the Dönme, and, predominantly after the sixteenth century, Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking Sephardim. The presence of this last group in what later became the unified, national Greece—after centuries under Ottoman rule—was so pervasive that the other groups, not without conflict, eventually became hispanicized, adopting the Spanish language and rituals, or minhagim, of the Sephardim.

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In the sixteenth century, recognizing the extent of the Jewish presence in Salonika, the Portuguese Jewish writer Samuel Usque called it the “Madre de Israel” (Mother of Israel). Perceived as a Jewish enclave, an international center of Jewish culture and religious influence, Salonika was also known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.”11 To be sure, in the early 1900s, Salonika was a very cosmopolitan place, with distinct national identities coexisting, including ­Albanians, Maltese, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks. But the Jews were the group that gave it its most pronounced character.12 Until World War II, Salonika remained, in Rodrigue’s words, “The center of Jewish life and creativity, and the last remaining large Judeo-Spanish center that had preserved its distinctiveness and had continued to influence the whole Judeo-Spanish diaspora.”13 In Matitiahu’s poetry, Salonika serves as a site of memory—a site for remembered storytelling rather than remembered experience, if only because Matitiahu was remembering what she had never seen. Her parents’ language, Ladino, is the vehicle linking site and story, or site and poetic retelling of the story.14 Inasmuch as she is a Sabra, a native Hebrew speaker, and a citizen of the modern nation seen as the “homeland” of the Jews and the end to all Jewish exiles, her linguistic return to Salonika not only foregrounds the politics of Jewish languages, but it also calls into question the very concepts of diasporic and nationalistic identities. In associating herself with a different land, and specifically with the double exile of the Greek Sephardim,15 Matitiahu is also assuming a diasporic identity that contradicts her position in Israeli society. At a minimum she is problematizing the concept of a homogenized national subject. Similarly, her return to her mother’s tongue is a firm and public acceptance, if not exposure, of Matitiahu’s active bilingualism, in a society that worked hard to erase “minor” languages as it “revived” Hebrew in the process of building a national state. “This is who I am,” says Matitiahu in a 1991 interview, “with those two languages. . . . I’m not schizophrenic, nor will I renounce part of what I am in order to make their [i.e., Israelis’] life easier. If anyone wants to write from the innermost part of her being, there are things that can only be said in her mother’s language.”16 To build the nation-state and promote a national culture, Jews had to be unified around a single language and forget their native diasporic languages. The Zionist project’s quest for homogeneity led to the suppression of different Jewish vernaculars in favor of Hebrew, provoking battles—ideological and sometimes physical—that became known as the “language wars.” Today,

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­ ebrew’s position as the national language of the Jewish state is no longer H threatened. This firmly established dominance now allows the state and its academic institutions to fund departments and cultural events that study and promote other Jewish languages. In 1992, for example, the Ladino Preservation Council was established. In 1997, the government of Israel invested in the creation of the National Authority for Ladino and Its Culture, and in 2002, UNESCO organized a conference on Ladino in Paris, with the purpose of protecting and revitalizing the language. All four main Israeli universities now offer courses in Ladino, and there are two important centers for the study of Ladino in the country: the Naime & Yeoshua Salti Center for Ladino Studies at Bar Ilan University, and the Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture at Ben-Gurion University. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ladino Studies is a subdivision of the Center for the Study of Jewish Languages and Literatures. In 1992 there were a number of commemorative events to mark the fivehundredth anniversary of the expulsion of Jews from Spain. A commission of Spanish Jews created Sefarad 92, “an international program of publications, lectures, exhibitions, concerts and movies to commemorate both the Jews’ expulsion and their cultural, scientific, medical and economic legacies.”17 A number of publications in Ladino, including several poetry anthologies, appeared in that commemorative year. Since then, there have been editorial and cultural initiatives that promote the use and the memory of the Judeo-Spanish language. The most salient ones have taken place in Spain and Israel, important loci in the history and geography of the Sephardim. Indeed, Spain’s King Juan Carlos and President Chaim Herzog of Israel marked the anniversary of the expulsion by praying together in a synagogue in Madrid, publicly displaying the interest in bridging the distances between the countries that, respectively, expelled and eventually received the displaced Sephardim. This bridge, between the fifteenth-century departure and the twentiethcentury arrival of a people, has been less ceremoniously and more gradually erected by laborious Spanish scholars, government officials, and writers, notable among them the Spanish physician Ángel Pulido Fernández (1852–1932), a committed Catholic who devoted himself to the Philo-Sephardi cause, seeking to strengthen the links between Spain and the descendants of the expelled Sephardim. At a time when the Alliance Israélite Universelle was a powerful vehicle of French colonial—and linguistic—expansion, Pulido attempted instead to interest North African Jews in Spanish, in order to bring the region

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and its communities under Spain’s cultural influence. The result was a new patina of interest in the Sephardim, and eager attempts to (re)claim them as Spaniards—a practice we still see today. More recently Spain has been attracting Sephardic Jews with promises of Spanish citizenship—and then creating roadblocks. A case in point is the citizenship law that, after repeated promises, was finally passed in June 2015, but with requirements that seem at least excessive or at most unattainable. Even more recently, in November 2015, the Real Academía Española elected eight scholars, six of them from Israel, to represent the Judeo-Spanish language. It is a symbolic move, since the scholars cannot vote but will advise in linguistic and literary matters concerning the language.18 It is an initiative meant as historical recognition of the loyalty that Sephardic Jews purportedly showed to Castilian by speaking a language that, in the eyes of Spanish authorities, “represents the essence of Old ­Castilian.”19 If Spaniards have invested in the recovery of the dispersed ­Sephardim, largely viewing Judeo-Spanish language and literature as important insofar as they contribute to Spanish literature, or supposedly belong to the larger Spanish cultural patrimony, their Israeli counterparts have for the most part gladly reciprocated. Emblematic of this posture is an anecdote recounted by Margalit Matitiahu in her book Vagabundo eterno, where she describes a conversation between herself and the Spanish novelist and 1989 Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela (1916–2002): When Camilo . . . visited Israel, I met him at a celebration dinner and he told me with emotion: “You would have been Spanish if not for that mistaken edict [of expulsion under Ferdinand and Isabella].” He was very moved to hear his own language, conserved and kept as it was, and maintained for centuries. As he was leaving, he bade me farewell saying: “Goodbye, Spanish woman.”20

If there was any irony in the exchange, it is not apparent in the transcription; Matitiahu herself seems very taken by the words. The Israeli Ladino poet has spent frequent and increasingly longer periods of time in Spain over the past twenty years, strengthening ties to her family’s hometown of León, where the City Council and the local university have financed the publication of two of Matitiahu’s books—Vagabondo eternel and Vela de la luz. There her verses also appear on a public monument honoring Jews who lived in Puente Castro until 1196, when the community was destroyed in the war between the kingdoms of Castile and León.21 The monument was in-

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augurated when Matitiahu was received and honored by the town in 1997.22 The verses inscribed on the bridge Puente Castro in León are “Entonses, muestros nombres / se van a grabar en los caminos de secreto / y van a abrir las puertas de unión” (Then our names / will be engraved in the secret paths / and will open the doors to union).23 The poet and her son Jack Matitiahu have gone on to produce León, reencuentro (León, Reencounter) and Toledo, el secreto oculto (Toledo, the Hidden Secret), documentary films about Spain and its ancestral Jewish connection. Matituahu was also recognized by the city of Salamanca, receiving the title of “Distinguished Guest” in October 2014. Many of her books have been published in Spain, and a number have in fact been sponsored by Spanish institutions. To make them more accessible to contemporary Spanish speakers, modern Spanish orthography has been substituted in these for the Ladino spelling adopted by the journal Akí Yerushalaim. Matitiahu’s deference toward Spain and the country’s embrace of her work are clear in Vagabundo eterno, where Spanish takes center stage. Equally clear is Spain’s attempt to appropriate Ladino and Castilianize it. The main title appears in large letters, in Spanish, while on the next line, both in parenthesis and in smaller font, is the translated title in Judeo-Spanish, Vagabondo eternel. The book’s publication was sponsored by León’s City Council, two of its three prologues were written by Spaniards, and Spanish readers are recognized as those who can ultimately keep Ladino alive. In the second text of the prologue, the first secretary and cultural attaché of the Spanish Embassy in Tel Aviv, Raúl Fuentes Milani, explains and defends the “Castilianization” of Ladino in the book in the following terms: Whoever enters these pages will find a peculiar language. The author and the editor have decided to present the work with a “Castilianized” spelling that diverges from the traditional Judeo-Spanish spelling in order to make it more easily accessible to the reader used to modern Spanish. It is a bold and generous decision and should be welcome, because it shows the will to keep the language alive to serve communication among a larger number of interlocutors.24

In Bozes en la shara, however, the editor Carlos Morales offers a somewhat different view, at least admitting Ladino’s specificity, but still seeing in Castilian, or modern Spanish, the possible future of Ladino. Morales writes that Ladino has a “capacity of expansion lacking in other minority languages” (even if “because of its similarities with Castilian Spanish”), and that “the Sephardic language must be considered a language with its own status.” Despite its specific

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identity, the Sephardic language and literary tradition seem “beautifully familiar” to Spaniards, according to Morales. He explains that the series “­Kuadrinos Sefardíes,” to which Bozes en la shara belongs, has two aims: the first is to popularize this old literary tradition among Spanish readers, and the second is to “return to the Sephardic linguistic and literary territory the vitality of the Spanish language by translating into Ladino . . . part of the Spanish literature.”25 This attempted dialogue or exchange receives its iconic, verbal counterpart in Morales’s use of the hyphenated phrase “España-Sefarad,” with which he seeks to establish a clear equivalence between the two terms. Undoubtedly, Matitiahu’s rapprochement with Spain and, more specifically, León, affected her personally and poetically. Her reencounter with Spain has driven her to examine herself, as she explains, “My trips to Spain made me get to know myself better.”26 But if Ladino has become the language of most of her most recent poetry—which also receives the bulk of critical attention—­ Matitiahu has not abandoned Hebrew. Her 2003 poetry collection Despertar el selencio / Leha’ir ha-shtikah (Awakening Silence), for example, consists of thirty-two poems in Ladino and forty-eight in Hebrew. Some are bilingual versions of the same poem, but most are unique poems written in each language. Matitiahu’s readers and critics remain divided, however, and the split is typically marked by linguistic borders: while Hebrew reviews also speak of her Ladino poems, Ladino or Spanish reviews of her work do not usually refer to her Hebrew work. Maybe this is because in Israel her readers can read both the Hebrew and the Ladino, even though the Ladino seems curious and ­exotic. As for Matitiahu’s many readers in Spain, they are limited to the text in roman type, and, as noted earlier, quite often written with modern Spanish spelling. In the course of this discussion I read two poems from her first two bilingual volumes, in both their Hebrew and Ladino versions, paying attention to the specificities of the languages and their respective audiences. Only by looking at the multiplicity of her poetic expression are the complexities of Matitiahu’s multilingual work duly appreciated. In addition, by contrasting the Hebrew and Ladino versions, we can also understand the expectations of the different reading communities and recognize nuances of linguistic and poetic expression.

. . . Of the sixteen books, Margalit Matitiahu has published in Israel and Spain, six are in Hebrew, seven in Ladino, and three are bilingual Hebrew-Ladino vol-

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umes. As mentioned earlier, she wrote four books in Hebrew before she began writing again in Ladino: Mi-ba’ad la-shmasha (Through the Window Pane) (1976), I-sheket keytzi (A Summer Restlessness) (1978), Klafim levanim (White Cards) (1983), and Chasufa (Exposed) (1987). Then came the bilingual volumes Kurtijo kemado / Chatzer charuka (Scorched Courtyard) (1988) and Alegrika (1992), followed by the Hebrew Madrigot shel chatzot (Midnight’s Steps) (1995) and the Ladino Matriz de luz (Womb of Light) (1997).27 While each of these volumes was published in Israel, the book that followed marked a change in direction when Matitiahu began publishing in Spain: Vela de la luz (Vigil of Light) (1997)28 precedes Kamino de tormento (Road of Torment) (2000), Vagabundo eterno (Eternal Wanderer) (2001), Bozes en la shara (Voices in the Forest) (2001), Canton de solombra (Canton of Shadows) (2005) and Asiguiendo al esfuenio (Following the Dream) (2005). This series of Spanish publications was interrupted only once, by the Hebrew-Ladino collection Leha’ir et ­ha-shtika / Despertar el selencio (Awakening Silence), published in Israel in 2003, with support from the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino y su Cultura (National Authority of Ladino and Its Culture) and the Tel Aviv–based Yeoshua Rabinovich Art Foundation. In 2011, Matitiahu’s first prose book appeared in Hebrew: Ha-safek: Sipurim katzarim (The Doubt: Short Stories).

. . . Reviews of Margalit Matitiahu’s first published volumes dwell on terms such as “feelings” and “physicality,” emphasizing not only an intense eroticism in her poetry but also the poet’s use of mundane objects to express her world of ideas and emotions. In an article titled “Ha-muchashi ve-ha-mufshat” (The Concrete and the Abstract), reviewing Matitiahu’s 1983 collection Klafim levanim (White Cards), Daliah Kaminer argues that the personal experience Matitiahu brings to her poetry—be it intellectual, emotional or physical—provides her poetry with “truth” and “honesty.” Matitiahu’s poetry, she writes, “lies around a central axis beginning with a deep intellectual, emotional, or physical experience lived by the poet. The objects stimulating her experience pertain to three groups: the world of inanimate life that surrounds her, the world of living and growing things, and the human landscape.”29 Of the poet’s ability to dislocate the names of concrete objects to the realm of abstract ideas, she adds: “In the process of creation the concrete objects distance themselves from their physical meaning. By means of the image that they create, they elevate themselves and turn into an abstract idea.”30

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Kaminer offers different examples of this device. The poem “Rechem ohr” (Womb of Light) begins, for instance, with the image of a blanket covering the poet’s body: “The blanket carves my body / like a twisting fetus [Ha-smicha megalefet gufi ke-pituli ‘ubar].” Kaminer argues that “the moment that there is an association made between the physical, concrete blanket and the womb that keeps and protects the fetus against any possible injury, then the blanket ceases to exist as a concrete object, and takes off in its abstract form to the realm of ideas.”31 Reviewing the 1987 collection Chasufah (Exposed), Hannah Ya’oz refers to Matitiahu’s “imagistic poetics,”32 which expresses “the sensuality exuded by her poems.” With this observation she joins other critics who stress the physicality of Matitiahu’s poems. Ya’oz claims that Matitiahu reveals a “femininity that is expressive, colorful, and vibrant.” She adds, “the subject of love is central to the series of poems, for example, ‘latet dvash al basar ha-lashon’ [“put honey on the tongue,” literally, “give honey on the tongue’s flesh,” meaning “to say sweet nothings”], a line that is marked entirely by the senses of color, touch, and taste.”33 Ya’oz also points out the dualities in the volume: “pain and pleasure intertwined, happiness and grief, a girl’s timidity and her almost shameless desire, that of a woman and mother.” In her review, Nechama Berlinksy observes the range of modes in the intimate poetry of Chasufah: “Rich personal landscapes, occasionally stormy, occasionally weakened, flow in [Matitiahu’s] poems, to the heights of gentleness and sensitivity, of realism and abstraction, and back.”34 Other reviews of C ­ hasufah point out how the poet exposes intimate thoughts and “reveals her soul,” and classify her poetry as “romantic, sentimental,” combining the treatment of personal relationships and places. It is, however, her 1988 volume Kurtijo kemado / Chatzer charuka (Scorched Courtyard) that has generated the most attention. Published in a bilingual Ladino-Hebrew edition, the book was hailed, in Nitza Gurvitz’s words, as a “unique phenomenon in Hebrew letters.”35 Yehudit Malik-Shiran describes it as constituting “a kind of novelty in the field of Hebrew literature in Israel,”36 and Hannah Ya’oz attempts to locate the volume in the Hebrew literary historiography of the Shoah. Referring to verses from the title poem of the collection, Ya’oz claims that ‘Scorched Courtyard’ adds a new phrase to the vocabulary already known and used in the treatment of the Shoah in Hebrew poetry—one that includes words like “car,” “transport,” “boots,” and “smoke.” She writes: “These lines . . . guide the reader between real and unreal, while personifying a certain

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stillness and its accompanying phrase. ‘Scorched Courtyard’ contributes a new cypher to the encrypted lexicon of the Shoah in the Hebrew poetry of [Israel’s] statehood generation [dor ha-medina].”37 The story of Greek Jews who perished in the Shoah was for the most part unknown in Israel until recently; similarly, Ladino, the language of these communities who perished, is mostly unrecognized there. Literary production in Ladino had had few proponents in Israel,38 and along with its readers, was mostly disappearing. Matitiahu’s first bilingual book had a renewing effect across Judeo-Spanish poetry—it was a unique contribution to what has become a renaissance over the past three decades across the Ladino cultural world. In bringing the story of the Greek Jews in the Shoah to center stage, introducing a new vocabulary to the discourse of the Shoah in Israel, and doing so in Ladino, thus breaking the dominant monoglossia of Hebrew literature in Israel, Kurtijo kemado represents a turning point in the literature of the Shoah, as well as in Matitiahu’s poetic trajectory. Its novelty was further, and perhaps best, recognized by Israeli scholars of Ladino, who could also identify Matitiahu’s innovations to literature in Ladino, which is usually dependent on traditional forms and genres. Shmuel Refael, for example, has welcomed Kurtijo kemado as a book the “originality [of which] lies in the challenge of reviving the Judeo-Spanish language as a language of literary creation,” and its particularity in “the expression the poet gives to her feelings, revealing spiritual ties to a culture that disappeared.”39 “The publication of a poetry collection in two languages, Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish,” he says in an understatement, “is an interesting development in the field of Hebrew literature.” Refael is surprised by the poet’s choice of language, especially because she hails from Israel, but sees it as an opportunity to take “the new poetry of today down unknown paths.” Later, in his introductory text to Vagabondo eternel, Refael already refers to Matitiahu as “the most original poet writing today in Judeo-Spanish”;40 her originality is apparent not only in her militant use of the Sephardic language, but also in the “lyric structures and the diverse thematic world” of her work. Matitiahu gives Judeo-Spanish poetry a modern diction: she uses an old language to speak of contemporary issues and places her poetry amid a modern aesthetic experience. She tends new poetic alternatives by treating contemporary themes, using unexpected images, and establishing a poetic dialogue with forms found in modern English, French, Spanish, and Hebrew poetry. As a result, the Israeli poet provides Ladino literature with a future. “Her poetry,”

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writes Refael, “is not limited to reveling in the past, but it offers futurist alternatives, like modern poetry in general, in the Judeo-Spanish language.”41 He further explains how Matitiahu differs from most other poets in Ladino: There is no doubt that Matitiahu does an innovative job within the field of ­Judeo-Spanish poetry. Innovative in the sense that her work is not a direct continuation of any of the “classic” molds and structures of this poetry. She doesn’t write romanzas, canciones, or coplas. Her poems do not try to imitate the lyric structures that are conventional and admired in this language, as is the case with almost all the poets who write in Judeo-Spanish. Matitiahu brings to her poems a wave of lyric modernism that was not known, perhaps not even understood, by her ancestors, who were raised, and educated the other generations, nourished by “classic” Judeo-Spanish poetry.42

Written after Matitiahu’s first trip to her parents’ birthplace, a now vanished center of Sephardic life, the poems of Kurtijo kemado are marked by a desolation and sense of nostalgia for a lost world. The book seeks to recover a past the poet had only lived through memories of her mother, who, though dead, continues to shape this recovery process. Kurtijo kemado is a return to Matitiahu’s origins, to her personal roots and the roots of her maternal language. It tries to chronicle the destruction of “the Jerusalem of the Balkans” and retrieve the landscape of the ruined city of Salonika. Matitiahu’s subsequent bilingual book, Alegrika, has a different goal. It is still nostalgic, evoking the past and seeking it in the places and faces of people the poet sees during her 1986 trip to Greece. But, as Benjamin Harshav asks, “Why would the Holocaust be so horrible, why wouldn’t it be just part of the general World War II, just 6 out of 50 million killed, if it were not a Holocaust of something, of a nation and a culture that disappeared with it?”43 He is referring to the destruction of the “modern Jewish nation and culture, especially as it had lived in Eastern Europe,” but his words can just as well apply to the destruction of Salonika and the culture that practically disappeared with it. Alegrika, published in 1992, is an attempt to conjure up that community and culture that existed before the war, as the poet transforms her earlier images of the scorched courtyard into those of a courtyard inhabited by families, and marked by voices, sounds, smells, colors and gestures. But the work is also more than that. It is Matitiahu’s attempt to revive the family that provided her with these very memories. Commenting on the personalities she imagined in order to craft her Salonikan scene, Matitiahu explains the genesis of her title

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character: “Alegrika,” she says, “is an invented character, to whom I gave life. She is like a symbol who gathers in[to] her[self] three generations in a metaphysical manner.”44 Part of the Israeli critical establishment was still a bit perplexed by Matitiahu’s use of two languages in this volume, a reaction that emphasizes the hegemony of the Hebrew monolingual model in Israeli cultural life. Yehudit Malik-Shiran, in her review, writes that Ladino is a rich language, through which Matitiahu manages to bring back to life portraits of a Jewish world that existed and disappeared.45 But Fabiana Chafetz, for example, notes that the poet does not offer a preface or a postface, or any note explaining her linguistic choices—or, I would say, justifying this flagrant violation of the cultural norm and the contradiction in expectations of the Hebrew literary system. The critic then plausibly ventures that, given the book’s 1992 publication, choosing Ladino was most likely guided by the commemoration of the five hundred years of the Jewish exile from Spain.46 Most significantly, Chafetz argues that the old world of Salonika depicted in Alegrika does not necessarily find a solid connection with the modern Hebrew spoken in Israel, and that the reader, lacking a cultural model with which to read the bilingual work, might read it as if it were entirely in Ladino or entirely in Hebrew. “It is possible to argue, for the purposes of this collection,” Chafetz continues, “that there may be a flaw in that Modern Hebrew still does not include linguistic echoes from Ladino as it does from [biblical, mishnaic and rabbinic] Hebrew and Yiddish.”47 Chafetz is sensitive enough to acknowledge the importance of reading the collection as a bilingual work, where the relationship between the two versions matters. But whereas the influence of Ladino on modern Hebrew is not widely recognized (the critic certainly is not alone), it does exist. The linguist Ora Schwarzwald argues that spoken Judeo-Spanish, as the substrate language of the early speakers of modern Hebrew in Israel, is present in the vocabulary and is the origin of several constructions in the new language. Schwarzwald demonstrates that the influence of Judeo-Spanish on modern Hebrew exists at least in the lexical field (“as dictionary entries”), with loan words, and as Judeo-Spanish expressions translated into Hebrew. Several expressions were translated into Hebrew and became part of the idiom, Schwarzwald explains, adding that the Hebrew speakers have since then lost awareness of these Judeo-Spanish origins.48

. . .

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Moving beyond the critics’ perplexity, let us examine both versions of “In the Streets of Athens,” published in Matitiahu’s second bilingual book, Alegrika, with the Ladino and Hebrew versions facing each other on opposite pages. In the Streets of Athens

‫בִרְחוֹבוֹת אֲתוּנָה‬

To the streets of Athens

‫שׂאתִ י ִמזְוֶדֶ ת יַלְדוּת סְמוּי ָה‬ ָ ָ‫ֶאל ְרחוֹבוֹת אַתוּנָה נ‬

I carried the hidden suitcase of

‫ ְצ ָבעִים ו ְֵריחוֹת‬,‫שׁמוֹת‬ ֵ ‫וּבָהּ‬

childhood

.‫שׁי‬ ִ ‫שׁלְפוּ ְכ ִאגְרוֹת ְמר ֹא‬ ְ ִ ‫שׁנּ‬ ֶ

In it, names, colors, and scents Drawn like letters from my head. From the fountain in Omonia Square Sprays clung to sounds of the language

* “‫ִמן ַה ִמּז ְָר ָקה ִבּ ְפּלָתֵ יאָה ”הוֹמוֹנְי ָה‬ ‫שׁ ֵהגִיחָה‬ ֶ ‫שׂפָה‬ ָ ‫סִילוֹנִים דָּ בְקוּ ִל ְצלִילֵי‬ .‫ִמזִּכְרוֹן ַבּי ִת‬

that emerges From a memory of home.

‫שׂר ֵמת‬ ָ ‫בְּדוּ ְכנֵי הַשׁוּק ַרעַשׁ ָבּ‬

On the counters at the marketplace, noise

,‫ְבּ ֶצבַע דָּ ם‬

of dead meat

‫וּמוֹנִיּוֹת ְצהֻבּוֹת בִּדְ ה ָָרה‬

The color of blood

.‫ז ְָרקוּ ָעלַי ֶאת ַה ֶצבַע ה ָָרע‬

And galloping yellow cabs Cast upon me the evil color.

‫שׁים‬ ִ ָ‫עֵינַי הָיוּ ֶאל ְפּנֵי ֲאנ‬

My eyes were on people’s faces

‫שׂ ִרידֵ י תָּ וִים‬ ְ ‫תָּ רוֹת‬

Searching for remains of features

‫שׁחָיוּ ְבּעֵינֵיהֶם ַה ֵמּתוֹת‬ ֶ

That lived in the dead eyes

.‫שׁל אָבִי ְו ִא ִמּי‬ ֶ

Of my father and my mother.

‫* פלתיאה ­— ִכּכָּר‬

En las kayes de Atena

In the Streets of Athens

En las kayes de Athena

In the streets of Athens

Yevava la validja envizible de mi chikes

I carried the invisible suitcase of my

Eya konservava nombres, kolores, i golores Ke se desvainavan komo kartas de mi memoria.

childhood It held names, colors, and scents Which were drawn from my memory like letters.

Los choros desbrochados por la fuente

The spouts released by the fountain

En la plasa “Homonia”

In “Homonia Square”

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Se aunavan kon los sones de la lengua

Merged with sounds of the language

Venida mezzo los rekordos de mi kaza.

That came back to me amid the memories of my home.

En las kalejas del soko se sentia El ruido de la karne muerta a la kolor

At the counters in the open market you could hear

De sangre,

The noise of blood-colored dead

I los taxis amariyos en koriendo

Meat

Arojavan sovre mi la mala kolor.

And yellow cabs rushing by Slung at me the evil color.

Fiksando la mirada en las fachas de la djente

Fixing my gaze on people’s faces I searched for remnants of features

Bushkava restos de fizionomias

That once lived in the (now dead) eyes

Ke bivian en los ojos (agora muertos)

Of my father and my mother.

De mi padre i mi madre.

The poem reveals, through bold and colorful metaphors, the powerful effects of the poet’s encounter with Greece and tells the story of the “reactivation” of her memory. As the title suggests, it is an urban poem, a sort of “scenes in the life of the city,” a depiction of a day in Athens in which the speaker herself is the passer-by. The particular syntaxes of Ladino and Hebrew and the characteristics of each language are at play helping to shape the two versions of the poem. The Ladino version, in general terms, is more prolix than the Hebrew one, with more verbs and pronouns. But both versions offer the same mixture of acute concreteness and abstraction, and heavily synesthetic images. Each version of the poem begins with the speaker carrying a suitcase. This is a common image in representations of exile, almost traditional as a representation of the Jewish diasporic condition, inasmuch as the Jew is permanently restless, in a constant state of “imminent departure.”49 The suitcase is the modern version of the bundle or rucksack characteristic of traditional renditions of the Wandering Jew. But here the suitcase is not by her side, to be filled by the departing poet. The poet, in fact, has left already—significantly, she has departed from Israel, the “final destination,” and headed back into exile. The suitcase—a concrete noun and object—is doubly qualified as invisible, or at least hidden, and is an object that dates back to her childhood, a detail that alters the metaphor, adding a certain degree of abstraction. In Hebrew it is in fact a haunting image. Because of the built-in ambiguity of the Hebrew construct

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state (smichut), mizvedet ialdut smuyiah can be translated either as “invisible/ hidden suitcase of childhood” or “suitcase of an invisible childhood,” linking the object itself to the experience of the Shoah and the transports. The invisible suitcase of childhood holds not clothes, or even pictures, as one might carry in his or her dislocations, but rather “names, colors, and scents”— the personal and intangible “baggage” acquired in childhood. The verb “to draw” (desvainar, in Ladino, and lishlof in Hebrew) implies suddenness, if not violence, related as it is to guns and weapons in general, as in the expressions “to draw a gun” and “to unsheathe a sword.” In this case, the speaker’s memory is quickly and effectively triggered. The names, colors, and scents of childhood—probably received in the home managed by her immigrant mother, a place the speaker holds closely—suddenly resurface. These first three verses in Hebrew (four in Ladino) offer just two concrete nouns—“suitcase” and “letters”—around which more conceptual and abstract, or at least intangible elements are structured, establishing a strong connection among memory, landscapes, and physical senses. At the sight and sound of a particular view—the water spurting from the fountain at Omonia Square—the sounds of Judeo-Spanish, the language spoken in the poet’s home, are reactivated in her memory. It is both a language of speech and a language of stories about the old home in Salonika. Matitiahu, during her trip, visited her mother’s house in Salonika. In the poem, however, she is not in Salonika but in Athens, which becomes a place in lieu of true memory, a construct enabled by language. There is a confluence of sounds, those of the water and those of the language, expressed by the poetic verb aunar in Ladino, which means “to make one”—that is, “to combine or merge”—and by the more concrete, “realistic” Hebrew ledaveq, “to adhere to,” or “to be attached to,” which comes from deveq, “glue.” The link between water sounds and Ladino sounds reveals interesting psychological associations. The sound of water is known for its soothing effects. For bilingual children, the mother’s language tends to be associated, not only with feelings and emotions, but also with these same comforting effects, since it is the language of intimacy.50 In addition, the rushing sounds of water may recall certain sounds characteristic to Ladino—sounds that do not exist in ­Castilian / modern Spanish but are still present in the Aragonese and Leonese dialects, and that resemble Portuguese sounds—such as the voiceless palatal fricative sh, as in the English shop. In Ladino spelling, as standardized by the journal Akí Yerushalaim, this typical rushing sound is also represented by sh, as in tengash (the subjunctive present, second person plural of “to have,” which in Spanish is tengáis).51

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However, the connection of spouts/sprays and sounds of language is not limited only to sounds in the verse. In fact, image and sounds are bound in the process of recapturing childhood memories. The spouts adhere to or are made one with the sounds of the language from home. I see the spouting fountain, in its strong, “sudden” movement, as analogous to the drawing or unsheathing of names, colors, and scents “like letters from the memory/head.” It is a concrete, almost surreal visual image that resembles the manner in which these elements from the past are unearthed or recalled by the speaker, “pulled out of my head like letters.” There is a certain power, strength, and suddenness even in the repetitive movements of the spouts, and these characteristics are enhanced especially in Hebrew by the use of the verb lehagiach. Meaning “to sally,” “to emerge,” “to reappear from behind a wall, a hidden place,” or simply “to pop up,” it implies not only a somewhat violent outpouring, but also a birth—the baby emerging from its mother’s womb. The following stanza proceeds with powerful combinations of sights and sounds. The “abstract” colors of the first stanza become concrete colors in the body of the poem. New sounds are revealed in synesthesia that test the limits of more conventional expression. This stanza offers a striking contrast: it depicts scenes of daily life in the city, the market being one of the liveliest and most colorful places in a city, and yet, those colors are here closely associated with death. Life and death, by means of bold colors, are thematized in this third stanza, which opens with a synesthesia: the sound of dead meat. The expression “dead meat” itself seems to stress death in its pleonastic bent, since especially in the context of a market, the meat is likely to be dead, and the word “meat” would not refer to flesh (the Ladino karne and the Hebrew basar, can be either “meat” or “flesh”).52 This sense of death is further emphasized by the periphrasis “color of blood,” in lieu of “red.” In Hebrew, the word “red,” adom, shares letters and sounds with “blood,” dam, and while one can say tzeva adom—“color red”— and tzeva ha-dam—“color of blood” (but note the definite article –ha before the second noun), the expression Matitiahu uses, tzeva dam—“color of blood,” but without the article—is not an uncommon choice in poetry. Matitiahu’s use of the expression is less banal: on the one hand, she uses “color of blood” to refer to meat, literally, the color of blood because it is indeed bloody—therefore subverting the metaphor by making it literal; on the other hand, she introduces the color yellow and pushes the metaphor even further to the concrete side. The yellow comes in speeding or “galloping” taxis, an image that again represents life and movement. These taxis, however, spread death, since their wheels

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splash the blood of the market (“the evil color”). Their movement along the market makes the color of death—and therefore death itself—more pervasive, when it physically marks the speaker: “And yellow cabs rushing by / Slung at me the evil color”; “And galloping yellow cabs / Cast upon me the evil color.” Some degree of violence in this splashing blood running from the market meat counters is expressed by the verbs arojar (to push, to throw) and lizroq (to throw), which I have chosen to translate as “to sling” and “to cast.” This use of yellow is a reference to the folk connotations of “yellow” in Hebrew: yellow is the color of envy and also of heated hostility.53 Even though the presence of other human beings is implicit in the reference to the market and to moving cabs, people appear explicitly only in the last stanza of the poem. Until then, the reader is privy to only the inner sensations the speaker has in relation to the city’s lively, but inanimate and static, monuments and objects. Now the reader follows the speaker’s eyes as they focus on the faces of people whom she sees perhaps only once, in the fleeting seconds when they cross paths on the streets of Athens. The speaker, whose sounds and images of childhood were reawakened by contact with the Greek city, is at this moment consciously seeking to relive her parents’ impressions, however belated and fragmentary they will unavoidably be. Note, for example, the use of the words restos—“remnants,” “remains”—and sarid—“residue,” “vestige.” Verses of remarkable grammatical and syntactical simplicity (especially in the Hebrew) express the speaker’s attempt to internalize visions that her parents might have seen, in an effort to identify with them and affirm some continuity. Once more life and death are treated in the poem, but this time the dead parents, represented by the synecdoche of their “dead eyes,” are revived through their living daughter, whose eyes become an extension of their own.

The Syntax of Forgetting Renan’s will [to nationhood] is itself the site of a strange forgetting of the history of the nation’s past: the violence involved in establishing the nation’s writ. It is this forgetting— the signification of a minus in the origin—that constitutes the beginning of the nation’s narrative. . . . It is through this syntax of forgetting—or being obliged to forget—that the problematic identification of a national people becomes visible. . . . Being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering the nation . . . —Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation”54

The process of Israeli nation-building involved a rearticulation of the past that aimed at constructing a distinct, specific national identity and culture. Earlier events and memories of the past, pre-Zionist narratives of Jewish history, tradi-

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tion and culture were reconstructed in order to conform to the master narrative of the new and unified nation. Jewish history and memory were carefully exploited to shape Israeli history and the collective memory of the new national formation. In so doing, the cultural and historical diversity of the Jews, who for two thousand years had lived among other nations, was merged into a single period between the two eras recognized by Zionist ideology: antiquity and the national revival in the ancient homeland, the Land of Israel.55 The accomplishments of Jewish life in the Diaspora were reduced to a void, filled only by the rhetoric that identifies exile56 solely with oppression, persecution, suffering, and death.57 Harshav stresses the inaccuracy in the representation of diasporic life, reminding us that “[b]etween one wave of pogroms and another, the Jewish nation was flourishing.”58 In this context where exile is perceived in highly negative terms, newly arrived immigrants in Israel had to become natives, relinquishing their languages, customs, and past traditions. A publication for the education of the New Hebrew youth suggests the tone when addressing the issue of exile in the early years of the nation-building enterprise: “Anything that relates to Exile, or anything that has something of Exile’s spirit on it, or anything that smells of Exile, should be out of the reach of this youth.”59 To be sure, exilic elements were incorporated into the indigenous cultural expressions of Israel, as Itamar Even-Zohar has shown.60 But the general and conscious trend, necessary for the construction of a native Hebrew culture, was to repress the diasporic past—to forget in order to remember the tale of territorialized national origins. Amnon Rubinstein describes the New Hebrew, the social type that marks the beginning of a new era: The Sabra became a mythological—and necessarily also archetypal—figure that forms a solid mold by which the Israeli-born would be shaped. The superior Sabra is characterized not only by what he possesses, but also by that which he does not have: he has no fear, weakness, or timidity; he has none of the exilic spirit [ galutiyut]. He is the product of the Land of Israel, the outcome of generations’ hopes, and he stands in contrast to the Jew of Exile. He is Hebrew and not Jew, and he is to put an end to the humiliation of his fathers. Anything that the Jew has lacked he has: strength, health, labor, return to nature, deep-rootedness, and a little of the peasant’s slowness and heaviness.61

The valorization of native elements and the repudiation of exile per se led to a further contempt for the products of exilic life: the Jews. If life in exile was

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reduced to pain and humiliation—“pariahdom,” in Ella Shohat’s words62—the uprooted people who lived under these conditions were assumed to be fearful, weak, and passive. These traits, as Rubinstein describes above, were to be abandoned in the Land of Israel and replaced with vigor and power, inasmuch as the old Jew was transformed into the New Hebrew. The association of the Sabra, or native Israeli, with virility and strength only stresses what even Rubinstein’s language (note the “he’s” and the “fathers”) makes clear: that the Sabra is manly, and the exilic Jew, by contrast, is effeminate. Better said, the Zionist narrative genders Jewish history, feminizing the Diaspora and offering a new constructed masculinity embodied in the New Hebrew. Zerubavel shows that historical moments marked by armed resistance were privileged in the Israeli/Zionist commemorative tradition, and that certain events that ended in defeat were conveniently transformed and folded into the national memory to endorse the militaristic and masculine reconstruction of the past.63 In light of the role played by the army in Israeli society, it is evident how much this masculine national memory is the basis of Israeli national identity. The historian Simona Sharoni also links statehood to gender, discussing the feminine Diaspora in contrast to the masculine Yishuv (pre-state settlement). She claims that Zionism projected onto Diaspora Judaism the antisemitic stereotypes applied to and internalized by European Jews.64 Other works treat the reconfiguration of Jewish diasporic subjectivity and the construction of a new Israeli masculinity.65 Daniel Boyarin also genders Zionism, but he disagrees with Sharoni when he argues that the effeminate, “sissy” Jew—his ideal Jewish male type—is a positive historical product of Jewish culture and not an image imposed by non-Jews. Boyarin asserts that “there is something correct . . . in the persistent European representation of the Jewish man as a sort of woman. More than just an antisemitic stereotype, the Jewish ideal male as countertype to ‘manliness’ is an assertive historical product of Jewish culture.”66 And he continues, The vector of my theoretical-political work . . . is not to deny as antisemitic fantasy but to reclaim the nineteenth-century notion of the feminized Jewish male, to argue for his reality as one Jewish ideal going back to the Babylonian Talmud.67 I argue that traditionally Jewish men identified themselves as fem(m)inized . . . and understood that fem(m)inization as a positive aspect of their cultural identity.68

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According to Boyarin, it is the Zionist attempt to create an overly masculine Jew that constitutes an acceptance of Aryan paradigms, hence a move toward assimilation.69 Whether in positive or negative terms, the fact is that the Diaspora, with all of its implications, was gendered as feminine and rejected. In the same vein, diasporic languages, which had marked the daily life and the literary creation of Jews around the world for many centuries, were suppressed in favor of Hebrew. As the language of the Bible, Hebrew corresponded to the time when the Jewish people, now returning for the national rebirth, inhabited the land, making the old language a good choice for the Zionist project of constructing a “New Hebrew” who would homogenize the disparate constituencies of the new state.70 Unifying the Jewish people around a single language and tying that language to a territory was part of the dream of building a nation-state with a specific political national culture. Endorsing a view that is subscribed to by a number of social scientists who connect nationalism, statehood, and language,71 it was a project derived from a nineteenth-century romantic European view of nationalism. Until then Jews had held an idea of nationalism that was not necessarily linked to language: one could be a member of the Jewish nation and still speak any number of languages. Now language borders were being created to go along with ethnic and political borders, conforming to the ideology of the nation-state—one that creates a false unity. “[T]he assumption of overlapping identity of nation, land and language is an essentialist fallacy,” Harshav writes. “In history, there was a great deal of asymmetry between those three categories.”72 It was thus the modern nationalist impulse that provoked the politicization of Hebrew.73 As Hebrew’s political importance increased, other Jewish languages were undermined—languages that might threaten the desired homogeneity of the unified national state, for they were too diverse and too reminiscent of the Diaspora, which Israelis were expected to forget.74 Associated with the fact that other Jewish languages were marks of the ­Diaspora was the correlated gendering of the languages. The identification of the diasporic languages with the feminine in part derived from a mind-set that saw Hebrew and Sabras as eminently virile, while the “powerless diasporic Jew,” with his language, was emasculated. However, the gendering of languages did not begin with Zionism, but was rather a process that evolved within the bilingual (or trilingual) Jewish communities themselves. Naomi Seidman discusses the “sexual-linguistic system” formed by Hebrew and Yiddish when treating

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the diglossia of Ashkenazi communities. Following Max Weinreich’s formulation of “internal bilingualism,”75 which identifies specific complimentary and hierarchical sociological roles assigned to each language—Yiddish to communicate orally, and Hebrew for written records—and building on Shmuel Niger’s work, Seidman examines the connections between Hebrew and men, on the one hand, and Yiddish and women, on the other. Stressing the historicity of the system, but also admitting that the femininity of Yiddish became its dominant ideology, Seidman affirms that “the sexualized perceptions about Hebrew and Yiddish must be traced in large part to their respective literary audiences rather than to some quality intrinsic to the respective languages.”76 Indeed, in traditional Jewish communities, studying the Torah and the Talmud has been reserved for men, while women, consistently excluded from the realm of religious learning, were responsible for working outside the home and supporting the household. Because of their studies, men in Ashkenazi communities were able to read Hebrew, the sacred language, while women would read works in Yiddish, written specifically for “women and simple people,” or “women and men who are like women, that is, they are uneducated.”77 Hebrew and masculinity were what a linguist would call unmarked, while Yiddish and femininity were marked as inferior. The Zionist impulse reinforces the association of Hebrew and masculinity, now in an explicit ideological form. Such an association, literally performed by the new Hebrew speakers, both reveals and symbolizes a transformation in attitudes. More “macho” and belligerent, the Hebrew speakers in Palestine contrast with the soft Yiddish speakers from the Diaspora.78 Such a pattern is carried over into pronunciation and prosody, with the decision that modern Hebrew would avoid the Yiddish accentual system, deemed too weak and “whining.”

. . . The outcome of the “language wars” in Israel between the partisans of Hebrew and Yiddish is clear, inasmuch as the revival of Hebrew and its adoption as the national language were very successful.79 I want to turn my attention to how other Jewish languages faired in this context and whether these too were gendered. Since Ladino is my main concern, I examine whether the “internal bilingualism” that also characterized the Sephardic communities of the Levant may be similarly viewed as a “sexual-linguistic” system.80 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Sephardic world of the Levant was responsible for critical intellectual achievements in Hebrew, with the

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publication of significant works, including the authoritative Shulkhan Arukh— Joseph Karo’s code of Jewish law, still used today by Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities alike. As in most Jewish communities, Hebrew has traditionally been the sacred language (lashon akodesh),81 used in Torah studies and rabbinical writings. Its prestige has never been surpassed by any other language, and because the religious studies setting has traditionally been dominated exclusively by men, Hebrew has in turn been mastered mostly by men. The division of complementary roles that we find in the Hebrew/Yiddish relationship is also recognizable in the relationship between Hebrew and Ladino/Judezmo/Spanyol (vernacular Judeo-Spanish), with the former favored for writing and the latter for speaking. This, however, is complicated by the addition of Ladino calque, a third linguistic form that is intimately articulated with Hebrew and Spanish: an archaizing, artificial calque language, used in literal translations of Hebrew and Aramaic texts that preserve Hebrew’s syntax while using Spanish words.82 This linguistic dovetailing between Hebrew and Ladino is further expressed by the fact that Ladino literature developed largely in conjunction with its translation of Hebrew texts, essentially using Hebrew literature as its template. Translations into Ladino, or Spanyol, the spoken language of the masses developed in the Levantine Diaspora, always had a large component of Hebrew and Aramaic expressions woven into its dominant Hispanic syntactic substratum. Men and women, both of whom used the language as their vernacular, had thus some knowledge of Hebrew. But very few indeed had a good command of “Whole Hebrew”— the Hebrew language proper, at all of its structural levels. Except for rabbinic scholars and highly educated Jews (and these would be male), few could write fluently in Hebrew, or read the Bible and rabbinic literature.83 Books on Jewish religion and morals had to be published in the vernacular language as early as the first century following the arrival of Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, some time in the sixteenth century, which might suggest that their knowledge of Hebrew was already rather limited. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, apparently only 10 percent of Jews (again, male) knew “Whole Hebrew.”84 In this context, Ladino, the language used to teach Hebrew by means of translations of sacred texts, acquired both greater importance and a patina of sacredness in religious and scholarly settings (but one not comparable to the position that the Yiddish Taytsch might have had in the Ashkenazi world). In the words of José Benoliel, the Ladino version of the Bible “has remained sacred and untouchable [ha quedado consagrada e intangible].”85 As such, Ladino as calque grew increasingly unintelligible to the masses, almost as much as Hebrew itself.

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Besides being the language of oral communication, vernacular Judeo-­ Spanish moved into the realm of translations and education. Aiming to educate the masses by making texts more accessible to the unlearned, ­eighteenth-century rabbis began producing free translations of rabbinical texts instead of the customary literal Ladino (calque) translations. Furthermore, rabbis began writing in the vernacular, looking to free literary creativity in Ladino from its dependence on Hebrew. The eighteenth century saw a new translation of the Bible, replacing that of 1547, as well as the publication of what is considered by many the masterpiece of Ladino literature, the Me’am Lo’ez, 86 a compendium of commentaries on the Bible, legends, stories, anecdotes, and maxims. This encyclopedic work, written with the moral and religious education of the people in mind following the deep crisis provoked by the Sabbatean movement,87 became the most popular book in the homes of Sephardic Jews in the Levant. Compared to a similar project, the Yiddish Tzene Urena, I would suggest that the Me’am Lo’ez is more ambitious in scope, broader in its content, and was never identified with a feminine audience, given that it was written for and read by both men and women, as well as children. Used to popularize religious precepts and practices, and popular among the less educated, it however retained its prestige within the rabbinical elite. And even as it reinforced the place of the vernacular in the linguistic system, the title Me’am Lo’ez, (“From a People of Strange Language),” also reaffirmed that the vernacular Ladino is a foreign language, yet again recognizing Hebrew as the indigenous language of the Jews. Modernization and the rise of modern nation-states severely shifted the status of the vernacular within the Sephardic communities. Many other non-Jewish languages—mainly French, Italian, and Turkish—increasingly participated in the fusion that characterizes Jewish languages and altered the way speakers use them. For my purposes here, I focus on the sexual implications of the relationship between the languages. The superior position of Hebrew in the hierarchy of languages, because it stresses the privileged position of the men who can use it, might allow for an identification of Hebrew with men. But so does calque Ladino, associated with rabbinical scholars and highly educated Ottoman Jewish men. Both men and women speak Ladino/Djudezmo, the vernacular language, marked by a high number of Hebraisms. There was never a myth of femininity linked to Ladino/Djudezmo, perhaps because it also participated in religious education, and because it was a language of business that came to dominate other minor languages in certain regions of the Ottoman Empire.

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The popular books were meant for a general audience of both genders, since the masses were generally lax in their orthodox practices. Nowadays there is a nostalgic identification of vernacular Ladino, or ­Djudezmo/Spanyol, with the mother, albeit not to the same degree as in Yiddish, which has been referred to as mameloshn, literally, the “mother’s language.” Still, Ladino’s links to the past and to memories of one’s mother have become more readily accepted. This nostalgic maternal identification derives, I believe, from the fact that Jewish speakers, both men and women, were increasingly required to use more non-Jewish languages as the Sephardim were modernized and Westernized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and new nationstates emerged in the Ottoman Empire. Many young women soon became conversant in French, Italian, or Greek, but the generational gap was apparent, as older women could still, for some time, remain monolingual (by which I mean native speakers of Ladino/Djudezmo, which was full of Hebraisms).88 Men were conducting business, trading, and traveling, and gradually becoming more comfortable with the national languages, whereas women, limited to domestic and Jewish spaces, weren’t as exposed to non-Jewish languages.89 Gradually, the Sephardic language was used only by older generations and in the more intimate spaces of the home, synagogue, and community centers. The transformation of Ladino/Djudezmo into a language of the hearth emphasized its linkage to women and, specifically, to mothers. From a full-fledged language inhabiting Jewish and non-Jewish spaces, the world of business and the world of home, vernacular Judeo-Spanish saw itself restricted to the warmth of a familiar world of mothers and grandmothers. Activities usually performed at home, such as the telling of stories and the singing of traditional Ladino songs, were performed by the community of women, and became identified with them. Genres such as the kunsejas (moral stories) were consequently associated with women, reproducing the duality between script and orality, in which the written text is part of the male world and the oral literary genres (the so-called folk genres) are held by the woman.

. . . As the speaker walks the streets of Athens, Margalit Matitiahu is performing more than one return. Against the necessary Israeli injunction to forget in ­order to foster the nation-building project, and following the Jewish precept to remember, Matitiahu strives to remember her parents’ past—a past found in the buildings, rocks, and landscapes, and that she will try to bring back by

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way of her poetry. Although not exclusively, her own past is made up of remnants of her parents’ world, carefully built upon memories of Salonika, and recomposed at home in Israel with texts, images, objects, colors, and scents—her inner invisible suitcase. Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” is useful to describe Matitiahu’s relationship to her mother’s memories, which she inherits. Rather than a direct recollection, one’s memory and perception of an object or event is mediated by the personal memories of an earlier generation. These memories produce a narrative that dominates the experience of secondgeneration family members. In Hirsch’s own words: Postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.90

In Greece, Matitiahu tries to perceive the world as her parents had perceived it, and to locate herself in relation to their past. It is a constructed perception, because she knows that these memories are not her own; and in the case of this poem, her journey is not even a “return” to the same place: she is in Athens, not Salonika, and the two are very different cultural sites. Matitiahu’s deliberate identification with her parents is shadowed by the conscious realization that what is left are nothing more than vestiges of a past that can never again be fully apprehended: “I searched for remains of features / That once lived in the (now dead) eyes / Of my father and my mother.” Still, if the past cannot be relived, there is hope that she can unearth elements of this past and recuperate them as a living part of the present. This hope, however, is complicated: it coexists with a self-awareness of both the inauthenticity of memory and the impossibility of return. Home, language, memory, and death are thus interwoven in “In the Streets of Athens.” The concept of “home” itself is problematized in the poem, especially in the differences presented in the Ladino and Hebrew versions. “The spouts released by the fountain . . .  / Merged with sounds of the language / That came back to me amid memories of my home,” the Ladino poem reads, while the Hebrew reads: “Sprays clung to sounds of the language that emerges / From a

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memory of home.” In the Hebrew version, “home” is not accompanied by a possessive, first person singular, nor by the idiomatically required definite article that would suggest the sense of “my home.” The context clearly establishes that this is the speaker’s home, but the grammatical and syntactical structure allows enough ambiguity that, in hindsight, evokes a connection between an abstract version of “home” (zikaron bait, literally, “home memory”) and the dead parents. Matitiahu’s home, in the private, familiar sense, is in Israel. In the dichotomy of home vs. homeland, her home is also Israel, the concrete territorial location normalized as the homeland of the Jews.91 However, as a daughter of immigrants, she witnessed her mother’s nostalgia for her own home, Salonika. At the same time, those elements her mother brought to the poet’s childhood house in Israel were nonspatial, but just as crucial in defining “home”: traditions, customs, ethnic identity, language. In fact, the Ladino language carefully preserved in the household replaced the “home” that was Salonika with the accepted “homeland” that was Israel. There was never a complete resolution of the conflict between “here” and “there,” “now” and “then”—“foreign” elements that were supposed to disappear among the new “locals” were somehow preserved. This irresolution is evident in cultural differences within Israeli society, differences that remain despite the efforts to construct a homogeneous national citizenry, revolving around one land, one language, and one national culture, out of a centuries-old diasporic nation. It also confirms the trend to relegate Ladino to the domestic realm, so that it symbolically came to represent home, thereby preserving Hebrew’s status as the worldly language of education, administration, and other state affairs. The “home” of Matitiahu’s mother (in Salonika) is not Matitiahu’s home, and yet it is that too. Living her mother’s memories at second hand throughout childhood, Matitiahu was already positioned between the two homes, ambivalently “here” and “there.” By way of speech and written texts—newspapers and books that her mother brought in a trunk when she immigrated to the homeland, Israel—language was preserved, and language is the crux of memory and of its recreation of home. The intimate connection between home and language, interwoven by memory, is expressed in the verses that speak of “the language /  That came back to me amid the memories of my home,” or “the language that emerges / From a memory of home.” Note that in Ladino the article that precedes “language” is always the definite “the,” qualifying the unnamed language as the only one that is brought back by memory. Curiously, this l­anguage— vernacular Ladino, or “Spanyol,” as Matitiahu prefers to call it 92—is the one

86   AT THE CROSSROADS

element that, conversely, has the power to bring back memories, to promote Matitiahu’s return not only to her childhood, but to her mother’s childhood: her “home.” Significantly, the sudden, near-violent reactivation of the speaker’s memory that we witness in this poem happens when the poet returns to the location of her mother’s pre-Palestine life. And a further complication: Matitiahu is returning to her mother’s literal home—her actual house in Salonika. In this poem, it is Athens, a metonymic deflection from the “real” or “actual” home. This is a strange return: strictly speaking, Matitiahu cannot “return” to Greece, since she has never been there. However, her physical dislocation represents a symbolic return to her mother’s diasporic life, and a literal presence in a land that was home and motherland, but was never homeland. Michel de Certeau writes that memory is “mobilized relative to particular events.”93 Death was just such an event for Matitiahu, as her return (her “triggering trip”) was only performed following her mother’s death, as if a definitive and traumatic event were necessary to unblock a series of associations that had been repressed for some time; as if death required, or were the foundational moment of a new ritual or a new order in one’s life. Usually this new order comes from a need or desire to establish continuity with those who died. For Matitiahu, her mother’s death prompted her to revisit “diaspora” (while visiting the Diaspora) and revive images and sounds from the past. She seeks to preserve them, rescuing them from death and restoring them to life, as she gives them a new, poetic life. Returning to the language of her childhood, her mother’s language, Matitiahu embraces her mother’s memories and imposes herself as both a link to the past and a guarantor of the transmission of Se­ phardic culture. As she explains, making clear that her mother’s memories and past are at the core of her poetic practice and represent her original connection to the more distant Sephardic past: This language takes me back to the folklore and culture of my parents, whose ancestors were driven out of Spain in 1492. . . . For me Ladino is the living language of my mother and of my childhood. . . . I want not only to connect with the long cultural history of Spanish Jews, but to breathe life into the language for new generations.94

Matitiahu links Ladino and death in a personal way, but this is a recurrent association that has been made by linguists and ethnologists.95 If the historical changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had already cur-

AT THE CROSSROADS   87

tailed its use, Nazi Germany dealt Ladino a mortal blow (as it did Yiddish) when it killed 80 percent of its speakers during the Shoah. This association of Ladino with the death of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews is not lost on Matitiahu: “The return [of Ladino] came in a very deep way, an impulse that was revived in me, as I realized that this language that was my parents’ tongue is dying. The language that was the language of life in the Balkans was gone after the Holocaust.”96 She further admits to a communal attachment deepened by the language, one of the most important defining elements of Sephardic ethnocultural identity: “The language also connected me to the Jews and the spirit of the community which arose from my parents’ stories.”97 Her connection to the past and to the language bears the imprint of both migration and the Shoah. “The relation of the vast majority of contemporary Jews to their past is marked by the experiences of genocide or emigration, or both,” Joelle Bahloul observes.98 Matitiahu’s first bilingual book, Kurtijo kemado, attempts to revitalize the living language of her parents’ Greek community, but is marked by the ominous shadow of the Shoah in Greek Jewish history. The poems speak of destruction and desolation. It is a project of memorializing life that is now forever marked by death. Matitiahu’s second book, Alegrika, returns to the same house that appears burned in Kurtijo kemado, but depicts it as it was before the war: full of life, sounds, real people and real names. It delves further into the past, asking us to uncover the vibrancy of life that preceded the Shoah and recognize the enormity of what was lost. In one of his studies of threatened languages, Joshua A. Fishman summarizes the confluence of ancestral emotional and cultural elements conjugating life and death in the process of intergenerational and ethnocultural continuity through language maintenance. His words could well describe Matitiahu’s position as she attempts to maintain, with Ladino, the “symbolic heritage” (Bahloul)99 of her family and ethnic group: Child development research has revealed that children begin to learn the phonology and the syntax of their prospective “mother tongue” when they are still in the womb. Many ethnocultures have always supposed that this was so and since the culturally specific language issues forth from what is perceived as a culturally specific body-type and genetic pool, it is not uncommon to view the language as being yet another tangible contributor to authentic ethnocultural membership. To abandon the language may be viewed as an abandonment not only of the traditional doings and knowings, but as an abandonment of personal

88   AT THE CROSSROADS

ancestral kin and cultural ancestral heroes per se. Similarly, guaranteeing or fostering the specific language’s acquisition and use is often viewed as fostering one’s own personal (in addition to the culture’s) triumph over death and obliteration via living on in one’s own children and grandchildren. Life and death imagery is pervasive in ethnolinguistic consciousness the world over.100

Driven by death, Matitiahu sets out to enliven the past, to relive her mother’s memories of Salonika. Her first two bilingual books are an attempt to reconfigure the world of her parents before their emigration to Palestine. Because Matitiahu did not grow up in Salonika, and did not have firsthand knowledge of traditional life in the city’s Jewish community and the experiences she tries to recast in her poetry, her task is to translate into verse her mother’s memories as received from performances of memory in her home: conversations, stories, and the perusal of old books and newspapers. Writing about her decision to leave for Israel, Elie Carasso offers a picture of Matitiahu’s mother, whom he calls “Dona Matilde León,” and the cultural trove she collected and passed on to her daughter: “Dona Matilde . . . never stopped loving the city of her birth. She fervently collected newspapers and journals published by Jews from Salonika, turning her home into an invaluable cultural site.”101 Matitiahu also recognizes the role played by her mother’s store of textual, material memories in both her mother’s and her own lives and literary development. “Books were her life,” she writes. “She collected many of them: history books, novels, short stories, coplas, newspapers and journals (more than 120), and other materials. All of this she brought with her to Israel. Books accompanied her throughout her life. Now they accompany me, since my childhood.”102 In fact, both in her poems and in interviews, Matitiahu refers to “stories” that conjured up the Jewish world of interwar Salonika. These stories eventually fashion her poetic construction of memory, her shaping of a vanquished world that appears to her heavily dominated by strong women and their relationships. Matitiahu’s constructed vision of the Salonikan world, as Stacy Beckwith notes, depicts the influence that her mother exerted over her as memory that is firmly and deeply grounded. Matitiahu writes in Ladino, “Memories planted in me by my mother.”103 These vicarious memories are translated into bilingual verses, marked not only by the intrinsic linguistic differences between Hebrew and Ladino, but also by Matitiahu’s different perception of and intimacy with each language.

AT THE CROSSROADS   89

What domains of experience has she lived in each of the languages? How fluent is she, not in the languages necessarily, but in the worlds that each language elicits, in their specific cultural perspectives? How much detail can she provide about memories that are not her own in an everyday, colloquial, modern language with which she grew up, Hebrew, and in another language, Ladino, restricted to home, and of which she learned a 1930s version? As happened with Hebrew during the efforts of language revival, many words for contemporary daily objects are lacking in Ladino, and the task of establishing such a vocabulary has drawn the attention of Ladino scholars. This is certainly an issue for someone who takes it upon herself to revitalize Ladino literature and “breathe life into the language for new generations.”104 Matitiahu asserts her intention to write contemporary literature in Ladino using free verse and modern forms, and insists on trying her hand at genres other than those consecrated by traditional Ladino poetry: “I have no interest in imitating or reviving the old ‘classic’ forms such as romances, canciones, coplas.”105 She further explains: In my poetry there is an encounter between old language and contemporary modern lyric poetry. The poems do not emulate the creative forms of the past. They are written in the form and structure of modern poetry, without rhymes, with internal rhythm, as in today’s poetry.106

And, perhaps in a claim for integration of her multilingual and Ladino poetry into the national Israeli Hebrew-centered literary corpus, Matitiahu states elsewhere: “I write modern poetry, which joins the field of contemporary Israeli literature.”107 In this double binding of past and future, Matitiahu presents two visions of Salonikan Jewish life, where the Ladino version is more heavily influenced or mediated by her mother’s presence and linguistic practices. Perhaps for this reason, it is still difficult for Matitiahu to speak of love and sex in her first two bilingual books, subjects restricted to her Hebrew poems.108 In later books, mainly or exclusively written in Ladino,109 the thematic repertoire is amplified, and it appears that the poet is more comfortable with the language and its ability to express her own memories and life experiences. Matitiahu herself recognizes the change, as she says: “now the themes of my Ladino poems are as varied as those of my Hebrew poetry: womanhood, impressions from my ­travels in Spain, facing the difficult Israeli political situation, love, grappling with philosophical questions of human existence.”110

90   AT THE CROSSROADS

Returning to her first book, Kurtiijo kemado, I would like to observe how the differences between Hebrew and Ladino—in language, culture, history and audiences—are revealed in one particular poem about the Shoah. Again, the concept of translation becomes increasingly relevant. Matitiahu denies the general perception that her bilingual poems are a translation from one language to the other (the direction may vary); instead she reaffirms “the power of language to reshape how we think about content.”111 She repeatedly insists that sometimes a poem is written first in Hebrew, and sometimes in Ladino. The experience is the same. When I write in Hebrew, I think in Hebrew, and when I write in Ladino, the language guides me through concepts and connotations. Sometimes the realm of meanings is altogether different. ἀ e poems are written twice, once in Hebrew and once in Ladino; they are not translated. . . . The essence of the experience is conveyed in both languages, and in every poem the language is what guides me.112

Although she might reject the word “translation” to describe her bilingual writing, there is an inevitable element of “self-translation” involved in this process. Whether or not there is an immediate transfer of text from one language into the other, or whether she rewrites the “theme” based on the particular creative possibilities of each language,113 Matitiahu is in fact translating herself—her emotions and perceptions—into two different linguistic media. If, as discussed earlier, we assume her first Ladino poems are a tribute to her mother and an attempt to translate her mother’s memories, then we have, not one, but at least two juxtaposed layers of translation.114 The consequence of Matitiahu’s insistence is clear. She refuses to grant either language the status of the “original;” she refuses to privilege either Ladino or Hebrew over the other. She is instead articulating a negotiation that leaves each language and culture equally original, which is why her work demands a translation theory that supersedes issues of textual fidelity or betrayal, and escapes binary categories dividing author and translator, original and translation, native and other. Her work demands that we recognize her engagement with two different audiences and the fact that she fundamentally lives a translingual experience. In “On Language and Words,” Arthur Schopenhauer claims that “A complete mastery of another language has taken place when one is capable of translating not books but oneself into the other language.”115 “Translating oneself ” is a process epitomized when a writer translates her own works. Auto-translation

AT THE CROSSROADS   91

also allows for an easier observation of the norms of each literary system to which the two versions belong, since it is then that these norms confront each other most explicitly. Considering the multiple versions created by the author also underscores the urgency of questions that traditionally arise during the study of translations. Can cultures be translated into different languages? Is translation interpretation? Or is it rewriting? Translation usually assumes a monolingual context: one language is transferred (in)to another, “carried,” as Webster’s states, “from one place to another.”116 But what happens to the tacit norms and assumptions of translation when the author herself is the one who translates her poems? When she belongs simultaneously to the different cultural constructs that inform the two distinct languages? When her readers may or may not share her cultural location and languages? Do the languages overlap? Do they affect each other in the choice of metaphors and expressions? Ultimately, is the process a translation or a rewrite? Even these do not exhaust the questions raised by Matitiahu’s “­Liberty Square,” which we shall read next. Presented in Ladino on the left page and in Hebrew on the right, the poem, in its diction and typographic presentation, confuses the distinction between original text and target language. Each text is, for the target reader, positioned in its traditional place, according to the direction each language—Semitic or Romance—is read: Hebrew on the right, and Ladino on the left. The textual differences of the two versions and their equal standing on the page provoke an instability that works toward the erasure of a concept of a definitive first text, as if to suggest that every text is always a translation of another text. La plasa de la libertad La plasa onde los dijidios de Saloniki fueron arekojidos i mandados A los kampos de konsentrasion

Liberty Square The square where the Jews of Salonika were gathered and sent To the concentration camps.

En la plasa pozava la kayades

There was silence in the square

Ma muestros oyidos sintian el ruido ke

But our ears heard the noise that rose

suvia del tiempo pasado Las ventanas de las kazas mos miravan kon ojos estranyos I una negregura enlokesida paresia abashar

from times past. The windows of the houses looked at us with strange eyes And a maddened perversity seemed to descend

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De las agilas arrevatadoras vistidas de

From ravaging eagles dressed in evil.

maldad. la plasa mos azia sinyos invezibles,

The square made us invisible signs,

la kayadez korria gritando en muestras

The silence ran screaming in our veins

venas En la londjura—la mar kedava blue komo el sielo

In the distance—the sea turned blue like the sky

Ma muestros mushos se empretesian.

But our lips blackened.

“La plasa de la libertad”

“Liberty Square”

Topa oy avrigo basho la solombra de los

Today finds shelter under the shade of

arvoles

trees

Abokados por el pezgor del enverano

Bent by the weight of summer

I de una manera de libertad timida

And with a timid liberty

Kontinua a sirkolar el movimiento.

Continues to move the traffic,

Ma de las ventanas ke siempre van

But from the windows that always hunt

kasando la luz

for light

Nunka no podra fuir la eskuridad.

Darkness will never escape.

July 1986 SU Press

SU Press

(my translation) Hebrew

poem_91-92[14]MB.doc

poem_91-92[14]MB.doc ‫ככר 'החרות' בשׂאלוניקי‬

“Liberty” Square in Salonika

Hebrew

1

1 ‫ככר ’החרות‘ בשׂאלוניקי‬

‫)ככר בה ריכזו הנאצים רבבות מיהודי שאלוניקי‬ (Square where the Nazis rounded ‫בשׂאלוניקי‬ '‫'החרות‬ ‫ ככר‬up myriads ‫ואשר שוכנו בבנינים סביבה במרמה ולא הורשו‬ of Salonika Jews, ‫)ככר בה ריכזו הנאצים רבבות מיהודי שאלוניקי‬ who were then deceived into moving into the (.‫לשוב לבתיהם עד הישלחם למחנות העבודה וההשמדה‬ ‫ואשר שוכנו בבנינים סביבה במרמה ולא הורשו‬ surrounding buildings and forbidden to return home before being(.‫וההשמדה‬ sent to ‫הישלחם למחנות העבודה‬ ‫עדִפּוּר ַה ִכּכָּר‬ ‫לבתיהםלָה ס‬ ‫לשוב ַמן ָרחוֹק ָע‬ ְ‫ִמתּוְֹך ז‬ labor and death camps.) ‫חַלּוֹנוֹת ַהבָּתִּ ים נִנְעֲצוּ בְּגוּפֵנוּ‬

From a distant time rose the story of the square The windows of the houses were plunged into our bodies and a rampaging wild evil landed in eagles of prey clothed in malice from the tip of the boot to the cap.

‫שׁתּוֹלֵל נָחַת‬ ְ ‫וְר ֹ ַע ִמ‬

‫ִמתּוְֹך ז ְ ַמן ָרחוֹק ָעלָה סִפּוּר ַה ִכּכָּר‬

‫שׁי זָדוֹן‬ ֵ ‫שׁ ִרים טוֹרפִים לְבוּ‬ ָ ְ‫ִמנּ‬

‫נִנְעֲצוּ בְּגוּפֵנוּ‬.‫יםַע‬ ַ ‫ַלּוֹנוֹתָף‬ ‫העבַּדָתִּכּוב‬ ‫ִמח ְקצֵה ַמגּ‬ ‫שׁתּוֹלֵל נָחַת‬ ְ ‫וְר ֹ ַע ִמ‬

,‫אוֹתיוֹת סְמוּי ִים נָתְ נָה בָּנוּ‬

‫שׁי זָדוֹן‬ ֵ ‫שׁ ִרים טוֹרפִים לְבוּ‬ ָ ְ‫ִמנּ‬

.‫שׁתִ י ָקה זָ ֲע ָקה ְבּ ַמסָּע הַדָּ ם‬ ְ ‫ַה‬

.‫ִמ ְקצֵה ַמגָּף עַד כּובַע‬

‫שׁ ַמי ִם‬ ָ ‫ ֵמעַל ִה ְכחִילוּ‬,‫ְבּ ֶמ ְרחָק ָמה ִה ְכחִיל ַהיּ ָם‬ ‫ְמוּי ָהל‬ ‫וֹתַשׂפסָתַ י ִם‬ ‫ְחוֹלי ה‬ ,‫בָּנוּ‬.‫ִיםְַך נ ְו ֶָתְה ֱענ ִמָהיק‬ ‫וּכאוֹת‬

.‫שׁתִ י ָקה זָ ֲע ָקה ְבּ ַמסָּע הַדָּ ם‬ ְ ‫ַה‬

‫שׂאלוֹנִי ִקי‬ ָ ‫ִכּכָּר ” ַהחֵרוּת“ ְבּ‬

‫שׁו ְבּצֵל ַצ ְמּרוֹת ֵעצִים ִכּבְדֵ י ַקי ִץ‬ ַ ‫חוֹסָה ַע ְכ‬ ‫חִיכ‬ ‫כשׁ‬ ‫המ ְמ‬ ִַ ‫מ ָמהה‬ ‫ָק מ ִָי‬ ְ‫ח תּ‬ ‫ֵרוּת‬ ‫שׁ ַמי ִם‬ ָ ‫ִילוּ‬,‫ְסוֹמבעֵבַלתְּ ִהנוּ ְכעחָה‬ ֵ ‫ל‬,‫ִילָה ַההיִּיאָם‬ ‫וּ ְבּב ֶחמ ְר‬

.‫וּכְחוֹל הַשׂפָתַ י ִם ָהלְַך ְו ֶה ֱע ִמיק‬

‫ַרק ֵמעֵינֵי חַלּוֹנוֹת ַהצָּדִ ים אוֹר‬

‫חַלּוֹנוֹת ַהבָּתִּ ים נִנְעֲצוּ בְּגוּפֵנוּ‬ ‫שׁתּוֹלֵל נָחַת‬ ְ ‫וְר ֹ ַע ִמ‬ ‫שׁי זָדוֹן‬ ֵ ‫שׁ ִרים טוֹרפִים לְבוּ‬ ָ ְ‫ִמנּ‬

AT THE CROSSROADS   93

.‫ִמ ְקצֵה ַמגָּף עַד כּובַע‬

She gave us invisible signs, the silence shrieked in the journey of blood. Some distance away the ocean turned

,‫אוֹתיוֹת סְמוּי ִים נָתְ נָה בָּנוּ‬ .‫שׁתִ י ָקה זָ ֲע ָקה ְבּ ַמסָּע הַדָּ ם‬ ְ ‫ַה‬ ‫שׁ ַמי ִם‬ ָ ‫ ֵמעַל ִה ְכחִילוּ‬,‫ְבּ ֶמ ְרחָק ָמה ִה ְכחִיל ַהיּ ָם‬ .‫וּכְחוֹל הַשׂפָתַ י ִם ָהלְַך ְו ֶה ֱע ִמיק‬

blue, above, the skies turned blue and the blueness of the lips became deeper and deeper “Liberty” Square in Salonika

‫שׂאלוֹנִי ִקי‬ ָ ‫ִכּכָּר ” ַהחֵרוּת“ ְבּ‬ ‫שׁו ְבּצֵל ַצ ְמּרוֹת ֵעצִים ִכּבְדֵ י ַקי ִץ‬ ַ ‫חוֹסָה ַע ְכ‬ ,‫שׁיכָה הִיא לְסוֹבֵב תְּ נוּעָה‬ ִ ‫וּ ְבחֵרוּת תְּ ִמי ָמה ַמ ְמ‬

now sheltered by the shade of trees heavy with summer and with innocent liberty the traffic goes round and round, only from the eyes of windows that hunt

‫ַרק ֵמעֵינֵי חַלּוֹנוֹת ַהצָּדִ ים אוֹר‬ .‫ֹלא תַ חְמ ֹק ָה ֲא ֵפלָה‬ 1986 ‫יולי‬

for light darkness cannot escape. (my translation)

Liberty Square—so named because it was the site of the 1908 Young Turk Revolt, which, borrowing from the French Revolution, proclaimed “Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood” for all Ottoman subjects—was also the stage for one of Salonika’s most humiliating public persecutions of Jews. It was there in 1942 that the Germans, then in control of the city, decided to test public response to their handling of the Jews. Male Jews were asked to report to the square. After being beaten and subjected to public humiliation throughout the day, they were registered for forced-labor assignments. According to Mark Mazower, The first public action against the Jews en masse, after a long period of antiSemitic campaigns in the local press, did not take place until 1942, when the Wehrmacht commander of northern Greece, General von Krenzski, announced that he had decided to mobilise the city’s Jewish population for civilian labour, and ordered the male Jews of the town to gather in Eleftheria (Freedom) Square on 11 July to register. . . . At dawn on the appointed day, the men went to receive their work cards. It turned out that they were to be deliberately humiliated. Crowds gathered to

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watch the spectacle. Surrounded by armed soldiers, almost 10,000 men were kept standing in the sun for hours. They were forbidden to wear hats—forcing them to contravene religious custom (it was a Saturday)—and some eventually collapsed in the heat. German soldiers kicked and beat them or doused them in cold water. Some were forced to do physical exercises until they were exhausted. Military personnel snapped photos of the scene while Greek civilians watched from their balconies. Actors and actresses visiting the city with the army’s theatrical agency, ‘Strength through Joy,’ applauded the entertainment the army had laid on.117

That July day, which set the stage for the deportation of Greek Jews to concentration camps, stands in the background of Matitiahu’s first encounter with the square and her double rendition of her emotions. The first perceptible difference between the two versions is the title itself. The Ladino version reads only “La plasa de la libertad,” or “Liberty Square,” while in Hebrew the author underscores the irony of the name by putting “Liberty” in quotation marks and adds the toponym “in Salonika.” I assume that the Ladino reader, taken—at least initially—from the community of Greek Jews in Israel, would know the square and the story behind it, and would need no more information to make it explicit. Hebrew readers, on the other hand, might not be as familiar with either the place or with the historical details of the Holocaust in Greece. My assumption is corroborated by the headnotes, which again are significantly different in each version. Unlike Ladino and other Romance languages, Hebrew is a synthetic language, in which multiple semantic notions can be expressed by the word structure itself. In Hebrew one can express different grammatical aspects in one word by changing the structure of the word, such as adding prefixes and suffixes to it, whereas the Romance languages require multiple words to express the same idea. Considering this fact, the visually perceptible difference in length between the headnotes is in itself remarkable. The Hebrew headnote is, moreover, in parentheses: it is a detailed narrative parenthetical statement. The rest of the poem follows suit. In Ladino, the reader is offered the story in broad strokes, with just a general explanation. In Hebrew, the story provides more information, with key words such as “Nazis,” “deceived” (shuchanu be-mirmah), and “labor and death camps” (machanot ­ha-avodah ­ve-ha-hashmadah). The words “labor” and “death,” used to specify the concentration camps—which in the Ladino appear only as the more generic kampos de konsentrasion—complement the verb lerakez (to gather, to concentrate), used in the beginning of the headnote, “square where the Nazis rounded up”

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(kikar ba rikzu ha nazim), which has the same root of the noun “concentration” as in “concentration camp” (machaneh rikuz). The phrase could literally be read as “square where the Nazis concentrated [the Jews].” The word rikzu, by bearing a phonic and visual similarity with the word rikuz, owing to their shared root, immediately brings the latter to mind, in a sort of punning foreshadowing, or mental evocation of a member of its morphological family. The word rikuz never enters the text proper, but this suggested vision is reinforced, or confirmed, at the end of the headnote by the “labor and death camps,” in the words machanot ha-avodah ve-ha-hashmadah. The Ladino poem has six stanzas of varying lengths, marked by a pattern of opposing concepts reflected in the use of the adversative ma, “but,” at the beginning of verses in stanzas 1, 4, and 6. The Hebrew poem has five stanzas instead, also of varying lengths that differ from those of the Ladino poem. The pronounced adversatives of the Ladino do not appear in the Hebrew version, which uses but one: raq (only) at the beginning of the final two-verse stanza (distich). Neither poem presents end rhymes or a set meter, corresponding to Matitiahu’s interest in eschewing fixed and traditional forms. What drives the poems along are the images and concepts that she deploys creating poetic effect. The narrative trend identified in the Hebrew headnote continues in the first stanza of the poem. The first verse itself refers to narrativity, as it speaks of a story, the story of the square. The first image is that of a spatial and temporal expression, that is, one in which time is expressed in physical, spatial terms: ­mitoch (from within), zman (time), rachoq (distant). The poet expresses this vision of time in a very particular way; more idiomatic Hebrew expressions would be menivchei zman ‘avar (literally, from the depths of time past), or me-nivchei hazman (from the depths of time), or zmanim sheavru (times past). The verb alah, meaning “to ascend,” or “to rise” in the past, defines the poem’s vertical line of movement. It is followed by the expression “evil descended/landed”—referring to the flying metaphorical eagles—which confirms the ­poem’s verticality, albeit in the opposite direction. Note that the eagles are metonymic too, as they are the Nazi insignia. The main point here, however, is the archaeological or geological spatialization of time—it is as if the story rises from deep within the earth, contrary to the descending movement of the Nazi “eagles.” The Ladino version seems less driven by narrative than the Hebrew; it is, in contrast, more sensory, more experiential, more “present.” The poem opens by offering a setting: the square, silent, empty. Kayade means “silence,” but it points to both the absence of sound and the absence of speech. The image,

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then, is one of a deserted and silent public space. Pozava is, in this case, “there was,”118 but the reflexive variation of the verb, pozarse, is also “to land.” This association helps build the image of “flying,” an image of movement that contradicts the silent stillness of which the verse speaks. The impression of a moment being relived at the time of the poem’s narration is also expressed in Ladino by the use of the past tense in the progressive aspect: pozava, sintian. In Ladino it is a not a story that rises from times past, but a ruido, a “noise.” This difference stresses the narrative line of the Hebrew version, as the events are already organized, classified, and transformed into history, and the contrasting experiential immediacy of the Ladino. The vagueness of the word ruido, “noise,” denotes a certain confusion of senses, while it also establishes a contrast with the “­silence” of the previous verse. In Ladino, the windows are personified, compounding the desolate climate of the square. They “look with strange eyes,” thereby adding a lugubrious and suspicious tone. From the Hebrew headnote we learn that these houses were once inhabited by Jews later sent to concentration camps. The window openings—a typical metaphor for eyes—become the eyes of these dead Jews, looking down upon their descendants or family members in the same square where they were rounded up. In Hebrew, the windows are even more active, if not hostile. They are plunged like a knife into the bodies of the speaker and of her companions (nin’atznu begufeinu), which more pointedly draws the association with a descending evil in the form of the Nazis.119 The Nazis are mentioned only in the Hebrew version, and in parenthesis, but appear in both versions by way of the “eagle” ­metonymy, evident in the Nazi uniform and flag. In Hebrew, however, the Nazis’ presence is more explicit in the verses as well, as they are “eagles of prey clothed in ­malice / from the tip of the boot to the cap.” The expression not only attempts to convey the totality of their evil, since it covers their entire bodies, but, by mentioning boot and cap, metonymically it evokes the Nazi uniform and the violence symbolized by the “Nazi boot.” The image of the uniformed Nazi allows a parallel connection with the bodies of the collective speaker in the square—­ bodies impaled by the windows. The destructive evil represented by the Nazi genocide is expressed by phrases that point to madness or a lack of reason: negregura enlokesida (maddened perversity) and, in Hebrew, the verb mishtolel (to riot, to run wild). But in Hebrew that evil “landed,” and in Ladino, again, it is the more general, almost uncertain, paresia abashar (seemed to descend).

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In both versions, an oxymoron appears in the descriptive narrative of the square, which once more seems sentient, exhibiting human feelings and behavior. The square seems to feel and communicate: “la plasa mos azia sinyos invezibles” (the square made us invisible signs), and “otiot simuyyim natnah banu” (she gave us invisible signs). Note that only in Ladino is the square explicitly introduced. It does not appear in the Hebrew verse; only the feminine ending of the verb (natnah) allows us to connect it to the kikar (square), which is also gendered as feminine. But in the Hebrew natnah banu—where banu literally reads as “in” or “within us”—it is as if the signs given by the square are markers on the collective speaker’s flesh, in a connection to nin’atzu be-gufeinu, plunged like a knife into our bodies. Another oxymoron follows: a silence that screams within the veins of the “spectators”—“la kayadez korria gritando en muestras venas.” In Ladino, it is a synesthesia: the silence also runs, because of the expression “la sangre corre en las venas” (blood runs in the veins). Blood here is replaced by silence in the veins; rather than “blood circulation,” it is “silence circulation.” While in ­Ladino the blood is inferred by the presence of the word venas (veins), in Hebrew it appears explicitly, adding the color red (in contrast to the blue that will appear later) and allowing for a more violent image. Note that the inferred (blood) circulation in Ladino will momentarily break the vertical movement of the poem in favor of a circular one, paralleled later on in the fifth stanza, when traffic will “circulate.” The use of the word sirkolasion in the text proper will allow the connection with the image that had been created earlier in the poem by the inferred circulation prompted by “la sangre corre en las venas.” The context of this first circular instance, however, precludes any calm or comfort. The silence in the Hebrew poem shouts (za’aqah) and goes on a journey (mas’ah ha-dam). Once again, the words Matitiahu chooses are not the most colloquial or idiomatic ones. “Blood circulation” would typically be referred to in Hebrew as zerem ha-dam. The word mas’ah (journey), used by the poet, allows for additional readings, besides that of the circulatory system. The most common primary reading is a reference to the transports or to the death marches. The marches are the first thing that comes to mind upon “hearing” the word mas’ah, especially in this context already established of camps and Nazis. The face-to-face reading of the Hebrew and the Ladino versions allows for different meanings to be construed and for the two texts to inform each other to a certain degree. Indeed, only via the juxtaposition with the Ladino does the metaphor for blood circulation become more prominent in the H ­ ebrew

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poem. An additional possible reading is that the “journey of the blood” refers to the generations in diaspora—the descendants of survivors from the square who made it to other places, like the Israeli children of Holocaust survivors who are now visiting Greece. The “blood” would then refer to the blood of family ties; the journey, to the dislocations of Jews in successive exiles. In the Hebrew poem this movement of the blood is more general too, since there are no personal pronouns: shtikah za’aqah be-mas’ah ha-dam (the silence shrieked in the journey of blood). In Ladino, on the contrary, the speaker of the poem includes herself in a possible community with the other children, as the verse reads “la kayadez corria gritando en muestras venas” (silence ran screaming in our veins).120 The next stanza moves us from the square itself into the more general Mediterranean landscape, with the appearance of the blue sea.121 In Ladino there is a dash, which graphically marks the distance to which the text refers, that between the square and the sea. The pause caused by the dash further enhances this distance. The sea, which in Spanish can be masculine—el mar—or feminine—la mar—in Ladino is only feminine. The sea became blue like the sky. In the Ladino version, the word “blue” actually comes from the French bleu, and/or the Italian blu, and its use reveals the level of education of the poet’s family—there was a tendency among the more educated families to use Western languages, especially French and Italian, rather than Greek or Turkish, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.122 Unlike in the Hebrew, here the lips do not turn into a darker shade of blue. Maybe it is because in Ladino there isn’t the grammatical option of turning the color into a verb and saying, “bluavan,” or “enbluavan,” as one can say with black, “enpretesian.” Thus, the sea matches the blue sky, but the lips of the poet and her companions in turn become black. The adversative ma (but) is used to show the contrast between the colors. The word mushos, originally meaning “thick lips,” is more popular than labios. Enpreteser, as referred above, is “to become black.” This “black” is preto, referring solely to the color (unlike “negro,” or “negregura,” which, while also meaning “black,” typically have a negative and moral connotation, meaning “bad” or “evil.”). The poet then establishes a contrast between color and life in the natural landscape, and cold, death, and blackness in the speaker. In the Hebrew poem, the color of the lips is still blue, not black, but the dark blue of the mouth also denotes cold, and can even be associated with death. The system of three-letter-roots characteristic of Semitic languages permits

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the combination of a verb and a noun to express the process of “turning blue” in the Hebrew poem: hikhil, hikhilu, and kachol (blue). In the Hebrew verses about the sea and the lips there are three clear differences compared to those in Ladino. First, the former are more detailed in spatial references—there are two prepositional phrases: me’al (from above) and be-merchaq (in the distance), instead of the Ladino’s one, en la londjura (in the distance). In Hebrew, the sea and the sky become blue simultaneously, evident in two parallel, consecutive verses; in Ladino, the sea emulates the sky. Finally, as seen above, the lips in Hebrew are blue too, rather than black, and that blue gradually becomes deeper. The intensity and dynamic thrust of the process is expressed by an inchoative Hebrew phrase made up of the verb lalechet (to go), in this case in the past (­halach), followed by the main verb le-he’emiq (to deepen), also in the past. Literally reading “went and deepened,” it enhances the gradual change in color. Note that in Hebrew there is an internal rhyme between shamayim (skies) at the end of the first verse, and ha-sfatayim (the lips), in the middle of the third, in a position metrically equivalent to each hemistich of the previous verse. I suspect Matitiahu followed the intrinsic resources of root, rhyme, and assonance of Hebrew (note that he’emiq has in the final -iq the same ee sound also found in hichil and hichilu) to create verses that are more detailed and linguistically polished than those in Ladino. This stanza in Ladino reveals basically a contrast between the sea and the sky, on the one hand, and the lips on the other, a contrast expressed by the adversative ma (but). The Hebrew version, by comparison, shows a connection between all of the elements and a progression in their “blueness.” In other words, the Ladino version creates a contrast between the natural and the human domain; the Hebrew forms a seamless continuity between the natural and the human. Again, the specific resources of each language seem to inform the poet’s different perspectives in her Hebrew and Ladino texts. But in both versions the verses speak of the pervasiveness of cold and death that invades the speaker and her companions when confronting the square—as in a confrontation with the past, transmitted by invisible or hidden signs, In the next stanza—the fifth in Ladino and the fourth in Hebrew—the speaker’s visual focus returns to the square after staying far away, in its cold sojourn at the sea. This time the name of the square, which also titles the poem, appears in quotation marks. Once again there is a demarcation of two physical or visual planes: above and under, which emphasize the poem’s verticality. The square is at the bottom, and now the trees stand above it (where before it

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was the “maddened perversity . . . from ravaging wild eagles dressed in evil”). The image of trees, offering shade in the Greek summer, creates a rather different atmosphere from that of the beginning of the poem. The description of the square is now comforting, offering a reassuring normalcy. The ordinariness of this scene is almost humorously underscored by the banality of traffic that insinuates itself into the poem. This is the first time that other people—other than the speaker and her companions, referred to merely by pronouns—­appear in the poem, even if obliquely, as traffic. And at this point the vertical perspective is flagrantly broken in favor of a flat, circular one. This circularity harkens back to the one that briefly appeared in the poems when referring to the “silence in the veins,” or the “journey of blood.” To be sure, as noted above, vertical lines are still drawn, but the circulation of cars, restoring the square as a setting for scenes of urban daily life, changes the atmosphere and our perception of the place. In terms of geometric connotations, the Hebrew kikar is generally circular (it can also be “traffic circle” or “roundabout”), just as the English “square” is square. As far as I know, plasa does not have a geometric connotation. (Curiously, Eleftheria Square, or Liberty Square, is square; better, rectangular.) The “circle” represents the continuation of life, the recurring movement that prevents paralysis. The normalcy introduced into the poem is qualified, however, for the traffic moves around the square, but the square allows it to move only “de una manera de libertad timida” (with a timid liberty). It seems that the poet wants to use the word libertad, now the concept of liberty, without quotation marks, to repeat and contrast with toponym “Liberty”—the square’s name cited in the first verse of the stanza, which is placed between quotation marks. The absence of quotation marks in this use of “liberty” implies a less cynical reading than the quotation marks that encircle the name of the square, scene of public humiliation. The use of the word movimiento (literally, movement) raises other questions. “Movement” contrasts with the stillness of the poet and her companions, who look at the square and feel its ghost-like atmosphere. However, “movement” sounds very much like a direct translation from the Hebrew tnuah, which can be “movement, motion, move, traffic, or vowel.”123 But in this context, the most likely sense is that of “traffic.” Even the possibility of other echoes, such as the contrast between stillness and movement, as I mentioned above, seems to derive mainly from Hebrew. Tnuah as movement works in opposition to shtikah, but tnuah in colloquial Hebrew, is simply “traffic.” Furthermore, in

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Ladino there is the word tráfiko, which would be much more clear and direct. In that sense, the meaning of movimiento as “traffic” in Ladino is defined by the Hebrew poem, where tnuah is read as traffic. The poet’s choice of movimiento instead of tráfiko signals the traces of Hebrew in the Ladino text. The passage of stanza four to five in Ladino, or of three to four in Hebrew, defines a contrast between the death overcoming the speaker and the new beginning of life in the square. Comparing the fifth stanza in Ladino to the fourth in Hebrew, there are other notable differences, including stylistic ones. Again the square appears with its location, Salonika, only in the Hebrew, as if for the Ladino readers the name and the place were easily recognizable. In the Hebrew, what stands between quotation marks, as in the title, is just “Liberty,” and not “Liberty Square,” as in Ladino. The Hebrew liberty is an innocent one, contrasting with the cynical “Liberty” in quotations, to be read sarcastically as the site of subjugation and persecution, and not that of liberty. In the L ­ adino version, liberty is timid. The second verse in Hebrew corresponds to the third and fourth in Ladino. The synthetic character of the Hebrew language is revealed here by the effect produced by phrases, suffixes, and prepositions, which compact much information into rather few words (a “high morpheme-perword ratio” in linguistic typology). The Hebrew chusah (sheltered), in ­Ladino appears as topa abrigo (finds shelter). Hebrew be-tzel, preposition be- + noun tzel, “shade,” making “by the shade,” is the six-syllable Ladino phrase basho la solombra. Hebrew tzamrot etzim, which means the “treetops,” but literally reads as “tops trees,” has no equivalent in Ladino. The specific “top” of the trees disappears, and the reader is offered a generic “trees.” Those trees are “­abokados por el pezgor del enverano” (bent by the weight of summer), while in Hebrew they are expressed by the short and compact phrase kivdei qaitz, or “heavy [plural adjective construct, or smichut] summer,” or, in grammatical English, “heavy with summer.” Hebrew seems to hand the poet a broader array of resources and possibilities, which she handles perhaps more naturally than when writing in Ladino, crafting verses that show, in their formal structure, at least at this stage, a somewhat higher degree of sophistication. The last stanza of the poems (the fifth in Hebrew, the sixth in Ladino) opens with an adversative conjunction. The Ladino poem offers this pattern of oppositions expressed by adversatives— present in stanzas 1, 4, and 6. In the Hebrew version, this is the first occurrence. The verses begin with ma or raq (but or only): “But from the windows that always hunt for light / Darkness will never escape” (Ladino) and “only from the eyes of windows that hunt for light / darkness cannot escape” (Hebrew).

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Again, in opposition to the life expressed by the movement of traffic circling the square, albeit timidly, the stanza offers a static image filled with darkness. The windows return to the text, and it is impossible to forget their role as “eyes,” witnesses of past events that took place in the square. They might recognize, perhaps (hence the “strange eyes” or the action of impaling) the link between the speaker and her companions and the demeaned people they watched long ago. The windows as “eyes” are emphasized in the Hebrew poem—eyney ­chalonot, “window eyes”—but not in the Ladino one. In both versions, the windows here are also just windows. It is this literal, physical dimension that is invoked by the metaphor “hunting for light,” even as “hunt” recalls the persecution that took place there a half-century earlier. Afelah, the poet’s Hebrew word for “darkness,” is much more ominous than the typical term, choshech. Now, even if light comes in and the windows seem to illuminate the house interior, the darkness they have witnessed—here metaphorically associated with evil— has taken them over. “La plasa de la libertad / Kikar ‘haCherut’ be-Saloniki” is one of Matitiahu’s most memorable poems. Initially striking because it speaks of the reality of the Sephardic Holocaust and brings its vocabulary to both the Ladino and the Hebrew literatures, it reveals some of Matitiahu’s repeated themes and concerns. Journeys, landscapes, memory, and reconstruction of the past are central in this text that pays homage to the poet’s mother and to all the victims of the Holocaust. When Matitiahu writes about Salonika here, she tries to evoke the past that she still sees and hears in the physical place that she (re)visits. A past that she only knows from hearing and reading about it, and a place where she had never been before, but that she manages to trace as if seeing it with her dead mother’s eyes. The place is sentient; the square emits signs, and projects audible voices that arise from the past sedimented and ever present in the place. It is a pictorial and sensorial reality that dominates a poem equally marked by images, painted with strokes of colors and light.

. . . It is important to bear in mind the significance of Salonika in the Jewish world, and specifically, in the Sephardic experience, to understand the weight of the disaster that befell the Sephardic world during World War II. Clearly, the Shoah figures prominently in the Jewish consciousness; thinking of one’s Jewishness today without any reference to the traumatic events of the Shoah is very difficult. But the Holocaust is typically associated with Ashkenazi Jews, and the

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effects the Nazi genocide of the Jews had on the Sephardic communities are rarely recognized. What place does the Sephardic experience have in the narrative of the Shoah and, ultimately, of Jewish history? How do Sephardim construct their Jewish identity in relation to the Shoah when it has become “an overwhelmingly Ashkenazi symbol”?124 In discussions and studies of the Shoah, little is devoted to the Sephardic experience; our standard histories imply that Sephardim were somehow not affected by it. Besides a general lack of historical knowledge, there is also the problematic issue of identifying Sephardim with “non-Europeans” or with “Jews from Arab lands.” Since the Shoah is viewed as a European affair, the Sephar­dim are often excluded from the major Holocaust narrative. Also, there is no question that, in absolute terms, most of the Holocaust’s victims came from the largest Jewish communities—those in Poland and in the Soviet Union—which were mainly Ashkenazi. The much smaller Sephardic communities—thousands, and not millions—have tended to disappear from the scholarly radar, and their survivors have been similarly overlooked. The Shoah was conceived in and implemented from within Europe, and the major concentration and death camps were located in Germany and Poland. Attention has been focused on these areas, seen as central to the development and execution of genocidal policies and practices. But Nazi power also extended to the homes of Sephardic Jews in North Africa, the Balkans, Italy, and Greece, each of which saw mass deportations and labor camps. Furthermore, if, in Shmuel Trigano’s words, “in North Africa the Jews had escaped in extremis [sic; i.e., in extreme circumstances] the concentration camps,”125 in places like Salonika they were almost completely decimated. However, without indulging in competitive victimization, I would simply like to emphasize that the massive extermination of Sephardic communities or the existence of labor camps in Morocco, for example, are not widely known historical facts, duly integrated into the Jewish—and non-Jewish—discourse on the Shoah. Following the encounter of Sephardim and Ashkenazim after 1950, especially in Israel, the Shoah has been a major complicating factor in Sephardic memory, consciousness, and identity construction. In literature, the representation of the Holocaust also served as a way to secure a place in Israeli culture. The fact that most Turkish and Bulgarian Jews survived the war, and many later arrived as immigrants in Israel, contributed to the perception that Se­ phardim were not affected by the Nazi genocide.126 The enormity of the Shoah provoked great empathy for the suffering of the Ashkenazim, and Trigano

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observes that “In this empathy, it was the consciousness of a Jewish people that was manifested, more than the ethnic consciousness of origins.”127 But he adds that most of the time, such empathy was unimaginable—even unacceptable and sacrilegious—to the many thousand Ashkenazim who saw in the memory of the Shoah a mark of identity specific to their ethnic group, a sign of belonging to the “Jewish people” from which the Sephardim could only logically be excluded and see the legitimacy of their experience and memory weakened because they had not suffered.128

Such a reaction, more intensely felt among Sepharadim and Ashkenazim living side by side in Israel, had at least two effects: on the one hand, it reinforced the marginalization of Sephardic communities who could not share the criteria of Jewish identity represented by the Shoah (a marginalization that, as we have seen, had a cultural and racial basis as well). On the other hand, this reaction minimized or even obliterated the drama of those Sephardic communities that were indeed deeply affected by the genocide. The Jewish community in Greece, who on the eve of World War II numbered 75,357, was reduced by 87 percent. Having lost 95 percent of its members, the community of Salonika looms large in this story of a human and cultural loss. Shmuel Refael explains how Turkish and Bulgarian Jews adapted to life in Israel, and how “the Holocaust was not a significant part of their life experience and had no place in their collective memory.”129 As for the Sephardic survivors in Israel, they kept their silence, their memories repressed, either because the difficult first years of the Jewish state absorbed their energy and focus, or because “their lives were significantly different from the heroic myths created around the partisans and the youth movements during the time of the War of Independence.”130 And these attitudes would be reflected in the literature on the Holocaust created by Sephardim. Because the Sephardim did not figure substantially, or clearly, in the narrative of the Holocaust, or in the public consciousness of Jews and non-Jews alike, their history, recounted from their own point of view, gradually “acquired an apologetic tone,” in Rafael’s words: “a subjugated tone, as if the Sephardic author wanted to apologize for speaking about it and for wanting to be placed on the same level as poets from other places and languages who have contributed their genius to the Holocaust narrative.”131 Most poems on the Shoah written in Ladino remain unpublished, absent from the prolific anthologies on the Holocaust. Work is being done—and must con-

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tinue to be done—to retrieve these poems from personal archives and family troves and to make them public.132 Revisiting the Shoah and including it in a process of Sephardic memory is a task now being embraced by different writers, among whom are Daniel Cohen, Itzhak Levy, Avner Perez, Moshe ’ha-Elion, David Uziel, and Margalit Matitiahu. Perez, himself a fine Ladino poet,133 has taken on the huge task of translating, editing, and publishing a series of works in Ladino, including ’ha-Elion’s coplas of the Holocaust, En los kampos de la muerte, and Clarisse Nicoïdski’s collection of poems Cara boz i locura.134 This late movement, led by Ladino poets, of gradual integration of Sephardic history and memory into the discourse of the Shoah, is somewhat parallel to the increase in historical studies about the war period in Greece, as Steven Bowman observes: “It is only now, a full generation after the destruction of the center of Sephardic culture that new religious leaders are being trained and the past systematically studied by scholars in Israel and elsewhere.”135 The dead cannot speak or bear witness to what happened to them. Members of a new generation, who did not live through the horrors of the World War II, and who experienced it only through the significant silences of their parents, have undertaken the task to remember the Shoah and to remind ­others of it. And here the question is not so much “how to speak the unspeakable” as “how to speak of what I myself did not see.” As noted earlier, the reclamation of the past, and the revival of her parents’ memories and their merger with her own world, are at the heart of Margalit Matitiahu’s poetic efforts. In Kurtijo kemado and Alegrika, Matitiahu attempts to give words to the lives, work, and memories of her parents. She decides to see what her parents might have seen and face the imagined eyes of the men rounded up in the square. Matitiahu’s efforts to remember take her to another land and to another language, as she shifts between an old home and a new homeland, her murdered family members of whom she learned from her mother at home, and the institutional Zionist nationalization of the Shoah with which she grew up.136 Searching for her Greek Sephardic roots, Matitiahu shapes a discourse of return, but not yet to a fixed, idealized past. Gradually, and much more recently, she will look toward Spain, and strengthen her ties with this locus of an even more remote past. But in her first impulse, when she returns to Ladino and claims to belong to another chain of literary and linguistic tradition, she adopts her mother’s strong posture and recognizes herself as one of the community of women, against a backdrop of a militaristic, male-dominated society. Matitiahu

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reverses the conventional Jewish narrative that leads to Israel; she fashions a discursive practice against Israel’s rigid rootedness, and the country’s insistence on the triangulation of nation/land/language.

. . . In the second Hebrew stanza of “In the Streets of Athens,” Matitiahu uses the Greek word plateia, dressed in Hebrew letters. At the bottom of the page, a small glossary for Hebrew readers explains that a plateia is a kikar, “square,” or plasa. A disruption in the body of the Hebrew poem, a contamination that destabilizes the uniformity of the text and requires the Hebrew readers to transport themselves to another linguistic space, this Greek word is also the irruption of Matitiahu’s composite identity. It is a sign of Matitiahu’s crucial encounter with her parents’ past and her continuous attempts to evoke it—a past that is in her very core and that can never be fully recovered. But it is also a reminder of the cultural and linguistic differences that remain; a textual mark of her resistance to a national normalization that demands homogeneity and forgetting.

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ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE L A N G U A G E  /  A R C H A E O L O G Y OF THE SELF Juan Gelman’s Journey to Ladino The tongue stretches language in order to better speak to itself . . . (And) all of those new words, aren’t they perchance a victory against the limits of language? Juan Gelman

“The attempt to Judaize texts that have no semblance of Jewishness only because their authors were born Jews strikes me as artificial and, in the final analysis, pathetic.” So says Gershon Shaked,1 and as we approach the work of the Argentine poet Juan Gelman, I take to heart his cautionary note. Because Gelman is acknowledged as one of the most important contemporary Latin American poets,2 and was repeatedly short-listed for the Nobel Prize, I must also suspect, as Morris Dickstein suggests,3 that there are possible “parochial reasons,” born out of “a skewed sense of communal pride,” that would lead to his appropriation into the canon of Jewish literature. Nevertheless, we shall step into this contested arena. I propose to speak of Juan Gelman, not simply as a Jewish writer, but as a Jewish writer who, within a specific historical context, chose to self-Sephardize himself. I propose to look at a crucial fifteen years in the arc of Gelman’s career, and to examine his own explorations of language that resulted from his exile. To that end, we shall read one of his foundational works of exile, 1978–79 Citas y comentarios, in which he first delves into the history of the Spanish language, briefly followed by Com/posiciones (1988–89). We shall then read Gelman’s 1994 Dibaxu— his most singular piece, and a result of the questions raised by the previous books—as the work of a deterritorialized author who consciously turns to a language that is not his own. Gelman’s Dibaxu (pronounced “Dee-BAH-shoo,” the Ladino equivalent of the Spanish debajo, “under,” “beneath,” or “underneath”) consists of twenty-nine untitled, numbered poems in ­Ladino, trans-

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lated by the author into Castellano, and presented side by side on opposite pages, Ladino on the left, and Castellano on the right. Though it is far from his last work, Dibaxu represents a culminating moment in shaping G ­ elman’s identity. Juan Gelman (1930–2014) was an Ashkenazi Jew, born and raised in Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital. He grew up as the only Argentine in his Ukrainian family. Russian, Yiddish, and Castellano (the Argentine national language) were the languages spoken at home, and until the publication of Dibaxu in 1994, he had only written in Castellano. What made him choose another language, one that is so markedly Jewish, and of even greater interest, one so closely associated with Sephardic Jews? This question of course alludes to traditional ethnic distinctions within the Jewish community but, just as important, it shows how in his work Gelman calls into question these very divisions, with their rigidity and biological determinism, as well as the larger category of Jewish writing itself. As he engages in what I call self-Sephardization, Gelman points to the possible—and perhaps necessary—permeability of ethnic borders, and to a personal, spiritual and cultural process of identity construction. Juan Gelman’s gradual self-Sephardization begins in 1975 with his exile in Rome, during a period of repression and violence in his country. The “Dirty War,” one of the harshest military dictatorships in Latin America, then followed (1976–83), a regime (in)famous for its many “disappeared,” and the disproportionate number of Jews among them. In this exile Gelman rewrote first the mystical poems of Santa Teresa de Ávila and San Juan de la Cruz, then poems by medieval Spanish Hebrew poets. Eventually, Gelman adopted ­Ladino, the Sephardic language par excellence. Deterritorialization, intertextuality, and multilingualism were the three central components of this process that prompted an Ashkenazi Latin American Jew to write—and translate—­ Sephardic poetry.

. . . In the Primer Simposio de Estudios Sefardíes (First Symposium on Sephardic Studies) held in Madrid in 1964, León S. Pérez claimed that Latin America was the ideal place for the creation of an “area of secondary Sephardization.” He began with a foundational premise: “What to other peoples means linguistic unity, in fact means plurality (bifrontalism and multifacetism)4 to the Jewish people in the diaspora.”5 Latin America provides linguistic and cultural conditions that encourage the “process of creating a Sephardic cultural type,” Pérez

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argued. The fact that most of Latin America speaks Spanish permits a “secondary Sephardization,” which he defines as: the creation of a new contact among Jews (Ashkenazim and Sephardim, but especially the former) in countries of modern Hispanic culture, especially in Latin America. This process may be divided into two periods: (1) Hispanization, meaning non-Sephardic Jews coming into contact with Latin America’s area of Hispanic culture, and (2) Sephardization, with the creation of a new psychological type shaped by new American conditions.6

This vision of a new Sephardic type, the product of the encounter among Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and the many cultures that are the foundation of Hispanic Latin America, announces the possibility of a new Sephardic cultural production, including a new Sephardic literature.7 In addition, since it imagines Jews of both exclusive and of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic origins as the creators of a future Sephardic literature, this proposal avoids rigid reliance on biological factors, as well as the rather simplistic identification of Spanishspeaking Jews with Sephardism. Inasmuch as it takes into account the different migratory waves on the continent, and the new contours that both Hispanic civilization and Jewish culture have acquired in Latin America, Pérez’s proposal assumes significant historical overtones.8 The Sephardic Symposium also addressed the future of Ladino, or, as the conference framed it, “the situation of Judeo-Spanish.” Several talks stressed the  “decadent state” of the language and its imminent death. A number of panels urged the so-called “purification” of Judeo-Spanish (implying the elimination of elements borrowed from languages other than Spanish) and its incorporation into modern Spanish—in other words, the Castilianization of Ladino—as a means of guaranteeing its survival.9 Manuel Criado de Val, a Spanish scholar, suggested that Judeo-Spanish should be endowed with “a literary content” in order to increase the language’s prestige and overcome the shame native speakers felt about their language. Criado de Val went on to say that in addition to organizing a dictionary and a standardized grammar, the only available contemporary means to amass the needed literary content was to translate Spanish works into Judeo-Spanish: We cannot attribute any literary content to Judeo-Spanish by means of contemporary literary works: finding a writer in Judeo-Spanish who has the luxury to publish and to offer a work of literature would not be easy. But there are Spanish

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works which indeed share that kind of prestige, and which could be offered in Judeo-Spanish versions.10

Between Pérez’s vision of a new Sephardic type, shaped by Latin American conditions, and Criado de Val’s disillusionment with modern Judeo-Spanish writers, there looms Juan Gelman. He is an established and renowned writer who can afford “the luxury to publish” in Ladino, and therefore has the possibility of adding an element of “prestige” to the language. As a Latin American Ashkenazi Jew living—in very personal and political ways—the tragic contemporary history of his continent, he approaches Sephardic culture as a means to reach out to his Jewish origins. In so doing he meets Pérez’s conditions, which, unbeknownst to the scholar, were addressed much faster and earlier than he expected. “I am speaking of a new Sephardic [man] yet to come,”11 Pérez affirmed in 1964. Juan Burichson Gelman announced the arrival of this new man in 1994, with the publication of his Dibaxu.

In the Beginning In the preface to Dibaxu, Gelman writes: I wrote the poems of Dibaxu in Sefardí from 1983 to 1985. I am of Jewish origins, but not Sephardic, and I suppose this had something to do with it. I think, in fact, that these poems are the culmination, or rather the outcome, of Citas and Comentarios, two books that I composed in exile, in 1978 and 1979, where the texts carry on a dialogue with sixteenth-century Castellano. As if searching for the substratum of this Castellano, which, in turn, is the substratum of our own Castellano, had been my obsession. As if the extreme solitude of exile had pushed me to search for roots within the language, the most profound and exiled roots of the language. I myself don’t know how to explain it.12

This statement, remarkable for many reasons, is Gelman’s first public acknowledgement that he is Jewish. It is true that the formula he uses is not as assertive as one might expect—instead of “I’m Jewish” he uses a more timid “I’m of Jewish origins.” In Spanish, the expression still does carry the attenuating connotation, but perhaps not to the extent that it does in English. Most important, the word “origins” is here directly connected to “Sephardic.” Gelman’s Jewishness is affirmed through denial of any Sephardic origins, since he seems to be aware of crossing some ethnic boundary by using Ladino. It is precisely because he is not Sephardic that Gelman feels the need to reveal that he is (at least) Jewish when he decides to write in Ladino, since Ladino is considered the Sephardic

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language par excellence, and, to many, the defining element of a Sephardic identity. Gelman uses the term “Sefardí,” mostly because in Spanish the word “Ladino” has negative associations. The unclear and awkward “and I suppose this had something to do with it,” even though it does not spell out what the “it” refers to, points to the fact that Gelman’s “Jewish origins” contributed to his choice of the Sephardic language. The central role of language in Gelman’s enterprise is clear from the direct linguistic link he establishes between Dibaxu and Citas y comentarios (Citations and Commentaries), works that are also bound together by their ­exilic creation. In 1975, after being condemned to death by Isabel Perón’s Triple A (the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), Juan Gelman exiled himself to Rome. His exile—also in Madrid, Paris, and Mexico City—would last thirteen years. Eventually, he settled in Mexico City, where he lived with his second wife Mara until his death, at eighty-three, in January 2014. Not only was he exiled himself, but many of his friends were exiled, or murdered, among them well-known writers, such as Rodolfo Walsh and Francisco Urondo. Marcelo Ariel, his son, and his seven-month-pregnant daughterin-law Maria Claudia, were arrested in August and then killed in prison in October 1976. Marcelo was shot at close range. His body was placed in a barrel, which was filled with cement and dropped into the San Fernando River. Maria C ­ laudia was abducted to a prison in Uruguay under the Operation Condor (an intelligence organization formed by the military regimes in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina) and killed shortly after giving birth. The young couple’s baby was born in jail and was adopted by a Uruguayan family linked to the military. Both parents officially “disappeared.” Marcelo Ariel’s remains were finally identified in 1989. Maria Claudia’s are yet to be found, and until his death Gelman tirelessly led a campaign to identify them. Gelman also directed a massive international campaign to learn the whereabouts of his grandchild, whom he located only in 2000, when the child was already twenty-four and living with the family of a policeman in Uruguay. A girl, she has reclaimed her family names and now signs María Macarena Gelman García Iruretagoyena. With the beginning of Gelman’s exile, “exile” was then added to the poet’s thematic core, joining love, poetry, and revolution. As Gelman admits, “Exile changed everything about me. I still don’t know how, but I’m no longer the same.”13 Citas y comentarios were originally written as two distinct works in 1978 and 1979 and then published in a combined volume in 1982. These were the

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first of a number of books that Gelman wrote in exile. In them, he rewrites the poetry of San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Ávila, along with that of tango lyricists such as Carlos Gardel, Alfredo Lepera, and Enrique Discépolo.14 Rewriting here takes on a range of meanings, since in these 1978–79 collections, Gelman combines the Spanish Christian mystics and the Argentine tango poets and invokes and incorporates their poetry, citing their themes, motifs, and even verses, updating, retextualizing, and recontextualizing them to speak of his own exile. Dibaxu follows Citas y comentarios, and becomes the culmination of an extended wrestling with the origins and development of the Spanish language. Approaching his search for the accumulated layers of the language in reverse order, Gelman begins with the Argentine national language, or present-day Argentine Castellano—to which he refers in the preface as “our Castellano”—and proceeds toward the sixteenth-century Castellano—named for the kingdom of Castile (Castilla), which dominated Spain and the Spanish Empire—used in his 1978–79 books.15 In the process he retrieves a still earlier version of Spanish, one that we have referred to as Ladino, and which, as noted earlier, he calls “Sefardí.” These terms, as we have seen, are just two of the many names for the same thing: the language spoken in the Spanish kingdom in the fifteenth-­ century and maintained, with new additions and variations, by the Jews dispersed across different lands after their expulsion in 1492. Gelman explains this process of language recovery in psychological terms: the word “obsession” helps as he tries to define the personal, linguistic, and historic links that conflate in his experience: “As if searching for the substratum of this Castellano, which, in turn, is the substratum of our Castellano, had been my obsession.”16 But the explanation is not a successful one, as he admits: “I myself don’t know how to explain it.” He can only provide tentative, almost babbling “as if ’s,” in lieu of an explanation for the connection he draws between personal exile, language, and national history. Gelman admits that his quest for roots stems from the “extreme solitude of exile,” a force that acts upon him and “pushes” him to recover origins. Moved by this force, he delves into the “search for roots within the language, the most profound and exiled roots of the language.” It is important to pay attention to prepositions. They conflate a double search: Gelman’s personal search for his roots, specifically, his Jewish roots, and the search for the roots of Castellano, which also play a significant role in shaping Gelman’s identity. But they also speak of the exile of the language, Ladino, and through that, metonymically, they speak of the exile of a people. Prompted

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by his exile, Gelman approaches Judaism through language: his “search for the roots within the language” deftly follows his earlier sentences, “I am of Jewish origins . . . and I assume this had something to do with it.” As for “the most profound and exiled roots of the language” in his text, they point to “Sefardí,” or Ladino, as the profound roots of Spanish, recasting Ladino as an essentially exilic language. Ladino is, literally, a language of exile. A creation of the Jewish Diaspora, after the expulsion from Spain, it exhibits the conservatism typical of languages distanced from their center—hence the retention of fifteenth-century forms—but also a dynamism and fusion resulting from the encounter with several different languages over the ensuing five centuries.17 It is additionally exilic because it suffered further dislocations and losses with the breakup of the ­Ottoman Empire; then, following the Nazi genocide and the death of many of its speakers, it became even more marginalized and displaced.18 Furthermore, in much of mainstream Jewish culture, and certainly in Gelman’s Jewish world, Ladino is seen as marginal to Hebrew and even to Yiddish. Ladino is also the unknown other to modern Spanish speakers who are unaware of its presence in the history of their language—hence Gelman’s reference to “the most profound and exiled roots of the language.” His own personal exile pushes Gelman to uncover the foundation of his language and of his self, peeling away layers in his downward search. His diction—“substratum,” “roots,” “profound”—reinforces this downward orientation as a representation of the past, as he burrows down through both geographical distance and historical time. In that same vein, Dibaxu represents the top of an inverted pyramid—it is the peak of his search, and yet means “under” or “beneath.” Language prompts a reflection on time, memory and history, but in Gelman’s poetry it also becomes the space in which time reveals itself. In the preface to the 1984 volume Com/posiciones (Com/positions) another instance of his rewriting of earlier poets, Gelman discusses the medieval Hebrew Spanish poets that are his focus: in any case, i spoke to them. as they did to me from their powdery bones and the splendor of their words. i don’t know what to celebrate more: whether the beauty of their verses or the life-giving mouth with which they did it, but they comingle and give me a past, surround my present, and present me with a future.19

I want to work from this quotation as we discuss the arc of Gelman’s work. Of crucial importance is his notion of a dialogue, for the intertextual exchange

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among poets: “I spoke to them as they did to me.” As an extension or literalization of this dialogue, and stressing the oral modeling of poetry as spoken word, Gelman adds to the abstract “beauty of their verses” the graphic and synecdochic image of “the life-giving mouth” that belongs to poets, despite their “powdery bones.” The approximation of life and death here, of splendor and powdery bones, will later reappear in Dibaxu, within the same process of inventing a future informed by a recovered past, which is in turn made present.

The Long Way to Ladino Juan Gelman has been called many things. He is known as a poet, an Argentine, a journalist, a Communist, an intellectual, a political exile, and a defender of human rights. And at least between 1973 and 1979, he was a member of the Movimiento Peronista Montonero (Peronist Montonero Movement) or MPM, an armed leftist guerrilla group that aimed to combat the Argentine government and, later, the military dictatorship.20 But through all of these turbulent affiliations, with the exception of the preface to Dibaxu, Juan Gelman has not publicly identified himself as Jewish. Nor has he been appropriated as such by anthologists and scholars of Jewish Latin American literature. Like many other modern writers (Bergson, Proust, and Kafka, to name a few), he set his Jewish identity aside as he made a name for himself, and he has not filled his works with obvious ethnic markers. When he wrote his first book, Violín y otras cuestiones, in 1956, he was part of the literary group El Pan Duro (The Stale Bread), which linked poetry to political action. Since then, Gelman has consistently used a language close to speech, and a lyricism that incorporates tango lyrics. Refusing to create a dichotomy between aesthetics and sociopolitical reality, and maintaining his commitment to formal experimentation, Gelman progressed toward a diction of his own in a body of work marked early on by themes of daily life, materials from popular culture, and orality. Gelman infuses his first book with his love of the tango, developed mostly during his teenage years in el barrio, and of the popular language and images that he found on the streets of Buenos Aires. The city of Buenos Aires walks through his poems, while the poet walks through the city, listening to its voices, its murmurs, its cries, and its music. Gelman’s choice of a certain language that acknowledges the daily creations of his city people, or his idiomatic community, represents his poetry’s links with reality. The reality of the spoken, colloquial language, which might not adhere to rules of normative grammar, and

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is marked by street inflections, slang, and popular expressions, becomes the mark of Gelman’s poetry. The reality of the cotidianeidad, the marvels born from within daily events, the quotidian, become matter and subject matter of Gelman’s poetry. In his words, daily life becomes his obsession, or as he says, “the quotidian understood essentially as reality. I’ve always been obsessed by this, still am, and I believe I shall continue to be.”21 In some of his subsequent books, such as Gotán (1962), Cólera buey (1965), and Los poemas de Sidney West (1969), Gelman strengthens his poetry’s connection with themes and phrasing that are usually unique to tango. Gotán is in fact the word “tango” in vesre, a linguistic oral practice which is an auxiliary element to lunfardo, an idiom of the Buenos Aires lower class. Vesre places syllables in reversed order, or al reves. Lunfardo is not considered a language—it has neither a syntax nor a grammar of its own, and its prosody, morphology, and spelling are those of Spanish. It is rather a code, a vast number of terms and locutions—that is, a vocabulary—which originated in the late nineteenth century in Buenos Aires as a result of the mixing of languages brought about by immigration.22 Its lower-class and multilingual origins, together with its popular use and appropriation by the tango, made lunfardo attractive to some poets, among them Gelman. It is a powerful tool of expression, revealing its immigrant origins. Over the course of the twentieth century, it became the autochthonous “language” of Buenos Aires, the voice of the city itself, in all its loud and colorful varieties. The association with the tango only increased the allure of ­lunfardo. It is clear how Gelman, who repeatedly claims to be a porteño—a native of ­Buenos Aires—would find in the tango material for his language play, for his lexical experimentation, for his special use of diminutives, unexpected turns of phrase and meaning. But we can also see how lunfardo becomes important in a poetry that is nurtured by speech, street conversations, and daily life. Furthermore, the working-class and immigrant origins of lunfardo resemble Gelman’s own. As the son of a Ukrainian worker who took part in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, Gelman also chose to align himself with the laboring class and workers’ movements. The first Argentine in his family, he was introduced to poetry when his much older brother Boris read Pushkin to him in Russian.23 Without understanding much, the young Gelman was fascinated by the poetry’s music and rhythm. Rather than gratuitously relying on biography, I contend that it is possible to combine Gelman’s life, language, and text on the following grounds: First,

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f­oreign workers and foreign languages, exile and immigration have been an essential part of Gelman’s experience, establishing the foundation for who Gelman is, or imagined himself to be, both as an individual and as a porteño. Second, a childhood lived among different languages contributed to his marveling at strange sounds and incomprehensible words,24 an attitude that is later reflected in his poetry and his quest for mystery and the poetic. It is also reflected in the way he creates and modifies words, refusing to obey the dicta of the Spanish language. Such influences, and such fascination for languages and sounds, clear early in his life, are part of what led Gelman in his trajectory along the many stages or historical layers of the Spanish language(s), a trajectory that would eventually take him to Ladino and the writing of Dibaxu.25 At the same time, Gelman’s attraction to voices in different tones and languages, allied with an interest in the construction or invention of the self, also define strategies that he uses in his poetry. His embrace of the other, in a humanistic and political sense, has a parallel development (but not a subordinate one) in both his poetics and his aesthetic choices, as Gelman combines the detachment of the poet from the lyrical “I” with the incorporation of multiple voices into the speaker’s own.26 In fact, in works as early as Cólera buey (1965) and Los poemas de Sidney West (1969), Gelman sets out a process María del Carmen Sillato describes as the “unfolding and displacement of the self,”27 resorting to techniques and devices that allow other voices, works, languages, and people to enter and populate his texts. Translation, the construction of personae, and intertextuality will become important characteristics of his poetic work.28 Gelman continued experimenting with the poetic subject by means of fictional translations, co-authorship with named or identified authors, and invention of fictional speakers. Already in Cólera buey, he includes two parts, titled “Traducciones I” and “Traducciones II” (Translations I and II), in which the works of a fictional English author named John Wendell and a fictional Japanese author, Yamanokuchi Ando, appear to be “translated.” In an interview with Mario Benedetti in 1971, Gelman explained these “translation” practices in terms of a Brechtian Verfremdung, or estrangement: In fact, when I made up the Englishman, it was to estrange myself from something that was happening to me (I mean to estrange myself in the Brechtian sense), because my poetry was becoming too intimate. Of course we aren’t perfectly conscious of these things, but as far as I can tell, at least from the point of view of conscience, this is what was going on: at that time I had left

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the Communist Party absolutely convinced it was too far right; apparently there was still no end in sight to the country’s political situation, or rather, there were no forces that offered an end in sight. This moved me toward a more intimate poetry. . . . And I felt like I was suffocating; I felt very bad. Then one day I decided to invent an Englishman who writes poetry, to see if I could get over my bad mood, because, quite frankly, I was tired. To be sure I continued talking about myself, until I myself was able to talk, not about myself but of other things too. Then I continued this with the Japanese and followed that with the American.29

Gradually Gelman multiplied the layers of estrangement in his poetry, creating, for example, fictional foreign poets who introduce to the reader another fictional poet, as in the case of José Galván introducing Julio Grecco, or the English poet John Wendell, who attributes several works to the Spanish poet Dom Pero Gonçalvez, and is then “translated” by Gelman. The Argentine poet’s play with the poetic voice and the subjectivity of the speaker responds to an aesthetic and creative necessity of estrangement, since it also allows him to embrace multiple other voices—from first person he passes to several different third persons. Such an estrangement happens not only in the Brechtian sense of alienation, which allows the poet to distance himself from his work (while he also incites a critical response from the reader, as a result of the detachment provoked between the reader and the work).30 It is also an estrangement in the Russian Formalist sense of defamiliarization, or ostranienie, in which perception is deautomatized when the familiar is invested with strangeness, thus preventing entropy, or the effects of habit and convention.31 In addition to these levels of estrangement, by “playing” with languages and nationalities in a very politicized moment, Gelman engages in a somewhat provocative discussion with other Argentine writers about the nature of national poetry. If Gelman is undoubtedly a porteño author, he calls into question the narrow positions of populist and nationalist poetry when he creates foreign fictional poets whom he also fictionally translates into Castellano. In fact, it becomes clear that it is in language, and not in any particular theme or national territory, that Gelman sees the locus of a national poetry: I made up middlemen and published them that way in part because they could take aim at the populist trends in vogue at the time that assumed a poetry is a national one—or isn’t—if it refers—or doesn’t—to places and anecdotes that are part of the nation. Those trends don’t recognize that a national poetry is not a

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question of will and much less of outward appearance. But it’s a question of language, and language is a way of understanding the world and even of confronting or enduring it. I think that these “translated” poets are very much Argentine. Then again, maybe they aren’t, but in any case whether they are or not has nothing to do with the fact that the Yankee might refer to “Chicago” rather than [the Argentine industrial city] “Rosario.”32

Gelman’s belief that language itself is the locus of national poetry, or of any poetry, for that matter, diverts him from a reliance on theme and enhances his focus on the materiality of language. His movement toward defamiliarization and estrangement thus also takes shape in the way Gelman utilizes the Spanish language. He makes use of what he calls las reservas de la lengua (the reserves of the language), or archaic linguistic models and structures, while at the same time seeking new idiomatic possibilities, creating neologisms, and transgressing grammatical norms. As argued by Lilián Uribe, the many devices Gelman uses to add more expressiveness to his language help create a sort of “counterlanguage”—one that attempts to name a new and different reality, and at the same time resists the discourse of power and speaks from the margins of such power.33 This counterlanguage emerges in numerous ways. He incorporates the lexical and syntactic contributions of centuries of earlier texts to complicate our present-day usage of language. Among the characteristics—listed and discussed by Uribe—with which Gelman endows his poetry in the creation of his alternative, resistant language are neologisms, archaisms, gender shifts (with a lot of feminization), spelling and accentual changes, verbal incongruities, intensive use of diminutives, and changes in the function of the parts of speech (nouns that function as verbs, adjectives, or adverbs; adjectives that work as adverbs or nouns; adverbs that function as nouns or verbs; and verbs that function as nouns). Such a language transgresses the norm of the established and authorized Spanish, and, with its lack of a prescribed system, embodies a persistent attempt to resort to the multiple possibilities of the idiom and its available devices.34 There are similarities here, recognized by Gelman himself,35 to Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make it New,” in which old words or works are recovered in their synchronic presence, as well as with the poetic principles of avant-garde Latin American poets writing in the early twentieth century, including César Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo Neruda. Latin American poets were understandably more apt to establish an estranged relationship with the Spanish language

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than were Spaniards. The recipients of an imposed language, they sought to denounce and resist Spanish even while they wrote in it. Wondering about the differences between Spaniards and Spanish Americans in their relationship to the Spanish language, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, concludes: Above all, it is a different attitude toward the language that they and we speak. . . . ours is critical; theirs is innocent. There is no distance between Spaniards and their language; none of their modern writers has called into question their language. . . . On the other hand, since our Independence we have denounced the Spanish past—in Spanish.36

Gelman is preoccupied with the Spanish language—its history, its presence, its poetic resources. His love for Castellano prompts a dialogue with a series of medieval Spanish poets he admires, such as Fray Luis de León, Francisco de Quevedo, and especially the major exponents of Christian mysticism, San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Ávila.37 Such a diachronically “­reversed trajectory” is consistent with Gelman’s attempt to unearth archaisms in Spanish and revitalize them with a synchronic perspective in his porteño Castellano. This backward movement is, simultaneously, a look toward the future, to the many possibilities of development and expression that the language holds. The Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa, who revolutionized Portuguese prose with his rigorous and experimental manipulation of language, once suggested, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that he was “a reactionary of language.”38 Gelman proceeds in a similar way in his quest for the origins of the language, for that initial moment when Spanish had not yet matured. His aim is to return to that primeval stage of the language, full of potentiality and expressiveness, in which there are different, multiple, and unexpected linguistic possibilities. In an interview Gelman mentions that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were five or six distinct and contemporaneous Spanish grammars, and that each one of them offered different solutions, showing how many ­viable paths were possible at one single time in the history of the language.39 In another interview, answering questions about his return to an original language, Gelman speaks of his “intention to follow a possible path that was not followed.” And he concludes by saying: These possible paths are recognized much more objectively, when one reads Spanish literature of a certain epoch, especially of the fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury conquistadores and travelers, in which the language—Spanish—had

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not yet crystallized, but was still in an incipient stage. What fascinates me about texts by Santa Teresa, San Juan, Fray Luis and so many others—Quevedo, for instance—is precisely the handling of the incipient language.40

There is, however, another explanation for Gelman’s attraction to San Juan’s and Santa Teresa’s texts: their visión exiliar, or “exilic vision.” The mystical and the poetical have in common “the extasis, the coming out of oneself.”41 Tango and mystical poetry resemble each other in that both speak of the absence of the loved one: in tango, a woman; in poetry, God. Mystical poetry tends to speak of one’s relationship with God in erotic, loving terms. The Song of Songs has been the main source text for poems where the separation and encounter between lovers depict, respectively, the absence of God or a mystical union with Him. Following the tradition of an allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, Jewish and Christian mystics have delved into the vast repertoire of metaphors offered by the biblical text, and sung the love between God and his people, Israel, or between Christ and his Church.42 Some poets developed a tropological reading of the Song, in which the woman who calls for her beloved may be read as an individual soul, rather than as a community, yearning for God.43 Earthly existence, a forced separation from God, is mystical poetry’s exile. In Citas y comentarios, Gelman combines tango and mystical poetry, and with these two treatments of abandonment and absence he creates a poetry that dialogues with, incorporates, and rewrites them, as he speaks of another absence: that of his country, Argentina. Originally, both books bear the dedication “a mi país” (to my country), words that speak this exile and serve to address his beloved and distant Argentina. This address mimics the stance of the speakers in the poems, since throughout the books, an element shared by the different texts is the lyrical “I” addressing the beloved absent one. Commenting on his mixing of tango and mystical poetry, Gelman states that the recurring reference to San Juan de la Cruz and to Santa Teresa does not imply that these authors influence me. It is more like coincidences with an exilic vision. Furthermore, I believe the tango has this exilic vision. Stories about a woman who abandons a man, the pain that it causes, and the other sorrows that make up the lyrics of tango, are nothing more than symbols and representations of other abandonments. And I think that the same thing happens with San Juan de la Cruz.44

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In Citas y comentarios, Gelman combines different discourses and literary traditions in which he sees symbols and metaphors of exile. He uses earlier metaphors and creates new ones taking as a point of departure his own lived experience of exile. Indeed, from the mid-1970s on, “exile” becomes central to Gelman both in existential and thematic terms. It is important to recognize the difference between literary estrangement and physical, real exile, fraught with violence, loss, and pain. Within the Latin American context, Juan Gelman’s exile is certainly not the only one. Júlio Cortázar goes as far as to assert that Latin American literary works born in exile will “further our deep identity, which will eventually show us our historical destiny as a continent.”45 But as part of this history, in his connection to the continent and to his language, Gelman deserves an appreciation of his particular and literal exile. There are specific conditions—individual, personal, and historical—that make him, not an exile because he is a poet, but a poet in exile because he is a man in exile. As a poet, he delves into the metaphors and language of exile to speak of the uprootedness that he indeed lives, and then creates more metaphors out of his own experience. But he never glorifies or romanticizes this experience, never indulges in the now current extreme of exalting the cultural and personal advantages of the exilic condition, and obliterating all the damages caused by violent uprooting. Perhaps I could say that Gelman is lucky insofar as, among the many displaced and dispossessed people, he at least is one who manages to articulate a voice—or rather, a multiplicity of voices. It is his exile in the literal sense, a product of the real situation of his country, that provokes Gelman to reapproach an exilic textual tradition that includes both the Jewish one through the Bible and the Kabbalah, and the Christian mystics. Notable in Juan Gelman’s paideuma for what they managed to do with the Spanish language and what they achieved in Spanish literature, Fray Luis de León, Santa Teresa, and San Juan have something else in common. They were descendants of converso families, members of the clergy, and linked to Reformation movements within the Church.46 They all came from cities which had had strong Jewish communities and where Kabbalah had flourished (Toledo and Ávila in particular). All three were Christian mystical writers, who, one might argue, called upon vivid kabbalistic imagery and symbolism, even if only to express and strengthen their Christianity, and two of them were eventually canonized by the Church.47 From among the works of these early Spanish poets, Juan Gelman chooses texts he will use in his own poetry of exile.48

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These texts become relevant to Gelman because they combine several critical elements: the incipient, immature Spanish, still pregnant with virtualities; the idea of God’s exile in the world;49 and a consciousness of the inadequacy of words.50 The mystical writers are aware that human language is too limited to express God’s manifestation. Gelman, too, although he insists on words, his working tools, admits: “All writing is a failure because it cannot encompass ‘that,’ as San Juan de la Cruz used to say. The word says more than what it silences, and silences more than what it says.”51 The Spanish mystic poets thus become partners in a dialogue that uses the language of the exiled to search for a nascent speech—as Gelman writes, “my tongue is cleaved / like a tongue of you.,” while the exile cauterizes his wound in the erotic link with the absent beloved who has abandoned him. Let us now take a look at one representative example from Citas y comentarios, and the ways in which exile and mysticism combine in this work. Following Gelman’s poem is San Juan de la Cruz’s “The Living Flame of Love,” written in 1584, which gives a glimpse of Gelman’s intertextual dialogue across time and space. comentario XXIII (san juan de la cruz)

commentary 23 (saint john of the cross)

Juan Gelman (1978–79) esta herida/con vos/o llaga/luz

this sore/with you/or wound/light

como criatura vulnerada o

like an injured creature or

pena de vos que vivemuere

pain of you that livedies

hasta que la matás haciéndola

until you kill it making it

dicha de vos cielando furias/paladar

joy of you heavening furies/palate

al que mi lengua está pegada

to which my tongue is cleaved

como lengua de vos/o tierra donde

like a tongue of you/or land where

crecés como dulzura/vos

you grow like sweetness/you

que me empezaste y quiero que me

who started me and I want you to finish

acabes

me

en la mitad de vos/país/amparo

in the middle of you/country/refuge

por donde toda vida va/temblor

through which all life passes/trembling

que me temblás en vos/claro de fuego

that you tremble me in you/ brightness of fire

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Llama de amor viva

The Living Flame of Love

Canciones del alma en la intima comunicación de unión de amor de Dios

Songs of the soul in the intimate communication of loving union with God

San Juan de la Cruz (1584)

Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D.

1. ¡Oh llama de amor viva,

1. O living flame of love

que tiernamente hieres

that tenderly wounds my soul

de mi alma en el más profundo

in its deepest center! Since

  centro!

now you are not oppressive,

Pues ya no eres esquiva,

now consummate! if it be your

acaba ya, si quieres;

  will:

¡rompe la tela de este dulce

tear through the veil of this sweet

  encuentro!

­­  

2. ¡Oh cauterio suave!

2. O sweet cautery,

¡Oh regalada llaga!

O delightful wound!

¡Oh mano blanda! ¡Oh toque

O gentle hand! O delicate touch

  delicado,

that tastes of eternal life

que a vida eterna sabe,

and pays every debt!

y toda deuda paga!

In killing you changed death to

Matando, muerte en vida la has

  life.

encounter!

  trocado. 3. ¡Oh lámparas de fuego,

3. O lamps of fire!

en cuyos resplandores

in whose splendors,

las profundas cavernas del

the deep caverns of feeling,

  sentido,

once obscure and blind,

que estaba oscuro y ciego,

now give forth, so rarely, so

con extraños primores

exquisitely,

calor y luz dan junto a su

both warmth and light to their

  Querido!

  Beloved.

4. ¡Cuán manso y amoroso

4. How gently and lovingly

recuerdas en mi seno,

you wake in my heart,

donde secretamente solo moras,

where in secret you dwell alone;

y en tu aspirar sabroso,

and in your sweet breathing,

de bien y gloria lleno,

filled with good and glory,

cuán delicadamente me

how tenderly you swell my heart

  enamoras!

  with love.

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As with the other poems in Citas y comentarios, “comentario XXIII” is a series of quatrains, its verses of similar length. Some of Gelman’s characteristic poetic devices are very apparent here, including the intense use of parallel structure, emphasized by slashes (/), and the equivalence between seemingly unrelated terms created merely by the conjunction o (or) or como (like). In addition, the ungrammatical use of verbs is evident, notably the transformation of the intransitive temblar (tremble) into a causative transitive, in “temblor que me temblás en vos” (tremble that you tremble me in you). Neologisms such as the portmanteau vivemuere (livedies) and the verb cielar (to heaven), from the noun cielo (heaven), appear throughout. The poem’s diction and syntax are unfamiliar in Spanish, which in turn makes its reading difficult. The insistent use of vos, the informal pronoun used in Argentina for “you,”—seven times—although not surprising in Gelman’s work, has a stylized or formal effect, especially in the three times it appears in the expression de vos (of you). See, for example, pena de vos (pain of you), which parallels and opposes dicha de vos (joy of you). Such an intense use of vos serves to call attention to the addressee and reveals the large role it or she plays in the speaker’s world, in his expression of exilic pain, and, of course, in the construction of the poem itself. Because vos sounds like voz (voice), it also emphasizes the importance of orality, and the poetic expression, or voice, the poet seeks for him and for his beloved woman/land addressee. This intertextual dialogue with San Juan involves clear—though not ­exclusive—allusions to the mystic’s poem “Llama de amor viva.” Gelman substitutes a number of words present in the earlier poem, and rearranges others, condensing images or whole verses into a single word. Some examples are: the initial injury (verse 1) in Gelman echoes verse 2 of San Juan’s poem. Such an injury is connected to San Juan’s fruit of the “living flame of love” (stanza 1 v. 1) that “tenderly wounds” (s. 1 v. 2) the poet’s soul. However, the injury is less pleasant in Gelman, as the “tenderness” and “love” that San Juan’s flame stands for are not present in this case; rather than ardor and exaltation, it is the speaker’s vulnerability (“like an injured creature”) that marks the tone of the first verses. The wound (v. 1) in Gelman’s first stanza echoes “O delightful wound!” (s. 2 v. 2) in San Juan. The light (v. 1) points to that (s. 3 v. 6) which in San Juan is brought by shining “lamps of fire” (s.3 v.1). Gelman’s “livedies” (v. 3) translates San Juan’s verse “In killing you changed death to life,” or, as I prefer, “Killing, death into life you have turned” (s. 2 v. 6). The sweetness (v. 8) more directly echoes the “sweet encounter” in s. 1 v. 6, but may also reflect the similar adverbs that frame San Juan’s poem: tenderly (s. 1 v. 1) and delicately (s. 4 v. 6).

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The “deepest center” (s. 1 v. 3) of the soul, which in San Juan is wounded by the flame, undergoes a great transformation in Gelman, reappearing at the end of the poem as “the middle of you” (v. 10). The “half,” “middle” or “center” is no longer of the soul, which belongs to, and stands for, the speaker and is invaded by the addressee (God, or the Holy Spirit) in San Juan. Now it is the “half ” or “middle” of the country, which receives and contains the speaker. In the verse “you that started me and I want you to finish me,” Gelman is alluding to Job 6:8–9, as understood by San Juan via the Latin translation—“Quis mihi det, ut qui coepit ipse me conterat?”—which he cites in his “Declaración” (Declaration) on “Canción VII” (Song 7) of his poem “Canción espiritual” (Spiritual Song). San Juan translates into Spanish as “¿Quién me dará a mí que el que me comenzó, ese me acabe?” (Who will grant that he who started me finishes with me?).52 Rather than addressing God, his creator, and pleading for a death that might end his suffering, the speaker in Gelman’s poem addresses his country, making it his origin and his desired end. As a character who feels the injustice of God, and isolation from his community, the wounded Job provides ­Gelman with a more desperate, or disillusioned, alternate reading, which does not accord with the ardent, elated tone of San Juan’s “The Living Flame of Love.” Witness the criatura vulnerada (injured creature) of Gelman’s second line, a phrase not found in San Juan’s poem. Even as he rewrites it, Gelman appropriates San Juan’s “Flame,” combining it with Job and—as we shall see below—also with Psalm 137, and through this rewriting transforms the relationship between speaker and addressee. In Gelman’s recontextualization of the verse “you that started me and I want you to finish me,” the addressee—country and/or woman—still has agency upon the speaker, but the speaker is inside the addressee, penetrating and inhabiting it. Such inhabitation never happens in San Juan’s “Flame,” where the speaker always refers to the touch, the piercing, and the wounds inflicted upon her by the addressee (we can think of the speaker as the Bride [of Christ], since the addressee is referred to in the masculine: Querido, solo, lleno). The speaker is feminized, befitting the grammatical gender of the Spanish alma (soul) and allowing for the construction of a traditional love poem, where feminine and masculine genders are represented, but also for a metaphorically homoerotic poem.53 It clearly recalls the Song of Songs, with the Shulamite calling for her lover, but it also resembles the traditional poem of love of God that tends to follow the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs.54

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In San Juan’s poem, the speaker is feminine and suffers the actions of the masculine addressee. If read not only as an allegorical mystical piece, but literally, in terms of human love, as already suggested by Willis Barnstone, 55 San Juan’s poem depicts a physical encounter between two lovers. The feminine voice asks to be further penetrated (s. 1 v. 4–6), speaks of pain and pleasure (s. 2), reaches orgasm (s. 2 v. 6), meditates with fiery joy on the successful act (s. 3), and concludes with serene and tender intimacy (s. 4). At the end of the poem the speaker offers the heart (or “breast,” as I prefer) where the addressee “dwell[s] alone,” which will also be the vessel into which he breathes (seemingly a reference to the Divine ruach, or the Holy Spirit).56 Kavanaugh and Rodriguez’s English translation makes this passive, receptacle-like image even more obvious, by choosing to translate enamorar (literally, to captivate, or cause to fall in love) as “swell [my] heart with love”; it not only makes the heart a container, but also suggests an image of impregnation. Barnstone’s translation reads “how tenderly you make me love!” which I consider closer to the Spanish text than that of the Carmelite priests. In either version, it is still clear that the masculine addressee is the agent who sets most of the poem in motion and who provokes the speaker’s love, while the latter embraces him and receives his actions. Here the mystical-erotic encounter between the soul and God occurs by virtue of God’s “possession” of the soul. There is however one moment in San Juan’s poem when there is a perceptible reciprocity between speaker and addressee. It happens in the third stanza, when the “lamps of fire” illuminate the “deep caverns of feeling.” Such feeling was “once obscure and blind,” but now, with the light emitted by the lamps, the caverns return or “give forth . . . both warmth and light to their ­Beloved.”57 It is the orgasmic moment of mystical and spiritual union, in which, for San Juan, God is touched by the soul. But the soul can only return light to God because God has illuminated and transformed it. Or, to use the images of human love that San Juan offers in his poem, the vagina is able to envelop and “give forth . . . warmth” to the penis because the penis has torn “the veil of this sweet encounter” and penetrated it.58 This union of the “I” and the “you” that happens in San Juan occurs in a more radical fashion when it is the yo and the vos. In “comentario XXIII,” Juan Gelman has his speaker not only wounded and penetrated by the addressee— “creature injured or pain of you,” and “my tongue is cleaved like tongue of you”—but is also, as I noted earlier, embodied inside it. Finally, speaker and addressee stand symbiotically united, since in the end of the poem their limits

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become blurred and confused, and one is inside the other: “trembling that you tremble me in you.” In this peculiar and idiosyncratic syntax, the addressee still acts upon the speaker, who suffers his trembling action, but the speaker is at the same time inside the addressee, therefore also altering or affecting the addressee’s body. The intense proximity of the verb ending, which indicates the person (temblÁS), and the reflexive pronoun (me) plus the preposition with personal pronoun (en vos) emphasizes this embrace and the confusion of the two. All is taken, altered, consumed by the bright fire that dominates the poem. A fire that appears metonymically as the last word in the first verse (light), then symmetrically reappears with all its brilliance as the last word in the last verse (“brightness of fire”). San Juan’s poem is a “Song of the soul in the intimate communication of loving union with God,” whereas Gelman’s is an intimate communication with his country, Argentina. Gelman’s poetic voice also speaks of the country’s pain, of the suffering it undergoes, and of the voice’s own suffering, which mingles with it. The poetic voice speaks of the country to the country—Argentina, in other words, is both the subject and the addressee—and that same country is finally revealed as the referent of vos in verse 8 of the last stanza. Here the issue of gender deserves some attention. In a poem that reads a mystico-erotic text so heavily defined by genders and sexual images, the gendering of speaker and addressee is complicated somewhat when the latter is país, a masculine noun. Gelman’s poem does not sound like San Juan’s, where the speaker is so clearly revealed as a feminine voice. As one of Gelman’s love poems, the speaker can be read as a man, much like the traditional speaker of a wailing tango, who laments that he has been abandoned by the woman he loves. Gelman’s speaker is injured by the addressee, but, as I observed, the addressee also shares this pain, along with the pleasures of their union and final merging. Gelman’s “commentary” retains San Juan’s meaning, and the textual possibility, of an active addressee that is the love that wounds, the fire that consumes the speaker, killing [him] and in so doing, giving [him] the joy of such overwhelming presence in eternal life. But Gelman’s poem is more ambivalent, for repeated sounds and expressions let the reader perceive a different message as well. It simultaneously builds and undermines the positive meaning of the “cauterization”—where a wound is cauterized so as to be healed59—and allows speaker and addressee to share more of each other, culminating in their union, through which, not only does the addressee act upon the speaker, but as noted, the speaker is made present within the addressee: “temblor que me temblás en vos.”

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This last verse reveals the dual and reciprocal agency of speaker and addressee, permitting us to identify the speaker, despite his subjugated position, as one who also penetrates the addressee and lies within her.60 This describes a more traditionally male role in a heterosexual relationship, but the fact that país (country) is a masculine noun in Spanish creates problems identifying the addressee as a woman, as the tango tradition would require. Counteracting that, however, is the fact that the erotic feminization of the land is a classical trope, one with roots in the prophetic books of the Bible and quite pervasive in Western literature.61 With the feminine personification of the land, the “land as a woman” metaphor allows for the maintenance of the typical model of the lyrical poem based on a heterosexual male addressing a beloved female.62 Gelman’s país seems to support this model: Argentina indeed has a feminine name, and one that, deriving from argent (silver), even brings to mind images that tend to be poetically associated with women, such as jewels, the night, and the moon. But the fact that the poet chose the word país, and not Argentina, maintains the gender ambiguity in the poem. It is not only the symbiotic relationship of the lovers (observable in San Juan’s poem), but the mutual injuring, and the presence of the speaker within the addressee, that make Gelman’s poem more daring and more ambiguous than its intertext. Even as speaker and addressee can still be identified, respectively, as man and woman, there is also an underlying movement that works to blur this rigid gender demarcation, or at least the traditional gender roles.63 By introducing country in his rewriting of San Juan de la Cruz’s poem, Gelman alludes to yet another text, also from the Hebrew Bible, but this time not cited by San Juan in “Flame.” It is a text that thematizes exile, and associates poetry with land. In fact, it is a central text in Jewish literature, the locus classicus of poetry written in exile. Gelman’s verses “palate / to which my tongue is cleaved / like a tongue of you [as your tongue],” recall Psalm 137, also known as the Psalm of Exile: “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, / let my right hand forget her cunning / Let my tongue cleave to my palate if I don’t remember you.”64 The critical correspondence between Jew and exile has been recurrent,65 although often oversimplified. Nevertheless, Psalm 137 is foundational in Jewish literature. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, in her study of the poetics of exile and homecoming in Hebrew and Ashkenazi Jewish literatures, maintains that Psalm 137 “generates the poetic vocabulary of exile,” and identifies it as “the source of a long intellectual journey.”66 Gelman joins this intellectual journey, which spans centuries, as yet another Jewish poet using images and expressions from the

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psalmodic tradition—itself already composite and palimpsestic67—in order to inform his own intertextual practice. Psalm 137 thematizes the moment of poetic creation: the Babylonian exile, we are told, strips the Levites of their desire to sing. When their Babylonian captors demand a song, a collective speaker replies, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” But then the poetic voice, shifting into the first person singular, begins to sing, and the psalm itself is proof and product of this song. Analogously, Juan Gelman, a poet, singer or modern Levite, faces the impossibility of writing, because he too has been exiled from his land, and overcomes it by turning exile itself into a reason for writing. In Spanish, the psalm’s subjunctive present expresses a curse, a hypothesis in the future: “Péguese mi lengua al paladar / si no me acuerdo de tí/” (Let my tongue cleave to my palate / if I don’t remember you).68 In Gelman, this possibility becomes a fact, a fait accompli, as is clear from the use of the past participle of the same verb, pegar/pegarse, in an adjectival role: “mi lengua está pegada” (my tongue is cleaved). Note that Gelman uses the word tierra (land), immediately after this phrase, alluding to the psalm’s verse “¿Cómo cantaremos cántico de J­ehová en tierra de extraños?” (How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?). Does this mean that the speaker has forgotten his land? The caesura right after pegada (cleaved) initially allows for this reading—“palate to which my tongue is cleaved”—but the enjambment that follows, “como lengua de vos” (like a tongue of you), introduces the image of a land/country that has a tongue, and one that is also cleaved, as the speaker compares his tongue to hers: “como lengua de vos.” Once again speaker and addressee reflect on each other, partaking of similar feelings, as if building toward their final symbiosis. Because the land’s tongue is also cleaved, and because lengua means both language and tongue, I see two possible interwoven, noncontradictory readings: from the speaker’s point of view, the addressee (woman/man/land) has forgotten the abandoned/ exiled man; or, twisting Psalm 137, the country itself cannot speak. Such an inability to speak is shared by the speaker and his land: this might be a reference to the gag imposed on Argentina by the military dictatorial regime of the 1970s and 1980s, a fact that while not explicitly evoked, looms in the background of Gelman’s exilic experience and poetry.69 The verses “my tongue cleaved / like a tongue of you” speak of the encounter of two tongues, as the speaker’s and the addressee’s cleaved tongues meet in a central metalinguistic reference. The erotic kiss is a shared speech/silence. Unable to use his own tongue/language,

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or that of his country, the speaker opens the possibility of using, in the future, a different tongue. The implication seems clear: to set his tongue free, he must shift to another language, one that is neither the Hebrew of the Psalm nor the Spanish of his land. What then? A language of other Jewish exiles: Ladino. As he includes this psalm among the texts with which he dialogues in “commentary,” Gelman brings to his poem an entirely new order of echoes and implications: in one move, both as a poet and as a Latin American Jew, Gelman engages the Jewish textual tradition and the Jewish experience of exile. He incorporates the psalmist’s voice into his poetry and includes his own voice among those that make up the tradition of Jewish literary creation on exile.70 He chooses a text charged with the discourse of national identity—it specifically links the Levites to Zion, and has reverberated in Hebrew poetry on national themes throughout the centuries—and updates its historical condition. Now he sings the loss and absence of another land, his land, Argentina. The “there” in Gelman’s poem is not any “elsewhere” but specifically Argentina, a concrete country, to which the poet yearns to return.71 Gelman resemanticizes Psalm 137 to express his memory of the experience of Argentine exile, thereby introducing the age-old trope of the palate-cleaving tongue in a specifically Argentine literature of exile. It is only fitting—and tragic, and ironic—that Psalm 137, a text considered foundational to a national poetry defined by the experience of exile, takes part in the tradition of another national literature written in and defined by exile, that of Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s.72 And it is also tragically amusing to observe that in trying to speak of Argentina as an Argentine, Gelman does it through the mediation of Jewish texts, as a Jew.73 As part of his creation—in exile, and about exile—and his interest in the development of the Spanish language, six years after Citas y comentarios, Gelman wrote another book centered on other writers’ texts: Com/posiciones. After working through San Juan de la Cruz and other canonical Christian works, and moving backward toward his Jewish origins and the origins of his language, Gelman arrives at other crucial texts—those of the Hebrew poets in medieval Iberia, or the Muslim-controlled region known as Al-Andalus. This encounter takes Gelman to a different level in his self-Sephardization process; these medieval Hebrew poets also wrote about exile, estrangement in a new land, and their own shifting identities. Among Gelman’s intertexts in Com/posiciones, we find the Spanish Hebrew poets Shmuel ha-Nagid, Yehuda ha-Levi, Shlomo ibn Gabirol, Yehuda al-Harizi, the kabbalists Abraham and Todros Abulafia and Isaac Luria, and the Italian Hebrew poets Joseph Tsarfati and Immanuel di

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Roma. Gelman also includes translations of Ezekiel, Amos, Job, and Psalms, among biblical texts, as well as from the Heykhalot Hymns, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Talmudic poems.74As the only non-Jewish sources, which significantly open and close the volume, Gelman adds the Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas and the eighteenth-century Bengali poet Ramprasad.75 In a synchronic operation, acting as anthologist, poet, and translator of translations, Gelman chooses texts by these authors and rewrites them. He alters them, engages in dialogues with them in their contemporaneity, and shares their exilic positioning. In the book’s preface, Gelman explains his project and reveals his ties to the Hebrew poets: i call com/positions the poems that follow because i have com/posed them, that is, put things of mine in the texts that great poets wrote many centuries ago. it is clear that i did not intend to improve them; their exilic vision startled me and i added—or changed, walked, offered—that which i myself felt. as contemporaneity and company? mine with them? backwards? inhabitants of the same condition?76

In contrast to his own poems, which he once named “Traducciones” (Translations), this poetry collection, a translation (in the loosest sense) of centuriesold poems, is titled “Com/posiciones” (Com/positions). To compose is to write, to create—in this case, a literary work—but it also suggests, as in one dictionary definition, “to make or form by combining things, parts, or elements,” or “to be or constitute a part or element of.”77 Gelman here seems to emphasize juxtaposition—literally posing, or positioning, different things together, side by side—as the model for writing. He creates a literary work shaped by the combination of different already existing texts, which he chooses and then selectively recontextualizes. In so doing, Gelman inscribes his work in a tradition of rewriting that spans centuries, since the Hebrew poets he is rewriting also actively reused each o ­ ther’s texts.78 Gelman himself recounts how he found out that one of ha-Levi’s poems included in Com/posisiones had it, too, been born out of an exercise of “rewriting” by ha-Levi, who had played on a love poem by a seventh-century Provençal poet. Gelman’s status within this tradition of rewriting is both sought and affirmed more clearly by his creation in this volume of the persona eliezer ben jonon, who shares the same exilic condition as the other poets. Furthermore, the slash dividing the title word stresses the prefix com (with), which in turn emphasizes the joint authorship of the work—as in “tarea compartida” (a shared task), “componer con otros” (compose with others), or “compartir la composición” (share the composition).

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The authorial fiction is again accompanied by a translational poetics and practice. Earlier in his career, amusing himself à la (Jorge Luis) Borges, Gelman invented poets whom he claimed to have translated in “Traducciones” I and II and in Los poemas de Sydney West.79 Fifteen years later, he again returns to translation, but now he refers to his translations as “compositions.” Rather than suggesting a distance, this time the use of translation establishes a bond; it finds a common language and identifies a common rhetoric with earlier writers and literary traditions. It is the same experience of pain and loss, of feeling the present absence of the loved one—be it God, Zion, a woman, or Argentina—that connects all these poets. But this common feeling of loss does not extinguish hope, because the poets are bound by a common desire. Gelman describes his intertextual practice in emotional terms: “I added—or changed, walked, offered—that which I myself felt.”80 He adds his own feelings to the text he chooses; he changes the text according to what moves him most, emphasizing a word, for example, or centering on a specific image. He does not say it is a book of translations. Yet each poem is followed by an italicized name, in traditionally Gelmanean lowercase, and some also carry the dates of the listed poet, as well as an emblematic itinerary that stresses the ­poet’s ­exilic condition. The title of the poem “El expulsado” (The expelled man), for example, is then followed by this information: “yehuda al-harizi (1170–1237/ toledo-provenza-palestina).” There is a reference to the poet, but no indication of a “source text,” no presentation of an authoritative “original.” What the reader receives are the words in Spanish, the caesuras that Gelman chooses, the inner divisions and rhythm of the verses marked by the poet’s typical fragmenting slashes. Gelman grasps the other poet’s text and imprints it with his own rhythm, distorts it with his own syntax. It is his text now. But the other’s voice is not muffled—it is there, latent, acknowledged as part of an encounter of souls, a mirroring of obsessions. In Com/posiciones, the new text is a flagrant polyphonic work, and, consistent with Gelman’s poetics, translation here is the means to recognize the other, the other voice and the voice of the other in his own creation. Gelman invites the reader’s readings and new writings in an unending operation, which, like his “translation,” discourages the idea of a definitive text, as he leaves traces and false clues about his sources along the way. The term rostros (faces) reappears almost like a leitmotif throughout Com/ posiciones, as Gelman reveals or adds these to the voices of his predecessors. “Faces” and “voices” (voces) also stand in this volume for a divided self. The issue of identity construction is a recurrent one in Gelman’s work—the po-

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etic voice unfolds in different ways across his texts, with the initial Gelmanean personae, the several “translated poets,” the communal popular voices from the tango and the city, and the incorporation of alien texts (San Juan, Santa Teresa, biblical sources, and now medieval Spanish poets). In Com/posiciones, which offers continuity to the poetry volumes of exile, the divided identity of the poetic voice appears clearly. An “I” that names itself, even though it is in pieces, even though it is removed from itself, is present throughout the volume. This “I” emerges in verses such as “estoy lejos de mí/yo tiembla en tu bondad” (i am far from myself/i trembles in your goodness), from “La situación” (The Situation), credited to Yehuda ha-Levi. Here the disagreement between the first person pronoun—yo—and the verb in the third person singular—tiembla—­ accentuates the voice’s internal division. Similarly, “soy dos/uno come/procura/ el otro/cava mis huesos/” (i am two/one eats/searches/the other/unearths my bones) (“El ciego” [The Blind Man], also “by” ha-Levi); or yet again, “estoy expulsado de mí” (i am expelled from myself) (“El expulsado” [The Expelled Man], Yehuda al-Harizi); and the kabbalistic “estoy exiliado de mí/como el Creador de todo lo creado” (i am exiled from myself/like the Creator from all the creation) (“El huerfano” [The Orphan], Isaac Luria). A singular element of Com/posiciones is the presence of a fictional Hebrew Gelmanean persona, added surreptitiously as if he were yet another medieval writer including dates of birth and death: 1130–1187. Like John Wendell and Sidney West, he is also a “translated poet,” but Gelman’s eliezer ben jonon—“son of juan”?— plays a different role. Unlike Gelman’s previous personae, he is not designed to add distance or to minimize the intimacy of the Gelman’s poetry. On the contrary, he serves as a link between Gelman’s own poetry and that of the medieval Iberian poets he translates and rewrites. In the poems signed by ben jonon, verses from other poems by different authors collected in the volume reappear, side by side with new verses, sometimes slightly modified, but always reaffirming the thematic concerns and the attention to a forlorn poetic “I” that mark Gelman’s rewriting of other poets. Perhaps a play on “the son of juan”? ben jonon is the “other” that is Gelman, who speaks passionately of dualities and opposites. In “Rostros” (Faces), for example, we read: “dame otra vez la noche/las­ ­tinieblas/de tu cuerpalma/o luz/o pechos/que/me confirman para que me ­deshaga/de mí/de mis pedazos/¿qué es/esta disolución en vos . . . ?” (give me  once more the night/the darkness/of your bodysoul/or light/or breasts/ that/confirm that I should strip myself/of myself/of my pieces/what is/this

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­ issolution in you . . . ?). The portmanteau “cuerpalma” (bodysoul) comd bines that which dualist Western philosophy separates; the presence of pechos (breasts), besides serving as a reference to the Song of Songs, also refers to the number two, marking the “double” while undermining dualism. Noche (night) appears in a verse preceded, in the poem, by a verse ending with the verb iluminar (to illuminate), and followed by another with tinieblas (darkness) and then luz (light). Opposites are combined, creating paradoxes that speak of the conflicted, complex relationship between the speaker and his beloved. The lyrical voice affirms itself in shattering, amid a process of disappearance or dissolution into the addressee. The confusion between speaker and addressee occurs again in “La Lejanía” (The Distance) where the other is also thematized: “este aroma de vos/¿sube?/¿baja?/¿viene de vos?/¿de mí?/¿en qué otro/me deberia convertir?/ ¿qué otro de mí/debiera ser/para saber/ver/los pedazos/de mundo que en silencio juntás?//” (this smell of yours/goes up?/ down?/ is it yours?/is it mine?/ what other/should I become?/what other of me/should I be/to know/how to see/the pieces/of world that you collect in silence?”). Self-transformed into a medieval Spanish poet,81 and still a divided, exiled man, and a poet preoccupied with the origins of the Spanish language, Gelman continues his archaeological excavation. His gradual approach to Judaism acquires an added vigor when he turns to Ladino and adopts a Jewish language as his writing language.

Dibaxu Following the “life-giving mouth” of the Spanish Hebrew poets, as mentioned in the preface to Com/posiciones, Dibaxu picks up the motif of the mouth. The volume opens with these orally oriented verses, in italicized Ladino on the left page facing the Castellano version on the right: il batideru di mis bezus/

the trembling of my kisses/

quero dizer: il batideru di mis bezus

i mean: the trembling of my kisses

si sintirá in tu pasado

will be heard in your past

cun mí in tu vinu/

with me in your wine/

el temblor de mis labios/

the trembling of my lips/

quiero decir: el temblor de mis besos

i mean: the trembling of my kisses

se oirá en tu pasado

will be heard in your past

conmigo en tu vino/

with me in your wine/

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The mouth opens the book—poetry is brought to life by a mouth inscribed in the poem, a mouth dynamic and trembling. Voice and word come from this mouth, as the original site of poetry. Kisses also come from this mouth, emblematic of an essential Gelmanian confluence: of lyric, love, and language. The opening verse also offers clear echoes of Shir haShirim, the Song of Songs. The Hebrew text reads, “ishakenu mineshikot pihu ki tovim dodeicha miiayin” (Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine).82 Kisses, the mouth, and wine are present in both openings, but Gelman’s male speaker refers to his own mouth and to the kisses he would have already given, rather than the addressee’s mouth and kisses that are desired by the female speaker in the Song of Songs. Note also the switch from the biblical taste of the present love to Gelman’s synesthesia of the sound of trembling kisses that reverberates to the past. Instead of a request, expressed with a verbal imperative, Gelman’s verse is an assertion that speaks of love that happened, of pleasure enjoyed. Gelman’s speaker has both kissed with his trembling lips and offered wine to the addressee; better yet, he has offered himself in the addressee’s wine: “with me in your wine.” In this image the speaker turns into a mock Christ figure and inverts the Christian allegorical reading of the Song of Songs. Right from the start Gelman’s intertextual choices define Dibaxu as a book of love poems, but the fact that it opens with echoes of the quintessential Hebrew love poem, and in a Jewish language, gives it an unmistakable Jewish mark. The trembling of the mouth can be heard in the addressee’s past, but significantly, the word “past” is preceded by a verb in the future, in the forms si sintirá / “se oirá” (will be heard). With this construction, the word transcends time, and the future somehow inhabits the past. This mingling of past and future happens again, and not exclusively, in poem IV, in the verses: “durmi todu/ il páxaru/la boz/il caminu/la yerva/qui amaniana viniera//” “todo duerme/el pájaro/la voz/el camino/la hierba/que mañana vino//” (everything is sleeping/ the bird/the voice/the path/the grass/that came tomorrow//). The thematization of time, expressed in the ungrammatical combination of a verb in the past and an adverb denoting future, occurs throughout the book. We can even say that time is thematized in the choice of language(s) itself, for the graphic disposition of the poems, side by side in Ladino and Castellano, forces the reader to confront the history of the Spanish language. It is time that trembles on those lips, as Gelman intends, when he requests in his preface that the reader read aloud the two versions, “so as to listen, perhaps, between the two sounds, for something of the time that has been

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trembling and giving us a past since El Cid.”83 Indeed, when read aloud by a contemporary Spanish speaker, the different sounds, syntax, and vocabulary in the two versions provoke an estrangement that is heightened by the supposed kinship between the two languages. The physical proximity of Ladino and Castellano underscores their differences while confirming their similarity. It is the tension provoked by the languages’ relationship, in their simultaneous, or synchronic, textual presence, that constitutes the creative force, the effort to construct meaning throughout the volume. As an example of the unexpected undercurrents of meaning found between the Ladino and the Castellano versions, I return to the opening verses: “the trembling of my lips/i mean: the trembling of my kisses/will be heard in your past/with me in your wine/.” As Geneviève Fabry has pointed out in her keen reading of this passage,84 the word bezus (kisses) appears twice in the Ladino version, whereas it is replaced by two different words in Castellano: labios (lips) and besos (kisses). When the speaker says “el tremblor de mis labios/quiero decir: el temblor de mis besos” (the trembling of my lips/i mean: the trembling of my kisses), the “quiero decir” (i mean) creates a pause and shifts direction. The phrase can correct what was stated or it can indicate a gap between what was stated and what the poet wished to state. In any case, Fabry points out, it introduces a different emphasis, for if “lips” may point to “kisses,” it also points to word and voice, while “kisses” is more clearly and exclusively related to love and eros. This difference does not exist in the Ladino, as the word bezus is used in both instances—unlike Gelman’s model, Nicoïdski, who uses mushos for lips. The verses are then not only parallel but virtually identical, and the poem becomes increasingly erotic. Curiously, the Ladino bezu may become “lip” by means of a circuitous trip to modern Castellano, which does contain the word bezo, with a z, meaning “blubber lip, or “fat lip,”85 not to be confused with the regular modern Spanish beso, “kiss.” Batideru, translated as the noun “trembling,” is temblor in Castellano. To a contemporary Castellano speaker, the word batideru may convey images rather distinct from those of a mouth trembling with passion. In fact, Cassell’s Spanish Dictionary lists the modern word as a “continuous beating or striking; beating-place; collision; uneven ground.”86 A “dimension of agon, or struggle,” in ­Geneviève Fabry’s words, is introduced into the text by the transference of sound and meaning from one language to the other.87 But not one of desolation, as she seems to accept from the early modern Spanish lexicologist Covarrubias’s creative, and even poetic, but ultimately incorrect etymological connection be-

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tween batir and the rare b.t.t. Hebrew root that will give BAT, desolare. As for the Ladino verb sintir (to hear), it is oír in Castellano. But sintir also sounds like the Castellano word sentir, which is mainly “to feel.”88 With these fake homonyms, a strange new image is now formed: “the beating of my swollen lips will be felt in your past.” Violence suffered by the speaker, reflected on the swollen lips, and violence perpetrated by him, through his rough kissing, mingle with the poem’s previous, and more literal, amorous setting. If on one level the poem follows the conventional metaphor that “love is war,”89 this possible reading also suggests echoes of the historical moment of repression and violence in which the poem was written, reminding the reader once again that this is a book of exile. “The Sephardic [sic] syntax brought me a lost innocence, and its diminutives, a tenderness from another time that is still alive and very comforting,” Gelman writes in the preface to Dibaxu. Part of his project is to reject our basic opposition between past and future, or the idea that the future simply supersedes the past. Gelman states the need to reclaim Ladino’s past and make it present; to return to that moment when linguistic paths and possibilities were still available to Spanish, before the language became normative, and by reinvigorating it, help it attain a new freshness and beauty in the future. Curiously, present-day Castellano, this fully developed and normative language with all  its registers, when juxtaposed to the old, marginalized Ladino language, bares its own past: it seems old and crystallized, with unavoidable fixed habits. For the contemporary reader, Ladino becomes a language with the unexpected power of rejecting automatization and renewing Castellano’s linguistic reserves, thus heightening its poetic force. Here, it is the dying language that breathes life into both Castellano specifically and poetry more generally.

Clarisse Nicoïdski and Dibaxu In the preface to Dibaxu, Gelman makes it clear that he felt the impulse to write in Ladino after reading poems by Clarisse Nicoïdski. He writes, “The access to poems like those by Clarisse Nikoïdski [sic], French novel writer and Sephardic [Ladino] poet, awakened this need that in me was dormant, deaf, willing to awake. Which need? Why was it dormant? Why was it deaf?”90 Furthermore, the dedication of Dibaxu includes the friend who presented him Nicoïdski’s poems. Despite being an intertextual source, Nicoïdski is not recognized in his texts the same way that San Juan and Santa Teresa are. In Dibaxu, Gelman does not offer the kinds of explicit hypotextual information that abound in Citas y comentarios or Com/posiciones: here there are no book titles, names of poems,

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or any other bibliographical reference that might lead us to this mostly unknown Jewish Franco-Bosnian writer. We met Clarisse Nicoïdski in the introduction to this book and followed the process that led her to change languages (from French to Ladino) and genres (from prose to poetry) in her collection of poems Lus ojus, las manus, la boca (Eyes, Hands, Mouth). The recuperative role Ladino plays in Nicoïdski’s work captivates Gelman. This attraction, coupled with the poet’s increased interest in Jewish sources and the history of the Spanish language, eventually culminates in Dibaxu. I am now careful to describe the layout and organization of ­Nicoïdski’s volume because, among other things, they foreground issues of language choice and dissemination of a dying language.91 They also form the intertextual model for Juan Gelman’s editorial decisions, which reveal his evolving relationship with the Ladino and Spanish languages. First there is the title in Ladino, then the translated title Eyes, Hands, Mouth. Below that the title page adds, in italics, the following information: “Sephardic poems by CLARISSE NICOÏDSKI with translations by KEVIN POWER.” This international, multilingual volume contains sixteen text pages divided into four parts that correspond exactly to four poems each, all in lowercase, their sections of one or more stanzas divided by graphic ellipses. Each page is divided in two: on the left a poem in Ladino, and on the right, the italicized English version. Each part includes only its title in Ladino: “Lus ojus,” “Las manus,” “La boca,” and there is also a last untitled piece bearing a dedication to Spanish poet F ­ ederico García Lorca. Unlike the others, this last poem also includes an anonymous epigraph with English translation, parts numbered 1 to 5 in lowercase Roman numerals, and capital letters at the beginning of the first verse of each part. The title page, as mentioned, clarifies that these are “Sephardic poems.” This added description, nonexistent in the Ladino text, is an attempt—by whom? The author? The translator? The editor?—explicitly to describe the nature of the Sephardic language, a recourse unnecessary in the Ladino version, since its (few) native speakers will already identify Ladino as a Jewish language. In a way, the phrase “Sephardic poems” in the English version of the volume serves to inform the English readers about the Jewish specificity of the author and her language: these are readers who might not read the original Ladino anyway, and who might perhaps only find it deliciously exotic. This description, however, while it carefully avoids naming the language used to write the poems, and uses an umbrella characterization that is understandable to a larger audience (“Sephardi” vs. “Ashkenazi”), ends up underscor-

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ing the difficulty of finding a consensual denomination for such a Sephardic language. This ongoing discussion begins again in the title page of Eyes, Hands, Mouth, and for our purposes continues on the back cover and preface of ­Dibaxu. In Gelman’s preface, as mentioned earlier, the poet affirms having written this book en sefardí (in Sephardic), where the word sefardí stands for the language, not the ethnicity. One line down, however, Gelman uses the same term to refer to the ethnic group within Judaism, to which, unlike Nicoïdski, he does not belong: “I am of Jewish origins, but not Sephardic.” But in the following paragraph sefardí is once more the language, when he describes Clarisse Nicoïdski as a “novelist in French and poet in Sephardic.” On the back cover, in an unsigned blurb, which is usually written by editorial staff, we find two more words used to refer to the language: sefaradí (Hebrew for “Sephardic”) and the more explanatory dialecto judeoespañol (Judeo-Spanish dialect). The name of the Sephardic language is a contentious issue, as we have seen again and again, and Dibaxu brings us no closer to a resolution. Juan Gelman is a Spanish speaker, and his semantic choices are at least partially guided by his linguistic environment, in which “Ladino,” as a Spanish term, has negative connotations. When Gelman writes that he wrote “poemas en sefardí,” it is because this is the regular name the language has in Spanish. However, the fact that Nicoïdski’s book comes with the English description “Sephardic poems” was another element to consider. In this case “Sephardic” identifies the author’s and the poems’ Jewishness in opposition to Ashkenazi (a term usually more recognizable to an English-speaking audience) and makes it clear that that language here that could be mistaken for a strange form of Spanish is in fact a Jewish language. In the Ladino version of Nicoïdski’s book, the language in which the poems are written remains unnamed, but the language is a vernacular Balkan JudeoSpanish. It is a dialect of Ladino the sounds and spelling patterns of which do not correspond to those laid out by Akí Yerushalaim—one of the few contemporary publications written exclusively in Ladino, its transliteration system, as mentioned earlier, has become the standard reference in the Ladino world.92 It is the language of the Sarajevo Jews (known as “Saraylis”) in the former Yugoslavia, marked by distinctive traits, which have been briefly described by H. V. Sephiha and Kalmi Baruch.93 Gelman writes Dibaxu in this Balkan Ladino. He does not speak Ladino, he does not belong to the ethnic community that speaks Ladino, and the Ladino he uses is basically the one he reads in Nicoïdski and learns from her—the vernacular Balkan, or Sarayli, Judeo-Spanish, with its particular sounds and spelling. For the culmination of his self-Sephardization,

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Nicoïdski’s poetry becomes his main intertext. Following the historical and linguistic excavation of both Citas y comentarios and Com/posiciones, Gelman’s Dibaxu reaches back to Ladino, an ancestral language. Gelman here communes with a contemporary poet, someone who is using an old language for the current moment, making it vibrant and alive. She searches for the mother tongue; he seeks to go beyond the mother tongue. She dons an old language with new images and metaphors; he too brings new metaphors to her language, and in addition, with this old language, he subverts and enriches his own native tongue. Furthermore, from Nicoïdski’s example Gelman recognizes the power of resistance and survival of both a people and a language in exile and sees the possibility of renewal in this process, forging for himself a language to speak his own exile. The last poem in Nicoïdski’s volume is the one most directly related to Juan Gelman’s Dibaxu. The poem uses several words and images that recur in her work and reappear in Gelman’s, among them aviarta (open), sarrada (closed), paxaru (bird), arvuli (tree), foja (leaf), and spantu (fear). Nicoïdski’s vocabulary is simple and limited; emphasis instead is on assonance and rhythmic variety. The poet as bird, the bird as voice or speech, the movements of descent and ascent, the centrality of voice and orality, and a sense of death are the foundations of this last poem, and they establish its tone. All of these rhetorical and lexical choices are also at the core of Juan Gelman’s Dibaxu. Some of the words repeated in this particular poem—sol (sun), árvulis (trees), dibaxu (beneath)— are also prevalent in Gelman’s Dibaxu. Furthermore, the images and metaphors in Nicoïdski’s poem often involve superimposed layers of figurality, suggesting that each layer always hides something underneath, that the end is never visible. The word dibaxu itself recurs in Nicoïdski’s poem, prefiguring the special relevance it will have for Gelman’s work.94

The Voice and Word of Dibaxu Gelman’s book consists of twenty-nine poems on facing pages: on the left, the italicized text in Ladino; on the right, the text in Castellano, in a standard font. The book title itself appears only in Ladino, with no translation. The poems themselves lack names, and instead are numbered with Roman numerals. This typographical layout prompts the first question: Who is the target reader? Considering that Gelman’s public is the typical consumer of Spanish American poetry, and considering that Gelman is Ashkenazi and has never maintained any particular relationship with Ladino-speaking communities, it is fair to say that

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his primary audience is Spanish-speaking, not necessarily Jewish, and certainly not especially Sephardic. On the back cover, the publisher’s blurb reads: “Juan Gelman wrote the twenty-nine poems that make up this book in the Judeo-Spanish dialect and then translated them into modern Castellano.” Gelman seems to subscribe to this when, in his introduction, he writes: “I include the texts in present-day Castellano not because I distrust the reader’s intelligence.” If he “includes” the ­Castellano translation, it is because “the text,” the source text, is the one he wrote in Ladino. He is telling us that at first he abandoned his own language in order to write in a foreign, and yet related, language—“an other,” older Castellano, as opposed to “present-day Castellano.” Hence the monolingual title, which would inscribe the volume among works written in Ladino (somewhat akin to Clarisse Nicoïdski’s monolingual title; even though her book is bilingual, it is always perceived as a work in Ladino). However, as Geneviève Fabry has suggested in what she calls her “‘naïve’ reading,” if we follow the typographic convention that italics point to either a foreign language or an inserted or quoted text, then “the ‘other’ text seems to be here the Judeo-Spanish poem.”95 There is thus a certain ambiguity in this project: the Castellano version appears on the right, like the English version in Nicoïdski’s book, making it the language of translation. The Ladino is on the left, following the layout of Nicoïdski’s volume. The difference, however, is that in Gelman’s case, the ­Ladino version is in italics, whereas in Nicoïdski it is the translated English text that is italicized. So which text is the “original” and which the translation? How trustworthy are the author’s indications, given the intertextual modeling on Nicoïdski, and considering his numerous authorial fictions earlier in his career? These questions are precisely the issues Gelman’s work engages: the unreliability of origins, the unstable nature of the distinction between original and translation, and the instability of ethnic and linguistic identity tout court. In Nicoïdski’s case, the juxtaposition of two different languages such as Ladino and English allows separate readings of each version—especially if we consider that English readers are not likely to know any Ladino. But Ladino and Spanish, as in Gelman’s book, are similar enough to prompt contemporary Spanish speakers to at least approach the Ladino version. This reaction is encouraged by the author himself: “i ask [the reader] to read these [the poems] aloud in one Castellano and in the other so as to listen, perhaps, between the two sounds, for something of the time that has been trembling and giving us a past since El Cid.”96

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If Gelman has followed Nicoïdski’s basic model in the typographic disposition of his book, by virtue of each of the languages used coupled with his personal poetic project, he has perhaps paradoxically heightened the feeling of “estrangement.” Indeed, it is because Ladino and Spanish are so mutually familiar that we are surprised to see them side by side. Nicoïdski’s English readers can choose to ignore the Ladino text, or look at it as an exotic piece, without undue consequences. Either reaction is expected, because of the significant difference between the languages, and because English has the upper hand in the asymmetrical relations of linguistic power. The distorted similarity between Ladino and Spanish elicits a different response. Both versions in Gelman’s book tempt, if they don’t actually seduce, the reader into taking a second look with an eye to comparing them. It is then that the familiar acquires unknown, surprising traits. Gelman’s project also stresses another dimension—time. The simultaneous presence of Ladino and Spanish underscores diachronic processes of consonant and vowel shifts, urging the reader to acknowledge the ways in which language has a past and a present. The page itself becomes a moving screen showing, in condensed format, elements of two worlds—two voices that complement each other while pointing to similarities and differences. The page turns into a physical representation of the passage of time and the history of languages, as spelling and sounds afford an instantaneous snapshot of this process. Time is indeed one of the dominant themes in Dibaxu: without a land, the exile has only time in his hands, and time becomes locus. Indeed, the word “time” itself appears throughout the volume, often as a physical, spatialized, material entity. Gelman speaks of “the door of time,” “the house of time,” “the hand of time,” and “pieces of time.” He temporalizes space when he writes in poem XVIII, “all that is called land/is time//;” or when, in poem XIX, time and land converge: the “here” of the poet is a “grain of sand,” which is simultaneously space and a minute in an hourglass: quirinsioza:

querendona:

no ti vayas d’aquí/

no te vayas de aquí/

de mi granu di arena/

de mi grano de arena/

desti minutu/

de este minuto/ my dear don’t go away from here/ from my grain of sand/ from this minute/

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Time is also thematized in the repeated use of words such as “past,” and the unexpected employment of verb tenses (“will be heard in your past”), in which past and future coexist, shaping a historical or historicized present that is also synchronic. Language is the site par excellence of this reflection about time; it is in language that the different streams that make up time engage each other. Ladino and Spanish appear in Dibaxu like the islands in poem XI: tus islas comu lampas

tus islas como lámparas

cun una escuridad/

con una oscuridad/

yendu/iniendu/

yendo/viniendo/

nil tiempu/

en el tiempo your islands like lamps with a darkness/ coming/going/ through time

The dynamism and materiality of time in its circular ebb and flow parallels the effect the two languages have on each other historically, as well as in their juxtaposition on the page. But the dialogue between past and present that occurs on each page, and is consistent with Gelman’s larger poetic project and aesthetic choices, also relates to the continuity of poetry. The future of poetry lies in the constant interaction of past and present, in the recognition of that part of the past that is still operating in the present, as well as in the creative manipulation and incorporation of voices—the rewriting of texts that make up the sediment of all poetry, and that is a particular obsession for Gelman. Poem XVI combines several of Gelman’s recurrent interests: the idea of the poet as an average man, stripped of demiurgic qualities, joins the concept of the motions of time and the persistence—the resistance—of life. Here, life persists. Even after death the poet, or the common man, will hear the lively noise of the flouncy skirt shaken by the wind. Or he will also feel it, if once more we consider the Ladino sounds as building a different meaning to the modern Spanish speakers. But if so, there is again the word batideru, which can, even if briefly, dim the more positive tone set by the poet, by reminding the reader of the context of exile and violence in which the volume is set. Life and dialogue, however, still persist. And here, poetry, too, still persists: it continues in the mouths of the people on the streets; in the oral transmission of tradition along generations, as it has been with Sephardic poetry; in the continued ­retelling of

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one another’s stories. Or, as Gelman’s persona Julio Grecco writes in the poem “Siempre la poesía” in Hacia el sur, evoking Lautréamont: “poetry must be made by all, not by one alone.” XVI cuando mi aya muridu

cuando esté muerto

sintiré entudavía

oiré todavía

il batideru

el temblor

di tu saia nil vienti

de tu saya en el viento/

uno qui liyera istus versus

alguien que leyó estos versos

prieguntara: “¿cómu ansí?/

preguntó: “¿cómo así?/

¿qui sintirás? ¿quí batideru?/

¿qué oirás? ¿qué temblor?/

¿quí saia?/¿quí vienti?”/

¿qué saya?/ ¿qué viento?”/

li dixí qui cayara/

dije que callara/

qui si sintara a la mesa cun mí/

que se sentara a mi mesa/97

qui biviera mi vinu/

que bebiera mi vino/

qui scriviera istus versus:

que escribiera estos versos:

“cuando mi aya muridu

“cuando esté muerto

sintiré entudavía

oiré todavía

il batideru

el temblor

di tu saia nil vienti”/

de tu saya en el viento”/

when i am dead i will still hear the trembling of your skirt in the wind/ someone who read these verses asked: “what does it mean?/ what will you hear? what trembling?/ what skirt? what wind?”/ i told him to be quiet/ to sit with me at my table/ to drink my wine/ to write these verses:

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“when i am dead i will still hear the trembling of your skirt in the wind”/

Here the speaker affirms the relevance of sounds—even after death he will still be able to hear. There is a reproduction of speech within the poem, as conversational lines appear conventionally represented, inserted between quotation marks. Such a use of conversation is reminiscent of Gelman’s earlier works, where it appears frequently. But this is only one aspect revealing the crucial role of orality in the structure of the volume. In Dibaxu, sounds, but especially voice and word/speech, are central themes, developed through different motifs: birds, leaves, trees (note the many trees in a volume that epitomizes the poet’s search for the roots of his Jewish identity, and the roots of the Spanish language). As noted earlier, the volume opens with a mouth, site of word and voice, and origin of poetry. Explicit references to “cantu/canto” (song), “boz/voz” (voice), “dixera/dijo” (said)—and “dizin/dicen” (say)—“senti/oye” (hears), “silenziu/silencio” (­silence), “gritus/gritos” (cries), “avla/palavra” (word), and “caya/calla” (­quiets//silences), serve to emphasize the pervasive presence of orality throughout the book and in the poet’s reflection about language and poetry. As in Clarisse Nicoïdski’s book, the thematization of voice and speech is related to writing. Finding a tongue, forging a language, is a process of poetic creation—it takes place in the process of poetic creation. Gelman’s choice of Ladino as a language of writing is in large part guided by its oral qualities—the vowel sounds and the tenderness of its ­diminutives—and its role as a vernacular language and a language of affection. He admits in the preface to Dibaxu: “The Sephardic [sic] syntax brought me a lost innocence, and its diminutives, a tenderness from another time that is still alive and very comforting.”98 Writing poetry in Ladino also reaffirms it as a literary language, while contributing to its basic survival: Gelman’s text pays tribute to the tradition of oral poetry in Ladino, whereas by writing in the language Gelman helps disseminate it and add to its life, to its afterlife.99 In poem XVI, discussed above, it is clear that the speaker/poet is aware that his spoken words are written verses, for someone has read them. Within the poem itself the poet acknowledges that his verses are written: “someone who read these verses asked.” The organic relationship between reading and writing is expressed by the fact that they both precede and follow each other in the poem, pointing to the recursiveness of the process. In the end, the next

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poet will (re)write the (same?) verses: “I told him to be quiet . . . /to write these verses.” The quotation marks that adorned the lines of an oral utterance—the reader’s words—now frame the written verses. An explicit, “quoted” poem appears within a poem, in a mise-en-abîme that, by repeating the first stanza, also creates a clear circularity that not only mimics the relationship between reading and writing, but also reconnects the act of writing in the final stanza with voice in the first. Voice is indeed very much at the core of the volume. The speaker addresses a woman, and refers to some of her body parts: her hand, eyes, feet, heart, and belly, and even her blood. But what receives most of his attention, what elicits most of his words, is her voice. Variations in voice might describe the relationship between the poet and his addressee, as in poem XV: tu boz sta escura

tu voz está oscura

di bezus qui a mí no dieras/

de besos que no me diste/

di bezus qui a mí no das/

de besos que no me das/

la noche es polvu dest’ixiliu/

la noche es polvo de este exilio/

your voice is dark of kisses that you did not give to me/ of kisses that you do not give to me/ night is dust from this exile/

Here Gelman again conflates the absence of the beloved woman with exile from his land—an exile that, if thematized throughout the volume, only irrupts explicitly in the text in this very poem. The Song of Song’s initial verses again seem to shadow these lines, but instead of a request for kisses—“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth”— the speaker admits that kisses are not offered—“kisses that you did not give to me/ . . . kisses that you do not give to me.” (Poem XVII also speaks of kisses that were not given.) Darkness appears as absence, and mouth as the void, the primordial feminized abyss. The combination of “voice” and “kisses” makes “mouth” present, even if by its absence, by it not being named. The speaker uses multiple synesthesia, all motivated by synecdoche: the mouth. In “your voice is dark of kisses” there is sound in “voice,” sight in “dark,” and touch in “kisses.” Those kisses that are not given “darken” the voice, and such darkness is parallel to the night, which in turn refers to exile. Note that the fourth verse does not seem to follow previous ones—the voice’s darkness in the opening verse, ex-

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plained and intensified by the emphatic and almost exact repetition of the medial verses, is precisely what connects it to “night,” thereby establishing a crucial correspondence among the elements: dark voice, absence of kisses, night and exile. These are all linked via absence—of light, love, kisses—and the abyss. In poem XXI, voice is the source of the puzzlement, marvel, or wonder that the woman’s presence inspires in the poet: sintí tu boz in mi vintana/

oí tu voz en mi ventana/

mi vintana no da a tu boz/

mi ventana no da a tu voz/

apenas si da al mundu/

apenas si da al mundo/

¿cómu viniera tu boz?/

¿cómu vino tu voz?/

i heard your voice at my window/ my window does not open to your voice/ it opens only to the world/ how did your voice come?/

These verses again echo the Song of Songs, this time with an inversion of gender. The Ariel and Chana Bloch’s translation of Song of Songs 2:8–9 reads: “The voice of my love: listen! / bounding over the mountains/toward me, across the hills. // My love is a gazelle, a wild stag. / There he stands on the other side / of our wall, gazing / between the stones.”100 The Shulamite speaks in these verses, but it is the male speaker who hears his beloved’s voice approaching him in Dibaxu. The beloved is represented by her voice, which seems to have a life of its own, not unlike the “leaping” or “bounding voice” of the Hebrew text, preserved in the Blochs’ translation: because of the ambiguity created by the construct, or smichut, the voice itself could be doing the leaping (“qol dodi medaleg”).101 In Gelman, her voice makes way to the speaker through unexpected paths: “my window does not open to your voice/ . . . how did your voice come?”102 Like the Shulamite’s lover, who comes from outside the door, the beloved in Gelman’s poem appears from outside the window, in a movement toward the speaker inside. In this it recalls the Hebrew mashgiach min ha-chalonot, literally, “peering from the windows,” where the “from” may also mean “through,” and according to Ariel Bloch, “in addition to its regular sense of marking the point of origin, implies a notion of direction” (154). Both in the Song of Songs and in Gelman, there is the sexual use of “opening,” played with doors and windows. The woman’s voice acquires a more physical dimension when it becomes place—a source or recipient of other objects. In poem VI, the voice—associated

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with leaves, one of the poem’s dominant motifs—can be pictured in two different, conflicting ways. Semantically, it is on top in a descending movement. In an image that makes the woman metaphorically a tree, a variety of leaves fall from her voice onto the ground: folyas curiladas y verdis/

hojas coloradas y verdes/

folyas secas/folyas friscas/

hojas secas/hojas frescas/

cayin di tu boz/

caen de tu voz/

durmidas/

dormidas/ red and green leaves/ dry leaves/fresh leaves/ fall from your voice/ asleep/

Structurally, the voice is at the bottom (line 3), as if asleep under a pile of leaves. The structure of the stanza provides the spatialized image of voice, while the semantics build an image of the voice as a shedding tree in the fall. Voice is related to ascending or descending movements, as well as to space, as the layers enhanced by the use of dibaxu (under) throughout the volume become more and more relevant, in a curious combination of archaeological and botanical metaphors. A downward movement seems to dominate, as evidenced by the repeated use of the verb caer (to fall), which appears ten times in Dibaxu. In poem II, for example, the movement of falling and the superimposition of layers combine in one final stanza, where again the synesthetic aspect is paramount: dibaxu dil cantu sta a boz/

debajo del canto está la voz/

dibaxu di la boz sta la folya

debajo de la voz está la hoja

qu’il árvuli dexara

que el árbol dejó

cayer di mi boca/

caer de mi boca/ under the song is the voice/ under the voice is the leaf that the tree let fall from my mouth/

The movement of the voice is embodied, too, in the crucial figure of the bird. Poem IV, for example, reads, veyi//si queries//il páxaru/qui vola in mi boz/atan chitiu//, “mira//si quieres//el pájaro/que vuela en mi voz/tan chico//”

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(look//if you want//at the bird/that flies in my voice//so small//); or, in poem XXVI: agora pinsu/qui un paxaricu in tu boz/arrastra/la caza dil otonio//, “ahora pienso/que un pajarito en tu voz/arrastra/la casa del otoño//” (now I think/that a little bird in your voice/carries/autumn’s house//). Poem XIV adds the fall to this combination, indirectly introducing the connection with “tree” as well: lu qui avlas/dexa cayer/un páxaru/qui li soy nidu//, “lo que hablas/deja caer/un pájaro/y le soy nido//” (what you say/lets a bird/fall/and i’m his nest//). “Bird” is the most frequently used noun in the volume, and often represents the poetic voice. It is a recurring word in Juan Gelman’s earlier works, having already appeared in his first book (Violín y otras cuestiones) as a metaphor for ­poetry, “La poesía no es un pájaro. / Y es” (Poetry is not a bird. / And it is).103 In later books, birds will still be used by Gelman. “Bird” also appears in Clarisse Nicoïdski’s book, most remarkably in the first stanza of the last poem, in which the word dibaxu, the movement of falling, and the bird (páxaru) are all present. Furthermore, in modern Jewish literature, especially since Bialik, the bird is an important metaphor for the muse or the source of poetry.104 The Shekhinah, for example, which literally means “dwelling,” or “resting,” has been interpreted widely, but it is often represented as a bird that accompanies the people of Israel in exile.105 In modern secular Jewish literature, the Shekhinah gets rewritten as the woman or female bird that embodies the poet’s yearnings and enables his song. In Dibaxu, the association between voice, birds, trees, and leaves is also stated in poem X, where these elements represent hope and the possibility of happiness. Voice manifests itself in speech and combines with music; it becomes song. Note the aural and graphic similarity of the words AVLaS (words) and ÁrVuLiS (trees), forming a paranomasia in the first verse in Ladino. Not only does it call attention to the poetic function,106 but, in comparison to the Castellano version, it also strengthens the identification between the two elements: dizis avlas cun árvulis/

dices palabras con árboles/

tenin folyas qui cantan

tienen hojas que cantan

y páxarus

y pájaros

qui djuntan sol/

que juntan sol/ you say words with trees/ they have leaves that sing and birds that gather sun/

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Also in poem XXII, birds appear in a context of hope, indicating a future. Again as poetic voice, originating in the beloved woman/land/country, the birds sing, but do so “in what is to come,” in a verse that clearly points to the future as a potential, a possibility. nil trigu di tu ventre

en el trigo de tu vientre

volan páxarus

vuelan pájaros

qui cantan

que cantan

in lu qui va a venir/

en lo que va a venir/

in the wheat of your womb birds fly singing in what is to come

Another image in which birds are associated with time is found in poem III: l’amaniana arrelumbra a lus páxarus/

la mañana hace brillar a los pájaros/

sta aviarta/teni frescura

está abierta/tiene frescura the morning brightens the birds/ it is open/it is fresh

In this example, the motif of the bird is combined with the word “open” (aviarta/“abierta”) as the past participle of the verb abrir, “to open,” a verb that, in its many forms, appears seven times in the volume. The morning, as a new beginning, brings with it freshness. It is open to what is to come; it is light and illuminates the birds. In the Castellano version, the morning “makes the birds shine,” whereas in Ladino it “lightens them up.” It is curious that Gelman chose not to use the modern Spanish verb “relumbrar,” so graphically and aurally similar to the Ladino arrelumbrar. But this example indicates a difference between the two languages, one that Gelman has insistently observed: that Ladino retains a broader polysemic range than Spanish. In this specific example, Ladino offers two possible meanings (with a transitive and an intransitive verb) whereas Spanish is crystallized around one meaning. While relumbiar in Spanish means “to shine brightly,”107 arrelumbrar may be briyar, which is lucir in Spanish, or “sparkle, shine,” as well as asender, translated as alumbrar, “illuminate,” in Spanish.108 Although Gelman chooses the definition of lucir, “shine,” he does not use relumbrar, because unlike the seemingly correspondent

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­ adino verb, it can only be used as an intransitive verb. In this poem, the birds L don’t shine; rather, the morning makes them shine—in aggramatical terms, “it shines them.” Emphasis on the morning’s role and agency—morning as time, as beginning—together with its “openness,” points to a moment of renewal that brightens the birds, or enriches the poetic word. Written in Ladino, with the two possible meanings of arrelumbrar, these verses offer a concrete example of both the openness and the virtualities of the old language that brings freshness and unexpected novelty to the normalized Castellano. In Dibaxu, Gelman revisits several images and words present in his previous works, and combines these with the treatment they receive in Clarisse ­Nicoïdski’s poetry. In a way, Gelman’s 1994 volume provides a synthesis of his earlier work, marked by the experience of exile and the violence of the Argentine dictatorship, but also by his intense lyricism and experiments with language. The recurrence of layering images in Dibaxu seems to be a poetic, metaphorical expression reproducing Gelman’s own process reflecting upon the origins of the lyric, love, or the Spanish language. His investigation into what constitutes the self and, ultimately, into the Jewish strains that shape his identity, are also expressed in recurring images of sedimentation, of the physical stratification of geological layers. As in any archaeological dig, time is a crucial element. Hence, perhaps, the poet’s insistence on spatializing time: it becomes something palpable, concrete; time can even be “under one’s feet.”

“Dibaxu” in Dibaxu In Gelman’s archeological project, both the first and last poems of the volume end with similar images, with the word dibaxu directly associated with “past.” Poem I reads, nila caza dil tiempu/sta il pasadu//dibaxu di tu piede//qui balia//, “en la casa del tiempo/está el pasado/ debajo de tu pie//que baila//” (past is/ in time’s house//under your foot//that dances//). Poem XXIX ends with the past one level down in a stratification of layers. If in Poem I the past was under the addressee’s dancing feet, now it is above the poet’s fear: pondrí mi spantu londji//dibaxu dil pasadu//qui arde/cayadu com’il sol//, “pondré mi espanto ­lejos//debajo del pasado//que arde/callado como el sol//” (i will set my fear afar//underneath the past//that burns/silent as the sun//). We have already seen the preeminence of the word dibaxu in Clarisse Nicoïdski’s last Ladino poem in Lus ojus las manus la boca and the role that poem played in Gelman’s own Ladino volume. The word dibaxu has several other meanings inferable from Gelman’s previous works and from their relationship with Dibaxu

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itself. Examining these meanings might explain Gelman’s liking for Nicoïdski’s work and his choice to use her poems as his main intertexts in D ­ ibaxu. It could also clarify his broader, more significant decision to write in Ladino. Dibaxu, “under,” can sometimes refer to the past, that which is underneath layers of time. Gelman uses the archaeological metaphor combined with the botanical one (the repetition of trees, “the search for ‘roots’”) to express a conceptualization of time and self that takes into account different strata and is not necessarily linear. The past, after all, informs the present, and its shards can often be found inadvertently, protruding through the surface above. Dibaxu also relates to language, to what Gelman calls in the preface the “substratum of Castellano,” a direct reference to Ladino. Throughout his poetic work, Gelman makes use of what he deems “the language reserves,” or archaic linguistic models and structures, while also pursuing new idioms by creating neologisms and subverting the grammar. With Dibaxu he looks to recognize elements from an earlier stage of the Spanish language and reintegrate them, dynamically, into modern Castellano, with innovative and revolutionary results. The Ladino he uses, however, is not a museum of antiquities, for it is marked by the evolving, contemporary signs and sounds of the Diaspora. In addition, the beneath or underbelly of a word can represent the many layers of meaning that accumulate and combine, as if footprints on a moving surface. At times poetry is dibaxu, or beneath, the voice, an image that points both to the nascent state of poetry and its connection with orality. It then refers to that moment of latency, where the word is still suspended, undifferentiated, waiting to be uttered, as in poem XIII: eris/mi única avla//no sé/tu nombri//, “eres/mi única palabra//no sé/tu nombre//” (you’re/my only word//don’t know/ your name//). On other occasions, the poetry that lies beneath the voice uncovers a depressing mood, a psychological state that, on the contrary, can prevent the writing of poetry. The term dibaxu is also a reference to the people at the bottom of the social and political ladder—the poor, oppressed, and humiliated, children, immigrants, workers, and political prisoners, whom Gelman privileges in his work. The poet tries to fashion a language meant to describe a new reality while resisting power and its discourse. Removed from power, in an ex-centric position, Gelman turns to those who literally are dibaxu, and whose language and discourse he tries to incorporate into his own poetry. But true to the physicality of the volume, dibaxu can also be a geographical reference to the Southern Cone—the countries in southernmost Latin Amer-

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ica: Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. In relation to the Europe of Gelman’s exile, this region is “down there,” at the bottom of the American continent. It is the Sur, the South, also introduced metonymically as a trope by other exiled authors to the literary discourse of the Argentine exile. The region had already been the object of some of Gelman’s poems, especially Hacia el sur (Towards the South), a 1982 book of exile that speaks of the land, and of his murdered comrades who lie under the earth beneath southern skies. Closely related to this last meaning, dibaxu can also be a direct reference to Argentina, that is, to the Argentina under the rule of the military dictatorship. In a network of significations, to “be under” is then associated with the “big defeat” ( grande derrota), as Gelman calls it, suffered by those who fought for a democratic Argentina. Some people were buried under the earth or under the sea; some “under a foreign rain” (Bajo la lluvia ajena is the title of yet another book by Gelman); all ultimately found themselves under the military boot. On a more personal, yet related note, “under” is among the last words written by Gelman’s son before his kidnapping, “disappearance,” and murder at the hands of the Junta on August 26, 1976. One night, in a bar, Marcelo Ariel wrote on a paper napkin this poem, dominated by an incessantly repeated haunting blackness that the speaker’s red cannot obliterate: La oveja negra

The black sheep

pace en el campo negro

grazes in the black field

sobre la nieve negra

on the black snow

bajo la noche negra

under the black night

junto a la ciudad negra

close to the black city

donde lloro vestido de rojo.

where I cry dressed in red.

Dibaxu itself has thus many layers of meaning and multiple interacting associations. The Argentine political background of exile, torture, and death that Gelman has actually experienced triggers his journey in search of his personal and linguistic roots. His son’s bajo la noche negra (under the black night) seems to foreshadow Gelman’s emotional descent into the depths of darkness. The horrors of the dictatorship and the burdens of exile lead Gelman to search for a more tender, even feminine, language to address both his dead son and his dead mother. As mentioned earlier, in two other books—Carta abierta (Public Letter, 1980) and Carta a mi madre (Letters to My Mother, 1989)—Gelman becomes son to his son and mother to his mother, using a language that counters the rules and authority of the State.

154    ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE LANGUAGE / ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE SELF

Similarly, Gelman’s choice to use Ladino brings him one step closer to feminizing his language, when he seeks to embrace his loved ones. Like the speech of a mother talking to an infant, the diminutives and affective words that characterize Ladino make it more intimate and endearing—in Gelman’s words, they bring tenderness and comfort—even when it speaks of terrible things. From its own structure or constitution, Ladino offers him devices that he cherishes and has used in other works—except that there Gelman was deviating from the linguistic norm. By writing in Ladino, Gelman also takes a step closer to distancing himself from the traditional trappings of Argentine national identity. He turns to Ladino as an exile who seeks to remember his past, his land, his love, and his language. But if he speaks of his love for the land, his switch in language also detaches himself from the country’s institutional apparatus. Ladino is the language evoked by the memories of one’s mother, and in which oral poetry is transmitted mainly by women. It is also a language in exile, spoken by Jews in a “double exile,” marked by the death of most of its speakers. Gelman sees in Ladino the linguistic possibility of expressing the connection he establishes between the horrors done to the Jews and those done to the Argentines. From his personal, political, and emotional experience, Gelman traces the strands that make up his identity; he interweaves his Jewishness and his Argentine-ness, reading and reaching each through the other. Gelman uses Ladino to speak of his Argentine exile, to describe his own country. But also through the prism of his Argentine condition he better understands and comes closer to his own Jewish origins; this is when he recognizes el judío de el (his Jew) as part of his subjectivity. Gelman admits as much in an interview: I was a Jewish boy, but not observant. . . . My deeper encounter with Jewish and Hebrew culture came later, when I lived in exile. Then I started asking myself many things: why they had defeated us, the killings in Argentina, the disappearance of loved ones, one’s absence from the country, the country’s absence from one, the voice of our people.109

His own “Judaizing” process—which begins with his connection to the Jewish experience of exile and his insertion into the Jewish literary tradition on exile— takes a new turn with a more conscious and explicit move, when he decides to write in a Jewish, exilic language: Ladino. “His Jew,” it turns out, is Sephardic. Gelman said in 1993 that “the only truly Jewish writers . . . are those who wrote and write in Yiddish or Hebrew (special case of the ‘Sephardic’ [­Ladino]).”110 Being a Jewish writer is, for him, writing in a Jewish language.

ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE LANGUAGE / ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE SELF   155

When he embraces Nicoïdski and sets out to write in Ladino, Gelman now recognizes himself as a Jewish writer. And he perceives that his exilic experience cannot be further contained by a territorial, national, and—by association with the regime it represents—oppressive language. It is important to recognize the difference between Gelman’s stance and use of Ladino and those of other poets, especially those who identify as ethnically Sephardic. Many Sephardic artists use Ladino as a vehicle to express their childhood memories and maintain the legacy of their families, thus affirming their identity and links to the great Sephardic “nation.” In the works of many contemporary poets, Ladino takes on the role of reconquering memory and vanquishing death; it becomes a safeguard of the memory of a culture, and by this process it is itself safeguarded or “saved.” By writing in Ladino, Nicoïdski and Gelman embark on the same project: to create a future from a past endangered in its present form. But they don’t do it for similar reasons. Nicoïdski takes the Sephardic language as a mark of memory of her family and people, whereas Gelman’s Argentine exilic strategy is different: his particular identitary inflection is one built in solitude, not in community. Ladino appears in his poetry as the language of the exile who has lost his homeland and yearns to name—and thus recover —it resorting to the early stages of Castilian. Unlike Matitiahu’s or Nicoïdski’s, Gelman’s interest is not in “saving” a dying culture, since the dwindling world of the Sephardim has never been his. Rather, he is fighting against the limits of language and trying to expand it by searching for the memory of the word. Ladino becomes another way to create a counterlanguage and combine past and future, the past providing elements to subvert, renew, and expand the Spanish language; the past thus pointing to a new life, a different future. From the position of an exile, an expulsado, Gelman transcends his linguistic borders and finally adopts an expelled language that opens a window to older forms of Castellano—forms born ex-centrically, in the margins; forms that in his view resemble the babbling and muttering of poetry.111 Gelman’s Dibaxu, ultimately engages in issues such as the unreliability of origins, and the instability of ethnic and linguistic identity tout court. It breaks the monoglossia of the Argentine national idiom and begins a heteroglossic poetics in Ladino and Castellano, while stressing the essential ambiguity of the exilic poetic discourse that is out of place, where the notions of “inside” and “outside,” and “homeland” and “diaspora” are called into question, and where it no longer matters which is the “original language” and which is the “translation.”112

156    ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE LANGUAGE / ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE SELF

Contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s formula for minor literatures, which correlates oppositionality and deterritorialization only with minor writing in a major language, in his revolutionary project Gelman abandons his native ­Spanish (­Castellano) and radically assumes a new language—a minor, diasporic, trans­national Jewish language. If Gelman, like other Ashkenazi Latin American authors, turns to the Spanish past of the continent and approaches the Se­ phardic cultural heritage, it is not to use Ladino as a representation of “Sepharad” or engage in a mythical recreation of the historical past. It is not to find a national identity and express his modern nationalism, as the Argentine Alberto ­Gerchunoff might have done with his appropriation of Sephardic heritage in his Gauchos judíos.113 Nor, similarly, does Gelman seek to claim a historical presence in the continent and inscribe himself in the national narrative, like the Brazilian Moacyr Scliar, with his investigations into the origins and uses of the Sephardic past in Latin America in A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes (1983; trans. as ἀ e Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes).114 No, his impetus is rather unlike those of his colleagues. Gelman regresses in an exploration of the Spanish language and arrives at “Sefardí,” or Ladino, as a way to claim a diasporic positioning, as a means to reject a limited and oppressive national identity—that of an Argentina controlled by a military dictatorship. To write his exile and express his deterritorialized, decentered identity, Gelman abandons his Castellano and instead writes in a minor language, born of an experience of marginalization and exclusion, and without a center of power. A language that is the product of a culture created, as he puts it, “without a State behind it to support or foment this process.”115 The Sephardic language provides Gelman with the means to both speak of his suffering in exile, and to find a singing, poetic voice: in order to speak, fighting back the imposed “cleaved tongue,” Gelman forges a new poetic voice in Ladino. It is through Ladino that, amid all the horror, he can sing again. With Ladino, in the confluence of past and future, the possibility of poetry: lu qui a mí dates

lo que me diste

es avla qui timbla

es palabra que tiembla

nila manu dil tiempu

en la mano del tiempo

aviarta para beber/

abierta para beber/

what you gave me is word that trembles in the hand of time open, ready to drink/



CONCLUSION Whither? Ladino is now rarely used as a written language. . . . There is no real cultural production of significance in the language. Aron Rodrigue, Sephardim and the Holocaust The contemporary Sephardic poets . . . are the hope that this literature has not arrived at its end, for every time that a Sepharadi writes a poem in Judeo-Spanish, it is clear that this poem reveals inspiration, and not expiration; it produces light, and not death. Ana Maria Riaño and María del Carmen Marcos, “Poesía contemporánea en lengua judeo-española” The aims of life are the best defense against death. Primo Levi, ἀe Drowned and the Saved

In examining a number of poets from rather different sociocultural environments and geographical locations—Algeria, Israel and Greece, and ­Argentina— I hoped to address the current state of the canon of Jewish literature and call into question the assumptions traditionally reserved to the general cultural production and, specifically, literary creation, of Sephardic Jews. At the same time, my study was intended to debate and challenge contemporary theories of marginality, and review the process by which they forge their own revered paideuma. The first chapter presents Sadia Lévy, an Algerian poet who attempted to inscribe himself in the gallery of French symbolists while writing in a French enriched by infusions of Hebrew and sometimes Judeo-Spanish, activating biblical and Kabbalistic genres and allusions in his poems. Lévy reveals his cultural and literary affiliations when he combines two main universes of ­discourse—French symbolist and Jewish. He is an example that I contend challenges D ­ eleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literatures, blind as such a theory is to the multilingual aspects of minority cultures. Sadia Lévy is also an author who allows us to look at the development of modernism from a different angle, and he may also serve as an example that will prompt changes in the course of Jewish historical narrative, destabilizing certain views of Jewish culture, more

158   WHITHER?

specifically about Sephardi and North African Jews. Writing in French in colonial Algeria, Lévy equally makes us rethink the boundaries that define a French and a Francophone author. Having written one of the first Maghrebi novels in French, his precedence has gone unrecognized by scholars because as a Jew, he is considered French—an ideological exclusionary act that misses his ambivalent position and does not recognize that the privilege of his French citizenship is, to use Derrida’s words as he describes his own circumstances as a Maghrebi Jew, “precarious, recent, threatened, and more artificial than ever.”1 Chapter 2, on Israeli contemporary poet Margalit Matitiahu, focuses on her bilingual Hebrew-Ladino books—especially her first volumes, Kurtijo kemado and Alegrika. I discuss the critical reception of her work within Hebrew and Ladino literatures and, observing that her readers and critics are for the most part still divided across linguistic borders, I offer a reading of two poems in both their Hebrew and Ladino versions, paying attention to the specificities of the languages and their respective audiences, and observing the poet’s strategies of self-translation. This chapter also brings to the foreground the politics of Jewish languages and questions the concepts of diasporic and nationalist identities, pointing to a critique of the nation and the attempted creation of a homogenizing national subject. There I also touch upon the place of the Shoah in Sephardic memory and identity. Chapter 3, about Argentine Ashkenazi poet Juan Gelman, destabilizes notions of fixed identity and breaks down dichotomic divisions of ethnic origins as it traces Gelman’s gradual rewriting of himself as a Sephardic Jew at the very moment when he most identifies as a Jew. I read Gelman’s bilingual Ladino-Spanish collection Dibaxu, placing this work in the context of Gelman’s larger poetic creation, as Dibaxu is the culmination of his rewritings of Spanish canonical authors, such as the mystical poets San Juan de la Cruz and Santa ­Teresa de Ávila. I focus on the “process of self-Sephardization” that, I contend, is initially triggered by Gelman’s historical condition as a political exile, and then fed by his translation and rewriting of canonical medieval Spanish Hebrew poets, such as Yehuda ha-Levi and Ibn Gabirol. He proceeds in a linguistic “excavation” of the many layers in the Spanish language, and, through the language and its main texts, he writes himself as a Sephardic Jew. Gelman does not turn to the major language and major forms. Rather, in opposition to an oppressive regime with which his language is associated, Gelman makes a deterritorializing move and radically assumes a new language: the Jewish, exilic and minor Ladino.

WHITHER?  159

Sadia Lévy, Margalit Matitiahu, and Juan Gelman each describes a world where creative possibilities of multilingualism, poetic experimentation, and exilic experience merge into a body of work that also represents an attempt to construct an identity by means of linguistic and intertextual choices. These poets, however, as significant as they are both for poetry and for the project of critically revisiting the main narratives within Jewish cultural history, represent but a small sample of the wealth being produced and waiting to be acknowledged. Different circumstances have encouraged a valorization and revival of Jewish languages, driving a renewed sense of excitement and creativity in the best known among these, Yiddish and Ladino. The Sephardic language has yet to attain the recognition and institutional endorsement Yiddish enjoys, but it has seen increasing attention in both academia and in popular culture—we can observe a growing number of university classes devoted to it in the United States and abroad, and in Europe, Israel, North and South America, there has been a real explosion of books and music CDs using the language, some of them, significantly, with original lyrics written in Ladino. This increased activity, which cannot replace the fundamental role Ladino had in the lives of organic communities that have now disappeared, at the very least has kept the language from disappearing completely and assures that it retains its place as a cultural language. Surprising as it is, more than fifty years after most of its speakers have died, this renewed enthusiasm and productivity in Ladino appears to map precisely to a stage in identity politics when “the celebration of differences” is valued and when several minority communities, for social and economic reasons, now feel integrated into their societies and comfortable enough to accept and even flaunt their ethnic and cultural specificities. It is possible that recent treatments of multiculturalism have prompted an inner look at intra-Jewish difference and an acceptance and even an enthusiastic reclaiming of Sephardic heritage and Jewish multilingualism. Amid a global trend, and in connection to other centers of a secondary Sephardic diaspora, Latin America has proved a fertile ground for Ladino. Despite the threat that the surrounding Spanish represents to the maintenance of the Sephardic language—since the similarity between the languages favors the rapid assimilation to the co-territorial language—Ladino has become the language of choice for a series of musicians and writers. Ladino is gaining momentum as a cultural language, a language with which the ties with the past are tightened, and hopes for the future are consciously crafted.

160   WHITHER?

This new phenomenon offers many possibilities to scholars interested in following the development of the Judeo-Spanish language in its diaspora. Latin American Sephardic Jews are writing poems in Ladino. They are also translating foundational, national texts into Ladino as well as adopting Latin American genres into the canon of Sephardic literature. Sephardic Jews in Argentina are translating tangos into Ladino and composing original tangos in Ladino in the birthplace of tango, right in Buenos Aires. These experiences seem to me a compelling initiative that not only calls into question certain notions of nationality but also affirm a specific Jewish, Sephardic, Latin American identity.2 If memory and death have for so long been associated with Ladino, the new works, full of sounds, colors and hope might point to a direction in which scholarship on Ladino might again begin to speak of life—of vibrant living Jews.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION Epigraph: Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 33. 1.  Nicoïdski’s novels include Le désespoir tout blanc (1968), Couvre-feux (1981) and Guerres civiles (1989). Among her other works are Amedeo Modigliani: Autobiographie imaginaire (1989), Les cerceaux de feu: Livret d’opéra (1990), Soutine ou la profanation: Biographie 1893–1943 (1993), and Une histoire des femmes peintres: Des origines à nos jours (1994). See Dictionnaire littéraire des femmes de langue française, ed. Christiane Makward and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage (Paris: Karthala, 1996), “Nicoïdski Clarisse.” Las ínsulas extrañas: Antología de poesía en lengua española, 1950–2000, ed. Eduardo Milán et al. (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2002), includes work by Nicoïdski. 2.  The renowned scholar of Jewish languages Haïm Vidal Sephiha is Nicoïdski’s literary executor. Lus ojus and Caminus di palavras have been published, with the Ladino in both Rashi script and Roman type and a facing Hebrew translation, by the Ladino poet Avner Perez under the title Cara boz i locura (Maaleh Adumim: Maaleh Adumim Institute, 2006). 3.  Following the end of World War II, Nicoïdski and her parents—her father from Sarajevo and her mother from Trieste—moved to Morocco, where they lived in Casablanca from 1954 to 1959. She subsequently studied linguistics and English in Paris and married the painter Robert Nicoïdski, with whom she had a son, Elie Robert. Her early childhood in Lyon is recounted in her autobiographical novel Couvre-feux (Curfews) and mentioned in works by her personal friend Haïm Vidal Sephiha. 4.  Haïm Vidal Sephiha, “Clarisse Nicoïdski, la dernière poétesse judéo-espagnole,” in Homenaje a Mathilde Pomès: Estudio sobre la literatura del siglo XX, Revista de la Universidad Complutense 26 (1977): 293–301. 5.  Nicoïdski quoted in Una manu tumó l’otra (Madrid: El Europeo, 1999; Buenos Aires: Acqua, 2004), the booklet accompanying the Argentine singer Dina Rot’s CD setting poems by her and by Juan Gelman to music. 6. Ibid. 7.  Nicoïdski writes (and I use her spelling), “quisiera que estas palabras en la lingua perdida sean para ella, mi madre, como un kadish, repetido a menudo [I would like these words in the lost language to be for her, my mother, as a kaddish, often repeated]” (ibid.).

162   NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10.  For an analysis of Nicoïdski’s poetry, and Gelman’s dialogue with it, see Monique Balbuena, “Dibaxu: A Comparative Analysis of Clarisse Nicoïdski’s and Juan Gelman’s Bilingual Poetry,” Romance Studies 27, no. 4 (2009): 296–310. 11.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dona Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 26. 12. Ibid., 16. Deleuze and Guattari write: “The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. . . . The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value” (17). 13. Ibid., 16. 14.  Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10. 15.  Chana Kronfeld, “Jewish Literatures Beyond Deleuze and Guattari, Take II” (2004 Association for Jewish Studies Annual Meeting paper in panel organized by Avi Matalon and Monique Balbuena, “What’s So Minor about Jewish Literature?”). 16.  Iacob M. Hassán, “Hacia una visión panorámica de la literature sefardí,” in Actas de las jornadas de estudios sefardíes, ed. Antonio Viudas Camarasa (Cáceres, Spain: Universidad de Extremadura, Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación, 1980), 51–68. 17.  On the rabbinical translation of musar (Jewish ethics) literature for the masses in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, see Matthias B. Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.) 18.  Paloma Díaz-Mas, Sephardim: ἀ e Jews from Spain, trans. George K. Zucker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 145. See also Paloma Díaz-Mas, Poesía oral sefardí (Ferrol, Spain: Esquío, 1994); Manuel Alvar, Poesía tradicional de los judíos españoles (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1966); Elena Romero, La creación literaria en lengua sefardí (Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992); Michael Molho, Literatura sefardita de Oriente (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and Instituto Arias Montano, 1960); and Moshe Lazar, ἀ e Sephardic Tradition: Ladino and Spanish-Jewish Literature. (New York: Norton, 1972). 19. Díaz-Mas, Sephardim, 136. 20. See Moshe ha-Elion, Be-Machanot ha-mavet / En los kampos de la muerte (Ma’aleh Adumin: Ma’aleh Adumin Institute, 2000), and authors such as Clarisse Nicoïdski, Margalit Matitiahu, Henriette Besso, Itzhak Levy, Avner Perez, and David Uziel. 21.  Laura Minervini, “The Formation of the Judeo-Spanish Koiné: Dialect Convergence in the Sixteenth Century,” in Proceedings of the Tenth British Conference on JudeoSpanish Studies: 29 June–1 July 1997, ed. Annette Benaïm (London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, Dept. of Hispanic Studies, 1999), 44. 22.  Haïm Vidal Sephiha, “Judeo-Spanish: Birth, Death and Re-Birth,” in Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish: A European Heritage (Brussels: European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages, 1997), 3 23.  It appears alternatively as “Espanyol” or “Spanyol.” 24.  Possible confusion with this Ladino is indeed one of the reasons why Karen

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION   163

Gerson Sarhon, director of the Research Center for Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Culture, prefers to use “Judeo-Spanish.” 25.  See Haïm Vidal Sephiha, Le Ladino, judéo-espagnol calque: Deutéronome, versions de Constantinople (1547) et de Ferrare (1553) (Paris: Institut d’études hispaniques, 1973). 26.  Sephiha, “Judeo-Spanish,” 3. 27.  Joan Coromines and José Antonio Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (Madrid: Gredos, 1997). 28.  Denah Lida, “Ladino Language and Literature,” in Jewish Languages: ἀ emes and Variations, ed. Herbert H. Paper (Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1978), 79. 29.  See also Minervini, “Formation of the Judeo-Spanish Koiné,” 41–52. 30.  Sephiha calls the Sephardim “Judéo-Espagnols.” See Haïm Vidal Sephiha, L’agonie des judéo-espagnoles (Paris: Entente, 1977). 31.  Moshe Lazar, “Ladino,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, CD-Rom ed. (Jerusalem: Judaica Multimedia, 1997). 32.  Tracy Harris, ἀ e Death of the Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1994), 25–29; Arlene Malinowski, “A Report on the Status of Judeo-Spanish in Turkey,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 37 (1982): 7–23. 33.  Ladinokomunita: www.sephardicstudies.org/komunita.html. 34.  See, e.g., Iacob M. Hassán, “El español sefardí (judeoespañol, ladino),” in La lengua española, hoy (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 1995), 117–40. 35.  Guatemala, Ministerio de Educación (MINEDUC), “Reflexiones sobre el mestizaje y la identidad nacional en Centroamérica: de la colonia a las Repúblicas liberales” (PDF, 2008). 36.  The term judío (Jew) was euphemistically replaced by israelita (Israelite), a name later embraced by the Jews themselves, who preferred its less religious tone during the Emancipation period. 37.  See Corominas and Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e h ispánico, s.v. 38.  Eliezer Papo Yachanin, “Novidedes del pasado” (News from the Past), www ­.sefarad.org/publication/lm/010/eliezer.html (accessed May 7, 2015). 39.  See Jean Baumgarten, “Langues juives ou langues des juifs: Esquisse d’une définition” (15–42), in Linguistique des langues juives et linguistique générale, ed. Frank Alvarez-Péreyre and Jean Baumgarten (Paris: CNRS, 2003). 40.  Benjamin Harshav, ἀ e Polyphony of Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 4, and id., Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 41. Harshav, Polyphony, 35. 42.  Ibid., vii; and see esp. chap. 2, “Multilingualism.” 43. Ibid., 5. Explaining the role and magnitude of Yiddish among Eastern European Jews, especially Polish Jewry, Harshav writes: “It unified Jewish existence, codified a unique Jewish discourse, and preserved the Jews as a distinct nation. For the first time

164   NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

in Jewish history, a Jewish language lived on for more than one generation in the territory of a different language group.” Preemptively responding to those who might be surprised at this claim and the omission of Ladino, which has survived for five hundred years in the territory of a different language group, Harshav adds in a parenthesis: “(Yes, there is the case of Ladino, but there is no comparison to the multifunctional, everdeveloping Yiddish)” (20). 44.  See Sarah A. Stein, Making Jews Modern: ἀ e Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 45.  “ . . . at precisely the same moment that the Ladino cultural area of Southeastern Europe was greying, the Yiddish cultural area of Eastern Europe was retaining—and replenishing—its youth” (ibid., 208). 46. Ibid., 16. Stein discusses the flourishing of a modern Ladino press in which editors and readers discuss the need to use a different language in Ladino. 47. Ibid., 17. 48.  See Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau, ἀ e Penguin Atlas of Diasporas (New York: Penguin Books, 1997); Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States (Boulder, CO: Westview Publishers, 1977); E. P. Skinner, “The Dialectic Between Diasporas and Homelands,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. J. E. Harris (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 11–40. 49.  See William Safran, “Comparing Diasporas and Conceptions of Diaspora,” ­Diaspora 8, no. 3 (1999): 270. 50.  See Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). 51.  Safran, “Comparing Diasporas and Conceptions of Diaspora,” 255–91. 52.  Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, “Introduction,” Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 12–13. The “Preface” identifies the author of the “Introduction” as Jonathan Boyarin (viii). 53. Ibid., 12. 54. Ibid., 11. 55.  Charles Ferguson’s original definition of “diglossia” was “a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any section of the community for ordinary conversation.” Charles F. Ferguson, “Diglossia,” WORD 15, no. 2 (1959): 325–40.Cited in Dell Hymes, Language in Culture and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 429–39. In 1991, Ferguson presented a “refined” version of this definition, since he admitted the original one was not meant to account fully for all instances of multilingualism or functional differentiation of the languages. See Charles F. Ferguson, “Diglossia Revisited,” in “Studies in Diglossia,” ed. Alan Hudson, Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10, no. 1 (1991).

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER 1  165

Fishman contributes with an extended formulation of diglossia, including situations where the two languages fulfilling very different roles—one, a literate prestigious language, the other, informal and spoken—are genetically unrelated or historically distant. Joshua Fishman, “Bilingualism With and Without Diglossia; Diglossia With and Without Bilingualism,” Journal of Social Issues 23, no. 2 (1967): 29–38; revised as “Societal Bilingualism: Stable and Transitional,” in Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction (Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1970), 78–89. 56.  For a diachronic and generic study of language choice in medieval Spain, covering the domains of education, translation and science, literary composition, and nonfictional prose, see Elaine R. Miller, Jewish Multiglossia: Hebrew, Arabic, and Castilian in Medieval Spain (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000). For other treatments of Jewish multilingualism, see María Rosa Menocal, “Visions of al-Andalus,” in ἀ e Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. id. et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–24; Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, “Living in Languages, Jewish Multilingualism as Reflected in the Polish and Polish-Jewish Literature of the 20th century” Studia Judaica 5, no. 1 (2002): 109–17; and Barbara Vigil, “The Jewish Communities,” in Multilingualism in Spain, ed. M. ­Teresa Turell (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2001), chap. 8. 57.  The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, supposedly by a group of seventy-two translators in Alexandria, Egypt, in the third century bce. ­Onkelos was the translator of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, then the Jewish vernacular in Baby­lon. His second-century bce text is known as the Targum [translation] Onkelos. 58.  Howard M. Sachar, Farewell España (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 218. 59.  Anthony Pym, Negotiating the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2000), 2. Rabbi Moses Arragel’s translation into medieval Castilian, the illuminated Alba Bible, commissioned by the grand master of the Christian military Order of Calatrava, is discussed by Pym in his chap. 5. Pym calls this fascinating example of early fifteenth-century textual negotiation “a profoundly Rabbinic bible . . . effectively concealed beneath a Christianized surface” (vii). CHAPTER 1. MINOR LITERATURES AND MAJOR LAMENTS 1.  For political and ideological reasons, Sadia Lévy is an almost forgotten chapter in the history of francophone literature, although Guy Dugas has written about him in France in the Jewish Maghrebi context. As far as I know, only Yaël Even-Levy has delved into Lévy’s work in the United States, and I am indebted to her pioneering study “The Poetics of Identity in Judeo-Maghrebi Poetry: The Poetry of Sadia Lévy, Ryvel, and Blanche Bendahan” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1998). 2.  The term pied-noir refers broadly to people of European origin born in Frenchruled Algeria. Robert Randau is the pseudonym of Robert Arnaud (1873–1950), born in Algiers to a family of French settlers. A prolific author, he is one of the founders of the literary movement called “Algerianism.” 3.  Sadia Lévy and Robert Randau, Rabbin (Paris: G. Havard fils, 1896). 4. Guy Dugas, La littérature judéo-maghrébine d’expression française (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1990), 261.

166   NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

5.  Guy Dugas, Bibliographie critique de la literature judéo-maghrébine d’expression française (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1992), 38. 6.  In the western Maghreb, especially in Morocco, the Jewish quarter is called the mellah. It is usually separated by a wall from the Muslim section, the kasbah. In Tunisia and the eastern Maghreb, the Jewish quarter is known as the hara. See Encyclopedia of Islam, 1st ed., s.v. Mellâh (Georges Colin); Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. Mallah (H. Zafrani); Daniel Schroeter, “The Jewish Quarter and the Moroccan City,” in New Horizons in Sephardic Studies, ed. Yedida K. Stillman and George K. Zucker (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 67–81. And see also Daniel Schroeter, “Jewish Quarters in the Arab-Islamic Cities of Ottoman Empire,” in ἀ e Jews of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Avigdor Levy (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994), 287–300; Norman Stillman, ἀ e Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991); and Emily Gottreich ἀ e Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in ­Morocco’s Red City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 7.  Randau cited in Guy Dugas, “Sadia Lévy (1876–1951),” Parcours 13 (1990): 82. 8. Ibid., 107; my trans. 9. Dugas, La littérature judéo-maghrébine d’expression française, 261. 10.  See Mildred Mortimer, Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 2, 10 (notes). 11. Ibid., 13–25. 12.  Mouloud Feraoun and Taous Amrouche were both born in 1913. 13. Abdelkader Djeghloul, Eléments d’histoire culturelle algérienne (Algiers: E.N.A.L., 1984), 33, cited in Leïla Benammar Benmansour, L’‘algérianité’, ses expressions dans l’édition française (1919–1939): ‘et le livre devint média’” (doctoral thesis, PanthéonAssas University [Paris II], April 2000), 142. 14.  Jean Déjeux, Maghreb littératures de langue française (Paris: Arcantère, 1993), 27, cited in Benmansour, “L’‘algérianité,’” 142. 15.  Jean Déjeux, Situation de la littérature maghrébine de langue française (Algiers: Office des publications universitaires, 1982), 8. 16. Ibid., 20. 17.  Jews who came to Algeria after the destruction of the First and the Second Jerusalem Temples, in 586 bce and 70ce, respectively, were called toshavim (residents). In 1391, after events in Seville led to anti-Jewish pogroms and a Jewish flight to Algeria, and a century later, following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many Europeanized Judeo-Spanish–speaking Jews joined the original population of toshavim. The ­Iberian Jews were known as megorashim (expelled), and they usually lived apart from the toshavim. Some of the megorashim migrated to Algeria from northern Morocco, mainly settling in Oran. Sadia Lévy’s family belonged to the latter group. 18. Before 1870, French citizenship was granted on an individual basis to a number of Algerian Jews and Muslims. 19.  In Claude Lanziou’s words, “the Algerianists are thus settlers, but settlers who discover for themselves, without any repulsion, a partially Berber origin, like Randau’s protagonist Cassard (1921), and who work toward the birth of ‘a young Franco-Berber

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  167

people’” (Lanziou, “Entre Algérie française et Algérie musulmane,” Confluences Mediterranée, no. 33 [Spring 2000]: 162). 20.  See also Charles Bonn Le roman algérien de langue française (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1985); id., La littérature maghrébine (Paris: Répertoire des chercheurs, 1976); id., La littérature algérienne de langue française et ses lectures, imaginaires et discours d’idées (­Ottawa: Naaman, 1974); id., Littérature maghrébine d’expression française (Paris: ­Edicef, 1996); Jean Déjeux, La culture algérienne dans les textes (Paris: Publisud, 1985); id., Biblio­graphie de la littérature algérienne des Français (Paris: CNRS, 1978); id., Dictionnaire des auteurs maghrébins de langue française (Paris: Khartala, 1984); Aimé Dupuy, L’Algérie dans les lettres d’expression française (Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1956); ­Abdelkebir Khatibi, Le roman maghrébin (Rabat: S.M.E.R., 1979); Ahmed Lanasri, La littérature algérienne de l’entre-deux-guerres, genèse et fonctionnement (Paris: Edisud, 1995); id., Mohamed Ould Cheikh: Un romancier algérien des années trente (Algiers: Office des publications universitaires, 1986); Albert Memmi, Une littérature de la séparation (Paris: Présence africaine, 1969); id., Écrivains francophones du Maghreb: Anthologie (Paris: Seghers, 1985). 21.  Lanziou, “Entre Algérie française et Algérie musulmane,” 162. 22.  See Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre: Ou la prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996). 23.  Sadia Lévy and Robert Randau, XI journées en force (Algiers: Jourdan, 1902). 24.  This thesis has been explored by Chana Kronfeld in On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), building on Itamar Even-Zohar’s ideas on polysystems. Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Theory (Revised),” in Papers in Culture Research (e-book; Tel Aviv: Porter Chair of Semiotics, 2005). 25.  Sadia Lévy, “La geste éparse de Kehath ben Lévi, faits et dits recueillis pour un essai sur le stylisme,” Écrits pour l’art, 2nd ser., ca. May 15, 1905–February 15, 1906. 26.  The reference is to the hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours, considered “the bible” of decadent literature. The refined and reclusive Des Esseintes was the model of the decadent hero. An aesthete and aristocrat who loves Latin literature, he searches for rare sensations, indulging in experiments with liquor, drugs, sex and Satanism, and showing utter contempt for the judgment and the morals of the common, bourgeois man. “[Sadia Lévy] wrote a good novel, Rabbin, and another very interesting one [­Kehath] that was not published in a volume and is the novel of his impotence,” Apollinaire wrote to Madeline Pagès. “This book was fortunate enough to be imitated by [Giovanni] Papini, one of the best Italian writers today, [in] Un uomo finito [1913; The Failure], and in this form it had much success. Sadia Lévy is a proud, very modest man” (Guillaume Apollinnaire, Tendre comme le souvenir [Paris: Gallimard, 1952], 253). 27.  Sadia Lévy, Abishag (Monte Carlo: Regain, 1957), 11. In his correspondence, Apollinaire admits that “[Sadia Lévy] began a magnificent translation of the Psalms that he was wrong to have interrupted” (Tendre comme le souvenir, 253). 28.  Sadia Lévy, Sensations d’un égorgé (Paris: Des portiques, ca. 1933). 29.  Sadia Lévy, Treize à la douzaine (Paris: Jacomet, 1932).

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30.  See Guy Dugas, “Redécouvrir Sadia Lévy,” Le Magreb littéraire: Revue canadienne des littératures maghrébines 3, no. 6 (1999): 43. 31. Ibid., 13. 32.  Most of the anthologies and histories of symbolist poetry were produced in the early 1900s. Since Abishag was only published in 1957—and then in a limited edition of five hundred copies—it is understandable that Sadia Lévy does not figure in these works. Among other issues of canon formation, his belatedness worked against him. For later collections, see Anthology of Modern French Poetry, ed. C. A. Hackett (New York: Macmillan, 1968), Anthologie de la poésie française, ed. Martine Bercot et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); and Anthologie de la poésie symboliste et décadente, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001). 33.  See Apollinaire, Tendre comme le souvenir, 253–54, 256–57. In this series of letters to his Algerian girlfriend, Madeline Pagès, Apollinaire comments on Sadia Lévy and his family. On November, 8, 1915, Apollinaire writes: “I have known . . . Sadia Lévy for a long time, more or less twelve years. We both used to write for la Grande France. . . . Sadia Lévy sometimes came to my house, and at other times I visited him in his house in Montrouge” (253). Of his appearance, Apollinaire adds, showing that he knew what “Lévy/levite” meant: “He’s a red-haired, priestly Jew” (253). And of his credulity, Apollinaire writes: “Very honest, he was incapable of doing business, and used to live on his savings, which his best friend has devoured, swindled in the most evil manner” (253). 34.  See Guillaume Apollinaire, Œuvres poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). Robert Couffignal also remarks on the similarity of Lévy’s and Apollinaire’s characters, saying: “Sadia seemed picturesque [to Apollinaire, who writes], ‘He’s a red-haired, priestly Jew’—red-haired like the hero of the ‘Larron,’ the protector of Marzibill, and the Christ—all of them poetic characters and Jewish” (Couffignal, L’inspiration biblique dans l’œuvre de Guillaume Apollinaire [Paris: Lettres modernes, 1966], 42–43; also cited by Even-Levy, “Poetics of Identity,” 39). 35.  In Dugas, “Redécouvrir Sadia Lévy,” 35–36. Claude Debon defines moallacas as “sacred poems of the Arabs” (Debon, Apollinaire: Glossaire des œuvres completes [Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 1988], 78). 36.  In French: “tous les haut-lieux consacrés à la beauté.” 37.  Dedication in Lévy, Abishag, 7–8. 38. Ibid., 40. 39.  See Dugas. “Redécouvrir Sadia Lévy,” 44. 40.  Lévy, “Preface,” in Abishag, 14. 41.  Even-Levy, “Poetics of Identity,” 33. 42.  Dugas, “Redécouvrir Sadia Lévy,” 43. 43.  See Michael A. Meyer, “Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?” Judaism 24 (1975): 329–38. See, too, ἀ e Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 3–6, and Arthur Hertzberg, ἀ e French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). 44.  On the patterns of assimilation of the French Jew, in an analysis of French Jew-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  169

ish institutions from the French Revolution to the end of the Second Empire, see Simon Schwarzfuchs, Du Juif à l’Israélite: Histoire d’une mutation, 1770–1870 (Paris: Fayard, 1989). See also Jay R. Berkovitz, ἀ e Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989); and on the French Jewish solidarity efforts as supposed precursors of Jewish nationalism, see Michael Graetz, Les Juifs en France au XIXe siècle: De la Révolution française à l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Salomon Malka (Paris: Seuil, 1989). 45.  See Michel Abitbol, “The Encounter Between French Jewry and the Jews of North Africa: Analysis of a Discourse (1830–1914),” in ἀ e Jews in Modern France, ed. Frances Malino and Bernard Wasserstein (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1985), 31–32. 46. Ibid., 34. 47.  By the time Tunisia and Morocco became French protectorates, the Jewish communities there had had more experience with immigrants than their co-religionists in Algeria had had, and were both more open to changes in their mores and more resistant to impositions from France. Tunisian and “Moroccan Jews were denied modern consistories,” according to Michael M. Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: ἀ e Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 14. 48.  See Abitbol, “Encounter,” 37, where he cites “L’Œuvre des écoles,” BAIU, January 1865, 5n13. 49.  On the Alliance, see André Chouraqui, Cent ans d’histoire: l’Alliance Israélite Universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine, 1860–1960 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965); Simon Schwarzfuchs, L’“Alliance” dans les communautés du bassin méditerranéen à la fin du 19ème siècle et son influence sur la situation sociale et culturelle: Actes du deuxième congrès international de recherche du patrimoine des juifs sépharades et d’Orient 1985 (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalaim, 1987); Michael M. Laskier, ἀe Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco (1862–1962) (New York: State University of New York Press, 1983); and Michael Graetz, ἀ e Jews in Nineteenth-­Century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). See also Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: ἀ e Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and id., Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition, 1860–1939: ἀ e Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990). For a novelistic treatment of the educational role of the Alliance and the identity conflicts it provoked, see Albert Memmi’s largely autobiographical account in La statue de sel (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). On the process of modernization in the Arab world, see Norman A. Stillman, ἀ e Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991). 50.  See Haïm Zafrani, Mille ans de vie juive au Maroc (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1983), 60–67; id., Deux mille ans de vie juive au Maroc (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1998), 59–68; and Jacques Taïeb, Être juif au Maghreb à la veille de la colonisation (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 83–84.

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51.  Revolutionary ideals did not always guide the course of Jewish emancipation in France; economic disputes and antisemitism played a role in it. The Sephardic Jews in southwestern France obtained legal rights in January 1790, while the situation of the Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace and Lorraine was only settled at the end of September 1791. Emancipation was possible thanks to the lobbying of two groups, the Jews themselves and the pro-Jewish faction in the National Assembly, according to Robert Badinter, “­Libres et égaux . . .”: L’émancipation des Juifs sous la Révolution française, 1789–1791 (Paris: Fayard, 1989). 52.  See Esther Benbassa, “Education for Jewish Girls in the East: A Portrait of the Galata School in Istanbul, 1872–1912,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 9 (1993): 163–73. 53.  Scholars recognize Algeria’s unique position as the only colony among French protectorates, with the longest French occupation, and because France fought hard to keep it French. “Throughout the colonial era, Algeria’s contact with the French colonizer was longer, more complex, and more violent. If we view the process of colonization as a wound—which many Maghrebian writers do—we must conclude that Algeria’s wound was deeper and more painful than that of its North African neighbors, Morocco to the west and Tunisia to the east,” Mildred Mortimer writes (id., Maghrebian Mosaic, 1). 54.  See Achille-Edmond Halphen, Recueil des lois, décrets, ordonnances, avis du conseil d’état: Arrêtés et règlements concernant les Israélites depuis la Révolution de 1789 (Paris: n.p., 1851), 137–42. On the Algerian educational system, see Serge Jouin et al., L’école en Algérie, 1830–1962: De la régence aux centres sociaux éducatifs (Paris: Publisud, 2001). 55.  Guy Dugas cites differences in the literature programs offered by schools in Algeria and the protectorates, comparing French texts cited in works by authors from these countries. He writes, “It is possible to trace without difficulty the map of these [literary] borrowings . . . : very rare and belated in the Moroccan writers, very classic among the Tunisian, they multiply and diversify in Algeria, where the programs of the republican schools undoubtedly discriminated less than those of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. That explains why references to poets such as Verlaine and Baudelaire can only be found in works by Algerian writers, whereas in the two neighboring countries, one rather cites La Fontaine and [Victor] Hugo” (Dugas, Littérature judéo-maghrébine, 104). For an analysis of “The Politics of Education in the Colonial Era,” see also Laskier North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 27–32. 56.  After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, Adolphe Crémieux, one of the founders of the AIU and minister of justice in the new republican government, took a few days to prepare a new constitution to Algeria. He submitted nine decrees to the government’s council, among them that of the naturalization of Algerian Jews, and all of them were ratified. See Michel Ansky, Les juifs d’Algérie: Du décret Crémieux à la Libération (Paris: Éditions du Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, 1950), 28–44. 57.  See Pierre Hebey, Alger, 1898: La grande vague antijuive (Paris: Nil, 1996); Gene­ viève Dermenjian, La crise anti-juive oranaise, 1895–1905: L’antisémitisme dans l’Algérie coloniale (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1986); id., Juifs et européens d’Algérie: L’antisémitisme ­oranais (1892–1905) (Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1983); Michel Ansky, “Les manifesta-

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tions antijuives en Algérie de 1871 à 1900,” in id., Les juifs d’Algérie, 45–62. “Anti-Jewish attitudes had been evident in North Africa for many years before the establishment of the Vichy regime. In the latter half of the nineteenth century in Algeria, the European population protested violently against the rights which France granted the Jews, and was especially vocal during the Dreyfus Affair,” Laskier writes in North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 56. 58.  On the role of French Jews as agents of French imperialism, Mair José Bernadete (himself interested in promoting Spanish cultural/linguistic imperialism among Levantine Jews) writes: “Consciously or unconsciously, the founders of the Alliance were agents of cultural imperialism of France. Wherever the Alliance opened schools, the medium of teaching was French” (Bernadete, Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews [New York: Sepher-Hamon, 1982], 150). See also Simon Schwarzfuchs, “Colonialisme français et colonialisme juif en Algérie,” in Judaïsme d’Afrique du Nord aux XIX–XXe siècles, ed. Michel Abitbol (Jerusalem: Institut Ben Zvi, 1980), 37–48. 59.  On superstitions and customs, see David Rouach, Imma ou rites, coutumes et croyances chez la femme juive d’Afrique du Nord (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1990). See also in Memmi’s account in La statue de sel. 60.  Michel Abitbol comments on the different reception these French ideas on culture and education had among the Tunisians, who underwent this process more than fifty years after the Algerians. He cites a 1900 letter addressed to French rabbi Zadoc Kahn that “challenged the very principles of French Jewry’s ‘mission’ in North Africa”: “The Alliance Israélite . . . in violation of the most basic rules of conduct, is seeking to impose the French spirit, embodied by the French national educational system, on the Jewish population of Tunisia. . . . In order to enlighten this population, to introduce it to modern life, one must not replace its traditions and historical memories by other traditions and other memories” (Abitbol, “Encounter,” 53). Cf. Memmi’s account of his experience of acculturation in La statue de sel. 61.  See Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999). 62.  See Haïm Zafrani, Poésie juive en Occident musulman (Paris: Geuthner, 1977) and Juifs d’Andalousie et du Maghreb (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1996). 63.  For a breakdown of groups and regions speaking Judeo-Spanish or Judeo-­ Arabic in the Maghreb, see Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 15–16. 64.  Compare Jews’ francophony in the Maghreb with Iraqi Jewish fluency in English and Egyptian Jews’ multilingualism and near ignorance of Arabic. 65.  Encyclopedia of Islam, s.v. “Dhimma” (Cl. Cahen), 227. 66. The Encyclopedia of Islam mentions that a dhimmi could not marry a Muslim woman, whereas a Muslim could marry a dhimmi woman. It also refers to the double rate of taxes a dhimmi merchant had to pay. The entry continues: “Finally the dhimmi had, according to the doctrine going back in part to the time of ‘Umar, . . . to wear distinguishing articles of dress, in particular the zunnar belt, the original intention of which was perhaps merely to prevent administrative errors but which gradually came to be regarded as a sign of humiliation, and was accompanied by complementary ­restrictions

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such as the prohibition of fine cloth, noble steeds, uncut forelocks, etc.” (228). Georges Memmi mentions in his novel Qui se souvient du café Rubens (Paris: Lattès, 1984), 104–5, that, when passing by a Muslim while riding a mule, a Jew had to dismount and wait for “the true believer” to pass and that Muslim women did not bother to veil themselves in front of a Jewish man, making him feel like an animal. Historians note the differences between the status of Jews in Muslim and Christian lands. In Centre international de recherche sur les juifs du Maroc, Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc, ed. Michel Abitbol, 31–46, Haïm Zafrani writes: “The Jews of dar-al-islam know the dhimmi condition imposed by the dominant religion, a condition that is certainly degrading and often precarious, but in the end, a liberal legal status (high level of legal, administrative and cultural autonomy) compared to the arbitrary one known by the Jews of Christendom, in Ashkenazi lands” (33). He continues: “It is incontestable that an antisemitism comparable to the aberrant forms that the hate of the Jew took in medieval, modern, or contemporary Europe is completely strange to Muslim history and thought in the Maghreb, especially in Morocco” (34). For more on Jewish-Muslim relations, see Israel and Ishmael: Studies in Muslim-Jewish Relations, ed. Tudor Parfitt (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 67.  See Dugas, La littérature judéo-maghrébine d’expression française, 33–62. 68.  In “Pour accorder l’instrument,” Lévy clearly endorses the symbolist precept expressed by Verlaine’s poem “De la musique avant toute chose.” 69.  “Music History,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, CD-Rom ed. (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997), calls the kinnor “[a] stringed instrument of the lyre family, constituted by a body, two arms, and a yoke. The Canaanite type of the instrument, which was certainly the same as used by the Israelites, is asymmetric, with one arm shorter than the other, and its body is box shaped. The instrument was probably of an average height of 20–23 in. (50–60 cm.) and sounded in the alto range, as evinced by surviving specimens from Egypt (which took over the form and even kept the name of the instrument from the neighboring Semites). The kinnor is the noble string instrument of Semitic civilization, and became the chief instrument of the orchestra of the Second Temple. It was played by David and was therefore held in particular honor by the Levites. According to Josephus, it had ten strings and was sounded with a plectrum (Ant., 7:306), and according to the Mishnah its strings were made of the small intestines of sheep (Kin. 3:6).” 70.  The villanelle, whose name derives from the Italian villanella, is a “song, pastoral poetry; [or the] dance that accompanied it originally.” From this it came to denote a “poem with fixed form (end of the 16th century), with three-verse couplets and a refrain, ending with a four-verse stanza” (Petit Robert 1 [1988], 2095). The villanelle also has a specific rhyme scheme: aba aba aba aba aba abaa, organized in five tercets and one quatrain, where the first and third lines of the first tercet are repeated alternately in the final lines of the following stanzas. In the last stanza, the two final lines consist of the refrain. 71.  Different legends trace the origins of North African Jews to the ancient Israelites. Among these myths of origin is the belief that the first Jewish colonies were founded in Africa following the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar. The Jews would have come by sea and joined their ancient neighbors, the Phoenicians. “Till

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  173

the fall of Carthage in 146 bce, the Jews, in partnership with the Phoenicians, molded North Africa with Semitic influences,” André Chouraqui writes. “To quote Gsell, by the end of this period [813 –146 bce], the natives of North Africa ‘by their language and by their customs, had become Phoenicians’—in other words, Semites, closely related to the Hebrews of Palestine” (Chouraqui, Between East and West: A History of the Jews of North Africa [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1968], xvi, 6). “Traditions on the antiquity of the Jews in Morocco were not only maintained by the Jewish communities but also the local population . . . the popular story told is the Jews first arrived following the destruction of the First Temple, while some traditions echo the tradition of their arrival at the time of Solomon,” Daniel Schroeter writes (Schroeter, “On the Origins and Identity of Indigenous North African Jews,” in North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities, ed. Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krauze [Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007], 166). 72.  The athanor is a “[s]ymbole du creuset des transmutations, physiques, morales ou mystiques,” according to Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles (Paris: Seghers, 1973), 134. I find it particularly significant to my reading of this poem that the French word creuset means both “furnace” and “place where different things blend and merge” (Petit Robert 1, 422). See also on the athanor Andrea Aromatico, Alchimie: le grand secret (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), and the Grand Larousse universel (Paris: Larousse, 1995). 73. See 1 Kings 5:15–26, 7:13–46; 2 Chron. 2:2–15. 74.  On Kohath and Kohathites, see Gen. 46:11; Exod. 6:16, 6:18; Num. 3:17, 3:19, 3:27, 3:29–30, 4:2, 4:4, 4:15, 4:18, 4:34, 4:37, 7:9, 10:21, 16:1, 26:57–58; Josh. 21:5, 21:10, 21:20, 21:26; 1 Chron. 6:1–2, 6:16, 6:18, 6:22, 6:33, 6:38, 6:54, 6:61,6:66, 6:70, 9:32, 15:5, 23:6, 12; 2 Chron. 20:19, 29:12, 34:12. 75.  See Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). 76.  The contribution of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews to Jewish culture and literature tends to be described as restricted to the Spanish Golden Age (but only with the “disarab­ization” of its authors), and, in modern times, to pop culture, folklore, and cuisine, usually enveloped in an aura of exotic primitivism. The identification of Jews from Muslim lands with backwardness and inferiority was perpetuated by Zionism and maintained in Israel by means of a clear class division, which includes inequalities in economic, educational, and cultural opportunities. Such a (diminishing) view of Se­phardi and Mizrahi Jews is still reflected in the perception that most of American and European Jewry has of them. See Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Post­ colonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 39–68; Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For an anthology that unearths marginalized Sephardi and Mizrahi poets in Israel, see Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996). A striking example of the erasure of the Sephardic component from the records of Jew-

174   NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

ish cultural production is Ruth R. Wisse, ἀ e Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey ἀ rough Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 2000), which does not include a single Sephardic author. On myths about Sephardim, and Sephardim in various parts of the world, see Daniel J. Elazar, ἀ e Other Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 77.  Jean Moréas (né Ioannis Papadiamantopoulos; 1856–1910) published his “Manifeste du symbolisme” (Symbolist Manifesto) in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in 1886, invoking “esoteric affinities” between “sensible appearances and primordial Ideas” and advocating use of the alexandrine and certain odd-syllable verses. Five years later, reacting against symbolist “deliquescences” and unintelligibility, and reaffirming his taste for Greek antiquity and classical beauty, Moréas founded the École Romane. Marked by works by seventeenth-century poets and poets from the Pléiade, this combines “symbolist subtlety and classic rigor” (Petit Robert, 1244). See A.-M. Schmidt, La littérature symboliste (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1942), 69–75; XIXe siècle: Les grands auteurs français du programme, ed. André Lagarde and Laurent Michard (Paris: Bordas, 1985), 540, 545. 78.  See Pierre de Ronsard, Les amours (1552–87; Paris: Gallimard, 1964, 1996). 79. A blason is a sixteenth-century poetic genre that provides a detailed description of a person or object. It can be either laudatory or satirical. 80.  Maurice Scève, Délie: Object de plus haulte vertu, ed. Gérard Defaux (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 1: 563 . 81.  “L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant.” See Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: Dutton, 1958), pt. 4 (trans. modified), www .gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269–0.txt (accessed May 20, 2015). 82.  See “A Psalm to David” (Mizmor le-David) used at the beginning of many Psalms. 83.  David is also associated with Jesus, since both are from the house of Jesse. 84.  See p. 35 for more on Kohath. 85.  In Lévy, Abishag, “Premiers vers” (First Verses), 52. 86.  In an apostrophe to the women, the poet’s muses, the speaker of “Prélude” says: “Vous m’êtes l’Hippocrène et l’unique Sion” (To me you are the Hippocrene and the only Zion) (19). 87.  According to Elena Romero, the coplas are “strophic poems, each consisting of a variable number of stanzas, all of which, in each poem, respond to the same metric scheme and offer a thematic link” (Romero, La creación literaria en lengua sefardí [­Madrid: Mapfre, 1992], 142). See also I. M. Hassán, “Un género castizo sefardí: Las ­Coplas,” in Los sefardíes: Cultura y literatura (San Sebastián, 1987), 103–23; Paloma Díaz-Más, Sephardim: ἀ e Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 4. 88.  “Théodore de Banville,” in Mallarmé, Divagations (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), x. 89.  See Chouraqui, Between East and West. 90.  In the title page for the elegies to Liliane, there are two discrepancies: her name appears as “Lilian,” and the subtitle reads: “Five elegies followed by three tombeaux,” but there are apparently only two tombeaux—one to a dead child and the other to Apollinaire. “Kinah” is in fact the third one, but this may be confusing, because it is the only one with its own separate title page.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  175

91.  Even-Levy, “Poetics of Identity,” 108. 92. Zafrani, Poésie juive en Occident musulman, 368. 93. Ibid., 367. 94. Ibid., 371. 95.  The numerical value of the letter ‫( י‬yud) is 10; ‫( ה‬hey) is 5; and ‫( ו‬vav) is 6. ‫יהוה‬ (YHVH) is thus equivalent to 26, and ‫( יה‬YAH) corresponds to 15. YHVH, if pronounced “Elohim,” corresponds to the Sefirah Binah, or Understanding. If it is pronounced “Adonai,” it corresponds to Tiferet, or Beauty. YAH is associated with Chochmah, or Wisdom. See Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, Likutey Moharan (Jerusalem and New York: Breslov Research Institute, 1997), appendix. 96.  This was the view of psalmist poetics in the French Bible scholarship of Lévy’s time as represented by Édouard Dhorme, La poésie biblique (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1931), cited by Zafrani in Poésie juive en Occident musulman, 274. 97.  The practice of tearing the clothes (keria, in Hebrew) is correct, but the grieving period is often of eleven, and not ten, months, after the initial thirty-day period (Sheloshim). 98.  The French transliteration follows the Massoretic Hebrew vocalization of the biblical text. See La Bible, trans. Louis Segond (Paris: Alliance biblique universelle, 1910). In English, the name is given as Kohath. 99.  On recreating history, or giving voice to a muted past, see Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” usually referred to as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (1968; New York: Schocken Books, 2007). 100.  A.-M. Schmidt offers an unedifying yet revealing portrait of Ghil: “Possessed by his humanitarian and scientific dream, friend of a most certain devotion but a failed Orpheus, he has only produced works as ambitious as they are illegible. He is nevertheless the idol of a sectarian cult. Every week a little group [cabale] receives from him, in intimate confabulations [colloques], teachings filled with knowledge and disinterested encouragement. Some also say that a few Russians admire him” (Schmidt, La littérature symboliste [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1942], 69). 101.  The most famous text on “L’Instrumentisme” is Mallarmé’s “Avant-dire au Traité du verbe de R. Ghil (1885).” See René Ghil, Le IIe livre des masques (Paris: Mercure de France, 1898) and Choix de poèmes: Précédé d’un exposé sommaire des theories du poète et d’un argument détaillé de son œuvre (Paris: Albert Messein, 1928). 102.  The avant-garde composer Arthur Petrónio (1897–1983) makes the connection between Ghil’s theories of instrumentation and Kandinsky’s work. Born in Switzerland in 1897, this Frenchman of Italian origin developed polyphonic works: symphonic poems with few verbal elements underlined by sound instruments and rhythm made of percussion instruments, whispers, and breathing. He claims that René Ghil and Kandinsky aroused his interest in sound poetry. Petrónio “apparently created the ‘verbophonie’ concept as early as 1919, as a way to integrate sound poetry into regular music scores.” (www.ubu.com/sound/petronio.html [accessed May 20, 2015]). 103. See André Spire, Plaisir poétique, plaisir musculaire—Essai sur l’évolution des

176   NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

techniques poétiques (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1949). See also Guy Dugas on Lévy and Spire: “Trois théoriciens d’une poésie de la voix: Sadia Lévy, André Spire et Henri Meschonnic,” in Voix et création au XXe siècle: Actes du Colloque de Montpellier, 26, 27, 28 janvier 1995, ed. Michel Collomb (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 187–96. 104.  Cited by Zafrani in his discussion of Judeo-Arabic music, in Poésie juive en Occident musulman, 282. On the musical instruments in the Psalms, see esp. Psalm 150:3–6. Verse 6 completes and generalizes the previous list of keley shir (“instruments of song”): “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” Again, note the connection of “breath” with “le souffleur de dires ovalaires.” 105.  Michel Butor, Essais sur les modernes (1960; Paris: Galimard, 1964), 98. Also cited in Zafrani, Poésie juive en Occident musulman, 282. 106.  See esp. Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” in Poe’s Poems and Essays, ed. Andrew Lang (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1955). 107.  See Even-Levy, “Poetics of Identity,” 116. 108.  See Num. 16:1–49, 26:9–11. The Psalms of the sons of Korah are 42, 44–49, 84, 85, and 87. 109.  The reference is to William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Thoughtful Lover,” in ἀ e Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 19–20. 110.  The interest in authors such as Eliphas Lévy (Alphonse Louis Constant) and Madame (H. P.) Blavatsky at the end of the nineteenth century is widely recognized. On occultism and symbolism, see John Senior, ἀ e Way Down and Out: ἀ e Occult in Symbolist Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959); Alain Mercier, Les sources ésoteriques et occultes de la poésie symboliste (Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1969). A good example of the esoteric spirit of the times is the following description of an 1889 encounter with a typographer called, “esoterically, Arcturus”: “He served me the most incredible hodgepodge one can imagine. He spoke to me about Atma and Karma, the perispirit and the astral. He cited the Sepher Gezirath [sic] and the Piste-Sophia, Eliphas Lévy and Mr. Fabre des Essarts, a gnostic patriarch, Madame Blavatsky and the Duchess of Pomar. He commented on the Initiation of Mr. Papus and Stanislas de Guaita’s ἀ e Serpent of Genesis. He exalted Crooks and condemned Doctor Gibier.” Cited in Adolphe Retté, Le symbolisme: Anedoctes et souvenirs (1903; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1983), 26. 111.  See Verlaine’s 1874 “L’art poétique.” The first stanza reads: “De la musique avant toute chose, / Et pour cela préfère l’Impair, / Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air, / Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.” See Paul Verlaine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Yves-Alain Favre (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992). 112.  See p. 27 for more on Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas. 113. Zafrani, Poésie juive en Occident musulman, 368. 114.  I am using Benjamin Harshav’s terms, as described in Harshav [Hrushovski], “An Outline of Integrational Semantics: An Understander’s Theory of Meaning in Context,” Poetics Today 3, no. 4 (1982): 59–88, and “Poetic Metaphor and Frames of Reference,” Poetics Today 5, no. 1 (1984): 5–43. 115.  Guy Dugas, “Sadia Lévy (1876–1951),” Parcours 13 (1990): 83–84; my trans.

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 1 AND 2   177

116. Ibid., 83. 117.  See Lévy’s own account in his Sensations d’un égorgé: Notes de clinique (Paris: Des Portiques [1933]). And see also Guy Dugas, “Trois théoriciens d’une poésie de la voix: Sadia Lévy, André Spire et Henri Meschonnic,” in Voix et création au XXe siècle: Actes du Colloque de Montpellier, 26, 27, 28 janvier 1995, ed. Michel Collomb, 187–96 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997). CHAPTER 2. AT THE CROSSROADS 1.  The terminology used for the Nazi genocide of Jews is controversial. Shoah refers originally in Hebrew to natural catastrophes, and its application to the Nazi genocide might suggest that premeditated mass murder is natural, and that the guilt for it is not attributable to real individuals. “Holocaust” has become a conventional term for the murder of Jews by the Nazis, but since it derives from the Greek word holocauston, meaning “whole burnt offering,” it only refers to the deaths, omitting the murderers. “Holocaust” has odd theological connotations, since it seems to imply that the Jews are a sacrifice offered to God (who accepts it!) by the Nazis—who, if we follow this metaphor to its logical conclusion, become the Kohanim, or High Priests of the Temple. As for the Yiddish word khurbn, it simply means “destruction,” deriving from the Hebrew for the destruction of the Temple. Even if, for practical reasons or because it is more readily understood, I use “Holocaust” and “Shoah,” I prefer to all of these terms above the expression “Nazi genocide of Jews,” which names both the agents—the perpetrators—and the victims, and precisely defines the act. For more on the terminological problems, see Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, ἀ eory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Tom Segev, ἀ e Seventh Million: ἀ e Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993); Ronit Lentin, Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). 2.  Thalia Pandiri, “Bilingual Creative Writing: A Conversation with Margalit Matitiahu,” Metamorphoses, Fall 2001, 344. The text is a condensed version of several hours of formal and informal interviews conducted both in Greek and in English with Margalit Matitiahu during her 2001 visit to Smith College in Massachusetts. 3. Ibid., 344. 4.  Margalit Matitiahu and Juan Fernández, Vagabundo eterno = Vagabondo eternel (León: Ayuntamiento de León, Consejalía de Cultura, 2001), 116. In Ladino; my trans. 5.  Matitiahu is also a member of the Israeli Pen Club and has received the 1999 Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature in Israel. She also received the 1996 “Ateneo de Jaén” International Literature Prize in Spain. 6.  Matitiahu speaks about her work at the association in her interview with Hannah Ya’oz, “Sicha ‘al ha-qesher bein sifrut Ladino ve-havaiat ha-Shoah ‘yim Margalit Matitiahu,” Psifas 33 (1996): 19–20. 7.  Pandiri, “Bilingual Creative Writing,” 344–45. 8.  André Elbaz, “Ma mémoire sépharade,” in La mémoire sépharade, ed. Hélène Trigano and Shmuel Trigano (Paris: Éditions In Press, 2000), 167. 9.  Nicholas Stavroulakis and Timothy J. DeVinney, Jewish Sites and Synagogues of

178   NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

Greece (Athens: Talos Press, 1992), 11. Here again, the terminology is imprecise and unreliable. The “Castillian Spanish” Stavroulakis refers to is the ancient Castilian, i.e., vernacular Ladino, and not modern Spanish. 10.  Aron Rodrigue, Sephardim and the Holocaust (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, 2005), 4. 11.  See Nicholas Stavroulakis, ἀ e Jews of Greece: An Essay (Athens: Talos Press, 1990), and Stavroulakis and DeVinney, Jewish Sites and Synagogues of Greece; Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. (Montville, NJ: Hendrickson, 1999); John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323 bce–117 ce) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); John Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Erika Perahia Zemour, “Le judaïsme perdu et retrouvé de Salonique,” in La mémoire sépharade, ed. Hélène Trigano and Shmuel Trigano (Paris: Éditions In Press, 2000), 153–64. 12.  See C. Z. Kloetzel, “Salonika and Palestine,” Palestine Post, April 14, 1941. 13. Rodrigue, Sephardim and the Holocaust, 15. 14.  See Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). 15.  The expulsion from Spain counts as the first exile, and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and subsequent immigration after World War II counts as the second. 16.  Margalit Matitiahu, interview with Mario Wainstein, August 22, 1991, in Aurora, reproduced in Elie Carasso, “Une poétesse israélienne,” www.sefarad.org/publication/ lm/010/carasso.html (accessed May 12, 2015). 17.  Alan Riding, “500 Years after Expulsion, Spain Reaches Out to Jews,” New York Times, April 1, 1992, www.nytimes.com/1992/04/01/world/500-years-after-expulsion-spain -reaches-out-to-jews.html?pagewanted=all (accessed May 8, 2015). 18.   Real Academia Española, “La RAE elige a ocho académicos correspondientes judeoespañoles,” November 12, 2015, www.rae.es/noticias/la-rae-elige-ocho-academicos -correspondientes-judeoespanoles (accessed December 22, 2015). The Spanish text explains that the scholars “podrán asistir a las juntas de la Academia solo cuando se trate de materias literarias o lingüísticas, en las cuales tendrán voz” (will be able to participate in the plenary sessions of the Academia only when either literary or linguistic matters are being discussed, at which time they will be heard). 19.   “La elección de académicos judeoespañoles tiene un significado histórico,” Canarias7.es, November 13, 2015, canarias7.es/articulo.cfm?id=396483 (accessed December 23, 2015). 20. Matitiahu, Vagabundo eterno, 108; in Ladino; my trans. 21.  The verses on the monument are from the poem “En el fondo del tiempo” in Matitiahu’s book Vela de la luz, which reproduces selected poems from previous books. This poem is placed in the part “Matriz de luz,” even though it does not figure in the book Matriz de luz, published in Israel simultaneously with Vela de la luz in Spain (Tel Aviv: Tag, 1997). 22.  See J. Maria Rodríguez, “En memoria de los judíos,” La Crónica (León), June 28, 1997, 8.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  179

23.  Margalit Matitiahu, Vela de la luz (León: PonteAérea, 1997). 24.  Margalit Matitiahu, Vagabundo eterno, 11; in Spanish; my trans. “We . . . wish to contribute to the diffusion of this poetry, convinced that the history of Spanish literature must be enriched and completed by the inclusion of genres such as this belonging to the modern Sephardic literature,” Ana Maria Riaño Lopez and Maria del Carmen Marcos Casquero observe similarly in “Poesía contemporánea en lengua judeoespañola: Margalit Matitiahu y su obra,” Estudios Humanísticos: Filología (Universidad de León, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras) 23 (2001): 172. 25.  Margalit Matitiahu, Bozes en la shara (Cuenca, Spain: El Toro de Barro, 2001), 5–6. 26.  “Intervista” in Giuseppina Gerometta, “La poesia sefardita di Margalit Matitiahu” (degree thesis, University of Udine, 2001–2), 222. 27.  In Hebrew, the title of this book is given as Rechem ohr, which literally means “womb of light.” Matriz can be “source.” 28.  Vela is “candle,” “sail,” but also “vigil.” “Pasar la noche en vela” is “to stay awake all night.” The Hebrew translation of this title is erev ohr, which means “evening of light,” but sounds like the nonexistent parallel to boker ohr, the usual reply to boker tov (good morning). 29.  Daliah Kaminer, “Ha-muchashi ve-ha-mufshat” (The Concrete and the Abstract), Davar 2 (March 1984): 17. 30. Ibid., 17. 31. Ibid., 17 (my trans.). 32.  Hannah Ya’oz, “Qod shel zicaron,” Yediot Ahronot, Ha-Musaf le-Shabat (Saturday Supplement), July 14, 1989, 24. 33. Ibid., 24. 34.  Nechama Berlinsky, “Margalit Matitiahu—Meshoreret meqorit ono,” Chinuch Tarbut ve-Omanut, n.d. 35.  Nitza Gurvitz, “Meshoreret Achat, Shtei Safot,” Davar, November 11, 1991, 9. 36.  Yehudit Malik-Shiran, “Mechuzot shel ke’ev ve-zikaron,” Moznayim 56, nos. 6–7 (1990): 75. 37.  Ya’oz, “Qod shel zicaron,” 24. 38.  In “Be-petach ha-chatzer ha-charuka” / “A la entrada del Kurtijo kemado,” in Margalit Matitiahu, Kurtijo kemado / Chatzer charuka (Tel Aviv: Eḳed, 1988), 6–7 (Hebrew), 33–35 (Ladino), Shmuel Refael cites Izhak Ben-Rubi, Baruh Uziel, and Shlomo Reuben among Ladino’s proponents in Israel. Now we can add to these the names of Avner Perez, Moshe ’ha-Elion, Matilda Koén-Sarano and Michal Held. 39.  Refael, “Be-petach ha-chatzer ha-charuka,” 6–7 (Hebrew), 33–35 (Ladino). 40.  Shmuel Refael, “Modernismo en el Judeo-Español,” in Matitiahu, Vagabondo eternel, 12–15. 41. Ibid., 14–15. 42. Ibid., 13. 43.  Benjamin Harshav, ἀe Polyphony of the Jewish Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 141.

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44.  Cited in Lopez and Casquero, “Poesía contemporánea en lengua judeoespañola,” 158. 45.  Yehudit Malik-Shiran, “Alegrika: Ha-petach le-sfigat ha-ohr,” Ha-Umah (1992): 238–39. 46.  Fabiana Chafetz, “Kefilot lashonit,” Yediot Ahronot, Ha-Musaf le-Shabat (Saturday Supplement), October 2, 1992, 22–23. 47. Ibid., 23. 48.  Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald, “Shakiei sefaradit-yehudit be-ivrit ha-chadasha” (Remnants of Judeo-Spanish in Modern Hebrew), Peamim 56 (1992–93): 33–49. See also Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald, “Judeo-Spanish Influence on Hebrew,” in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, ed. Geoffrey Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald and Sigal Shlomo, “Modern Hebrew še- and Judeo-Spanish ke- (que-) in Independent Modal Constructions,” in Language Contact and the Development of Modern Hebrew, ed. Edit Doron, 91–103 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), and Itamar Francez, “Modern-Hebrew lama-še Interrogatives and Their Judeo-Spanish Origins,” ibid., 104–15, discuss the influence of Judeo-Spanish in Modern Hebrew grammatical constructions. 49.  The Israeli Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai uses similar images in at least two poems. In “My Parents’ Migration,” he writes: “And my parents’ migration has not yet calmed in me,” presenting exile as an ongoing personal and individualized experience, and “migration” as an “inherited” condition. In a more recent poem, part of the cycle “Jewish Travel: Change Is God; Death, His Prophet,” in the book Open Closed Open, the condition of permanent restlessness is specifically attributed to Jewish collective existence. The refrain insists: “What remains? The suitcase on top of the closet, that’s what remains.” See Yehuda Amichai, “My Parents’ Migrations,” trans. Ted Hughes and Assia Gutman, in ἀ e Early Books of Yehuda Amichai, trans. Harold Schimmel, Ted Hughes, and Assia Gutman (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1988); ibid., Open Closed Open, trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 117–18. 50. See Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children, ed. D. Kimbrough Oller and Rebecca E. Eilers (Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters, 2002); Traute Taeschner, ἀ e Sun Is Feminine: A Study on Language Acquisition in Bilingual Children (Berlin: Springer, 1983); Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, ed. Colin Baker and Sylvia Prys Jones (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1998). 51.  In his diachronic studies of Ladino, Haïm Vidal Sephiha describes the change that occurred around 1700 when words such as kantais, komeis, and eskrivis became kantach, komech, and resivich (the French spelling) “simply by the palatalization of the final –s by the –i that precedes it. This is what gives the particular hissing sound to the Levantine Djudezmo [vernacular Judeo-Spanish], which drives one mistakenly to imagine a Portuguese origin to our language” (Sephiha, Le Judéo-Espagnol [Paris: Entente, 1986], 102). 52.  Although the word “flesh” could refer to meat. According to the OED, flesh appears “in recent use primarily suggesting ‘butchers’ meat’, not poultry etc. (cf. ‘fish, flesh,

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  181

and fowl’).” The “noise” could refer to the cries of lambs being slaughtered, but then the meat would not be dead yet. The use of “dead,” however, would be more understandable, as a reference to the animal that has just become “meat.” 53.  In Mishnaic Hebrew we find: “Shtei ha-nashim tzehovot zo le-zo” (The two wives were hostile [literally, yellow] to each other). 54.  In Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in id., ἀ e Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 160–61. 55.  Yael Zerubavel offers two graphics that represent the Zionist periodization of Jewish history outlining the three periods: Antiquity (Land of Israel, Hebrews, Hebrew language), Exile (many countries, Jews, many languages), and National Revival (Land of Israel, New Hebrews, modern Hebrew). See Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31–32. 56.  “Exile” here refers to the period before the “return” to the Land of Israel. 57.  On political, cultural, and spiritual Zionism and the emergence of the State of Israel, see David Vital. ἀ e Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); ἀ e Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York: Meridian Books, 1960); Ben Halpern, ἀ e Idea of the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History: ἀ e Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Gideon Shimoni, ἀ e Zionist Ideology (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1995); and Shlomo Avineri, ἀ e Making of Modern Zionism: ἀ e Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 1981). On arguments against the historical view that identifies life in the Diaspora with passivity and powerlessness, see David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). 58. Harshav, Polyphony, 17. 59.  Michael Ish-Shalom, “Anu chotrim le-atid” (We Strive for the Future), Metsada (Masada) (Jerusalem: Hitagdut ha-Studentim ha-Revisionistim, 1934), 13. Cited in Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 20. 60.  Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Emergence of Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882–1948,” Studies in Zionism 4 (1981): 167–84. 61.  See Amnon Rubinstein. Liheyot am chofshi (To Be a Free People) (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1977), 134. Cited in Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 26–27. 62.  Ella Habiba Shohat, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text: ἀ eory, Culture, and Ideology 19–20 (Fall 1988): 1–35. 63. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, xviii. Zerubavel discusses the importance of the past in Zionist ideology. She centers her work on three specific historical events that “evolved as major symbolic events in the Zionist Hebrew culture”: the fall of Masada, the Bar Kokhba Revolt, and the defense of Tel Hai. 64.  According to Simona Sharoni, the State of Israel can be seen as “a reassertion of masculinity, justified by the need to end a history of weakness and suffering by creating an image of an Israeli man who is exceedingly masculine, pragmatic, protective, assertive and emotionally tough” (Sharoni, “Every Woman is an Occupied Territory: The

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Politics of Militarism and Sexism and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Journal of Gender Studies 4 [1995]: 457). 65.  See Michael Gluzman, “Hakmiha leheterosexualiut: Zionut uminiut beAltneuland” (Longing for Heterosexuality: Zionism and Sexuality in Altneuland). Teorya ­u-vikoret (Theory and Criticism) 11 (1997): 145–62; Lesley Hazelton, Tsela Adam: Ha’isha bachevra haisraelit (Adam’s Rib: Women in Israeli Society) (Jerusalem: Idanim, 1978); Erella Shadmi, “Women, Palestinians, Zionism: A Personal View,” News from Within, 8, nos. 10–11 (1992): 13–16; and Ella Shohat, “Making the Silences Speak in Israeli Cinema,” in Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel, ed. Barbara Swirski and Marilyn P. Safir (New York: Pergamon Press, 1991). 66.  Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: ἀ e Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3–4. See also Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of the Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 37–46. 67.  Daniel Boyarin, “Prologue,” in Unheroic Conduct, xiv. 68.  Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, “Masada or Yavneh: Gender and the Arts of Jewish Resistance,” in Jews and Other Differences: ἀ e New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. id. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 307, which defines “fem(m)inized” thus: “The odd spelling of this term is to signal, once more, that such ‘fem(m)inization’ is not with respect to an essential femininity (e.g., Jungian anima) but with respect to a cultural construction of the female as femme (not butch).” 69.  Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 302. 70.  See H. Goldberg, “Culture and Ethnicity in the Study of Israeli Society,” Ethnic Groups 1 (1977): 163–86. 71.  See Fernand Braudel, ἀ e Identity of France (New York: Harper & Row, 1988– 90); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Carl Darling Buck, “Language and the Sentiment of Nationality,” American Political Science Review 10 (1916): 44–69. 72. Harshav, Polyphony, 27. 73.  The historian of nationalism Hans Kohn credits the Jews with originating three basic elements of nationalism: the idea of the chosen people, consciousness of national history, and national messianism (Kohn, ἀ e Idea of Nationalism [New York: Macmillan, 1945], 36–37). William Safran comments that “none of these was necessarily connected with race or ethnicity, for foreigners could be admitted into membership in the community of the chosen people by signing a ‘covenant’ (e.g., by marriage or conversion), thereby sharing both the historical consciousness and the messianic aspirations of the Jews. . . . None of these elements was necessarily connected with language, although Hebrew was widely considered the most convenient medium for their expression” (Safran, “Nationalism,” in Handbook of Language & Ethnic Identity, ed. Joshua A. Fishman [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 79). See also William Safran, “Language, Ideology, and State-Building: A Comparison of Policies in France, Israel, and the Soviet Union,” International Political Science Review 13 (1992): 397–414. 74.  Raymon Renard writes: “In Israel, the government succeeded in imposing the

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  183

new national language, Hebrew, and it is significant to observe that despite their number, the Sephardim publish only two journals . . . not more than their “coreligionnaires” from Istanbul, who are ten or fifteen times less numerous” (Renard, Sepharad: Le monde et la langue judéo-espagnole des Séphardim (Mons, Belgium: Annales universitaires de Mons, n.d.), 188. 75.  See Max Weinreich, “Internal Bilingualism in Ashkenaz until the Haskalah: Facts and Concepts,” Die goldene keyt 35 (1959): 3–11 (in Yiddish); Weinreich, “Internal Bilingualism in Ashkenaz,” trans. Lucy Davidowicz, in Voices from the Yiddish, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (1959; New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 279–80. See also Weinreich., ἀ e History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua Fishman (1973; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 320–25. 76.  Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: ἀ e Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 6. 77.  The examples of “apologetic introduction” are given by Seidman (ibid., 3), quoting Weinreich in History of the Yiddish Language, 276. 78.  Seidman offers an anecdote related by Yeshurun Keshet, which exemplifies the striking difference between the Yiddish-speaking Jew and the Hebrew-speaking Israeli: “A refugee child [from Hitler’s Europe] in one of the temporary camps that had been set up beside a kibbutz ran crying home to his mother, ‘Mame, di hebre’ishe shkotsim’lekh viln mikh shlogn’ (Mama, the little Hebrew gentile boys want to hit me). Keshet’s story captures the difference between the Yiddish-speaking diasporic Jewish male, clinging to his mother in fear and helplessness, and his fierce Hebrew counterpart, who is associated in the mind of the Yiddish child with the non-Jewish hoodlums of Europe” (Seidman, Marriage, 115). 79.  These “language wars” in the Yishuv were an intense political struggle, and at times the conflict between Yiddishists and Hebraists took a violent physical form. But Zionism was not without minorities and dissensions, and the linguistic practices of its proponents were eventually more heterogeneous than they care to admit. Many of the Zionists, who sprang from the Ashkenazi world and were culturally and emotionally attached to Yiddish, struggled with their own ambivalence during the political and cultural language wars. Significant examples are the writers Joseph Chaim Brenner and Shmuel Yosef Agnon. See Yael Chaver, “What Must Be Forgotten”: Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004). 80.  Since my interest is in Ladino, a linguistic product of the Jewish Diaspora in the Ottoman Empire, I shall not discuss the multilingualism of western Sephardim, who after the expulsion from Spain carried with them the urban education and cultural ideals of an economic elite fluent in several European languages. Portuguese and Spanish were the main vernacular languages of these communities, while Hebrew was used by rabbinic scholars. See Yosef Kaplan, “Bom Judesmo: The Western Sephardic Diaspora,” in Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 637–69. See also Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 81.  This is the transliteration used by Ladino speakers.

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82.  For the distinction between Ladino (calque) and Ladino vernacular, similar to “Judeo-Spanish,” “Djudezmo,” “Spanyol” or “Spanyolit,” see Sephiha, Le judéo-espagnol. 83.  Shlemo Morag divides the “oral aspects of the Hebrew heritage” into what he calls the “Classical Corpus” and the “Integrated Corpus.” He writes: By “Classical Corpus” I denote the communal traditions for reading Scripture (in particular the Pentateuch, Haftarot, Five Megillot and Psalms) and the post-biblical literature, especially the Mishna (whether by itself or as a part of the Babylonian Talmud) and for reciting prayers. The “Integrated Corpus” consisted of numerous Hebrew and Aramaic words, biblical quotations and allusions, idioms borrowed from the Mishna, the Talmud and the Midrash, as well as many words that came into being during the long years of exile—all of which became part and parcel of the spoken language of the community.

Morag, “Preface” to David Bunis, A Lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic Elements of Modern Judezmo (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 9. 84. Bunis, Lexicon, 42. 85.  José Benoliel, Dialecto judeo-hispano marroquí o hakitía, 24. Cited in Sephiha, Le judéo-espagnol, 149. 86.  The Me’am Lo’ez is an eighteenth-century ethico-homiletical Bible commentary in Ladino that Jacob Culi conceived and began in 1730 with a volume on Genesis. It presents extracts from the Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, Zohar, and the biblical commentaries translated into the Ladino vernacular. Its title was taken from Psalms 114:1, “When Israel went forth out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language.” See Me’am Lo’ez: El gran comentario bíblico sefardí, ed. David Gonzalo Maeso and Pascual Pascual Recuero (Madrid: Gredos, 1969). 87.  The Sabbatean movement of the 1660s was led by Shabbetai Tzvi, whose numerous followers fervently believed that he was the Messiah and would bring them redemption, but were cruelly disappointed when, facing a choice between conversion to Islam or death, he chose to convert. Many followed him into Islam, however, giving rise to the Dönme sect, which still exists in Greece and Turkey. See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: ἀ e Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); id., ἀ e Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). 88.  David Bunis discusses the languages of interwar Salonika in his study of a satirical series published in Salonika in Djudezmo. Pointing to the generational differences in languages and writing systems, which caused communication problems, he notes of one of the characters: Like most local Jewish women of her generation, Sunhula was literate, probably in French, Italian, and/or Greek, which she might have studied at a branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle or the Società Dante Alighieri, or in one of several foreign language institutes operating in Salonika at the time. But she was not literate in her ancestral language, at least not in its traditional Jewish-letter form. As the younger generations of the Salonika Sephardim began to receive their education in Western-style schools, in European languages such as French and Italian,

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  185

they became increasingly accustomed to writing Judezmo—to whatever extent they continued to write it—in romanization. This resulted in a generational literacy gap: older people could not decipher the writings, and later, the romanized publications, of the younger speakers, even if in Judezmo; and younger people were not only incapable of reading their elders’ handwriting, but became completely cut off from the literature that had been created in Judezmo, in the Jewish alphabet, during the half-millenium following the expulsion from Spain. In this period of transition, the alphabet employed by a Judezmo-speaker served as an immediate indicator of his or her generation, educational background, and general cultural orientation.

Voices from Jewish Salonika, ed. Bunis (Jerusalem and Thessaloníki: Misgav Yerusha­ laim / Ets Ahaim Foundation, 1999), 72–73. 89. Ibid., 91. 90.  Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. 91.  National discourses use the idea of “home,” transferring or projecting the private, familiar home onto a national home, which replicates the same ties that link family members. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (London: Verso/NLB, 1983), and Edward Said, ἀ e World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). For different articulations of “home” and its symbolic boundaries, configuring discourses of inclusion and exclusion, see also D. Massey, “A Place Called Home,” New Formations 17 (1992), and “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today, June 1991; M. Douglas, “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space,” Social Research 58 (1991): 1; N. Rathzel, “Harmonious ‘Heimat’ and Disturbing ‘Ausländer,’” in Shifting Identities and Shifting Racisms, ed. K. K. Bhavani and A. Phoenix (London: Sage, 1994); D. Sibley, “Purification of Space,” Environment and Planning, ser. D: Society and Space 6 (1988): 4; id., Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995). 92.  Matitiahu uses many names to refer to the Judeo-Spanish language in articles and interviews. In a personal correspondence with me she states that she prefers “S­panyol” or “Spanyolit,” as it was called in her home. 93.  Michel de Certeau, ἀ e Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 86. 94.  Pandiri, “Bilingual Creative Writing,” 343–44. Emphasis added. 95.  See Tracy K. Harris, Death of a Language: ἀ e History of Judeo-Spanish (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1994); Sephiha, L’agonie des judéo-espagnols; Henry V. Besso. “Judeo-Spanish: Its Growth and Decline,” in ἀ e Sephardi Heritage, ed. R. Barnett (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1971), 604–35; Raymond Renard, “La mort d’une langue: le judéo-espagnol,” Revue des langues vivantes 37 (1971): 709–22. Marcel Cohen also writes in Ladino, in epistolary form: “Kyero eskrivirte en djudyo antes ke no keda nada del avlar de mis padres. No saves . . . lo ke es morirse en su lingua [I want to write to you in Jewish before there is nothing left from my parents’ tongue. You don’t know . . . what it is to have your language die]” (Marcel

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Cohen, Lettre à Antonio Saura / Letra a Antonio Saura [Paris: L’Échoppe, 1997], 47 (in French and Ladino). 96.  Pandiri, “Bilingual Creative Writing,” 344. 97. Ibid., 344–45. 98.  Joelle Bahloul, ἀ e Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962, trans. Catherine du Peloux Ménagé (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125. 99.  “What is at stake is the preservation of the symbolic heritage of a domestic group after migration and deracination” (ibid., 132). 100.  Joshua A. Fishman, “Why Is It So Hard to Save a Threatened Language?” in Can ἀ reatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective, ed. id. (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2001), 5. Emphasis added. 101.  “Constituant à demeure un inestimable fonds culturel.” Elie Carasso, “Une poétesse israélienne,” www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/010/carasso.html (accessed May 12, 2015). 102. Matitiahu, Vagabondo eternel, 115. 103.  “Saloniki” in Matitiahu, Kurtijo kemado / Chatzer charuka, 17. See Stacy Beckwith, “Via Her Mother(’s) Tongue: Translated Dimensions in Margalit Matitiahu’s Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish Poetry” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in March 1998). 104.  See Robert Alter’s account in ἀ e Invention of Modern Hebrew Prose (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988) of European modernist Hebrew writers’ efforts to create a secular modern literature in Hebrew with a limited vocabulary. 105.  Pandiri, “Bilingual Creative Writing,” 343–44. 106. Matitiahu, Vagabondo eternel, 116. 107.  Margalit Matitiahu, “Porke eskrivo en dos lenguas, hebreo i judeo-espaniol” (Why I Write in Two Languages, Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish), La Crónica (León), May 28, 1997, 16 (in Ladino). 108. Matitiahu’s 2003 book Despertar el selencio / Leha’ir et ha-Shtika, already presents a more balanced treatment of these themes between the two languages. 109.  See Matitiahu, Vagabondo eternel; id., Bozes en la shara. 110.  Pandiri, “Bilingual Creative Writing,” 346. 111. Ibid., 345. 112.  Ibid. Emphasis added. 113.  “I never write the poem in Hebrew or Ladino at the same time,” Matitiahu claims, describing her creative process. “The poems are not translated; they are written twice. Each language has its own qualities. The theme is the same; the words or sentences my be different” (personal correspondence with the author, November 2003). 114.  See Rainier Grutman, “Auto-Translation,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (London: Routledge, 1998), 17–20. 115.  Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Languages and Words,” trans. Peter Mollenhauer, in ἀ eories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 34.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  187

116.  Among the listed meanings of “translate” are “to bear, carry, or move from one place, position, etc., to another; transfer” (Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language [New York: Random House, Gramercy Books, 1996], 2011). 117.  Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: ἀ e Experience of Occupation, 1941– 44 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 238–39. See also Stavroulakis and DeVinney, Jewish Sites and Synagogues of Greece, 176–77; Michael Molho and Joseph Nehama, ἀ e Destruction of Greek Jewry (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1965); Joshua Eli Plaut, Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913–1983: Patterns of Jewish Survival in the Greek Provinces Before and after the Holocaust (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). 118.  Only contextually, in this specific translation, can I speak of pozava as “there was.” Pozar can also mean “to put down.” See Elli Kohen and Dahlia Kohen-Gordon, Ladino-English/English-Ladino Concise Encyclopedic Dictionary (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2000). Here pozava is something like “settled on,” which creates the mirror image of the Hebrew: the silence descends and the sounds ascend. 119.  This is also an allusion to Leah Goldberg’s poem about immigrants in Tel Aviv, “Tel Aviv 1935,” using the same verb nin’atzu. 120.  Note that in the first verse kayades is spelled with a final s, while in the seventh it appears with a final z: kayadez. The indecision is likely due to the absence of a complete standard unification of the varied Ladino spellings, which are generally phonetic. The National Ladino Authority in Israel and the journal Akí Yerushalaim have suggested a spelling system that is now used as the standard by different Ladino groups, but variations still occur. 121.  Erika Perahia, director of the Jewish Museum in Thessaloníki, notes that this is a reference to the city’s port, which is adjacent to Eleftherias Square. 122. In 1845, Raffael Uziel published a biweekly journal in Izmir, Turkey, the Sha’arei Mizrah (Gates of the East), which according to David Bunis laid the foundation for what he calls “Modern Judezmo”: “Uziel westernized, modernized, and secularized his language by reducing its Eastern elements—the centuries-old Hebrew-Aramaic and Turkish-Balkan components—to a bare minimum. He also introduced scores of replacement terms, supplementary vocabulary, and elements of grammar and syntax from what came to be considered the more ‘civilized’ Western languages, such as Italian and French (e.g. blu, blue, from the Italian blu and/or the French bleu, replacing Turkishorigin maví)” (Bunis, “Modernization of Judezmo and Hakitia (Judeo-Spanish),” in ἀe Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, ed. Reeva Spector Simon et al. [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], 122–23). 123.  See Shimon Zilberman, ἀ e Compact Up-to-Date English-Hebrew / HebrewEnglish Dictionary (Jerusalem: Zilberman, 1995), 280. 124. Ibid. 125.  Shmuel Trigano, “La mémoire du peuple disparu,” in La mémoire sépharade, ed. Hélène Trigano and Shmuel Trigano (Paris: Éditions In Press, 2000), 18. 126. See Un grito en el silencio: La poesía sobre el Holocausto en lengua sefardí. Estudio y antología, ed. Shmuel Refael (Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2008), 27.

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127.  Trigano, “Mémoire du peuple disparu,”18. 128. Ibid., 19. 129.  Grito en el silencio, ed. Refael, 27. 130. Ibid., 25, referring to Hanna Yablonka’s “Tsayarim nitsolei shoah be-yisra’el: Hebet nosafla-shetiqa she-lo haita” (Holocaust Survivor Painters in Israel: A Further Aspect of the Silence That Never Was), in Ha-Shoah: Historia ve-zikaron, ed. Shmuel Almog et al. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001). 131.  Grito en el silencio, ed. Refael, 21. 132.  See Renée Levine Melamed, An Ode to Salonika: ἀ e Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 133.  See Avner Perez, Siniza i fumo: Siklo de poemas dedikado a la memoria de Saloniko (Jerusalem: Sefarad, 1986). 134.  Moshe ’ha-Elion, Be-machanot ha-mavet / En los kampos de la muerte, ed. and trans. Avner Perez (Ma’aleh Adumin: Mekhon Ma’aleh Adumin Institute, 2000); ­Clarisse Nicoïdski, Cara boz i locura, ed. and trans. Avner Perez (Ma’aleh Adumim: Ma’aleh Adumim Institute, 2006). See also ’ha-Elion’s memoir of World War II, now published in Ladino, Las angustias del enferno: Las pasadias de un djidio de Saloniki en los kampos de eksterminasion almanes Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Melk i Ebensee (Beersheba: Sentro Moshe David Gaon de Kultura Djudeo-Espanyola, 2007). 135.  Steven Bowman, “Jews in War Time Greece,” Jewish Social Studies 48, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 60n24. On Sephardim, specifically Greek Jewry, and the Shoah, see Solomon Gaon and Mitchell Serels, Sephardim and the Holocaust (New York: J. E. Safra Institute of Sephardic Studies / Yeshiva University, 1987), with a new expanded edition titled Del fuego: Sephardim and the Holocaust (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1995); An Introduction to Literature on the Holocaust in Greece, ed. Robert Bedford (New York: Sephardic Historical Committee / Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 1994); Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece; Isaac Kabeli, “The Resistance of the Greek Jews,” Social Sciences 8 (1953): 281–88; Alexander Kitroeff, “The Jews in Greece, 1941–1944: Eyewitness Accounts,” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 12, no. 3 (1985): 5–32; Daniel Carpi, “Yehudei Yevan be-Tekufot ha-Shoah [Jews of Greece at the Time of the Shoah] (1941–1943),” in Me’az ve’ad Atah (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1984), 107–35; Joshua Eli Plaut, Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913–1983: Patterns of Jewish Survival in the Greek Provinces Before and After the Holocaust (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). Titles partially devoted to Greece and the Shoah are Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York: Knopf, 2005); Bea Lewkowicz, ἀ e Jewish Community of Salonika: History, Memory, Identity (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006); K. E. Fleming, Greece: A Jewish History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Among other testimonies there is Erika Kounio-Amarilio’s From ἀ essaloniki to Auschwitz and Back: Memories of a Survivor from ἀ essaloniki (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000). Some testimonies and translations of creative literary works can be found in And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust, ed. and trans. Isaac Jack Lévy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); and Grito en el silencio, ed. Refael.

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 2 AND 3  189

136.  Cf. Ronit Lentin, Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000); id., Memory and Forgetting: Gendered Counter Narratives of Silence in the Relations Between Israeli Zionism and the Shoah (San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy: European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre, 2001). CHAPTER 3. ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE LANGUAGE /  ARCHAEOLO GY OF THE SELF 1.  Gershon Shaked, “A Response,” Prooftexts 21, no. 3 (2001): 334. 2.  Gelman has been awarded the Mondello Prize for Poetry (Italy, 1980), the Lerici Pea Prize (Italy, 1980), the Boris Vian Prize (Argentina, 1987), the National Poetry Prize (Argentina, 1997), the Juan Rulfo International Literary Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature (Mexico, 2000), the Rodolfo Walsh Journalism Prize (Argentina, 2002), the José Lezama Lima Poetry Prize (Cuba, 2003), the IberoAmerican Poetry Prize Ramón López Velarde (Mexico, 2004), the IberoAmerican Poetry Prize Reina Sofía (Spain, 2004), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Chile, 2005), and the Cervantes Prize (the most important award given to a Hispanic writer; Spain, 2007). His works have been translated into over fourteen languages. 3.  Morris Dickstein, “A Response,” Prooftexts 21, no. 3 (2001): 325. 4.  Bifrontalismo and multifacetismo are rather unusual words in Spanish, as are their equivalents in English. 5.  León Pérez, “El area de sefardización secundaria: America Latina,” in Actas del primer simposio de estudios sefardíes, ed. Iacob M. Hassán (Madrid: Instituto Arias Montano, 1970), 142. 6. Ibid., 143n1. 7.  On the use of Pérez’s idea of reserfadización to read Latin American Sephardic authors (ibid.), see Edna Aizenberg’s works, most recently, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff, and Argentine-Jewish Writing (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002), chap. 2. There is a now vast collection of works on the visions and uses of Sepharad, among which we can count Ismar Schorsch’s 1956 “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” Ivan Marcus’s 1985 “Beyond the Sephardic Mystique, and, in the context of Latin America, the announcement of Sephardism or Neo-Sephardism at the 1964 Primer simposio de estudios sefardíes, Itic Croitoru Rotbaum’s De Sefarad al neosefardismo (Bogotá: Editorial Kelly, 1967) and texts by Leonardo Senkman, Edna Aizenberg, and Darrell Lockhart, to name a few. More recently, see Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, ed. Yael Halevi-Wise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), and John Effron’s German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015) 8.  Pérez clarifies in a note: “I am not referring to the works of the Sephardim, but rather to the Sephardim as works, that is, results of a given setting. . . . the secondary Sephardization will create new Sephardic types according to the variables that intervene in the American process and in the present state of the Jewish people in the world” (“El area de sefardización secundaria,” 146n2). Contesting Attias’s position that “Sephardism

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is a historic idea, and we cannot create new Sephardim,” Pérez proposes to “at least, broaden our criteria: to see the Sepharadi as a process, to see history evolving and at the same time, to see a perspective of future in relation to our past” (411). 9.  See, e.g., the discussion between Camhy, Besso, Révah, Bernadete, Attias, Correa, Molho, Pérez Castro, Bentata, and Levitte in Actas del primer simposio de estudios sefardíes, ed. Iacob M. Hassán (Madrid: Instituto Arias Montano, 1970), 414–26. Significant is Antonio Quilis’s position that “a long life to Judeo-Spanish” could be attained in two ways: “the systematic recompilation of all the remaining linguistic material,” and “fomenting the teaching of modern Spanish among the Sephardic colonies” (232). 10.  Manuel Criado de Val ,“Conservación del judeo-español por medio de versiones literarias,” in Actas del primer simposio de estudios sefardíes, ed. Iacob M. Hassán (­Madrid: Instituto Arias Montano, 1970), 278. 11.  Pérez, “El area de sefardización secundaria,” 145. 12.  Juan Gelman, “Escolio,” in Dibaxu, (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994), 7. 13.  José Ángel Leyva, “Entrevista a Juan Gelman: 80 años de vida,” La Otra: Revista de Poesía, 2001, www.scribd.com/doc/30084799/Entrevista-a-Juan-Gelman (accessed May 24, 2015). 14.  The tango is a typical local dance form that sprang up among the workers who came to Buenos Aires in internal and external migrations. It is considered the expression of the soul and spirit of the porteños, as the citizens of Buenos Aires call themselves (and by extension, of the Argentine). More broadly, tango is also a musical and poetic genre, with a large and respected corpus of poetry—tango lyrics—the idiom of which has helped shape the vernacular in Buenos Aires. 15.  Castellano was the name chosen for the language spoken in Argentina after intense debates ca. 1930, with the participation of the poetic avant garde, academics, and politicians, including figures such as Amado Alonso and Jorge Luis Borges. Español (Spanish) was understood to be the name of the national language of Spain. As Argentina, along with many other recently independent American nations, sought to establish its political and cultural independence from the former metropolis, a different name was deemed necessary to refer to its own specific national language. Castellano harkens back to the original settlers, who spoke Castilian, inasmuch as they came from the kingdom of Castile, but, as Amado Alonso argues, the name does not necessarily suggest “a man from Castile” and does not evoke citizenship, in the way español does. Castellano eventually prevailed in Argentina over español and the more ambiguous, or vague, “­national language” (idioma nacional). See Amado Alonso, Castellano, español, idioma nacional: Historia espiritual de tres nombres (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y L ­ etras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1936), esp. 145–58, and Gustavo Ferrari and Ezequiel Gallo, La Argentina del ochenta al centenario (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1980). 16.  Gelman, “Escolio,” in Dibaxu, 7. 17.  “[T]he presence of archaic terms and phrases is one of the most salient characteristics of Judeo-Spanish due to the fact that the Sephardim were separated from Spain and thus conserved words and expressions that were eventually eliminated from the Castilian lexicon” (Tracy Harris, Death of a Language: ἀ e History of Judeo-Spanish [New-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  191

ark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1994], 81–82). “Distance from Spain, geographically even more than chronologically, was one of the most important factors in the increasing divergence between Ladino and Castilian Spanish,” Moshe Lazar writes in “Ladino,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, CD-Rom ed. (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997). 18.  See Haïm Vidal Sephiha, L’agonie des judéo-espagnols (Paris: Entente, 1977) and Le judéo-espagnol (Paris: Entente, 1986); and Aron Rodrigue, “The Ottoman Diaspora: The Rise and Fall of Ladino Literary Culture,” in ἀ e Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 863–85. 19.  Juan Gelman Com/posiciones, in id., De palabra (Madrid: Visor, 1994), 452–512 (453), and Interrupciones 2, 149–212 (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1998). The use of lower case and the expressive ungrammatical punctuation are all Gelman’s. 20.  The short-lived Movimiento Peronista Montonero (MPM; Peronist Montonero Movement) was an armed leftist guerrilla movement that aimed to combat the Argentine government and, later, the military dictatorship. The MPM was a strange mix of Marxism, Catholicism, and Peronism (named for Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón [1946–55; 1973–74]). After the coup by General Jorge Rafael Videla in 1976, the MPM became progressively militarized and was unable to foresee the duration and scope of the damage inflicted by the military dictatorship. Juan Gelman was a member of the traditional Communist Party, of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR), which he joined in 1967, and then later of the Montoneros (after the MPM merged with the FAR in 1973), but resigned in 1979 in strong disagreement over the organization’s decision to go underground and abandon the democratic struggle. Gelman’s departure from the MPM created the singular situation in which he was condemned to death by both the Triple A (the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, a clandestine death squad organization active during the rule of President Isabel Martínez de Perón [1974–76]) and by his former Montonero comrades. See Roberto Mero, Conversaciones con Juan ­Gelman: Contraderrota, Montoneros y l a revolución perdida (Buenos Aires: Contrapunto, 1987). 21.  Gelman quoted in Pablo Montanaro and Ture (Rubén Salvador), Palabra de ­Gelman (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1998), 141. 22.  Lunfardo arose from the encounter of gauchos who left their original rural homes in the nineteenth century and moved to the capital with the masses of immigrants to Argentina, who also ended up in the suburbs. Its structure is based on the replacement of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and interjections in Castellano by other terms whose meaning has been modified. Such terms come from Germanía (jargon or cant; language of delinquents), caló (Gypsy slang or cant), Italian and its dialects, French, Portuguese, English, some Indian (Native American) languages, and even from Spanish, its language base, but then their meanings in lunfardo have little to do with their original Spanish meanings. The Diccionario de la lengua española of the Real Academia Española defines lunfardo as (1) an Argentine word no longer in use, originally meaning “pickpocket, thief,” and (2) “Jargon originally used by the low life of the city of Buenos Aires and its surroundings. In particular, its use later on became widespread among

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the other social classes and throughout the country” (21st ed., Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1992). José Gobello, one of the greatest authorities in the subject, offers a somewhat loose definition of lunfardo that stresses its oral character, while maintaining its inclusiveness and dynamism: “Vocabulary made up of words of different origins used by the people of Buenos Aires in opposition to the common speech” (Gobello, Aproximación al lunfardo [Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Universidad Católica Argentina, 1996]). Earlier Gobello had written, “We no longer call the lunfardo the frustratingly esoteric language of the delinquents but rather that which the porteño [Buenos Aires native] speaks when he begins to feel comfortable” (Gobello and Luciano Payet, Breve diccionario lunfardo [Buenos Aires: A. Peña Lillo, 1959], “Nota bene”). 23.  See “De la infancia al Pan Duro,” in Montanaro and Ture, Palabra de Gelman, 13–18. 24.  He is attracted by “on the one hand, the sounds, and, on the other hand, the mystery of some incomprehensible words” (Montanaro and Ture, Palabra de Gelman, 16–17). 25.  On the relationship between biography and poetic creation, I turn to the linguist and poetry scholar Roman Jakobson. Answering a question about “the role of biography in literary studies,” Jakobson comments on his interest in the lives of Mayakovski, Pushkin, and the Czech poets Mácha and Erben: The question naturally arose of the internal relation between life and creativity. I also saw that it was necessary to oppose this question to the vulgar conception of poetic fiction as a mechanical superstructure on reality, as well as to the equally vulgar dogma that I call “anti-biographism,” which rejects any relation between art and its personal and social background. I attempted to demonstrate, using the example of [the nineteenth-century Czech romantic poet Karel Hynek] Mácha’s verses, diaries, and letters, that there is no precise delineation between biographical “truth” and poetic “fiction.’”

Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska, Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 144. 26.  See María del Carmen Sillato, Juan Gelman: las estrategias de la otredad: Heteronimia, intertextualidad, traducción (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 1996), and María Rosa Olivera-Williams, “Citas y comentarios de Juan Gelman o la (re)creación amorosa de la patria en el exilio,” Inti: Revista de literatura hispánica 1, no. 29 (1989): 78–88 . As Olivera-Williams and Sillato point out, two traditions are combined here: those of late symbolist and modernist European poetry, as described by Hugo Friedrich in ἀ e Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), “which promotes the ‘dehumanization’ of the poet’s ‘I’ and its detachment from the voice that speaks in the poem,” and that initiated by Walt Whitman, “in which the poet assumes a collective voice and the lyrical ‘I’ expresses many different voices” (Sillato, Juan Gelman, 13). I believe that Ezra Pound and his collages and citations, in the attempt to speak “the tales of the tribe,” and César Vallejo’s experiments with speech contributed to the mix from which Gelman’s esthetical option in his treatment of the lyrical “I” and its relation to the

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“other” developed. See also Antonio Carreño, La dialéctica de la identidad en la poesía contemporánea: La persona, la máscara (Madrid: Gredos, 1982). 27. Sillato, Juan Gelman, 11. 28.  Sillato (ibid.) speaks of “ use of heteronyms” (heteronimia), rather than personae. 29.  In Mario Benedetti, Los poetas comunicantes (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, 1972), 229. 30. See A Bertold Brecht Reference Companion, ed. Siegfried Mews (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977); Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils. A Critical Study of the Man, His Work, and His Opinions (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980); Eric Bentley, Bentley on Brecht (New York: Applause, 1998). 31.  See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (1955; 2nd rev. ed., The Hague: Mouton, 1965); Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971); Tzvetan Todorov, ἀ éorie de la littérature: textes des formalistes russes (Paris: Seuil, 1965, 2001). 32.  In Jorge Boccanera, “La cólera de las palabras,” Cuadernos de crisis 33 (1988): 28–29. 33.  In Lilián Uribe, “Juan Gelman: Palabras como fuego” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1990), 32–33. When I mention the margins of this center of power from which language speaks, I include children, workers, immigrants, impoverished people, political prisoners, and other groups whose language and discourse Gelman tries to incorporate into his poetry. Gelman seeks to potentialize the expressive capacity of the different synchronic strata of the language, while working against automatization, habit, and entropy. Borrowing Victor Shklovski’s metaphor, I would say that Gelman seeks to “make a stone stony” (Shklovski, “Art as a Device,” in Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971]). 34.  Uribe, “Juan Gelman: Palabras como fuego,” analyzes these devices in detail, as well as the “strategies of retextualization” of San Juan de la Cruz and Santa Teresa de Ávila employed by Gelman in Citas y comentarios. 35.  See, e.g., Leyva, “Entrevista a Juan Gelman.” 36.  Octavio Paz, “¿Poesía Latinoamericana?” in El signo y el garabato (Mexico City: Joaquim Mortiz, 1975), 155–57. Also cited in Uribe, “Juan Gelman: Palabras como fuego,” 75–76. 37. In Citas, Gelman rewrites texts by Santa Teresa only. The fragments by Santa ­Teresa with which he works here and in Comentarios are taken from the following works: Camino de perfección, Conceptos del amor de Diós, and Moradas. In Comentarios, Gelman works with texts by many more authors: not only San Juan de la Cruz, Santa ­Teresa de Ávila, and Saint Paul, but also Isaiah, Ezekiel, King David, Zephaniah, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Baudelaire, and the tango lyricists Roberto Firpo, Homero Manzi, Carlos Gardel, Pascual Contursi, Homero Expósito, Cátulo Castillo, González Castillo, Carlos Bahr, Alfredo Le Pera, and Cotinina. In some poems Gelman makes amusing combinations, such as, for example, of King David and Cátulo Castillo in “Comentario XLVI,” Ezekiel and Le Pera in “Comentario LVII,” and Homero Manzi and

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Saint Paul in “­Comentario LXIV.” The texts by San Juan that Gelman rewrites in Comentarios are “Cántico espiritual” (Spiritual Song) and “Llama de amor viva” (The Living Flame of Love). 38.  “I would prefer to be called a reactionary of the language, since each and every day I long to return to the origins of the language, there where the word is still in the depths of the soul,” Guimarães Rosa told Günter Lorenz in an interview (cited in Lorenz, Diálogo com a América Latina [São Paulo: Editora Pedagógica e Universitária, 1973]). 39.  See Miguel Gaya and Javier Cófreces, “La poesía es una e indivisible” (interview), Brecha, September 9, 1988, 30–31. 40.  Gelman quoted in María del Carmen Rodríguez, “Entrevista con Juan Gelman,” Cuaderno de Crisis 33 (1988): 57–58. 41.  Ángel Leyva, “Entrevista a Juan Gelman.” 42.  See E. Ann Matter, ἀ e Voice of My Beloved: ἀ e Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Arthur Green, “The Song of Songs in Early Jewish Mysticism,” Orim: A Jewish Journal at Yale 2, no. 2 (1987): 49ff.; Sarah Kamin, Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991); S. Lieberman, “Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim,” in Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1960), 118–26 (app. D); Ann Astell, ἀ e Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 43.  In “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs,” AJS Review 26, no. 1 (2002): 1–52, Arthur Green writes that “what would be later called tropological readings of some verses, referring them to a dialogue between Christ and the individual soul rather than the collective ecclesia, are already to be found in Origen and elsewhere in pre-medieval Christian interpretation” (5). He also affirms that tropological readings did not develop as much within Judaism, since the allegorical reading of the Song as “the most sublime expression of the love between God and Israel . . . became the single and indeed the only permitted way of reading the Song of Songs among the Jews for quite some centuries” (3). Even though Green identifies in the Hebrew love poetry of the Spanish Golden Age images of the Song that speak of “the poet’s or the soul’s longing for God” (9), which might point to a tropological reading, he insists that these poems are allegorical. In them, according to Green, the figure of the “beloved,” with whom the poet identifies, is also the “Community of Israel, the poetic embodiment of the Jewish people” (9), thus equating the poet’s soul with the “collective soul of Israel” (10). Green adds: “the Ashkenzaic poetic tradition, more conservative in many ways than the ­Sephardic, remained entirely faithful to the collectivist interpretation of the Song that it had received from earlier generations of poets and Midrashic exegetes” (10). Despite Green’s focus on liturgical or religious poetry, I would like to note that the Song is also an important model for medieval Hebrew secular love poetry, both hetero- and homoerotic. See Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 44.  Eduardo Giordano (interview), El porteño 57 (1986): 74–77. I want to point out how similar this language is to that used by Arthur Green to refer to the “images of be-

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trayal, wounded love, and abandonment” in Ibn Gabirol’s poetry. Spanish Hebrew poets provided Gelman with the texts he would “rewrite” in his following book, Com/posiciones. See Green, “Shekhinah,” 9n39. 45.  Júlio Cortázar, “De gladiadores y niños arrojados al río” (text of speech delivered at the Universidad de Veracruz, México), reproduced in Crisis, April 1986, 40–42. 46.  In “Lo judío y la literatura castellana,” Hispamerica 62 (1993): 83–90, Gelman himself refers to the Converso origins of Santa Teresa de Ávila, establishes a parallel between her “Moradas” and the palaces of the Heykhalot hymns, and points out that her name, Teresa, anagrammatically hides the name Ester. 47. In Spanish Christian Cabala: ἀ e Works of Luis de León, Santa Teresa de Jesús, and San Juan de la Cruz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), Catherine Swietlicki examines these three figures and their relation to Kabbalah. See also Beatriz Oberländer Niselkowska, “Relación entre la cábala judía y el misticismo cristiano en España: ‘Pardés’ y ‘Shejiná,’” in Actas de las jornadas de estudios sefardíes (Cáceres, Spain: Universidad de Extremadura, Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación, 1980), 169–75. 48.  That Jewish, Christian, and Sufi forms of mysticism influenced one another is generally conceded, but not all the scholars are as enthusiastic as Swietlicki about the influence that Spanish Jewish Kabbalah might have exerted on the mystics of the Spanish Renacimiento. In his review of her book, “Swietlicki’s ‘Spanish Christian Cabala,’” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 78, nos. 3–4 (January–April 1988): 310–13, Moshe Idel, for example, recognizes the powerful influence of the Kabbalistic theosophico-theurgical hermeneutics of Castilla and Aragón on the Italian Renaissance, but considers Swiet­ licki’s assessment of the Spanish mystics an exaggeration. 49.  The idea of God’s exile in the world is expressed here via the dominant metaphor of the lover and the beloved in erotic-mystical language developed from mystical and allegorical readings of the Song of Songs, which Gelman, following his interest in “woman” as a poetic topos, combines with the diction of the tango. 50.  Commenting on the mystics’ “urge for self-expression,” Gershom Scholem notes: “They continuously and bitterly complain of the utter inadequacy of words to express their true feelings, but, for all that, they glory in them; they indulge in the rhetoric and never weary of trying to express the inexpressible in words” (Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [New York: Schocken Books, 1946], 15. 51.  Gelman, statement made at a meeting of Jewish Latin American writers in July 1992, cited in Sillato, Juan Gelman, 92. 52.  Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D., ἀ e Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (Washington, DC: ICS Studies, 1991), 501, translate it as “Who will grant that he who gave me a beginning might destroy me?” 53.  In “Mystico-Erotic Love in ‘O Living Flame of Love,’” Revista Hispánica ­Moderna 37 (1972–73): 253–61, Willis Barnstone argues that “San Juan speaks in the voice of a woman, for by theological convention the soul (anima) is feminine and seeks union with God, canonically a masculine figure. If the soul were masculine (animus), it would be awkward, the immediate love experience homosexual rather than heterosexual. Hence the convention of anima.” I am considering this “awkward” possibility.

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54.  In Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, ἀ e Song of Songs: A New Translation (New York: Random House, 1995), 30, Ariel Bloch cites biblical verses used by both rabbis and Church Fathers to support “the Old Testament metaphor of God’s marriage to Israel and the New Testament image of Christ as a Bridegroom”: Isa. 54:5, Jer. 2:2, Hosea 2:14–20; Matt. 9:15, 25:1–13; John 3:29. 55.  Barnstone, “Mystico-Erotic Love,” 255. 56.  “Heart” is less physical, more emotional and abstract. “Breast” literally translates seno, conserving both its meaning as “the bosom regarded as the seat of thoughts and feelings” (American College Dictionary) and its physical and erotic suggestiveness. Barnstone’s translation as “breasts” only emphasizes physicality and eroticism—­ comprehensible, since he is invested in reading the text “as common language” (254) and “acknowledg[ing] the sexuality in the poems” (255). 57.  Barnstone explains this change from first to third person: “This is appropriate, for in this stanza of extreme eroticism, San Juan steps back, as it were, from the persona of the girl and seems to participate as both man and woman in the exploration” (259). 58.  On the verse “tear through the veil of this sweet encounter,” Barnstone writes, using his own translation “break the membrane of our sweet union”: “As the penis wounds her in her deepest center, she asks her lover dramatically to pierce the last separation, the hymen, separating them” (257). On the third stanza, discussing the “lamps of fire,” Barnstone argues: “It’s the male image of the penis examining ‘the lowest caverns of the sense,’ las profundas cavernas del sentido, where the caverns are clearly the vagina” (259). 59.  I am referring to the process of cauterizing a wound in order to cure it. San Juan uses this image to speak of the love of God and the effects of such a love upon the soul, an image that coincides with the metaphor of sexual penetration and orgasm. I quote from San Juan’s own exegesis to his “Living Flame of Love”: Yet there is a difference between this loving cautery and the cautery produced by material fire. The wound left by material fire is only curable by other medicines, whereas the wound effected by the cautery of love is incurable through medicine; for the very cautery that causes it, cures it, and by curing it causes it. As often as the cautery of love touches the wound of love, it causes a deeper wound of love, and thus the more it wounds, the more it cures and heals. The more wounded the lover, the healthier the lover is, and the cure caused by love is to wound and inflict wound upon wound, to such an extent that the entire soul is dissolved into a wound of love. And now all cauterized and made one wound of love, it is completely healthy in love, for it is transformed in love.

Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 659–60. 60.  The Hebraic tradition brings in the feminine—“her”—but the Spanish “queers” the biblical image, making it possible for it to be a “him.” 61.  In the prophetic biblical books, Zion/Jerusalem may be depicted as a mother, a wife, and a lover. In several books she is represented as an unfaithful woman, to convey that the people of Israel have strayed from God. In In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Fawcett Columbine,

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1992), 175, Tikva Frymer-Kensky reviews images of Jerusalem as a woman as they appear in the Prophets. Important instances of the metaphor “land as a woman” can be found in Isa. 1:21, 23:15–18, 54:1–8, 57:6–9, 61:10–11, 62:4–5 and 12, 66:9–10; Jer. 2:1–3, 20–5 and 32–37, 3:1–13 and 20, 13:26–27, 22:20–23, 30:14–17, 31:1–5, 20–21; Ezek. 16:2–63, 23:1–49; Hosea 1:2–9, 3–20, 3:1–5; Mic. 1:7–16; Nah. 3:4–12; Zeph. 3:11–12, 14–18; Mal. 2:11 and 14. 62.  In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, and Lakoff and Mark Turner, More ἀ an Cool Reason: A F ield Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), Lakoff lists and discusses the “metaphorical system” “LAND (CITY, EARTH) AS BELOVED WOMAN.” On the “unfaithful wife” figure in the Hebrew Bible, see Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). “Rewriting the Woman as Land in Esther Raab’s Poetry” (MS) by Chana Kronfeld is a topical study of the implications of the use of the metaphor “land as a woman” by a contemporary female poet writing in a female voice. 63.  In two other books, Carta abierta (Public Letter) (1980), addressed to his son, then “disappeared,” and Carta a mi madre (Letter to My Mother) (1989), written upon receiving, in exile, news of her death, Gelman uses and thematizes a feminized ­language—escaping the language of the state, of authority. In one book he is the father who strives to protect his son, enveloping him in tenderness. While attempting to give the text and the language maternal dimension, the father/speaker also changes into the role of son of his son. In the other book, he is the son who, in an expression of love, transforms into a mother to his mother. See Enrique Foffani, “La lengua salvada,” Lateinamerika-Studien 36: 183–202 64.  La Biblia de las Américas (Anaheim, CA: Foundation Publications, 1997); my trans. 65.  Jews are repeatedly identified with exile or Diaspora: the constant confusion derives perhaps from the fact that the Hebrew words galut (banishment or exile) and golah (diaspora) are usually translated the same way. Such identification has produced attractive tropes and concepts (Jew = exile = writing) but is not particularly sensitive to the basic needs and real-life conditions of real Jews. On the important theoretical distinction between exile and Diaspora, see John Durham Peters, “Exile, Nomadism, ­Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon,” in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (London: Routledge, 1999), 17–41. Chana Kron­feld also discusses the use of the Jew as a trope in modernist literature, and the consequent denial of “the literality of Jewish cultural discourse” in On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 230. In “Modernism and Exile: A View from the Margins,” in Insider/ Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Michael Gluzman writes about the “double conflation of modernism and exile, of exile and Jewishness” (232), “calling into question the Eurocentric/Western view of exile as freedom” (249). The allegorization of the Jew in the works of theorists and philosophers is discussed by Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin in “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of

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Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993), in the context of advocating the diasporic position as the ethical Jewish one. In “Scattered Seeds: A Dialogue of Diasporas,” in Insider/­Outsider, ed. Biale et al., Michael Galchinsky discusses the Boyarins’ and other texts in his treatment of Jewish American “exceptionalism” against the background of Jewish diasporas and in relation to postcolonial theory. See also Maeera Y. Schreiber, “The End of Exile: Jewish Identity and Its Diasporic Poetics,” PMLA 113, no. 2 (1998): 273–87, where the author “means to trouble the relation between Jewish identity and the problematic marker of exile within the contexts of cultural and postcolonial theory.” 66.  Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 9. 67.  Robert Alter notes that the Book of Psalms has a clear anthological character, having been composed over at least five centuries, and encompassing different poetic genres, with borrowed “images, phrases, or even whole sequences of lines from the Syro-Palestine pagan psalmodic tradition.” See Alter, “Psalms,” in ἀ e Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. id. and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 244. 68. The Reina-Valera Antigua gives: “Mi lengua se pegue a mi paladar, / Si de ti no me acordare” (www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+137&version=RVA); ReinaValera 1960 reads: “Mi lengua se pegue a mi paladar, / Si de ti no me acordare” (www. biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+137&version=RVR1960), and Reina-Valera 1995 has: “Mi lengua se pegue a mi paladar, / si de ti no me acuerdo” (www.biblegateway .com/passage/?search=Psalm+137&version=RVR1995) (all accessed May 16, 2015). 69.  The dictatorship and its murderers and dead are evoked in several of Gelman’s books but are not directly mentioned in the poetry collections I am discussing here, namely, Citas y comentarios, Com/posiciones, and Dibaxu. 70.  See Ezrahi, Booking Passage, and Gluzman, “Modernism and Exile,” in Insider/ Outsider, ed. Biale et al. 71.  Ezrahi writes that “the pleonastic ‘there,’ repeated in the third verse ‘there we sat and cried as we remembered Zion’, calls attention to itself by its very redundancy; syntactically superfluous, ‘there’ defines exile as the place that is always elsewhere” (Ezrahi, Booking Passage, 9). 72.  Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, Mempo Giardinelli, Luiza Futuransky, and Mario Szichman are among the Argentine authors who remained creative in exile. 73.  Other European and Latin American romantic poets used biblical images and characters in their texts without necessarily being “judaized.” 74.  Gelman did not know Hebrew and admitted as much to María del Carmen Sillato in a 1992 interview. See Sillato, Juan Gelman, 148n13. 75.  Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami (ca. 760–815) was a lyric poet at the court of Harun al-Rashid, the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad (786–808). Considered one of the greatest poets of the Abbasid period, Abu Nuwas celebrates the love of wine and boys in his poetry. He appears as a character in A ἀ ousand and One Nights. See O Tribe ἀ at Loves Boys: ἀ e Poetry of Abu Nuwas, trans. Hakim Bey (Amsterdam: Entimos Press, 1993), and Philip F. Kennedy, ἀ e Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and

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the Literary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Ramprasad Sen (1718–1778) was a Bengali Hindu mystical poet who worshipped the Divine in its female aspect as Kali. See Ramprasad Sen, Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair: Selected Poems to the Mother Goddess, trans. Leonard Nathan and Clinton Seeley (Boulder, CO: Great Eastern, 1982); and Malcolm McLean, Devoted to the Goddess: ἀ e Life and Work of Ramprasad (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998). 76.  “Exergo,” in Com/posiciones, in Interrupciones 2 (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1998), 153. The ungrammatical punctuation is Gelman’s. 77.  Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, s.v. 78.  “These texts . . . utilize material existing elsewhere in this corpus, allowing words, phrases, names, places, and themes to reverberate through evocation and reuse” (Jonathan P. Decter, Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007], 11). 79.  “Traducciones I,” in Juan Gelman, Cólera Buey (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994), 137–77, contains “Los poemas de John Wendell (1965–68)” and “Los poemas de Dom Pero.” “Traducciones II,” ibid., 191–210, has “Los poemas de Yamanokuchi Ando” (1968). See also Gelman, Los poemas de Sidney West (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994), a volume that consists entirely of laments; its subtitle is “Traducciones III (1968–1969).” 80.  Gelman, “Exergo,” in Com/posiciones, 153. 81.  I do not say “Sephardic” here because that is a category linked to the experience of exile and refers to Spanish Jews after the expulsion in 1492 and their descendants. In Sephardim, ἀ e Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 8, Paloma Días-Mas prefers to call “those who lived in the Iberian Peninsula before the expulsion . . . Spanish Jews . . . whose culture, when expressed in Hebrew, is ­Hebreo-Spanish or Hispano-Hebrew” (8). But she also leaves out of this classification “the first generation of those expelled, who more accurately might be considered Spanish Jews in exile than true Sephardim, because their sociocultural milieu had not yet produced the changes derived from having lived isolated from the Iberian Peninsula.” See also Raymon Renard, Sepharad: Le monde et la langue judéo-espagnole des Séphardim (Mons, Belgium: Annales universitaires de Mons, 1966). However, it is clear that such categorizations are not unanimous, because in his attempt to “retrace the history of the Sephardim, since their installation in the Iberian Peninsula and out of Spain” (11), Renard speaks of “the vicissitudes of the Sephardim from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries (19). One common criterion that Díaz-Mas and Renard share— and they are not alone—is the centrality of the linguistic element in the definition of the Sephardi. Díaz-Mas affirms that in her work she “only consider[s] marginally the Jews of Spanish origin who, throughout the centuries, have assimilated culturally to the countries that received them, losing the Spanish language” (9). So while many of the descendants of Spanish Jews who no longer speak Judeo-Spanish are excluded from the category of Sephardim, others are not included even if all they have is mastery of the language: “merely speaking Spanish is not sufficient to automatically identify a Jew as a Sephardi,” Díaz-Mas observes (9). And she peremptorily delimits the Sephardic identity she covers in her book: “Only the Spanish-speaking Jew who is

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also the descendant of Spanish Jews in exile is a Sephardi” (9). In the same vein of “no language, no appartenance [membership],” Renard seems to agree that only Spanishspeaking Jews [he means Judeo-Spanish] can be Sephardim, and ordinary hispanophone Jews cannot. But, through the language, Renard leaves room for inclusion of others who are not direct descendants of exiled Spanish Jews: “I have deliberately given more importance to the linguistic aspect than the racial one. I counted among them [the Sephardim] the Jews of different rites who became so integrated into the Spanish Jewish communities that they adopted their language” (11). 82.  ἀ e Jerusalem Bible, trans. Harold Fisch (Jerusalem: Koren, 1992), 866. Note that Gelman had already opened Citas with a request for kisses in his rewriting of Santa Teresa: “. . . que me besés con besos de tu boca [ . . . that you kiss me with kisses from your mouth]” (Gelman, De palavra, 259). 83. Gelman, Dibaxu, 7. 84.  Geneviève Fabry, “El diálogo interlingüístico en Dibaxu (1994) de Juan Gelman,” in Convergencias e interferencias: Escribir des los borde(r)s, ed. Rita de Maeseneer (Valencia, Spain: eXcultura, 2001), 93–102. 85.  Cassell’s Spanish Dictionary translates it as “blubber lip” and “(med.) proud flesh” (1978, 98). In Lus ojus las manus la boca, her book of poems in Ladino, ­Clarisse Nicoïdski uses the word bezu for “kiss,” and labios for “lips.” Labios is seldom used nowadays, since mushos, which originally denoted “thick lips” (like lippe in French), has gradually replaced it. I thank Haïm Vidal Sephiha for supplying this etymological information via e-mail. 86. See Cassell’s Spanish Dictionary (1978), 94. “It is true, batidero/u derives from batir/beat (the heart), but with the forms in -dero being generally used to designate manias, or negative habits, batidero may even express bad temper,” Haïm Vidal Sephiha writes (personal correspondence). 87.  “In the Judeo-Spanish version, the trembling of time gives way to a dimension of agon, or struggle, absent from the text in Castellano” (Fabry, “El diálogo interlingüístico,” 96.) Although I reach many of the same conclusions as Fabry does about these opening verses, I disagree with her rendering of bezo as “lip” in “Sefardí” (in which she follows Ana Riaño) and do not subscribe either to the view that in Dibaxu there is a “repeated claim that despite (or by means of) their co-substantial relationship, love and word do not coincide” (95). But I owe much to her sensitive reading. 88.  Cassell’s Spanish Dictionary (1978) offers the following meanings: “to feel; to sense, notice; to hear; to regret, be sorry about” (536). 89.  On the “love-as-war-metaphor,” see Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 49. 90.  Gelman, “Preface,” in Dibaxu, 7. 91.  By publishing a bilingual Ladino-English edition of Lus ojus las manus la boca, her only collection of poetry in Ladino, in France, Nicoïdski clearly sought not only a larger readership for her work but a way initially to disseminate and ultimately to perpetuate Ladino more effectively. 92.  Akí Yerushalaim: Revista Kulturala Djudeo-espanyola is a quarterly Jewish-

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Spanish cultural journal published by SEFARAD—the Asosiasion para la Konservasion i Promosion de la Kultura Djudeo-espanyola (Association for the Conservation and Promotion of Jewish-Spanish Culture)—in collaboration with the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino (Ladino National Authority). It was founded in 1979 by the team responsible for the Emision Djudeo-espanyola de Kol Israel (Israeli National Radio Kol Israel’s Judeo-Spanish program). 93.  Haïm Vidal Sephiha, “Le Judéo-Espagnol de Sarajevo: Clarisse Nicoïdski, née Abinun, conteuse et poétesse judéo-espagnole,” in Proceedings of the Tenth British Conference on Judeo-Spanish Studies: 29 June–1 July 1997, ed. Annette Benaïm, 53–64 (London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, Dept. of Hispanic Studies, 1999); Kalmi ­Baruch, “El judeo-español de Bosnia,” Revista de Filología Española 17 (1930): 113–54. 94.  For a more detailed comparative reading of Nicoïdski and Gelman, see Balbuena, “Dibaxu.” 95.  Fabry, “El diálogo interlingüístico.” 96. Gelman, Dibaxu, 7. 97.  Note that in Ladino the verse reads “to sit at the table with me,” while in Castellano it does not include the final “with me,” reading, rather, “to sit at my table.” 98. Gelman, Dibaxu, 7. 99.  There is an extensive tradition of biblical, rabbinical, and secular texts in Ladino: see Michael Molho, Literatura sefardita de Oriente (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and Instituto Arias Montano, 1960), and Sefarad in My Heart, ed. Moshe Lazar (Lancaster, CA.: Labyrinthos, 1999). The vast oral corpus of the romancero judeo-español has acquired unsurpassed fame in the Ladino repertoire, transcribed and studied by numerous scholars who helped document and preserve traditional Sephardic narrative poetry. “[T]his research has a single objective: to save from oblivion the last living echoes of those multisecular, medieval voices, which today are in immediate danger of disappearing forever,” Samuel Armistead observes in El romancero judeo-español en el Archivo Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Cátedra Seminário Menéndez Pidal, 1978), 40. On the relation between oral and written text in Ladino, he notes: “The very concept of oral literature has been—and continues to be—rather difficult to comprehend for some of us who are part of now basically literate cultures” (45). 100.  Bloch and Bloch, Song of Songs, 59. The Jerusalem Bible translation reads: “The voice of my beloved! behold, he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young hart: behold, he stands behind our wall, he looks in at the windows; he peers through the lattice” (857). 101.  Cf. Song of Songs 5:2: “qol dodi dofek ptachi li.” 102.  Bloch and Bloch, Song of Songs, 154. Ariel Bloch explains in reference to 2:8 that “[i]n the imagery of the Bible, a voice or sound—qol can mean either—may be treated almost as an independent animate agent, able to ‘cry out’ (Gen. 4:10, Isa. 40:3, 6), to ‘break the cedars of Lebanon’ (Ps. 29:5), or “to follow” someone, as in ‘no doubt the sound of his master’s footsteps will follow behind’ (2 Kings 6:32)” (ibid., 153). 103. Gelman, Violín y otras cuestiones (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Gleizer, 1956), 75. 104.  See Hayim Nachman Bialik, “El ha-tzipor” (To the bird) (1892), in id., Project

202   NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

Ben-Yehuda, ed. Asaf Bar-Tov (in Hebrew), http://benyehuda.org/bialik (accessed September 19, 2015). 105.  In rabbinic texts, the bird most often signifies the immanence of God in the world. In the Talmud and the Midrash, one much-disseminated view argues that when Israel is in exile, the Shekhinah goes in exile with them, and that it will be redeemed when Israel is redeemed (Meg. 29a). The use of the expression “under the wings of the Shekhinah” (meaning “under its patronage”) has contributed to the visual identification of the Shekhinah with a birdlike form (Shab. 31a; SER 6:29; Tosef., Hor. 2:7). In his Book of the Kuzari, the medieval Spanish Hebrew poet, doctor, and philosopher Yehuda ha-Levi links the Shekhinah to prophecy, arguing that the destruction of the Temple brought about the end of prophecy, and “the Shekhinah ceased to appear, but will return with the coming of the Messiah” (Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. “Shekhinah”). See also Gershom Scholem, “Shekhinah: The Feminine Element in Divinity,” in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 140–96. 106.  See Roman Jakobson, “The Speech Event and the Functions of Language,” in On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–79. 107.  Cassell’s Spanish Dictionary, 510. 108. See http://ladinokomunita.tallerdetinoco.org/index.php?page=16 (accessed May 27, 2015). 109.  Montanaro and Ture, Palabra de Gelman, 45. 110.  Juan Gelman, “Lo judío y la literatura en castellano,” Hispamerica 62 (1993): 83–90. Reprinted in Confines 3 (1996): 108–13. 111.  “I was taken by the tenderness of [Sefardí] Ladino, by the sound of its diminutives, by its syntax, which effectively follows a logic that is older, in a manner of speaking more primitive, with a significant construction that resembles muttering [balbuceo],” Gelman said (cited in Ángel Leyva, “Entrevista a Juan Gelman”). 112.  See also Monique Balbuena, “Ladino in Latin America: An Old Language in the New World,” in Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Margalit Bejarano and Edna Aizenberg (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 161–83. I thank Leonardo Senkman for his comments and suggestions here. 113.  Alberto Gerchunoff, Parricide on the Pampa? A New Study and Translation [by Edna Aizenberg] of Alberto Gerchunoff ’s “Los gauchos judíos” (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2000). See also Aizenberg, Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires, and Leonardo Senkman, La identidad judía en la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: Pardes, 1983). 114.  Moacyr Scliar, ἀ e Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes, trans. Eloah F. Giacomelli (New York: Harmony Books, 1987). See also Yael Halevi-Wise, “Life on the Hyphen: Metaphors of Latin American Jewish Experience in Two Novels of Moacyr Scliar,” in the panel “Diasporas,” American Jewish Studies Conference, 2001, and Monique Balbuena, “Sepharad in Brazil: Between the Metaphorical and the Literal.” Modern Jewish Studies (Yiddish) 15, nos. 1–2 (2007): 31–44 . 115.  Gelman in Montanaro and Ture, Palabra de Gelman, 44.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION  203

CONCLUSION: WHITHER? Epigraphs: Aron Rodrigue, Sephardim and the Holocaust (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, 2005), 16; Ana Maria Riaño Lopez, and Maria del Carmen Marcos Casquero, “Poesía contemporánea en lengua Judeo-Española: Margalit Matitiahu y su obra,” Estudios Humanísticos: Filología 23 (Universidad de León, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2001), 146; Primo Levi, ἀe Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage International, 1988), 148. 1.  Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, ἀ e Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 15: “I am speaking of a ‘community’ group . . . a supposedly ‘ethnic’ or ‘religious’ group that finds itself one day deprived, as a group, of its citizenship by a state that, with the brutality of unilateral decision, withdraws it without asking for their opinion, and without the said group gaining back any other citizenship. No other” (emphasis added). 2.  See Monique Balbuena, “Ladino in Latin America: An Old Language in the New World,” and id., “Judeo-Spanish Texts in Latin American Genres: Language Revival and National Identity in Contemporary Argentina,” in Selected Papers from the Fifteenth British Conference on Judeo-Spanish Studies, ed. Hilary Pomeroy, Christopher J. ­Pountain, and Elena Romero (London: Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Queen Mary University of London, 2012), 37–49.

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INDEX

Abishag (Lévy): Abishag figure in, 39, 48; Christological motifs in, 39; display of French and classical erudition in, 36–39, 41; display of Hebrew erudition in, 39–40; elegies to Liliane Lévy in, 42–43; final poem of, 42–43; focus on breasts in, 37; on Lévy’s heroes, 27; Muslim elements in, 40–41; overview of, 26; preface to, 26, 52; publication history of, 26, 56, 168n32 Abitbol, Michel, 28, 171n60 Abu-Haidar, Farida, 23 Abulafia, Todros, 130 Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier (Ben Chérif), 23 AIU. See Alliance Israélite Universelle Akí Yerushalaim (periodical), 9, 65, 74, 139 Algeria, French rule in: and antisemitism, 30, 54–56, 171n57; and European acculturation, 28–32, 170n53, 170n55; fragility of Jewish position in, 25; history of, 166n17; Jewish embrace of, 31–32, 171n58; Jewish social mobility under, 29, 30; urbanization under, 29. See also Lévy, Sadia Algeria, Vichy government in: and destruction of Jewish rights, 54–55; and Jewish loss of identity, 55–56; and Jewish perception of France, 55–56; Jewish Statute of 1940, 54–55; revocation of Jewish citizenship, 25, 55 Algerian Jews, citizenship of: Arab resentment of, 30; European settlers’ opposition to, 30; as pretext of exclusion from Algerian francophone literature, 24–25, 56, 158; revocation by Vichy government, 25, 55 al-Harizi, Yehuda, 130, 133 Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), 9, 28–29, 30–31, 63, 170n56, 171n60 antisemitism: Algerian Jews and, 30, 54–56, 171n57; stereotypes of in Zionist rhetoric, 78 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 26–27, 43, 167n26, 168nn33–34

Arabic, as diglossic, 31 À Rebours (Huysmans), 167n26 Argentina, Dirty War in, 108, 111 Argentine Castellano: Gelman’s search for roots of, 108, 112–13; Ladino as substratum of, 108; naming of, 190n15. See also Dibaxu, Ladino-Castellano juxtaposition in Asch, Sholem, 39 Ashkenazi Jews: and adoption of secular European culture, 14; and call for new Sephardim in Latin America, 109; and French Revolution, 170n51; as main focus of Shoah accounts, 102–4 Barnstone, Willis, 126, 195n53 Baruch, Kalmi, 139 “Because I am Jealous” (“Puisque je suis ­jalous”; Lévy), 39, 40 Ben Chérif, Mohammed (Caïd), 23 Bhabha, Homi, 76 Boyarin, Daniel, 15–16, 78–79 Boyarin, Jonathan, 15–16 Bunis, David, 184–85n88 Butor, Michel, 51 Cagayous (Musette), 24–25 cancionero, as genre, 7 “Canción espiritual” (San Juan), 125 Carnet intimes (Sénac), 27 Castellano. See Argentine Castellano Certeau, Michel de, 86 Chagall, Mark, 39 Citas y Comentarios (Gelman): as precursor to Dibaxu, 110, 111, 112; publication history, 111; rewriting of medieval mystical texts in, 193–94n37 Citas y Comentarios, comentario XXIII: ­allusions to Job in, 125; Argentina as addressee in, 125, 127, 128, 129–30; and choice

232  INDEX

of ­Ladino, 130; exile as theme in, 120, 121, 128–30; experimental language use in, 124; gender as issue in, 125–26, 127–28, 195n53; Psalm 137 in, 128–30; rewriting of San Juan’s “The Living Flame of Love” in, 124–29; structure of, 124; text of, 122 Cólera buey (Gelman), 115, 116–17, 132 Les compagnons du jardin (Hadj Hamou and Randau), 24 Com/posiciones (Gelman), 130–34; divided self in, 132–33; exile as theme in, 131, 132, 133; faces and voices as themes in, 132–33; fictional poet created for, 131–32, 133; Gelman’s preface to, 113; and Hebrew poets’ tradition of rewriting, 131; identity construction as theme in, 132–34; non-Jewish poets in, 131; title of, 131–32; as translation/rewriting of medieval Hebrew poets, 130–32 Constantinople Pentateuch (1547), 17 coplas, as genre, 5, 7, 174n87 Crémieux Decree, 24, 30, 55 culture, language as defining element of, 87–88 death: memory as resistance to, in Matitiahu, 86–87; Nicoïdski’s efforts to resist, 3; as occasion for memory, in Matitiahu, 86, 88. See also “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil” (Lévy); Shoah Défense et illustration de la langue française (Bellay), 37 de Gaulle, Charles, 55 Déjeux, Jean, 23, 24 Deleuze, Gilles, 3–4, 156 “Délie” (Scève), 37 Derrida, Jacques, 25, 55, 158 deterritorialized writing, Deleuze and Guattari on, 3–4 dhimmi, Maghrebi Jews as, 32, 171–72n66 Días-Mas, Paloma, 199–200n81 diaspora, broadening of term, 15–16 Diaspora, Jewish: effeminate Jews of, vs. new Israeli Hebrew, 77–80; and formation of Jewish languages, 12–15, 16, 165n55; and Jewish identity, 16, 128, 197–98n65; Matitiahu’s embrace of, 62, 86; suppression of diversity of in Israeli nation building, 77–78, 79, 158; and Zionists’ emphasis on effeminacy of exilic Jews, 77–80 Dibaxu (Gelman), 134–56; archaeological metaphor in, 151, 152, 158; ascent and descent as images in, 140, 148, 149; as bilingual work,

107–8; bird, tree and leaf as images in, 140, 145, 148–50; blurring of original/translation distinction in, 141, 155; Citas y Comentarios as precursor of, 110, 111, 112; and conversation, use of, 145; dibaxu as term in, 140, 151–53; downward search for origins in, 113, 158; echoes of Argentine repression in, 136–37, 143, 151, 153; exile as theme in, 146, 151, 155; format of, 134; on future of poetry, 143; Gelman on motives for writing of, 110–11; as Gelman’s first Ladino work, 108; and inclusion of marginalized voices, 152; instability of ethnic and linguistic identity as theme in, 155; and Jewishness, acknowledgment of, 135, 154; mouth as motif in, 134–35, 136, 145, 146; and name of Sephardic language, 139; Nicoïdski’s influence on, 137–40, 142, 151; on persistence of life, 143; on persistence of poetry, 143–44; pervasive sense of orality in, 145; preface to, 110, 135, 137, 139, 145, 152; reading aloud, Gelman’s recommendation for, 135–36, 141; readingwriting circularity in, 145–46; recurring images of sedimentation in, 151; Song of Songs references in, 135, 146, 147; structure of, 140; as synthesis of Gelman’s earlier work, 151, 158; target readers of, 140–41; temporalization of space in, 142, 151; thematization of time in, 135–36, 137, 142–43, 152; voice and word/speech as recurring themes in, 145, 146–48, 149, 152 Dibaxu, Ladino-Castellano juxtaposition in: creative tensions generated by, 136–37; estrangement produced by, 142; evocation of Spanish language history in, 135, 142–43; greater flexibility and vitality of Ladino and, 137, 150–51, 152 Dibaxu, Ladino in: as Balkan dialect, 139; choice to use, 137, 140, 153–55; as distancing from past Argentine life, 154; as language of exile, 140, 154; as living language, 152; as means of subverting and renewing Spanish, 154; Nicoïdski’s influence and, 137; orality of, 145; and return to early vital forms of Spanish, 137, 141, 151, 152; tenderness of language and, 137, 145, 153–54 Dibaxu, poems within: poem I, 134–35, 136–37, 151; poem II, 148; poem III, 150; poem IV, 135, 148–49; poem VI, 147–48; poem X, 149; poem XI, 143; poem XII, 150; poem XIII, 152; poem XIV, 149; poem XVI, 143–46;

INDEX  233

poem XVII, 146–47; poem XIX, 142; poem XXI, 147; poem XXVI, 149; poem XXIX, 151 diglossia: defined, 164–65n55; Jews and, 16 djizya, Maghreb Jews and, 32 Dugas, Guy, 22–23, 54, 165n1, 170n55 École romane (Roman School), 36–37 Écrits pour l’art (periodical), 25 Enlightenment, North African Jews and, 29 En los kampos de la muerte (’ha-Elion), 105 A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes (Scliar), 156 European secular culture, Jewish adoption of: in Algeria, 28–32, 170n53, 170n55; in eastern-Europe, 13, 14; Sephardic Jews and, 14–15 Even-Lévy, Yaël, 27, 46, 48, 165n1 Eyes Hands Mouth (Lus ojus las manus la boca; Nicoïdski), 1–3, 138–39, 140, 151 Fabry, Geneviève, 136, 141, 200n87 Fikri, Mohamed, 23, 24–25 Fishman, Joshua A., 87, 165n55 Flaubert, Gustave, 38 France: emancipation of Jews in, 28, 170n51; Jewish identification with after Revolution, 28–29, 32; legal rights for Jews in, 170n51; perception of after Vichy government, 55– 56. See also Algeria, French rule in; Algeria, Vichy government in francophone literature: boundaries of, Lévy and, 21, 23–25, 158; citizenship as pretext for Algerian Jews’ exclusion from, 24–25, 56, 158; as inscribed in plurilinguistic field, 31 French language, and acculturation of Algerian Jews, 30–32 García Lorca, Federico, 1, 138 Gauchos judíos (Gerchunoff), 156 Gelman, Juan: background of, 115; as communist, 114, 116–17, 191n20; embrace of other in, 116; and future as informed by recovered past, 114; honors and awards, 107, 189n2; on inadequacy of words, 122; languages spoken by, 108; language used in writing, 6, 107–8; life of, 108, 114, 115–16; and minor literature, 4; and Movimiento Peronista Montonero, 114, 191n20; as multilingual-multicultural poet, 5–6, 115–16; murder of son and daughter-in-law, 111, 153; on national poetry, language as basis of, 117–18; political activism

of, 114, 115, 116–17; search for granddaughter, 111; search for personal roots, 112–13; search for roots of Argentine Castellano, 108, 112– 13; self-Sephardization by, 107, 108, 130, 134, 139–40, 154, 158; on Spanish, early incipient forms of, 119–20, 122, 137; translations by, 17 Gelman, Castellano used by: as counterlanguage, 118; experimentation in, 114, 115, 116, 118, 124; feminized form of, 197n63; incorporation of archaic linguistic forms in, 118, 119; as language of street, 114–15; and lunfardo, 115, 191–92n22; multilingual background and, 5–6, 115–16 Gelman, exile of, 108, 111; impact on work, 111, 120, 121, 155; and Ladino as language of exile, 112–13, 140, 154, 156; as reason for writing, 129; refusal to romanticize, 121; and search for personal and linguistic roots, 108, 112–13, 153; as theme in Citas y Comentarios, 128–30; as theme in Com/posiciones, 131, 132, 133; works produced in, 108, 111–12 Gelman, as Jew: acknowledgment of, 108, 114, 135, 154; as Ashkenazi, 108; and engagement with Jewish tradition, 128–30; and ethnic distinctions between Jews, questioning of, 108; and Jewish canon, 4, 107; and Jewish intertexuality, 6; on Jewish writers, 154 Gelman, and Ladino: as adopted language, 107; as counterlanguage, 155; embrace of as search for roots, 112–13; as language of exile, 112–13, 140, 154, 156; as link between the Shoah and Argentine “Dirty War,” 154; as means of embracing his Jewish origins, 110; as means of subverting and renewing Spanish, 154; as more poetic language, 156; motives for adopting, 12, 108, 110–11, 130, 137, 156; Nicoïdski’s influence and, 137; as substratum of Argentine Castellano, 108; term for, 12, 111, 112, 139. See also Dibaxu (Gelman) Gelman, works by: Bajo la lluvia ajena, 153; bird imagery in, 149; Carta abierta, 153, 197n63; Cartas a mi madre, 153, 197n63; defamiliarization and estrangement in, 116–18, 121; “El expulsado,” 132; fictional translations in, 116; Gotán, 115; Hacia el sur, 153; identity construction as theme in, 6, 132–33, 158, 159; and inclusion of marginalized voices, 152; investigation of language and identity in, as downward and backward, 113, 119, 151, 158; “La Lejanía,” 134;

234  INDEX

and medieval mystical poetry, rewriting of, 108, 112, 113–14, 119, 158; and medieval mystical poetry, source of interest in, 120, 121–22; multiple fictional voices in, 116–17, 131–32, 133; Los poemas de Sidney West, 115, 116, 132; quotidian subject matter of, 114–15; “Rostros,” 133–34; Siempre la poesía, 144; and speaking from margin of power, 118, 193n33; tango and, 112, 114, 115, 120, 128; Violín y otras cuestiones, 114, 149. See also Citas y Comentarios (Gelman); Com/posiciones (Gelman); Dibaxu (Gelman) Gelman, Marcelo Ariel (son), 111, 153 Gematria, 48 Ghil, René, 25, 175n100, 175n102. See also “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil” (Lévy) Gramática de la lengua castellana (Nebrija), 8–9 Greece: Jewish migration to after destruction of Second Temple, 61; Matitiahu’s poetry on lost Jewish culture in, 70–71; Matitiahu’s recovery of Ladino heritage in, 59, 60–61, 62, 72, 74; Shoah in, 104; and World War II, increase in historical studies on, 105. See also “In the Streets of Athens” (Matitiahu); “Liberty Square” (Matitiahu); Salonika Guattari, Félix, 3–4, 156 Hadj Hamou, Abdelkader. See Fikri, Mohamed ’ha-Elion, Moshe, 105 haketía, 10, 31, 61 ha-Levi, Yehuda, 130, 131, 158, 202n105 ha-Nagid, Shmuel, 130 Harshav, Benjamin, 13–14, 70, 77, 79, 163–64n43 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 28 Hebrew: Classical and Integrated corpuses of, 184n83; gendering of in Israeli nation building, 79; Israeli nation building and, 62–63, 79–80, 182n73, 183n79; vs. Ladino, as written vs. spoken language, 81–82; and Ladino calque, 10, 11, 81, 82; Ladino influence on, 71; significant 16th–17th-century publications in, 80–81; as synthetic language, 94, 101; traditional gendering of vs. Yiddish, 79–80, 183n78 Hebrew texts, Ladino use in popular translations of, 81–83 Holocaust: as term, 177n1. See also Shoah Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 167n26

ibn Gabirol, Shlomo, 130, 158 Instrumentism, 49–50 “In the Streets of Athens” (Matitiahu), 72–73; and death as occasion for mobilization of memory, 86, 88; differences between Hebrew and Ladino versions of, 73–76, 84–85; evocations of death in, 75–76; home as problematized concept in, 84–86; and interweaving of language and home in memory, 85–86; Israeli injunction to forget and, 83; and Matitiahu’s composite identity, 106; and Matitiahu’s embrace of Sephardic diasporic life, 86; and Matitiahu’s identification with parents, 84, 85; and Matitiahu’s recovery of Ladino heritage, 84–86, 86–88; and memory as resistance to death, 86–87, 88; and postmemory, 83–84, 88 Israel, and Ladino: Israeli efforts to preserve, 63; Israeli language wars and, 62–63, 80; Ladino studies programs, 63; limited familiarity with, 69; revival of, Matitiahu and, 69 Israel, marginalization of Sephardic communities in, 103, 104 Israeli Federation of Writers, 60 Israeli nation building: false homogeneity created by, 79; and Hebrew as national language, 62–63, 79–80, 183n79; nationalism as concept and, 79, 182n73; and New Hebrew vs. effeminate Diaspora Jews, 77–80; and suppression of Diaspora diversity, 77–78, 79, 85, 158 Jewish languages, formation of through migrations, 12–15, 16, 165n55 Jewish literatures: bird as metaphor in, 149, 202n105; unity of through translation, 16–17; value of expanding canon of, 18 Jews: identity of, Diaspora and, 16, 128, 197– 98n65; male, New Hebrew vs. effeminate Diaspora version of, 77–80; from Muslim lands, characterization of as primitive, 173n76. See also Ashkenazi Jews; Diaspora, Jewish; Sephardic Jews journalism: importance in Sephardic world, 7; and modernization of Judeo-Spanish language, 9 Judeo-Arabic language, 31, 61 Judéo-Fragnol (Judeo-Franco-Spanish), 9, 10 Judeo-Spanish language: names for, 10–11; philology of, 8–12; transliteration of, 9; written forms of, 9. See also Ladino

INDEX  235

Kabbalah: creative power of language in, 50; Gelman and, 121, 195n48; in Lévy’s “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil,” 48, 50, 51, 52, 53 Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari), 3–4 Kaminer, Daliah, 67–68 ketivad raši, 9 kharaj, Maghreb Jews and, 32 “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil” (Lévy), 42–53; Biblical and Talmudic references in, 48–50, 51–52; and connection between poetry and music, 48–49, 52; echoes of “Pour accorder l’instrument . . .” in, 33; final note of hope in, 53; as final poem of Abishag, 42–43; focus on orality in, 50–51; on Ghil’s death as tragedy for community of poets, 47; on Ghil’s self-discipline, 51–52; and Hebrew genres, embrace of, 48; and Jewish traditions of mourning, 49–50; Kabbalistic elements in, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53; and kinah in Jewish tradition, 46–47, 51, 53; layout of, 43; and linguistic diversity of Jewish-Maghrebi life, 53–54; merging of Symbolist and Jewish motifs in, 50–51, 52, 53–54; move away from French poetic structure in, 48; narrator’s identification with Kehath and Kohatites, 49; on poetic creation, 51; and prosody as spatial form, 50; structure of, 47–48, 49; on subversive quality of poets, 52; text of, 43–46; title of, 46 Ladino: adoption of Western language terms into, 98, 187n122; Castilianization of, calls for, 109; characteristics of, 12; as dying language, 2–3, 87–88, 109; feminization of with modernization, 83, 85; greater flexibility vs. Castellano, 137, 150–51, 152; vs. Hebrew, as spoken vs. written language, 81–82; influence on modern Spanish, 71; lack of modern vocabulary in, 89; Latin American growth of, 159–60; literary genres in, 7; and longing for lost culture, 61; number of speakers, 8; philology of, 8–12; purification of, calls for, 109; resources in vs. Hebrew, 94, 98–99, 101; retention of 15th-century forms in, 113, 190–91n17; and Sephardic identity, 81, 87, 199–200; Sephardic Symposium debate on, 109; and Shoah, 87, 113, 159; Spanish efforts to appropriate, 65–66; tenderness of, 137, 145, 153–54; as term, 10–12; traditional use in vernacular translations of Hebrew texts, 81–83. See also ­Dibaxu,

­Ladino-Castellano juxtaposition in; Dibaxu, Ladino in; Gelman, and Ladino; Matitiahu, and Ladino Ladino, Israel and: Israeli efforts to preserve, 63; Israeli language wars and, 62–63, 80; ­Ladino studies programs, 63; limited familiarity with, 69; revival of, Matitiahu and, 69 Ladino, revitalization of: calls for new literary content, 109–10; and celebration of difference, 159; Gelman’s Dibaxu and, 145; increasing pace of, 159–60; Matitiahu and, 69, 89; modern literary production and, 157; Lus ojus las manus la boca and, 1–3; poetry and song as focus of, 3, 7 Ladino calque, and Hebrew, 10, 11, 81, 82 Ladino Preservation Council (Israel), 63 language, as defining element of both individual and culture, 87–88 Latin America: call for new Sephardic type in, 108–9, 110, 189–90n8; estrangement of poets from imposed Spanish language in, 118–19; growth of Ladino in, 159–60; and writers in exile, 121. See also Gelman, Juan letraz de ezkritura, 9 Levant, European acculturation of Jews in, 28–32 Lévy, Sadia: activism against antisemitism, 56; as almost-forgotten author, 27, 56, 165n1, 168n32; aphasia suffered by, 26, 56; and canons of Jewish literature, 4; and construction of identity, 158; critical recognition of, 27; critics’ motives for ignoring, 56, 57, 158; desire for place in French canon, 27–28, 157; and destabilization of traditional Jewish culture, 36, 157–58; and French as language of colonizer, 5, 21; French literary circles and, 26–27; French of, 42; Hebrew as oppositional language for, 16; hybrid poetic idiom of, 42; intellectual shaping of by both East and West, 36; and Jewish intertexuality, 6; and Jewish-Maghrebi identity, 21; as journal editor, 25; languages spoken by, 22; life of, 21, 22, 56; as liminal figure, 36, 54; and linguistic diversity of Jewish-Maghrebi life, 53–54; and minor literature, 4, 20, 157; move away from French poetic structure, 48; as multilingual-multicultural poet, 5, 53–54, 56–57; negotiation of identity in, 6; oppositional stance of, 56; reclusiveness of later life, 56; self-identification as JewishMaghrebi modernist poet, 54; ­simultaneous

236  INDEX

attraction to and ambivalence about France, 21; as symbolist, 25, 27, 36, 157; translations by, 17, 26; writing career of, 22 Lévy, and francophone literature: desire for place in French canon, 27–28, 157; display of French and classical erudition in, 36–39, 41; and French as language of colonizer, 5, 21; French literary circles and, 26–27; French of, 42; impact on boundaries of francophone literature, 21, 23–25, 158; infusion of minor languages within French poetry, 21, 56, 157; move away from French poetic structure, 48; as one of first Algerian novelists in French, 22; political implications of writing in French, 22–23; simultaneous attraction to and ambivalence about France, 21 Lévy, works by, 25–26; “Another Blason about Breasts,” 37, 39; “Autumn Feeling,” 37, 40–41; “Because I am Jealous” (“Puisque je suis jalous”), 39, 40; and boundaries of francophone literature, 21, 23–25, 158; “Colloquium of a Socrates . . .,” 38–39; “Constellation of the Symbol,” 27, 52; and cultural plurality of Algeria, 42; “De la Hart à la Traque aux Anges,” 39; “Despectus tibi sum,” 39; display of French and classical erudition in, 36–39, 41; display of Hebrew erudition in, 39–40; XI journées en force (with Randau), 39–40; El, 25, 40; erasure of traditional distinctions in, 54; “Free Me!,” 48; La geste éparse de Kehath ben Lévi, 25–26; “Hippocrène,” 36; “I Dreamt That Night,” 42; influence of Hebrew tradition on, 54; influence of translation work on, 17; infusion of minor languages within French poetry, 21, 56, 157; “Interlude,” 37, 38, 39; and Jewish experience under Vichy government, 54, 56; Kehath, 40; languages used in, 5, 17; and linguistic diversity of JewishMaghrebi life, 53–54; Muslim elements in, 40–41; XI journées en force (with Randau), 25, 26–27; “Pick the Roses of Life,” 37, 38; “The Poet Remains,” 39, 40; “The Poet’s Bed,” 40; “Praise to Young Breasts,” 37; “­Prelude,” 39; “Recuerdos,” 40; “El Seloso,” 40; Sensations d’un égorgé; Treize à la douzaine, 26. See also “Pour accorder l’instrument . . .” (Lévy); Abishag (Lévy); “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil” (Lévy); Rabbin (Lévy and Randau)

“Liberty Square” (Matitiahu), 91–93; differences between Hebrew and Ladino versions of, 94–102; headnotes to, differences in, 94– 95; history of Jewish humiliation in Liberty Square, 93–94; imagery of blood in, 97–98; imagery of Nazi evil in, 96, 97; Matitiahu’s repeated themes and, 102; and renewal of life, 100, 101; and resources of Hebrew vs. Ladino, 94, 98–99, 101; sensory focus of Ladino version, 95–96; structure of Hebrew vs. Ladino version, 95, 101; and troubling of original-translation distinction, 91–92; windows as metaphor in, 96, 101–2 Lida, Denah, 11, 12 linguistic diversity, as political good, 18 “The Living Flame of Love” (Llama de amor viva; San Juan), 123; Gelman’s rewriting of in Citas y comentarios, 124–29; San Juan’s exegesis of, 196n59 Luis de León, 119, 121–22 lunfardo, Gelman and, 115, 191–92n22 Luria, Isaac, 130, 133 Maghreb: first novels in French, 23–25, 158; Muslim resentment of French rule in, 32; names for Jewish quarters in, 166n6 Maghrebi Jews: as dhimmi in Muslim lands, 32, 171–72n66; diglossia as norm for, 31; embrace of French rule, 31–32; Muslim taxes on, 32 Malik-Shiran, Yehudit, 68, 71 Mallarmé, Stéphane: and Instrumentism, 50; Lévy and, 25, 26, 39, 40–41, 52; on music and song, 51; and Symbolists, 52 Matitiahu, Jack, 65 Matitiahu, Margalit: and canons of Jewish literature, 4; and community of women, 105; and construction of identity, 158; diasporic identity assumed by, 62, 86; and Jewish intertexuality, 6; languages spoken by, 60; life of, 59; and minority-language literature in Israel, 60; and minor literature, 4; on mother’s love of books, 88; as multilingualmulticultural poet, 5–6; multilingual work, complexities of, 66; negotiation of identity in, 6; parents’ escape from Shoah, 59; and Sephardic Shoah experience, recovery of, 105; Spanish interest in, 64–65 Matitiahu, and Greece: poetry on lost Jewish culture in, 70–71; recovery of Ladino heritage in, 59, 60–61, 62, 72, 74. See also “In

INDEX  237

the Streets of Athens” (Matitiahu); “Liberty Square” (Matitiahu); Salonika Matitiahu, and Ladino: commitment to preserving heritage of, 86–89; critics’ response to works in, 71; and domains of experience in Ladino vs. Hebrew, 88–89; embrace of, 12; emotional ties to, 59–60; as first language, 59; Israeli promotion of Hebrew and, 62–63, 106; modernization of, 69–70, 89; as oppositional language, 16; as recovery of heritage, 59, 60–61, 62, 72, 74, 105, 154 Matitiahu, and Spain: deference to, 65; efforts to appropriate Ladino, 65–66; as link to Sephardic past, 105; visits to, 64–65, 66; works published in, 64, 65, 67 Matitiahu, works by, 66–67; Alegrika, 67, 70– 71, 72, 87, 105, 158; Asiguiendo al esfuenio, 67; bilingual poems, as autotranslations, 17, 90–91, 158; bilingual volumes of, 66–67, 68, 70, 71, 87–88, 158; Bozes en la shara, 65–66, 67; Canton de solombra, 67; Chasufa, 67, 68; critics on, 66, 67–71; Despertar el selencio/ Leha’ir et ha-shtikah, 66; films, 65; Ha-safek: Sipurim katzarim, 67; in Hebrew, 59, 66; I-sheket keytzi, 67; Kamino de tormento, 67; Klafim levanim, 67; “Kuadrinos Sefardies,” 66; Kurtijo kemado / Chatzer charuka, 67, 68–70, 87, 90, 105, 158; in Ladino, 59, 66, 89; languages used in, 6, 59–60, 66–67; Leha’ir et ha-shtika / Despertar el selencio, 67; León, reencuentro (film), 65; Madrigot shel chatzot, 67; Matriz de luz, 67; as mediated by mother’s presence, 89; Mi-ba’ad la-shmasha, 67; objects as symbols in, 67–68; as part of modern Israeli literature, 89; publication in Spain, 64, 65, 67; “Rechem ohr,” 68; and revival of Ladino, 62, 69; Salonika in, 62; sensuality of, 67, 68; on Shoah, 68–69, 70–71, 74; Toledo, el secreto oculto (film), 65; translations by, 17; Vela de la luz, 64, 67. See also “In the Streets of Athens” (Matitiahu); Kurtijo kemado / Chatzer charuka (Matitiahu); “Liberty Square” (Matitiahu); Vagabundo eterno (Matitiahu) Mazower, Mark, 93–94 Me’am Lo’ez, 5, 7, 82, 184n86 memory, in Matitiahu: death as occasion for mobilization of, 86, 88; interweaving of language and home in, 85–86; postmemory, 83–84, 88; as resistance to death, 86–87, 88 minor literatures: challenging and reinscrip-

tion of dominant languages by, 4, 21; Deleuze and Guattari on, 3–4, 156, 157; Lévy’s problematizing of, 20, 157; in multilingual contexts, 4 mizmor, as genre, 7 Mizrahi Jews: contributions to modern culture, 173n76; Lévy and, 36 modern Jewish revolution, 13, 14–15 Moréas, Jean, 36, 174n77 Morocco, European acculturation in, 29, 169n47, 170n53, 170n55 Mortimer, Mildred, 23, 24 Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Studies (Israel), 63 Movimiento Peronista Montonero (MPM), 114, 191n20 multilingualism: and formation of Jewish languages through migration, 12–15, 165n55; Gelman and, 5–6, 115–16; Lévy and, 5, 53–54, 56–57; Matitiahu and, 5–6, 66; and minor literatures, 4; of Sephardic writers, 3, 56–57; of western Sephardic Jews, 183n80 Musette (Auguste Robinet), 23, 24–25 Musulmans et chrétiens (Bouri Ahmed), 23 Naime & Yeoshua Salti Center for Ladino Studies (Israel), 63 National Authority for Ladino and Its Culture (Israel), 63 national identity, homogenous, Sephardic writers’ hybrid identity and, 3 Nazi genocide of Jews: as term, 177n1. See also Shoah Neruda, Pablo, 118 Nicoïdski, Clarisse: bird imagery in, 149; Cara boz i locura, 105; Couvre-Feux, 2; influence on Gelman’s Dibaxu, 137–40, 142, 151; and Ladino as cultural recovery, 154; languages used by, 6, 139; life and work of, 2, 105, 161nn1–3; as multilingual-multicultural poet, 6; Lus ojus las manus la boca (Eyes Hands Mouth), 1–3, 138–39, 140, 151; thematization of voice/speech in, 145 Ninth of Av, kinah and, 47 North Africa: arrival of Jews in, 33, 172–73n71; Shoah in, 103 Lus ojus las manus la boca (Eyes Hands Mouth; Nicoïdski), 1–3, 138–39, 140, 151 “On Language and Words” (Schopenhauer), 90

238  INDEX

oppositional language: Gelman and, 118, 155; variation by place and time, 16 Ottoman Empire, and development of Jewish languages, 9, 14 El Pan Duro, 114 Pascal, Blaise, 37–38 Pérez, León S., 108–9, 110, 189–90n8 La Phalange (periodical), 25, 26 Phoenicians: as bridge between East and West, 33–34, 34–35; as Hebrew allies, 34–35, 172–73n71 piyut, as genre, 7 Pléiade, 37 Poe, Edgar Allan, Lévy and, 25, 27, 39, 42, 48, 51 poesía de autor, as genre, 7 “Pour accorder l’instrument . . .” (“To Tune the Instrument . . .”; Lévy), 19–20; Biblical and Judaic references in, 20, 33, 34; classical Petrarchan form of, 32–33, 35; complex mix of references in, 20, 21, 32–36; Greco-Latin references in, 20, 33, 35; Lévy’s hybrid poetic idiom and, 42; and marriage of sound and meaning, 35–36; meeting of East and West in, 33–34; multicultural poetic voice in, 20, 33, 35, 36; and poetry as expression of identity, 21; and problematizing of major vs. minor languages, 20; on role of other in definition of self, 35 Primer Simposio de Estudios Sefardíes (1964), 108–9 “Puisque je suis jalous” (“Because I am Jealous”; Lévy), 27, 39, 40 Pulido Fernández, Ángel, 63–64 Quevedo, Francisco de, 119, 120 Rabbin (Lévy and Randau): Apollinaire on, 167n26; exclusion of from accounts of Algerian francophone literature, 23–25; as one of first Algerian novels in French, 22; plot of, 22; poor reception by Algerian Jews, 22–23; writing of in French, political implications of, 22–23 Randau, Robert, 22, 24, 25, 27 Rashi script, 9 Real Academía Española, 64 Refael, Shmuel, 69–70, 104 Renard, Raymon, 182–83n74, 199–200n81 Reytan, Jack and Matilde, 59, 88

Robinet, Auguste (Musette), 23, 24–25 Rodrigue, Aron, 61, 157 romancero, as genre, 7 Royère, Jean, 25, 26, 27, 52, 54 Rubinstein, Amnon, 77, 78 Russia, development of Jewish languages in, 13, 14 Safran, William, 15, 182n73 Salonika: cultural diversity of, 61, 62; development of Jewish languages in, 13, 14, 184–85n88; Ladino language and, 61; in Matitiahu’s poetry, 62, 70–71, 74, 84, 85, 88, 89; Matitiahu’s visit to, 59, 60–61, 74; prewar, as Jewish enclave, 61–62; Shoah and, 61, 70–71, 103, 104; significance in Jewish world, 102. See also “In the Streets of Athens” (Matitiahu); “Liberty Square” (Matitiahu) San Juan de la Cruz: Gelman’s interest in, 120, 121–22; Gelman’s rewriting of mystical poems by, 108, 112, 119, 158, 193n37. See also “The Living Flame of Love” (San Juan) Schopenhauer, Arthur, 90 Sefarad 92, 63 Seidman, Naomi, 79–80, 183n78 Sephardic Jews: and adoption of secular European culture, 115; call for new type of in Latin America, 108–9, 110, 189–90n8; contributions to modern culture, 173–74n76; and French Revolution, 170n51; history of, 8, 166n17, 199n81; impact of Shoah on, as underappreciated, 103–4; Ladino as defining feature of, 87, 199–200n81; literature on Shoah by, 104; marginalization of in Israel, 103, 104; and pain of disappearing culture, 2–3; projects to include Shoah in cultural memory of, 105; in Salonika, 61–62; Spanish outreach to, 63–64; tradition of translation among, 17; western, multilingualism of, 183n80 Sephardic literature: genres of, 6–7; importance of poetry in, 6–7; in Latin America, growth of, 109, 159–60 Sephardic poetry: contemporary, as focus of this work, 4–5, 157; genres of, 4–5, 7, 40; limited scholarship on, 4–5 Sephardic writers, multilingual hybrid identity claimed by, 3, 56–57 Sephiha, Haïm Vidal, 9, 10, 11, 12, 139, 180n51 Sharoni, Simona, 78, 181–82n64

INDEX  239

Shekhinah, 149, 202n105 shir, as genre, 7 Shoah: Greek Jews and, 61, 69; impact on Sephardic Jews, as underappreciated, 103–5; in Jewish consciousness, 102; Ladino as casualty of, 59, 87, 113; Ladino poems on, as largely unpublished, 104–5; Matitiahu’s parents’ escape from, 59; in Matitiahu’s poetry, 68–69, 70–71, 74; in North Africa, 103; primary focus on Ashkenazi Jews, 102–4; projects to include in cultural memory of Sephardic Jews, 105; and Salonika, 61, 70–71, 103, 104; second-hand remembrance of by new generation, 105; Sephardic literature on, 104; as term, 177n1. See also “In the Streets of Athens” (Matitiahu); “Liberty Square” (Matitiahu) Shulkhan Arukh (Karo), 81 solitreo, 9 Song of Songs: in Gelman’s Citas y Comentarios, 125; in Gelman’s Dibaxu, 135, 146, 147; tropological readings of, 120, 194n43 Spain: and citizenship for Sephardic Jews, 64; commemoration of expulsion of Jews from, 63; expulsion of Jews from, 8, 166n17; and Ladino, effort to appropriate, 65–66; Matitiahu’s deference to, 65; Matitiahu’s visits to, 64–65, 66; Matitiahu’s works published in, 64, 65, 67; outreach to Sephardim, 63–64 Spire, André, 50, 54 ἀ e Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes (Scliar), 156 Symbolists: and connection between poetry and music, 52; emphasis on orality in, 50– 51; Lévy as, 25, 27, 36; Lévy’s “Kinah pour la mort de René Ghil” and, 50–51, 52, 53–54 tango: and revitalization of Ladino, 160; in works of Gelman, 112, 114, 115, 120, 128 Temples of Jerusalem, destruction of: and Jewish migration to Africa, 33; and Jewish migration to Greece, 61; and Ninth of Av, 47 Teresa de Ávila: Gelman’s interest in, 120, 121– 22; Gelman’s rewriting of mystical poems by, 108, 112, 119, 158, 193n37 El Tiempo (periodical), 59

“To Tune the Instrument . . .” (Lévy). See “Pour accorder l’instrument . . .” translation: Gelman’s Com/posiciones as, 130– 32; Gelman’s Dibaxu as blurring of original/translation distinction, 141, 155; from Hebrew texts, Ladino and, 7, 10, 11, 81–83; issues in, 91; Jewish tradition of, 16–17; Matitiahu’s autotranslation, 17, 90–91, 158 Trigano, Shmuel, 103–4 Tsarfati, Joseph, 130–31 Tunisia: European acculturation in, 23, 29, 169n47, 170n53, 170n55, 171n60; Jewish authors in, 24 Tzene Urena, 82 UNESCO, conference of Ladino (2002), 63 Uribe, Lilián, 118 Vagabundo eterno (Matitiahu): centrality of Spanish in, 65; on Ladino, Matitiahu’s ties to, 60; Refael introduction to, 69; on Spanish appropriation of Ladino, 67; Spanish financing of publication, 64, 65; on Spanish outreach to Sephardim, 64 La vengeance du Cheikh (Rahal), 23 Verlaine, Paul, 52 Villon, François, 37 Wissenchaf des Judentums (Jewish Studies) movement, 28 women, in Lévy’s poetry, 38, 39, 40 women’s rights, in French Algeria, 29 Ya’oz, Hannah, 68 Yiddish: development of Jewish languages and, 13–15; Israeli language wars and, 183n79; and Jewish identity, 163–64n43; Shoah and, 87; traditional gendering of vs. Hebrew, 79–80, 183n78 Zafrani, Haïm, 46–47 Zerubavel, Yael, 78 Zionism, and characterization of Jews from Muslim lands as primitive, 173n76. See also Israeli nation building Zohra: La femme du mineur (Fikri), 23, 24–25