Children Book featuring Ladino Culture: The Key from Spain by Debbie Levy

I am very happy to discover lately so many events and discussion groups and publications - online particularly - dedicated to feature the Ladino language and culture. I am sure many of them were there already for a long time already and it´s only me who is a late comer in this movement, aimed to feature and outline an unique episode of the Jewish history.

As usual, it started with a tragedy that, as usual, we tried to get the best of it: as Jews were persecuted from Spain, they moved on to the Balkans particularly and especially Turkey. Carrying with them the language and the key of their houses, they contributed alongiside with the other communities to the new definitions of the modern states. I am far from being a naive assuming that life was ever easy for Jews living there, but no matter what, they were able to strive.

The Key from Spain by Debbie Levy, colourfully and beautifully illustrated by Sonja Wimmer, published in 2019 by Kar Ben Publishing is dedicated to the memory of the late Ladino singer Flory Jagoda. A Bosnian Jew with Spanish roots, she carried with her the songs and memories of the lost worlds and was an important supporter of the Ladino revival.

In a language accessible to children - preschool and first to mid-grade - the book convenes in few and simple words both the global and the personal histories: of the Jews fleeing Western Europe but also of the brave Flory who remained faitful to her culture and happily shared it with the older and newer generations of Jews from Ladino families. Children books on such topics are even more important than academic studies about Ladino because it raises the interest among the little ones at an age when they are curious and open to learn about the world, but also about themselves and their families. 

The book also includes a couple of words in Ladino, enough to create a certain level of expectation among the children for learn a bit more.

I am glad that such books exist and I was able to read it to my son. As I was growing up, Ladino was rarely, if ever mentioned and there were, for sure, no pedagogical resources and no children books to make you aware of your heritage. I am glad that nowadays there is a strong support to diverse identities among the Jewish communities, too much reduced before to the Askenazi vs. Mizrahi (with the Sephardim included here for the wrong reason of the mental comfort) duality. 

I hope to have the chance to read soon to my son and review more and more books on Ladino-related topics.

Kafka, the Middle East Version

 

What if Kafka had been lived in the Middle East? Would his writing be even more painful and heartaching? How absurd life can be, especially when humans meet the institutions made by men?

Although acknowleding her disillusioning, Lizzie Doron is far from being an apologetic for one cause or another. At least not in Who the Fuck is Kafka, a personal account of an encounter with a Palestinian writer, Nadim, at a Peace Conference in Rome. I had access to this book in audiobook format in an exceptional arrangement played, among others by Corinne Kirchhoff, translated from Hebrew into German by the late Mirjam Pressler. 

Doron´s first person account can be compared from the point of view of the information with the stories of Sayed Kashua. It starts though as a two-way effort to understand the situation of Palestinians, through coming back and forth from fears to compassion and human understanding. The voice of the author, as an Israeli living in the proximity of the terrorist attacks of the Second Intifada, a mother, daughter of a Holocaust survivor. 

It is important to try to understand the other side, it is the first step towards trust, but it is not enough though. Personally, I want to see solutions, I want to see a future without conflict, but how exactly this future may look like should be the task of people living there. Although now I am more informed about the conflict as I was 5 or even 4 years ago, I am still convinced that peace has two different meanings for each of the two sides. Will it be possible, any time soon, to go out of the kafkian paradigm?

Effingers, a German Jewish Story

 

German-born Gabriele Tergit - born Elise Hirschmann - is a relatively new name for the German literary realm. Her multi-generational roman, Effingers, following a family story of a liberal Jewish family from the 19th century until the mid-20th was published only a couple of years ago.

The family base is in the fictional Kragsheim, but the book also offers an extensive historical and social panorama of Germany during those times, particularly Berlin, through the eyes of the Jewish characters. The book was written in German and finished in 1951. Tergit, the mother of the mathematician Ernst Robert Reifenberg, - whose name was given to a street in Berlin - was born in Germany but escaped the country via Palestine before reaching London where she settled.

Effingers is a very dense novel with many characters who are connecting in different circumstances. Their social mobility and modernity is reflected through their choices and new family connections built on the go. Tergit is a fine observer of the emerging social structures as well as of the Jewish society at the time. In addition to the rich nonfiction bibliography on this topic, the literary contribution is valuable for its authenticity and vicinity to the facts mentioned and the overall social realm. The writer is not only a creator of fictional words but indirectly a witness. 

For a compedium of European Jewish literature, Effingers is of particular importance as an unique - for me, at least - literary saga. A translation of the book into English or French would have offer to the non-German speakers access to an important source of literary testimony about Jewish everyday life in Germany before the Nazi destruction. 

Der gebrauchte Jude

 

Maxim Biller arrived from Czechoslovakia to Germany as an early teen. His Jewish Soviet-born family was forced to leave country after country in order to escape the anti-semitism and political pressures. 

´Ich bin Jude, weil ich keine Russe, Tschecke oder Deutsche sein will´. (I am Jewish, as I don´t want to be Russian, Czech or German - my translation). 

His story is a story of Jewish life in the 1980s, at a time when Jews - Jews coming to live in Germany particularly - were a rare occurrence. Those living there already in public positions - like the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki that Biller randomly interviewed as he 24 years old - were rare and rather were introduced in a ´clean´ narrative of the post-WWII Germany. A rhetoric of the kind: You see, we don´t kill all our Jews, some of them are even allowed to return? From this perspective, there may be some Jews who accepted to be publicly used in this way.

As someone who haven´t lived in Germany those years, such an autobiographical account fills up many details about what really Jewish life meant at the time. I may not say that now it is better or things are improved, but there are different pieces of the puzzle that may come together differently. 

At the same time, the book is also a book about coming-at-age in Germany as a non-German Jew, finding your literary way and thinking at length about having - or not - a place in this complex realm. It is not a philosophical approach too, and there is a lot of Czech-alike humour that is still very useful for surviving Germany, particularly if you take your Jewish identity seriously. 

PS: On purpose I will not mention anything at all about the recent Biller-Czollek ´halachic´ debate

Jerusalem, Drawn&Quartered

´I wanted for someone to hiss at me. I waited for a rock to gaze my temple. Instead, I had dessert´.

For one year, Sarah Tuttle-Singer took the decision to spend as much as possible time exploring the borders and points of contact - if any - of the many quarters of Jerusalem. ´I want to live here in Jerusalem, in the Old City, and move between the quarters and understand each one, and feel a part of each one as much as an outsider like me can´.

I´ve slowly read this memoir, trying to remember the scents and the buzz and the voices of a place where I´ve spent many hundreds of hours, that I miss dearly. But compared to her, I´ve mostly walked the beaten path, moving in circle around the same areas, interacting almost with the same people, having my food fix in the same places. Most of the people, even those living in Israel for ever are probably doing the same. Not daring to threshold their own boundaries.

What Sarah Tuttle-Singer revealed in this year of wandering the beaten roads of the Old City round the four seasons was the divisions that remain but also the search for a different language and a reality that can be perceived from different angles. After all, even the heart of the fiercest Salafist enemy of ´the occupation´ will melt holding in his arms a few days old kitten. 

There is no recipe for peace or hope for one, but it is a journey through reality seen with clean eyes. Eyes who are not searching for Gd or sublime transfigurations, but for human connections and layers of memories. Because there is not only the history - with H - or the conflict - with C - that matters, but how we are part of a bigger story - with simple s - made of all the steps of the people who ever paced those stones. Like her mother, and her grandmother who kissed on a roof. 

Jerusalem Drawn&Quartered is a memoir of finding a place when you do not belong fully, or rather reaching the freedom given by the reality of living in-between languages, worlds, stories. Like the mermaid she tattooed on her arm where else ? in decade-old studio in the Old City. ´Mermaids are a lot like immigrants that way. To others, we are both a little familiar, and a little frightening. To ourselves, we belong in both places, but not really in either´. 

Israel remains a country of people and many histories, of blood, tears but nevertheless of survival. This feeling gives you strength, even in the most hopeless world. No matter what NYT will try to make you believe, it´s one of the happiest places on Earth, one of the places I always feel happy, and I can´t only wait to be back and see with my own fresh eyes some of the places featured by Sarah Tuttle-Singer in this perceptive memoir, including the tattoo parlour.

About ´Fate´ by Zeruya Shalev (translated into German by Anne Birkenhauer)

 

Fate (translated into German as Schicksal by Anne Birkenhauer, who translated among others David Grossman or Yehuda Amichai) is from all the books by Zeruya Shalev I´ve read until now, the most Israel-oriented. All of her books are taking place in Israel and do include elements of the everyday life in the country, particularly terorist threats or the religious context, but the main topics mainly have to do with relationship, betrayal, love and pain (the book before, Pain was by far my favorite, for the complexity of the characters and the surgical precision exploring suffering).

Fate - that was completed during the Covid pandemic - has a completely different spin and is partly inspired by Shalev´s own family history, namely her father´s. After the death of her father, a famous brain researcher, Menachem (Mino) Rubin, her daughter, Atara wants to find out the woman her father was married before, Rachel. Atara, an architect specialized in historical monuments, lives in Haifa (like Shalev herself). Rachel, whose son is a Breslev hasid, met Atara´s father during their time in Lechi, an armed group active during the British Mandate whose aim was, among others, to push the Brits out of the country, with any price. 

Most of the book is an exploration of memory, the ways in which we remember. Memory is an emotional business and its authenticity is at a large extent doubtful. The names of the Lehi members killed are repeated in the story as a mantra. Likewise, the story of the doll stucked with explosive who blew up. For many reasons, the history of Lehi in the creation of the state of Israel is rarely mentioned openly - compared to Irgun or Palmach, for instance. In the account include in Fate, they look like promoters of a Jewish-Arab entente and co-existence, with the only enemy being the Brits, which is a too edulcorated and romanticized version for my taste. I would have loved much more a rough version of a Lehi member, maybe confused, violent, idealistic, but more authentic than by being assigned ideas and intentions that just resonate with current political concerns. This distorted voice is a big pity for the overall representation of Lehi, given that they were, in fact, a very interesting movement, to be understood and placed in the equally complex context of the times.

I had access to the book in audiobook format, read by actressed Maria Schrader and Eva Meckbach. 

Rating: 3 stars 

On Cultural Boycotts

Cultural boycotts, of any kind, are idiotic. Exactly, you´ve read the word right. There is nothing more lame and anti-intellectual and the opposite of being intelligent in general as a cultural boycott. It denies automatically the mission of writing and culture in general, which is, in my opinion, to open minds and hearts through ideas and words.

The media is lately mentioning how Sally Rooney, an Irish bestseller author famous for books like Beautiful World and Normal People and latest Beautiful World, Where are You? is definitely against her last book being translated into Hebrew. Her first books were published by Modan Publishing House into Hebrew but now, her agent confirmed that she opposes a further translation. 

Sally Rooney is a popular Millennial author, writing in a simple way about issues Millenials may deal with. In one of her books a character is going to a pro-Palestinian demonstration. Recently, she signed together with other authors and public intellectuals, a letter accusing Israel of apartheid and called for her (Israel´s) international isolation. 

In fact, Israel´s publishing industry, one of the most vibrant in the Middle East, is doing well, with or without Rooney´s books, that I bet are a favorite read among Palestinian millennials as well, many of them perfectly fluent in Hebrew. 

But people like Rooney do not have - and sometimes do not want it either - time and energy for such subtelties. By embracing the BDS they seems to be happy for apparently fulfilling a role of public intellectuals. Rooney is not the first and probably not the last author with such a stance. In 2012, Alice Walker also refused her book The Color Purple - to be translated into Hebrew. Her bad, but in fact, readers, smart readers in Israel can and will read their books, in many other international translations because eventually they will want being informed, including about those who really don´t want them to exist. Israel is a country where there are many people native-level fluent in many languages, covering, among others, various Arab dialects, Amharic, Persian, French, Russian, German etc.

This is not a literary post where I will evaluate the literary value of Rooney´s books. It does not matter at all, in fact. The decision of boycotting a language - and not other languages from countries where, for instance, women are sent to prison for not being in line with a strict religious interpretation or for their private life choices - is a cheap, very cheap manifestation of a so-called public opinion makers. 

By using her temporary status of literary star for uttering an international politics stance, Rooney is not doing anything outstanding. She is not a hero or a writer turned overnight into an opinion maker. She is a person of temporary talent who is keen to get more points for supporting a very controversial and anti-intellectual movement. It´s not mainstream, it is not bravery. It is intellectual opportunism which is, in fact, nothing close to public awareness or the weight of an intellectual mission. What she - and maybe others - does not help anyone. It´s just an intellectual parody.