Paloma Díaz-Mas and Elisa Martín Ortega, Eds.
Mujeres sefardíes lectoras y escritoras, siglos XIX-XXI
Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2016. Pp. 384 paperback ISBN: 978-8484899334
Reviewed by Vanessa Paloma Elbaz*
This important volume analyses the societal process of Sephardi women’s transition into written and read European literate cultural worlds and its impact on the wider community. As the editors specify in the introduction (pp. 16-19), only elite Sephardi women had had access to textual reading until the mid-nineteenth century. Díaz-Mas and Martín Ortega discuss the impact of foreign schools for Sephardi communities throughout the Mediterranean Basin, and the entry of women readers and writers into fiction, poetry, press and theatre, as authors, characters and audience members. They also specify the importance to this community’s historic and continuous involvement in oral transmission of literate culture through romances, proverbs, wedding songs and stories.
This oral-literate transition meant that in the beginning of the twentieth century women became more actively engaged in Jewish charitable organizations, giving them a new implication in official communal engagement (p. 21).
Towards the end of the introduction the authors outline different generations of Sephardi women writers, separating them into three groups. Those born between 1900 and 1930 were marked by the end of the Ottoman empire, the rise of nationalist states and the Holocaust. The group of authors born between 1930 and 1960 were usually born in traditional Jewish communities where they spoke Judeo-Spanish as their mother tongue but emigrated to new countries, where their language was relegated to the private sphere. Finally, the authors born in the 60s and 70s usually write in languages distant from Judeo-Spanish and hark back through their writing to almost completely lost linguistic and family traditions.
The volume is divided into two major sections, with one lone chapter of a previously unpublished text forming the third section. The first section entitled “Woman and Literature: from Oral Culture to Written Transmission” covers a miscellany of formats from proverbs, school manuals, and rabbinic books written for women to post-Enlightenment formats such as the Sephardi press and an analysis of print advertising directed at women readers.
The thread that goes through the volume is the role of the Sephardi woman in communal life, and how text either written, sung, acted out or printed supported their inner life as well as maintaining their lines of acceptable behavior and roles clearly delineated within traditional boundaries.
Tamar Alexander’s opening chapter of the first section analyses the proverbs she collected from her own mother, and the relationship between a mother and a daughter in transmitting, protecting and reprimanding through mediated communication and non-linear oral transmission.
Teresa Madrid Alvarez-Piñer and Paloma Díaz-Mas analyze school manuals from Salonika and Istanbul in the early twentieth century, showing the changes that happened when more women started integrating into the ranks of teachers. There is a desire for modernity, and a reiteration of women’s concerns and rights around financial independence that appear increasingly.
Katja Smid analyzes the Yoré De’á, a rabbinic text written for a female audience by Eliezer Papo 1884 and shows that the text and its context not only show what was expected of a religious Sephardi woman in the Bosnian-Ottoman context during that period, but the relationship that Papo himself had with the women around him.
Tina Rivlin’s chapter about Las madres judías de la época bíblica, written in Bulgaria and published in 1913 in Istanbul also shows male rabbinic concern with women’s roles and their importance in protecting the community from assimilation through avoiding mixed marriages. It is also an interesting example because its author, Zemach Rabiner, hailed from Lithuania, and wrote in Judeo-Spanish: thus it shows the influence of Orthodox Ashkenazi writers in the early 20th century Ottoman Jewish world, when assimilation and spiritual declination were growing.
The next chapter moves to the press. María Sánchez-Pérez reiterates the revolutionary aspect of the printed press in the life of Sephardi women: the fact that this voice from the outside world made it in to the private domestic space and began to bring in previously inaccessible information and relationships to the wider Jewish world. She looks at two publications: Ilustra Guerta de Istoria (Vienna 1880-1882) and Yerushalayim (Jerusalem 1909), both of which are aimed at masculine and feminine readers – but that addressed topics which some scholars have perceived to be under women’s domain, such as hygiene, education and moral behavior.
Yvette Bürki and Aitor Garcia Moreno take us to consumerism and women’s appearance through Judeo-Spanish press advertisements. The first, as still in use today, uses the female model to sell a product to men, usually by showing his modernity or sex appeal. Products for women’s use in the home or for health also seem to be aimed at a feminine readership, and finally women’s beauty and fashion products. Their analysis focuses on the forms of language surrounding each form of advertisement, and how it places women at the center or periphery of locution.
The second section focuses on women writers. Gila Hadar’s opening chapter analyses the voice of a Reyna Cohen, an early 20th century mystic from Salonika. Cohen published three books and wrote another which remained in manuscript. In all of them she exhorted Jewish women to stay on the “true” path of Judaism to aid in the arrival of the Messiah.
Elena Romero’s chapter on a Jewish Salonikan woman journalist of the beginning of the 20th century (the chapter title has a typo, saying 21st century, but she was writing in 1901) who wrote in the Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Epoca describes some of the difficulties that a young single woman had in the professional world, as well as her wide thematic breadth and commitment to maintaining Judeo-Spanish language as a living and working language through the press as well.
The poetry of Esther Morguez Algranti (Smyrna) was broached by Susy Gruss – as a writer who had lived through the Holocaust, her written output was not just restricted to religious and moralistic material, but also to the great pain and loss caused by the Holocaust. However, the poem that she focuses on is one that celebrates the 9th of Elul in Izmir, the date when they were liberated from the Greeks by Ataturk – and which falls squarely within nationalistic tropes repeated by Jews throughout the Mediterranean. She utilizes the exact same poetic structure and images from a poem by Yehuda Halevy, which Dr. Gruss suggests might have been a way of gaining acceptance as a writer.
Zeljko Jovanovic presents a Bosnian Sephardi author, Gina Camhy, who writes preponderantly about the nostalgia of the lost Jewish world in her city of Sarajevo, providing a view into the life and customs of the Bosnian Jewish community.
The Macedonian Sephardi writer, Jamila Andjela Kolonomos is presented by Krinka Vidakovic-Petrov, who describes her work as having two principal themes: Macedonian Jewish culture and folklore, and the Holocaust in Macedonia. She published as late as 2006 Monastir sin Judios and it was translated into English in 2008, with a title including a subtitle Recollections of a Jewish partisan in Macedonia, placing her contribution as a woman, a partisan and one of the remaining Jewish voices in Macedonia.
Jelena Filipovic and Ivana Vucina-Simovic’s chapter compares two authors born during World War II who wrote autobiographical works. Rosa Nissan from Mexico and Gordana Kuic from Serbia – facing two sorts of Jewish women’s lives. The Latin American Sephardi one, which is tied to family, tradition and the conservatism that exists in the surrounding culture, contrasts with the Serbian one who lived through the modernity of the post-war period and the social and financial emancipation of women. In the Serbian case, the characters were also confronting the societal consequences that both socialism and Jewish assimilation brought. The Mexican character found herself tied to a suffocating wider tribe, from which it was difficult to free herself.
Michael Studemund-Halevy writes about Gracia Albuhayre from Karnobat and her poetry. He equates her political choice to write in Judezmo as a manner of eliciting the idea of a portable homeland through the language, especially after the Holocaust. This Bulgarian writer, belonging to a group of close to twenty other women who have used Judezmo as a way to establish their identity, reestablish links to a glorious past and pave the future (p. 285). Her 144 poems published between 2005 and 2014 establish her connection to Bulgaria, her Sephardi identity and love.
The last poet that appears in this volume is Margalit Matitiahu born in Tel Aviv in 1935 of parents from Salonika. The author Agnieszka August-Zarebska refers to her first book Kurtijo Kemado (1986) as a book of grief, referring to Matitiahu’s recent loss of her mother, which may have been the impulse for a trip to her mother’s motherland. This symbiotic relationship between mother’s memory and daughter’s action towards rememoration relays the reader of this volume to some of the previous chapters where daughters and mothers trace a literary and traditional line of continuity through words.
This second section finishes with a chapter of Pilar Romeu Ferré on female writers of North Africa, from the early twentieth century until the twenty first. She has included writers from Morocco and born in the diaspora, writing preponderantly in French, but also in Spanish as is the case of Esther Bendahan. Romeu Ferré’s chapter finishes with an invitation for a future study that is yet to be done on the linguistic apparitions of identity lexicon which she concludes will help to understand the manner in which North African women express their Sephardi identity.
The last section, part III presents the readers with a short play “Bohoreta” written by Laura Papo (Bosnia). Eliezer Papo gives us a short introduction to her life and the context of this previously unpublished manuscript. Laura Papo died during WWII, and this short play in Judezmo invites the reader to look inside the life of Sephardi women before the catastrophe of the Holocaust.
This volume is an important and original contribution to the study of Sephardi literature, presenting such a varied series of examples of literature for and from women. I would be interested in seeing a further exploration of Sephardi feminine multi-lingual literature and the possibility of finding that the concerns and voices of the Sephardi woman might cut through national and linguistic barriers.
* Vanessa Paloma Elbaz is a Research Associate at Cambridge University, UK.