Editors' Note
Sephardim and the City
This issue contains a special section on Sephardic literature entitled ‘Sephardim and the City’ edited by Jane Mushabac of City University, New York and Yael Halevi-Wise, of McGill University. We are honored to publish these papers that were delivered at a session of the Modern Language Association on “Sephardim and the City” and moderated by Nohemy Solorzano-Thompson , in January 2018.
Yael Halevi-Wise writes:
New York was covered in snow on the 4th of January 2018, when the authors of three of the articles published in this issue of Sephardic Horizons met to talk about “Sephardim and the City” at the Modern Languages Association’s largest annual convention. The Sephardic Studies forum had organized itself months in advance—with Nohemy Solorzano-Thompson as chairperson, and panelists Gloria Ascher, Teresa Vilarós, Ruth Malka and myself as presenters. But the weather, as sometimes happens at this time of the year, had its own contraventions, and along with the efforts of many other fellow travelers, my paper on A. B. Yehoshua’s multicultural Jerusalem never made it out of the airport.1
Our topic of “Sephardim and the City” aimed to contribute to an analysis of space and place pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti in a broader sociohistorical context and applied to Sephardic Studies from an historical point of view by scholars such as Devin Naar and Julia Phillips Cohen in their works on Salonika. Unlike the Eastern European Jews who dwelled in rural shtetls as much as in urban areas, Sephardim are mostly city people. They are historically associated with Salonika, Toledo, Jerusalem and Safed, and today with Seattle, Los Angeles, Paris, Istanbul, Yeruham and Beersheva. The two places most closely associated with Sephardic history—Toledo and Salonika—became ghost towns as far as their Jewish existence is concerned. Toledo’s Jewish community was wiped out as we know between the persecutions of 1391 and the expulsion of 1492, and Salonika’s Jews were decimated in the Holocaust. But, today, new manifestations of Sephardic culture continue to emerge in both diasporic and Israeli centers thanks to invigorating interactions with Ashkenazi, Arab and other cultural groups, for example in Tel Aviv, though one hardly thinks of it as a ‘Sephardic’ city.
Is New York a ‘Sephardic city’? It certainly becomes one in His Hundred Years, A Tale, as Gloria Ascher notes in her review of this novel, which traces a century-long journey from Ottoman Turkey to the shores of Long Beach by the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean links the Old and New Worlds in this debut work of fiction by Shalach Manot, who under her actual name, as Jane Mushabac, had co-authored the delightful Short and Remarkable History of New York City, reprinted five times by Fordham University Press since its publication at the turn of this millennium.
Bringing us back to the principal locus of Sephardic history in the Iberian Peninsula, Teresa Vilarós introduces us to a remarkable modern writer who imagined his beloved Catalonia as a destroyed Sepharad. After Catalonian culture was crushed by Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, Salvador Espriu i Molas—trained as a scholar of Semitic languages and literature—began to refer symbolically to his coastal hometown of Arenys de Mar, thirty miles north of Barcelona. In his poetic work, he renamed it ‘Sinera’ and mapped its history upon a lost Sepharad. Since for Espriu, “destruction and the unthinkable have already happened,” as Vilarós explains, Sinera and Sepharad “are located poetically beyond and ‘outside’ the reach of destructive action.” They thus become “a crypto-Jewish-like site of mourning and dwelling.”
Our third presentation is Ruth Malka’s critique of a subdued relationship between place and culture(s) in the fiction of one of the most eccentric French modernists, the Sephardic writer Albert Cohen of Solal fame. Ruth Malka notes a perplexing dichotomy between East and West in Cohen’s representation of Corfu, the Greek island where he was born when it was still under Ottoman rule, and Geneva, where he worked throughout his adult life, and where he sets much of his fiction. While many Sephardic writers—A. B. Yehoshua is a case in point—like to historicize the interactions between the representatives of a variety of cultural groups in diverse locales, Albert Cohen glosses over ethnic and religious nuances in the semi-autobiographical locales of his fictional worlds. His caricaturesque Sephardic Jews, “hailing from a Greek ghetto,” are presented in a binary relationship with a Christianized West that bypasses both the experiences of Ashkenazim in the francophone Parisian and Swiss locales to which his protagonist emigrates, and overlooks as well the presence of Christians Greeks in his native Corfu. This reduction paradoxically enables Cohen to emphasize the Jew’s overall precariousness in all these places.
I am grateful to Judith Roumani for inviting us to continue this discussion through the pages of Sephardic Horizons, and take this opportunity to congratulate her for indefatigable work on this journal for nearly a decade. (Y. H.-W.)
The rest of our issue is also partially dedicated to literature and the city. We publish for the first time a short story by the Yemenite-Canadian novelist Gila Green, chronicling the dilemmas of a fiction writer of similar background living in the city of Jerusalem today. The Yemenite/Canadian/immigrant/religious/ aspects of the real and the fictional writers are constantly in question, dialoging with each other, obliged to live with each other. Our review section also includes a review of a recently published novel, White Zion by this same promising author.
In our Ladino/Judeo-Spanish section, the Chilean writer Hernan Rodriguez Fisse generously shares an essay on his long-ago experience as a student in Jerusalem, and our book reviews cover a multiplicity of recent publications. On Iraqi Jewish culture, Nimrod Raphaeli, himself of Iraqi Jewish origin, reviews a novel newly translated from the Arabic and published in English, Samir Naqqash’s Cobwebs and Neighbors, lyrically weaving the web of life in an apartment building in Baghdad inhabited by Jews and Muslims; Raphaeli also reviews Matti Friedman’s history of Israel’s earliest (Mizrahi) spies, risking their lives to take the pulse of neighboring, hostile Arab countries before there was even a country to spy for.
Annette Fromm reviews a young adult book about exiled Jewish children from Portugal, torn from their parents five hundred years ago and sent to a harsh island environment off Africa, while two more reviews, by Lucia Admiraal and Judith Roumani, cover two new landmark publications on Jews in North Africa during the Holocaust/war years.
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Lucette Lagnado z”l, the much respected American Sephardic writer of Egyptian origin, journalist for The Wall Street Journal, author of several touching autobiographical works, including a memoir of her father, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, and who also contributed a review of the late Jacques Roumani’s Jewish Libya, published recently in Sephardic Horizons. Her sensitive literary touch is much missed.
We hope you will find something of interest in the line-up for this issue. With much gratitude to our contributors, to the two co-editors, and thanks to our webmaster Altan Gabbay and our associate editor Annette Fromm,
Judith Roumani, Yael Halevi-Wise, Jane Mushabac
1 An extended discussion of A. B. Yehoshua’s attitude toward Jerusalem will appear in Yael Halevi-Wise’s A. B. Yehoshua’s Multilayered Imagination (forthcoming from Penn State University Press in 2020).