THE SCHOCKEN BOOK OF MODERN SEPHARDIC LITERATURE
Ilan Stavans, editor. Schocken Books, New York, 2005. 440 pages.
Shortly after arriving in Israel in 1970, a group
of Soviet newcomers was welcomed to Zion by Prime
Minister Golda Meir. "You are the real Jews," she
told them. "You speak Yiddish ?. Every loyal Jew
must speak Yiddish, for he who does not speak
Yiddish is not a Jew."
Ignorance of Yiddish did not diminish the
Jewishness of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph,
Moses, David, Elijah, and Rashi. And it has not
kept immigrants from India and Ethiopia from
being recognized as Jews under Israel's Law of
Return. Meir, who was born in Kiev and grew up in
Milwaukee, always spoke Hebrew inflected with
Yiddish and English, not the Sephardic accent
that dominates speech in the country that she
governed. To many Jews who fly a Yiddish kite,
Sephardim-descendents of Jews expelled from Spain
in 1492 and Portugal in 1497-are invisible.
Instead of knishes, they eat borekas. Instead of
Yiddish-a blend of German with Hebrew and Slavic
elements-many speak Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish
hybrid that evolved when 15th-century Spanish
interacted with Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish.
Instead of Sholem Aleichem, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, and Saul Bellow, they count
Judah Halevi, Baruch Spinoza, Elias Canetti, and
A. B. Yehoshua as their literary champions.
Insisting on the sumptuous diversity of Jewish
culture, The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic
Literature sets out to overcome what editor Ilan
Stavans calls "the Ashkenazic monolith"-the
presumption that the long sojourn in Eastern
Europe was the defining experience of Jewish
life. After abandoning Iberia on the
recommendation of the Inquisition (the choice was
conversion, emigration, or death), Jews settled
throughout what became the Ottoman Empire-Turkey,
Greece, Bulgaria, Syria. Contemporary Sephardic
Jews have scattered far beyond the Mediterranean,
as minorities within the minority Jewish
community. Though the vast majority of North
American Jews are Ashkenazim, the first
arrivals-twenty-three refugees who showed up in
New Amsterdam in 1654 after Portugal seized
Brazil from the Dutch-were Sephardim. Giving
voice to Jews too often ignored by the Ashkenazic
establishment, this new anthology offers an
alternative international canon to the one
already occupied by Alberto Gerchunoff, Nadine
Gordimer, Eugène Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Imre
Kertész, A. M. Klein, Ivan Klíma, Osip
Mandel'shtam, Harry Mulisch, Amos Oz, Harold
Pinter, Henry Roth, Bruno Schulz, and Italo Svevo.
Despite hoary jokes about how a village with two
Jews requires three synagogues, the State of
Israel makes do with two chief rabbis: Ashkenazic
and Sephardic. However, Sephardim are not just
not-Ashkenazim, and a Manichaeanism that assigns
all Jews to one camp or the other fails to
account for historic communities in Iraq, Iran,
and Yemen that developed independently of either
Eastern Europe or Iberia. World Jewry is not
symmetrical, mathematically divided between
two-and only two- parallel communities. And it is
a common misconception that Mizrachi or Oriental
Jews-those from North Africa or the Middle
East-are all Sephardim, when they might in fact
lack any link to Spain. Attentive to the
distinctive qualities of Sephardic culture as
well as the variety among Sephardim, Stavans has
assembled twenty-seven authors from twenty
nations. Writing in Arabic, English, French,
German, Hebrew, Italian, Ladino, Serbo-Croatian,
and Spanish, these men and women evoke so wide a
range of experiences that it is reasonable to
ask: Is there such a thing as Sefardismo, an
essence shared by all descended from the Spanish
expulsion? What does Gini Alhadeff - who writes
of living in Cairo, Khartoum, Florence, Tokyo,
and New York and being unaware of her Jewish
genealogy until twenty - have in common with
Albert Memmi, who grew up in the insular Jewish
quarter of Tunis? While Judaism and his
rabbinical forebears inspired the prose and
poetry of Yehuda Haim Aaron Ha-Cohen Perahia,
Angelina Muñiz-Huberman grew up Catholic. Giorgio
Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, and Primo Levi were
prominent figures in Italian literature, and
Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Yet Grace Aguilar lingers in obscurity among
Victorian English novelists.
As with other Jewish authors, the Holocaust and
Israel are recurrent themes. So are identity and
assimilation, but the contributors to this
anthology occupy a diaspora within the Diaspora,
an expulsion from Iberia that compounds their
exile from Zion. Tradition portrays the former as
an echo of the latter, claiming that both of the
ancient Temples were destroyed on the same
dreadful calendar day that more than 100,000 Jews
embarked from Spain-Tishah B'Av. It was not until
1968 that the government in Madrid revoked the
edict that in 1492 forced all Jews either to
convert or flee. Sephardic identity is grounded
in nostalgia, collective memory of an
irreclaimable home away from home. And while many
question the accuracy of La Convivencia, the myth
of a golden age of Moorish rule in which Muslims,
Christians, and Jews lived in harmony, a belief
in la España perdida-lost Spain-continues to
beguile Sephardim. By contrast, few Ashkenazim,
despite sentimentalization by Fiddler on the
Roof, yearn to return to squalid shtetlakh in
Galicia or the Russian Pale.
As the useful chronology of Sephardic history at
the beginning of this book suggests, a thorough
sampling of Sephardic literature would fill
several volumes and would begin in the tenth
century, when most Jews resided in Spain. It
would include selections from Moses de Léon's
Zohar and Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed ,
as well as the poetry of Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon
ibn Gabirol, Yehuda Halevi, and Moses ibn Ezra.
Focusing on the post-Haskalah period, Stavans
begins, instead, in 1844, with a story by Grace
Aguilar. He reprints three poems-including "The
New Colossus," which was inscribed on the
pedestal of the Statue of Liberty-that Emma
Lazarus published in the late nineteenth century.
However, the "modern" Sephardic literature in
this collection is largely late twentieth
century, and includes a strong representation
from authors, such as Sami Michael, Moris Farhi,
A. B. Yehoshua, Hélène Cixous, André Aciman, Gini
Alhadeff, Ruth Knafo Setton, Ruth Behar, Ammiel
Alcalay, and Sami Shalom Chetrit, who are still
active. In a flash of editorial inspiration,
Stavans concludes with an excerpt by a notable
author who is not Sephardic and not even
Jewish-Salman Rushdie. His 1995 novel The Moor's
Last Sigh is narrated by the final scion of a
dynasty of spice merchants who came to Cochin,
India, after the expulsion from Spain.
The collection includes a smattering of poetry
and a few powerful pieces of fiction. Stavans
includes a generous excerpt from Mr. Mani (1990),
an acclaimed Hebrew novel by A. B. Yehoshua that
traces the fortunes of one family over three
centuries and through sojourns in Salonika,
Constantinople, and Jerusalem. In an excerpt from
his 1977 novel Refuge, Sami Michael, an Israeli
born in Baghdad, explores the political
radicalism of Arab Jews alienated from Israeli
society. In "Two Sisters," Yehuda Burla,
considered the first Hebrew novelist of Sephardic
descent, tells the story of two antagonistic
siblings who emigrate from Rhodes to separate
sections of Jerusalem and live out their days in
angry isolation. The context of this collection
makes it tempting to read Burla's work as an
allegory about tensions between two cultures
within contemporary Jewry.
But the anthology is strongest in
nonfiction-memoirs and essays that offer direct
access to the experiences and thoughts of
Sephardic authors. In an excerpt from his
autobiographical The Tongue Set Free (1977),
Elias Canetti evokes growing up Jewish in the
multilingual, multicultural community of Ruschuk,
a Bulgarian port on the Danube. In "The Last
Seder," a selection from his 1994 memoir Out of
Egypt, André Aciman, who was born in Alexandria
in 1951, recalls the dramatic circumstances in
which his family was forced to flee their home.
"He and I," by Natalia Ginzburg, is a trenchant
meditation on the relationship between a woman
and a man, and perhaps as well between Jew and
Gentile. An excerpt from The Sun at Midday (1997)
offers Gini Alhadeff's vertiginous account of a
vibrant, peripatetic clan "who considered
ourselves primarily free to be anything we
wished." According to Victor Perera, born in 1934
in Guatemala to parents who had come from
Jerusalem and later moved on with him to New
York, "To be a Sephardi, I discovered, is to see
the world as mystery, so that even ordinary
events are infused with the sense of otherness."
An extract from The Cross and the Pear Tree
(1995), Perera's attempt to untangle the branches
of his family tree back to 1492, is, like the
rest of this collection, a celebration of
otherness.
Born in Mexico City with roots in Eastern Europe,
Stavans, who lives in Massachusetts, is an ideal
bridge between communities. A prolific editor and
penetrating critic, Stavans has published
important collections of Hispanic literature,
Jewish literature, and Hispanic Jewish
literature. While it might not by itself reverse
the polarization of world Jewry into Ashkenazic
and Sephardic camps, The Schocken Book of Modern
Sephardic Literature is a major act of cultural
reclamation. "The world exists because the book
does," declared Edmond Jabès, who wrote in French
though born in 1912 in Cairo to a family of
Italian origin. A richer world of Jewish thoughts
comes into existence because of this book.