“The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature” is an essential anthology for Jewish readers.
Edited by and with a superb introduction from the Mexican-born Jewish scholar Ilan Stavans, this book is in its own way, as important as Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s groundbreaking “A Treasury of Yiddish Stories.”
“Yiddish Stories” brought home to Jewish American readers our debt to “the world of our fathers” and to Yiddish as a language and ethos.
Stavans’ anthology will make clear to the Jewish reader the depth of Sephardic achievement and the greatness of Sephardic culture as well, as the extent the Sephardic experience is a mirror onto the larger Jewish experience.
Common themes include the authors’ pride in their Jewish roots, the majesty of the Spanish Jewish language of Ladino and the sense of being an outsider.
Yet being an outsider does not place these featured writers outside Jewish history or experience.
“Shema,” a poem by Primo Levi, for example, transcends Italian Jewish roots and is an expression of an entire Jewish experience that cries out to the world.
Levi describes a man in a concentration camp who “labors in the mud” and who “knows no peace” and “dies at a yes or no.” Levi also describes a woman “without hair or name … with no more strength to remember.”
He concludes the poem with an admonition to never forget those killed by the Nazis:
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Obviously Levi speaks here for all who died or suffered in the camps, whether speaking Yiddish or Ladino or Italian.
The roll call of modern Sephardic writers included in this book is more than impressive. Besides Primo Levi one encounters 28 writers, among them Natalia Ginzberg, A.B. Yehoshua, Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti and Georgio Bassani. The Iraqi-born Israeli author Sami Michael is also included, as is Victor Perrera who wrote so tellingly of his Guatemalan childhood in the “The Cross and The Pear Tree.”
These writers are representative of a culture that existed in Spain more than 200 years BCE, that included, as editor Stavans tells us, the great Jewish poets and philosophers and scientists of the Jewish Golden Age, such as Maimonides and Yehuda Halevi.
When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, they suffered further persecution as the Inquisition followed them elsewhere. Sephardic Jews from Italy and Greece
experienced the Holocaust.
Yet for many Jews, Sephardic Jewry has been seen as merely exotic. According to Stavans, too many Ashkenazi Jews have ignorantly stereotyped the Sephardim ” as being less cultured, less accomplished.” In reality, Sephardic literature reflects a people both Jewish and universal in the highest sense of those words.
Emma Lazarus is an example of a writer who distilled the Sephardic experience in a way that relates to the total experience of the Jewish people and to all of the earth’s homeless exiles.
An American-born Portuguese Jew, Lazarus, like Primo Levi, represented multitudes. Aware of the suffering of her ancestors and the persecution that brought them to the New World, she spoke for all victims of persecution. Her knowledge of her own specific identity allowed her to identify with “your poor, your tired your huddled masses yearning to breath free … ” It was a Sephardic Jewish woman, aware of the meaning of her own people’s experience, who found the words to define the American meaning of refuge and freedom.
This book marks another important step for Jews coming to terms with the totality of Jewish history. Stavans’ defense of Sephardic Jewry, in the introduction, is eloquent and worth the price of the book alone.
“The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature” edited by Ilan Stavans (439 pages,
Schocken Books, $27.50).