Renée Levine Melammed, An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty

Abstract

Scholars of Renee Levine Melammed’s standing having already established their prestige on the basis of the originality and quality of their past publications, do not need additional accolades of their new published works. I nevertheless feel indebted to Nashim for having given me the opportunity to study and comment on Levine Melammed’s new book, An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty. This book, which links directly to my own work on the history and culture of the Sefardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire and in Greece, comprises an extraordinary and original collection of 512 coplas. A popular poetic genre similar to the Greek mantinades, coplas are spontaneously constructed verses which, when recited or sung, end with a toast dedicated to a friend or a personality widely known in the Jewish community. Most of the coplas assembled in Levine Melammed’s book are from unpublished Judeo-Spanish poetic sources, such as my own work, complementing the official documents used by historians.1 Given that historical “truth” and “objectivity” often prove to be biased by the researcher’s social and ideological preconceptions or interests, these poems, conveying the authentic views, experiences and knowledge of local improvisers such as Bouena Sarfatty, who were involved in the events of their time (the interwar period, the German occupation and the liberation), are sources of primary importance for all those interested in studying Salonikan Jewry. Often they put historians’ understandings to the test, challenging but also enriching their perspective. Bouena Sarfatty (1916–1997), as Levine Melammed presents her in the Preface, was no ordinary woman. Born and bred in Salonika, she was a contemporary of my mother, Jeannette Bensoussan (nee Amarillio), and my mother-in-law, Renee Molho (nee Saltiel).2 Like them, she was a working woman who had attended the French schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, shared the social, cultural and historical experiences of Salonika’s Jewish life, and survived the Holocaust with the help of the Greek resistance. Though still young and inexperienced, these women were defined