Reviewed by: Twentieth-Century Sephardic Authors from the Former Yugoslavia by Željko Jovanović Alma Prelec Twentieth-Century Sephardic Authors from the Former Yugoslavia. By Željko Jovanović. (Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, 41) Cambridge: Legenda. 2020. xiv+210 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–78188–851–3. When the Sarajevo National Library was reduced to cinders in August 1992, countless artefacts were lost. The Sarajevo Haggadah was not among them. Having survived the Spanish Expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the Second World War, the illustrated manuscript again evaded destruction. While the histories of the Sephardim—and the Haggadah itself—in the former Yugoslavia have inspired an array of artistic responses, scholarly attention has tended to focus on the larger communities further east, particularly those of Greece and Turkey. Željko Jovanović intervenes in this discussion and expands its range, incorporating a timely and illuminating overview of the main literary players in the region alongside their formulation of a lost Iberia. Jovanović examines four authors (two men and two women) with contrasting approaches to Sephardic cultural and educational reform. Chapter 1 juxtaposes the efforts of Haim S. Davičo (1854–1918) and Laura Papo (1891–1942). Biographical context is shown to be essential in understanding the authors' literary outputs. Davičo's Serbian version of Tirso de Molina's novella Los tres maridos burladores, Ženske Šale, is read and understood through the prism of Davičo's attitude towards Sephardic integration. Raised in an intellectual Jewish family in Belgrade, Davičo favoured assimilation and wrote almost exclusively in Serbian. In a close literary analysis of Ženske Šale, Jovanović notes that Davičo removes most topographical references in Tirso's novella yet does not replace these with Belgrade adjacent equivalents. Jovanović maintains that the removal of specific Spanish cultural allusions aids the author in what appears to be another, if less obvious, gesture: to present the text not as a translation of Tirso's, but as an authentic Sephardic tale. If, for Davičo, archival work on Ladino texts represented a chance to claim their place within a broader Serbian literary context, for Laura Papo the intention instead was to maintain the integrity of the Bosnian Jewish cultural tradition as a separate entity. Born in Sarajevo but educated in Istanbul and Paris, Papo received a polyglot education that allowed her later to translate German and French, as well as Serbian, texts into Ladino. Considered the first Sephardic female playwright, Papo wrote exclusively in Ladino, a political decision guaranteeing that the performances would be accessible to her intended audience. Unlike Davičo, Papo collected her archival material in situ, integrating these elements (folklore, proverbs, and ballads) into the fabric of her plays. Here referencing tradition rather than theory, Jovanović underscores how gender norms within the Sephardic community influenced the authors' approaches to their work. [End Page 271] Turning to the late twentieth century, Chapter 2 explores the preservation efforts of Gina Camhy (1909-1990) and Isak Papo (1912-1996) in the aftermath of the Second World War. Jovanović offers important insights into Camhy's biography, of which relatively little is known. Camhy wrote from Paris, where her literary career began, narrating Sephardic customs from her native Bosnia in Judaeo-Spanish. Isak Papo trained in London and later published bilingual editions of the cuentos, some of which were probably transcribed from memory. Both authors collected and contextualized the tales, engaging in a form of memory work distinct from the adaptational efforts of their predecessors. The final chapter uncovers the Yugoslav travels of Djohá, a trickster figure generally thought to have descended from Al-Andalus to find a place later in the Sephardic oral tradition. Here the reader again encounters Davičo, whose references to the Djohá tales are the oldest to be found in present-day Serbia. Davičo introduces Djohá, already a polysemic figure, to a new context through comparison with the Turkish Nasr al-Din Khodja, whose attributes and characterization would have been familiar to Serbian audiences following centuries of Ottoman rule. Charting Djohá's transliterations across different authors and decades within and beyond Yugoslavia, Jovanović reveals how the character was transformed by the authors' personal mores and, occasionally, cultural sensitivities...
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Nov 13, 2024
Alisa Van De Haar 
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