Marcel Cohen (1) (1937–)

I had never heard of this book until someone here on LT praised it highly, and then it sounded so fascinating I ordered it. Ladino is the language that was spoken by the Jews of Spain before they were expelled in 1492, and then by their descendants who settled around the Mediterranean, most notably in Turkey where they were more warmly welcomed (at least most of the time) than in other countries. It is based on Spanish, but incorporates words derived from Turkish, Hebrew, French, and other languages too.

This slim dual-language book by Marcel Cohen, who was born in France but whose parents moved there from Turkey in the 1930s, takes the form of a series of "letters" to his friend, the Spanish artist Antonio Saura, but is really a poetic elegy not only for an almost-lost language but also for the lost world of these Ladino-speaking Jews who, as tradition has it, never lost their desire to return to Spain, or the keys to their homes there, despite 500 years in exile. He touches on the lives (and deaths) of Jews in Istanbul, Salonika, and elsewhere, but the book is really about language. One of the most interesting things for me was that in this English translation, as in Cohen's own translation of the original Ladino into French, many Ladino terms were left untranslated (there's a glossary at the end); this gave me a feel not only for the expressiveness and sounds of the language, but also for Cohen's sadness at its loss.… (más)

This brief memoir is in large part an elegy to the Ladino language, mourning its decline and coming death and celebrating what the language brings - childhood memories for the author, and an encapsulated history of the community of Ladino speakers. The community flourished under the Ottoman empire: "in the seventeenth century, envoys from proud Louis XIV had to learn Djudyo to do business in Greece and Turkey; that the first books printed in the Ottoman Empire were in Ladino". But the book also mentions the 54,000 speakers of Ladino who died in Auschwitz. Cohen suggests that Ladino is now, for the most part, an academic interest rather than a living language.

A lot of the book is about the vividness with which the language calls up the community - one section is a list of Ladino expressions: "when someone's getting upset over nothing: 'The fish is still in the sea but the oil has to be heated?' ... When someone had waited in vain: "He inherited a cucumber's ass'."

Cohen also discusses the inherent impossibilities of translation. "Do you remember what Kafka said about the German language? He explained that his mother would never be a mutter because she had nothing in common with Teutonic mothers. This is why Kafka felt he was totally incapable of evoking his mother in his writings. That's my case exactly. My madre wasn't a mère, nor was my nona a grandmother. Between the madre, or mama, of the Sephardim and the French mère, between all the sweetness of a nona or a vava and that of a grand-mère, are five centuries of life in the Ottoman Empire that sink into the unsayable."

A very interesting book for anyone interested in languages, or in the lost communities of Istanbul and Salonica that Cohen describes.… (más)