Agnieszka August-Zarębska

The article investigates the issue of the status of contemporary Judeo-Spanish literature, principally poetry, and advances the thesis of the postvernacular character of works written in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino). The backing for this conclusion is an analysis of dozens of volumes of poetry published during the arrebivimyento period, between 1975 and the 2020s. This study analyses several characteristic features of these book editions that give evidence of the postvernacular condition of the language and its culture, primarily the multilingualism of the book, the variety of the adopted alphabets and orthographic notation in the Latin alphabet, and the presence of many paratexts. These elements are understood as aimed at supporting the reception of a book written in Ladino by its potential readers—in a situation where the Ladino language itself, classified as endangered, is not “autonomous” enough. The article concludes by offering the metaphor of a nature monument of a tree, protected and upheld in its existence by various “props,” as a figure reflecting both the material and nonmaterial aspects of contemporary Judeo-Spanish literature and books.

This paper concerns Avner Perez’s Siniza i Fumo (1986), which is one of the first collections of poems published in Judeo-Spanish since the 1970s, after the long interruption caused by the Holocaust. The book not only commemorates the Jewish community of Salonica, exterminated in 1943 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and pays homage to its language and cultural legacy, but also ponders over the possibility of the survival of Ladino as a living language. The study analyses the internal dynamics of Siniza i Fumo, which presents “step by step” the way that the Jews from Salonica were forced to go through before being killed in gas chambers. After the images of extermination come the ones of hope, but it is only limited and conditional hope, concerning the revival of Judeo-Spanish language and literature. The paper also discusses Perez’s references to different sources of Sephardic literature such as the Bible (Lamentations) and Sephardic folk poetry.