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  • Voices from Jewish Salonika: Selections from the Judezmo Satirical Series “Tio Ezrá I su mujer Benuta” and“Tio Bohor i su majer Djamila” by Moshe Cazes
  • Shmuel Refael
David M. Bunis . Voices from Jewish Salonika: Selections from the Judezmo Satirical Series “Tio Ezrá I su mujer Benuta” and“Tio Bohor i su majer Djamila” by Moshe Cazes[Hebrew, English, Judeo-Spanish]. Jerusalem and Thessaloniki: Misgav Yerushalayim, Jerusalem; The National Authority for Judeo-Spanish Culture, Jerusalem; Ets Ahaim Foundation of Thessaloniki, 1999. Pp. 350 in Hebrew; 649 in English and Judeo-Spanish.

Until many years ago, before the investigation of Judeo-Spanish literature began to gain momentum in Israel and abroad, before the ranges of this literature began to be unveiled, and before the investigative-academic community began to allocate worthwhile research resources to this area, there were many who believed that Judeo-Spanish literature was nothing other that an opaque, washed out, and stifled iteration of the many idioms, periods, and regions of Spanish literature, and that its defining qualities were in the ways it was a vague echo of the tumultuous sounds, notes, and rhythms of Spanish. Those who wish to hear the particular sounds of this literature must have felt just like those who yell out against a mountain and find that their own voice echoing from the hills and ridges is only a muddy, dull, twisted, and willful sound. Still those who hoarsely talked to mountains also roamed them, crazily, looking for the smallest particle of information that could be used to reconstruct and restore the traditional sounds that had been lost.

These early efforts succeeded only partly, since although they themselves were full of idealism and desire and had great confidence in their own capacity to reproduce the sounds of the past, they also understood that with the passing of the generations it would become more and more difficult to reach the sources of those sounds and to decipher each musical-literary note of this once popular spoken literature. So, many of them went back to deciphering the symbols, the shapes, and the signals ingrained and engraved on the bedrock of Judeo-Spanish speakers' texts and memories, among the mountainous valleys, the secret crevices, and rocky fissures from which the voices once sounded. And so began a slow uncovering, an archaeological-literary study, of written Judeo-Spanish literature—from texts there began to emerge the voices, and through them the lifestyle, of the Judeo-Spanish–speaking Sephardic Jews in [End Page e110] their adopted countries, beginning with their expatriation from Spain and up to their forced migration to the extermination camps in Poland.

Those yearning for the sounds and voices of Judeo-Spanish have now shifted their focus to the particulars of local evidence, yielding a deep concentration on the exact details of the written word, on the traditions of writing, on the linguistic origins of this literature, on the different shadings it acquired in relation to its prominence, its formats, its grammar and syntax. The recorded and printed works, mostly in Hebrew letters, which were preserved between the worn-out pages of books and issues of old newspapers, concealed in magazines, diaries, or brochures, were the raw material. Slowly but surely and with the greatest of patience, scholars began to reconstruct the sounds of daily Jewish life that characterized the Judeo-Spanish–speaking Sephardic communities, not in some idealized "mountains" but in real context. These voices belonged to those who lived in the urban communities where the Judeo-Spanish speakers had lived—Jews who had been for too long quiet and unheard.

This book by David Bunis, Voices from Jewish Salonika, is an ideal example of the conscious turn to written literary tradition taken in Judeo- Spanish research. David Bunis does not look for the mountain echoes but rather for the voices of Jewish Salonika engraved in its stone. From those textual testimonies, he created a rare work of research that is a combination of the intellectual and the emotional, the artistic and the popular, the documented and the recollected.

Voices from Jewish Salonika is a thorough work by an expert linguistic archaeologist and anthropologist of Judeo-Spanish. The Hebrew and English reader...

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