An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty by Renée Levine Melammed (review)

Scholars of Renée 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 mantinádes, 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 Most of the coplas assembled in Levine Melammed’s book are from unpublished Judeo-Spanish poetic sources, such as my own work, complementing the official documents used by historians.¹ Given that historical “truth” and “objectivity”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 (née Amarillio), and my mother-in-law, Renée Molho (née 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 by strong personalities, which helped them take daring decisions of a kind from which women of their times and class usually refrained. Bouena in particular, who, like Jeannette and Renée, did not belong to any political party, accidentally became a fighting partisan for both right and left-wing Greek resistance units, as well as a spy for the British in Crete under German occupation. Her life story, artfully delineated by Levine Melammed based on her unpublished memoirs, reveals a hitherto unknown facet of Salonika’s history. Bouena’s thrilling adventures during and after the war could easily serve as an inspiration for a documentary or even a feature film based on the history of Sefardi women in Salonika during the Holocaust.

Chapter 3 presents Bouena’s verses, in which she endeavored to resuscitate every imaginable aspect of the Jewish world in Salonika before 1941, thus creating a tribute to what was forever lost in the Holocaust. Starting with coplas on the coplas, as a spontaneously improvised poetic genre of memorialization, she goes on to write coplas on dowries, a sine qua non for any Salonika woman or man who wished to marry even for love; and on births and circumcisions, family dynamics, social institutions and education, economy and women’s work, Ladino publications, Sabbath and Jewish holiday observances, changes in tradition and confronting modernity; fashion, Greek (and Jewish) nationalism, historical developments and even anecdotes and local expressions. These are the categories assigned to Bouena’s verses by Levine Melammed in her effort to organize them thematically.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the miseries inflicted by the Germans upon the Jews of Salonika during World War II. Chapter 4 offers a historical introduction to the German occupation and the deportation of the Salonikan Jews to the death camps, while Chapter 5, the last chapter, presents Bouena’s coplas on the tortures...