An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty

Preface

prefAce It was purely due to chance that I happened to gain access to the writings of Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle. In the 1970s, while researching the de Botons—an eminent family of rabbinic scholars, I corresponded with Sephardi communities worldwide. Bouena Sarfatty of Montreal wrote me a letter in French informing me that she knew many de Botons who had perished in Auschwitz. In the fall of 1989 I flew to Montreal to meet her. After recording her memories of this family, we talked about more general topics. When Bouena heard that I offered a course in the history of the Sephardi Jews during World War II, she told me she had written about the Nazi takeover of Salonika and offered me a large packet of photocopied verses comprising some two hundred pages. I must confess that I was not free at the time to address this material, but in 1995, I consulted with Moshe Shaul, a colleague active in the Ladino world, who was enthusiastic and encouraging. Slowly but surely, I worked my way through these komplas (coplas in Spanish). Having transcribed Inquisition documents, I was familiar with the travails of paleography—yet these pages presented a challenge of their own. Bouena’s Ladino, as will be seen in the texts, is characterized by her sometimescreative orthography; by French, Italian, Greek, and Turkish influences; and by the idiosyncrasies of her handwriting. In order to understand Bouena’s poetry, one needs to be acquainted with the history of Salonika as well as with the poet’s personal history. Bouena Sarfatty was born November 15, 1916,1 in Salonika, Greece, to an eminent family of Sephardi Jews that traced its origins to the expulsion from Spain in 1492. She passed away at age eighty on July 23, 1997. Although she was born into an established family of comfortable means, Bouena did not have an easy life. Her father died when she was two years old,2 leaving her brother, Eliaou, to care for his five younger sisters, his mother (who died of cancer in 1940), and his aged maternal grandmother. Eliaou was a dedicated brother who ensured his sisters were well educated and fluent in a number of languages; he also arranged for their debutante presentations. The Nazis invaded Greece in April 1941, when Bouena was not yet twentyfive years old and was engaged to be married to a fellow Salonikan. Bouena’s brother, Eliaou; her younger sister, Regina; her centenarian grandmother; and her aunts would all be deported and perish in Auschwitz. An older sister, Marie, moved to Marseilles before the war and her two remaining sisters, Rachel and Daisy, immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. Bouena remained in Greece and became active in the resistance. After the war, on July 14, 1946, Bouena married x u Preface Max Garfinkle, a Ukrainian-born Canadian active in the socialist youth movement Hashomer Hatsa’ir and a founder, in the mid-1930s, of Kibbutz Ein Ha-Shofet. When Italy attacked Greece on October 28, 1940, Bouena’s first cousin Samuel and her fiancé, Chaim, were drafted into the Greek army.3 On April 6, 1941, with the Italians facing defeat, the Germans attacked Greece and the Greek army began its retreat. Bouena and her widowed aunt Donna were concerned that they had not received letters recently from their “boys.” When they realized that the retreating Greek soldiers were entering the city, they glued themselves to the window, hoping to sight their loved ones among them. An entry in Bouena’s memoirs exposes the delicacy of this moment:4 Tia Donna and I were watching the retreating soldiers, and it was the most depressing sight of my life. Some of the soldiers in the ranks were crying. Others couldn’t walk anymore. Others were wounded and in pain. It was a very dark tableau; there was silence in the house. Tia Donna broke the silence. “With this good deed that we will do tomorrow, God is going to help Samuel and Chaim,” she said. She had not finished saying this when a soldier escaped from the ranks. He was heading for our door. I went down the stairs and spoke to him from afar. “Come in, come into my apartment.” “It’s me, Chaim, it’s me!” I heard a very familiar voice say. He came upstairs. Tia Donna, a woman who never lost her courage, had the bathwater warming before we got upstairs. She took Chaim’s uniform and he put on...