An Ode to Salonika

Renée Levine Melammed

Description

Winner, 2014 Canadian Jewish Book Awards, biography/memoir category

Through the poetry of Bouena Sarfatty (1916-1997), An Ode to Salonika sketches the life and demise of the Sephardi Jewish community that once flourished in this Greek crossroads city. A resident of Salonika who survived the Holocaust as a partisan and later settled in Canada, Sarfatty preserved the traditions and memories of this diverse and thriving Sephardi community in some 500 Ladino poems known as coplas. The coplas also describe the traumas the community faced under German occupation before the Nazis deported its Jewish residents to Auschwitz. The coplas in Ladino and in Renée Levine Melammed's English translation are framed by chapters that trace the history of the Sephardi community in Salonika and provide context for the poems. This unique and moving source provides a rare entrée into a once vibrant world now lost.

Preface
Introduction: 20th Century Salonika and Bouena's Ladino Coplas
1. Bouena's Ode to Salonika
2. Tradition versus Modernity and Historical Developments
3. Coplas Written by Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle about Life in Salonika
4. "The Miseries the Germans Inflicted on Salonika"
5. Coplas about the Miseries that the Germans Inflicted upon Salonika from 1941-1943
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Community Members' Names That Appear in the Coplas
Index

Sujets

• Jewish Studies
• Jewish
• Middle Eastern
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• Middle East
• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253007094
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

AN ODE TO SALONIKA
INDIANA SERIES IN SEPHARDI AND MIZRAHI STUDIES
Harvy E. Goldberg and Matthias Lehmann, editors
THE LA DINO VERSES OF BOUENA SARFATTY
____________
REN E LEVINE MELAMMED
Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis
Published with the generous support
of the Helen and Martin Schwartz Endowment.
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
2013 by Ren e Levine Melammed
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Melammed, Ren e Levine.
An ode to Salonika : the Ladino verses of Bouena Sarfatty /
Ren e Levine Melammed.
p. cm. - (Indiana series in Sephardi and Mizrahi studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00681-3 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00709-4 (eb) 1. Ladino poetry-20th century. 2. Coplas-Greece-Thessalonike. 3. Jews-Greece-Thessalonike-Social life and customs-20th century. 4. Jewish women-Greece-Thessalonike-Intellectual life-20th century. 5. Jews-Greece-Thessalonike-Intellectual life-20th century. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Greece-Thessalonike-Personal narratives. 7. Garfinkle, Bouena Sarfatty, (1916-1995) 8. Greece-History-Occupation, 1941-1944. 9. Thessalonike (Greece)-Biography. I. Title.
PC4813.7.M45 2013 861 .62-dc23
2012032101
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle (1916-1995)
and Denah Levy Lida (1923-2007)
and to the health of G ler Orgun (1947-).
Each woman transmitted the Sephardi heritage in her own remarkable way.
CONTENTS
Preface
INTRODUCTION
Twentieth-Century Salonika and Bouena s Ladino Coplas
CHAPTER 1
Bouena s Ode to Salonika
CHAPTER 2
Tradition versus Modernity and Historical Developments
CHAPTER 3
Coplas Written by Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle about Life in Salonika
CHAPTER 4
The Miseries That the Germans Inflicted on Salonika
CHAPTER 5
Coplas about the Miseries That the Germans Inflicted on Salonika, 1941-1943
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Community Members Names That Appear in the Coplas
Index
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 sometimes-creative 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 twenty-five 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 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 fianc , 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 pajamas until the bath was ready. She put the khaki clothes in a laundry sack, made a parcel and tied it well, and threw it into the yard as far away as she could. . . . Two hours later, we could see only German tanks in the street. . . . When we got up the next morning, the yard was full of parcels with uniforms inside. Everyone had copied Tia Donna s idea: every apartment had soldiers hiding inside. 5
The community suffered as a result of the German occupation and also faced a severe winter (1941-42) that was exacerbated by a food shortage. The Red Cross sought to alleviate the situation, as did the Jewish community itself. 6 Bouena, her sister Regina, her best friend Sarah, and other young women offered their services to this international agency. Bouena had previously worked for Matanot La-Evionim, so she essentially was following a similar path-once again distributing food to the hungry and, in this case, providing milk for children from the working districts. Mothers arrived at the Soupe Populaire with empty bottles and displayed the required cards indicating their daily quotas; volunteers prepared the condensed milk and filled the bottles accordingly.
On July 11, 1942, the Nazis began forced conscription of all Jewish males between the ages of nineteen and forty-five. 7 Bouena continued her volunteer work, which by then also included providing for the children of married soldiers in compulsory service. She devoted many verses of poetry to this experience. 8 Some months later, on March 15, 1943, the mothers from the Baron de Hirsch neighborhood did not appear at the regular distribution time and a great deal of condensed milk was left over. 9 The Red Cross representative volunteered his car and driver to take Bouena to that neighborhood in order to deliver the milk to these women. They were surprised and disconcerted to find the neighborhood under heavy guard. Because of its proximity to the train station, Baron de Hirsch had become the designated ghetto from which deportations were arranged. On this very day, Bouena had a traumatic encounter with Vital Hasson, the head of the Jewish police; this experience convinced her that it was no longer safe for her to remain in Salonika. Because of the imminent danger to Bouena as well as to her fianc , Chaim proposed that they be wed the next day, presumably prior to a joint flight from the city. That night Bouena was warned by an anonymous non-Jew that it would be dangerous for her to sleep in the ghetto. 10 As a result, she stayed with friends who lived near what she referred to as the Midrash, the synagogue (chapel) where the rabbi was scheduled to marry them. 11 The following morning, she arrived at the Midrash as planned only to find that Chaim had been shot by the Germans and lay dying as he waited for her at the wedding canopy.
Bouena was subsequently arrested and taken to the Pavlos Melas