A memoir out of a culture both deeply Ottoman and deeply Jewish

(c) Stanford University Press

Years ago sitting in the manuscript room of the Israel National Library, Aron Rodrigue came across something and as soon as he laid his eyes on it, he knew it was going to be something very special.

What he had come across that day was the earliest known memoir in the Ladino language, written sometime in the early 1880s by a Jewish printer who lived in Salonica, Greece in the days of the Ottoman Empire named Sa’adi Besalel A-Levi.

After years of having the manuscript sit on his shelf , unsure of what to do with it, Rodrigue and his co-editor, Sarah Stein, finally translated and transliterated the book from its original Judaeo-Spanish text in to English and launched the book at an event hosted by the center for Jewish studies at UCLA, Wednesday.

The book, which is titled “A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel A-Levi,” focuses on the observations and reflections of the everyday life encountered in Salonica by Sa’adi, who was excommunicated for criticizing the corrupt and oppressive rabbinic authority.

At the time when Sa’adi, who was also the founder and editor of the first Ladino newspaper in Salonica, began writing his memoirs, Stein said, the city was going through radical changes, which could be attributed as one of the main reasons he began writing his memoir in the first place

From the Ottoman bureaucratic structure to the actual psychical fabric and the layout of the streets of the city in which Sa’adi lived, everything was going through or was at the brink of a metamorphosis, Stein said.

Throughout the project of putting together the memoir, the editors said they had to make several perplexing decisions about how the book would be translated as well as what genre this book would fall into.

“We made somewhat of an unusual choice with this memoir in terms of not only translating the memoir but also in transliterating it… in a time when books are so expensive and every page counts.” Stein said.

The reason for this choice Stein said was, among other things, a hope that this memoir would become a language tool for students of the dying Ladino language.

As far as the question of the genre this memoir would fall into, Stein said it didn’t really conform to anyone genre.

“We had a lot of difficultly figuring out what to call it. It isn’t exactly an autobiography and it doesn’t really conform to the genre of memoir either,” Stein said “for the sake of simplicity we decided to call it a memoir thinking it hued most closely to that genre.”

But the reason the editors had such a hard time in that respect, Stein said, was the fact that Sa’adi wasn’t trying to adhere to any particular genre when writing his memoir.

Another question that comes up in the course of the project as well as the discussion was the question of whether the reference point of the memoir was Ottoman or Jewish.

“The answer is neither and both, [it] is neither one nor the other because the answer is both,” Stein said, “this memoir is produced out of a culture that was both deeply Ottoman and deeply Jewish.”

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Posted in: Aron Rodrigue, Books, History, Judaism, Memoir, Ottoman Empire