Lika Eshkenazi, Tomislav
Vichev, and Daniel Petrov give small concerts of Ladino
music every Monday night at the Jewish home.
Put yourself in their place: You are told that unless you quit
the country you'll be killed. You must leave behind your home, your
land, your belongings, your wealth. You bundle up your children
and head for—where? You've heard that you will be safe in a faraway
place, so you go, on carts or wagons or ships, taking with you little
but your clothes, your stories, your songs, and your language.
So it has been for millions of refugees through the ages. And so
it was for more than 150,000 Jews expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand
and Queen Isabella in 1492 under the infamous Alhambra Decree. Most
went to Portugal or North Africa, but tens of thousands traveled
north and east to the Balkans, where the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire
welcomed them. Over the years their 15th century Spanish changed—absorbing
bits of the languages of Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and Bulgaria,
along with touches of Hebrew and Arabic. Eventually it took on a
name of its own: Ladino.
In 2003 I traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to research
a chapter for a book called The Lemon Tree, about an Arab
and a Jew and their common history in the city of Ramle, in present-day
Israel. The Israeli woman left Bulgaria as an infant in 1948; in
tracing her story I'd come to understand how it was that she came
to be born—how most of Bulgaria's 50,000 Jews escaped the Holocaust.
The skyline of Sofia,
Bulgaria's capital. Nine out of ten Bulgarian Jews moved
to Israel after World War II.
During my interviews with elderly Bulgarian Jews I was surprised
to find that I could communicate in Spanish—not perfectly, as many
of the words and pronunciations were different, but we could understand
each other. They described, in Ladino, the astonishing drama of
March, 1943—how they and their families avoided the trains bound
for Treblinka.
One of those Jews, Sophie Danon, is the leader of the Club Ladino,
which meets on Tuesday evenings to reminisce, to share poems and
proverbs, and to teach the next generation—sprightly 60-somethings—what
they know. Often they're joined by a singer named Lika Eshkanazi,
whose beautiful voice converts simple lullabies into haunting evocations
of a long, deep history.
If that history has been hard on the Jews, it has also been hard
on Ladino. Countless speakers were killed in the Holocaust. In Bulgaria,
where most Jews survived that horror, communism and Zionism took
the greatest toll. After the war, nine out of every ten Bulgarian
Jews moved to the new state of Israel, where Hebrew would take hold.
Most who remained were proud communists, ready to set aside Ladino
in favor of the secular national language. So, beginning in the
1940s, Ladino began to move from the streets to the kitchen. While
its decline has been slower in other countries, in Bulgaria Ladino
is destined for the archives. For the few speakers who remain, the
hope is that the language won't die there—that the tongue
may go silent, but that its heart will keep beating.
Yo
me namorí d'un ayre 
