An Ode to Salonika: the Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty / Renee Levine Melammed 308 pp.

This was a pleasant surprise.  I'll share a definition of Ladino, only because I didn't know what it was before I read this title: a nearly extinct Romance language with elements borrowed from Hebrew that is spoken by Sephardic Jews esp. in the Balkans, Turkey, and the Near East. (Webster's)  Sarfatty grew up in the Sephardic community in Salonika, whose roots are traced back to Spain at the time of the expulsion of the Jews in the 15th century.  She was imprisoned during WWII, escaped, and worked as a partisan to free others.  During and after the war she chronicled the history of her community by writing approximately 500 coplas, a form of Ladino poetry.  The book contains chapters of explication, in which Melammed provides both Sarfatty's personal history and the history of her community.  Then we get to see the complete collection of her coplas, both in Ladino and translated into English.  As Melammed points out, Sarfatty's coplas would not be considered high art, but they provide an amazing amount of information in an intimate and immediate way.  Really fascinating.