Balbuena, ''Ladino in Latin America''

This essay reads Argentine poet Juan Gelman’s 1994 bilingual Ladino- Castellano book Dibaxu in light of its intertextual relationship with Franco- Bosnian author Clarisse Nicoïdski’s work, especially her 1986 bilingual Ladino-English poetry collection Lus ojus, las manus, la boca. I return to Gelman’s text, written in a foreign, diasporic, and Jewish language in order to acknowledge Nicoïdski’s work not only as a pre-text, but as a fundamen- tal intertextual source for Dibaxu. In doing so, I observe the different reasons these two poets have to use the Ladino language: while Nicoïdski seeks to establish a link with her Sephardic community, Gelman uses the language to escape the limited trappings of a national identity. Both, however, work towards the maintenance, or survival, of Ladino.

American Literary Translators Association Conference “Drama in Translation,” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 21 October 2010.

Philip Balma, “Translating Italian Dialectal Literature: Thinking Outside the Box” Gloria Pastorino, “Can Performance Save Meaning? Trying to ‘Stick to the Original’ in Fo, Pirandello, Costa, Mayorga” Stefano Boselli, “The Multiple Realities of the One-Act Play in Translation: Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in His Mouth” Viola Miglio (respondent)

Ladino is living a seemingly contradictory moment: While it disappears as an active language of daily use, it also undergoes a general revival, with increased cultural production. As the site where a politics of identity was shaped that encouraged ethnic identifi cation and the " celebration of diff erence, " the United States sees a plural and productive stage in the development of Ladino. In this paper I will initially discuss the beginnings of Ladino usage in the United States, introducing the Ladino press and then off ering a comprehensive – and yet nonexhaustive – picture of poets and writers who wrote in and about Ladino. In a second part I will introduce a few contemporary artists who have created and performed in Ladino and observe their stance toward language preservation, while interrogating their place in both the Jewish and the broader community. I will argue that the present stage of " bridging " between Sephardic/Ladino and Latino artists not only can be one of the most powerful tools in the eff orts of preservation of the Ladino language and tradition but also renders possible innovative and creative aesthetic choices, thus enlarging both the Jewish and the broader non-Jewish repertoires. Furthermore, such a bridging or collaboration participates in the shaping of a new view and a new discourse about ethnicity, minorities, and viable political alliances.

American Literary Translators Association Conference “Drama in Translation,” Philadelphia, October 21, 2010.

Rachel Dalven was a Romaniote Jew, translator of modern Greek poetry, playwright, and historian of the Jews of Ioannina, Greece. She was an educated and well-traveled independent woman, who brought to the English-speaking audiences in the West the poets Cavafy, Ritsos, and Yosef Eliya as well as many female Greek poets. She visited the Jewish community of Ioannina several times in the 1930s, and wrote about the deportation and annihilation of the Jews from Ioannina in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was a cross between a Greek-speaking Romaniote Jew and a Sephardic Jew, both little-known subgroups within the Jewish minority. Residing in New York City, she benefited from being in a rich cultural hub with its connections and benefits in encouraging and enabling translation, poetry, theater, academic research, publishing, and travel grants.

The 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel, August 6-10, 2017, 2017

This paper addresses Geltungsjuden – children of a non-Jewish parent considered to be part of the Jewish community. Besides intermarried Jews, they were the second major group remaining “legally” in Germany even after June 1943, when Goebbels had declared Berlin “free of Jews.” Focusing on Berlin’s Jewish community as still the largest in Germany, I will follow those less than a thousand “last Jewish youngsters”, who – under the persisting threat of deportation – struggled for physical and spiritual survival. New research on German late-war Jewish communities generally focuses on the experience of Jews in hiding or mixed marriage families such as Beate Meyer’s magisterial work on Mischlinge as well as Susanna Schrafstetter’s and Max Strnad’s work on Munich. This paper examines the connections between ongoing deportations, a fluid Jewish identity and the coexistence of their in- and exclusion within the remaining Jewish community. At the same time, Geltungsjuden experienced everyday persecution, denunciations as well as occasional solidarity and help by Berlin’s non-Jewish population. There is a narrative in many testimonies of survivors who were deported in the years up to 1943, that Jewish life in Berlin ended with the dissolution of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden on June 10th, 1943. But actually, the Reichsvereinigung was never formally dissolved, as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt was interested in keeping the remainder of Jewish assets under their control, instead of handing everything over to the Oberfinanzpräsident - and thus, a letter dated August 1943 states, that the Reichsvereinigung in fact continued to exist beyond the deportation of its full-jewish members in early summer 1943. Parallel to that and equally lesser-known, the Jewish community of Berlin did not „collapse“ (as a Berlin survivor then in Theresienstadt expressed it) but continued to exist - a pale, absurd, yet quite real existence. When in May 1945 Geltungsjuden became the “first Jewish youth” of the post-war community, most of them had survived by Jewish as well as non-Jewish assistance. Thus, Geltungsjuden invite us to re-examine the complexity of Jewish and non-Jewish relations. This will contribute to our understanding of the last stage of the Holocaust, but will also help us understand how after the war, some of these survivors could call Berlin, of all places, their home.

The 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel, August 6-10, 2017

Jewish Community of Zagreb, 1943-1945, Naida-Michal Brandl The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was proclaimed on April 10, 1941. The anti-Jewish measures were implemented swiftly and on April 30, the Racial laws were proclaimed (of 35,000 Jews in the NDH, around 12,000 were in Zagreb). Deportations to Croatian camps started in May 1941. Until the beginning of 1942 around half of the remaining Jews in Zagreb were deported. From August 1942 the Germans were included in the deportation process, and in the next and last mass deportation in May 1943, Jews were deported mainly to Auschwitz. The Jewish Community in Zagreb was closed in April and reopened in May 1941, now in charge of all racially defined Jews. It was under direct control of pro-Nazi regime, and responsible for Jews imprisoned in concentration camps in the NDH, remaining Jews in Zagreb, the old people’s home(s), school, and registrar books. There was an acting synagogue as well. The community was financed by member fees and international Jewish organizations. After the last big German-Croatian deportations of May 1943, only Jews in mixed marriages or honorary Aryans remained. They took over the leadership of the community, which continued to care about Jews in camps as well as the old people’s home. After liberation, they were still community leaders and took over new tasks following the same logic of the war-time period. The school as well as synagogue ceased to exist after May of 1943. There were still funerals in the Jewish section of the public cemetery, which survived the War intact.

Examines the art of translation as an expression of deep affinities that are an expression of a deep, often unconscious connection as found in Hardie St. Martin's exquisite translation of Juan Gelman's work, and in the connection of other poet/ translators such as Paul Blackburn and Ezra Pound.