My Mother’s Tongue: Delving into the Sephardic Archive

Nancy Saporta Sternbach¹

“Did your mother have a stroke?” a cousin inquired. He noticed her garbled, twisted, unfluent speech as if her swollen tongue were trapped. “A mini-stroke?” We made an appointment with one Doctor Gendelman, a septuagenarian neurologist, who spelled it out: “It won’t kill her, but eventually she won’t be able to speak at all.”

For a boisterous, gregarious woman with a voice memorable for its stories and its volume, this was the cruelest of all the indignities of old age. A neurological disorder robbed this verbose New York woman of her accent, and then her sense of direction, and then her balance.

“I’m the only person in the whole wide world who has this,” our eighty-eight-year-old mother sputtered when Dr. Gendelman diagnosed “pseudo-bulbar palsy.” It was then that we understood that this progressive and degenerative neurological disorder inching its way through her mouth, throat, and tongue, now interfered with the ability even to form words on paper. Our only consolation was that she was still able to laugh.

***

Before the diagnosis, she justified her incomprehensible language as a speech “impediment.” “This happened to me because my son died,” she explained. Later a young neurologist would confirm a “non-specific insult” to the brain, as if the death of a child were “non-specific,” though it certainly was an “insult.” Soon after, she regressed to complete speechlessness, although her comprehension was unhindered.

With the TV was blasting in the tiny room of her assisted living apartment. I experimented with the notion of language retention at the end of life. I flipped on to the Spanish channel.

“How’s this?” Nod. “Do you understand?” Assent.
“¿Qué está dizendo?” I asked, with a flicker of hope, mixing my contemporary Spanish with her ancient Ladino, keen to spark a memory. Her eyes lit up.
“Stop punching me!” my sister yelled to my brother.
“I’m not punching you, I’m just tapping you. Baby!”
“Moooom, he’s hitting me again.”
“You keep your hands to yourself. You hear? Separate! You sit in-between them,” she instructed me, interrupting her driving just long enough to glare. I slid over while my sister scrambled on top of me.
“When are we getting there?” I said, getting elbowed on both sides.
“Look at this goddamn traffic, howda I know?”
“I’m bored,” the three of us said in unison.
“Ansina,” my mother suddenly declared. “I’m going to teach all of you some Spanish. Repeat after me. We’ll do the numbers. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco.”
Obediently, we repeated, over and over again, the same five numbers.
When she was satisfied that we had mastered these, she moved us on to “seis siete ocho nueve diez,” not as easy. But we complied.
“Now, Grandma will be so proud that you know your numbers in Spanish.”

***

This was my first conscious memory of my mother’s desire to teach us Spanish, the language she crooned over as an adult, and simultaneously the one that had caused her so much pain as a child. As for us, we had heard this language all our lives, but nobody ever actually spoke it to us. In fact, the opposite was true; it was the secret adult code. Every time they switched to Spanish, our ears perked up. Although that car ride was the first lesson where I vocalized words in Spanish, my young ears were already accustomed to it.

A few years later, we moved mid-year to another school where there was a half-hour Spanish TV show every Thursday morning. I was mortified. The only Spanish I knew was that one lesson in the car. My class, in contrast, seemed have memorized Señorita Conchita’s TV singalong.

In her brightly-colored serape draped over one shoulder and a long dark braid, Miss Conchita played her guitar as we children sang to the phonetically-arranged words on the screen. My whole class enthusiastically intoned the words while I was overwhelmed by my ignorance.

I tried to follow; but I only knew those few numbers from that infamous car ride. Yet, I perceived something else. I knew how the words were supposed to sound and I realized the other kids were mangling the pronunciation. I cringed. These two simultaneous feelings: humiliation at my ignorance and joy at knowing how to pronounce unknown words may have been the unconscious root of my nascent Spanish career.

Our family’s relationship to Spanish was instilled in me from an early age. I was already hooked on it when presented with a choice of languages to study in junior high school. Relatives had taught me to open my ears, and I yearned for the exotic syllables that my mother and grandmother spoke, like some secret archive. It was unthinkable that a family member could opt for anything but Spanish. By then, I hungered for the hidden meanings on the packages at the Puerto Rican bodega near my grandmother’s building. This language held secrets and history for me, all of which I coveted. I loved its sound, its beautiful vowels, the trilled R, its diphthongs, its musicality, its drama, and the bundles of affection and sentiment accompanying the words.

The family proclaimed: “For five hundred years they kept speaking Spanish. Yes, the Spanish Jews went to Turkey and never, ever, ever lost the Spanish language,” utterances filled with such pride that they became a family cliché.

For me the language was its poetry, the movement of the tongue, the exhalation of breath when I pronounced it. Later, Spanish allowed me to reinvent myself into a new persona. Instead of the gawky schoolgirl who could not follow Miss Conchita, I was the confident teenager with the great accent, which gave me a great advantage when I began formal study; I could advance rapidly on my own. Never again would anything be so easy for me to learn. I heard it and I knew it. Had my teachers been more creative, they might have invented projects for me. Instead, they kept narrowed eagle eyes on me to ensure I didn’t leak test answers to Kenny Gabay, my handsome language-lab partner. My newfound knowledge had an immediate effect on the weekend visits to my grandmother. Instead of the playing outside with my cousins, I wandered back upstairs to my grandmother’s apartment where she and my mother sat.

My grandmother, always cooking, might be rolling out the dough for bizchochos, or oiling a pan for spanakopita, which we called filo. After more than thirty years in New York, she still resisted assimilation, deploying my mother as translator. On the grey walls of her bleak kitchen, she thickly penciled important phone numbers using an all-number system that had yet to come into vogue.

“Call your sister,” she demanded, in Spanish. Flora, who worked at a beauty parlor on Kingsbridge Road, did not pick up.
“She may already be en casa,” my mother offered. I understood early on their special bilingual code and so was accustomed to understanding only half a sentence; I later learned this was code-switching. Even with their unfamiliar use of the hard “z” instead of the “s,” I followed their conversation. With my gaze, I pivoted from one to the other.
“A dieu, dieu,” my grandmother exclaimed when she saw I was following. “Comprende!” she said in triumph, pointing to me with her eyes.

As my Spanish advanced, these scenes multiplied. The next summer, in a camp parking lot, my mother rolled down her car window, stuck her head out, and yelled to her brother, “No te conozco,” so as not to reveal the scam they were pulling off. And I understood. Even when it was my grandfather’s last week on earth, I paid more attention to the words my grandmother uttered to my mother, “Se está muriendo,” than to their dreaded meaning.

For me, the world had changed because in all these circumstances, I had understood the Spanish. When I connected my Spanish to a geopolitical location, of course it was Spain, the mythical homeland, idealized by everyone. Despite the fact that nobody in the family had set foot in Spain for nearly five hundred years, it remained the paradigm of home. We were, all of us, Hispanophiles, a love and admiration for Spain that had been ingrained into our DNA for as long as anyone had remembered. It did not occur to any of us, least of all our instigating grandparents, to question Spain as the country that had enacted the Inquisition and expelled all of us, or had burned us at the stake, or forcibly converted those who stayed. Even when that unpleasant history was recited, as in, “We were the Jews that were kicked out of Spain during Inquisition,” nobody’s desire to claim Spain and its yet- to-be-detected vast Sephardic archive was diminished.

One summer, while still in high school, I got my chance: “I’m going to go to Spain this summer, Grandma,” I announced. My parents had agreed to send me to a Spanish-language program in Granada instead of summer camp. I had seen pictures of that gorgeous city and was just nerdy enough to send letters to the Spanish tourist office to request brochures.

“A dieu, dieu,” Grandma’s replied, practically in tears. Her granddaughter would visit the land of her dreams.

“A lot of Sephardic Jews claim they still have the key to their house in Spain,” my mother informed. “They always thought that the Inquisition would be a temporary banishment, and then they’d be able to return. So, they kept their keys.” I have since learned that the mythical house was always in Toledo and that the key-to-the-house-in-Toledo is still as widespread a trope today as it was then, even among Spaniards.

“Do we have a key?” I asked my mother.
“No, of course not,” she guffawed. “We don’t really even know where in Spain our people came from.”

But I clung to that romantic idea of a key being passed down through generations as a deathbed bequest. That key allowed me an imaginary set of ancestors scurrying through the streets of Toledo, Sevilla, or Córdoba with a rusty piece of metal tucked into an apron pocket. This visualization led to the fantasies about forebears who packed the key among treasures taken to Turkey in the hope of one day returning. Later on, Spaniards themselves helped feed the myth: I was asked endlessly if I had a key to a house in Toledo. Then they clarified, “You have a Catalan name,” so I dreamily added Barcelona and Ibiza to my list of places where women in wide woolen skirts scurried through narrow cobble-stoned streets in wooden clogs.

We were a working-class family, and when relatives traveled it was to the Catskills, Atlantic City, or Florida. But my ambitious parents had changed our social class to coincide with my high school years, making me the first person in my family in half a millennium to visit Spain, the teenager with two years of high school Spanish. It was love at first sight, at first smell, at first sound, at first touch. Even though I was predisposed well before my arrival, Spain did the rest. On the one side, there was Grandma with her mythical, genetic connection, and on the other there was my father, the Ashkenazi with aspirations, who brought Spanish music into our home. I allowed myself to be embraced, if not swallowed, by this country into a love affair that, despite its vicissitudes, has lasted to this day, like the cranky relative you love despite the crankiness. Later, even when I broke up with Spain for over a decade, we eventually reconciled.

My father did not speak Spanish himself, but that did not diminish his ardor for it, especially in song. At the same time that I was wandering through the halls of high school muttering, “Hola Isabel,”² my father introduced us to Sarita Montiel, a beguiling brunette with pouty red lips, who loved bullfighters. On Sunday mornings as we cleaned our home, my father lightened our task by transporting us to the Plaza de Toros in Madrid or Valencia, trumpets blaring, with Sarita throwing flowers to the triumphant matador. As I vacuumed and dusted, with my then limited knowledge, I gathered something about a bullfighter and a beautiful foot, “tan lindo pie.” In that song, Sarita and the bullfighter complimented each other so much that I never ascertained whose beautiful foot it was: his or hers? Other songs were so poignant Sarita’s throaty, sexy voice appeared to be crying as she declared her love for the matador, or other men. She then introduced the whole family to classics like “Bésame mucho,” or “Quizás, quizás quizás,” songs that we ourselves would learn to croon. Sarita became the first of many buxom Spanish-speaking women whose music my father adored, a bridge from the homogenous world of the Ashkenazi and Italian suburbs to our much less-than-usual home. That Sarita’s powerful commanding voice in Spanish exuded sexuality everywhere, from her bounding breasts to her scarlet lips, made her irresistible. Even if the music had been mediocre, her presence alone would have sufficed.

Such triumph emboldened my father to tromp through the tri-state area for more: Trini Lopez one week, Stan Getz, the next. We loved the seductive words of Trini’s Latin beat, “If I Had a Hammer” or Astrud Gilberto’s, “The Girl from Ipanema.” But nothing, then, or in all the subsequent years, could surpass the all-time favorite, Eydie Gorme and the Trio Los Panchos. One night, my father came home with a yellow Sam Goody bag and extracted Eydie’s album presenting it to my mother with a flourish: Eydie with her teased bouffant hairdo and blue mohair sweater emblazoning the cover.

“You brought home Eydie Gorme?” my mother screamed.
“Why? What’s wrong with that?”
“Wrong?” She practically hissed the words along with a healthy wad of saliva. “Do you know who she is?”
“Yeah, she’s the dame married to Steve Lawrence,” my father said.
“So, you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“She’s a Sephardic Jew!”

It seemed to me that my mother made a habit of knowing the genealogy of every Sephardic Jew in the country. From then on, Eydie’s love songs wafted through our home, songs that we had first heard from Sarita, now sung by Eydie. We should have built a little shrine to her she was so revered. Even though the songs were Mexican, and known to all Mexicans, Eydie was Sephardic, and she belonged to us.

“That’s why she speaks Spanish,” my mother informed.

As for my father, he immediately fell in love with Eydie, too. Despite the fact that his Spanish had not improved, he loved the guitars and upbeat rhythms; my mother loved Eydie’s accent, a lot like her own. These classics of the Mexican repertoire are typical serenades in Mexican restaurants and known to all Mexicans.

After dinner many evenings, my mother and I sat on the couch listening to Eydie’s catchy songs with her great voice. I was not yet fluent but together, my mother and I, like a mother-daughter College Bowl team, transcribed the words to all of Eydie’s songs: the corny ones that led to bales of laughter once descrambled, the heartbreak ones, or the easy repetition ones such as “me importas tú y tú y tú y tú, y nadie más que tú. Ojos negros, piel canela ….”

“Black eyes, cinnamon skin,” my mother attempted, slipping, as always, on the pronunciation of cinnamon. We both loved the flirty chorus of “me importas tú y tú y tú ….” that allowed us drama, eye contact, and exaggeration. If one of my siblings wandered in while we were performing this soap opera, they joined in with the “tú y tú” refrain also. My father played these songs so incessantly they entered our bloodstream by osmosis.

At the time, I was embarrassed by the explicit sexuality in songs like “Media Vuelta,” and “Sabor a mí,” especially in front of my parents, but my mother was happily engaged. Little by little, I began to understand the complicated verbs and even the dreaded subjunctive. Together my mother and I laughed as we decoded.

“Oh,” my mother said suddenly one day, “you speak such a beautiful Spanish,” emphasizing, a beautiful Spanish.
“You speak such a beautiful Spanish and I sound like a chambermaid,” she added.

But, what was a chambermaid and how did she speak? In this manner, that word entered our lexicon. From that day onwards, whenever we sat down to Eydie, coaxing a little more vocabulary from her each time, the phrase re-emerged: “You speak such a beautiful Spanish and I sound like a chambermaid.” Before too long, my mother got the idea that I spoke Spanish and she did not. Useless were arguments that it was her mother tongue. It was decades before I would have the educational and theoretical arguments to convince her to the contrary. The situation worsened as she now attributed the whole phrase to me.

“You told me I speak like a chambermaid. And you speak a beautiful Spanish, like an aristocrat,” she said to me. Year after year, she repeated the same phrase. My horror escalated.

Spanish nerd that I was, clandestinely, after school each day I headed straight to the record player and unbeknownst to anyone, spent the rest of the afternoon belting out “Granada” with Trini Lopez. By this time, I had actually been to Granada. I longed repeatedly for the bewitching feeling it gave to me, I loved the starry nights, and I mooned ceaselessly over the window serenades from young Spanish men. Trini’s lyrics were conveniently printed on the album jacket, thus improving my vocabulary, syntax, and grammar simultaneously, not to mention my accent. I managed to follow Trini’s diphthongs, blended vowels and trilled r’s.

Between the school’s monolithic grammar classes and Trini’s Mexican-inflected “Granada,” I was hooked. There was nothing I loved more than the words to that romantic song and “the beautiful Spanish” you needed to sing it. Just like my forebears, but in a different way, I was bewitched by Spain, especially Granada.

Even today, as an adult, whenever I return to Granada, to its wide new avenues and trendy shops, its pedestrian quarter in the center of town, and its twenty thousand tourists a day, I evoke that teenager who fell in love with its beauty and charm before I knew its bloody, hateful history: before I knew that Queen Isabel marched in wearing Moorish gowns to take the city away from those very people whose clothing she donned and whose monuments she coveted, but whom she detested. That was before I heard the famous invocation in which she declared she would not change her underwear until the Christians had recaptured the city, the last Islamic stronghold in Spain. But it took until I was in college to learn that only two months after the defeat, also from Granada, she signed the edict that would be so definitive to my own ancestors, giving them three months to convert, or leave. Granada is also where Columbus came to request and was granted his now famous ships. None of this concerned me as that teenager listening to Spanish in the living room of our home and teaching myself  Spanish’s elaborate and infamous verb tenses.

***

In college, of course I majored in Spanish and was determined to become completely bilingual, so as to be mistaken for native. I knew I had to live there, and “there” was Spain. I spent my junior year in Madrid and made it my personal agenda to visit as many regions and towns as I could throughout the Peninsula.

I also threw myself into my classes with vigor, taking exemplary notes with my black fountain pen. When truant classmates requested these notes, I only loaned them with great reluctance lest someone mistreat or lose them. My Spanish continually developed, which resulted in enormous satisfaction. And while I did not hide my Judaism, I did not advertise it either. I may have been the first Jew that some Spaniards had ever met, yet increasingly when I said I was Sephardic, it evoked a dreamy nostalgia in my interlocutors, some of whom invoked the Toledo key. To this day, when asked why I learned their language, the answer is always: “Soy sefardí,” I tell them. “I’m Sephardic.” Then, there is a nod of the head, an appreciation, a history. “That is so beautiful,” one shopkeeper told me. “I just feel that I must be Jewish, too,” a young man explained at the Casa Sefarad. “I know from our name that our family was Jewish,” a colleague remarked. Spain’s Jewish past is everywhere for those who want to find it.

When my parents visited me in the early spring of that year abroad, I reveled, showing off my Spanish to my mother. I had moved from “speaking a beautiful Spanish” to near-native fluency. In restaurants, I ordered for us in my perfect accent. My Spanish friends could not refrain from commenting.

“Your mother speaks such a weird Spanish,” one said, “it’s like from the fifteenth century, or like from Don Quijote.”

Years later, one of those friends remembering her said, “We were all flabbergasted. We’d never heard judeo-español before.” After all, nobody had pronounced the hard “j” in hija since 1492. I, of course, understood her perfectly but my friends were not the only ones who found her Spanish unusual. Heads had turned whenever she spoke. While making herself understood, nobody could place her accent.

We went to Lisbon for a weekend and explored the nearby coast in the beautiful and sunny March weather. In college, I had taken elementary Portuguese in addition to Spanish, and wanted to practice a little now. In the fishing village where we had stopped, it was getting to be lunch time.

“Ask them if they recommend anywhere for lunch,” my mother said, knowing I had studied Portuguese.
“Disculpa,” I said to the fisherman mending his net on his upturned boat. He seemed surprised that a tourist would address him in Portuguese.
“Vôce pode recomendar um restaurante?” I asked with my Brazilian accent. He shrugged his shoulders and returned to his net. The next fisherman on the next boat responded in kind.
“I see our tuition dollars were very well spent,” my father joked. Nobody in that small enclave on the beach understood my Portuguese. My mother, her patience diminishing with each negative response, was uncontainable.

In her inimitable judeo-español, like the phantom chambermaid, she marched up to the next person and asked the same question. Of course I understood my mother’s question, but I never would have chosen those nouns, those verbs, nor her ancient pronunciation. I was completely ready to abandon the whole project when one of the locals turned to my mother and answered, pointing us down the road. Given my one semester of Portuguese, I understood.

“There!” she declared, triumphant. “See, they understood my chambermaid Spanish.”

There it was again, the chambermaid. My father and I stood dumbfounded because it was my mother with her quaint fifteenth-century Spanish who, until that moment, had not ever set a foot in Iberia, it was my mother whose language, Judezmo, judeo-español, Ladino, that the local Portuguese understood. How was it possible that they understood her Ladino over my Portuguese?

“Imagine that,” my mother said again. “They understood me.” We commented on this remarkable scene but laughed it off instead of analyzing it.

The episode stayed with me. They returned to New York, and I remained in Spain. My inclinations and perceptions deepened. I now could tease out Castilians from Basques, Catalans and Gallegos, all of whom spoke a different language, all of which were strictly prohibited during Franco’s long dictatorship. Only the dominant language, Castilian, was taught in schools. I was learning that my dream language had a negative, colonizing, often oppressive history attached to it, just the way my dream country did.

One day while daydreaming in a dreary class, at the edge of consciousness I heard the prof say: Of course the Castilian spoken in the fifteenth century was a lot closer to Portuguese than it is now. That must be it! My mother’s Spanish was, of course, fifteenth century, and while the rest of the language had evolved into everyday twentieth-century life, her Spanish, nurtured, yet isolated, in Turkey for all those centuries, retained much of what made Spanish and Portuguese similar.

When I returned to the U.S. after that year dedicated to making myself fluent, I researched my mother’s tongue, wrote a thesis on its proverbs. It had a name, as it turned out: Ladino, the language she and her family spoke, indeed the Jews from all over the Ottoman Empire spoke a language that was inflected with Greek and Turkish and Hebrew, but whose core was Spanish. And it was called Ladino. Ladino. Turning it over in my mouth, I let the “d” come between my upper and lower teeth as it rested on my tongue. Ladino. The chambermaid fifteenth-century Spanish that the Portuguese understood better than the Spaniards had a name. Ladino. Suddenly, my mother seemed to recognize this name. “Oh, yes,” she said, “I’ve heard of that.” But for her, for my mother, it was always called Spanish. It was Spanish when she went to kindergarten in Harlem and had to put out her small six-year-old hand to be rapped by the ruler for speaking “Spanish.” Eighty years later, tears still welled up as she recalled her tiny, traumatized self, receiving the physical punishment that said, “Give up Spanish.”

“You know,” I said, changing the subject, “scholars call it “judeo-español.” Judeo-Spanish.
“That is so wonderful,” she said, overjoyed. Just as she and her generation, the last Ladino speakers reach the last years of their lives, just as the language was about to enter extinction, a group of scholars began reviving and teaching it.
Again she gushed, “That is so wonderful,” she repeated. “Where?”
“The Hebrew University in Jerusalem,” I said, “and other places, too. They’re starting to teach it to a younger generation. In Istanbul there’s a newspaper in Ladino. The University of Washington in Seattle. Bulgaria has a Ladino Ladies Lunch Club.”
“Really?” She stared, disbelieving. After a lifetime downgrading her Spanish, calling herself a chambermaid, now all of a sudden, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem validated her mother tongue, and a newspaper published in it.

***

Nevertheless, it’s hard to slough off old habits and we fell into our old pattern on another trip to Spain. Now, I was an adult, a Spanish professor, and she was in her late seventies. Just as we had in Spain and Portugal so many years earlier, we were walking down the street, talking and laughing. My job had taken me to Córdoba as director of a study abroad program, where my office was located in the maze of narrow, twisted, cobblestone streets of the ancient Jewish quarter, the judería. Both of us felt a similar immense attraction to the place and were mentally transported to the time in history when our ancestors may have lived here. It is impossible not to imagine them inhabiting these very alleys.

“So, how was your morning?” I asked, having let her wander while I went to work.
“Wonderful, just wonderful. The people are so friendly and warm,” she gushed. “I just love it here so much.”
“I know,” I said. “I feel so lucky that I get to live here this year. How did you do with the Spanish?” I ventured.
“Oh, fine. Just fine. You know me. I’m not shy.”
“And everyone understood you?”
“Well, you know, a little sign language, a little English, a little Spanish. Of course, I don’t really speak Spanish. I speak like a chambermaid. You said so yourself.”

After all these decades, how could we be repeating this conversation. Hadn’t we established Ladino’s importance in Jerusalem and elsewhere? Hadn’t its place in world history been documented?

I couldn’t disguise my annoyance, but I also understood the full trauma of assimilation and loss. For decades teaching Spanish, I had consoled fluent Latinx heritage students from bilingual homes who berated themselves because they could not write a language they had never formally studied.

This time when my mother made the hated chambermaid remark, I stopped in my tracks. I placed my hands on my hips preparing myself for a speech, and then turned to face her. As if I had been rehearsing this line all my life, I made my pronouncement: “You are a heritage speaker of a proud language. It has survived five hundred years over three continents, and is spoken by people with no formal education who did not live in a Spanish-speaking country.” I paused to take a breath, such was my indignation. I continued. “This is something you should be proud of, should celebrate for its uniqueness and perseverance. There’s nothing like it anywhere. Five hundred years,” I repeated for emphasis, as if I were returning those early life lessons to her that she had imparted to us.

She stopped in her tracks too, looked up at me and stared, completely speechless. She opened her mouth, took in a breath as if to speak, always the one who had to have the last word, but then, shut it again. Nothing. She repeated this gesture as if she were having an internal conversation with herself. After these pauses, she turned from the praise and smiled. The idea was taking hold in her mind through her facial expressions. Her eyes widened, she was absorbing the information. Heritage speaker. She liked this; I could tell. Her manner suddenly eased. I removed my hands from my hips, the confrontation ended. Now I was smiling too, and our eyes met in recognition. It had taken us a lifetime to arrive at this moment, and we were thrilled.

“Heritage speaker,” she repeated. “I never thought of it that way.”

---

1 Nancy Saporta Sternbach was born in the Bronx and makes her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is professor emerita of Spanish at Smith College. She taught courses in and published on U.S. Latinx cultures, Latina feminisms and food cultures of the Spanish-speaking world. She is the recipient of grants from the NEH and the Fulbright Foundation. “My Mother’s Tongue” is excerpted from her family memoir Bellydancing in the Bronx. Other excerpts of her memoir have appeared in The Sun, Narrative and American Jewish Studies Perspectives. Additionally, she is working on a Sephardic cookbook.

2 Dialogue from the popular 1960s Audio Lingual Method.