The Phenomenon of Rivka Abiry
By Jane Mushabac *
Rivka Abiry is a phenomenon. Her 2015 Ladino book, Una Lagrima, Una Riza: Lo Ke Mos Konta Rivka [Tears and Laughter: The Stories Rivka Tells Us], contains an explosion of a hundred short tales, published 2007-2015 month by month in the Ladino supplement of the Istanbul newspaper Şalom.
While her style is playful and conversational, the
tales are threaded through with longing and desire. They are rich with a
pleasure in language. She writes from Haifa, her home for much of her
adult life, and her Ladino is deeply energized by the linguistic
hybridity central to Sephardic lives and literature.
Who is Abiry? She was born in 1920 in Marseilles,
her mother from Istanbul and her father from Vidin (Bulgaria). She spent
her childhood in Vienna, her adolescence in Varna (Bulgaria) and, during
World War II, was in exile with her family in Teheran, where she
received her diploma and had her first job. Afterwards she moved to
Israel with 45,000 other Bulgarian Jews; she has spent over sixty-five
years in Haifa, marrying, and raising her two children there. She lost
her older son in the Yom Kippur War two days after his wedding. A later
loss was her younger brother. Then in 2000 the international internet
chat group Ladinokomunita went
live, and shortly afterwards a new Ladino supplement, “El Amaneser” [The Dawn], began appearing in
Şalom,
giving Abiry, over eighty, the opportunity to embark on a
decade as a remarkable writer of evocative Ladino stories.
Amazingly, Abiry did not grow up speaking Ladino.
The language she grew up speaking in Vienna—at home and in school—was
German. Over the years, she added five or six well-known languages.
But her grandmother, who lived
with her family for most of her childhood, used to tell stories in
Ladino, and that was Abiry’s touchstone for the language which she
honors here to connect with family and Sephardim worldwide. She loved
her grandmother, her warmth, even (in the way children experience the
world) the smell of her bed. The stories inspired by her
nona reflect the closeness of
human life, individuals’ anxieties, frights, eccentricities, and an
indomitable instinct for the good. As with other contemporary Ladino
writers, Ladino was the language Abiry reclaimed to reclaim her own
life. She brings back her grandmother’s Ladino to feel close to her
readers, and to suggest the importance of people’s wild persistence in
finding what they need.
Many of her tales end by clinching the absurdity or
sagacity of people’s actions. But the tales are not relentlessly upbeat.
The grimness underlying the many happy endings gives a quiet depth to
the author’s impulse. Also, don’t expect to be constrained by the
writer’s memories; far from it. Abiry is very much the cosmopolitan.
The tales reflect her decidedly international upbringing,
penchant for world travel, and immense desire to connect to others; and
her naturally infused Ladino can provide a challenge to the Ladino
reader, with words slipped in from Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Italian,
Hebrew, French, and Portuguese. In fact the book’s charm lies in the way
a storyteller’s modesty of bearing opens up a feeling for the great
broad scope of the world.
Let’s consider a few of the
kuentos. The opening
story, “Mi Ermaniko,” less than a page long, introduces her baby brother who
was so luscious with his calm blue eyes and a curl over one ear, that
she, fifteen months older, wanted to
just eat him up.
In fact, jealous of the attention he gets from his grandmother,
when the latter steps out of the room, she quietly feeds him medicine
sitting on a nearby table, although it’s for a sore, not for the baby to
eat. Ultimately we gather the baby is unharmed, and the toddler has
received some unnamed punishment after several panicked shrieks from the
returning grandmother. Here,
in a seemingly innocent little tale of two cuddly siblings, we get a
taste of the Cain and Abel story at the root of all human affairs.
This is the beloved brother, we may guess, whose death years
after her son’s death as a soldier, spurred her to write her one hundred
Ladino kuentos.
“La Reunion”
opens by noting the great ironic benefit of two domestic accidents
befalling a husband and wife on the same day, the husband with a broken
leg from a fall and the wife with severe burns from a burst of hot oil
spattering from the stove.
The injuries bring their adult children to the hospital and then to
their house for an entire week together, feeling really close and having
the pleasure of an extended stay. Mixed in eventually with these
celebratory remarks is the author’s acknowledgment that this occurred at
a time of terrible fear; Saddam Hussein was sending missiles from Iraq,
Israelis had prepared their houses “for this cursed war,” gas masks were
always at the ready, and no one dared to go outside once the sirens
wailed. The “reunion” was a gift in the midst of the madness of war.
In “Bumuelos,”
a street vendor who turns up daily for recess at the entrance to the
author’s school in Bulgaria is a Russian emigrant who fled with people
of all backgrounds after the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. From his
tray he sells sugar-dusted homemade
bumuelos, which provide his
family’s only income. By a
stroke of luck, the school’s Russian teacher suddenly falls sick, and
the man Abiry calls her “Russian hero” is able to return to his former
profession as a teacher of Russian language and literature.
He holds her class in rapt
attention, teaching the works of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gogol and
Pushkin.
“La Siya de
Charley” [Charley’s Chair] highlights the indomitable Sephardic
habit of talking to strangers, which we see in one tale after another.
Everyone in her tales is reaching
out; no one wants to miss out on the opportunity to tell a story, or the
story of their life. Abiry, like many people her age, requests a wheel
chair at the Tel Aviv airport to expedite getting to the gate amidst
mobs of pre-Passover travelers. The elderly commanding man pushing her
chair introduces himself as Charley, and not surprisingly the two strike
up a conversation. His rider learns he’s miserable having lost track of
his niece who may not even know he exists; and by the next paragraph
Abiry, having reached her destination in the Moabit neighborhood of
Berlin, has managed to find Charley’s niece and, unannounced, brought
her back to Ben Gurion airport to find her uncle.
Sometimes it’s a stray niece, sometimes a discarded piece of
furniture, a bufetiko with
gold coins hidden in it during the Shoah, sometimes an estranged brother
who had embraced communism in Bulgaria in his youth before becoming a
famous singer and later as an old man moving to Israel, sometimes it’s
an inviting package of biskochos. But in a kind of expressionist magnetism, untold numbers
of objects and people seem destined to find their way to each other,
because of the immense desire at the root of their personalities, their
transnational geographies of the heart, and simply the desire to live.
I have translated the Ladino title of another tale
with help from Adam Sandler: “Don’t
Mess with an Old Lady.” An
elderly woman driving from Haifa to Tel Aviv, when stopped for speeding,
blandly responds to the policeman that she has no license, that her
vehicle is a car she stole with the help of her husband, but since her
husband has been annoying her, she has locked him in the trunk.
Soon the narrator’s car is surrounded by screaming sirens and
five police cars. When the chief of police asks for her license and
registration, she promptly hands over the documents; the trunk meanwhile
has been found empty. The chief tells her the absurd things the original
officer had told him, and she laughs, saying he probably also said I was
speeding! Then off she goes.
The storyteller in her eighties and nineties is
alive and well. No thinking these are outdated little old lady Ladino
tales, bureka recipes, sweet
nothings delivered in handkerchiefs wrapped around cloves of garlic to
keep off the evil eye. Life
goes on, brutal and full of desirings and tricks. Welcome to the world
of Rivka Abiry.
At the start of a review a reader expects to learn
the book’s publisher. While all the stories in the collection have been
published in the Istanbul newspaper, and many republished in the U.S.,
Chile, and Belgium, for instance, the book as a collection is simply a
184-page self-published pdf. It’s only a matter of time, however, before
an Israeli or American publisher will want the book or a collection of
its best tales, and translations into Hebrew and English are sought. In
the December 2016 New York Times Magazine we
read that, in the previous month, Google’s computer-generated
translations had suddenly made immense game-changing strides; and people
are wild about the improvement. Awkward reiterations have been replaced
with poetic conversational prose! And more and more languages are being
added to the program each month because of the new use of artificial
intelligence in Google Brain. That
transnational neural network flexibility, whoa! reminds me of the
polyglot Sephardic brain. Who
knows, maybe The Stories Rivka Tells Us will be the first computer-generated
English collection of Ladino fiction. Abiry’s
stories, most each just a page or two, go down easily, many clinched
with evocative endings. But
their power lies in the longing that draws people together with people,
people with things, families with hardships and solutions, and stories
with meanings.
A Final Note
on Abiry’s Ladino
In her bio on the book’s last page, mentioning that
her family only spoke German in her Vienna childhood, Abiry continues:
Entourada de esta lingua dura, se
oyiva komo de leshos la boz melodika i atirante de mi nona, ke bivio
todo el tiempo kon mosotros.
Es mi nona ke me
metio en mi kuna el Ladino kon los kuentos de su chikes en Estambol, i
de los anios del sieklo pasado. Sin saver el ladino, los kuentos sonavan
komo una musika, i me tresalian. . .
[Surrounded by this hard language, I heard as if from afar
the melodic appealing voice of my nona, who lived with us all the time.
It is my nona who brought Ladino into my cradle with her stories of her
Istanbul childhood and of the years of the past century. I didn’t know
Ladino, but her stories sounded like music, and overjoyed me.]
About the book, Abiry says that to succeed with it
and communicate with her relatives, she should write it in Ladino, “ke
fina este tiempo yo no lo avlava din el todo” [which until this
time—in all fairness— I didn’t speak].
She goes on, “Me
parese ke el saver avlar esta lingua lo yevava siempre kon mi, ma ke fue
komo enserado en mi korason, i ke se topava en un kiche (pina) olvidado.
Tenia solo avrir la puerta. En una vez, i subito, todo salio en medio, i
esto kon una fortalesa maraviosa.
[It seems that I always carried with me the knowledge of
how to speak this language, but it was as if it was buried in my heart
and I’d find it in a forgotten chamber. I only had to open the door. And
in one moment, suddenly, everything spilled out, and with it this
astonishing feeling of power.]
*Jane Mushabac is professor of English at City Tech, CUNY and a member of the Sephardic Horizons editorial board. She wrote a Ladino short story, “Pasha: Pensamientos de David Aroughetti,” which appeared in Sephardic Horizons 1.4. Her 2016 novel, His Hundred Years, A Tale (Albion-Andalus Books) is in English. She wrote both with the pen name Shalach Manot.