Richard Kostelanetz
Sephardic Culture and Me (2003)
Two different ways of reading the Bible developed among Jewish scholars in the sixteenth century. One, centered around the Sephardic schools of Spain and North Africa, preferred to summarize the contents of a passage with little discussion of the details that composed it, concentrating on the literal and grammatical sense. The other, in the Ashkenazi schools based largely in France, Poland, and the Germanic countries, analyzed every line and every word, searching for every possible sense.
—Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (1996)
There is a rumor in my family that when I was born in 1940 my parents thought about sending out a card that would read, “Now we present our son Dick, one part kike, some other parts spic.” Politically correct before everyone else, so avant‑garde were they, my parents decided instead to print a more conventional announcement of my arrival.
One continuing source of identity confusion, at least for me, is that Latinos in New York hear my family name Kostelanetz as Spanish, even though my father was born in Russia; so that when I’m asked to spell it, say over the telephone, I hear back C‑O‑S. K‑O‑S, I repeat, with emphasis on the first letter. C‑O‑S, I hear again. K‑O‑S, I must repeat, often for a third time. “K, as in King.” There’s usually a pause on the other end of the line, because the letter K isn’t common in Spanish and I sense Latino listeners think I’m deceiving them. Actually, Latinos aren’t wrong in what they hear. What was Kah‑stel‑ja‑netz in Russia, with emphasis on the third syllable, probably came from Castellanos, likewise emphasizing the third syllable, which is to say someone from Castile, whose ancestors left Spain hundreds of years before. Perhaps this accounts for why my parents were married in Sheareth Isreal, the Spanish‑Portuguese synagogue on 69th Street in Manhattan, and why my grandfather Kostelanetz chose to be buried in its current cemetery in Cyprus Hills. I always speak of my friends Richard Castellana and Vince Castellano as “cousins, having the same name as mine—just spelled differently.”
Perhaps because I descend from a mixed Jewish marriage, so to speak, I’ve always been aware of the exclusion of Sephardic Jews from histories and generalizations about the American‑Jewish experience. Too many of them say nothing about Jews who came to America speaking not Yiddish but archaic Spanish, or Levantine French, as in the case of my grandparents. The word Sephardic sometimes doesn’t even appear in these books’ indices, which likewise lack Jewish names ending in vowels, to recall an Italian‑American friend’s advice on quickly identifying Mediterranean monikers. The only Sephardic included in Abraham Chapman’s anthology of Jewish‑American Literature (1974) is the nineteenth‑century poet Emma Lazarus. I can’t find any Sephardim in Daniel Walden’s On Being Jewish, an anthology likewise from 1974. Look at the recent Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Jewish-American Writing, and you’ll find only one surname ending with a vowel—Harvey Shapiro’s—and he’s not Sephardic. Of the 75 writers meriting individual entries in Joel Shatsky and Michael Taub’s Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Biocritical Sourcebook (1997), the only name terminating in a vowel is Max Apple’s, which sounds like an abbreviation of a name that isn’t Sephardic either. In Steven J. Rubin’s Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry (1997), there is Emma Lazarus, a token in more ways than one nowadays, and three Shapiros—Harvey, Karl, and Alan—but no other Sephardim. Need I go on documenting omissions? Maybe such recurring neglect reflects a general Ashkenazi snobbery toward all people, gentile as well as Jewish, whose names end in vowels.
For many years the only Sephardic name ever included in such American-Jewish literary gatherings was Edouard Roditi, a Surrealist poet who was publicly gay as early as the 1960s. Born in Paris in 1910, Roditi was educated in England before coming to the University of Chicago in the later 1930s and obtaining American citizenship at the time. After WWII, he lived mostly in Paris working as a polylingual simultaneous interpreter. Looking back, I’ve come to think of him as the token exotic of modern American‑Jewish literature, as much for homosexuality and his continental residence as his Sephardic name.
You could say that Sephardic Jews and Mizrahi Jews descending from places to the east of them are a minority’s minority to the degree that the majority of the minority doesn’t often acknowledge their (or our) existence. It is scarcely surprising that Sephardic Jews had an epithet for the Ashkenazi that I heard as the “lach-lee,” which I was warned not to say publicly, apparently because it means filthy and was (and perhaps still is) as offensive as “kike” or “spic.”
Several years ago, I tried to get support for an extended audio feature about the sound of Judeo‑Spanish, or Ladino. My plan was to interview Ladino‑speakers living in America in English about the differences between their language and the Spanish generally heard here and thus to have them define acoustically as well as conceptually the distinctiveness of Ladino. Having previously composed multitrack audio of and about the sound of certain unique sources (the language of prayer, the Hebrew of the Diaspora, New York City, and so forth), I figured that I would conclude this feature with a piece of audio art about characteristically Ladino articulations. However, this proposal didn’t get any support, not even a nibble, perhaps because it epitomizes that kind of avant‑garde Jewish art that customarily gets better support in Germany or because few funders here were aware of the existence of Judeo‑Spanish or Ladino.
I’ve come to think of Sephardic Jews as culturally different from Ashkenazi. They are closer to other Mediterranean peoples, such as Italians and Greeks, especially if they came from Greece or, like my mother’s parents, from that part of Asia Minor that was culturally Greek before World War I. (Note that I said Asia Minor to locate Smyrna, rather than saying “Turkey,” where my grandparents’ home city is now called Izmir.) It is indicative that one great modern Sephardic cultural figure, Rosa Eskenazi, was the celebrated singer of Rembetica, also called Rebetica, which is the common name for Greek underground music in the 1920s and 1930s. Born around 1900 in Asia Minor, she came to Greece after World War I, reportedly with an Armenian circus troupe, and she lived there well into her eighties, into the 1980s, even though her most notorious song, first recorded in 1932, was called “Why I Like Cocaine.” Rembetica music was so radical, don’t forget, that whenever generals assumed power in Greece, as they did from time to time, beginning in the late 1930s, they banned it.
One book owned by my late friend Diane Tong, a book I never saw, alas, is a Rosa Eskenazi autobiography published around 1970, which I’d like to read in English sometime if only to learn how she survived. The small‑print notes to a recent disc of her historic recordings acknowledge her debt to a great Turkish singer named Isak AlGazi, born a few years before her, who was also Jewish, about whom I’d like to know more as well. I can’t think of a prominent Ashkenazic musician in America who was comparably declassé. (The Bnai-Brith-oriented institutions of Jewish publicity would have probably discredited him or her.) The closest semblance was the jazzman Mezz Mezzrow, who wrote about his heroin addiction. The only Ashkenazic analogy that comes to mind is the comedian Lenny Bruce, born Leonard Alfred Schneider, who likewise had experience with hard drugs and the law but survived only into his early forties.
One way in which American Sephardic Jews have resembled Greeks, to be frank, is the lesser value they place on advanced education, unlike Edouard Roditi’s parents, say, who sent him to Oxford before he came to America. Many American Sephardim grew up in houses devoid of books. In my case, as I recall, there was a bookshelf; but since my mother didn’t read books, it never occurred to her to put a lamp next to a chair. I always ask American Sephardim of my generation if their parents supported their going to college. They are far more likely than Ashkenazim to reply that their parents thought high school was enough education and that, once they collected their high school diploma, they should think about establishing some kind of biz. An Italian‑ American friend tells me that she was discouraged for continuing beyond high school because her father feared his children would become smarter than he and thus undermine his patriarchal authority. I wonder if a similarly defensive motive informed Sephardic fathers and thus whether a Sephardic resistance to book‑learning accounts for why Sephardic Jews, who were culturally ahead of Ashkenazi several hundred years ago, fell generally behind in America.
I’ve discovered informally that Sephardic Jews in America conducted kinds of enterprise unknown to Ashkenazim. In my mother’s family, some relatives imported olive oil while others brokered cashew nuts and comparably exotic foods. Their ideal appeared to be self-employment with all the freedoms and responsibilities involved. (Self‑employment has been my ideal as well.) The father of the painter Micaela Amato was a wholesaler of Latino herbs found in a Botanica, which is a kind of shop unknown to most Americans, if not most Ashkenazi Jews.
If Sephardic Jews are indeed culturally different, even in America, then Sephardic‑American art should be different as well—as different as Rosa Eskenazi’s songs are from Al Jolson’s, say—or in my case at least half‑different. That’s a question that Sephardic‑American artists, as they (we) recognize a common alternative Jewish heritage, will hopefully explore.