#judeo spanish

[nesyanast]

How beautiful is the Ladino ✡️ language! I read this song is common at Sephardi weddings, but this version gives it such an enchanting ethereal vibe to it. I can't stop playing this track on Spotify, my new song fixation of the week.

[sefaradweb]

🇪🇸 El Instituto Cervantes ha incorporado recientemente a su Caja de las Letras un valioso legado cultural sefardí, donado por la Comunidad Judía de Salónica. Entre los objetos más simbólicos de esta donación se encuentra un juego de llaves de casas de sefardíes expulsados de Toledo en 1492 por los Reyes Católicos. Estas llaves han sido preservadas por generaciones de descendientes como un emblema de la esperanza de regresar a su hogar ancestral. El legado, depositado en el cajetín número 1.447 de la institución, también incluye discos de música judeo-española, actas de congresos internacionales sobre la lengua judeo-española, y una maqueta del futuro Museo del Holocausto de Salónica. El acto de recepción tuvo lugar el martes pasado, destacando los lazos profundos que unen la cultura sefardí con la hispánica. Carmen Noguero, secretaria general del Instituto Cervantes, subrayó la importancia de este legado para la cultura española, mientras David Saltiel, presidente de la Comunidad Judía de Salónica, destacó el valor histórico y simbólico de este patrimonio.

🇺🇸 The Cervantes Institute recently added a valuable Sephardic cultural legacy to its Caja de las Letras, donated by the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki. Among the most symbolic items in the donation is a set of keys from the houses of Sephardic Jews expelled from Toledo in 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs. These keys have been preserved by generations of descendants as a symbol of hope to return to their ancestral homeland. The legacy, placed in locker number 1,447, also includes records of Judeo-Spanish music, proceedings from international conferences on the Judeo-Spanish language, and a model of the future Holocaust Museum of Thessaloniki. The reception took place last Tuesday, highlighting the deep ties between Sephardic and Hispanic culture. Carmen Noguero, the Secretary General of the Cervantes Institute, emphasized the importance of this legacy for Spanish culture, while David Saltiel, President of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, highlighted the historical and symbolic value of this heritage.

[yellingmetatron]

Upon the Reception of Certain Information

"…FUCKING FUCK. FUCK. FOR HOW LONG?"

"Um…"

"NO, DON'T BOTHER FUCKING ANSWERING THAT." Metatron makes a halfturn counterclockwise and inverts himself. "ANY TIME IS TOO LONG. I'LL LOOK IT UP LATER. AND CAN YOU TELL ME WHY NOBODY FUCKING INFORMED ME OF THIS DECISION?"

"Lady Sera thought it was… best to keep as few angels as possible aware of the Exterminations. In your absence she is the most senior archangel, so…" the Er'el who drew the short straw fidgets nervously

"SO SHE WAS FUCKING TRYING TO PROTECT US. I KNOW HOW SHE WORKS. AND I KNOW HOW ADAM WORKS, TOO. FUCK, I KNEW HE SPENT TOO LONG ON EARTH… SERA CAN WAIT. I WANNA TALK TO THE HIJIKO. FUCKING… NEVER BEEN GOOD AT TALKING WITH HIM, SERA WAS SUPPOSED TO BE BETTER AT THIS, WHY DIDN'T SHE--"

"Umhe'sinHellnow"

The light in the Archives takes on a strange, painful quality.

"What. Do you mean. Adam is in Hell."

Metatron's voice is very, very soft and very, very calm. It is perhaps the most terrifying thing the lesser angel has ever heard.

"The… the last Extermination… Lucifer and his daughter organized a resistance… there was another angel there too, Vagatha I think--"

It's hard to describe what happens next. If the sound of sheet metal tearing could be described as an atmospheric condition like fog, it would come close. The Er'el cowers as the archangel's emotions are made manifest, the intensity of his rage and anguish carving scars into reality as the Er'el's vision blurs and its extremities go numb. Something that is almost like thunder rolls through every atom of the Archives, and the painful light dims-- but the painful quality strengthens. Yet all through this, Metatron's tz'funahim simply flit about serenely, completely unaffected.

Then, things go still.

"…I AM GOING OUT. THE CHAYOTH ARE COLLECTIVELY IN CHARGE OF THE ARCHIVES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. DO NOT SEEK TO CONTACT ME. AND IF SERA WANTS TO KNOW WHERE I AM… ALL THE ANSWER SHE NEEDS IS MY SILENCE."

[soundgrammar]

Listen/purchase: Onde que Tope una que es Plaziente (Where You Encounter a Pleasing One) by Jack Mayesh

[oatmilkandvellichor]

i love being in an excessively multilingual, multicultural relationship.

hahahaha, jajajaja, חחחחח, yalla, let’s go, dai, stop, cut it out, enough, nu?, so?, and?, ¿y?, what?, huh?, ¿que?, yes, yeah, sí, enka, yay, yesh, chabibi, achi, dude, bestie, compa, llave, kerido, querido, mi vida, cariño, tateleh, lovey, bitch, pendejo, shkots, fucking insane, descabellado, balagan, thank you, mvto, you good?, ‘stonko?

even the things that mean more or less the same thing Do Not mean the same thing in this house. if i’m laughing in hebrew instead of english there’s a reason. if i say querido instead of kerido there’s a reason. if zee calls me tateleh instead of papí there’s a reason. thanking you in creek instead of english isn’t a slip. etc etc etc.

i genuinely cannot explain this to you if you do not live in an excessively multicultural household. it is not enough to be bilingual/multilingual. i am spinning trying to explain this to people rn.

[puppydogwithlargeeyes]

when given the choice between a metered and unmetered version of a folk song... i confess i will always choose unmetered...

[adiradirim]

Karen Gerson Şarhon, editor in chief of El Amaneser ("The Dawn,") , a 32-page monthly Ladino supplement to Turkey’s weekly Jewish newspaper and the world’s only monthly Judeo-Spanish publication. El Amaneser is a project of the nonprofit she directs, the Sephardic Cultural Research Center, which acts as the hub of Istanbul’s Jewish community and a treasure trove of precious Ladino texts and translations. Included in these archives are recordings of native Ladino speakers preserved by the Center’s Ladino Database Project, and other undertakings such as the most comprehensive recordings and research of Maftirim, a musical tradition unique to the Turkish-Jewish community that emerged through interactions with Muslim Sufi orders in Edirne. Şarhon notes proudly that the center also has a variety of language-learning programs on its website, the only one on the internet with a Ladino language option. Şarhon grew up in a Ladino-speaking family in Istanbul, and her passion for the language intensified when she formed Los Pasharos Sefaradis (The Sephardic Birds), the first ensemble dedicated to researching and performing Sephardic music, in which she sang the old Ladino songs in the authentic style of her grandmothers. She went on to be a champion of Sephardic and Ladino cultural preservation. Read more about her accomplishments here.

“Ke mos biva esta lingua ermoza de muestros abuelos i el Dio ke mos de fuersa i enerjiya para luchar kontra su desaparision,” Karen Gerson Şarhon proclaims in Ladino. “Long live this beautiful language of our ancestors, and may God give us strength and energy to strive against its disappearance.”

[edenfenixblogs]

EVERYONE LOOK AT THIS STUNNING EDITION OF THE FAMILIAR BY LEIGH BARDUGO I HAVE JUST ACQUIRED

I’ve committed to only buying books I love in hardcopy any more. And this is the first time I’ve ever done this for a book I haven’t finished reading yet, but I love Leigh Bardugo and her writing style. I love that this is a Judeo-Spanish/sephardic magical realist story. And it has POMEGRANATES on it. How could I resist??????

I don’t wanna work today. I just wanna read The Familiar all day.

[letheology]

Shortly before Yvette Solal was born, the Crémieux Decree granted French citizenship to Jews in French Algeria, including Yvette's family. As an effort at assimilation, it was a massive success. Within a generation, most Algerian Jews spoke French over Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish. Of course, antisemitism was still rampant. French colonists were not so eager to accept Algerian Jews as fellow citizens. But Yvette's family still believed that becoming French was the key to their future, and so that was the way they were raised.

Growing up, Yvette didn't speak French. They didn't speak any language. But they came to understand it, slowly, and found other ways to communicate - gestures, pictures, and eventually writing. For all their struggle with words, they were good with numbers and patterns. They were quick to point out errors in their family's ledgers, and even quicker to make recommendations for the business. More importantly, they had tremendously good luck. Their market predictions were uncannily accurate. They could always guess if a new customer was a good omen or a bad one. As they got older, their family relied on them more and more to run the business. But they never truly stopped seeing Yvette as a child. She was their baby, their good luck charm, to be protected above all else.

And the time would come for them to be protected. In early 1903, when it seemed like France was on the verge of completing their conquest, the powers suddenly shifted. Revolutions sprung up all over North Africa. Yvette and their family found that many of their Jewish neighbors joined in alongside their Muslim ones. The Solal family did not do so. When France withdrew from Algeria, Yvette's family fled, too. But they did not flee to France.

Fearing that the fighting would follow them to Europe, and following the promise of aid from a certain wealthy Moroccan Jew in London, Yvette's family went down to the Neath, and dragged Yvette down with them.

Yvette had protested. They wrote out their reasoning in hurried script, with their most proper French. They did not want to flee and abandon all they'd worked for. They did not trust the word of this stranger from a world away. Snake eyes. Bad luck. But this time, they were ignored.

And though all the freedoms of Fallen London were a welcome surprise, this was not their choice. Years of built-up resentment spilled over in an instant. They would not be leaving, no. Here, they will come into their power.

[sefaradweb]

Judíos, conversos y el judeoespañol

🇪🇸 El artículo de Juan Antonio Frago analiza la historia del judeoespañol, desde sus orígenes en la península ibérica hasta la unificación lingüística que experimentaron los judíos expulsados en 1492. También se examina el papel de los conversos, tanto aquellos de última hora como las generaciones posteriores de cristianos nuevos, quienes a través de sus declaraciones ante la Inquisición proporcionaron información sobre su realidad cultural e idiomática. Se estudia una comunidad judía de Aragón como ejemplo del peso que las comunidades rurales tuvieron en la diáspora. El autor concluye que el judeoespañol ya existía antes de la firma del Edicto de Expulsión de 1492, en aspectos fundamentales relacionados con la diversidad lingüística de España en el siglo XV.

🇺🇸 Juan Antonio Frago's article explores the history of Judeo-Spanish, from its origins in the Iberian Peninsula to the linguistic unification experienced by the Jews expelled in 1492. It also examines the role of conversos, including late converts and later generations of new Christians, who provided insights into their cultural and linguistic realities through their Inquisition testimonies. The study focuses on a Jewish community in Aragón, highlighting the influence of rural communities in the diaspora. The author concludes that Judeo-Spanish existed before the signing of the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, in key aspects related to Spain's linguistic diversity in the 15th century.

[eretzyisrael]

Who are the Mizrahim? History 101

Where do Jews come from and what is the difference between Sephardim and Mizrahim? Loolwa Khazzoom gives this succint explanation for the Jewish Virtual Library:

A Baghdadi Jewish family

Regardless of where Jews lived most recently, therefore, all Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Some communities, of course, have more recent ties to this region: Mizrahim and Sephardim, two distinct communities that are often confused with one another.

Mizrahim are Jews who never left the Middle East and North Africa since the beginnings of the Jewish people 4,000 years ago. In 586 B.C.E., the Babylonian Empire (ancient Iraq) conquered Yehudah (Judah), the southern region of ancient Israel.

Babylonians occupied the Land of Israel and exiled the Yehudim (Judeans, or Jews), as captives into Babylon. Some 50 years later, the Persian Empire (ancient Iran) conquered the Babylonian Empire and allowed the Jews to return home to the land of Israel. But, offered freedom under Persian rule and daunted by the task of rebuilding a society that lay in ruins, most Jews remained in Babylon. Over the next millennia, some Jews remained in today’s Iraq and Iran, and some migrated to neighboring lands in the region (including today’s Syria, Yemen, and Egypt), or emigrated to lands in Central and East Asia (including India, China, and Afghanistan).

Sephardim are among the descendants of the line of Jews who chose to return and rebuild Israel after the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonian Empire. About half a millennium later, the Roman Empireconquered ancient Israel for the second time, massacring most of the nation and taking the bulk of the remainder as slaves to Rome. Once the Roman Empire crumbled, descendants of these captives migrated throughout the European continent. Many settled in Spain (Sepharad) and Portugal, where they thrived until the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion of 1492 and the Portuguese Inquisition and Expulsion shortly thereafter.

During these periods, Jews living in Christian countries faced discrimination and hardship. Some Jews who fled persecution in Europe settled throughout the Mediterranean regions of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, as well as Central and South America. Sephardim who fled to Ottoman-ruled Middle Eastern and North African countries merged with the Mizrahim, whose families had been living in the region for thousands of years.

In the early 20th century, severe violence against Jews forced communities throughout the Middle Eastern region to flee once again, arriving as refugees predominantly in Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and the Americas. In Israel, Middle Eastern and North African Jews were the majority of the Jewish population for decades, with numbers as high as 70 percent of the Jewish population, until the mass Russian immigration of the 1990s. Mizrahi Jews are now half of the Jewish population in Israel.

Throughout the rest of the world, Mizrahi Jews have a strong presence in metropolitan areas — Paris, London, Montreal, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Mexico City. Mizrahim and Sephardim share more than common history from the past five centuries. Mizrahi and Sephardic religious leaders traditionally have stressed hesed (compassion) over humra (severity, or strictness), following a more lenient interpretation of Jewish law.

Despite such baseline commonalities, Middle Eastern and North African Mizrahim and Sephardim do retain distinct cultural traditions. Though Mizrahi and Sephardic prayer books are close in form and content, for example, they are not identical. Mizrahi prayers are usually sung in quarter tones, whereas Sephardic prayers have more of a Southern European feel. Traditionally, moreover, Sephardic prayers are often accompanied by a Western-style choir in the synagogue.

Mizrahim traditionally spoke Judeo-Arabic — a language blending Hebrew and a local Arabic dialect. While a number of Sephardim in the Middle East and North Africa learned and spoke this language, they also spoke Ladino–a blend of Hebrew and Spanish. Having had no history in Spain or Portugal, Mizrahim generally did not speak Ladino.

In certain areas, where the Sephardic immigration was weak, Sephardim assimilated into the predominantly Mizrahi communities, taking on all Mizrahi traditions and retaining just a hint of Sephardic heritage — such as Spanish-sounding names. In countries such as Morocco, however, Spanish and Portuguese Jews came in droves, and the Sephardic community set up its own synagogues and schools, remaining separate from the Mizrahi community.

Even within the Mizrahi and Sephardi communities, there were cultural differences from country to country. On Purim, Iraqi Jews had strolling musicians going from house to house and entertaining families (comparable to Christmas caroling), whereas Egyptian Jews closed off the Jewish quarter for a full-day festival (comparable to Mardi Gras). On Shabbat, Moroccan Jews prepared hamin (spicy meat stew), whereas Yemenite Jews prepared showeah (spicy roasted meat), among other foods.

Read article in full 

The post Who are the Mizrahim? History 101 appeared first on Point of No Return. Read in browser »

[rotzaprachim]

nothing like introducing a friend to the sheer joys of

a) https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/?startyear=1783&endyear=1981

the national library of Israel historic newspaper archive!!!! - this is one of the widest ranging collections of Jewish language documents I’ve ever found and includes quite literally millions of pages of Jewish papers and magazines not only in Yiddish and hebrew but also ladino, Spanish, French, judeo-Arabic, polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, the list goes ever on…. If you’ve seen the very very pretty covers to the milgroyim and rimonim art journals then you should know they are available online for free:

https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/rmn? https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/rmn? Learning ladino? Here’s a ten years of a monthly paper for ladino speaking immigrants to the early twentieth century U.S.:

https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/laa? Here’s a Yiddish paper from 1920’s Havana!:

There’s so so much here! b) Yiddish book center! And their ELEVEN THOUSAND YIDDISH BOOKS which are free to read anywhere without an account! https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/search?f%5B0%5D=collection%3AYiddish%20Book%20Center%27s%20Spielberg%20Digital%20Yiddish%20Library

Overwhelmed? Here’s the top 1000:

still overwhelmed? Here’s a more manageable list of audiobooks read off by native speakers:

Learning Yiddish? Here are some readers and children’s books:

Enjoy!

[adarkrainbow]

As you might have noticed with my latest post, I have been looking into Frau Holle recently. And I just read an article by Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne which has some interesting points.

The article starts out by pointing out the difficulty of translating "Frau Holle", the very name of the tale/entity, in French. "Frau" can become easily "Madame" or "Dame", Miss or Lady, no problem... But what about "Holle"? The very name is a part of German folklore - and not just German folklore, a very specific regional folklore in Germany around Hesse - and as such it means nothing to a French audience. Not only that, but since French is a Latin-derived language, unlike German, the very name "Holle" does not bear any connotations, implications or echoes in French the same way it does in German or even English. As such, while there were translations as "Madame Hollé" as early as 1869, the idea of keeping "Frau Holle" as "Frau Holle" or just transliterating as "Lady Holle" is quite recent - and only applies to scholarly translations. Meanwhile, for older or more "common" translations, a specific trend appeared in France, a translation-tradition that still lasts to this day. Translating Frau Holle as "Madame la Neige" (Miss Snow), "Dame Hiver" (Lady Winter) or other cold-related names.

An habit that the author of the article severely criticizes, because while indeed snow plays an important part in the fairytale, Frau Holle is not supposed to be a spirit of winter or an embodiment of the snow - or at least she does not appear exclusively as such. Frau Holle is a very complex cultural figure with various functions and appearances.

To help the audience understand the complexity of Frau Holle, the article presents in a simplified and summarized version the list of supernatural beings that appear in variations of the "Frau Holle" tale around the world - a list extracted from a work by Warren E. Roberts, a "very complete synthesis" called "The Tale of the Kind and Unkind Girls" (1958). To highlight this intertextuality not only helps understand the various roles and elements surrounding the "part" Frau Holle is supposed to play ; while also proving how Frau Holle synthetizes all of those various aspects together.

In most fairytales of the type "The Kind and Unkind Girls", the supernatural being is a female entity of magic. For example, a fairy - fairies are very recurring in this type of fairytale though, unlike in Perrault's famous "Diamonds and Toads", there is never just one fairy, they are always three. It is exemplified by Basile's "The Three Fairies" in his Pentamerone ; they also appear within several Judeo-Spanish fairytales of the Balkans (there was a recent anthology of them translated in French published by the José Corti edition), and it is quite common for these three fairies to be washer-women, or at least tied to water/rivers (several variations in the French region of Gascogne have the fairies as washer-women by the river). There is also an equally important number of fairytales, among these "female tales", where the girls rather deal with witches - characters that very easily replace or are confused with fairies in folktales. The most famous of those witches tale is the one Afanassiev called simply "The Baba Yaga", and where the famous Russian witch plays the part of Frau Holle. A third option also exists for the female magical being: just "an old woman", "little old woman", who is clearly magic but never called by any specific name like "fairy" or "witch" (this type of character, the "magical old woman", not quite a fairy not quite a witch, is very common among the Grimm fairytales). The "simple old woman" appears for example in another one of Basile's tales "The two little pizzas", and in a Bulgarian fairytale "Girl of gold, girl of ashes" (a story which did reach France through the Père Castor collection for children). Sometimes the old woman will ask to have lice removed from her head (for example in Greek fairytales). Finally, in lands with a strong Catholic presence, of course, the female supernatural entity is replaced by the Virgin Mary - something very common among Christianized fairytales, where the Virgin Mary plays the part of every positive female magical character (an example is the Spanish fairytale "Three Balls of Gold").

So we have here a quite coherent group of female entities, though quite ambiguous, the fairy-witch group. There is also a share of those stories that have male characters as the supernatural entity. Usually these are earthly entities tied somehow to nature: in the Ludwig Bechstein's "Golden Mary, Sticky Mary", it is a "wild man" or "savage man", the "Thürschemann" ; in Afanassiev's The Old Grumpy Woman it is a leshy, a male "forest spirit" ; and in Grimm's own "The Three Little Men of the Forest" it is, as the title says, three dwarves living in the woods. When it comes to the male stories, having them be a specific entity related to the weather or the flow of time similar to Frau Holle is quite common: in England you have Jack Frost, in Russia Grandfather Frost ; and in many European fairytales the supernatural group of men embodies either the four seasons or the twelve months (Basile's "The Months" for example ; the article also notes a 1996 French children book "Adeline, Adelune et le feu des saisons", Adeline, Adelune and the fire of the seasons).

Finally, there is also a set of tales with more enigmatic and mysterioues entities, whose roots seem to belong in myths, religious symbolism or magical rituals. For example in the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions, the entity is usually three disembodied heads within a well, that asked for their hair to be brushed, or simply to be treated with respect. Miranda Jane Green evoked this trope within her "Celtic Myths", and James Orchard Halliweel collected a version of it, "The Three Heads in the Well" for his "Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England".

And Frau Holle, as an old and ancient avatar of a lost Germanic goddess, manages to compile and regroup all of those aspects and all those various entities within her. Like the three heads in the well, she is associated with ancient myths and the world of the dead. Like the four seasons, the twelve months, and Jack/Grandfather Frost, she is a spirit of the weather and the cycle of time. Like the wild-men and forest-spirits, she is an entity of wilderness and nature (the Brothers Grimm, in their "German Legends", do note several times that she leads a "Wild Hunt" throughout the forest). And finally she is the ultimately fairy-witch ; she is the kind and benevolent wise woman... and the terrifying ogress-like long-teethed hag.

A complexity of character, a multiplicity of faces, that is retranscribed within the ungoing debate surrounding the etymology of "Holle". For those who want to study the German fairytales under a mythological angle (Jacob Grimm was one of the most famous names to do so, more recently Eugen Rewermann, a religion specialist, took back the Grimm theory), Holle is survivance of the old pagan goddess of Germany Hulda, a mother-earth goddess (hence why Frau Holle lives underground, down a well). This is notably this analysis that led Lucie Crane, the woman that translated the Grimm fairytales for the edition illustrated by Walter Crane, to translate "Frau Holle" as "Mother Hulda": it was an attempt to give back to her a mythological glory. But other scholars have argued that Frau Holle could also be a female version of this Norse winter-god associated with the dead that appears in the Eddas: Uller/Holler. Another analysis, that is tied to the fairytale, is the homonimy between "Frau Holle" and "die Hölle" - which is "Hell" of course, but since here Frau Holle rules over a benevolet underground "land of the dead", we can think of it as a generic term for the "Underworld" (the same way for example in some languages the Greek Underworld are referred to as "Hell" despite having the paradise of the Elysian Fields). And more so: "Holle" coul also be... "die Holde", which means kindness or benevolence.

Many, many possible readings all true in their own way, which not only testifies to the cultural wealth behind the figure of Frau Holle, but also reflects perfectly how the character is one of paradoxes, duality and multiplicites. Frau Holle is so powerful that she mixes the up and the down - her realm is underground and yet in it she makes it snow in the sky, as a goddess both chthonian and celestial... With Frau Holle, life and death becomes a blur ; and more importantly Frau Holle gathers within her all seasons, because she might make it snow like in winter, her domain is stilled filled with the fresh flowers of spring and the hot sun of summer...

[The author of the article did praise greatly John Warren Stewig's decision of translating the character's name as "Mother Holly" in 2001. "Holly" is close enough to "Holle" in sonority, but it also makes the character feel more familiar to an English-speaking audience since it is a quite common name ; and "Holly" also plays cleverly on both "holly", the plant, one of the defining symbols of winter, and "holy", evoking Frau Holle's alternate roles as a saint or a goddess]

[spacelazarwolf]

if you don’t know who flory jagoda is, you absolutely should. she was a sephardic bosnian jewish musician who was famous for her interpretations of judeo-spanish (ladino) folk songs. her music is on spotify and if you haven’t listened to it you are missing out.

[jewishpositivity18]

Across the Jewish diaspora, Jewish people have adapted to the cultures they've lived in, even creating their own languages! Of course there's Hebrew, the OG Jewish language, but there's also: Yiddish (Judeo-German)

Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)

Judeo-Arabic

and more!!

[mariacallous]

The inside cover of my grandmother’s cookbook is inscribed with her handwriting, “Think of me when you cook.” It is a copy of the same spiral-bound book that has been given to all of the women in my family. “The Sephardic Cooks: Comé Con Gana” has somehow made its way from one synagogue in Atlanta to Sephardic communities and families from New Jersey to California. It has all the classic recipes, including a section titled “Main Dish Pastries.” These dishes are the cornerstone of the Sephardic tradition, desayuno.

The word “desayuno” literally translates to “breakfast” in Ladino, the dying Judeo-Spanish language historically spoken by Sephardic Jews. Yet, the meaning extends beyond that one meal. In Sephardic culture, desayunois a category of foods associated with the large Saturday morning meal that would be served after Shabbat, including egg dishes and savory pastries. 

These desayuno foods are some of my favorite things to eat and the ones I most associate with my own family traditions. The blocks of crustless quajado (spinach quiche) that always seemed to be in my childhood freezer, ready to thaw for lunch. The doughy, cheesy spinach boyos my grandmother would have ready for our breakfast every time we traveled to visit her. The pasteles (mini meat pies) my great-aunt taught to a room filled with four generations of cousins at our family reunion last summer. The rice-and-cheese-filled bureka pastries my mom comes over to make with my kids and me. 

While delicious and crowd-pleasing, these are also some of the most time-consuming recipes to prepare. I picture my great-grandmother standing in a friend’s kitchen as all the ladies of the community work together to knead mounds of dough, mix a vat of filling, fold and crimp sheets and sheets of burekas. Whether this is accurate or just my imagination justifying why it feels intimidating to make these by myself, desayuno pastries do not align well with today’s fast-paced, individual lifestyle. Save for the times my mom comes to bake with us (importantly, bringing a container of prepped filling), making dough and pastry from scratch is not happening in my kitchen. 

I hope to be a part of the thread that keeps Sephardic traditions alive, yet I do not want to let perfection be the enemy of my intentions. I think my grandmother would agree. While she baked burekas with all of her grandchildren and always had a freezer full of freshly baked rosca (coffee rolls), she was never one to turn down a good shortcut. She developed her own boyo recipe featuring Hungry-Jack biscuit dough as the base and once described to me a full lentil soup recipe, only to end it with, “or you could just buy a can of lentil soup.” She loved when I would call her to share that I had tried a Sephardic recipe, such as cinnamon biscocho cookies or lemon chicken soup. Whether my attempts had been successful or a flop (like my rock-hard biscochos), her smile would be audible through the phone saying, “I’m just so glad you tried.” 

As Sephardic culture and traditions fade and assimilate, food provides an important outlet to preserve history and share it with family and friends. More important than getting it right or spending hours in the kitchen is remembering our traditions, trying recipes, talking about or simply eating Sephardic foods, regardless of who made them.  

In that spirit, I would like to propose lowering our standards, for the greater good of keeping traditions alive. Consider a desayuno with fewer parts or with a little help from the freezer aisle. Rather than the large spread my ancestors would prepare for days in advance, consider making one thing from scratch (though I won’t tell if you cook zero things). You could make a batch of burekas or a quajado, arguably the easiest of the Sephardic breakfast dishes, or even just prepare a pot of hard-boiled eggs. Supplement with frozen spanakopita, Ta’amti Bourekas or a Trader Joe’s Greek cheese spiral for a full table. 

Nothing will taste quite like homemade pastries fresh from the oven and I still aspire to make them (occasionally). Yet, even when I munch a makeshift Sephardic meal, I will be thinking of my grandmother, just as she inscribed in her cookbook. As long as we are sharing food together, talking about Sephardic traditions, remembering meals and people who matter to us, I will call it desayuno. I think my grandmother would be proud.