eSefarad Noticias del Mundo Sefaradi
My mother would go to synagogue every few weeks and light candles on the Sabbath before the pictures of her dead relatives. One of her sisters, Matilde, had disappeared from France, where she had been living during the Nazi occupation. For years my mother would visit international relief agencies, Jewish groups, foreign embassies trying to find traces of my aunt. After the war we learned that she had been deported and had died in Auschwitz. My mother raised money for Jewish organizations (the Histadruth, the Sephardic Home for the Aged, orphanages), and I would watch her transformation: her voice changed and she would not take “no” for an answer. She asked my father’s friends for money to support the “birth of state of Israel”, and she cried with joy when the sate of Israel was finally born. Her greatest wish was to visit Israel some day. And she did: in her early sixties, she went with a tour group, the only time she travelled without another member of the family. After that, she said, she was ready to die. My mother believed that in spite of all the suffering, Jews were indeed the “chosen people” and the justice would prevail in the end.
My father gave money to the Jewish charities reluctantly; but he was not interested in visiting Israel. He loved going to a club of Sephardic families witch gathered to play cards., hear Oriental music and meet other Sephardim. Parties, wedding and social gatherings at the club, just a few blocks from our house, were his way of being active in the community.
Until I went to school I did not know that the rest of the world was not Jewish. Except for the maids, no Christians had been in our home. In elementary from them, and, with another Jewish girls, I was given “Moral” classes. We had to read books that said that in spite of the fact that the Jews had killed Jesus, they could become moral beings if they cultivated the right qualities: obedience, forgiveness, selflessness. During the “Moral” classes we were left alone. At the end of the hour the “Religion” teacher would appear and throw some questions at us: “What were primary sins and secondary sins?” “Name five virtues!” There were never more than one or two Jews in my classes and never Sephardic. The Ashkenazi children did not believe that I was a Jew; I did not understand Yiddish, and my parents were from
Turkey. I convinced them by showing my knowledge of episodes from the Old Testament. Moses and the Ten Commandments. David and Goliath.
Though what was going on at school was clearly anti-Semitic, I did not recognize it. I was among the best students in my class, an I did not feel that I was being discriminated against. I was allowed to carry the Argentine flag in national holidays, a privilege reserved four outstanding students. Once, in a ceremony in honor of General San Martín (a leader of Argentinean independence), I was standing with the flag in the firs row, close to the national authorities. My heart almost stopped beating when Evita Peron touched my head. She had red hair and wore a fur coat, and I did not say anything to my parents because I knew they did not like her. They thought she was an adventuress and mistrusted her involvement in politics.
My first direct experience with anti-Semitism came when I was about 9 years old. I used to go to a friend’s house to do homework. When she and I were working in her room, I heard her mother sy in the next room, “Dirty, noisy Jews”. My face got very hot and my breath stopped. These people liked me and welcomed me in their home. I realized they did not see me as a Jew. Like many other Sephardics, my Italian name and Mediterranean appearance “disguised” my Jewishness. They were not talking about “us”; they were talking bout the Yiddish-speaking Jews.
A constant theme in my life has been not to be seen as a Jew. My looks, my family background, my name: it all fit together. I could not be Jewish! Being separated from those “noisy Jews,” being seen as different by the Ashkenazi Jews, created a scenario in which it was tempting to “pass” as a Christian. It seemed simpler. It was tiring to go though the long explanation about my background and them to face blank looks. Elias Canetti’s autobiography The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood is the only work I know that describes some of the complexities and ambivalences in the development of a Sephardic Jewish Identity. I could recognize some of the feelings of “difference” and questions that I have struggled with for most of my adult life. His work has encouraged me to take a look at my situation as a woman with a Sephardic background. I was excited to read that his mother, a Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria, was originally named Arditti.
I chose a high school that was the only coed school in Buenos Aires, a school supported by the small English-speaking community. I boarded there for 3 years, and I met Protestant, whom I had only read about in books and articles. I found them more tolerant than the Catholics, and I attended Sunday school services where we sang and prayed “each one to its own Lord”. I liked their openness and toyed with the idea of conversion. To their credit, they were not at oll interested in proselytizing, and my conversion fantasies did not find fertile ground. And I learned that there were other religious groups than Catholics and Jews, and the some Christians did not see Jews primarily as the “killers of Jesus”.
*Ladino word meaning «good-looking woman
My Ancestors Speak : To be a Hanúm – Part 1
Fuente: The book: The Tribe of Dina, a Jewish women’s anthology.
We received this book by Gloria Ascher courtesy.
