eSefarad Noticias del Mundo Sefaradi
By Benjamin Ivry
Born in Paris in 1950, Dominique Vidal is a French author and journalist specializing in the Middle East, the Holocaust, far-right-wing European politics and related issues. A contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique, he has co-written “The New A-Z of the Middle East,” among other books. He is the son of Haïm Vidal Sephiha, a Judeo-Spanish linguist and activist born in Brussels in 1923 to a Sephardic family from Istanbul. Vidal Sephiha survived Auschwitz, where he was a slave laborer for 16 months in the Fürstengrube subcamp, toiling in a coal mine. Moving to Paris after the war, he gradually became a leading light in the scholarly study of Judeo-Spanish, usually referred to in America and Israel as Ladino — erroneously, according to Vidal Sephiha. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., houses the Haïm Vidal Sephiha Judeo-Spanish Library, donated by the scholar. Father and son have collaborated on a new book of conversations, “My Life for Judeo-Spanish: My Mother’s Language,” recently published in France by Le Bord de l’eau Editions.•
Source: Forward.com
