An Ode to Salonika

Through the poetry of Bouena Sarfatty (1916-1997), An Ode to Salonika sketches the life and demise of the Sephardi Jewish community that once flourished in this Greek crossroads city. In some 500 Ladino poems known as coplas, Sarfatty, a resident of Salonika who survived the Holocaust as a partisan and later settled in Canada, preserves the traditions and memories of a diverse and thriving Sephardi community in the first half of the 20th century and describes the traumas this community faced under German occupation before the Nazis deported its Jewish residents to Auschwitz. The coplas in Ladino and in Renée Levine Melammed's English translation are framed by chapters tracing the history of the Sephardi community in Salonika and contextualizing the themes of the poems. This unique and moving source provides a rare entrée into a once vibrant world now lost.