5: Letter to the editor, Bula Satula (Moise B. Soulam), 1928, and film trailer, Ruth Behar, 2002.

5: Letter to the editor, Bula Satula (Moise B. Soulam), 1928, and film trailer, Ruth Behar, 2002.

Like Myriam Moscona’s family (see Resource 4 of this kit), many Sephardim left the Ottoman Empire and its successor states (including Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey) in the early twentieth century for countries like France, Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. The years before and after World War I witnessed great political, social, and economic upheavals in the lands where Sephardim lived, and significant numbers emigrated in search of safety, stability, and opportunity. In these modern diasporas, adjusting to new environments, even Jewish or Spanish-speaking ones, created tremendous difficulty for these immigrants. For some, their Ladino language skills could either help or hinder their acclimation to new lives, while for others their Jewishness would be doubted or denied because it was so dissimilar from the Ashkenazi majority culture. 

Suggested Activities: Read this letter-to-the-editor from a Ladino-language newspaper from New York City in 1928. What advice and warning does the author want to communicate to other Sephardic immigrants? What does this letter reveal about cultural and linguistic expectations of Sephardic Jews, and particularly of Sephardic immigrant women, in New York? What does it reveal about tensions that may have existed between Sephardim and their neighbors in New York?

Then watch the trailer for Adio Kerida (Goodbye Dear Love). How does this immigrant story differ from that portrayed in the letter-to-the-editor? What comparisons and connections are made between Sephardim on one hand and Cubans, Afro-Cubans, and Ashkenazi Jews on the other? Why do you think Ruth Behar chose “Adio Kerida” as the title of her film?

Sources:  Bula Satula (Moise B. Soulam), La Vara, November 30, 1928. Reproduced in Aviva Ben-Ur, “‘We Speak and Write This Language Against Our Will:’ Jews, Hispanics, and the Dilemma of Ladino-Speaking Sephardim in Early-Twentieth-Century New York,” American Jewish Archives Journal 50:1–2 (1998): 136–38. Translated from Ladino by Aviva Ben-Ur. Reprinted as "When Spanish is No Longer a Jewish Language: Immigrant Encounters on the Streets of New York City (1928)" in Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, eds., Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014), 362–364.

Ruth Behar, "Adio Kerida (trailer)" 2002, accessed online.