BOOK MARKS

IN 1998, MEXICAN-BORN ILAN STAVANS edited an excellent collection, The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (Jewish Star review, Nov. 17, 1998), and now he's back with his newest collection -- only this time, the focus is on Sephardic literature.

The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (Schocken Books, 2005, 240 pp., $27.50), covers the same time period as the Oxford collection -- from the 19th Century to the present -- although it includes fewer authors.

Not surprisingly, there is some crossover. Primo Levi, A.B. Yehoshua and Elias Canetti are three well-known writers who are included in both collections.

Also not surprisingly, readers are likely to be more familiar with writers in the Oxford collection.

For both, Stavans has written valuable, informative introductions, providing an overview of his subject, historical context and descriptions of his selection process. Necessity has required him also to define first, Jewish literature, and now, for the current collection, Sephardic literature.

Is it language? Content? Heritage? Geography? Religion? The author's identity?

These are questions and issues Stavans addresses, and because he does so, our understanding and appreciation of the literature is enhanced.

As he wrote in his Introduction to the Oxford collection, these literary works serve "as maps across linguistic and geographical spheres."

Thus The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature acts as a more detailed map to that less familiar region of Jewish literary imagination.

As defined by Stavans, Sephardim are descendants of Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal before the expulsion of the Jews from those countries in 1492.

The resulting dispersion, according to Stavans, has meant that the "Sephardic condition is one of fracture and displacement" and "Sephardic identity is ... a hall of mirrors."

The collection, which is arranged chronologically according to the author's date of birth, opens with selections from two women.

First is a short story by the Sephardic English novelist Grace Aguilar, "The Escape", published in 1844. It is set in Portugal, home to her ancestors until the Inquisition.

This is followed by three poems by the American, Emma Lazarus, whose father was Sephardic.

Another woman that Stavans has included is Veza Canetti, wife of the Nobel Prize winning writer Elias Canetti. Most of her writing was published after she died in 1963, and not available in English translation until 1990.

An excerpt from her novel The Tortoises, "Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement", is printed in this collection, chillingly evoking the coming Holocaust.

Bulgarian-born Elias Canetti, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, is represented by excerpts from his memoir, The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood, published in English in 1979.

Here, memories of a happy childhood in Bulgaria, and of the Sephardic pride his family held (he calls it "naive arrogance"), are conveyed as Canetti recalls holiday celebrations and daily incidents.

An excerpt from another memoir, Out of Egypt by the Egyptian-born Andr� Aciman, titled "The Last Seder", is the story of the family's last Passover in Alexandria, in 1965.

"They don't want us in Egypt," the author's father tells him one day. Aciman continues, "But we had always known that, I thought. Then he blurted it out: we had been officially expelled and had a week to get our things together."

On the eve of their departure, the family, which had lived in Egypt since 1905 (before that in Italy and before that in Turkey), decides to hold a seder.

They left Egypt for Rome, then Paris, and eventually, New York, a journey illustrative of the Sephardic "fracture and displacement" of which Stavans writes in his Introduction.

The divide between Sephardim and Ashkenazim is bitingly captured in a poem by Moroccan-born Israeli Sami Shalom Chetrit.

"Who Is a Jew and What Kind of a Jew?" constructs a conversation between the poet and an American Jew.

The poet describes himself: "I'm an Arab Jew."

The American protests that the two words don't go together.

"...how can you say 'Arab Jew' when all the Arabs want is to destroy the Jews?

"And how can you say 'European Jew' when the Europeans have already destroyed the Jews?"

IN THESE 28 WRITERS, WHO cross borders, languages and cultures -- often multiple times -- Ilan Stavans offers a volume that is educational, informative and thought-provoking.

At the end of the day, however, the writers stand on their own, giving diverse expression to the Jewish experience. The literary portrait they present differs in many ways from the Euro-centered one many of us are familiar with.

Yet even in these differences these writers implicitly illustrate, as Stavans has phrased it, one literature, many tongues.

Article copyright Star Media Group, Inc.