Reviews

Profoundly moved by the death of her parents, French academic Courtine-Denamy (Three Women in Dark Times) traces her family's roots back to the Spanish village of Cuenca, where her earliest known ancestors were Sepharadic Jews exiled during the Inquisition. Ranging over three continents, several countries, and a dozen generations, she recounts the fates of various relatives up through her parents as they move through Salonika, Constantinople, Bayonne, Varna, Vienna, Israel, America, Paris, and the Nazi occupation. Courtine-Denamy addresses much of her writing to her ancestors, speaking in the second person throughout much of the book-a technique that adds a degree of animation to the author's dead relatives but often doesn't work as the author must rely on presumption. Oral anecdotes and the author's memories enliven the text, as does the frequent use of expressions in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, all documented in a glossary. As a capsule of history, this is an ambitious undertaking by a woman driven to preserve a culture and, especially, a language that has no home country. Julia Kristeva notes in the foreword that Courtine-Denamy's testimonial to the Judeo-Spanish language is a valuable counterpoint to the overwhelming recognition of Hebrew as the language of the Jews. Suitable for Jewish studies collections.-Janet Sassi, New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

The author of this intimate history of a Sephardic Jewish family, an associate researcher at Centre des Religions du Livre at France's prestigious Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, was raised by nonobservant parents (as a schoolgirl, she insolently declared to her rabbi-teacher, "At our place we eat ham sandwiches!") who had changed the family surname from the Sephardic Coenca to a more French-sounding Denamy. It was only after their deaths that she took to heart her father's lifelong, if undefined, admonition to his only child: Zakhor (remember). But remember what? Both parents had been stingy with family lore. So she seeks out relatives as far-flung as California and Israel to augment and corroborate the scant stories she has. In Spain, she finds records of an ancestor, Juan Cuenca, a convert to Catholicism who in 1490 was posthumously found guilty by the Inquisition of secretly practicing Judaism. His grandson Joan, acquitted two years later of the same charge, left for Ottoman Turkey when the Jews were expelled from Spain. Like an archeologist trying to resurrect an entire civilization through assorted pottery shards, Denamy uses DNA and imagination to recreate her family's history. Among other things, she discovers the origin of some of the Judeo-Spanish idioms she grew up with. (The book is rife with Judeo-Spanish and includes a glossary of terms, as well as an indispensable family tree.) Readers with a more poetic turn of mind will appreciate Courtine-Denamy's journey as she traces her family from Salonika, Bulgaria and Constantinople to Israel, Austria and France. This slim volume was awarded the Alberto Benveniste Prize for Sephardi Literature in 2002. 1 map. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.