Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire [Hardcover]

Olga Borovaya explores the emergence and expansion of print culture in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), the mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire, in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She provides the first comprehensive study of the three major forms of Ladino literary productionthe press, belles lettres, and theateras a single cultural phenomenon. The product of meticulous research and innovative methodology,Modern Ladino Cultureoffers a new perspective on the history of the Ladino press, a novel approach to the study of belles lettres in Ladino and their relationship to their European sources, and a fine-grained critique of Sephardic plays as venues for moral education and politicization.

The literary culture of the Ottoman Empire's Sephardic Jews

Olga Borovaya is a visiting scholar at Stanford University. She is author ofModernization of a Culture(in Russian).

Acknowledgements
Note on Translation, Transcription, Proper Names, and Dates
Introduction

Part 1. The Press
The Emergence of modern Culture Production in Ladino: The Sephardi Press
The Press in Salonica: a Case Study

Part 2. Belles Lettres
The Serialized Novel as Rewriting
Ladino Fiction: Case Studies

Part 3. Theater
Sephardi Theater: Project and Practice
Ladino Drama: Case Studies
Conclusion

Notes
Index

Finalist, 2012 National Jewish Book Awards, Sephardic Culture

This groundbreaking, eye-opening study demonstrates that literary and cultural analytical tools are key to answering historical questions about Ladino texts. . . . Borovaya's study underscores the richness of Ladino literature as a source for the history of Ottoman Sephardim and their diasporic offshoots.

A superb literary-historical study of Ladino literature . . . that goes very far in fleshing out, correcting, and innovatively interpreting the history and substance of Ladino literary prodl#6