13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

HELD, Michal

The Personal Narrative of a Judeo-Spanish Storyteller from Jerusalem as an Interface of Genres

A group of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) storytellers has been meeting in Jerusalem once a month for the last fourteen years. The group consists of thirty elderly ladies, originating from various communities of the descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and settled in new communities in the Ottoman Empire, where they continued to use their ethnic language and develop a rich Judeo-Spanish-Ottoman culture. The group’s founder and leader, Matilda Koen-Sarano, had transcribed and published many of the members’ folk tales in four large volumes.

This paper sets out to explore the personal narrative of Sol Mymaran, a central figure in the Ladino storytellers group who died last year. Skilfully interwoven into the personal narrative are thirteen folk tales, and one fragment of a para-liturgical work in Ladino. I hope to demonstrate in this paper the way in which the two levels of Sol’s narrative - the personal and the ethnic - don’t compete with one another but rather join to form a unified painting of a self that is defined in a historical, an ethnic and an imaginary realm. Her narrative is made of a fusion of folkloristic materials and personal experiences that cannot and should not be regarded as separate entities, but as complementary ones reflecting a whole multi-layered self.

The interpretation of the personal-folkloristic narrative process is too elaborated to be disentangled within the boundaries of a short paper such as this one. However, the paper will demonstrate the multi-layered process of the way in which its narrator, the listener/researcher and the narrator’s family members are interpreting the personal narrative.