In Celebration of the

Jewish Book Month

Gaon Books honors Sephardic Legacy

Sephardic Legacy: Stories and Songs from Jewish Spain is Dr. Samelson’s record of his family’s Sephardic heritage from the Turkish tradition, using the Ladino romance (Judeo-Spanish ballad) as the means of telling this story. He summarizes Sephardic history, as well as the history of the Sephardic ballad, which developed from the Spanish romance tradition. Many of the romances included here were collected from his family members. Sephardic Legacy is a unique record of Sephardic culture and history.

William Samelson, Ph.D. is a Professor Emeritus, Holocaust & Genocide Studies, University of Texas. He was born in Poland and lived there until the age of eleven when he was interned in various Nazi labor and concentration camps in Poland and Germany. He was a member of the partisans at the age of thirteen. Captured by the Nazis, he was taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp where he spent three and a half years. He was liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, and emigrated to the United States in 1948.

Dr. Samelson holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at Kent State University, The University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Samelson has written extensively on the Holocaust and lectured widely on it. Among his publications are All Lie in Wait, One Bridge to Life, Warning and Hope.

For more information on Sephardic Legacy, go to:

www.gaonbooks.com/SephardicLegacy.html

Celebrating the Jewish Book Month -- Moroccan Sephardic Romancero

Jewish Book Month

Gaon Books Proudly Presents

Moroccan Sephardic Romancero is an anthology of Sephardic Romances in the Moroccan tradition, based on four decades of research. Starting in the 1970s’ the author has collected more than two hundred variations on ballads from people living in the different countries of the Moroccan Diaspora. 

For all of us who work on the traditional Romancero—and for all Hispanists whatever their speciality—we need to thank and congratulate Shoshana Weich...for having created and published a splendid book that is invaluable and full of pleasant surprises for the study of one of the most important branches of Spanish poetry: the traditional Romancero. 

Samuel G. Armistead, University of California

Susana Weich-Shahak’s anthology of the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero vividly brings to life the Judeo-Spanish ballads transmitted by Moroccan women over the course of time and in scattered locales.  Through its careful presentation of more than two hundred songs and details of their transmission processes, this volume serves both to document a remarkable repertory in great detail and to memorialize the women who sustained these songs. This is a collection that speaks eloquently to the importance of music in Jewish life.  

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Harvard University

Susana Weich-Shahak

Translator's Note:

Translating Susana Weich-Shahak’s Moroccan Sephardic Romancero has been a pleasure and honor. Having followed her writings for close to twenty years, I have been privy to the consistency of her detailed attention to the historical, textual and musical nuances within Judeo-Spanish song. Her fieldwork has been extensive, collecting songs from Morocco and from various countries in the Moroccan Diaspora, especially first generation émigrés to Israel. Bringing this anthology of Moroccan Sephardic repertoire to an English speaking public I hope will elucidate the complexities in this rich oral tradition to a wider audience.

Vanessa Paloma

Casablanca, 2013

For more information about the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero, go to www.gaonbooks.com/MoroccanRomancero.html