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Gaon Author Susana Weich-Shahak Wins European Prize for Folklore

Gaon Books Author

Susana Weich-Shahak

Has won the European Prize for Folklore

Agapito Marazuela

Named after the Spanish folkorist, this prize was given to Dr. Weich-Shahak for her work over the last four decades recording and documenting the Sephardic romancero (Judeo-Spanish ballads). In the interview below, which she gave after winning the award, she mentions the role of songs and oral tradition as primary factors in holding together Sephardic identity and heritage even after 500 years of exile in non-Spanish speaking lands from Morocco to Turkey and Israel around the Mediterranean and in the Americas from Argentina to the United States.






Dr. Weich-Shahak's book Moroccan Sephardic Romancero, was published by Gaon Books (2013) and summarizes her work of four decades of collecting, documenting and analyzing Judeo-Spanish ballads, which are traditionally sung by women.

What others have said about her work and this book.

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, Davis

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

Click to Buy the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero from Amazon.com

 Click Here to Learn More about the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero

The Art of the Hebrew Alphabet - Gloria Abella Ballen

Gloria Abella Ballen

The Art of the Hebrew Alphabet

See videos in which Gloria talks about the art and meanings of the Hebrew letters and hear her in-depth radio interview with Mary-Charlotte in Santa Fe.

To see the videos and hear the interview go to

gaonbooks.com/HebrewAlphabet.html

Gaon Books at the URJ Biennial 2013

Thank you to the hundreds of people who came by the Gaon Books booth in the first two days of the URJ Biennial, to those who stopped to look at the books and talk, to those who bought books from Ruth Sohn's Crossing Cairo about being Jewish in Egypt to Reb Zalman's A Hidden Light about early Hasidic rabbis in eastern Europe, Patricia Shapiro's The Privilege of Aging about Jewish women and the new super agers, Arthur Gross-Schaefer's The Rabbi Wore Moccasins, about a rabbi/lawyer  who solves a murder mystery, and Gloria Abella Ballen's just published The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet that was described by a buyer as "ravishingly beautiful" and to the buyers of all the other books. Here are some of the photos at the booth and of a few of the people who stopped by.

We welcome you to visit Gaon Books in Booth 104 at the URJ Biennial in San Diego this week. We will be displaying all Gaon books, and we will be featuring recent titles, especially those of three authors who will be there signing their books - Gloria Abella Ballen, The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet. 

Also Arthur Gross-Schaefer will be signing his book, The Rabbi Wore Moccasins.

And Rabbi Ruth H. Sohn will be signing her book

Crossing Cairo: a Jewish Woman's Encounter with Egypt.

The hours for the signings of each author are listed

on the Gaon Books page of the URJ Biennial website.

We hope to see you there.

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