Contemporary Judeo–Spanish Poetry for Young Readers

Abstract

This article presents contemporary Judeo-Spanish poetry for children in the context of the postvernacular mode (when the language is not used any more in everyday communication) of the language. It discusses the poetry collections of three authors who have published Judeo-Spanish poems in the twenty-first century: Ada Gattegno-Saltiel, Avner Perez, and Sarah Aroeste, as well as the project Yeladino, which is an anthology of Judeo-Spanish translations of Hebrew poems. It analyses the books and projects in terms of their subject matter, language, and poetic devices, as well as the relation of some of them with music, theatre-music performance, and educational activities. The paper raises the question of audience of this poetry, allowing for the fact that nowadays there are no children learning Judeo-Spanish as their first language, and that the language itself is considered severely endangered. The paper states the presence of the dual address in these books, i.e. to children and adults, both on the level of implied and real audience.