I was born in Casablanca of Judeo-Spanish heritage on my mother’s side and Judeo-Berber on my father’s. My family was also deeply influenced by French culture (Morocco was a French protectorate from 1911 to 1956) and by Argentinean culture, my great grandfather having immigrated to Buenos Aires in the early 1920s.
My Judeo-Spanish roots, however, were the more powerful and resilient. Though dormant for many years, growing up in Casablanca, Paris and New York, they began to push through my multicultural surface and blossomed in song - Sephardic Song!
The music became a means to reassert my heritage. Exploring the vast repertoire of hauntingly beautiful Sephardic melodies and verses, I felt a joy and fullness of purpose that made the musical experience profound and complete. These songs spoke to me in the hidden language of unconscious and deeply emotional experiences.
In the words of my friend, Bob Ore, a fellow Moroccan, poet and philosopher, whose itinerant life has mirrored my own:
On est toujours de son pays
Quoi que l’on dise, quoi que l’on fasse
On traine toujours sa nostalgie,
Ou que l’on vive ou que l’on passe,
Jamais, jamais ca ne s’oublie
On est toujours de son pays.
Translation: We are always from one’s own country, whatever we say, whatever we do. Our nostalgia follows us wherever we go. It is never, never forgotten, we are always from one’s own country.
Remembering and reconnecting to one’s “own country” is a powerful human need. You find that your deepest voice can harmonize with other voices that share something of your past, something of your cultural soil. While embracing the oral tradition of my ancestors I have found my deepest artistic voice which continues to find expression through my many performances and recordings.
Following many of my concerts in Sephardic communities around the world, I am often pulled aside by older Sephardim who enthusiastically teach me the words and music to songs they have been singing all their lives and want to pass on to posterity. I once spent an afternoon with a 94 year old woman from Turkey who knew many Sephardic songs I had never heard of, and I know many hundreds of songs, often 3 or 4 melodies to the same text, or many texts to the same melody. She even knew verses to that old warhorse “Los Bilbilicos” which were totally new to me. A few years ago, I was also given the Ladino words to the Hatikvah (written for the 1957 Zionist Congress in Israel) by a very special friend, Rebecca Levy, who spent the last years of her life at the Menorah Home for the Aged in Brooklyn, New York. Such experiences have not only given me great personal satisfaction but have also served to deepen my commitment to preserving Sephardic Culture.
It has become one of my life’s greatest blessings – and what makes my Judaism most meaningful – to be able to share the many treasures of Sephardic song with audiences throughout the world. But finally, the message and the music transcend their origin, the boundaries become more permeable as we allow others into our world and take a journey into theirs.
