In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonio Saura

A poignant and richly textured prose work, originally written in Judeo-Spanish-the language of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire and of Cohen's own childhood-and later translated by the author himself into French. The book (which appears here both in English and the Ladino original) is "more or less what my mind retains of the five centuries that my ancestors spent in Turkey." A haunting journey into personal and collective memory, it is also a meditation on a dying language and in fact a dying way of life-that of the Sephardic Jews of Salonica, Istanbul, and other points east. Includes a series of ink drawings by the well-known Spanish painter to whom Cohen addresses his letter.