"Prayer" from Everything I Kept (Todo Lo Que Guarde) by Ruth Behar
 

Like her fleeing Spanish ancestors hoping to return home someday, Ruth Beharís poetry unlocks the emotions connected with exile and reconciliation.

Born in Cuba in 1956, she is the product of Sefardi and Ashkenazi heritages. Her paternal Turkish grandparents fled to Cuba in the 1920ís, her maternal Polish-Russian grandparents fled the impending horror of Nazism. But the Cuban Revolution in 1961 left the Jewish population feeling threatened and Behar grew up in New York, watching the family remake itself as Americans.

For Moroccan-born Ruth Knafo Setton, "Poetry encompasses all the selves in me: the Sefardic pre-memory self, the exile and the immigrant, the assimilated American, the woman in all her roles and an ageless identity that includes and transcends all these."

 "When I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, my house was like a little Morocco," she says. "I'd open the door and instead of palm trees and the sea, Iíd see snow and barns." She condenses some childhood experiences in "Nightfruits":

"Poetry begins with roots," she explains. "If you start with the roots and grow then it touches everyone."

Behar turned to anthropology to work out the "diasporic puzzles" of her identity. "[It] gave me the philosophic framework to understand how people relate to culture," explains the University of Michigan professor. It wasnít until a visit to Cuba in 1991 that she realized she couldn't treat it as just another field site.

Though her poems are not always specifically Sefardic, they often have a "Sefardic valence," she says. "In my family, it's very hard for people to reconcile. We were given the edict: Convert or die! That dictum left a legacy of intolerance." She expresses the struggle with her inability to forgive in "Nameless Daughter," a poem for Papi, her father. 

Says Brenda Serotte, who won a literary prize for her poetry from the National Sephardi Literary Contest in 1998, "I'm not a Sefardic poet." Serotte, who grew up in a Turkish family in the Bronx, explains: ìI'm a poet who writes about Sefardic things. We all have a touch of that longing that comes from pouring your heart out in secret."

Serotte used to be embarrassed by her Sefardic heritage. "Other grandmothers made latkes and chicken soup and knitted. My mother remembers that when she came home from school, her mother and friends were sewing their shrouds. I wanted to forget all that." Now she misses that warm, boisterous family and draws on her rich memories for a poetry collection, Dance Into Your Sultanís Heart, and a memoir, Turkish Delights and Other Fattening Recollections. Translating Ladino poetry has become a passion. In "The Scholarís Turban," Serotte recalls that a girlís job was to be pretty, a good cook and marry well.

The quincentennial of the expulsion from Spain reawakened the Sefardic consciousness of Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, whose ancestry is Greek. She discovered people were still writing in Ladino, and later received a Witter-Byner foundation award to collect and create equivalencies for the small lode of twentieth-century Ladino poems. The editor of Aristeia, a myth journal, Roffman writes about "myth in contemporary dress" and about healing. Sefardic themes are one of many that animate her poetry. "Poetry is a search for a kind of language, not an explaining, straightforward language," she says.

Several of her works were inspired by a trip to Greece, where she felt she was "stepping on ground my ancestors may have stepped on." "Fabric" focuses on a drive from Salonika to Kastoria.

"The immigrant tale has been told and retold in mainstream American Jewish literature," says Judy Benoliel Belsky, a poet and psychologist who grew up in Seattle and now lives in Jerusalem. "In this literature Sefardim are invisible. The Torah observant are trivialized. Women are marginalized or eviscerated. I am all three: Woman, Sefardic, Torah observant. My poems rub against the friction of old lies." In "After Dark," these three selves emerge:

Schulamith Halevy, an Israeli poet and scholar, also combines feminist, religious and Sefardic themes. She became involved with anusim (forced converts) when in 1992 she was invited to speak at a conference on Conversos, and she has since become a resource for the community.

 "The anusim are a matricentric culture," explains Halevy, who writes in both Hebrew and English. A major figure for her is Santa Teresa de Avila, a patron saint of Spain said to be of Jewish descent, hence Halevyís poem "Santa Teresa."

While she writes about love, life, loss, Jerusalem and God, much of Halevy's poetry centers around the experience of the forced converts, whose "spiritual rape," she says, "is not only incredibly painful but also a metaphor for the human condition that almost always involves some loss of sovereignty. The Sefardic side of my life is connected to my calling in this world."

For Linda Ashear, the impulse to express things Sefardic is more subtle. "I write to express a feeling,î she says. Born in Brooklyn to a Syrian-Austrian family, many of her poems relate to her father, who came to New York from Aleppo.

Ashear says she tries to take the best of "both gefilte fish and kibbe." Though she now lives in Westchester, she has "strong links" to the Brooklyn Syrian community but does not write a lot about it. In "Revelation" she writes of being "the sum of all my parts."

Anger, hope, life, love and death mix in the poetry of Miriam Israel Moses, the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Greece. "The Holocaust is not just an Ashkenazic province," says Moses. "I want people to feel a fluidity of death and dying and horror. I want it to hurt." In "Survivors and Pieces of Glass" she describes the day she imagines when the German soldiers came.

I can see then my mother, sitting in her shop,... her adept fingers placed finishing touches on the beautiful dress she was making for her younger sister with the sun golden hair that I have never seen and whose name I never knew, who was my aunt before I was born and I cannot go on.

 Moses decided in her forties "to make poetry a serious part of my life, on a par with music in terms of craftsmanship and effect. I wanted to widen my audience." She lives in Seattle, but despite the cityís large Sefardic population, Moses still feels very separate. "Being Sefardic," she says, "is everything that I am."