Davcheva, L. (University of Sofia) and Fay, R. (University of Manchester), Living intercultural lives: Identity performance and zones of interculturality. Paper presented at the Cultural Horizons: Identities, Relationships and Languages in Migration conference, Cagliari (Sardinia/Italy), September 25th – 27th, 2015.

1. 11
Living Intercultural Lives:
Identity Performance & Zones of Interculturality
Leah Davcheva & Richard Fay
Intercultural Horizons 5th International Conference
Identities, Relationships and Languages in Migration

2. April 1492
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3. Migrations and settlements
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4. Yasmin Levy’s sings ….
No tengo lugar
Y no tengo paisaje
Yo enos tengo patria
‘Naci en Alamo’, from the
album La Juderia by
Yasmin Levy
© 2005, Adama Music 4
I have no place
And I have no landscapes
I have no homeland

5. Today’s focus
 On the intra-, inter- and trans-cultural activities that
the members of the diasporic Sephardic community
in Bulgaria have engaged in and continue to engage
in drawing upon their resources in Ladino
 Interactions enabled by their multilingualism and
especially their main language of cultural affiliation –
Ladino
 Interactions within and beyond their home society in
Bulgaria and beyond
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6. Ladino – heritage language of the Sephardim
Names: Judesmo, Judaeo-Spanish, Spanyol, etc.
A Romance language with roots in mediaeval Spanish
Elements from:
* Hebrew and Aramaic, reflecting its function as a Jewish
language
* French (via schooling)
* Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian (co- territorial status in
the Ottoman Empire)
Has played an important cultural and communicational
role for Sephardic Jewish communities
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7. Elias Canetti wrote:
People of the most varied backgrounds lived there, on any one day you
could here seven or eight languages. […]
Through the centuries since their expulsion from Spain, the Spanish they
spoke with one another has changed little. A few Turkish words had
been absorbed, but they were recognisable as Turkish, and there were
nearly always Spanish words for them. The first children’s songs I heard
were Spanish, I heard old Spanish romances; but the thing that was
most powerful was a Spanish attitude. [...] To each other, my parents
spoke German, which I was not allowed to understand. To us children
and to all relatives and friends, they spoke Ladino. That was the true
vernacular, albeit an ancient Spanish, I often heard it later on and I’ve
never forgotten it. ... All events of those first few years were in Ladino or
Bulgarian. It wasn’t until much later that most of them were rendered into
German within me. (1979:10)
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8. Our research project
 Narrative study - the Ladino-focused life stories of a
largely elderly group of Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria
 Moving on from an exercise in oral history towards a
statement of what these individuals did and do with
their Ladino skills
 Evolving from a framework of their Ladino framed
lives to a more generally applicable
conceptualisation
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9. Meet our storytellers
 Chosen for their knowledge of Ladino
 Unexceptional, ordinary people
 Not particularly special vis-à-vis intercultural
communication
 Having lived their lives in a complex and diverse
society
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10. Ivet Anavi
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11. Eli Anavi
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12. Claire Levy
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13. David Cohen
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14. Reina Lidgi
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15. Aron Balli
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16. Solomon Balli
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17. Samuel Frances
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18. Itsko Finzi
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19. Our research project
 Narrative study - the Ladino-focused life stories of a
largely elderly group of Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria
 Moving from an exercise in oral history towards a
statement of what these individuals did and do with
their Ladino skills
 Evolving from a framework of their Ladino framed
lives to a more generally applicable
conceptualisation
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20. Main research outcome:
five zones of interculturality
 the (intra-)personal --- a zone of internal dialogue;
 the domestic --- a zone for the family
 the local --- a zone for the Sephardic community in Bulgaria;
 the diasporic --- a zone for the wider Sephardic community; &
 the international --- the international community of Spanish-
users.
As set against the historically-, politically-, culturally-, and
societally- changing Bulgarian Sephardic Jewish Ladino-
oriented context(s)
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21. The (Intra-)Personal zone (1)
 … the way I felt exceptional when I realised that I knew a
language which was not typically spoken in Bulgaria.
[Aron]
 My sense of being an heir to this language is special. It
enthuses and empowers me with a kind of primary and
fundamental force … We seek our sense of uniqueness
and find it in this language. It is a symbol, a token of our
otherness. [Andrey]
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22. The (Intra-)Personal zone (2)
 Ladino gives me a sense of belonging to something
larger. Every so often, it gives me the freedom of choice
– I can choose the culture I want to belong to. Even
though it is not the language that I use now it just pops
up in certain situations and this makes me realise that
there’s this language inside me, lurking there, deep
inside. [Gredi]
 I sometimes wonder about my [Ladino] accent or my
intonation – perhaps they bear some Jewish traces and
give me away. [Andrey]
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23. The domestic zone (1)
 Judesmo is my mother tongue. At home we spoke
Judesmo. I spoke Judesmo with my aunts, grannies,
everybody … [Ivet]
 We lived with my maternal grandparents, Grandad
Gershon and Grandma Rachel. They spoke to me in
Spanyol [Ladino] but I didn’t understand much at first.
[Gredi]
 My grandma would always speak to me in Spanish
[Ladino]. [Andrey]
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24. The domestic zone (2)
 My Grandma always spoke to me in Ladino. When I was
in my teens and my friends were around, she would still
do it. She very well knew that my friends were all
Bulgarian and could not understand a single Ladino
word.
Invariably, my reaction was to respond to her in
Bulgarian, and thus demonstrate my disapproval –
emphatically and strongly. This kind of response
destroyed the intimacy between us. We would often
argue. [Andrey]
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25. The domestic zone (3)
 … my Grandma moved in with us. […] She could not
speak Bulgarian and she took it upon herself to teach me
Ladino. She must have been a good ‘teacher’ … in less
than three months, I was able to communicate with her in
Ladino. I don’t think I could fully understand everything
but we somehow managed to talk with each other. [Reina]
 Our domestic help were Bulgarian girls and we spoke
Bulgarian with them. [Ivet]
 In the years when the first socialist government came into
power … gradually Judesmo [Ladino] stopped being the
language of my family. During socialism, we did not
speak Judesmo. [Ivet]
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26. The local zone of the Sephardim in
Bulgaria (1)
 In Plovdiv, my father used to go to the Jewish club every
day. He played cards with his friends. All their jokes,
curses and playful bantering were done in Judesmo. [Eli]
 When she was young, my paternal Grandma Blanca
regarded herself a modern young woman and tended to
speak Bulgarian only. In those times, they apparently
believed that speaking Ladino was something that only
the lower classes did, or just old women anyway.
Competence in correctly spoken literary Bulgarian was
very highly valued. [Andrey].
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27. The local zone of the Sephardim in
Bulgaria (2)
 A terrible pressure for integration was exerted, both from
the inside and from the outside. I grew up in the Jewish
neighbourhood where we spoke Bulgarian with a
distinctive accent. [….] We did not like sticking out like
this and did our best to get rid of the accent - so that
nobody could tell. [Aron]
 When I started singing in the Dulce Canto choir we sang
Ladino songs there and I felt I was able ‘to hear’ this
language and identify with it. [Solomon]
 Ladino is like a live coal hidden among the ashes [Aron]
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28. The ‘diasporic’ zone of the wide Sephardic
community (1)
 We became ‘Bulgarian Jews’ only 70-80 years ago.
Before that we used to be Balkan Jews. Should we find
ourselves among Jews from other Balkan countries,
there would hardly be anything to make us inherently
different from each other – except for the language our
passports have been written in. We do things in similar
ways. Everywhere on the Balkans I feel at home.
[Solomon]
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29. The ‘diasporic’ zone of the wide Sephardic
community (2)
 I do business with people from Istanbul, in Turkey […]
Half of my communication goes in Turkish, the other half
– in Spanyol. [Aron]
 In Jerusalem, I set out to see the Holocaust museum. As
it was closed I wanted to find out about the working hours
and came across a man from Egypt who spoke Spanyol.
When we finished talking he said to me, “If you walk a bit
further, you’ll find another guy who can also speak
Spanyol.” [Sami]
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30. The ‘diasporic’ zone of the wide Sephardic
community (3)
 At this event, I had the chance to speak Ladino with the
ex-president of Israel, Yitzhak Navon. Navon himself was
born in Israel but, in his family, Ladino had been spoken
for centuries. He was Chair of the Sephardic Institute in
Israel. We communicated in Ladino and understood each
other perfectly well. There were differences in the way we
spoke it but this didn’t surprise me. Over the centuries,
Spanyol had absorbed features from many other
languages. [Sami]
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31. The ‘diasporic’ zone of the wide Sephardic
community (4)
• I’ve come across people from other Sephardic
communities […] I met a Jewish guy from Cuba once. We
spoke and our conversation resonated with something
deep inside me and we both felt we belonged together.
[Solomon]
 … my paternal grandma Lisa – she had so many books
in Spanyol; she used to buy these books in Plovdiv, but
also in Istanbul, and bring them back with her. Small
books, beautifully bound, linking us together [Gredi]
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32. The international community of Spanish
speakers (1)
 I remember my first visit to Spain, quite an emotional
experience. I felt completely comfortable in the Spanish
speaking context and was pleasantly excited by listening to
the people around me and being able to understand. Away
from home and my own country, I still had this amazing
sense of being in a linguistically familiar context. I said the
last couple of sentences of my presentation in Judaesmo-
Espanyol. It may have all sounded ridiculous and primitive
because I had never specially studied Judaesmo, but it was
received well. People applauded me. … I felt at home and
an insider. [Eli]
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33. The international community of Spanish
speakers (2)
 Have you ever heard Cubans speak Spanish? They tend
to swallow their consonants and it’s hard to understand
them. For a whole week I kept my mouth shut and did not
dare speak. By and by, I gathered courage and would put
in a Ladino word here and a word there. […]
The the response of the Cubans was twofold. First, they
thought they heard somebody who had risen from their
grave. So obsolete was the language I produced. They
were enormously delighted and would make me repeat
what I said, time and time again. [Aron]
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34. The international community of Spanish
speakers (3)
 I expressed myself by capturing the root of a word and
then attached different things to it. The result was a
mongrel-like language, a mixture of everything. But I
managed to get around through this approximation of the
Spanish language. [Gredi]
 I bought myself a Spanish textbook. In Sofia, I became
friends with a man from Cuba and learned a lot of
Spanish words from him. When I write email messages to
my friends, I try to write them in Spanish. My vocabulary
has increased and I make efforts to use the correct
words. [Itsko]
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35. The international community of Spanish
speakers (4)
 When we first met, I spoke to her in Ladino. I was
amazed that Reyes could understand what I was saying
and importantly, I could understand her too. [Reina]
 […] was keen to hear the language which he had never
heard anybody speak before. The time we spent together
made me aware of the special attitude the Spanish have
for us, Sephardic Jews: they find it truly amazing that not
only have we preserved Ladino for five centuries but we
also cherish the warmest sentiments for Spain itself.
[Reina]
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36. Our research project
 Narrative study - the Ladino-focused life stories of a
largely elderly group of Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria
 Moving from an exercise in oral history towards a
statement of what these individuals did and do with
their Ladino skills
 Evolving from a framework of their Ladino framed
lives to a more generally applicable
conceptualisation
36

37. Origins of our conceptual model
 Evolving as a by-product of our main focus on the
storytellers’ narrativised understandings of Ladino
 Developed inductively rather than framed in existing
models of ICC
 Shared set of ways of working with and understanding the
intercultural
 A prior initial attempt to work with zones of
interculturality
 A sense of identity work through narration
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38. The model: Zones of Interculturality
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39. Zones of interculturality
 From the most personal to the most global
 Increasing or decreasing the number of zones
 Fluidity between the zones
 The langua-cultural resources of the participants
 Work in progress
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40. An invitation to engage: telling your story
• Bearing in mind the conference themes of IC
encounters, migration, languages and identity
and the Ladino stories and our research related
to them what does this make you think of?
• What story can you tell triggered by the excerpt
in the handout?
• Begin like this:
This story makes me think of … …
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