Poet traces Spanish roots to salvage language

By Martin Roberts

TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - Even though her ancestors were forced to leave Spain 500 years ago, Margalit Matitiahu has no trouble speaking to people on the streets of Madrid in the language she learned at her mother's knee in Israel.

For almost five centuries after Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jews and Muslims in 1492, Jewish communities across the Mediterranean maintained the Spanish language and culture.

Matitiahu grew up speaking Ladino, a variant of Spanish which is still close to the modern language. It is spoken by Sephardic Jews in the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, Greece and Turkey but in some area it is nearly extinct.

Matitiahu had been publishing poems in Ladino for years when she was persuaded by two Spanish poets to visit Spain in 1993.

"It was like returning to my family home," she said during a recent visit to Toronto.

"Language is a culture and brings back memories and the richness of a way of life that is still with me."

Matitiahu's filmmaker son Jack persuaded her to write and present a documentary about the history of Ladino and the legacy of Spain's once important Jewish community.

The first part of a planned trilogy, "Sefarad," was recently screened at a Latin film festival in Toronto. It was filmed in the northern Spanish city of Leon and named after what has become the modern Hebrew word for Spain.