It is not enough for Mario Levi to be one of the most translated Turkish novelists. He also wants to be the sentimental notary of a community doomed to extinction. "I belong to the last generation that has heard Judeo-Spanish at home." The melancholy, intrinsic to Istanbul, is redoubled in his case.
"But it's not nostalgia for Toledo either, but for my childhood, for my 'chiquez', for better days."
Would you want to go back to them? “I would say no, I am happier and calmer now. What I want is to make known that multicultural existence, which I still lived. Let those who don't know know. Others have recounted that Istanbul, but they belong to another culture.”
The Ottoman Empire welcomed many Jews expelled from the kingdoms of Spain, in Constantinople, Thessaloniki or Izmir. Over the centuries, some Turkish, Italian or Greek words added to Spanish, forming Ladino. “But the first blow came about 150 years ago, with the Universal Israelite Alliance,” Levi explains, “which banned the speaking of Spanish in their schools.” Well-to-do Sephardim gradually switched to French, while their own language became corrupted. Levi shrugs: "The French worked a lot and the Spanish, nothing."
In the 20th century, those who really kept the ladino were the most humble, until they heard the trumpets of Israel, in 1948, and they flocked to it, since they had nothing to lose.
Except the tongue.
In her case, although her parents already spoke to her in Turkish, her “nonona”, her grandmother Clara Jerez, decided to continue speaking to her in Ladino, a language that she also heard in conversations between parents and grandparents. It should be said that Mario Levi graduated in French Philology and speaks French "even better than Spanish".
With one difference, he affirms: “In France I am in a foreign country. In Spain, I feel at home. The language is lost, but gastronomy remains, his other passion. Like the “leek meatballs” from nona Clara or “the beans with spinach”.
Levi accumulates 66 years, three marriages and three daughters. A precision that cannot bother someone whose literature resembles a meticulous rendering of accounts of the innards of families and the relationships they interweave. He himself specifies that his first wife, mother of his twin girls, was Jewish. "My current wife, who was previously my student, is a Muslim," he adds about Masal Clara's mother.
Mario Levi explains himself as if he were telling a story. "Masal", a story in Turkish, is part of the title of his best-known novel, the voluminous Istanbul was a story, an altarpiece with fifty characters. In Spanish it has also been published I have made a cake for you. Although Levi regrets that the title of the latter loses the wink of the original to the Pandispanya, as it is said in Turkish, Italian-style sponge cake.
But that is not why he has decided to translate his latest book himself. “I wanted to write a novel starring a certain Joseph Levi, that would go from the Toledo of the expulsion, in 1492, until the installation in Ottoman lands, in 1555. In Turkish it is already finished and will have 530 pages. But I haven't sent it yet, because I want to write the same novel in Ladino. A version of which I already have more than a hundred pages. Karen Sharhon (responsible for El amaneser, the monthly supplement of the weekly Shalom), tells me that for the first time a literary text is written in Ladino”. Will it also be his epitaph?
"Let's leave it in a will," he qualifies. “We will make 1,492 copies in a special bilingual edition by 2024, which will never be published again. I need to finish it before the end of the year. Hopefully!". Mario Levi reads a couple of pages in the cafe where he has quoted La Vanguardia -in his Moda neighborhood- and rhetorically asks if it is understood and if it could be of interest as it is, in Spain.
His first trip was made "in 1978". “In a market in Madrid I asked. What is that? Well, what will it be, they answered me, lupins. The fact is that in Turkey only the Jews ate lupins”.
Until when, he doesn't know. "I have no hope. Not anymore because of the ladino and his culture. It is the Jewish community in Istanbul itself that will disappear, in 50 or 60 years." He then quantifies it: “Every year, 250 emigrate, mostly to Israel. 250 die. And only 180 are born. On top of that, there are many mixed marriages”. Quite a cultural change: “In the time of my parents, marrying a non-Jew was a scandal. In my generation it was frowned upon. And for my daughters' generation, it's normal. For this reason, if a century ago we were 80,000, now we are 9,000. That's why I write."
Levi acknowledges that the Jews of Istanbul are not very religious and that he goes "little" to the synagogue and even less to the cemeteries. The one in Kuzguncuk, a neighborhood that is one of the most common sets for Turkish soap operas, he says he has set foot on “once”.
On the other hand, the writer closes in on diagnosing the cultural or political situation in Turkey, which is a diagnosis in itself. If the average Turk is prudent, the Jew - like the other minorities - has learned to be twice prudent.
“Anti-Semitism? Being told that you speak Turkish much better than the Turks is also anti-Semitic." “You see that my relationship with the country is ambiguous,” she admits, “but my relationship with the Turkish language is very deep. My country is Turkish, not Türkiye."
It is not a passport issue. Mario Levi is one of the thousands of Sephardim who in recent years, after proving his roots, have obtained Spanish nationality. Many others, who were suspicious of the Ladino language test, have settled for the Portuguese passport, without that requirement. Today, Levi says, it's less sentimental than "pragmatic, making it easy to travel." "For most, but not for me," he declares. “What I would like is to buy a flat in Barcelona. Maybe in two or three years. Because Istanbul is a story that ends well”
