Musing in My Lingua Franca

In my backpack, there are notebooks, folders with class materials, a pencil case (which contains pencils, a pencil sharpener, markers, and highlighters), my stick bag, my identification, my smartphone, $5, napkins, masks, and a calculator. My notebooks contain, in addition to course notes, a variety of whims I conceived capriciously at various times and felt inclined to write down.   My folders contain many of the materials which support my learning at school, while my pencil case and calculator provide me with the most basic supplies I need. My identification enables me to obtain lunch every day at school. My stick bag, which contains the sticks and mallets I use to play percussion instruments, reminds me of an ideal to which I aspire: a connection to music that reminds me of my roots and helps me find peace.  My mom puts some money in my backpack in case I want to purchase snacks at lunchtime. She also puts napkins and masks in my backpack in case I ever feel ill. Since I ha...

For years, she remained silent. Then, she brought an ancient legacy to life. On December 21 st , 1923, a child was born to an ambitious mother and an errant father in Sarajevo. Little did the infant girl know that she would become the bearer of her family’s ancient legacy, the “keeper of the flame” of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Sephardic Jewish community. Flory Papo had family roots in the Bosnian village of Vlasenica, where her mother, Rosa Altarac, had grown up. Her ancestors had come from Sarajevo after settling there under the auspices of Sultan Bayazid II, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire. Bayazid welcomed the Jews into his lands after the Catholic rulers of the Iberian Peninsula expelled them.  Centuries later, the Altarac family, descended from those Sephardic Jews, continued to preserve its Judæo-Iberian customs, music, and identity. They spoke Ladino, a mediæval Jewish language derived from Old Spanish. As Flory would recount in  an interview with the United States Holoc...