KALICI MİSAFİR: MARCEL COHEN'İN KAYIP BİR LADİNO'NUN İZİNDE'SİNDE BELLEK VE KİMLİK

This article focuses on French author Marcel Cohen’s In Search of Lost Ladino, written in Ladino published in 1985 in Madrid, and analyzes questions of memory and ethnic identity in the work with a deconstructive approach. Lost Ladino brings together questions of exile, multi-lingualism, minority status, assimilation and uprooting, while exploring Sephardic collective identity within its larger historical context, from the 1492 expulsion from Spain, to the rise and fall of Ottoman Empire and to contemporary France. Cohen’s central concern in writing Lost Ladino is to reconstruct the lost world of Sephardic community. He does so by using an almost inaccessible childhood language; by giving accounts of Sephardic customs and cultural history; by incorporating the heritage of Ladino poetry and songs, and by acts of recollection and imagination. By rereading the text through deconstructive analysis, this article argues that it offers more than a conventional diaspora narrative. Linguistic and textual gaps, slips, ambivalences and inconsistencies point to a central conflict in the narration, between imagining home as a securely enclosed and fixed entity and acknowledging its destabilized version grounded in the recognition that unity is transitory. The dialogic nature of the text challenges Cohen’s emphasis on loss and dissociation and uncovers its potential to imagine other configurations of belonging.