By Kathryn Medill
On December 8, 2024, with the support of both the MELC Department and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, Dr. Canan Bolel organized UW’s annual Ladino Day, designed to celebrate Sephardic Jewish language and culture.
This year’s main event was a conversation with Bolel and author Leigh Bardugo. Bardugo’s YA fantasy novels have been New York Times bestsellers for more than ten years, and have even inspired a Netflix series, Shadow and Bone. The main subject of their conversation was Bardugo’s newest book, The Familiar, a historical fantasy novel set in sixteenth-century Madrid, whose protagonist, Luzia Cotado, is a Sephardic Jew whose family is forced to convert to Christianity. When Luzia is forced into the Spanish court, she must use magic to survive.
Bardugo remarked, “I knew I wanted to tell the story of a conversa [a Jewish convert to Christianity] because… most of my ancestors left Spain in 1492 [in the Jewish expulsion], were exiled, but we know people remained, and this was a way of kind of filling in these ghost branches of the family tree.” She reached out to Bolel for help when she was researching refranes, Ladino proverbs and folk poems, some of which she had learned from her own grandmother. These refranes, along with Sephardic herbal practices and domestic rituals, became the basis for her protagonist’s magic.
Bardugo wanted to raise awareness about the Ladino language since she had gotten some criticism when she used Ladino words and phrases in the Ninth House novels. “I would get these snide, ‘I don’t know who did the Spanish translation for you, but this is not [correct].’ I was like, ‘[Ladino is] not Spanish, my friend.’”
Bardugo didn’t need to change much about the sixteenth-century Spanish world to allow for the kind of magic she wanted to include. “At that time those boundaries [i.e. the boundaries between magic and other things] were already blurred. Astrology and astronomy—same thing. Alchemy and chemistry—no line between them. The difference is, … miracles belong to the church, magic belongs to the devil… and the devil can have whatever shape, … so that devil may be in the shape of a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Protestant, or potentially somebody practicing witchcraft… This was a moment … when the possibility for the miraculous existed everywhere.”
Over 250 people attended the event in person, with another 700 joining online. Find the full recording of their conversation here: Interview with author Leigh Bardugo on "The Familiar" - Ladino Day 2024