To Read, to Listen, to Understand, or: How to Gather Yourself in the Text

Eliezer Papo`s new book Nesabrane priče i još nesabranije misli i crtice, a o desetercu da se i ne govori (Uncollected stories and even more uncollected thoughts and lines, not to mention the decasyllabic) is a comlex structure, composed of short stories, the author`s translations of two books from the Ketuvim corpus: Megillot Ruth and Megillot Estherand two orginal songs,sung in the decasyllabic verses. The short stories are mostly records of the Papo`s previous oral narrations, while with adaptations of Megillot Ruth and Megillot Esther and two orginal songs, the canonical verse of Serbian oral literature is transposed into written form.

The formal characteristics, which balancing on the border of oral and written genre, indicated the author`s scholarship. Cultural heritage of the Balkan Sephardim (and that includes Sarajevo`s dialect of Ladino) which himself deals with within Sephardic studies, in the Papo`s book are not just literary resource. With the author`s language-creating gift, microstructure becomes trope.

Conceived in this way, the book though can be read as a set of witty, anecdotal writtings, supplemented by experimenting with decasyllabic verses. However, the semantic field of the Papo`s book is much wider. It is inseparable from the fundamental signifiers not only of the author/rabbi, but also of those of his listeners/readers who know that every generation has an obligation to contribute to the Grandt Narrative of the World.

In this paper, we will try to point out these and some other aspects of the Papo`s book, because it seems to us that this is a literary work that announces a new phase in the long and dynamic history of Jewish literaturein the Balkans.