Olga Borovaya’s new book, Mod­ern Ladi­no Cul­ture, is the first to exam­ine as a uni­fied phe­nom­e­non three gen­res of Ladi­no cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion: the press, belles let­tres, and the­ater. Unknown in ear­li­er peri­ods of the Ottoman Jew­ish his­to­ry, Borovaya iden­ti­fies these gen­res as imports from the West which ​“took root” among Ottoman Sephardim at the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and devel­oped with­in the con­text of the local cul­ture. Her book focus­es on the com­mu­ni­ties of Saloni­ca, Izmir, and Istan­bul — the major cen­ters of Ladi­no cul­ture.

Borovaya con­sid­ers it impor­tant to approach Ladi­no print cul­ture as a sin­gle phe­nom­e­non in order to rec­og­nize and under­stand the cul­tur­al move­ment under­way at the time and to com­pre­hend the impor­tance of that move­ment in Sephar­di his­to­ry. Not­ing that there are no more than one thou­sand Ladi­no texts extant, she regards her fun­da­men­tal con­cern as being the exam­i­na­tion of ​“tex­tu­al man­i­fes­ta­tions as a source of Sephar­di his­to­ry.” Nev­er­the­less, she does ana­lyze the three gen­res in order of their devel­op­ment, begin­ning with the press – ​“the ear­li­est and most influ­en­tial form of mod­ern Ladi­no print cul­ture.” She then turns to ​“belles let­tres,” a genre depen­dant on the growth of the press. Last­ly she deals with Sephar­di the­ater, for which she asserts that the Ladi­no press pro­vides the only ade­quate source of infor­ma­tion.

Borovaya explores the sig­nif­i­cant role that the Alliance schools played in the growth of Ladi­no cul­ture. The ​“west­ern­iza­tion” mis­sion of these schools was reflect­ed in the edu­ca­tion­al objec­tives of Ladi­no print pro­duc­tion. The Ladi­no press set out to encour­age a broad­er, more lib­er­al world view. This was also the goal of the ​“belles let­tres” genre. Borovaya dis­cuss­es the phe­nom­e­non of ​“rewrit­ing.” Nov­els were gen­er­al­ly rewrit­ten from west­ern Euro­pean texts — often yield­ing a dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ter that defied their ori­gins — and then seri­al­ized in the press. She pro­vides fas­ci­nat­ing insights into the moti­va­tions and careers of the major fig­ures in these cul­tur­al endeav­ors.

With detailed notes and an index Borovaya presents a com­pre­hen­sive but high­ly read­able analy­sis which pro­vides a wel­come com­pan­ion to the study of a rather rare col­lec­tion of materials.