pluecker

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Jewish Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Antena. The narrator of TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH travels to Bulgaria, searching for traces of her Sephardic heritage. Her journey becomes an autobiographical and imagined exploration of childhood, diaspora, and the possibilities of her family language: Ladino or Judeo- Spanish, the living tongue spoken by descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Memoir, poetry, storytelling, songs, and dreams are interwoven in this visionary text—this tela or cloth that brings the past to life, if only for a moment, and that looks at the present though the lens of history.

In 2012, TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH was awarded one of Mexico’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, whose previous winners include Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Bellatin.

＂TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH is an absolutely extraordinary text... it successfully joins past and present, life and death, memory and imagination.＂—Juan Gelman

＂Readers will find, through this tale of the relationship between a girl and her embittered grandmother, an entirely singular world narrated from the point of view of an ’I’ whose range exceeds the territory of any private life.＂—Mario Bellatin