Raz can trace her Sephardi roots on her father’s side back to Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, (912-961) a Jewish scholar, physician, diplomat and patron of science, and the first Jewish dignitary to serve the Caliph in Cordoba. After the expulsion, her ancestors fled to Turkey where they were welcomed by the Sultan. On her mother’s side, Raz is descended from Sephardi Jews who settled in Bulgaria. When the Bulgarian grandmother met the Turkish grandmother for the first time they had no problem communicating. They spoke Ladino. On a recent trip to Bulgaria with her mother, the two women knocked on the door where her mother grew up before the family was deported by the Bulgarian authorities, along with other Jews, to a distant village in the countryside. “At first, they didn’t want to open the door, so my mother and I began walking away. Then someone ran after us. She hugged my mother, and said, ‘I am so-and-so. We used to play together when we were children.’ She invited us to come and took out a bunch of sepia photographs of our family. They were neighbors who had moved into our house when my family was deported. They had kept the photos. ‘I knew you would return one day,’” she said.
Since that mystical moonlit evening in the garden when she saw her grandmother’s face, Raz returned to her Sephardi roots and the language of her ancestors. She makes every attempt to pass it on.
“Ladino is not just a language. It’s a way of life. I have six grandchildren and the lullabies I sing to them are in Ladino.”