Interview with Drita Tutunović: Judeo-Spanish from Salonika

Interview with Drita Tutunović, A Sephardic Jew based in Belgrade, but born and raised in Kosovo. Her family originally comes from Salonika, Greece. The interview was conducted in January 2023 in her home in Belgrade. The interview comprises questions concerning Judeo-Spanish, the speaker's attitude toward the language, samples of free conversation and word elicitation. This recording is part of the “Atlas of the Balkan Linguistic Area” project supported by the French National Research Agency [CNRS] (ANR-21-CE27-0020-ABLA) and the Russian Science Foundation (22-48-09003) whose goal is to study language contacts among spoken Balkan languages.

Drita Tutunović was born in 1944 in a concentration camp Bergen-Belsen where her parents were imprisoned. Luckily both her parents and she survived, and settled in Kosovo after WWII. She came from a mixed family: her father was an Albanian Kosovar and her mother a Sephardic Jew. Her mother's family was originally from Salonika, Greece, and, thus, Drita's Judeo-Spanish bears witness to the nature of this Judeo-Spanish dialect. She learned Judeo-Spanish from her grandmother who would take care of her while her parents were working outside of home. This is how Drita became fluent in Judeo-Spanish. After her grandmother's death, she barely spoke the language as most of the Jews in the former Yugoslavia were assimilated or perished in the Holocaust. It was later in her life that she started going back to her family roots as part of her education: she did her Masters dissertation in Judeo-Spanish from Serbia at the University of Belgrade. She also started collecting songs, tales and proverbs that she could recall from her memory, and she has thus far published several books which contain this material. Songs were particularly important for Drita as she is a singer too (one of the reasons why she was able to remember many of them). Today she lives in Belgrade. This interview took place in January 2023 in her home in Belgrade. I posed open questions and let Drita speak freely: we would start with one subject, but then we would touch upon many other at the same time. The main topics revolve around her family life, family history, the Judeo-Spanish language, her academic and literary work.