Sarajevo writer, the first major woman playwright in Judeo-Spanish. Her plays and her study of Bosnian Sephardic women preserve a world destroyed in the Holocaust, during which she died in 1942.
Life and legacy
Laura Papo Bohoreta was the first major woman dramatist in Judeo-Spanish literature and a crucial interpreter of Bosnian Sephardic life. Writing primarily in the Sarajevo variety of Judeo-Spanish, she produced plays, stories, essays, poetry, translations, and collections of oral tradition. Her study La mužer sefardi de Bosna examined women’s work, family roles, customs, language, and adaptation to economic and social change. Rather than treating tradition as static folklore, Papo dramatized the tensions between inherited communal expectations, women’s education, wage labor, technology, and modern urban life. Much of her writing remained unpublished in manuscript, and scholarship has reconstructed her corpus only gradually. Her work preserves women’s voices and everyday cultural knowledge largely absent from institutional archives of Balkan Jewry.
Sephardic connection
Sarajevo-born Judeo-Spanish writer who documented and interpreted the social world of Bosnian Sephardic women
Sources
- Eliezer Papo, The State of the Research and an Annotated Bibliography of the Literary Opus of Laura Papo Bohoreta, Sefarad
- Ana Cecilia Prenz, ed., Esterka de Laura Papo Bohoreta
