“Kada nochi di Shabat/Mi rikordu di mi Nona/Kun la luz di laz kandelas/Maldandu sux birahas/Lungas nochais di l’invernu/Asentada in el minder/Muz kantav laz kantikas/I las lindas kunsejikas di amor.”
“Rikordus di mi Nona” is the fifth song on Flory Jagoda’s final album. The lyrics—in Ladino, her Judeo-Spanish native language—recall her grandmother “chanting her prayers” and “singing the songs of love” to little Flory and her many cousins. It’s a beautiful, bittersweet image: Flory’s beloved Nona had been killed, alongside the majority of her family, during the Holocaust.
Hers is a story of sadness, yes, but also one of triumph and remembrance. Jagoda is known today as “The Keeper of the Flame” and “everybody’s Nona.” She reignited the love for and pride of Sephardic music. In doing so, she kept generations of Jewish ancestry alive.
But first, she was simply a talented little girl.
Flory Jagoda was born Florica Papo on December 21, 1923, in Sarajevo. She was the daughter of Jewish parents: her mother, Rosa Altarač, was a homemaker; her father, Samuel Papo, a musician. Somewhat ironically, young Flory never developed a relationship with her biological father. Following Rosa and Samuel’s divorce in 1924, she returned with her mother to Vlasenica, a shroud of societal shame following them.
Despite the stigma, it was this country town that gave Jagoda her joyous childhood. She grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, and her beloved Nona and Nonu, speaking Ladino and practicing music and art. The children’s talents were heavily encouraged by their grandparents. Her Nona, Berta Altarač, herself a well-known songstress, would often proclaim: “Si nu puedis meter la alma, nu kantis!” (If you can’t put your soul into your songs, don’t bother singing!). Jagoda held this sentiment close to her heart for the rest of her life.
The entire family did, in fact. The Altarač family were rather like the Yugoslavian von Trapps. All were musically gifted, and were invited to perform at every town festival. They held a good portion of influence, as well, with Nonu and his brother sitting on the Vlasenica council alongside Muslim and Greek Orthodox elders.
Vlasenica was a town that knew its fair share of generational strife and religious inclusion. The Altarač family was descended from the Sephardim of Spain: following the 1492 Edict of Expulsion, their ancestors were forced to choose between Christian conversion or fleeing their homeland of some seven centuries. The Altaračes themselves traveled to Cordoba, under the umbrella of the Ottoman Empire. Moving eastward, they had firmly established themselves in Vlasenica by the 1880s, and ran a flourishing trade business. They shared the belief of La Yave with their Sephardim compatriots; this legend told of a key that every exiled Sephardim carried with them, a key that would one day return them to their Spanish homeland.
Over 400 years after the Expulsion, eleven-year-old Jagoda was preparing for a different move. In 1934, her mother remarried, and the three moved to Zagreb. She adjusted quite well—taking classes in piano, art, ballet, and theatre—but always yearned for the summers she would spend with Nona and her cousins. It was here that Jagoda’s stepfather gifted her a Harmoniku (a Hohner accordion), the instrument she would cherish for the rest of her life. It immediately became as much a part of her as her piano.
Those happy years soon came to end, though. World War II broke out, and the Altarač family was caught between the Germans and the Soviets. By the war’s end, only 17% of Yugoslavia’s Jewish population would survive.
In April 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Zagreb, Jagoda’s stepfather secured them false papers to the Adriatic city of Split. Eighteen-year-old Flory was sent first, armed with little more than a change of clothes and her Harmoniku. It was the latter that likely saved her life: she played Serbo-Croatian songs for all four hours of the trip, so enchanting the conductor that he didn’t ask for her papers.
Shortly after her arrival in Split, Jagoda was joined by her parents, and the three were sent to the island of Korčula. They remained there until 1943, when Italy broke with Germany. The Jewish refugees hidden away on Adriatic islands were then secreted in small boats to a variety of Italian cities, where they were encouraged to build new lives. Jagoda, her mother, and her stepfather attempted to do just that, and succeeded in many ways. Flory found a job as a translator for the American army in Bari: growing up a multilinguist, she was skilled in picking up languages. There, she met and fell in love with Sgt. Harry Jagoda. They were married on June 24, 1945. It was a beautiful affair, complete with a homemade huppah, a flown-in Rabbi, an Army band, and all of the Jewish refugees in town. Only her Nona and Nonu, and all her aunts and uncles and cousins, were missing.
Upon returning from her honeymoon, Jagoda learned the horrible truth of what had happened. On May 6, 1942, 42 members of her family were rounded up, tortured, murdered, and buried in a mass grave by the Nazi-allied Ustasha. Only an uncle and a cousin remained. Jagoda and her mother were so devastated that they stopped speaking Ladino, stopped telling the stories; as one can imagine, the pain in remembering was just too much.
In April of 1946, twenty-two-year-old Jagoda joined her husband in Youngstown, Ohio. The next year, the couple moved to Washington, DC, a city Jagoda adored. She formed strong bonds with fellow immigrants, joined art classes, and began playing music again. She taught piano and accordion lessons, and started studying classical guitar.
Still, Jagoda suppressed those memories. She and her husband raised their four children—Betty, Elliot, Andy, and Lori—to speak only English, to be American Jews, not Sephardic Jews. Their family traditions were based upon Harry’s Ashkenazi upbringing. Jagoda’s mother insisted on being called Grandma instead of Nona, telling her daughter that her language had died with her family. No ancestral songs were sung, and certainly no stories were told. Even after moving to Virginia in 1956. Even after founding the Jewish Folk Arts Society in the 1960s. Even after Jagoda herself became the epicenter of a multilingual, musical friendship group. Nothing was sung, nothing was said, until 1972. The year of Rosa’s death.
After her mother died, Jagoda allowed herself to peruse her family photo albums for the first time since the 1940s. With the happy memories rushing back, Jagoda found in herself a new calling. She wrote down every song, every story, and determined that her children would learn them.
They picked up on Ladino and Sephardic music wonderfully quickly. Eventually, all four would add in their own guitars, drums, tambourines, castanets, finger cymbals, and rhythmic clapping. The family was invited to perform at regional festivals, and Jagoda’s teaching grew in popularity and renown. In 1982, the family gave their first “official” concert at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, DC.
From there, Flory Jagoda’s fame took off. She toured the world until 2016, performing as soloist at universities, synagogues, concert halls, museums, and festivals. Her children joined her for tours through (the former) Yugoslavia (1985), Spain (1994), and Vienna (1999). In 2002, the National Endowment of the Arts awarded her a National Heritage Award. One year later, she was given an Immigrant Achievement Award from the American Immigration Council. In 2013, the Library of Congress hosted a sold-out Celebration Concert to celebrate her 93rd birthday. In 2015, she was awarded the Hallel V’Zimrah Award from the Zamir Choral Foundation.
And she never forgot her family, or the horrors they all went through. In March of 2003, she was the invited soloist at the dedication of the Ladino memorial plaque in Auschwitz, performing “Arvoles Yoran por Luvias” (Trees Cry for Rain). Not a single eyes was dry. “Every song that I have written…it's all about them. They're with me. They're with my children, they're with my audiences,” she would say in Memories of Sarajevo. Her life’s goal was to ensure her culture and her family remained in the world, and I dare say she accomplished it.
Flory Jagoda passed away on January 29, 2021, at the age of 97. Her work is carried on in documentaries and books of her life, and in the Trio Sefardi, former apprentices who tour the world to share her music and her story.
I never knew her, and I miss her. Everybody’s Nona.
“All the enduring feelings that I have for my Sephardic culture, its stories and especially its songs were a loving gift from Nona to me. She taught her daughters and granddaughters all the women’s Birahas and Bendiziones (prayers and benedictions) that she learned from her own Nona and Biznona (grandmother and great grandmother). Included in her teachings was the important tenet of Ts’daka (charitable acts). Just before every Shabbat evening, my cousins and I would hurry home from school to take baskets of food that Nona had prepared for the poor. Nona would admonish us in her Bosnian Judeo-Espanol ‘Nu asperis ke ti digan grasyas – soz mazaloza ke poidis dar’ (Don’t wait for them to say thank you, you are fortunate that you are able to give).”
- Flory Jagoda, The Flory Jagoda Songbook: Memories of Sarajevo -
Speaking of the murders: “Nona, the daughters, the grandchildren, the babies — all of them. All the songs, the culture […gone].”
- Flory Jagoda, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum -
“Every song that I have written about holidays, it's all about them. They're with me. They're with my children, they're with my audiences.”
- Flory Jagoda, The Flory Jagoda Songbook: Memories of Sarajevo -
Sources/For More Info: “Flory Jagoda” by Rachel Amado Bortnick and Betty Jagoda Murphy, “Remembering Flory Jagoda, Who Preserved Sephardic Jewish Music And Language” by Anastasia Tsioulcas, “Flory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97” by Richard Sandomir, “The Sounds of Hanukkah: Flory Jagoda” by Rachel Evangeline Barham, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Flory Jagoda Songbook: Memories of Sarajevo by Flory Jagoda