No 54- Michael Studemund-Halévy
The count disembarks in Istanbul: Eliya R. Carmona and his version of The Count of Monte Cristo. 336 p., illust. (22 x 16 cm). ISBN 978-84-126518-5-0
Michael Studemund-Halévy, docteur ès-lettres, linguist and author of numerous books and articles, worked for many years as a teacher and researcher at the Institute of History of the Jews in Germany. He is currently an associate researcher at the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (University of Hamburg).
His line of research covers Judeo-Romanesque languages, iconography and epigraphy. Jewish and Portuguese, the history of ex-Marranos in Hamburg and the Caribbean. As founder of the International Sephardic Summer University (Sofia-Halberstadt), organizes from 15 years ago courses on Sephardic language and literature with the assistance of numerous students from all over the world, forming a study group that addresses Sephardic texts of different kinds from different perspectives.
The monograph that he now presents to us introduces us to the various versions expressed in Spanish. Judeo-Spanish from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (father), one of the works masters of universal literature, and, especially, those he edits, prepared by Eliya R. Carmona: El kapitan korajozo (Constantinople: Arditi y Castro, 1910), in plain characters, and Mateo i Odoxia (Istanbul: Eliya Ğayus, 1934), in Latin characters according to the new alphabet Turkish. In the preliminary study, these two works are related to the several that They appeared in the East (Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Izmir) and in New York from 1850 to 1937, as well as those published in other languages in the eastern environment: Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Greek and Karamanlı Greek, Armenian and Judeo-Arabic.
With this monograph, the author cherishes the idea of being able to offer language lovers and Judeo-Spanish students a text substantial enough to delve into in this language through the front door.
