Tag #123538 - Interview #88203 (Avram Aleksander Mosic)

Grandmother lived with my aunt and uncle, in that house they spoke Ladino or Jewish Spanish. We differentiate between Ladino and Jewish Spanish in that Jewish Spanish is a literary language and Ladino is a type of spoken language, a bit of a dialect. I understand Ladino to be the lower level of language of educated Sephardic Jews. So, at home my grandmother and uncle spoke Ladino and Jewish Spanish which enriched my childhood. Because I listened to Ladino throughout my childhood and it remained in my ear, today I can understand Spanish, be it Jewish Spanish, Catalina, Mexican, even though I cannot speak it. I can always get by in spoken Spanish. Having listened to one romance language in my childhood helped me a great deal later, when I went to gymnasium and had to learn French, based on which I later learned Italian. So that my knowledge of romance languages and my love of romance languages begins from my pure Sephardic surroundings. At home my parents did not speak Ladino even though my father spoke Ladino, rather they spoke Serbian and German because my mother was from Vienna and did not know Ladino. My father completed his commercial middle school education in Germany. If I am not mistaken, many years have passed, it was a commercial academy in Mahtbrajt, I do not know what part of Germany that is. Certainly during father's schooling in Germany he mastered German and spoke it without any kind of foreign accent.