Sephardic poetry for children: from oral tradition to contemporary lullabies

Abstract

Poetry for children is a literary genre with its own characteristics, both in the form and in the content, which plays an important social role in all cultures. Firstly, we propose an analysis of the main characteristics of poetry for children in the Sephardic oral tradition. The second part of the article is devoted to the study of the lullabies and nursery rhymes composed by two contemporary authors, Beatriz Mazliah and Ada Gattegno Saltiel, who write poetry for children in Judeo-Spanish in a moment when this language is close to extinction. The question asked is what the cultural significance of writing poetry for children in a language which is no longer spoken by children is.