This month, Hear Sunday takes a literary turn as we welcome Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein to join drum and oud duo Wahid for an evening of music and readings.

Brozgal and Stein’s newly released translation of the 1938 novella Ninette of Sin Street – one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French – is both a classic rags-to-riches tale and a subtle, incisive critique of French colonialism. This volume offers the first English translation of Ottoman author Vitalis Danon’s best-known work. A selection of Danon’s letters and an editors’ introduction and notes provide context for this cornerstone of Judeo-Tunisian writing.

Wahid is a musical dialogue between Chris Wabich on frame drums and Dimitris Mahlis on oud, approaching composition and improvisation in a daring, genre-defying way. Both in his compositions and playing, Greek-born Mahlis skillfully draws from Greek, Persian, Carnatic, and Western jazz traditions; in his hands, the oud deftly transforms into a multi-dimensional stringed instrument echoing these traditions. Three-time Grammy nominee, Chris Wabich, created the world’s first bass frame drum set specifically for Wahid.  His unique setup conveys an extraordinary undercurrent of rhythm and bass harmonic function allowing the duo to create new sonic potential.  Together as Wahid, they create a sensitive language conveying the full-spectrum of human emotion and experience.

Lia Brozgal earned a BA in French from Chatham College and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. Her research and teaching encompass a variety of topics in Francophone North African literature, culture, and history, as well as contemporary France. She is the author of Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (U Nebraska Press, 2013); co-editor (with Sara Kippur) of Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today (Liverpool UP, 2015); co-editor (with Sarah Stein) of Ninette of Sin Street (Stanford UP 2017); and author of essays on North African literature cinema, beur cultural productions, chronicles of the Holocaust in North Africa, and Judeo-Maghrebi literature and film. Her work has been recognized by the UC President’s Fellowships in the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Camargo Foundation. 

Sarah Abrevaya Stein received her A.B. from Brown University and her doctorate from Stanford University. Her scholarship has ranged across the Yiddish and Ladino speaking diasporas and the British and French imperial, Russian, American, Ottoman and wider Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and North African settings, but is always engaged with the cultural, economic, and political intricacies of modern Jewish culture.  An elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Stein is the author of Extraterritorial Dreams:  European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016), winner of a 2016 National Jewish Book Award, Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (Yale University Press, 2008), winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Indiana University Press, hardback 2004), winner of the Salo Wittmayer Baron Prize for Best First Book in Jewish Studies for 2003 and finalist for the Koret Jewish Book Award in 2004.  Stein is co-editor, with Lia Brozgal, of Ninette of Sin Street (Stanford University Press, 2017), with Julia Phillips Cohen, of Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2014), winner of a 2014 National Jewish Book Award: and co-editor, and, with Aron Rodrigue, of A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa’adi Besalel a-Levi (Stanford University Press, 2012), finalist for a National Jewish Book Award.