Bar Mitzvah Speech

Morris Tarragano’s family, as many Sephardim after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, immigrated to the West. A second generation American, Tarragano was a native speaker of English and Ladino, which was used both for sacred and secular speech. This Bar Mitzvah address was written first in Ladino and then transcribed into English, a sign of the changing linguistic preferences of American Sephardim.