Laura Papo

Born in Sarajevo (today in Bosnia), Laura Papo “Bohoreta” studied at Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Istanbul, where she also learned German. In 1908, she returned to Sarajevo, where she taught French, German, Latin, and piano. She began writing, sometimes under the pen name Bohoreta, a Ladino variation of the Hebrew bekhorah, or “female firstborn.” One of the first published Jewish female authors from the Bosnian region, she wrote primarily in Ladino, writing editorials, short stories, poetry, poetry translations, three novels, and ten plays. Papo’s literary enterprise encouraged women to get educated and become gainfully employed, preserve the Sephardic Jewish ethos, and cultivate the ethnic language of Sephardic Jews. Her 1916 German-language article “Die Spaniolische Frau” (The Sephardic Woman) became the basis of her 1931 Ladino monograph La mužer sefardi de Bosna (The Sephardic Woman in Bosnia), the only known Ladino-language work devoted to Sephardic women in Bosnian history and culture. Papo’s children were captured by the Croatian fascist Ustasha and killed en route to Jasenovac in 1941; she died soon thereafter in a Catholic hospital in Sarajevo where she was in hiding.