Cupertino Filmmaker Talks About an Ancient Language and Music

A Cupertino filmmaker and polyglot is giving a presentation Saturday in San Francisco on a movie she is co-producing about how a little known language saved the life of a Bosnian Sephardic boy during the Holocaust in Yugoslavia.

, will show an eight-minute reel of the film Saved by Language and talk about how music is keeping alive the language of Ladino at an event hosted by the Northern California Translators Association. Zaraysky lived in Sarajevo when she met the man the movie is about, Moris Albahari.

By speaking his mother tongue, Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, to an Italian colonel, Albahari developed a relationship with the colonel who then helped Albahari escape a train taking Yugoslavian Jews to Nazi death camps. And in 1944 he spoke Ladino to a Spanish-speaking U.S. pilot. Albahari led the pilot and his American and British colleagues to a safe airport.

The movie is mostly in English and some Ladino of which Zarasky says she can “speak some.”

In addition to English, she is fluent in Russian, French, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Italian.

She will also talk about her book Language is Music and how to learn languages with the use of music, TV, radio, film and other media.

Zaraysky’s talk will be held at Westfield San Francisco Centre, 835 Market St. and 4th Street, Room 619, 6th floor, beginning at 2 p.m. on Dec. 8.

Read more about Zaraysky, a Patch contributor, in the Patch article, Learn Any Language By Treating it as Music.