In 1991 she studied in Paris improving her vocal techniques with MME CHARLOT.

It was during a tour in Israel that she discovered Sephardic music. "In May 1992", she says, "when I was in Tel Aviv, I visited Beit Hatefutsot, the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. There I listened to a fragment of only twenty seconds of a lullaby: "Durme Durme", sung in Ladino. At that moment I became totally enthralled and I realized that my life would take an entirely new turn. I started to do intensive research about Ladino songs and Sefarad in general. In Israel, Paris, London, New York, I discovered invaluable sources-records, books, costumes, photographs, musical scores, personal recollections-which acquainted me with Ladino music as well as with Sephardic history and traditions. I discovered a new and immensely rich dimension of my people and felt as if I was getting in touch with my own spiritual roots."

FORTUNA : THE MEDITERRANEAN MUSE

When considering the title of Jacó Guinsburg's fascinating book on Yiddish (Perspectiva, 1996), one could say that ladino, the Judeo-Spanish dialect (also known as judezmo), is also an adventurous and errant language. After a splendid multicultural and multiracial time experience, boosted by religious tolerance and bearing fruits such as the 'Translators' School at Toledo" (poet-king Alfonso El Sabio having been one of its mainstays, a learned Castilian dynast, whose poetry was written in Galizian Portuguese), the same augural year America was conquered - 1492 - saw the Jews expelled from Iberia under Catholic Kingdom (Los Reyes Católicos). The Sephardic community was spread in a new Diaspora, and settled down in the eastern Mediterranean region (for instance, from the Balkans to Greece, in Turkey, in Marroco, and back to their origins, in Jerusalem). In that area, the Sephardim cultivated (and still cultivate) their Spanish medievally-rooted poetic, belonging to religious or secular tradition, with the supervenient imbrications from Greek, Turkish, and Moroccan extraction, not to mention the Hebrew components, of original Judeo-Spanish blend, already present in the writing characters (as in Yiddish, for instance, a form of hybrid Medieval German) printing types resorted to (predominantly as late as our century) for the permanent register of songs, romances, couplets, endevinas (riddles) and ladino refrains (proverbs).

The rich poetry from this "flowery language" (as ladino is characterized by Spanish scholar and anthologist Angelina Muñiz-Huberman), so reminiscent of our lyrical-popular traditions and of our Galizian Portuguese medieval songs, (also immigrated to the Americas, where it fructified; Leonor Scliar-Cabral, among us, has retrieved this nourishing poetic

stream). It is a privilege, therefore, that our audience can now enjoy the charming orality of ladino songs at this contemporary stage of its secular roving, a fortunate creation indeed, since its herald and elective mediator among us is the singer Fortuna, the Muse from Sepharad. Fostered by the tropical blood in her Brazilian background, Fortuna fascinates with the crystalline plenitude of her voice, her emotional vigor of performance, her most competent conveying either of a prayer ruled by liturgical compulsion or a love poem moved by lyric cooing. She provides us with the "Mediterranean light" (to recall the well-known Raul de Leoni's impressionist book of poems): with the radiance of songs which have cheered the Balkan, North African and Mid-Eastern Diaspora of the exiled Sephardim, longing for their Iberian second motherland. There, in their glorious past, poets like ibn Gabirol, ibn Ezra, Yehudá ha-Levy (Fortuna sings one of his poems), or Sem Tob de Carrión have blossomed, (the latter acculturated amongst Hebrew, Arab and Spanish languages, a poet acknowledged as one of the founders of Hispanic lyricism,) and left a splendid legacy.