Armando Bezés

Armando Bezés (1915- ?) –There is a story to tell here, courtesy of “Claude”, of a search for detective or crime fiction in Ladino. Around the turn of the 20th century, as the crime/detective genre swept Europe and the US (Sherlock Holmes being the most famous export), Sephardic Jewish readers in the Ottoman Empire were avid consumers of it too. As with much of Ladino print culture at the time, these were mostly translations or adaptations from other languages rather than original Ladino compositions. They were published as aljamiado texts — Ladino written in Hebrew script — mostly out of Salonica (today’s Thessaloniki, Greece), then one of the great hubs of Ottoman Sephardic publishing. Typically each novel ran about forty pages and was issued as a standalone booklet, though some appeared in installments in the Ladino press of the day.

The most-studied case is a Ladino series built around a recurring detective character named Nat Pinkerton — the same dime-novel-style American detective character popular across European pulp translations at the time (not Allan Pinkerton, but a fictional pulp hero loosely riffing on his name/fame). Ten of these Ladino Nat Pinkerton novels were studied and translated into modern Spanish by scholar Julie Scolnik in her 2014 book Nat Pinkerton: Diez Novelas Policíacas en Lengua Sefardí, which also includes a glossary of the Ladino vocabulary used in them.

This all traces to the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment movement), which by the second half of the 19th century had reached Sephardic communities in the Ottoman Empire and spurred a wave of secular Sephardic literature — narrative fiction, theater, and press — much of it built on translations/adaptations of Western classics (Ladino versions of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, even Romeo and Juliet circulated). Detective fiction rode in on that same wave. This flourishing was short-lived: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of new nation-states after World War I led to a broader decline of Ladino print culture generally, and detective fiction went down with it.

There is no individual author listed on these Ladino Nat Pinkerton booklets. The “Nat Pinkerton” byline is essentially a house pseudonym/brand, not a real person — same model as a lot of pulp-fiction dime-novel series of that era. However, Most of the Ladino Nat Pinkerton novels — over twenty of them — were published in Salonica by Biblioteka Betsalel and edited by publisher Besalel Sa’adi Halevi, son of the well-known publisher and journalist Sa’adi Besalel Halevi (1819–1903). The father, incidentally, is a notable figure in his own right in Ladino literary history — his own memoir was translated into English by scholars Aron Rodrigue, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and Isaac Jerusalmi. So, we keep searching (or letting Claude do it).

One of the search results points to a separate scholarly paper titled “Bezes desconocido y su obra: El detektive kriminal (Salónica, 1935)” — about an author named Bezes, described as “unknown,” and his work El detektive kriminal (Salonica, 1935). This looks like a case of a detective novel actually written (not just translated) in Ladino, by an identifiable — if now obscure — named author, rather than an adaptation of the German Pinkerton franchise. That in turn leads eventually to a Ladino print industry family: the Salonika printer and translator Baruj David Bezés, who published religious books, popular novels, and the satirical newspaper El Bourlon, and his two sons, Benedeto and Armando. It turns out that El detektive kriminal is not a standalone book — it’s one of four stories collected inside a 1935 volume called El Buketo de Pesah (“The Passover Bouquet”), published by the Bezes press in Salonica. The title itself mixes Ladino with the borrowed international word “detektive” — typical of how the genre’s vocabulary got absorbed into Judeo-Spanish. There was a question of which of the two brothers was the likeliest author, and the conclusion points to the younger one, Armando. The significance of this case is that this was not an adaptation of a foreign detective novel, but an original composition in Ladino.

An exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Greece on wartime resistance adds further information about Armando. It is necessary to access the exhibition catalogue - Synagonistis: Greek Jews in the National Resistance (Jewish Museum of Greece, 2013–2014) – to dig deeper. There is also Sefardiweb — a Spanish research database of Sephardic biographical entries (proyectos.cchs.csic.es/sefardiweb).

The wartime story unfolds. During the German occupation, Armando took to the mountains to join the partisans, carrying a manual printing press at great personal risk. Under the pseudonym “Antonis Bezezis,” he became a printer for EAM (the National Liberation Front) in Thessaly. His bulletins and newspapers informed and inspired the villagers, who would anxiously wait for “Antonis” to deliver news. He personally hauled the printing equipment across a vast stretch of territory — from the Agrafa mountains to Mount Olympus — distributing publications and Rizospastis (the Communist Party’s newspaper). In his own words, recalled in a short memoir: “Once we made two whole dug-outs on Mt Olympos. We were alerted that a sweep operation was underway and we had to hide the printing machine on the mountain or underground.” He also worked in the printing press of the PEEA (the “government of the mountain” — EAM’s provisional wartime administration).

After the liberation, he settled in Athens and continued working as a printer. Greek Jewry had been almost completely liquidated: around 96% of Salonica’s Jews, some 50,000+ people, were murdered in the Holocaust. Armando lost his entire family in the camps — with the exception of one sister.

A remarkable postscript: In 1948, he printed a book by Thessaloniki doctor Zak Matarasso, Ki omos olio tous den pethanan (“Yet, Not Everyone Died”) — described as the first account of the Holocaust published in the Greek language. So the son of a Salonica Ladino printer, who himself may have written a Ladino detective story, ended up printing the very first Greek-language Holocaust testimony. The circle from El detektive kriminal to that book is a striking one.

Personal life confirmed by photo captions on the same page: there’s a 1945 photograph of “Armando Bezes with his wife Maria Vagena,” and a document from November 1944 — a travel permit from the PEEA printing offices made out to “Armando Bezes, alias Antonis Bezezis” — both preserved in the personal collection of Eleni Bezes, presumably his daughter or another descendant, which is how the museum obtained these documents and photos.

So: he survived the war, lost his whole immediate family except one sister, married, continued as a printer in Athens, and left a personal archive that’s now with a descendant named Eleni Bezes — meaning there’s a family line to trace further if you ever wanted to. – Claude]

Synopsis of El detektive kriminal, the only known original Ladino-language detective story with an identifiable (if barely-known) author: It’s a short story (about 8 pages), subtitled by the scholars “a tragedy of jealousy,” and the plot is a tight little irony piece:

The murder: Sam Benardizo returns from a long trip and gets a telegram from his beloved, Titnit Benevaske, telling him she never wants to see him again. Devastated, he rushes to her house — and finds her stabbed to death in her bed, discovered along with her maid, Palomba.

The investigation: Four detectives arrive, including the story’s star, the celebrated Hamed Sas — a name the scholars argue is a sly nod to hardboiled American author Dashiell Hammett (Hamed Sas ≈ “Hammett” + “Sam”). Sas finds the murder weapon — an antique knife engraved with the initials “S.B.” — and it’s Sam’s own knife. Sam is arrested and brought before the judge, Mr. Ledanyer.

The false confession and suicide: Facing accusation and seeing no way to prove his innocence, Sam hangs himself in his cell with his belt, leaving a note swearing his innocence but accepting he can’t fight the charge.

The twist: After both are buried, Ledanyer receives a letter — from Hamed Sas himself. It turns out Sas was secretly in love with Titnit. Consumed by jealousy that she loved Sam instead, he murdered her, stole Sam’s knife from his house to frame him, sent the fake breakup telegram in Titnit’s name, and then accused Sam himself. Racked by guilt, Sas shoots himself at the funeral procession, and his confession letter reveals the whole scheme. – Claude]