Flory Jagoda

Flory Jagoda (née Flora Papo) was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia. When she was still an infant, her parents divorced and her mother moved back to Vlasenica, a small village outside Sarajevo, where Flory’s Sephardic maternal grandparents lived. Flory grew up in this large and musically talented family. When her mother remarried, Flory, now eleven, moved with her mother and stepfather to Zagreb, Croatia. In 1941, the three of them fled the Nazi invasion, going to Split and eventually reaching Bari, Italy. There she met an American soldier, Harry Jagoda and, in 1945, married him. After the war, it was discovered that the entire Jewish population of Vlasenica had been murdered in 1942 by Nazi-aligned Croatian fascists. The Jagodas moved to the United States, living for a while in Washington, D.C., where they had four children. After her mother’s death, Flory was inspired to reclaim the Sephardic music of her lost family. She taught her children traditional Ladino songs and composed new ones, such as “Ocho Kandelikas.” She began to teach and perform, playing the guitar and singing, around the world, and became widely acclaimed for her preservation of Sephardic culture and Ladino music. In 2002, she was given the National Heritage Award by the National Endowment for the Arts.