ABSTRACT
“Ma femme aux fesses de dos de cygnet” (My woman with the buttocks of a swan’s back) wrote André Breton among the long string of nature similes to the woman’s body comprising most of his celebrated poem L’Union livre of 1931. The father of surrealism probably did not have access to the Judeo-Spanish song known as Las prendas de la novia (“The Gifts of the Bride”) that is the object of this chapter. We assume Breton’s lack of awareness of this Sephardic song even though, as we saw in Chapter 1, the Sephardic presence in Paris during the early 1920s grew substantially following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of a French protectorate of Morocco.
