BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Old Curse Inspires a Quest Through Sephardic History : THE CROSS AND THE PEAR TREE: A Sephardic Journey, <i> by Victor Perera</i> , Knopf, $25, 320 pages

An odd phrase that Victor Perera’s mother used to scold him-- Manga, ishto, deja ya tus desmodres (“Eat, animal, enough of your antics”)--turns out to be a kind of Rosetta Stone in “The Cross and the Pear Tree,” a key that opens the door to an exotic family saga and, not incidentally, a chronicle of the Jews known as Sephardim.

“Behind the Sancho Panza wit of many of mother’s gems,” explains Perera, “lurked a biblical heft and resonance enriched by 2,000 years of exile, resourcefulness and travail.”

His mother’s admonition was spoken in Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish patois that is the Sephardic counterpart to Yiddish, and Perera detects in her words and phrases all the way stations on the grand journey that is Sephardic history.

Perera himself was born in Guatemala to Sephardic parents from Jerusalem, but his mother’s tongue also included medieval Castilian and Italian dialect, faint traces of Morocco, Yugoslavia and Salonika, even “a vulgar Mayan expletive Mother tacked on for effect.”

Perera, a novelist and journalist who teaches at UC Berkeley, uses a dark family secret as the narrative device for a journey through history. And he writes with equal immediacy and tenderness about both his family and the Sephardim, so that a taxicab ride with his mother through Tel Aviv, an auto-da-fe in medieval Toledo, and the excommunication of Spinoza in 17th-Century Amsterdam all take on the same note of intimacy and urgency.

Indeed, an old family curse, which Perera discovered on a journey to Israel, is the revelation that captures his imagination and sends him on a quest through history: Any member of the family who leaves the Holy Land, his great-grandfather had decreed, would forfeit the blessings of “wealth, honor and long life.”

The curse followed his father to the New World and touched Perera himself in the form of a double-circumcision that he regards as a “symbolic castration.” Even worse, Perera sees his sister, stricken with madness, as a tragic victim of a fate intended for him.

“I came to see Becky’s schizophrenia as a metaphor for the fracturing of our family by a dark legacy of ancestral sins,” he writes. “According to this demonology, I was the one the curse was intended for, but I had managed to divert it to my younger sister, who lacked my survival instincts.”

As if to redeem himself, Perera conjures up the troubled ghosts of countless generations of his family, which turns out to include not only pious Jews and ardent Zionists but also Marranos --Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition and practiced their faith in secret. And, as he uncovers the secrets of their passionate lives, he discovers that his forebears found their way not only to Jerusalem but also Cairo, Guatemala City, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Because Perera has chosen to explore one of the most ancient and storied traditions in Jewish history, we find ourselves wandering back and forth across not only centuries but millennia. The “Golden Age” of Spanish Jewry reached its heights in the Middle Ages, as Perera shows us, and some Sephardic families claim to trace their lineage all the way back to King David.

If Perera weaves a rich and colorful tapestry out of historical facts and folk tales and family history, he does not leave out the darker threads. For example, Perera reminds us that the Holocaust--including the extermination of the Sephardic community of Salonika--may be seen as an upwelling of evil that dates back some 500 years to the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

“Questions similar to those that plagued Jews in the aftermath of Hitler’s Final Solution,” Perera writes with characteristic bluntness, “continue to be raised regarding the Spanish Jews’ feeble and seemingly self-defeating reaction to the Inquisition and the Expulsion.”

Although Perera styles his book as a family memoir and a work of history, there’s an even stronger sense of self-exorcism in “The Cross and the Pear,” as if Perera had set out not only to solve a family mystery but also to liberate himself from the curse uttered by his great-grandfather.

“You tell truths,” his mother told him shortly before her death, quoting yet another Ladino proverb, “you must pay.”

Once again, his mother’s words are a clue to a profound mystery. Afflicted by memory, haunted by history, Perera insists on telling the troubling truth about himself and his family. “The Cross and the Pear,” then, is the currency with which Perera now offers to pay.