El Itihad Maroc
Five years of sitting here without knowing how to write the story of my life. Five years of trying to find logic for the eighty years of my life, but there is no logic in one's life. Everything could have been totally different. I could have died in Jerusalem, be a politician in Madrid, or a successful businessman in Venezuela. I could have ended up in Paris, married to a woman from Oran, I could have ended up in the US, speaking immigrant English, I could have ended up in Canada, in Quebec, a Tetouan man, speaking Parisian French amongst the Canadian French, I could have been... and yet, I don’t even know what I actually was, there were so many options so the option chosen was the forced option.
Episodes of my life, images pass through my mind with no sense, my beautiful mother, standing here in front of me in the house I bought again seven years ago without thinking, I went back to visit Tetouan twenty years after I left that place, I went to that house on Consol Murphy 18, that's the only name I'll know, it has a different name now, Maharaka Anual, I went in, they were very welcoming, a rich old couple, I told them my father built this house, I told them, and cried, they asked me if I wanted to buy it, an unexpected question, I wasn’t even sure they will let me in and all of a sudden I had an opportunity to purchase it, for fifteen thousand dollars, I said yesimmediately, went to Tangier, stepped in to the American Express, made a withdrawal, and the house was mine again, the house my father built, Moshe Benzimra, son of Mimon Benzimra, whose name I carry.
I was the owner of my house again. I didn’t expect of course, that a year later, my wife, who was twenty years younger than me, would suddenly pass away, it was as if it was clear and agreed that I would die first, a sort of agreement between an older husband and his young wife, and when she died, it became clear to me I will come to die here, as my father and grandfather did, that I will be buried in the same place I was born, that people will walk over me at the place I once walked, I came here and brought my memories, memories that the people of Tetouan try to forget, that the world tries to forget, the name of the old streets, the Generalissimo Street that had changed to Hassan the 2nd street, Madrid street that had changed to Rabat street, or Lope De Vega that changed to Istiklal street, I ask them questions in French or Spanish, sometimes in my crooked Arabic even, "man el Generalissimo", and occasionally get answers by some of old man in Spanish, as if he knew my secret, he knows my secret but I don’t, to die here, not like my grandfather's granddad, that went to die in Jerusalem, to die here like all of my ancestors since the Spanish expulsion, five hundred years, eighty generations, they were born and buried here, when the Messiah comes he will take me to Jerusalem, I don't understand what did I do there for twenty years, so naive thinking they would welcome me happily, maybe I wanted it and my wife pushed me, from here only to Israel, from Tetouan only to Jerusalem, and words like these, not to Canada, not to Madrid, I arrived to Israel ready, with my naivety, to found a dye factory but they asked for thousands of certificates, so they can protect the Limarsol monopoly of course, but that doesn’t matter now, that's just a comma in a long story, so I was mad obviously, because what is there more to be mad about than when the place you considered home, your country, your homeland, that will they throw you out as if you were a stranger and an enemy, my children say I'm crazy, who moves to Morocco at the age of seventy five, leaves Jerusalem, but I had to, here, the asthma I suffered from almost completely disappeared, I still use Ventolin but only once a week, in Jerusalem it was after many fasts, and natural treatments, and cortisone, and it was much worse. I needed to breath the air of the place I was born at again, It's so clear no, but few years ago I couldn’t even imagine it. I couldn’t even think about it...
I saw a sixty year old Spanish woman today, she's a widow too, I asked her why doesn’t she go to her children in Madrid or Valencia, and she said she was born here and she will die here, her name is Suarez, a Marranos name, no doubt, they say I'm crazy and I tell them they will miss it like I did, I don't know why, but this is especially true for my poet son, he writes in Hebrew in Jerusalem and nobody understands what he talks about, and writes in Spanish here for the people that have already died, I write my memories for my grandson perhaps, but mainly for my granddad, who will remember my grandfather whose name I carry, who will remember him, the granddad from Brazil, maybe I have cousins in Brazil, he used to go there for a year or two, go back to Tetouan for a few months, get his wife pregnant and leave again, he came back and his girl was two years old, or his boy, I think, considering this family's libido, that he had a wife in Brazil too, or maybe not, I don't know anything about that, but I might have cousins there, everywhere maybe, as there were always more Tetouanese out of Tetouan than within it, in good times there were ten thousand Jews here, but in the previous century, there was great famine, and people went looking for work everywhere, a lot went to Oran, I spent a year in Oran, others went to Madrid, first Jews there in four hundred years, at the end of the nineteenth century, some even converted to Christianity, some even converted in Tetouan, but I read about that in a book, nobody told me about that, no Jew would admit such failure,
My father: the rich man, my father who was the first to import to Tetouanvia sea, became a millionaire at the age of seventeen, in those times concepts of course, than the Spanish, Franco, the sole franchise for flour, Sugar and oil marketing, the same sugar that will kill him in such a young age, monopoly, later I would fall victim to a monopoly, and then the never-ending money, that keeps coming in, the year of fifty six the independence of Morocco, and the franchise that ended, his death at the age of sixty two, the Spanish civil war, and then it was Spain here, to learn how to walk on toes, to walk the middle of the streets so no one will jump at you from some side street, not to state an opinion for or against, after that year, at the age of seventeen, when I listened to the Russian radio on a daily basis, as one would hear an Oracle, a convinced communist, son of a monopolist millionaire father, then becoming vegetarian before it was even named that, and my mom who was so afraid I'd die, as back then, my father, as the rich used to, had meat two times a day, for launch, he used to have egg for first course, then fish, then meat, non-stop proteins, there was a time nutritionists believed solely in proteins
The offer to leave to Madrid, to become the consultant for a big wood factory, and the obvious refusal, since I was an only child, a forever only child to a mom who went through ten abortions after I was born, they can easily cure it nowadays, if... if only they could back then, it's just a little injection that makes the mother not develop fetus antibodies, I might have had brothers today, and sisters, it was hard being an only son then, not so acceptable, and my mom died of cancer, probably from the pain, she suffered a lot, in this house, in this building, you can feel it, the walls have very long memory, that when you tear down a building, a wall, someone else's home, you tear down his memories, the memories of all its inhabitants, if a stone could write a book, how many pages would it have? I'm not young anymore and things get mixed up, but I'll try to organize this thing called my life, for the sake of whoever reads it, because I don't see no order in it, especially no chronological timeline,
I was born on 1917, I got married on 1956, the year Morocco got its independence, my father and mother died on 1965, I had five children, one of them died of a fatal disease when he was eight, it was in 1973, a year after I did Aliya, I stayed in Israel up until five years ago, I lived in Venezuela from 1977 to 1980, I lived in Oran in 1937 for two years, and that's right, I warned you, they seem ridiculous these dates, it's better I tell you one of my sons David is in London, my daughter Mercedes lives in NY, Moshe lives in Paris, and writes books in Hebrew there, Leon that will forever remain eight years old, the age he died and he is now buried in Givat Shaul cemetery, and the youngest of all is Shmuel, he’s in a Yeshiva,
All of the my living children, all four of them, are fathers and mothers to three children each, which means I have twelve grandchildren, just like Yitzhak our forefather, why three
each, I don’t know, but that’s the way it turned out, my eldest daughter Mercedes is the one closest to me, it’s hard to say I love her the most, how can you say such a thing, but she is the grown one, she is forty years old now, and she is the spoiled, only daughter, and for some reason I found much more in common with her than I did with the others, twelve grandchildren, that number twelve will show up again and again like an uncompromising periodicity in my life and in my children’s lives as well, births at the age of twenty four, thirty six and forty eight, I fell in love with my wife when I was thirty six, and she was the first one I offered marriage to, but we married when I was thirty nine, I quit law school when I was twenty four, because of the war, or maybe all of this is nothing but imaginations of my mathematical brain, forever calculating, always looking for numeric-logical periodicity, my son Moshe, or should I say my writer son, as he is also a restless traveler, world known computer programmer, and a sensitive poet, even wrote a chapter about me in one of his books, he begged it be published in Israel but he didn't succeed, I told him so many times that he talks about Sepharadim and Ashkenazim too much, and he even takes pride of it, and the Ashkenazim don’t like it, I ask you now my dear wife Coti, precious spoiled Coti, why did you take everyone to Israel, and all of them ran away from there, except Shmuel who talks only about mezuzahs and Orthodox people, just trying to get stronger in his belief all day long, and keep reading the Torah, I never known this kind of Judaism, even Rabbi Benwalid was less strict than him, and believe me, Tetouan was a city of very strict Halacha rulers, here they didn’t really study the Zohar in the mornings and evenings, but still Shmuel, my dear son Shmuel, I just don't understand what is he talking about, we used to talk about world cultures all the time, about the Rambam's “More Nevochim”, I talked with him about Schopenhauer and George Bernard Show since he was a boy, and about Lupe De Vega, but he arrived to Israel when he was five and they brainwashed him with the idea that Sepharadim are just something primitive with horns on their heads, he didn't believe me, he didn't even read Show or Pitigrilli or Schopenhauer only because I talked about them too much, he doesn't listen to Beethoven or Bach anymore too, but he used to at home, you know Mercedes and Moshe listened to music all the time, and Mercedes too, she's in NY, they came for a visit, one time each, they wanted me to go visit them, they're afraid to bring their children here, what is there to be afraid of here, we lived with the Arabs here for five hundred years and we were never afraid, only in Israel the Arabs became Nazis, it's Moshe who keeps talking about that, even on the phone, he tells me, here you went all that way to give us western, French and Spanish education, and they keep telling us we are uncivilized Easterners, not that the Arabs lack culture, but even when it comes to western culture you're more western than everybody, they always separate eastern and western, as if no one can be born in Tetouan or Bagdad or Alexandria and be western, he calls me his Nietzsche dad, writes me long letters, explaining all the time, as if explanations would help me or help anybody, as if explanations convince anyone, and even if they do, what affect do they make anyhow, and after him there is English David, he is the one that laughs at my jokes, I used to talk to them about the Scottish Benzimra all and they would start to laugh, he told me about Rabbi Benzimra just now, who was the Rabbi of Glasgow, so here you go, we found them in Scotland too, only we're not really related, he's from Casablanca, or as we used to call them, Forastero, which means forest man or something, as we were the Ladino Jews and all the rest were the aliens, one of the Forasteros once told me that the Tetouanese were always considered naive, and they make great cookies too, naive, maybe, but definitely as honest as can be, my naive dad didn’t agree to the cancelation or consolidation of his debts after the 1929 crisis, and paid back all of them, paid back and was left with nothing, when he was already immensely rich, despite the manager of the Bank de Espania’s offer, a bank that on good days was more profitable then the Madrid branch, because the Jewish merchants were never late on payments, and even if they were, there was no one who wouldn’t pay in their name, he was even more naive,considering his reputation, that when companies like Westinghouse and A.E.G and others came and offered him to be their exclusive representative in Morocco, he refused and claimed: "I'm a merchant, not a representative", then he was offered US citizenship, but refused because it meant he needed to visit there every five years, he was a Dutch subject, so am I, a Dutch subject, and I never been in Holland, that was a defense granted to Jews as foreign subjects, the Spaniards were quite anti-sematic even back then, they came from a country that expelled Jews, a country with no Jews, and full of dark Catholic Christianity and prejudice, that went as far as checking the Jews that came to Malaga and other cities for tails, interesting enough was that Halacha ruling that was out right after the expulsion, that settling back in Spain is prohibited for the next five hundred years, and interesting as well was the law that prohibited Jews settlement in Spain wasn't officially canceled until the eighties, five hundred years after the expulsion, but as I mentioned earlier, Jews settled in Spain at the end of the Nineteenth century, and most of them came to Madrid in the seventies and the eighties, the Jews of Tetouan concentrated there and in Caracas, some went to Israel, Argentina, Canada and France. The age, years teach you that things that once seemed very important turn insignificant one day, and insignificant things get great significance all of a sudden, to think that I, a man of Tetouan, was in favor of the proletarian struggle, but, maybe every normal person should be a communist for a couple of years, everyone should be vegetarian for a year at least, religious too, even if I never was really religious, maybe a little bit under the influence of my children who went through their year or two religious phase, and Shmuel stayed in the Yeshiva, Moshe, Mercedes and David were very religious too, they attended religious schools, where they learned, had a taste, it didn’t suit them, my dad was already quite tolerant about that, even if he did go to the synagogue on Shabbat and holidays, but not every day, but every day of the year his father died, and me too when my father died, we kept Kosher at home, but when we ate out, we had to negotiate with the Spaniards, with the Arabs too sometimes, and then we would eat their food, drink their wine, that didn't make us less Jewish, all of my children are actually very Jewish, traditional, and going to the synagogue, some more often than others, their children go to religious schools, or Jewish schools, all of them became very similar to the people of this city as I knew them eventually, in their own way and under the circumstances, Proud, but not extreme Jews, I keep telling Shmuel that and he tells me about my grandfather, on my mother's side, Rabbi Hatchwell, who was a great Hassid indeed, yes I suddenly remember, like flashes that occasionally reappear, I've heard the word Hassid when I was young, but not the word Haredi, nor the words religious or Secular, I barely heard the word Ashkenazi before the second world war, when German Jews arrived here and to Tangier, they were more German then they were Jews, I taught one of them Spanish so he could find his way around here, and he couldn't comprehend the fact that he won't be able to go back to Germany anymore, he couldn't understand what did going to the synagogue mean, small part of them even stayed in Tangier and ran big businesses, but they were very different from us, so Rabbi Cohen explained, in Israel we will see a different aspect of these Jews, Ashkenazim, an aspect it was best Rabbi Hatchwell didn't know about, he, the naive who died two weeks before Israel's inception, he always used to ask me in secret code "so, when?", and I kept comforting him "soon, it’s nearly here", but I was skeptic, very skeptic, for him it was just a matter of time, he never questioned whether there will be an Israeli state, only when will it be founded, a Hassid man, a grocery owner, works five to six hours a day in the grocery, and then goes to study Torah, with the little money he had he used to deliver groceries to the poor, nobody knew who did this, but I guess they suspected it was him, stealth charity, later on my son Moshe would write that because of this charity he made it to Israel, me too, or was it such a privilege. Or was it another attempt casted on ce
rtain people, to feel in exile in their own country, in their own Israeli state, and feel at home in their exile, or maybe Tetouan wasn't exile, maybe the place where one breathes air for the first time would never become exile to him, like the German guy I was teaching, even if the land spews and burns you, you'll keep going back to the place you were born, the place where you first shouted, or cried for the first time, past, present and future get mixed up between these walls. I suddenly see my children, their names change, Mercedes is Mercedita, Moshe is Moisito, David is Davito, Shmuel Samuelito and Leon and Leonsito, he comes to visit me sometimes, he stayed Leonsito forever, eight years old, dead, alive, maybe it's death's knocks that will one day come and knock on the door, this might not seem too far from now to you, as I am eighty years old already, but it feels very far to me, much farther than twenty years ago when I got pneumonia, that day seems far away, maybe it doesn't even matter, Davito who used to disappear all the time, and he was named after his mother's father, after the well-known David Sananes, well-known in this city at least, we were always looking for him, he went here and there, jumped out of his bed when he was only three months old, so different from Moisito who started walking when he was two but never fell, always stable, I remember them, running down the halls, climbing the granite that formed a meter high stair, and trying to knock each other down, always together, and Mercedita that was close to me and distant from her mom, always fighting with her mom till the very day she died, two women and two complete contrasts, lack of communication and lack of understanding, and I, as I go out to café Re’al, drink white wine and some calamari, have some of those famous tapas, going for businesses that always seemed big to me, but then turned out to be small, going to Gibraltar to buy toys for the shop, or clothes, the shop down the street, two meters away from home, they opened another grocery store, all the Arabs know is opening grocery stores, I remember the Arab worker that used to come to work stoned in the morning, I sometimes feared his eyes, which were just like they will come out of his body, they used to sell bread with hash in the grocery store right in front of us, and little Samuelito with his endless smile, he doesn’t remember anything from Morocco, he arrived to Israel when he was five, an excellent age to go through all the brainwash of schools there, the brainwash of our inexistence, of inexistence of the wonderful life we have here, he doesn’t even remember and doesn’t believe what I tell him, he comes to visit me under the command of his Rabbi, who told him he must respect me and practice the Mitzvah of visiting the sick, he was a bit surprised to find out I'm not sick, but insisted arguing that this not the house we once owned, insisted in convincing himself that this cannot be it, that I'm lying, that I must have lived in some tiny filthy room, and now I'm making things up with this big house, nothing will convince him, I took him for a trip in the Juderia, I took him to my grandfather's house that is still standing tall, and told him about the cholera plague that took place before I was born, a plague which made people go to the graveyard to bury themselves, because there was nobody to bury them, I told him about the room in my grandfather's house, the room my grandfather went close to and heard a big scream coming out of, and which door was shut for two years up until the last of the cholera victims, then got the courage and went in, went in and got cholera, but didn't die, very strong family no doubt, I took him to see Rabbi Benwalid's synagogue, which the king decided to turn into a museum now, and Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai's synagogue, there were sixteen synagogues in Tetouan, and why sixteen, because of the Halacha ruling that there will be no more than sixteen synagogues in the city, because every dispute and disagreement would cause another one to be opened, and yet later they opened the big synagogue outside the Juderia, in Ensanche, the expansion, where I went to pray, amongst a lot of people who kept going to the Juderia one, years after they moved to the new city so they can keep praying in their father's or grandfather's synagogue, some of the synagogues are very beautiful and well preserved, but most of the Torah books, including the one my grandfather wrote, were sent to Israel, the Rabbinate claimed ownership and sent them to unknown synagogues in Israel, maybe in Dimona, maybe in Netivot, maybe in an Ashkenazi synagogue in Naharia, because our Torahs were the same as the Ashkenazi ones, rolled up and covered with altar cloth, but not in boxes like the ones of the other Moroccan Jews, Shmuel jumped at the opportunity and told me: "you see, Ashkenazi Torahs, this you never mentioned, we are Lithuanian", he started laughing before I had a chance to smile, and for four minutes he was speaking with guttural H and A without even noticing, when he noticed he looked at me with disbelief, he never used this accent, and never talked for a whole hour, he thought he was possessed, but didn't talk about it, later he said "here, I brought you Tfilin, you need to wear Tfilin every morning you know, the time is near, and the time is right to repent", Samuelito, I said to him, and you think I don't have Tfilin, there's a synagogue here too, there's a Minyan on Shabbats, a bunch of elders as myself, but not like me, they never left Tetouan, they couldn't move out of the place they were born in, I didn’t understand them back then, there is no business here, so what is there to do here, that's what I was thinking, now I don’t know what kind of big businesses did I look for there in Israel, only Ashkenazim do business there, we are left with crumbs, I appreciate them today, the ones who recognized their limits, the ones who understood you can't really leave the place you were born in, you take it with you wherever you go, maybe when you're five, like you was Samuelito, maybe then you can forget, but you're young, you are thirty years old, and one day you'll remember, just like Moshe, he suddenly started remembering everything, after years of denial and forgetting, he is the only one that understands me a little, he just fails to understand why I choose to live in a non-democratic country, where they lock up dissidents in concentration camps, but what's a democratic country to me anyway, tell me, what good is an eighty year old man in prison to them, not only that, here I can say whatever I want, even more than in Israel, being old here is an advantage, they just call me the crazy guy that came back from Jerusalem, these days you can talk freely about Jerusalem and Israel, easier than talking about Sepharadim and Ashkenazim in Israel, you know what, ask Moshe, every time he talks about it, and he talks about it a lot, people turn their backs on him, we didn't use the word Israel around here back then, we'd say the land, he went to the land, forbidden words have such a majestic sound, it is much nicer than saying he went to Israel, he went to the land, maybe he went to the land, and maybe he went to Canada, "Dad, you don’t stop talking" even when there's no one around me, but there is always someone around, sometimes I can clearly see my father here, my grandfather walking down the street, Joseph, the owner of the grocery store, and his wife Simi, I can just see them, I know they are not there, but I also know I see them, I speak to them, with the living and with the dead, and here, look, I'm writing a book for my grandchild, and maybe for your grandchildren, as they will one day ask what does being Sepharadi mean, what does being Sepharadi Jew mean, "Ah... your fez is the past, there will still be Mimouna for politicians". Learn, son, learn, everything comes back, nothing disappears, like a tree that never grew leaves on one side, but then they start growing all of a sudden, a lot of leaves has grown on the Ashkenazi side, but one day leaves will start to grow on the other side, just as Leningrad became St. Petersburg, like they will want a king in France, and that's after hundreds of years, so what about us, only fifty years, and not all is gone, they just don't talk about it, and there is nothing stronger that a thing not discussed, like the land we used to say, that's much stronger than Canada or Caracas or Madrid, Israel had power that was not talked about, maybe with the talks about peace and all today, you might have stayed here, we might had even built a Jewish University, here or in Tangier, or in Larache, "but the important thing is that you wear Tfilin every morning, and keep Shabbat, that is the minimum you need to do, because you know, time is running out", that's all you can talk about, is this what you learned engineering for, psychology and philosophy, so much ph
ilosophy that probably filled your brain, "Exactly for that, you know, it's all god's will, I studied all that to so I could find the truth, and the truth is that we are servants of god, and all we need to do is to be observant, this is why I read your Schopenhauer and the More Nevohim, and Nietzsche, and Cunt, and Ouspensky, so I can find this simple truth, so simple that the great thinkers won't even accept, worship god with god's help" well, if you say so, but know that, there are other ways to warship god, not just in detailing the religious practice, neither me nor my father have seen Jews like you around here, and yet, with their calmness I think they were humble servants of god, just like grandfather, like my father was, and just like Joseph the owner of the grocery store, or Yussiko Lankry, have you heard about Yussiko Lankri, who lived here in the late nineteenth century, who used to go to buy a chicken taking a pepper mill with him, pour some pepper over the chicken's eyes and then negotiate its price, and as the chicken started to get crazy he would tell the Arab lady that it is sick, he once even got arrested by Napoleon the third in France for a theft he didn’t take part in, when he was asked who was he with, he gave the officers the name of the man who came to France with him, when his friend asked him "Why?" he answered "Because I didn't want to stay alone in jail", his mother went to Paris, stopped Napoleon and his convoy, and managed to get him out of prison, Yussiko Lankry, when rich people came from abroad he used to tell them "your dad and my dad were like brothers" and used to buy every Aliya Latorrah in millions, imaginary sums of money nobody could have paid and no one asked him to, and then the rich man would start to think that the Yussiko is even richer than him. And then there was Yamin Benarroch that moved to Tangier, he was very Hasidic and very rich, worked for one hour a day on the phone, this young man, used to buy and sell in stock markets around the world, and then study Torah and pray for the rest of the day, getting richer every day, when he traveled to Spain or Gibraltar for business, he used to take ten people with him so he can assemble Minyan, paying all expenses "this is a true Jew!" but he never talked like you, never preached, humble, this world is disappearing, it looks imaginary to you, science fiction to your son maybe, and I am the last one that remembers it, and this is why I'm the last one who should die here out of all the Benzimras, the last one because I need to write things down, here, the last one that was born here and died here as well, "nobody reads those books anymore, dad, they watch movies" your son will make a movie out of it, "god forbid, my son will be a man of Torah just like me", and you too Shmuel, you know, you are not going to stay such an orthodox "Dos" for the rest of your life, you will one day realize you are not made for this, this is a transition period, you may be religious, Hasid as we used to call it, but you can't be Lithuanian, because you didn't hear about it at home, you never heard "Cholam" instead of "Kamatz", notice their O locked them out of the world,
Keys to Tetouan Page 6