And later, his patients kept calling him non-stop, he took all the world on his back, calling at midnight, seven AM, he picks up the phone and explains, how many times can you say that it disturbed life at home, but he will do anything for his patients, he needs to save everybody, the whole world, except himself, me, his family, that he couldn’t save, maybe I didn't know how to save it too, there's always two to blame in divorces, but I believe I carry only ten percent of the blame, and he carries ninety, with his crazy ways, his life, his guilt that forced him into trying to be right all the time, to succeed at any cost where others failed,
And still, I should have tried to understand him better, as if I could, everything seemed impossible then, I'm calm these days so everything seems possible, but we couldn’t have any conversations back then, everything turned into a fight, very quickly, over anything or subject, over socks, over dishes, over food I used to cook for him, and he would complain too, your quiche is not cooked, with all the effort, the work, the diapers, the cleaning, he kept complaining, I couldn’t stand it, I got upset, for it is such a minor thing, what's so important about this not-properly cooked quiche, what's so important really.
19
- Who is that?
- It's your father.
- You came in my dream... did you find your rest, buried in Tetouan
- Yes I did, and don’t take me to Israel, don’t take my body over there, at least let the body stay here.
- It's impossible.
- Why?
- Because Shmuel insists, he will bring you here, I want your grave to be here too.
- Tell him I came to you in your dream, and the dead mustn't be moved.
- I told him that already, before you came.
- And...
- It didn’t help, his Rabbi said that his father shouldn’t stay amongst the gentiles, and he spoke about Joseph's tomb.
- Tell him it is all because those gentiles are Arab and not European, even the Rabbis became like that,
- I told him everything already dad, and we both know there 'is nothing to be done, they will bring your body here, and as you always said, corpse don't matter at all and if you weren't Jewish you would have asked it be burnt.
- Goodbye, son.
Exile
I’ve gone through three continents, four countries, and I’m still an exile. Exiled from what, exiled from who. Now I’m in Madrid, am I closing a circle? What is this circle I’m closing? As we were exiles here six hundred years ago, until my forefathers left Granada in 1391, to establish Tetouan, but isn’t this the place I feel most at home in? And what does most at home mean anyway? Even in Tetouan where I was born I was an exile, exiled from where, exiled from Spain or exiled from Jerusalem, because even in my seven years in Jerusalem I felt I was in exile, exiled from Tetouan or exiled from Spain, or maybe exiled from the fat seven years in Paris? University days, medicine days, I was sure that here, close to Toledo, I would find my place of birth. I will feel I am no longer a stranger. Maybe the surprising thing is that I don’t feel a stranger here, yet I am, as I wasn’t born here, for the Spaniards I was born in Africa, I’m from this town, that was Spain for a few dozens of years once, but why did I feel in exile when I was in Jerusalem, did Zionism failed with me. Jabes says that exile became the country of the Jews, so the State of Israel doesn’t really solve anything for most Jews, or for some of them at least. Everybody feels like a minority there somehow. Three children, in three countries, from three different women, the first one is in Paris, the second one is in Jerusalem, the third one is in Madrid, what will become of them? Will they be people of the world? Is the Jew a man of the world actually, even though he is not welcome anywhere, maybe a bit more in Arab countries, he will get expelled out of Europe eventually, sooner or later, maybe post-holocaust Europe starts to understand, as Spain did, that the Jews are part of it, and expelling the Jews harms them as well, and maybe just like a lot of Jews for thousands of years I’m just deluding myself by thinking things change, that it will be different now.
Years go by, but where do they go to, I wake up and go to my clinic every day, I see patients, I see them come to me for help, advise, medications, what do they expect from me, what do I expect from them, can I cure them, years ago I believed, fourteen years ago exactly, I believed medicine could cure, but I don’t believe these medications I subscribe anymore, it’s like a genetic destiny, my father’s story was the one about the first Benzimra that came to Tetouan with his dead brother on his back, he brought him from Fez, or from somewhere else in the cliff mountains, Eli Benzimra was a doctor, or a healer, he had five boys, and not like Rothchild, he decided each of them will take his own course in life, that was in the seventeenth century, was this Benzimra wandering the north of Morocco before he got to Tetouan, Is this a true story, I don’t know, but the Benzimras go to study medicine compulsively, they are well known doctors in Brazil, they are called Benzimrao there, which sounds a bit like Benzimran, with a longer A, they are dermatologists , surgeons, I’m just a family-doctor, just like my other cousin here in Madrid, and Jacob Hatchwell in Paris, and Eli Benzimra in Jerusalem, there are some general doctors too, maybe we should have started an international medical services network, but each of us went his own way, completely disconnected, what would have happened if all of the Benzimras would have gathered together one day, a few thousand people, the lost ones from the Amazonas too, the Greek tribe, the ones that disappeared in the fifteenth century, to different strange places, trying to break bread, that was so scarce here.
And what do all of them feel? Do they feel exiled? Exiled like I feel, do they ask themselves questions, as most people live their lives without being bothered by questions, they just live their lives, even the writers among them, there are several Benzimra writers, do they ask questions, the playwright Jacob Benzimra from Caracas, the writer Mois Benzimra Hatchwell from Paris, Moshe Benzimra in Jerusalem, do they, like me, reach forty five with questions, and my son Maurice from Paris, that was born to a non-Jewish mom and is now twenty years old, does he ask questions, does my son Yoel in Jerusalem, that was born to holocaust-survivors parents, does he ask questions, teenage questions, what does he ask about his father, I see them once a year, but it’s like a three legged chair, each son on a different leg, are they in exile in Jerusalem, six generations of Zionism, did they get Zionism out of their system, do they see their exile as I did, even though their father was born in Israel.
They didn’t see it and didn’t want to hear about it either, when I used to tell them that the attempt to be a country like other countries is not less an exile than living in the ghetto, that the wish to see other people from other countries from the same generation, as relatives is ancient, it goes all the way back to Rome, it goes back to Spain, it goes back to Greece, it goes back to Germany, Poland, and to any exile actually, and there is another way, can one not see himself connected to his generation all over the world, is it possible that the Jew will see himself as an alien in the world, isn’t Jewish normality means understanding that a Jew can’t and won’t be normal? Does understanding reality as it is and not trying to solve it, understanding the ever-exiled Jew, forever alien, is that the opposite of Zionism. And still, we see we are exceptions everywhere, we are a western country, which the west threw up, in a sea of Arab countries, and we don’t want to see the Arab side in ourselves, we are an abnormal country in an area we should have felt normal in, and then again, I admit I want to see Israel as a western country, of course, with all of its difficulties, western democracy is my ambition, and the ambition of every other educated enlightened person.
I want to talk I want to write, I want that the things I say will be heard, I want to write so I can understand my life, my life in Tetouan before I turned seventeen, the year in Strasburg, with all the weird Jews over there, so strict, the seven years in Paris, the Jews I met there, their disconnection, the understanding that I will find my way only in Israel, my divorce from Marianne, the trip to Jerusale
m, the seven years in Jerusalem, Cochava, Yoel, the coming back, moving to Madrid, because I consider that going back home, to the land of my fathers, not less than going back to Jerusalem, from here, where am I going back to, can I go back to Tetouan, sometimes I dream I go back there when I turn seventy, to spend the rest of my days there, to get old there, to die there, as my uncle Mimon did, I understand him, I tried explaining this to his sons, they wouldn’t listen, to go back to the land, as he said in my last visit to Tetouan, two months before he passed away, at the place I saw the land for the first time, like the elephants, like the birds, but I can’t go back to work there, and maybe I can, they need doctors there, and it’s not like I need more money, but my wife Marisol, that converted, won’t go there with me. She claims she is a Jewish offspring, that it was always running in her family, she even agreed to change her name to Miriam, but I still call her Marisol, she wants to move to Jerusalem even, but I can’t, I really felt like an alien there, the more I talked about Morocco the more they told me I don’t look Moroccan, but inside I felt closer and closer to those Moroccan Jews that were so strange to me at the beginning, I went to buy a djellaba, clothes we didn’t wear for years in Tetouan, I even wanted to wear the traditional fez, these clothes were part of my identity, inside them I felt I belong to myself, I belonged to my past, the djellaba that was called Juka in Tetouan. I still remember the last one who wore it in Tetouan, I remember my dad used to take me to Josef, who owned a grocery store, back then he didn’t even have a refrigerator, he had those big Hummus sacks, a poor man, but today I think his clothes were much nicer than all the shirts and pants you see nowadays, my dad told me he only washed in the Mikveh three times a year, maybe he didn’t smell that bad because he couldn’t eat the meat and the protein-rich food Jews used to eat to show their wealth back then, he was small and skinny and his wife Sol was big and fat, they didn’t have any children, and Sol, she used to babysit us, me and my brother used to drive her mad, and she used to shout at us, shouts that still resonate in my head, like a massage in my ear, like a soothing voice, in spite of the shouting, it was in Ladino:
WA YA MIRI Y MIRI Y MIRI PERO COMO ESTO NO MIRI
Which means: “I have seen and I have seen and I have seen, but I have never seen anything like this”, she was talking about our bad behavior, we used to make her run around from place to place, we used to let loose at her house, that still used oil burners for cooking, her poor dark house, with the peeling plaster, the big room downstairs and the bedroom upstairs, with no children rooms, I don’t even remember her surname, and Sol’s house was full of warmth and love for children, I promise that the next time I go to Tetouan, Sol and Josef, I will gather Minyan and say Kaddish over your graves, even if it’s not permitted by the Hallacha, I will pray for your souls, maybe that’s what I’m doing right now by writing this, praying for your childless souls, and for the children you didn’t have, and for the beauty of your humble house, and for the acceptance of your verdict, for the big true love you shared, I’m sure this love would have raised good souls in the world, you must have redeemed whole spheres with your simplicity, like the Ari in his studies, or like Rabbi Chalfon, my father Rabbi Azancot, or Rabbi Yitzhak Benwalid, or all the rabbis you loved so much, I can clearly recall Benwalid’s picture in the room downstairs now, not far from the oil burners, you were the lost simplicity of the people of Tetouan, that kissed back the Spaniards that expelled them too soon, as we always did, kissing Europe too soon. And maybe those Spaniards, were not the same Spaniards, like the Spaniards of today, who most of them have Jewish origins, maybe it was a reunion of those that converted and suffered and those who decided to stay Jewish and suffered, because who did stay in Spain and was a pure Christian, only if he was abandoned by his family, and nobody knew who are his parents, you could have said that he was a pure Christian, only you would presume that those were the pure Jews, because many Jewish mothers that starved or that were targeted by the Inquisition, thought that the best thing to do would be to leave their child next to a monastery, as Polish moms did in the holocaust hundreds of years later, history repeats itself, and is never expected, and never in the same way, we only understand this repetition later on.
The strangest thing I see in the Jewish history is not that Jews were murdered, slaughtered, humiliated, exported. It is brutal but it’s our second nature. The strangest thing is that they never rebelled, even when they had the financial resources and sometimes even the military capabilities, in Spain, in Poland, even when they had relative sovereignty, and could actually fight for their own territory, they didn’t. maybe that’s the meaning of the Jerusalem exile, of the fall of the Holy Temple, that we are always exiles, that we only fought for one land all over history, one specific territory, against the Romans, against the Greek, the Jebusite, and the Girgashites, against Britain and against the Arabs, we were willing to fight for this territory only. That means that the Jews never felt at home anywhere, they felt very close to it, so close they felt more related to the people in the countries they lived in than to Jews in other countries, but not close enough to stand up for their rights.
20
- So are you thinking of going back to Israel?
- Not at all, and considering the things you write about, it will be better for you to leave too and move to somewhere else, to London or Paris, or Madrid
- I can’t
- So what will you do there, you will spend your time complaining.
- I can’t because of my children, they grow up here,
- They will be the ones that will leave eventually,
- That would be their decision, when they grow up, they can make their own decisions, and my wife doesn’t want to go anywhere too, how many times can I leave for a few months and come back, I hate flights,
- At least here a man is valued by the things he does, this is why I live in London and your sister lives in NY, it might suit Shmuel because he is in his Yeshiva, but for a writer, it’s a waste of time,
Keys to Tetouan Page 11