Lucena

by Mois Benarroch

“Caballos,” the poem that gallops, I wrote in Spanish, the language of my mother. Spanish after so many years, so many ups and downs but precisely in Spanish the words sound good to me. I write a poem and I feel satisfaction, a satisfaction that I had not felt after thousands of poems in Hebrew. In Hebrew I always felt I had to write another, and another, and another, because I could not find the correct tone. But after one poem in Spanish, I can rest a few days. I feel a music. The place from which it has come, the sound of my infancy, of an infancy that returns with the words, with a sound, with the personal, exact coding. Words that come back through the tunnels of history, words that come back from Lucena.

  A week in Austin, a mysterious place for me, the melodies that I used to hear were always linked to this city. Or, at least with Texas. Songwriters, for me great poets, names unknown in Israel, even in the United States: Tornes Van Zandt, David Rodríguez, Jimmy Lafave, who, in reality was from Oklahoma, yet forms an inseparable part of the sounds of this city. Because in Austin, music is a kind of religion. Everyone goes there to hear music. It is everywhere, at ridiculous prices because the singers have to come through here. I went a few nights to the “Cactus Cafe” and there I heard Butch Hancock, Lafave, Elisa Gilkinson, and Cliff Eberhardt.

  I told Cliff Eberhardt that he looked Israeli. In reality I told him he looked Kurdish, I told him if he should go to Israel, people would speak to him in Hebrew. To my surprise he told me that his maternal grandfather was Professor Simon, who had taken part in the peace treaty with Martin Buber. Zionism had arrived in Austin and I could not escape it.

  I am here as though in a dream. I take careful note of my cosmopolitanism, I take note of it in my ancestors, who were Sephardim, but never forgot they form part of the greater world, the world of Christians and Muslims at the same time. So they could travel throughout the world without feeling like foreigners anywhere. Without counting Israel. In Israel they became a neglected minority and all their liberality sank into the sea. So that is how the strange situation is created. Here, I am the cosmopolitan and in Israel, the ethnic poet who does not concern himself with serious problems such as love between couples, death, or the Holocaust. And to think that one of the poets who has delved most deeply into the Holocaust is the Egyptian Sephardi Edmond Jabés who wrote in French. Without a doubt, if he had written in Hebrew, In Israel nobody would have paid him any attention. In the best case, he would have had to cover all the expenses of printing his books and he would have distributed them among his friends.

  Too late to worry about this, the issue is lost. Second and third generations for some time have accepted the stereotypes engulfing them. Sephardim are passive, whiners, only good for manual labor, and have no interest in getting ahead in life. I was the crazy guy that was there and I remember. I know how the Spaniards from Málaga and Madrid are. I lived there and I remember. But the memory is a damnation, a damnation that it is among the society where I live. I live, and I don’t. Because if I dream of anything it is about going back to live in the diaspora. I like exile. I like the Jews that don’t have anything to do with this economic and social calamity. I live in a schizophrenic society. But I, much to my sorrow, am not schizophrenic. After a hundred years of Zionism that should have healed the Jews, I am sorry to say that the ones out in the diaspora are the sanest, at least relatively. The real crazies are the ones who reside in Zion. Here in Texas I can realize that. Here people talk to me about poetry, about the meaning of the diaspora, about the words, not about Morocco, Morocco, and Morocco. In every interview I participate in, I am asked about Morocco as if I represented some organization of hundreds of thousands of persons, when I can barely talk about myself. They keep looking at me and asking themselves if I could get them votes in which case they would publish a book for me at the ‘Am Oved’ publishing house.

  That is what I accuse the Ashkenazi’s of. This does not absolve the Sephardim from their situation. In all parts of the diaspora they have struggled to maintain their identity and in Israel, without thinking for a moment, they make concessions to a tiny group of Cossack Jews who didn’t have enough money to go to the United States. They renounce their entire history for a plate of lentils with more carrots than lentils. That is why the food is so red.

  I get nervous again but no, I am not so angry, but there are days. Or, better said, there are moments in which I get angry but then I accept the verdict because I know that everything is a great lesson. To learn how to always be among the opposition, and understand it.

  In Austin one night at midnight on leaving the Alejandro Escobedo presentation, I walked to the hostel where I stayed the night. It was a walk of less than an hour, but at that time of night the streets were empty. Suddenly I saw a young black man in front of me walking slowly and a squad car of the Austin Rangers approached him, stopped and the police officer inside began talking with the young man. I was a few minutes distant from them but I could see it all clearly. I continued walking. The police car awaited me. The police officer politely wished me a good evening and asked me if everything was ok. Apparently I said yes, and then, surprisingly, the officer told me to be careful around that young black man who was walking in front of me and it would be best if I kept my distance from him. I said yes, thanked him, and continued on. Not only was I not afraid of the black man who by then had distanced himself from me but I couldn’t stop asking myself if he would have said the same thing if that young man had been white. And why did he have to tell me anything, me, a foreigner in a strange land. Who was really closer to him than the black man, whose family has lived in this country for more than three hundred years, and probably more years than that of the policeman?

  Could it be that the warning is what creates fear of the black person who then ends up being a delinquent? Could it be that this is what the statistics say? According to them, thirty percent of black men between twenty and thirty in the United States end up with a criminal record.

  During my free time in Israel I learned to observe and understand discrimination in another country and how that works. The difference in racial discrimination is that in a racist state you are told: “Don’t get close to that black man.” And in a discriminatory state there are always reasons that a black man warrants different and discriminatory treatment. So that when you, a Sephardic, come to the ministry to submit an application for a scholarship, they tell you you have arrived an hour late, that they can’t submit any more applications or your course of study isn’t relevant, or that you haven‘t completed the application in ink or anything else.

  The reasons are correct, all of them. And the ones they give to many of the Ashkenazi’s are, as well.

  So the blacks are foreigners in their own land. And that is how I learned first-hand about discrimination. Austin, March of 1999, and the music was marvelous.

  WILL DEATHS, AND THE DEAD, CEASE?

  -It is the end of the world, called the plague.

  -They say one dies in just a few days.

  -They say the only solution is to eat garlic.

  -Only God can help us. It is best not to leave home,

  -There are dead in all the streets,

  -People go to the cemetery to prepare their own tombs

  -Besides the fact we are dying, we are assured it is our own fault.

  -Those who think that should die.

  -Amen,

  -Amen.

  -They say our sins bring death. They call it the Jewish death, and the Black Death.

  -Damn destiny is endless. It is not sufficient that we die as they do. They want to kill us too.

  -They spread all kinds of rumors, especially when it’s about Jews.

  -We need to leave the country.

  -Where?

  -your cousin Yehudá, the poet, say we should return to the land of Israel

  -There they killed us too, and if we go back they will kill us

  -We came to this world to be killed. We have to celebrate our death

  -You are crazy.

  -You don
’t understand. Our God gives us a law. He tells us it is the law of life. We must do everything possible to live and to choose life and since we were given the tablets with the commandments. What is the world doing? Killing us as though it hadn’t anything better to do.

  -We have to keep struggling for life.

  -But we must also celebrate death. Death is our destiny and we must love it. Do you hear those shouts? Sol has died and Moishé the butcher. They say Sultana has also died. I’m not leaving the house. Frejahas died. They die by the minute, by the moment. I will sing as David did when his son Absolón died. I will sing Alleluia! Alleluia! The day of our death is better than the day of our birth.

  -You’re crazy. I’m going to cry.

  PAPA

  I ask myself, what did he go to look for there? Two lost and strange years. A staunch, upright man gathering up his family: wife, sons, daughters and going on the road. He isn’t young any longer. He has no religious beliefs. He knows that all his hopes are simply a bed of deceptions. And here, an act of insanity. A hundred years ago, the Moroccans take their families in search of exasperation. It’s like genetic code. What is it that moves teachers, businessmen, doctors, tailors, and farmers, simple folk and rich? What is it? What hidden hand? Don’t say my grandfather was a dreamer, a great cynic, a man of principles, because it is not true. He was a prosperous businessman in Tetuán. A cool headed businessman who understood that in Morocco there was neither more business nor place for a small group of Jews. It is only filling with people from the mountains who were seeking to earn their bread. They would be transformed into beggars and day laborers. He knew how to make objective analyses but this was no longer the sixties when it was not known what was happening. He had already traveled and knew what awaited him. The family had already told him what it meant to be a Moroccan in Israel. He knew what his children would be called in school. He knew it all, in spite of it all. Like a bullet, he had to shoot to Jerusalem. What was he fleeing? Perhaps it was about a last opportunity. He always talked about Spain, and Málaga. He has a brother there who will help him, sometimes from Canada, from Quebec, from London. He talked about the whole world but I was almost sure that we would move to Málaga. We had been there a few times. I liked that summery, maritime city. But one day, during the ten days of penance before Yom kipur, he told us that we were leaving, just after my Bar-Mitzva. We were leaving. I didn’t even ask where. I had no doubt it was to Málaga, but being in Ceuta he announced the news. It was assumed that I would be happy. He looked at me for several instants expecting to see some sign of joy from the child who goes to Jerusalem, to Temple, to the Land of Judah, He expected a look from me confirming his feelings which justified his action. But that look didn’t arrive.

  The trip was short. In Madrid we got on an airplane which took us to Tel-Aviv. It seemed long to me. Where are we going? I don’t have any Friends there. I don’t know the language. Well, yes, a bit of Hebrew that I studied for my Bar-Mitzva and from the Sunday classes from monsieur Zohar. But I didn’t know it well enough to live there. It was apparent to me that my place was not there. I don’t know where I got that feeling in my chest, that ache in the chest which lasted the two years we were there. An ache which no doctor could explain. A tenuous, but permanent ache, waking or sleeping. An ache which disappeared the day we returned to Málaga. But I ask myself again and again; what made him emigrate to Israel? I asked him, and he responded, as is customary among the Tetuanis, that we must not talk about the past. He didn’t care about psychology, Freud, Jung. He was always busy with his business. Business was to earn money, and support the family. Though in reality the purpose of his business was to escape from the family, avoid encounters with her, and problems with the children. That, he left to the wife, while he took charge of the business which kept him occupied from dawn to midnight, even on Saturdays. I think that what he wanted was to quiet his conscience. He simply wanted to be able to say: I tried. And that those above not come down from heaven to complicate his life with Zionism, the gathering of the dispersed, the Temple and the Jewish people. When I get to heaven he would say, “I tried it for two years. And look what your Jews did to me. They laughed at me every day I spent there. If you give awards for suffering, you must give me more than you gave Job who lost his children and his gods. And they pulled out one of my hairs every fifteen minutes. Then they pulled out my nails. And when they grew back, they pulled them out again. And then they plucked out my eyes. They made me want to be deaf so I wouldn’t hear what I heard. They made me want to die every day, to hate the Jewish people. They made me want to kill, and when I decided to leave, they asserted that the only thing I had wanted was to take advantage of the benefits from the resettlement office. That is what they said, without trying to assist or to listen.”

  I’m sure he did it to have his speech prepared for arrival in heaven because he had already been in Israel four times.

  There is where I did it for the first time. It was during a trip to Elat. They said she was easy. I remember what she was called. I remember her name but it’s hard for me to pronounce it. She had drunk a little cheap wine that we were offered on Friday then I took her to the beach. I don’t know if she wanted it or not. There was nobody around. It would have been about three in the morning. I did penetrate her. I don’t know who she supposedly had given herself to but there was a little blood. She was a virgin like me. Why did they say she was easy? Go figure. However it was, since that day we never spoke again. I don’t even remember our glances ever crossing once during the rest of the classes which we both attended. As though from that moment we had ceased to exist for each other.

  But also my father, perhaps, in those two years found his true love. I don’t believe he had ever loved my mother. It was a secret we kept that he had a lover. Everyone knew it and kept quiet. I have the impression that this was the only reason my mother agreed to emigrate, or return, to Málaga. She had always said she loved Israel and even today would have wanted to live in Jerusalem. But my father loved a Russian named Ludmila, a large, robust woman with blond hair, a woman like those of the forties. Not like the anorexics of today. Once I saw him entering a movie house in Tel-Aviv. I had never seen him look so happy. It seems that part of the business he had in Tel-Aviv, he had likely gone to get merchandise while my mother stayed in the store but besides the work, he also had a bit of pleasure. But that day I saw his face shining. He was happy as a kid. Happy as though he didn’t have a family. For him a family was like a growth on his back which he had to live with; a kind of life-long deformity without any way to avoid facing up to it.

  Lately I ask him regularly why he wanted to go to Israel. Every time he answers something different.

  Here are some of the answers I remember:

  “I wanted to look the Arabs up and down. I wanted to see them depending on me and not me on them.”

  “So your mother would leave me in peace so she couldn’t say that I hadn’t tried. It cost me a lot of money, but at least she keeps quiet.”

  “To live together with a lot of Jews. It is an unforgettable experience.”

  “So that you can be Jews. So you would not forget that you are Jews and so you wouldn’t marry a non-Jew.”

  There are other responses, but when I ask why he returned he does not answer. As if he himself said: Isn’t it obvious? It is very obvious that there was nothing for him to find there. It is absolutely certain that those two years were the strangest of my life. Everyone is always nosing around about your origin. My mother would say she is Spanish. My father would say he is from Spanish Morocco. And I say that I am from Morocco. And then, when we are at the table, my mother tells me that we are not Moroccan, that we are not like THOSE Moroccans. Nobody is like THOSE Moroccans. They don’t exist. She stubbornly insists that we have a European culture and she is proud not to have ever heard any Moorish music as though that were shameful. She only listened to Tchaikovsky and Mozart. I, whenever I could, listened to Bob Dylan and Neil Young. And at school I was
told I didn’t look like a Moroccan but I quickly understood that what they said about the Arabs, they really said about us. And when I tell my father that what he shouts at the television against the Arabs –that they should load them on a truck and take them to the other side of the border—is what they want to do with us. When they say you can’t trust an Arab, they mean you can’t trust a Moroccan. When they are afraid if you give an Arab something he will just want more, they are really referring to the Moroccans. When they say the Arabs are passive, they mean it is a lot better that they are, and that they don’t get involved in their affairs, in their country. Well, now my father understands that this is his country. He doesn’t understand very well the difference between Moroccans, Arabs and Asians, but it doesn’t matter anymore, only that it was insanity. Those were years of insanity. Years of cognitive dissonance. Yes, that is what it is called. The inner reality of the Moroccan is exactly the opposite of what he sees in every corner of the street. The only thing he can do is go crazy over it, become a delinquent, a crazy person, or leave the country. When I talk about this with my friends who dream of going to Israel, they say I am taking the side of the Arabs, and that I am an anti-Zionist. But one of them who studied a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sometimes tells me: “It’s a country of crazies.” but then he keeps quiet. I think it is not exactly a country of crazies, not at all. It is a country of Ashkenazi’s. To us, their behavior seems crazy to the degree that ours seems so to them. The only problem is that they are the ones with the money. So from now on I tell them: They are not crazies, they are Ashkenazi’s.

  WE ARE ALL POLACKS

  A short story by SAMUEL MURCIANO

  Charlie Bukovza woke in his destroyed apartment in South Tel-Aviv at noon.

  It was called a pleasant morning.

  But it was not to be.

  In the mailbox he found a letter from ‘Tzirím’ magazine asking for an article for a special issue: “Couscous in Moroccan Poetry.”