Brown Scarf Blues

Read Brown Scarf Blues Storyline:

A Sephardic Jewish writer comes to Madrid for a conference of Spanish-descended Jews, just after the deaths of his sister and his best friend. In Seville he finds a scarf that stays on his neck for thirteen days until, just as suddenly, it disappears, lost in Madrid. The scarf becomes an obsessive symbol of loss, of farewells to things and people. The writer says goodbye to the dead but also to all the people he has not been and never will be. He says goodbye to dreams. Meanwhile, he will soon meet Spanish Jews who were lost in the Amazon for 150 years, who he previously wrote about ten years earlier in a novel. Could he have invented that reality? Is reality the product of what we imagine? The novella spans countries—Morocco, Brazil, New York and Israel—and languages—Hebrew, French, Spanish, Portuguese and especially Haketia, the Judeo-Spanish of Northern Morocco that insists on surviving as a living-dead remnant of a vanished culture, as the words and expressions left...