Andalusian in Jerusalem
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About this ebook
The Jerusalem syndrome: a Spanish teenager decides to reveal a false secret to his closest friend and tells him he is a Jew. To his surprise his friend reacts with "I knew it!" as if this was the most well known secret in the world. In a matter of hours the whole school calls him the Jew. No denial or acceptance that he told a lie will change his nickname. This lie will lead him to be a respected writer till he finally writes an historical novel about the Jews. This novel is his first one to be translated and to his surprise it is translated into Hebrew. The novel gets him invited to a strange writer's festival in Jerusalem, where he meets an old, half senile woman, who looked like his recently deceased mother, and who is convinced that he is her son, who disappeared in the Lebanon War. He will also meet Charly, a Jewish-Moroccan Israeli writer, suffering from chronic discrimination who is doing his first steps writing a novel about Lucena in Spanish, his mother tongue, half forgotten in order to write in Hebrew. Jerusalem is at the center of Andalusian in Jerusalem, a short but intense novel where Madrid meets Jerusalem and the Jewish world becomes more fantastic than the novels of the writers who try to describe it. The Jewish past of Spain leads to Jerusalem and Spanish is at the heart of the Jewish world.
Mois Benarroch
"MOIS BENARROCH es el mejor escritor sefardí mediterráneo de Israel." Haaretz, Prof. Habiba Pdaya.
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Andalusian in Jerusalem - Mois Benarroch
A writer must follow his books, his readers, his words. Otherwise, he’s unforgivable. That’s why I wandered about the streets of Jerusalem, as if my book were leading me somewhere, as if I had no choice but to follow my words. I followed my words and my words chased me. The words I spoke in class when I was eight, lacking much sense, without clearly understanding why, in the school in Lucena, at the end of the world, I’m a Jew,
just as I said it to my best friend in secret, a secret which lasted half a morning before the whole class knew it and one day longer before it was on everybody’s lips, from students to headmaster. My intimate friend, I think his name was Raúl, said to me:
I knew it!
Which I couldn’t understand, how could he know it, if I had invented it. But everybody knew it the very same day, that is, everybody told me they knew I was an odd guy, and hence they did not find it strange at all that I should be a Jew. The very same thing happened to a transexual, a father of two, he told me how he announced to those around him that he was going to change his sex and everybody said they didn’t find it surprising at all and they’d always known something weird was going on with him. Everybody except himself, who up to the age of thirty-five had behaved just like all the men around him. Her name was Dafna, I met her when she was already a woman and I never asked what name she’d had as a man, that seemed indiscreet to me. My fabrication led to many discussions with teachers, with the headmaster, and with my parents. We’re talking of Franco’s time, and those days to be Jewish was to be Masonic-Jewish, and the only Franco-Jewish individual was Franco, and it was even dangerous. My mother told me a thousand times that one doesn’t speak about the matter, and I explained to no avail that I was only kidding. I already liked to read, and by reading I’d found out that many inventors, writers, scientists were Jews, and that’s why I invented this notion that I was a Jew. I couldn’t know what the reaction would be, at that time I had no idea that to say you’re a Jew was a sort of password in code, the Christian code. My father even told me that they had investigated him at his workplace, he was a functionary of the state, and he asked me not to repeat it, please. I haven’t, until today. But I did go to my grandmother and ask her whether we were Jews, a few months before she died, and she said: Hush-sh-sh...
When I was twelve I asked what that hush-sh-sh meant, and she lifted her finger and placed it across her lips, signaling that I should not speak of the matter any further. I said no more about it, but despite my silence the shouts during the soccer matches we lost were shitty Jew, or pass that ball to me, you Jewish asshole, or even shitty Jewish asshole, I was still the Jew, and even though the word was always escorted by dirty language I didn’t really dislike it. It made me feel special.
But was I, or wasn’t I a Jew? Why was it that nobody wanted to talk about it? Worse still, why is my father still unwilling to speak one word about it? Why did my mother, may she rest in peace, never say anything about the matter? And a thousand questions more.
Once my friend Charly, who in truth has become my one intimate friend in Jerusalem, and my friend when he comes to Madrid, because in Madrid he’s always in a good mood, but what I like about him in Jerusalem is that he’s always criticizing everything and everybody, the pro-Jewish and the anti-Semitic, Europeans and pro-Zionists and anti-Zionists, Ashkenazim and Arabs, Moroccans and everyone, and he even told me one day that he was anti-Semitic because all European thought has a basis of anti-Semitism, and perhaps he’s even right, well then, Charly told me that one day a friend of his called David (my secret Jewish name which nobody knows) traveled to Vinaroz on a vacation and an older woman told him that in the phone book she could recognize all the descendants of Jews. If it’s that way in Vinaroz, I think it must be even worse in Andalusia. I met Charly at the launch of one of his novels, a Jewish friend of mine, who had also come to my own launch, brought me, and during that talk Charly said that according to him most Andalusians were of Jewish descent, and one of the twenty people who came to the launch got to his feet and said that was an exaggeration, I remember that the presenter, an Andalusian poet whose name escapes me, asked this man what his name was and he replied José Rabal Caro, or something of the sort, I don’t remember his whole name, but his last name was Caro, and then Charly and the presenter burst out laughing and explained that Caro is one of the most Jewish names one can imagine. One day he told me that a certain Caro, a descendant of expelled Jews, had written the religious code which all Jews follow to this day, he did it in the seventeenth century.
So...
I was wandering for the third time about the streets of Jerusalem, invited to the writers’ festival thanks to the publication of my book, The Birthday Thief, which has already been published in six languages and had luckily appeared in Hebrew. It was Charly who translated the first two chapters for me and we submitted it in that form to several publishing houses, although I believe the first one bought the rights. Charly told me he thought it didn’t have much of a chance, that I’d better try with one of my six other novels, and that foreign books with Jewish themes and about the Shoah were almost never published in Israel and hardly sold at all, but in my book and in the words of my book, I had imagined it in Hebrew, and therefore it was published in Hebrew, I imagine ergo I believe, I believe ergo I believe, what does a writer have that’s better than his imagination and if he can create worlds within his books he can create new realities within reality. The book was issued by a small publishing house but it sells little by little and readers respond to it, as if they’d been waiting for a goy to talk to them about that, to reflect their anguish in his books, or at least in one book, because as Jelinek says it seems that only Jews care about what happened during the Shoah, and she’s right, when I published the book some of my friends said I should write about the occupation of Gaza and not about something that’s already in the past, as if literature were a newspaper, although those same writer friends spend their lives writing about that past of the Civil War, which came before the Shoah, no, no, Jews must live in the present because their past is bothersome, some friends even stopped talking to me and since then for no reason at all I’m considered a fan of the Zionists and a hater of Palestinians and Arabs, who knows what the world is coming to.
A talk in the most famous literary café in the city, Tmol Shilshom, which I’d already heard about, by another writer, called Yosi Abni. No, not by Charly who was not invited to the festival, according to him because they only invited Ashkenazim, although this Abni was of Kurdish origin, there are Jews everywhere, except among the Japanese, and he explained why he wrote about the Shoah, just as I was repeating for the nth time the reasons why I wrote this book, I had already done so forty times all over the world, and sometimes the questions gave it a more interesting touch, but not this time. Then we had a soft drink and I stepped out into the street alone around eight on my way to a meeting of Hispanic journalists organized by a girl called Nora whom I liked a lot, well somewhat more than that, I think I was a bit in love with her. I went out into one of the alleys of the quarter called Nahalat Shiva, which is the old but not-so-old city of Jerusalem, that is to say the old city outside the historical one which lies within the walls, it’s houses and streets built towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was once a poor neighborhood but it’s become a neighborhood for Jewish millionaires of the diaspora who can afford to pay millions of dollars for a house, and just as I was going down the stairs (Tmol Shilshom is on a second story) I perceived a woman who looked like my mother, may she rest in peace, I saw her out of the corner of my eye, I noticed most of her hair was white, like her own hair but diluted to one third or one fourth, and in less than a second (all these life-changing events happen in under one second) she turned and was in front of me, looking at me, and she said to me in Spanish,
I knew it!
And I was staring at her as if stupefied, unable to say one word, because as the seconds went by she looked more like my mother and she was dressed like the Andalusian women of a certain age, elegant but very unfashionable, very passé, as if time had stagnated in the sixties of the twentieth century, and she was there saying to me, I knew it!
and I was speechless and again and again she repeated the phrase, as if it were a mantra, as if she’d been waiting years to say it, and then she said, come Son, dinner is ready, and I’m sure you’ll remember I live here, I’ve always lived here next door, in this house, and they want to throw me out, that’ve offered me millions, but I’ll die in this house, this is the house that carries your dreams.
But Mamá, you’re dead, was what I was going to say, but I couldn’t, nor could I say I was not the one she was looking for, or something like it’s not me, I am not I, or one of those phrases that one says but that feel ridiculous when one recalls them. And she, this woman who was and at the same time wasn’t my mother, repeated the phrase, come Son, dinner is prepared, and then she continued the phrase, as I always prepare it for you, all the time you’ve been absent, every evening, because you always used to come home for dinner, and I made what you like, fava-bean soup, albaisal, and there’s also some oryza, which you like so much, left over from Shabbat, I know very well what oryza is, because my first wife, who was Jewish, used to cook it sometimes on Saturdays, a most delicious dish made of rice with saffron, and still unable to answer, still unable to speak a word, I was following her, walking 89 steps, I swear I counted them as if it were a way of believing that the world was still real and that I had not walked into one of Charly’s novels by mistake, or one of Paul Auster’s or one of mine, or that of some writer whom nobody knows exists but who kidnaps real people and sticks them into his novels, and on the 90th step I was inside her dwelling, an apartment on the ground floor, very small, I don’t think it measured over seventy square meters, full of things and books, with the kitchen by the entrance, to the right of the little parlor, which although it was now night one could tell was the only area that received some light during the day, and then three very small rooms beyond the parlor, or that’s what they seemed to be since I didn’t dare move from the step that led to the parlor, and the bathroom behind the kitchen, I thought it had been built that way to use