Published in 2003 in The Jerusalem Post

Stranger in the Holy LandBy TALYA HALKIN'Recently," the poet Moshe Benarroch said as he walked through the door of my Tel Aviv apartment on a hot afternoon in early November, "I've been thinking a lot about whether the past can change. "Imagine," he continued, settling into the least comfortable of my living-room chairs, "you suddenly discovered someone who, unbeknownst to you, had been part of your entire life; could this discovery transform your perception of your own experience to the point that your life would appear different from the one you believed yourself to have led?" While she was recovering from an asthma attack last year, Benarroch's mother told him she had come across the work of a writer by the name of Esther Bendahan. Like Benarroch himself, Bendahan was born in the city of Tetuan, in the far north of Morocco near the Straits of Gibraltar. Moshe, his parents, and his three siblings immigrated to Israel in 1972, when he was 13. Bendahan's family left Tetuan for Madrid when she was seven. "She writes like you," Benarroch's mother had told him, "about the same strange things you are interested in - Tetuan, converts, the Jews of medieval Spain." Benarroch had no recollection of ever knowing a girl named Esther Bendahan in Tetuan. Nor did he remember meeting her - as he may well have done - on numerous visits from Israel to the houses of friends and relatives in Madrid. "When I began reading her," he told me, "I couldn't believe it. Every couple of pages I said to myself, 'This is impossible - am I reading someone else's story, or am I reading a story that I myself wrote?' "For years," he continued, "I wrote poems about a woman whose presence I felt without knowing who she was. I imagined her walking through the streets of whatever city I happened to be in, traveling along a parallel path that I felt would never cross mine. Now that I have finally found her, I've discovered that I wasn't alone even during the moments I thought I was. "Maybe this is also what writing literature is about - allowing you to see your own past in a new way, to change it by giving it a different kind of interpretation." Now in his mid-forties, Benarroch lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Danielle, and their three children. He is a gentle, heavyset man with a big beard that does little to hide his vulnerability, and he is perennially out of place: Although it was largely the fault of my rather unstable living-room furniture, by the time we had been together for half an hour, our meeting had evolved into a clumsy dance of musical chairs punctuated by short bursts of conversation. "Exile is now in fashion," as the writer Ian Buruma pointedly noted a while ago. In Benarroch's case, however, displacements both personal and historical are a strikingly genuine obsession in a country where the fashion of exile has yet to hit the cultural runway. As a young man in colonial Morocco, Benarroch's paternal grandfather made a fortune in maritime trade. He lost it following Moroccan independence in 1956, at the same time that Benarroch's maternal grandfather amassed his own wealth selling construction materials in the post-independence building boom. The Jewish inhabitants of Tetuan first established the city's Juderia, or Jewish neighborhood, when they emigrated from Spain following a wave of anti-Semitic riots in 1391 - the first intimation of the terrible fate that was in store for Spanish Jewry. Like other members of the Sephardic Diaspora, their medieval Spanish was inflected with Hebrew and with local - in this case Arabic - words. Following the Spanish invasion of Tetuan in 1860, they gradually gave up Hakitia - the Moroccan dialect of Judeo-Spanish - for modern Spanish. By his own admission, Benarroch was born into "a world of bourgeois decadence." His father, who was studying law in Spain, quit the university with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was a frustrated writer in a family where there was tremendous pressure to succeed, and he suffered terribly from this pressure without ever earning a significant amount of money. Reluctant to emigrate to Israel, he arrived here at his wife's insistence and struggled to launch a series of enterprises that were all thwarted by government bureaucrats. The Jewish Alliance Francaise School Benarroch had studied at in Tetuan secretly taught its students modern Hebrew, against the Moroccan government's orders. When 13-year-old Moshe arrived in Israel, he spoke fluent Hebrew within a matter of weeks. "Nevertheless," he says, "coming here in 1972 was like landing on another planet." In his first book of poems, the 1994 The Immigrant's Lament, Benarroch recounted in detail the cultural shock and humiliation he and his family experienced when they arrived. His sister Rachel was 15 at the time. His brother Levi was 11. Their youngest brother, Ari, died a month after the Yom Kippur War from a disease he had been struggling with since early childhood. After a trying year at a Pardess Hanna absorption center, as he recounted in one of those poems, his family began making arrangements to move to Jerusalem, which appealed to his mother because of the dry climate, and the idea that her eldest children could soon enroll at the Hebrew University. The director of the absorption center told them they lacked the necessary "cultural sophistication" to live in the capital. "Arriving here was like a form of shell shock that erased everything that came before. I didn't understand what I was doing here, how it could be so different from what I had imagined. For years after we immigrated to Israel, I couldn't remember my childhood. I was 30 when I began recalling things for the first time. I still see them only in the form of flashbacks - I can't imagine one day from beginning to end." When he was 15, Benarroch began writing poems in English. "French was the language I was schooled in, but I had no emotional connection to it. Spanish, the language we spoke at home, was the real language of my childhood, but it was too painful to try and write in it. English was a kind of default language, a form of escape I associated with the music I listened to in my adolescence - Jackson Brown, Bob Dylan." Nevertheless, Benarroch says, he struggled for years to be a sabra. "With the publication of my first book of poetry, which I wrote in Hebrew, I felt I had finally entered Israeli society." The Immigrant's Lament was followed by a series of publications in Hebrew which include poetry collection The Bread and the Dream (2000) and the novels Keys to Tetuan (1999) and Lucena (2002). Although his first book of poems was well received, he says, "The ensuing lack of interest in my work got me very depressed, to the point that my sense of alienation within Israeli society became truly oppressive. "Zionism created something, but it also destroyed entire communities," says Benarroch. "For the Ashkenazi Jews coming from the destruction wrought by the Nazis, this was less of an issue. Furthermore, their understanding of Moroccan culture, which was largely based on the image of immigrants from the Atlas Mountains, made these European Zionists feel they were saving Moroccan Jewry." "When I am traveling," he wrote in The Immigrant's Lament, "I am the poet/ of many tongues, the international/ voice, the cultural vulture/ Back home/ I am a threat to the consensus/ that people born in Morocco are born illiterate and should die that way." In 1997, Benarroch began translating his Hebrew poems into English and publishing them on the Internet. A year later, during a visit to Paris, he began composing poems in Spanish. "I started writing in Spanish out of an awareness that in my family, I am the last generation born into this language." Although even the generation of Benarroch's parents no longer spoke Hakitia, it continues to influence the Spanish of Tetuan Jews. "The modern Spanish of Tetuan," Benarroch says, "is a tremendously vital language, which remains distinct from the Castilian spoken today in Spain." When his first book of poetry written in Spanish, Esquina En Tetuan ("A Corner in Tetuan") was published in 2000, he realized that to Spanish ears his written Spanish sounds slightly irregular - almost as if the poems were translated from another language. "When I wrote in Hebrew," Benarroch adds, "I felt dissatisfied at the end of every poem. In Spanish I feel full. It's a very different kind of poetry, that comes from a very different kind of place. For one thing, I am less angry. In Hebrew, my world began in 1972. In Spanish, I began writing about things I had never written about before - Granada, the Middle Ages, the Inquisition, my connection to Spain." Although he now writes all his poetry in Spanish, Benarroch continues to write prose in Hebrew. His two short novels weave together the lives of contemporary protagonists and historical figures whose destinies intertwine in time and space, leading backwards and forwards from modern-day Jerusalem, Madrid and Caracas to 19th-century Morocco and medieval Granada. "In 1492 two Spains came into being," Benarroch wrote in an article that describes his encounter with Esther Bendahan and their common sense of belonging to the Judeo-Spanish Diaspora. "The first is the one that appears on maps, and which became a land without Jews. The second is the one the Jews carried away at the time of their expulsion - a Spain whose Spanish was transformed into Ladino, a Spain without borders that is no less real than the geographical entity that bears the same name." According to Benarroch, Judeo-Spanish culture is treated today as a dead culture, whose folkloric vestiges are presented at conferences as if they were historical artifacts. "When you attend these events you feel the urge to scream 'I'm alive, I'm actually here,'" he says. When I called Esther Bendahan in Madrid, where she was preparing to participate in Spain's fifth annual Jewish book fair this week, she said the same thing. "In contemporary Spain, people talk about the Sephardi Jewry of the Middle Ages and about Ashkenazi culture, as if contemporary Sephardic culture doesn't exist. Even when they discuss major 20th-century writers like Elias Canetti or Albert Cohen, they are rarely placed in the context of Sephardic culture. In Spain today, I feel displaced very much in the same way that Moshe describes feeling in Israel. We both write about a world whose language and way of living have disappeared, and that continues to exist only as a memory. For both of us, literature has become another homeland." Benarroch counts the cryptic prose of the Egyptian-Jewish writer Edmond Jabes (which he has translated from French into Hebrew) and the free verse of the American-Jewish poet Charles Bukowski among his major literary models. "At present," Benarroch told me when we met again last week, "I see myself as a Jewish writer, not an Israeli writer. "Israeli culture has chosen to assert itself as distinct from the idea of a Jewish Diaspora, even though I don't think this is a necessary choice. We live in a society of immigrants and children of immigrants whose experience has hardly entered the Israeli literary canon." "What is it, exactly, that you long for?" I asked. "The Spain that could have been if the Jews hadn't been exiled from it," Benarroch replied.