Brown Scarf Blues by Mois Benarroch

Author:Mois Benarroch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Babelcube Inc.
Published: 2015-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

2008

A writer should be where his books are, should be where his readers are, near the bookshops that carry his books, in the countries his books reach, a writer is nothing more than his books.

I never thought a book would take me so far and at the same time so close to what I am and to what I someday will be. That afternoon, I was in a literary café in Jerusalem called Tmol Shilshom, talking with another Israeli writer about the only book of mine that was translated into Hebrew, The Birthday Thief, also my only Jewish-themed book. A book about the Holocaust and children in the Holocaust, written for a writers’ festival at which I was the only Jew. For the zillionth time I spoke about the topic of the Shoah in Spain and how almost no one there was writing about it, and how people had attacked me for writing about past atrocities and not the camps in Gaza. Okay, so I said what I always say, which is what always happens at these conferences. Same words, same questions, same answers.

Then I walked out into the alleyways of Nahalat Shiva on my way to a cocktail party for the Spanish press in Israel, where they had even more correspondents than they did in Budapest or Berlin. But on my way out, a woman in her seventies approached me and spoke to me in Hebrew, I said in Spanish that I didn’t speak Hebrew and she continued in Spanish. She called me Uri and said dinner was ready, and that I should go back up to the apartment with her. As she spoke to me in my language it reminded me of the warmth of my mother, who had died years earlier and whose face I’m not sure I could still pick out in a photo. Maybe she even was my mother. At least that’s what she said when I sat at the table and she served me a plate of paella. It felt like one of those situations where it’s hard, very hard, to tell if you’ve entered a novel or if you’re in real life. It was chicken paella, kosher. What I gleaned from her incoherent monologue was that her son had disappeared during the Lebanon war and now she was convinced that I was her son. She gave herself justifications for why I didn’t speak Hebrew, “Of course, it must have been a very difficult trauma” was her explanation. She was from Tetouan, like my friend Charly, and her speech reminded me of Andalusian Spanish mixed with years of disuse and of forgetting the language. Very different from how Charly spoke. Then she said she never doubted I was alive, or rather that her son was alive, Uri.

“I always sensed it, I always sensed you were alive.”

“Well, alive I am. Or at least I have that feeling of aliveness that people have when they’re alive.”

“And I also knew that before I died, I would see you.

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