South of Sepharad by Eric Z. Weintraub

Author:Eric Z. Weintraub
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: History Through Fiction LLC
Published: 2023-06-27T01:30:53+00:00

Every day that Catalina walked through La Judería to her parents’ old home, she saw Granada transform. Workers broke off the clay Stars of David from the fronts of the temples and schoolhouses and erected tall crucifixes on the lawns in their place. New families moved into the abandoned houses. The Ibn Ezras became the Zamoras, the Hagornis became the Machados, and the Yudahs became the Guerreros. At first, the changes made her want to weep. The monarchs had already committed an evil enough act by exiling her family. Now they were going to erase any evidence of their existence? She attempted to convince herself that the altered neighborhood shouldn’t disturb her. What did she expect would happen—that everything Jewish would be preserved in spite of the banishment? She reminded herself not to be bothered and prayed to Christ that the Jews of Granada never learn of the fate of their old Judería.

Ochoa had purchased her family’s home to give her father money to buy the horse and cart, and Catalina checked the house every day to make sure no squatters occupied it. The air inside felt stale without the five bodies of her family passing through. The rooms smelled of mildew and dust, no matter how much she cleaned them. Sometimes the sound of her father’s voice, a cough, or a sneeze emanated from the wall, a reminder that this was the closest she’d come to hearing her father again. How soon until all sound that remained in the walls escaped? She counted the days until her family’s first letter arrived from Fez.

Gabriel suggested they move into the home, but Catalina could not imagine raising a family of her own, laughing, and growing old in a place that her family was forced to abandon. She told Gabriel she was not comfortable living in a neighborhood now inhabited by the monarchs’ soldiers and their families, and that she did not want to go into labor in the house alone while he was away at work. They compromised that they would live with his parents until the baby was born. “But we cannot leave it vacant forever,” he said. “It was a gift from Father. It will insult him if we neglect it.”

After tending to her family’s home, she continued down the vacant serpentine alleyways of La Judería to the east end of town to honor a promise she’d made to her mother. The cemetery was small and hidden behind a newly converted Catholic school, where a crucifix mounted to the wall above the entryway covered the sun-damaged tan line of where a Star of David once stood. In the cemetery, Catalina traversed obstacles of gravestones to reach her sister’s headstone at the northeast end of the cemetery. At Sarah’s grave, she placed a bouquet of pomegranate flowers. It was not a Jewish custom, and she considered picking up rocks scattered throughout the cemetery grass to lay on the grave instead, for stones were a more permanent memento to leave on

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