The Last Jews of Kerala by Edna Fernandes

Author:Edna Fernandes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Son of Salem

“Courage has never been known to be a matter of muscle; it is a matter of the heart. The toughest muscle has been known to tremble before an imaginary fear. It was the heart that set the muscle trembling.”

—GANDHI, 1931

Every town has its maverick. In Mattancherry’s Jew Town that man was Gamy Salem: self-confessed cynic, scourge of convention and one who viewed the Cochini Jews’ checkered history with an unsparingly critical eye. He came from one of the Cochini Jewry’s most distinguished dynasties, a family of iconoclasts. His father had been known as the “Jewish Gandhi.”

The elder Salem had five children: two daughters and three sons. The sons, Raymond, Balfour and Gamy, all inherited the Salem spirit, but only Gamy survives still. In the 1950s, Gamy’s brother Balfour defied the conservative White elders by marrying Baby Koder, daughter of a prominent White Jewish family. It was the first intermarriage and blew apart the old dividing line. In a way, he was continuing his father’s work of breaking down barriers. Where A. B. Salem had used the law and nonviolent protests like his mentor Gandhi, his son Balfour changed local history by standing by his love for Baby.

Gamy also followed his brother in marrying a White Jewess, Reema, although things were much easier by the time their turn came. Sitting in his front parlor on Synagogue Lane, we would speak for hours on end. I came to enjoy our afternoon interludes over glasses of fizzy Mirinda and snacks. “Jew Town’s sole skeptic” as he called himself was a welcome relief from the prickliness of some of his neighbors. His approach to life was not bound by the strictures of orthodoxy and status. One sensed that for Gamy the world held deeper pleasures, more sparkling sensations than those of the synagogue and tradition. Here was an old man with a taste for trouble and an appetite for wider possibilities in life, even now, in his eighth decade.

When it came to his community, he feigned indifference, even amusement at this narrow little world, yet clearly he was deeply bound to it—despite his best efforts to disguise the fact that he cared. He remained one of the few willing to confront the past and future honestly. As one of the Black Jews in Ernakulam put it, “Gamy’s the only fellow over there who’s not a damned fool.”

Indeed, he was no fool, although sometimes he liked to play one. He was funny and kind with it. Strangers were drawn to his door by the tantalizing delights of easy conversation, bad jokes, worse whisky and fizzy drinks that glowed like radioactive waste. Seeing me stalking Synagogue Lane day in, day out, amused him. He would watch me from his doorway, feign horror, pretend to hide and then tease: “Your Enemy Number One (Sammy Hallegua) has gone to the market. I can talk for two minutes, then I have an urgent appointment to play bridge with my old ladies in Fort Cochin.” He wasn’t kidding about timing conversations.

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