- Leon got it easy, his death was a blessing, he died in Jerusalem when he was only eight years old and didn’t need to live through all this.
Zemer
David Zemer was about to join the army. His house on Jabotinsky St. in Netanya had a view to the sea. Western sunsets were too different, he loved them. It was only a few days ago he found out that his real surname is Benzimra. He was furious, even though he didn’t really understand why and what about.
His father, Jacob Benzimra came to Israel in 1952, one of the first ones that came from Tetouan. He was a successful insurance agent, especially among the big French community in the city.
“What is it to you if I changed my name in 1954? That was my decision and my decision only, I didn’t even know your mom back then, you weren’t even planned, what did you expect me to do, to consult with you before you were even born!”
“I don’t understand what are you mad about? I am mad because you didn’t tell me this, you hid this from me, as if my grandfather just vanished, simply Zemer and that’s it, I lived without a past, with no grandfather, I didn’t know about my grandfather, you didn’t tell me anything, and it was clear we speak about the future only, you didn’t even tell me about moving to Israel, about your first years here, about Tetouan”
“What do you know about Tetouan?”
“Why is that Important, I know, I checked, I’m on your trails, no one can erase his past, I thought maybe you are a holocaust survivor and that is why you don’t talk about it, I thought you were hiding things, that you were in the Mossad, or in the Secret Services, I thought a million things in the past year, until I suddenly saw somebody that looked just like you so I went to him and said hello, then I realized it wasn’t you, but on the other hand, I felt I should speak with him, it was your cousin, Jacob Benzimra, you look so similar, you almost look like twins, he remembered you, he was happy to hear you are alive, he wondered what made you change your name, he told me everything about you, told me about you being a brilliant student in Tetouan, about how your parents wanted you to study medicine in Madrid, about the way you disappeared when you were twenty one, told me everything about my family, you see, coincidence will reveal the truth always, you can’t hide it, not for long, dad.
Jacob Zemer kept silent, for a while...
What will he say now, what can he say to his eighteen year old son, the same age he rebelled and decided to go to Israel. The same age, will his son rebel, has his attempts to become normal Israeli failed, will his son be able to understand what he went through in the fifties, will he understand he didn’t have any choice. He kept trying to say something but he couldn’t.
All he could say eventually was:
“Please don’t tell your sisters.”
“You are ashamed of it as well.”
“I’m not ashamed. I just don’t want you to traumatize them.”
“I already told them, not only did I tell them, but I also took money out of the savings account you opened in my name fifteen years ago, yesterday, the day I turned eighteen, and bought a flight ticket to Morocco. I am going to see what you wanted to forget, I’m going there.”
Jacob cried.
“I was wrong, OK, I was wrong, I recognized my mistake quick, two days after we got married, but there was no way back, you must understand, David, my beloved son, you need to understand, the fifties were not what you think they were, they were much worse than what you imagine, and I didn’t belong to nobody, not to these ones and not to the others, maybe nobody belonged to nothing, everybody wanted to be this utopian figure, the Israeli, the Tsabar, those who pushed me to change my name, and those who got pushed like I was, I can’t remember, I can’t understand, maybe you will understand, the whole atmosphere was very different, everything was different, I’m not even trying to find excuses, I don’t even want you to understand, I don’t even know why am I talking about that. I won’t talk about it nomore.”
“That’s your decision dad. But I will talk about it. I will find out everything about your past, which is my past too, and I want you to know, I’m changing my name to Benzimra, that is a much nicer name than Zemer, I’m changing it back to my original name. Your name.”
21
- Are we there yet mom?
- We’re here.
- I can finally see we arrived, the trees are green here,
- The trees are green and the skies are light blue,
- We’re together here, and we can see all of our past from here, that wasn’t so terrible, we learned a lot,
- We learned exactly what we didn’t want to learn, and what we needed to learn, the things we resisted were the most significant,
- It was a long Journey,
- The journey is still long,
- Exile didn’t end here,
- Exile is everlasting, God is exile
- He was in exile when he created us,
- Only in exile does a man get to know his God, this is why he made us people of exile,
- Exiles in their own land,
- Everybody feels like exiles in their own land, Israel is the biggest exile, it is the yearning, because there, only there, you can no longer dream about nothing but things that are no longer there, only there you can feel real exile, which is our religion, it’s our God, through it we can understand the suffering of the world, the long journey, and understand we will never get there.
Fernando
I feel I need to explain. The question is who do I need to explain to, but I need to explain. Because that is not the way a man should leave his home, his religion, and his family. To leave a steady job in Venezuela, the no-religion life, even with my mom’s catholic education, my Jewish wife, my son John Benzimra, and to come live in Jerusalem.
I need to explain to my mom, I need to explain to my dad. But first of all, after ten years in Jerusalem, and five years in the “I’ll soon be back” Yeshiva, after my third daughter was born, I need an explanation, I need a clear explanation for the things I did. It looks like I did what I did subconsciously, and yet, it is only reasonable that even things done subconsciously will be explained with time.
I’ll tell you mom, Marisol, I had to do it, ever since I found out my father was Jewish I just had to go, I couldn’t stay in Caracas for another day, first to Jerusalem and then to Tetouan. There is where I went to the cemetery, to my grandfather’s grave, the famous Moises Benzimra. There in the well-taken-care-of graveyard, I found my destiny, I realized that my father was Jewish and my son is Jewish, and that is why I can’t be the one breaking this ancient chain, that is why I, whose name was supposed to be Moshe as well, won’t be the one that disconnects everybody from their past, from the hundreds, or maybe even the thousands of years the Benzimra sons existed in the world, at that grave, next to the flowers of spring, I knew my life-course was set, in that exact moment. That was long after you passed away, and that is why I couldn’t share this with you, but I don’t think I would have shared it with you even if you were still alive, I don’t think anybody could have changed my mind in that moment. It was one of those moments you can’t even think in, one of those moments the modern world keeps running away from, the moment you stand in front of a truth that is clearly true, the moment you stand in front of a light, a burning bush, and you know that this burning bush will guide your way, that is the fire that will keep you warm for the rest of your life, you can’t even choose to burn in it, this fire will only warm you up in cold times, it will light your letters in the dark, but it will never burn the book, the book that is your life, the book that holds your past and future, it might be your family’s fire as well, in spite of you being Catholic, I maybe going back to your family’s Judaism even, that is what dad once said without noticing, he said you might be descendant to Anusim, that this was what your father told him, which I think is true, and I think it was destiny when you married a Jew, and me having a Jewish son is destiny too, coincidence can’t write a symphony, someone is connecting the notes, and even if the
music is in chaos at start, the picture will slowly reveal, it may take years sometimes, a generation even, but then the logic behind the notes reveals, the structure that leads to the end of this symphony. This ending is John, I know it is him, him, even more than you and dad with his will that led me to Jerusalem, he is the one who led me to the Yeshiva, and how bad is the pain of not having him with me now, how bad is the pain of him not visiting Jerusalem even once, if he came to see me here once he would have stayed, he would have found the light just like I did. My cousin Shmuel says I shouldn’t give up and that John will come to Jerusalem, and I believe him, but I’m losing my patience, I want him next to me, I want to study Torah with him. I want to study Masechet Hagiga with him.
The explanation will probably be simpler to my father, because I know that as I am happy for my son John and as bad as I feel his pain, deep inside he wanted me to be Jewish, maybe he avoided that, because of his love to you, maybe the years made him rough, but I now he wrote that will for a reason, and I know he is happy I am a Jew living in Jerusalem now, that I am a proper Benzimra, that I am in the Yeshiva. He sits there in the Yeshiva of above, and I hope that I had something to do with his privileges there, a man is grunted with his sons privileges too, maybe if he told me these things when he was still alive, or when I was young, he would have made the Jewish thing just a tasteless Biographical piece of information, and maybe the fact that I found out about this thing only after he died is the reason I'm here today.
And to John,
Yochanan, I really miss you.
22
At the first corner on the right, in front of the entrance, stood a dog wanting to eat my genitals I tried to feed him and all the food I gave him didn't satisfy his appetite. He wasn’t pleased. I ended up killing and burying it and out of the ground I buried it in, a pinkish red flower grew.
At the second corner, counter clockwise, which is the left corner in front of the gate, stood a palace, and in the basement of that palace stood another black and white dog surrounded with round faced demons that became visible alternately and I asked the dog how long has he been there for and he answered since 1272 and what was he guarding and he said he was guarding a big key and that this big key opens a gate in Granada.
When the demons fell they became birds and I ate them, later they came out of my punctures and a great light filled the basement where the dead dog laid with a smile of tranquility on his face I buried him as well, just as I did before and a similar flower grew again.
And after I cleaned myself I took the key and opened the gate in Granada and many Jews that hid in that house since the persecutions in Spain came out of it. And I took care of them, but it turned out that the Spanish government decided to compensate all of them and to house them next to Madrid.
At the third corner there were many bills and I took less than I needed thinking I can always go back there and take more and more bills.
And in the fourth corner stood a house with its blinds shut and in it some immigrants were sitting, tired from the long journey, fearing the authorities will throw them out again and I could have walked through the walls and comfort them, their hair was white because of the burden they carried with them, their kids hair was white as well and the mayor and the philosopher of the city came and convinced them that nothing bad will happen to them and started opening the blinds and when the light came in they couldn’t look at it and died and during all that time twelve women dressed in white danced around the house and Cohen arrived and everybody came back to life and their hair was beautiful and they mated and made babies and went to the high mountain next to the house and they could fly and part of them did fly down and there was a river there and they swam in it and cleansed in it and came back to the mountain and when they came back a whole city was built for them with private houses and gardens.
The key
David Benzimra was very happy that day. He finally received his Bar-Mitzvah present. He got the historical Scanner, the latest thing in computer games. With the scanner, he could finally find his family's story. The idea behind this scanner is that you place an object on it, and it can project that object's past, everyone that saw it. It was Granddad Moshe's present.
Big brother Moshe wanted to put the key in the box, but David played with some of his childhood's clothes, shoes and blankets. He watched himself going to bed and the watched the games he played when he was only one year old. That wasn't interesting.
After that he put the shoe wedding, and watched his genetic donors in their happiest and most ludicrous day of their lives.
"Look" said Moshe," look at his yarmulke falling off of his head, he breaks the glass, and all of his Family is there, even his dead grandmother. And aunt Simi too, she was nearly a hundred and seven years old back then, she passed away two weeks after the wedding, a different generation, a hundred and twenty years... but, let’s put the key there."
"Why should I care about your key, what will we watch with it, things that happened five hundred years ago, why would we be interested in that, I want to watch my life, my life."
"It is your life, aren't you interested in what happened to your family in Tetouan, all those stories, the stories about their wealth, about their houses, about what happened to them in Spain, everything you read about in Moshe Benzimra and Moshe Hatchwell's books, those were our ancestors, don't you want to see Hatchwell in Paris"
"Later, later, OK..."
Later took hours, until it was bedtime. They went to bed, but Moshe couldn’t hold back anymore, he woke up at two o'clock, to find his brother playing quietly on his computer. This time he was wearing his big sister's socks.
"Put the key in there!" he whispered, nearly shouting, Moshe.
"Not now." The whispers got louder. Their parents woke up and sent them back to bed, with a clear warning of taking the historical scanner and putting it away in the attic for a month if they find them on the computer again.
That didn’t stop them obviously. They woke up again, shouted again, hit each other too this time, woke their parents up, and were sent to bed with new warnings.
Eventually Moshe managed to get control over the computer, when his brother finally went to his Karate lesson. He put the key in. "The key, the key" he said to himself out loud. "The key of Granada, that's what they call it since 1272, it was passed from generation to generation. Disappears and reappears again and again, and now here I am, understanding why. The key will speak."
And it did, the screen showed people from the past, at first he saw Moshe Benzimra, his great-great grandfather, giving a speech about discrimination in the Hebrew University.
"Yes, tell them!" Moshe said. But suddenly, Moshe got off the stage and shouted at the people there "Mouth shutters!"
"Don't give up, keep going, you can win this" Moshe shouted forgetting that he can’t really hear him.
With the click of a button the key moved to Portugal. It was the sixteenth century, he saw a women wearing black in a small town, he understood immediately they were speaking in Portuguese, but he couldn’t understand a word, she puts the key in her pocket every morning. She lights a candle in the evening.
David came back from his lesson,
"You see, David, this is a Simi or a Rachel, she is one of your ancestors"
"She looks ugly, you put the key finally, take it out for me."
But then the computer moved to a huge bedroom in a huge castle, with a lot of naked women.
"Wait a minute" David said, "Wait a minute."
"Ah... it is getting interesting now, ah..."
"Who are they anyway?"
"We don't know, and we can't ask them, but those are people that held the key then."
The women started to massage each other and hug. It was some kind of a party, not a real orgy, not really sexual, but it had that kind of atmosphere.
"Should I carry on?" Moshe asked.
"No, no, wait. Leave it like this for a bit. Let's see who is coming."
But two hours
passed and no one showed up. The women kept going.
"Shall I shut it down?"
"The problem is that we won’t be able to go back to this image again. Things that disappear can only show up randomlyagain."
"We’ll save it, we can ask dad.”
“No, we mustn’t ask mom or dad, they don’t need to know we put the key in the scanner.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why, but they don’t need to know that. You will understand when you grow up.”
They were immediately moved to a synagogue with simple wooden chairs. Why was the key in the synagogue, maybe it belonged to the collector. A lot of people prayed there, but you could clearly recognize some Benzimra faces.
“Enough! Leave it, it confuses me.”
Moshe pressed the button again, now it showed a big rally, and in its center, somebody was shouting, and the crowd cheered and clapped.
“I’ve been carrying this key for the last thousand years and no one will stop me, now, nothing will help them, not even trials or lawsuits, we will get stronger, the Sepharadim will get stronger, they won’t be able to erase hundreds of years of our culture, as tough as they get, I don’t understand how come this system always works in favor of the Ashkenazim and against our minister, I ask myself how many people are now serving sentence because the system didn’t work for them too, they gage war and we reach out our hands in peace, but no more! No more! They talk about law and order, but all of the judges are Ashkenazim”
“Don’t touch it,” Moshe shouted “I want to hear this”
“What is this? It’s boring.”
“A few more minutes”
“They speak of justice and the supremacy of the courts because it serves their interests, because verdicts are being ruled in secret rooms, the truth is not out, and this country demands justice, just as it always did, this land demands justice, it demands justice, the ground shouts justice, the trees shout justice, Jerusalem demands justice and not fancy buildings for the courts of law, a justice the simple man can understand, not the justice of vague phrasings that serve the judges and the ones they represent only, this land demands justice and if justice isn’t made, it will give death...”
Keys to Tetouan Page 12
