MADRID —
Sepharad is the old Hebrew word for Spain. Sephardic Jews are those who trace their origin to the expulsions from the Iberian peninsula starting in 1492. I am currently in Spain making a documentary for BBC World Service radio about the half-millennium history of Sephardic Jewry. The best part of this work is research and a new novel has helped me enormously.
Mazaltob is a romance not a romantic novel.
It is a romance in its older meaning of a sad chronicle of a love. The tale is set in Tetouan, a town in northern Morocco, the other side of the Rif mountains from Tangier. As Jews and Muslims headed across the Strait of Gibraltar after being expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella this was an early place of settlement. Spain was a short sail away and perhaps the people who settled there thought the political winds might change and they could go back.
That didn’t happen and by the turn of the 20th century, when the story is set, the place has become as ruled by tradition as Tevye and his daughter’s home town of Anatevka in Shalom Aleichem’s stories. The modern world can no longer be kept at bay and its effect, particularly on young women is not yet liberating, rather, it is disturbing.
Blanche Bendahan’s heroine Mazaltob — the Sephardic spelling of Mazeltov, Hebrew for Good Luck — is beautiful and bright and talented and trapped by tradition and for the novel’s length the author keeps us wondering if she will be able to step into the modern world.
I’m not a big reader of either romance or romantic fiction but Mazaltob held me for its 125 plus pages. Partially, because the heroine, is vividly described at the start of the book. It opens:
She is a ravishing little girl …
Then she is described as beautiful five times, and we are still on page one. Also on this first page we are told all the things she has been forbidden to do as a child: play in parks, run free through the country side, care for small animals. There is no evil step-parent forbidding her from childhood pleasure, it is clear that this is just the way it is in Tetouan’s Judéria for female children who are already being trained for their destinies of arranged marriage, producing children and guarding the hearth.
And without hitting a reader over the head, Bendahan has us wishing this very special young woman will be able to walk out into a countryside she has only glimpsed once through Tetouan’s city gates and find her way in the world.
In her terse, exceptionally modern style, Bendahan describes the various rituals of the Sephardic home, the courtship and negotiations for a husband and the ways in which the 20th century is pressing for entry into community life.
As the 20th century begins people are leaving for the wider Sephardic diaspora, particularly in South America: Argentina and Venezuela. At the same time, emancipated Ashkenazic Jews are arriving from France and points east bringing with them Enlightenment ideas of freedom of thought and action.
In the book, one of them, comes to Tetouan to work as a physician and is constantly trying to breathe a little liberating life into this tradition-trapped society.
Bendahan deftly weaves the dramatic tension — will Mazaltob escape her fate and enter a world beyond obligation — with observations of the society in which the young woman is trapped. Marriage is a constant topic.
“LOVE? Is that the name you give that stupid folly which lasts a few days, a few months, and sometimes a few years … ? What’s all of that in the face of a saintly lifelong marriage? No, Bralakoff, no, my dear doctor, love does not exist. There is family and home.”
She has humorous observations about Sephardic snobbery towards Ashkenazic Jews (a snobbery we Ashkenazim have long sent back at them):
But can we even expect of her — a foreigner, an Ashkenazi —the same thing we expect of a tetouani? Isn’t it unfortunate enough for the poor girl to belong to the plebeian branch of Israel?
Our ancestors, Jews from Spain who emigrated from Palestine well before the destruction of the Second Temple, never lived through the terrible siege of Jerusalem. They never experienced the painful humiliation of bearing the yoke of their enemy.
Their history had been brilliant until their exile from Spain following the decree of March 1492. They took part in royal councils and set up their tents through military campaigns. They even earned titles of nobility, flaunting coats of arms and had vassals of their own.
“Even” had titles of nobility. Really?
Bendahan explores a truth of unending exile: communities are held together by increasingly rigid rules of conduct and ritual. These are handed down the generations through interpretation by community leaders. As the societies around them change they cling to the past until the chasm between the exiles in the present and the wider contemporary society becomes unbridgeable.
Blanche Bendahan knew whereof she wrote. She came from a North African Sephardic background. She was born in 1893 in Oran, Algeria, a little further east from Tetouan along the North Africa coast. She was educated in France but lived most of her life in Oran. She was a poet and wrote occasional pieces for journals on all manner of subjects: artistic and political. Mazaltob was her first novel and it was given a prize by the Academie Francaise in 1930, the year it was published, a unique honor for a Jewish woman to receive.
I found out about the book because one of my interviewees for the BBC project, Professor Frances Malino of Wellesley College had just translated Mazaltob into English with a younger colleague, Yaëlle Azagury. I read it before intervewing them thinking the book would be a bit of academic archaeology, necessary to read to have a focus for the interview. It isn’t. It is a sad little gem of a book, not a historical curiosity but something to be read for all the good reasons you read a novel
In addition, this edition has the benefit of a very informative, academic-jargon free forward by Professor Malino. It is an excellent introduction to the origins of Sephardic Judaism and how its North African branch was brought into the modern world.
Another book I’ve been reading while looking for Sepharad is Richard Zimler’s The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon. The novel is a murder mystery built around a forgotten massacre of Jews — there have been so many over the millennia it’s impossible to remember them all. In 1506, 2000 Jews were massacred in Lisbon, many burned alive in a massive conflagration in the Rossio, Lisbon’s main square.
Zimler is an American who has lived in Portugal since 1989. Written in English, the book was first published nearly 30 years ago in Portuguese translation after it had been turned down by 25 publishers in New York. It became a best-seller in Portugal which led Overlook Press — which as the name implies publishes overlooked manuscripts — to bring it out in the US, where it also became a best-seller.
Zimler turned that success into a series and has written six further novels tracing the family of Berekiah Zarco, the title character, over the last 500 years. Zimler researches his story with academic breadth and rigor but wears it very lightly when he sits down to write. The Last Kabbalist is informative and entertaining and a thorough imagining of the catastrophe that cast the Jews of Iberia out into the world into a double exile: the first, from the place the Romans called Judaea, has come to an end. The second, from Sepharad, continues to this day.
I am hoping to get there later this week. The book is a very good and quick read.
You've sparked a memory! I know we've been to Tetouan, while visiting Morocco in 2015. Means I may have to read Mazaltob. Sounds enticing, thx!