Unmasking Spanish Faces

...This is not of course to applaud the expulsions, but to note an irony, one of the thousand or so too many that Jews have suffered...

...No, no...

...during the war Franco sent agents into several Axis-occupied countries with a renewal of a 1924 Spanish law that offered Spanish citizenship to Sephardim who would request it...

...Without fortunate birth, and with no formal education beyond the required, he has become a successful man in his village— restaurateur, builder, orchard-owner, once a fisherman, only occasionally now...

...Samuel Hux, a frequent contributor to moment, also writes for Dissent, Commonweal and Worldview...

...My mind slips sideways for a moment...

...he could be someone else, unique but familiar...

...And sometimes, less often, one means the Spain of Catholic-Gentile purity and the Spain of racial complexity...

...It did not work entirely, as Raul Hilberg's figures show (in The Destruction of European Jewry...

...he appreciates the attention I pay the patriarch, that I come by even when not to eat...

...After almost five centuries in Greece, the Jew told my friend in beautiful Renaissance Castil-ian, the key to the lost family house in Toledo still passed between generations...

...Just so...

...Inotehis speech: it indeliberate, grammatically precise, sonorous...

...As is so often the case in such instances, Spain's self-imposed tragedy gave a richness to the rest of the world: those Jews who left before the Inquisition, especially after the pogroms of 1391, and those who left with the expulsion decree enforced in 1492...

...perhaps confused with that immediately above, a Greek face reminding us of one of the more precious archeological finds in Spain of modern times, La Dama de Elche, near Valencia...

...Or had not a Sephardic Lopez left Spain to become a French de Louppes, the great essayist Montaigne would have had no mother—and I'd be without one hero...

...had my friend read it...

...he is, in truth, something of a talker, which not all of his neighbors appreciate...

...if there is more than less I do not see it...

...The easy explanation is that Franco had such a de Gaulle-like notion of Spanish honor that he could not bear to see it tampered with by any stretch of the historical imagination...

...Sometimes one means the Spain of the rich and the Spain of the poor, sometimes conservative "White" Spain and radical "Red" Spain, sometimes Catholic Spain and anti-clerical Spain, sometimes the Spain which proudly and defiantly accepted its cultural exclusion from Enlightened Europe ("Africa begins at the Pyrenees") and the Spain which hungered northward...

...they bear their names, you know...

...But the key as well: "I felt locked out of something...

...Whatever wherever, exactly!— someone might say...

...Isn't there something macho about that notion...

...A fisherman asked me recently if I'd read a book by another Samuel, or maybe it was Solomon, he thought, about the Jews of Russia...

...A son enters, smiles respectfully to his father, beams knowingly at me...

...There is a metaphysical principle here...

...With all respects to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, or whatever other WASPish enclave seems appropriate, I'd expect it less there...

...Two live here with him and his wife: one will probably settle here, the other...

...a Roman face reminding us of where Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese came from...

...of my grandfather...

...My eldest son is the image of my father in appearance and in habit, and my youngest son...

...Well...

...But say he doesn't: it will make no more difference, from a singular perspective, than the probable settler's settling, which itself makes no more difference than the geographical distance of the first three...

...Why talk of Spain...

...a Visigothic face to be found on any street in Munich...

...One can see a Celtic face reminiscent of an hotelier in Cardiff, Dublin, or Brest...

...But when his erstwhile ally invaded Greece, Franco sent word to Hitler that if he valued Spain's friendship and (crabbily) promised aid, the Salonikan Jews were not to be touched, were to be considered Spanish citizens...

...One can provide his own favored examples of the close and distant offspring of this long exodus...

...I let this impression impose its own weight...

...It cannot be circumscribed in time...

...I watch his face as he talks: he is very intense, has a deep inner life, no doubt about it...

...His article "Why History, Why Funerals...

...But, if Franco had not noticed, would the world have noticed that he hadn't...

...One needn't trust this as a deep sentiment in every case, for intellectuals speaking of racial or ethnic matters tend sometimes to fake a fashionable retrospective historical guilt...

...and Jewish faces from . . . Spain...

...I usually admit that I'm not, preferring to tell the truth...

...But efficient or not, it was not an idle, one-shot gesture...

...Jewish...

...And then a different quality of impression, even less documentable: I have a Spanish friend, patriarch of a large family...

...appeared in moment in June 1981...

...I fear that if I force analogies it will seem as too-much-protested to some as it probably seems sheer illusion to others...

...And with too much argument, a delicate private certainty might disappear under some critical apparatus...

...Perhaps the Salonikan had, I thought-why be so suspicious when life rhymes with art...

...In a 1940 broadcast Franco had spoken in extenuation of the persecution of "certain races" elsewhere in Europe and praised the foresight of Isabel and Fernando, "the Catholic Monarchs," for the fifteenth-century expulsion decrees...

...We westerners of enlightened persuasion are so foolish in our attempts to avoid the cliche that we often pretend we cannot tell the difference between the physiognomies of a typical Hamburger and a typical Neopolitan, or feel that we shouldn't try to...

...Or one can choose his own examples of the conversos, or of the close or distant offspring of those Jews who accepted conversion, and they are legion: from Luis de Santangel, chancellor to Fernando of Aragon and champion of Columbus, and Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor himself, to the rumored, because of name, Generalissimo Francisco Franco y Bahamonde...

...I could be somewhere else...

...Wouldn't you feel a newcomer if you heard someone speaking, naturally, Shakespearean...

...Two offspring are married and live abroad as does another who is not...

...In any case, you never hear "really German" (Visigothic) and seldom "really Celtic" unless you're in Galicia...

...Certainty...

...Conversation with an elderly Lithuanian Jew in a Horn and Hardart's many years ago...

...I thought the following story was a common apocryphal anecdote, until a trusted and travelled Spanish friend told me of his experience of meeting a Salonikan Jew...

...I listen to him intently, and I know he enjoys lecturing me...

...he is proud of his father, and somewhat in awe...

...One meets a Spaniard who says, in an offhand manner to explain something or other, "We're all really Jewish, you know...

...Nor can the family be circumscribed in space...

...Baruch Spinoza, for instance (Spanish or Portuguese Jew?—it hardly matters, Portugal being now a county, now a kingdom, and not fully independent of Spain until the seventeenth century...

...The family is not so puny a thing that it can be destroyed...

...I am not speaking of Franco the rumored descendent of conversos, but a Franco with a Spanish sense that someone in the national family was missing...

...If one knows much Spanish history he is not prepared—although perhaps he should be—for the Spaniard's interest in, concern for, sometimes obsession with, things Jewish...

...There is a poem by Jose Luis Borges, Una Have en Salonica...

...What has happened that is so amazing...

...The Castilian: "Older than Cervantes would have spoken...

...I'll explain that to you some time...

...and tragedy...

...Moving, a work of genius...

...Spain succeeded in imposing orthodoxy upon itself, but it did not, it can thank the gods, succeed in totally eliminating all its "impure" ethnic strains...

...There is less, somehow, of this generational similarity among the females...

...I recalled then the story of Franco and the Jews of Salonika—which will never be adequately explained, since there are so many ordinary explanations...

...Still . . . (I said I would not do this...

...No, not really...

...I timidly propose...

...joyful this day, somewhat doomful the week before...

...You do not understand...

...but there is sufficient...

...a Moorish face from North Africa—for not all the converted Arabs, moriscos, could have been expelled in 1609, many of them disappearing before that into the Spanish-speaking population...

...But we're in his restaurant actually...

...One thing one learns about Spain, be there enough, is to trust the ironic and avoid the super-clear...

...but the first who said it to me was a manager of a cafeteria, of scant schooling and ordinary mind...

...Does it weigh anything...

...I could mention, to sustain myself and whatever it is that's impressing me, the shocks of recognition others I know have received in Toledo, official center of Spanish Catholicism and once home of Sephardic culture, or while in conversation with a tailor in Oviedo, a priest in Cordoba, a whatever wherever...

...he's too young for one to say...

...He tells me about the village, recalls this learned man and that, remembers an event from el aho '36, discourses on the radical change of flora a bare fifteen kilometers away, traverses a dialectic of nacionalismo and localismo, pronounces upon Cervantes, explains the reasons for the Russian Revolution...

...I'm not Jewish, no one is buttering me up— although, in Spain, I'm sometimes taken to be because of my first name and my stateless surname...

...machismo is another thing, es otra cosa...

...Of what...

...Or el senor becomes more personal, in a distinctly philosophical style...

...Casticismo (purity) on the one hand, and on the other the darkly remembered shameful acts of the past and the underground knowledge of each present since...

...nor can distance destroy it...

...And if one looks and discriminates more closely one begins to refine the observations...

...You can have experiences like this—philosophical patriarchs, the world their oyster with pearly metaphysics—in New York, London, Boston, Montreal...

...But if one went by the names of the Sephardim, half of Spain would be ethnically Jewish to some degree...

...His family provided for, children educated, he spends more time now in his chosen avocation of polymath...

...But if we're honest, we see in Spain faces that strike us as oh so Spanish—and we needn't mean sleepy eyes and a skinny Franco mustache...

...Being more than biology, mere proximity did not create it...