Also Portugal
Stiller, Nikki
ALSO PORTUGAL NIKKI STILLER In an old Jewish story, the King of Portugal sends his chief adviser to the King of Spain in order to arrange a marriage between one of the Spanish princesses and the...
...Or, more precisely, I felt that all the Jews in Lisbon were already in the synagogue...
...But what about the tenuous tie of feeling...
...She came over to me, and drawing me further from the dark people, explained who they were: Jewish refugees from Iran...
...The stores were closing and the restaurants were crowded...
...In looking for the lost Marranos, the Jews of Amarante, I had come across those those who chose exile rather than adopt the trappings of the dominant society...
...She recounted with enthusiasm how all the political parties and representatives from the diverse religious groups had been called in by the government to give their opinion of the one religious MP, a Catholic, of course...
...The director had been the suitor in question, and Bensaude's mother the best friend of the director's wife...
...His response: "I don't know: They are idiots, all of them, including my children...
...Now there was only one Jew in Porto outside of her immediate family, and he lived some 40 miles away...
...In 1950, the community in Lisbon numbered 1,000 souls...
...all the other ships in Jaffa harbor had sailed away to escape Egyptian Are, but his men continued to unload while bombs exploded all around them...
...For what language would he use now...
...Senhora Zymmerman, for that was her name, described the situation in brief...
...ALSO PORTUGAL NIKKI STILLER In an old Jewish story, the King of Portugal sends his chief adviser to the King of Spain in order to arrange a marriage between one of the Spanish princesses and the heir to the Portuguese crown...
...it was a Marrano, calling to ask when the Dia de Deus—the Lord's Day—was to fall this year: He wanted to fast...
...I believe she sees herself as the spokesperson for Libson Jewry...
...Yvette Davidoff stressed that the Portuguese in general are not racists: one million black Angolans had been absorbed by these eight million peacefully...
...I admired Yvette Davidoff immensely...
...Although he did not appear to lack for anything, the state, he said, had "robbed" him...
...At one o'clock in the morning, Bensaude drove me back to my hotel, and before I bid him good night, we reflected on this thing...
...The problem was that the flour would have to be delivered while the harbor was under Egyptian bombardment...
...Senhor Naya roared with laughter, and I realized, as did he, that in the bright, bland cheerfulness of the present, the priest's reply had some piquancy: He had thought he'd gotten rid of us centuries ago once and for all...
...And that, my dear," Yvette Davidoff said with finality, "is the tragedy of the Jews...
...Here he hesitated...
...Various townspeople approached him on business, the last being a priest...
...The world seemed once more without Jews...
...No," he said, "I must begin it in a different way," and started over, in the Azores, in the home of his great-uncle, who owned the tobacco factory...
...And was it true that there were only five Jews in the city of Porto...
...the Lisbon community hoped such employment would give their young people a sense of pride and power...
...The wind that sweeps Lisbon even on warm nights began to whip our clothes...
...how the Jews in Spain during the War had been confined to DP camps but in Portugal had been free...
...Bensaude had received its purchase money at the St...
...The northern part of Portugal— above Porto itself but not yet in the winegrowing Minho—must contain hundreds of villages like Amarante, charming enclaves among steep, green ranges, an economy almost purely agricultural, and a smiling, curious population still set in peasant ways who would seem not to know or care about candles on Fridays or a sprinkling of names like da Silva and Cardozo...
...This explained the broadcloth of the man, the woman's kerchief, the girl's sobriety, the ungainly parcels and the intensity of the eyes on the horizon...
...There must be five thousand...
...Do you know what he replied when I asked him if he knew of any Jews in Amarante...
...These people, too, would of necessity learn new languages, take on the manners of new countries, in the way that Jews must in order to survive...
...Must one do anything at all...
...The room contained photos of ships—freighters—at dock...
...Approximately 50 Israelis live in Lisbon but with the exception of the ambassador and his wife, they never appear in the synagogue, nor do they maintain ties of other kinds with the community...
...And then he turned back to a real customer...
...asked Bensaude...
...The family and its in-laws had come from Austria, among the 40,000 Jews who had sought and found refuge in Portugal during World War II...
...For example, a war in the 19th century between two royal brothers—Don Miquel and Don Pedro— one of whom was Governor of Brazil and the other, the more reactionary, King of Portugal—caused many Jews to leave Portugal proper for the safer Azores and for South...
...The Queen chatted with Bensaude's mother...
...Approaching, I saw a group of people on the street, and a woman standing over varicolored parcels stacked at the curb...
...An appointment in the Mairie was arranged: Although he was a public figure, and much occupied with an upcoming wine-and-potato festival, the mayor's assistant agreed to receive me the next day...
...One day in the factory, I kissed that girl...
...And was this family connected with the synagogue...
...the loose fit of the man's jacket reminded me of that of the Arab workers in Jerusalem...
...And when I said that I did not know but would have to look it up, he was disappointed, and pointed out that part of the problem of looking for Marranos or their descendants is that secrecy concerning one's origins may Nikki Stiller is Assistant Professor of Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology...
...Thus she had seen the Jewish community swell and subside...
...government wished to use to take certain American cargoes to Africa...
...Spanish authorities boarded, and inquired of the captain whether he had any contraband on his ship...
...Yet it was true that I had encountered no one who reacted to my Star of David, and the few people whom I had seen wearing them, when asked if they were "Hebrew," replied in the negative...
...Yes, too true, unfortunately...
...I went to my mother and told her this...
...The brothers had not a penny, but the captain took pity on "the poor devils," as Bensaude said, and paid the pound sterling for each...
...A few minutes after my arrival at his apartment, he got up, with difficulty, and turned off the TV set...
...Once again through his mother, the copper was found...
...exclaimed Bensaude...
...Still restless and unsatisfied, I recalled having seen a fabric store called "Finkelsztein" on the main street, and recalled also having seen two portraits in the synagogue that bore the same name...
...His history, his family, that of the Jews in Portugal: From nine o'clock that night until one in the morning, the saga unfolded...
...however, contact with the Israelis had a very different effect...
...Now," Bensaude said, "I will have to confess I did something wicked...
...After that experience, however, they changed their name from Bensalim to Bensaude...
...But of all the things he had done in his life, he was proudest of having fed those 700,000 people...
...And it occurred to me then that perhaps in order to be a Jew at all, there must be another Jew about, or at least someone who knows what a Jew is...
...He had arrived in America...
...Several weeks later Bensaude received a telegram—which he showed me—signifying that the delivery had indeed been made...
...Bensaude, roaring with laughter, then proposed a toast to Sarah, a kind of Israeli Yellow Rose...
...He looked at me incredulously...
...Now, what can I do for you, my dear...
...and, in a far corner, a sad young man watching the scene...
...The husband wanted to buy some fruit—which he calls fruitka— and our guard pointed to the store across the street...
...Moreover, she did not try to conceal the problems of the Lisbon Jewish community, but spoke openly...
...It is a tragic way to end, isn't it...
...Before the revolution, many Jews sent their children to Israel because they, like Bensaude's mother half a century before, did not wish them to fight in Africa in a losing cause...
...Fernandez in French how many people used this beautiful synagogue, whether the entire congregation was Sephardic, and if there were many conversos among the congregants...
...Shortly thereafter one of her ladies-in-waiting came to the Bensaude's door (Papa was hunting grouse from the family lodge...
...She took a ring from her finger and told me, 'Take this, sell the diamonds, and go where you feel you must.'" Bensaude set out to look for Maria...
...Her family had come to Porto, and built the synagogue for other Jews who they thought would follow...
...What do you mean...
...In these mountains, many Jews settled after the Portuguese had given them the choice of dispersion, relocation in the colonies, or conversion to the Catholic faith...
...But then, what is a Jew...
...exclaimed Yvette Davidoff," neither Bensaude nor any of his family now living...
...The tourist office in New York had warned me that Jewish continuity in the mountains was "a fable," so I was willing to concede that Jewish Amarante was, perhaps, to be found only in the archives...
...The Senhora replied that she would be happy to, since she knew everything about the training of a voice, not having much of one herself...
...Was it possible that there were only five Jews in the city of Porto...
...I asked her about the Marranos...
...He found her in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and at the advice of a priest he met on the train from Grand Central Station, he placed her in the East Providence School for Girls, after having bought for her a sailor suit so that she would look like an American while learning to behave like one...
...Five...
...In concluding each story, Bensaude would rise, and, as if to assure himself as much as me, would take me by the hand and lead me to documents, photographs, telegrams—all pinned up on the walls of the apartment...
...Boston...
...I went into a pastelleria and had a croquette and a coffee and watched the families enjoying the eggy sweets of Portugal, cloying concoctions of pineapple, coconut and sugar, far too sweet for my palate...
...The building gleamed: Outside it was indistinguishable from a church, except for its Star of David, but inside it seemed to have the unbroken serenity of a mosque, and indeed the Sephardic design of the titles— azuleizos—and the restrained arabesques of the mahagony were definitely of Eastern origin...
...She was in fact born in Vienna, of a Sephardic mother and an Ashkenazic father, and fled from the Nazis to Lisbon in the thirties, along with thousands of Jews...
...Jose Bensaude had lived in New York for 30 years...
...For who would resent another's presence here in these pleasant highlands, their rug-gedness tempered by the moderating influence of the not-too-distant sea...
...He went on about the world of the Rothschilds and the Ullmans and royalty, a European version of Our Crowd...
...He bought a car for himself and a fur coat for Maria...
...lead eventually to utter ignorance of what those origins are...
...Since this was a Jewish romance, the young man had to make a living also...
...If the lack of Jewish presence in Porto was in some way connected with the scant number of bookstores in the city, the monolingual citizens and a more or less provincial temperament, I thought, so be it...
...He admitted to having two Jews...
...He's a hero...
...We found ourselves winding down by speaking of Portuguese tolerance: how Salazar, despite or because of his religiosity, had been pro-Jewish and a friend of the former president of the congregation...
...I decided to go back to the hotel and hide...
...Because," replied the Israeli, now an official, "/ was the one who paid Sarah to keep him in bed...
...The New Christians, as they were called, probably found it easier to maintain dual religious affiliations far from the Chief Inquisitor's scrutiny, and away from the courts and their autos-da-fe...
...According to Yvette Davidoff, the Israelis influenced the young people to scorn the synagogue...
...Yvette Davidoff is a small, sturdy woman of proud bearing whom one does not quite see as Portuguese...
...Whatever do you mean...
...He introduced himself: an 87-year-old man whose daughter had died some months past...
...The chief adviser, returning, reports to the King that the match has met with conditional acceptance, the condition being that the Portuguese banish all those of Jewish blood...
...America (c...
...Yeats wrote that many times man lives and dies between his "two eternities," that of race and that of soul...
...Since I knew of all the old Jewish families of Portugal not one of the younger generation remained within the Jewish community, I asked him how a Jew could give up such a wealth, a heritage, of feeling...
...Naturally, I did not believe him, and when he informed me that visitors from other countries kept up the synagogue, I was too frustrated by what I considered his dim wits to give him any money...
...Photos courtesy of the Portuguese Consulate...
...The brothers must have prospered quickly, for another century or so saw them connected with some of the most prestigious Jewish families in Europe, such as the Ullmans of France .'These Portuguese Jews, no less than their cousins once sprung from the Frankfurt ghetto, took chances, developed industries no others had thought of cultivating, and spun networks of credit throughout Europe and the New World...
...whose wife, in a nursing home, scarcely knew him...
...But Bensaude was not simply proud of his financial success: He was proud of the uses he had put it to, one of them having been the running of equipment to U.S...
...Senhor Naya escorted me down the stairs of the library...
...And how do you know about this...
...Nor had I met "frith the shrewd, assessing glances I had found typical of my co-religionists...
...Two Israelis had visited him, having heard that he was a Portuguese of Jewish descent...
...He became involved in shipping, his life's work, sailing for 30 years under the Portuguese flag...
...Well," replied the captain, "Do you know why the ship stayed in the harbor for a week and unloaded while the other ships took off and could not deliver their cargo...
...Despite these successes, Bensaude's career in shipping and his philanthropic endeavors came to an unsatisfactory end...
...these converted spouses took more of an interest in the synagogue than did her children, born Jews...
...the office began to fill with pragmatic types whose business it is to run the synagogue...
...Yvette Davidoff answered him politely, shrugging the inquiry off...
...The Israeli confessed he had known...
...A year later, he came across one of his original Israeli contacts and told him the story...
...And how would they make their way in the new life...
...The people were dark but did not look Portuguese...
...If you are angry, then everyone will be fired, not just me.'" And to make sure that he left her alone, Maria, her entire family weeping, set out for America...
...It was too late...
...A capable, organized, professional-looking woman, I realized that she could manage excellently in a half-dozen different languages, including Ladino...
...I realized that while I was not willing to sacrifice my individuality for even one hour to sit in the women's gallery in the Lisbon synagogue, these people had sacrificed their world...
...The Queen of Portugal for example, visited a church where his mother, restless in Lisbon after her hotel de ville in Paris, had taught the working women of the parish to sing Bach cantatas...
...The firm wrote back that it would probably be safe for them in the Southern Algarve, away from the center of the Inquisition...
...The ship with its cargo of flour set out...
...I returned to Porto...
...They asked if they, as Jews, could safely return to the mainland, as merchants, to sell sheepskins, to do business...
...government then changed its mind...
...Bensaude replied that he was willing but it was really up to his crew...
...Now 60 percent of the congregation is over 60 years of age...
...And I began to feel, that hour in Porto, that I was the last Jew on earth...
...Regis under a serving dish's silver dome...
...Thus the family returned to Portuguese soil...
...One doesn't maintain a synagogue for five people...
...But who can tell the outer limits—the edge of the world, as it were—beyond which the bond will fail and you or I will be lost as a Jew in the great wash of history as we are already lost in the clear eyes of the seafaring Portuguese...
...But they were never Jews...
...Because your engineer stayed in bed for seven days with a woman called Sarah, and without him we simply could not go...
...And where would the family sleep tonight...
...he made his first handsome profit...
...With respect he asked: Was his surname "Jewish...
...He, however, was more aware of what the consequences of such descent might have been in other times...
...I myself do...
...She undoubtedly has the right to shrug them off, so committed has she been to the community...
...A large hulk of a man, he was not exactly distinguished-looking but his presence was nonetheless imposing: a man who had had power, even a body used to power, the power having left him but its vessel remaining...
...I sought the eyes of the teenager and smiled at her but she did not smile back...
...The woman watched the horizon for a cab...
...The Inquisition was summoned to "disinfect" the boat, but even after the priest had performed, one pound sterling was required from each brother to forestall their removal to the Inquisitor's palace and the torture chambers there...
...The Iranians were on their' way to join a son in London...
...How to describe that night in Porto...
...A single Jew does not constitute such a presence...
...She wrote "The Shiksa Question," which appeared in moment in July-August 1980...
...The Marrano evidently felt himself in some way a Jew...
...bases in the Azores during World War II...
...Not only I but 15 people in my family work in the factory, and you are the heir of the patron...
...She regretted for her children's sake having settled where there were no other Jews—but what could one do...
...You or me...
...She salted this with irony...
...I want an apology...
...So these were the five in the congregation, sometimes joined by the furrier from forty miles away, and occasionally able to recruit several others and/ or a rabbi from Lisbon or abroad...
...In the middle of the toasts, Bensaude's captain leaned over and said, "Do you know your engineer is a no-good bum...
...He spoke that night of his feeling, his love, for the people Israel...
...I returned to the center of the city...
...In the small museum and library of Amarante, two assistants telephoned furiously in and around the town, and Architect Naya (middle name: da Silva) combed his memory, but despite certain tantalizing leads—"Marrano" mountain, Cardozo the painter whose master was Modigliani, sweets with irreverent names like "nun's tummies"—and the omnipresent Spanish-Jewish names of families, we turned up nothing but "a theme," as he called it, a subject for further exploration and not one that could be investigated in one day...
...I found the store, asked for the proprietress, and inquired if she was of the family...
...I saw that people could be peaceful and happy and hard-working, could make children and educate enough doctors and help their neighbors and eat pastry and have dinner and get up the next morning without Jews...
...Human beings," he said, "are this way: One bears the other a grudge, so he will call that other a Jew or, in these days, a fascist...
...At 87, he was the last full-blooded scion of an ancient Jewish house...
...His Lisbon apartment was much like the old man himself, an old man's apartment, full of mementos, photographs of the splendid past, ancestral paintings, inherited furniture...
...The poorer ones set out for North Africa, particularly Morocco, where many settled in Meknes...
...Yes, indeed...
...and Bensaude does also...
...Two brothers, living in Meknes, wrote to a firm in Lisbon...
...Unfortunately, the CIA did not see fit to tell the IRS of these doings, including Bensaude's donation: Bensaude had to leave the United States because of IRS harrassment...
...Yvette Davidoff, with a sadly-ironic smile, stressed the economic motive in such weekly attendance, but the phenomenon made me wonder if, in ties with one's people, sharing a meal might not still be the most powerful experience of community, and customs centering around food or fasts more effective than all the exhortations in the world...
...Neither the Bensaudes nor the Abecasses nor the Anahorys nor the Seruyas—none of the oldest Portuguese families—has one single Jewish descendant...
...Some boys sitting at the counter teased me, but when it became obvious to them that I was a foreigner and didn't understand anything, they left me alone...
...I went back to my hotel, prepared to leave, and thought of those last words which so accurately described the plight of these mute strangers, long isolated in a corner of the world we scarcely paid attention to, Jews, though perhaps they knew not why...
...thus it follows that few Jews remain of marriageable age, a situation which forces the young people to intermarry...
...At this point, as if to confirm my thoughts, the telephone rang...
...At what point does one stop or start being one...
...when the boy grew ill, Bensaude's presence became irksome to the old man, for he watched Bensaude living while the boy, symbol of hope, was slowly dying...
...It was definitely Shabbas...
...Several children circulated, among them a teenage girl in slacks...
...It was poorly lit, but later Bensaude would turn on a lamp, now to illuminate one spot, now another...
...From the Y, through his mother's Ashkenazic connections, he managed to buy some copper, which sailed away before he could sell it...
...Can you imagine...
...in other words, the state had confiscated the tobacco plantations of the Bensaudes in the Azores...
...Davidoff nor Mr...
...To prove this, Bensaude showed me a painting: Maria, with her portrait of Saint Christopher...
...Thus, after Israeli Independence, Bensaude, his captain and his engineer were feted at a great banquet by the new government...
...The Bensaude chronicle reached back to the Inquisition...
...Bensaude rounds out this anecdote by noting that, years later, in America, he found his mother's portrait in the home of the director of the Metropolitan Opera...
...He had also shipped flour to Israel during the War of Independence, a literal test of fire...
...they deemed it safer to be thought Arabs than Jews...
...I thought about the sardonic vision that sees the Jews as the creation of the anti-Semite...
...We folded our hands over our bare arms...
...The only time the sabras could be lured to join the Lisbon Jews was at Sunday kosher dinners, which the women of the synagogue prepared and provided at low cost...
...I think it is only in trouble that the Jews stick together, "she said softly...
...And yet, who knows...
...The two men set out in a Portuguese vessel, but an evil wind took them to Spain rather than to Portugal...
...This he had not known...
...She was...
...The woman wore a kerchief, but it was not the familiar flowered headcover-ing...
...and Bensaude seemed very much like one of these...
...And she said to me, 'Look, if you care about me at all, you will leave me alone...
...Part of the problem, according to Yvette Davidoff, is a general apathy, world-wide and political as well as ethnic, a turning back to creature comforts after two decades of political disappointments...
...His going to America had been, in a way, his mother's doing...
...I shook my head...
...The French-speaking architect to whom I was eventually assigned the next morning after much discussion and fuss was equally willing to have Jewish blood in his veins, and was equally innocent of it...
...Although he shook hands with me, his eyes glazed: I was not one of his congregation, and therefore to him, a simple man, I was a stranger...
...We said good-bye...
...The actual shrinking of the Jewish population, she speculated, was due to the sensitivity of Jews to political changes...
...He returned to New York and took a room at the YMCA where, he recalls with pleasure, no one asked him his religion or creed but only payment by the week...
...So he was living in circumstances much reduced, as the odd Louis XIV chair in the corner showed...
...The architect led me into the street...
...For Bensaude this world of wealth and subsequent cultivation was symbolized by his mother's fan, the fan she employed in her life as a Parisian heiress in her parents' salon, and on which the best known poets, composers and politicians of her day had signed their names...
...For his life had changed much since then...
...It was getting on toward lunchtime...
...I do not flatter myself that she spoke because of me, although we spoke about issues important to both of us...
...The architect asked him if he knew of the existence of any Jews, Marranos, or New Christians in Amarante, and the padre, startled, replied in Portuguese to Senhor Naya, shook hands with me, bowed and departed...
...Its price had risen in the interim...
...He produced more letters, including one which offered him a tax pardon because of his services to the United States in the War...
...For I saw that night in Porto, where the working people were kind and helpful, and ordered food for me and even led me literally by the hand once when I was lost, I saw that it was perfectly possible for the world to go on without Jews, and I felt a kind of futility I had never experience before...
...Senhor Naya asked me...
...Impossible...
...But like the Portuguese morning itself, it did not take her long to warm up...
...The U.S...
...Taking pictures, I asked Mr...
...and she added that, according to her sources, even the Portuguese Inquisition had been motivated by greed rather than a fanatic religious ideal...
...We agreed that I the State of Israel itself does not constitute the Jewish people, that it is only a part of the whole...
...Bensaude's family had been both rich and poor, and so had divided to live both north and south...
...Out of political dilemmas and the fear of persecution, new industries were made...
...I went back to my room, overlooking the city, and, had I known how, I would have said Kaddish, there in the twilight, over the mellow Portuguese wine...
...how both she and the current president are socialists since, as Jews, they cannot see themselves supporting a right-wing regime and since they think a socialist government in Portugal would not impair the climate of tolerance...
...What to do...
...Well," says the King, eyeing his advisor shrewdly, "Who is to leave first...
...Bensaude sold the ship but gave half the profits to the hungry people of the Azores, half to the International Red Cross...
...They spoke of the enormity of human suffering and also of human tenacity, a refusal to be subsumed...
...With another half hour on my hands, I walked back to the cafe for a glass of wine...
...Out of this flight came the great tobacco and sugar cane plantations which gave work to thousands...
...She feels that they do not belong to the community proper, and that they are for all intents and purposes Catholics, only inquiring around the High Holy Days and such...
...that a Jew is in some sense his country, and carries his nation with him in his soul...
...with the revolution, peaceful though it was, in 1975, the wealthy Jewish families left for an obvious reason: nationalization of vast properties...
...but either the Jews came and left again for other parts, or remained in Lisbon...
...Then I noticed that Yvette Davidoff stood with the group...
...Well," she replied, "there are only a few old people left, mostly in the North...
...this a Jew feels most sharply, and each must make his own separate peace...
...The proprietor spoke French and I related my experience to him, briefly, as is the way in the brusque North...
...he concluded...
...What is the absolute minimum one must do...
...Now all this good cheer was making us quite gloomy, for it left us to ponder directly the mystery of Jewish ambivalence itself...
...The stores were closing and the streets were quiet when I made my way towards the peaceful block on which the building stands, behind locked gates but undisturbed by graffiti, unlike the synagogue in Madrid...
...to a great extent I think she is just that, insofar as any one person can be...
...It looked untidy, but Bensaude would know the exact placement of everything...
...Would the Senhora tell her if her voice was worth developing...
...Once in Amarante, I set down my bags in the dusky-rose Hotel da Silva, and went out in search of my first Marranos—the generic slur for Jews and Moors who passed as Christians...
...What I am saying is that in general some Jewish presence provokes anti-Semites to use the Jews symbolically...
...On that melancholy note I took my leave...
...So poisoned was the atmosphere, the boy told Bensaude, that the only comfort he found came from the girl, formerly of the factory, who took care of him day and night, sleeping on the floor and never leaving his side...
...Yvette Davidoff murmured, "They do not speak, my dear, one word of any civilized language...
...Bensaude exclaimed to them, "My mother was a Jew and my father a Jew—what more do you want...
...They informed him that they needed a ship to carry flour to the Jewish population of Palestine, that 700,000 Jews would soon starve if they did not receive such a shipment...
...My route took me back past the Gates of Hope...
...the family...
...In a kind of daze, I entered a bookshop displaying two books on Jewish topics in the window, one on Kabbala and one on the Jewish tradition...
...As the single car of the local train crossed sparkling rivers and climbed into the greenery, I found myself thinking that if one had to pick the best spot on earth in which to hide, this was it...
...Strangely unfriendly, I thought, for one of the congregants...
...I looked more closely now and could see that the husband, a handsome man, sturdy, tall— possibly an artisan—with cropped hair and short, curly beard, had a face as kingly as David's must have been, except for a look of confusion and displacement...
...For some people," continued Bensaude, "a moral pain becomes a physical one...
...My first problem was to find a translator, and after much gesturing and querying, someone was found who spoke French...
...When El Al offices opened in Portugal, Jewish teenagers assisted the Israelis working at the airport...
...Davidoff told me of three brothers, for example, all of whom married gentile women, but who forbade their sister to marry the gentile she was in love with...
...Putting together her memoirs, he had found a confession that she had not wanted him to serve in Africa and would have done almost anything to have helped him leave Portugal...
...I do not want a pardon," he told government officials at that time...
...Friday evening I decided I owed it to the community to put in an appearance at the synagogue, despite my own problems with services and my discomfort with Orthodox seating arrangements...
...Senhora Zymmerman seemed resigned...
...Certainly not\'" the padre had replied...
...The now-familiar twinkle was again in his eye as he told me how it came about...
...The North African branch returned two centuries later, in 1806...
...But he walked half the way across Lisbon and has just come back...
...and I thought that it is not the poisonous and misguided theories of anti-Semitism which are significant, but that somehow, to the anti-Semite's consciousness, Jews are central...
...My translator in the meantime became somewhat curious...
...He was instructed to sell a ship the U.S...
...I called the synagogue, made an appointment with its caretaker, and taxied to the outlying district where it was located...
...Let no one misunderstand me: I am by no means in favor of anti-Semitism, and I wish the entire world were no more racist than the innocent and provincial Portuguese...
...When I mentioned the conversion and dispersion of Jewish families, he added that there had been burnings, too...
...His arms were already limp at his sides...
...The problem, once again, is the falling away of the people, not from anything as simple as loss of faith, for neither Mrs...
...At that time the wealthy Jews of Portugal escaped to the Azores, Brazil or other territories, as well as to countries such as Holland...
...Upon arrival in Lisbon, to support herself and her mother, she had gone to work first for HI AS, which had its Western European headquarters there, later for the synagogue...
...She alone has made my last days bearable...
...All the representatives, she remarked, from the Communist to the Fascist, respected the Jews, were knowledgeable about our history, and admired much that Israel had accomplished...
...The two women became friends, so close that the lady-in-waiting even asked her advice about a suitor...
...For this work he had been highly commended...
...The great-uncle had a grandson, his pride and joy...
...The last two questions seem beyond his linguistic means, but to the first question of how many—asked repeatedly in Spanish and Portuguese—he replied placidly that there were five...
...And I thought, too, for the first time with some understanding, of those isolated Jews one finds here and there: in a mountain town in Peru, in the working-class districts of Paris, in the depth of the American South—of those Jews who, while not denying to a passing stranger that they are Jews, have ceased in some way to think of themselves as Jews at all...
...whose 30 years in America had ended in scandal...
...1808), since most Jews had taken to the liberal doctrines Napoleon left in his wake...
...I reproached myself for not having contacted the Jews in Porto before my arduous journey from the city into the mountains, but promised Senhor Naya and his curators who were still telephoning that I would do so immediately, and would return to Amarante in the wintertime...
...Bensaude are what one would call "believers...
...At first she seemed aloof, maintaining a kind of Austrian formality even while carrying her dinner vegetables into the office in a net bag...
...I watched them enjoying these and ice cream and the sweet cold dririks they take in the early evening, and lost my tab, which was graciously re-calculated, and drank another coffee and felt not only alone, as one is apt to feel in a busy foreign city, but almost transparent, non-existent...
...Spotting the rabbi, I went up to introduce myself...
...But here, I thought, in this commercial city of 300,000,1 would surely find what I was looking for, for it was in Porto in 1923 that one Captain Bastos had declared himself a Jew, and it was in Porto that he established the first Marrano congregation...
...It couldn't be...
...The only thing she was glad of—thankful for—was that she had accomplished what she called a "minor miracle": Her son-in-law and daughter-in-law had both been Portuguese Catholics, and both had converted to Judaism...
...Nor does a real conflict exist between the Ashkenazic and Sephardic groups, for the rabbi, a good and simple man, does not object to saying Ashkenazic prayers upon request...
...We were conversing in her cheerful office atop the elegant, pale yellow synagogue, overlooking the red roofs of Lisbon...
...When I die," he begged Bensaude, "look after Maria, will you...
Vol. 7 • May 1982 • No. 5
