Intimate Impact

Chair:  Welcome to the launch of two new novels, two great novels.  One from Moris Farhi, Young Turk.  Another one from Richard Zimler, Hunting Midnight.  We will talk about them in detail later, but let me tell you first of all who I am.  My name is Firdevs Robinson.  I am a journalist, broadcast only.  I work with the BBC.  I am the editor for Central Asia and the Caucasus service at the World Service and I will be asking questions on your behalf.  Then we will be taking some questions afterwards from you.  After that we will move on to the next room where you have already seen the Book Fair and Richard and Moris will be signing their new books.

So let me start first of all introducing Moris.  Moris Farhi was born in Turkey in 1935.  He is a compatriot of mine: I also come from Turkey.  Moris is a poet, a playwright, a novelist and he is also a tireless champion of human rights.  Over the years I have seen Moris speak on many platforms championing the rights of all sorts of persecuted people: writers in prisons, the Roma, all sorts of people.  I am sure you will hear some of this from Moris and come across that in his books.  Moris is a Vice-President of International PEN and he has written several novels: Children of the Rainbow; Journey through the Wilderness; The Last of Days; The Pleasure of your Death and some of his poems have been published in anthologies.  One of them is the anthology of 20th century Jewish poets and Moris, if I’m right, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  Also, he was appointed MBE in 2001 for services to literature.  And Moris lives in London, luckily for us.

Moris moved from Turkey to London bringing his eastern heritage to the west, whereas Richard moved from west to east, embracing his Jewish heritage in Portugal.  Richard Zimler was born in the US in 1956.  He gained degrees in Comparative Religious Studies and in Journalism and he has been teaching journalism in Porto, Portugal for some years now.  He has published three novels since 1996: Unholy Ghosts; The Angelic Darkness and The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon and the children’s book Hunting Midnight.

I am going to ask first of all Moris to give us a little flavour of his novel Young Turk and I will do the same to Richard a bit later.  Moris, please.

Moris Farhi:  I prepared long sections to read but I think we only have about two or three minutes so I what I would like to read to you is really the section from the end of the book and I think that in many ways it sums up what Turkey represents for me, what Turkey means.  This book is really a love affair: my unrequited love affair with Turkey.  I grew up in a Turkey that, despite all its problems, maintained an idealism where you have duality, tolerance. 

One of the characters in the book in fact represents this great ideology that Turkish people have and sort of cloaks this in peaceful purposes.  It’s a valediction. 

This is a letter from the person as he dies and he has to give a few home truths to all the other characters in the book, actually for one character basically, his student.  So, if I may, I just want to tell you this passage.  This is about what Turkishness means.

[Excerpt]

“True Turkishness means rejoicing in the infinite plurality of people …

… … … … Home Truth Five: he went like water …  come back like water.”

Thank you.

Chair:  Thank you Moris. 

We have two different novels here, two historical novels with very different histories, set in different centuries even, but with also a lot of similarities.  Before we explore these, I would like to ask Richard to read us a short passage from his novel Hunting Midnight.

Richard Zimler:  Thank you.  Just let me tell you a tiny bit about the book and then I’ll read for two minutes as well.  It’s a historical novel that takes the reader from Porto, Portugal, a city in the north where port wine is from, at the beginning of the 19th century (that’s just when the Inquisition has been slightly dismantled but it’s not yet over) to the southern United States in about 1825.  And it’s about a young man.  At the beginning of the book he’s only seven years old.  His mother is a Portuguese Jew and his father is Scottish.  His best friend dies in a drowning accident in the Doro River.  It leaves him traumatised and the man who saves him is an African bushman who comes back to Portugal with his father, John’s father: John is the narrator.  This African bushman is a very powerful, charismatic person who changes the lives of the people he comes into contact with.  And so at this point that I’m going to read, the father has come back from southern Africa where he is exploring the possibility of buying some land to create a vineyard and he comes back with this bushman that the family hasn’t met yet.

“Poppa had not come alone.  With him was a wee dark-skinned man no more than five feet tall.  Months later I found out his original name which was Tsauma, the word in his language for a particular melon from the Kalahari Desert.  The fruit was of special importance to his people and, indeed, to all the creatures of southern Africa as its liquid, sweet flesh sustained one and all during periods of drought.  But he was introduced to me as Midnight. 

“The first thing I noticed about Midnight on the wharf that afternoon was his colouring which was not pure black as his name might imply but bronze.  The second was his diminutive stature, for he was clearly only a shade taller than my mother.  This might have been the expected size of a lad with some growing yet to do but he was surely a man of 25 or even 30 years of age. 

“I was soon to discover that he too was uncertain of his age since his people dated their births by referring to natural events in the world.  When we spoke of it, he offered a response that astounded me.  ‘I might be the age of the wild flowers that blossomed in the year of the hailstorm over Gemsbock Valley.  The whole of the valley was very, very green, you see.’ He circled his hands in the air then brought them together and opened them in a swirl of blossoms, as bright and as colourful as a desert oasis of flowers.  More than that he could not say.”

Then later that day they have their first meal together and the mother is not at all pleased that this man has come back with her husband.  She is interrogating him over supper and being rather rude and she says:

“‘So what can you tell us of Africa, sir,’ Mother said.  Midnight had never sailed beyond the borders of Africa so asking him to speak of his continent was tantamount to asking him to speak of the world itself, which is why, I believe, he gestured up towards our ceiling and said, ‘In the heavens are the stars who are the great and powerful hunters.  They dance to bring back the sun just as the bushman dances to bring back the moon.’

“Opening his hands to my mother and lifting them toward her, as though presenting her with a precious gift, he added, ‘And then there is Mantis who steps down from the sky to the desert.’  My mother was clearly taken aback by his beautiful words to the extent that I believed he had won her over.  But she cleared her throat, replied curtly, ‘Yes.  Well, that was very pretty, I’m sure, but I do not see what it has to do with Africa.’  ‘Africa is where these things are known.  Africa is memory.’ 

“It was as though a trumpet had sounded over the scene of a great battle, signalling all the soldiers to lay down their arms.  None of us spoke.  I believe each of us had a different reason for retreating into silence.  To me, Midnight made no sense at all but his words seemed magical, like those of a sorcerer.  Mother had plainly concluded that this African was beyond salvation, a heathen who ought to have remained in his loathsome homeland.  As for my father, his eyes were gleaming with pride as though he had welcomed Robert Burns himself into his home.”

Chair:  Thank you Richard.  Your previous novel, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, was a best-seller in more than eleven countries.  It was translated into many languages.  Is this, in one way, a sequel to that? 

Richard Zimler:  Well, my publishers would have liked me to write Rambo 2 and Rambo 3 and Rambo 4, but I really didn’t want to do that.  Having said that, this novel does deal with some of the same themes and some of the big issues like solidarity and tolerance and intolerance, like Moris was talking about.  Only after I had written a good part of the book did I realise that what I was doing (sometimes you realise things years later) was that I was telling Sephardic history through one family: through one family, through different generations and different branches of the same family.  So what I decided to do was to write what I call the ‘Sephardic Cycle’, which is again different generations and branches of the same family: completely independent books, not sequels but Sephardic history is so interesting and so diverse because of the Diaspora that I can pick any place from Curaçao to Goa in India and I pick almost any century and have a dramatic background story to tell.  So it gives me great freedom and at the same time it’s an over-arching project that I find very exciting.  So I would just say that it’s a loosely-tied novel.

Chair: Would you say the same about yours?  Is there a sort of natural progression from one to another?

Moris Farhi:  Not quite.  It is a natural progression obviously because I think hopefully each book you improve a bit and you have different visions.  But this was a book I had to write after about fifty years of absence.  In fact, this year is the 50th year that I have been away from Turkey.  The great love affair with Turkey has always been to me particularly important.  We hear a great deal about human rights and so on.  But the mainstream of tolerance which is something that the present country has inherited from the Ottoman Empire, the tolerance for races and religions, that has always been something that I very much wanted to write about and never felt that I could write until a certain maturity had arrived.  And in my old age I thought, yes, I’ll go back to the first love.  And again, of course, thematically it is to some extent because it does deal with human rights issues.  There’s a story there for instance about Lars [?], who he’d met, who is certainly one of the ten greatest poets of the last century, who was imprisoned for many years for being a Communist.  There’s a story about him and how students tried to rescue him and eventually he escapes to Russia.  So, all that and the human rights issues continue.

Chair:  Both of you wrote books in some way really intensely personal, from reading them one after another.  I would just like to ask you: How much of your background, your Jewishness, your understanding of Jewish tradition and culture, and your life experience, you have set in your books?  What is the impact of where you come from and who you are in your novels?

Richard Zimler:  In a sense, when you write a novel everything in that novel is from you.  I mean that might sound like an obvious thing to say but, on the other hand, when things go well in a novel and you’re writing well and you’re in a ‘zone’, so to speak, where things are coming to you, it is almost as if you are attached to a separate reality, something beyond yourself.  And I felt that while writing Hunting Midnight.  I knew nothing about bushman culture, for instance, and so I had to do a lot of research and, as I wrote the book, I found that it is of course a process of self-discovery in which you tap into a reality that is different from your own.  I can’t really explain it.  In part, sometimes I feel like I’m mystical and sometimes I feel I’m very rational.  So perhaps it’s just some deep psychological insights that are occurring to you as you write and perhaps there’s something transcendent that’s occurring. 

I was raised in a secular Jewish household so my background of Judaism was just restricted to barmitzvahs and weddings and things like that.  I discovered Judaism much later.  I discovered it quite by accident.  In my mother’s house I picked up a book on Jewish manuscript illumination.  I knew nothing about that tradition and right away there came into my head an idea for a manuscript illuminator, living in Lisbon prior to the Inquisition.  I had been to Lisbon before so that seemed a natural choice for me.  And that later became The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon so rediscovering my Jewishness has just been an ongoing process.  I love Sephardic history.  I’ve always been more interested in things I don’t know than things I already know so it’s also part of my curiosity.  So, I’m sorry that I’m not really answering your question very specifically but everything in Hunting Midnight is from me and nothing in Hunting Midnight is from me.  It’s a paradox.  I can’t explain it.  Maybe Moris can explain the writing process better than I can!

Moris Farhi:  I can’t explain the writing process.  Young Turk has got, not so much about me, but certainly about the Turkey I lived in: my generation.  This is a book about my generation.  The novel comprises 13 stories which I interlink and then some of the protagonists are girls and boys and young men and young women.  And the whole idea was to create a picture of a generation.  So there is a great deal of my past history in it, but a lot of it is also about things that I heard about.

For instance, there is a story set in a circus called A Resting Man which, of course, is not in my experience.  But we knew of a person like that: my generation of boys knew of a person like that and we actually worshipped him because he was the great hero.  He was a great humanitarian.  His purpose in life was saving lives and so that memory has remained and, of course, went through the usual prism that the writer goes through.

So yes, in many ways it is very much part of my background.  In many ways, as Richard says, it wrote itself.

Chair:  Is that just for Young Turk but for your other works, the fact that the subject matter that you choose and things that you are interested in, things that you analyse in depth, isn’t there a Jewish tradition behind it?

Moris Farhi: Of course there is, yes.  I think that basically the foremost experience in my life that actually made me a writer was my mother.  My mother comes from Salonika.  She was the only person in her family to have escaped the Holocaust because she came on an arranged marriage to get married to my father who was living in Turkey and thus she survived.  About nineteen members of her family perished and my mother actually, at the end of the war, lost her mind and we had to just nurse her for the rest of her life.  Now that was such a weight that I thought I had to keep on writing about persecution.  For instance, I wanted to write about my mother’s family but I couldn’t because I was too near.  So I wrote a book about the Gypsy Holocaust and, you know, that’s how it evolved really.  So the Jewish tradition is there, I think.

Chair:  When I read your poetry, I see something slightly different.  Just as I was reading about slavery, there is something different about you writing about slavery and, say, any other American or other writer writing about slavery.  Isn’t there a very deep symbolism there …

Richard Zimler:  Yes, that’s true.  I mean I think the central story for me in Judaism is the story of the Exodus that we recount every Passover at the Seder and actually a character in the novel says that.  It’s a complicated story but in a sense the narrator of the story, this young Jewish man that I was talking about at the beginning, has to go to the southern United States to try to find Midnight who may have been sold into slavery.  He may be dead.  He doesn’t know.  So it’s this desperate journey he makes.  And when he gets there, he’s terrified and horrified to find that there are Jewish slave owners in Charleston, South Carolina, which is where he ends up.  And he has an argument with the chazan there and he says, “But our central story is the Exodus.  How can we be slave owners?  It’s impossible.”  And the answer that the chazzan gives is that no, the central story of Judaism is survival and that it is our covenant with the Lord and that it is our survival.  

So these are two opposing perspectives.  So I do write about slavery, I think from a Jewish perspective, and this book creates parallels, subtle I hope, between the Inquisition in Portugal and what it did to the Jews there and how it destroyed the psychology of an entire nation for 240 years.  And I still see remnants of the effects of the Inquisition in my day-to-day life in Portugal (we can talk about that some) and the tradition of slavery in the United States.  I’m ashamed to say that, although I’m American, from New York, I knew very little about slavery when I started this book.  I’d read a few slave journals and the usual things.  I’d seen Roots on TV. 

But now, after having researched slavery and written about it, for me there are two great references for history of the last, let’s say 160-170 years.  This is just for me.  One is the Holocaust and one is slavery.  And I understand American blacks much better now because it decimated not just one generation but successive, ten, fifteen generations of people.  And I can see how for an American black, slavery is how they orient their entire lives even up to today.  I mean, you have white people in America saying, “Get over it!  You know, it happened so long ago.  Just get over and get on with your lives!” 

Well, to me that’s like saying to a Jew: “Get over the Holocaust!”  I mean, my answer to that is, “No, I’m sorry.  The Holocaust is a reference for all of us.”  It doesn’t mean we can’t go on with our lives.  In fact it can mean, as Moris does, it can mean a further commitment to helping other people in other cultures overcome problems.  But it is not something ‘to get over’. 

So for me it was very exciting to write about slavery and to draw those parallels with my own Jewish background.

Chair:  Moris, how much of your writing is a response to your family tragedies and your personal experience of suffering and what you have in your background?  Is that a factor in your life?

Moris Farhi:  I think it is so difficult to distinguish.  You know, I think you write through a prism and it just filters through and sort of colours it.  So I think the family history remains.  The family’s past history remains and your people’s history remains.  So I think they creep up into the writing.  I don’t consciously set out to write episodes that have happened to me or to my family.  But I think they have a way of coming in.  They have a way of maybe transforming themselves in some form and, you know, you suddenly find it’s them in a different shape.  I think perhaps the only merit I would give to myself is that, having come from a very multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, society, I have this ability maybe, certainly I feel it in myself, that I can osmose into other cultures. 

For instance, Journey through the Wilderness, is about the Amerindians of South America in the Andean areas and I sort of travelled there and lived with many of them.  At the time that I came back, I really felt that I was an Amerindian.  I chewed coca with them.  It seemed to be part of my culture. 

Similarly, when I was researching the Gypsy book and I lived in Skopje with a number of Gypsy communities mainly because they could speak Turkish.  It was the only way I could communicate with them.  I’m a godfather to Gypsy children.  I came back a Gypsy, I think.  My wife was very wise and thinks that I’ve been a Gypsy all my life and I think I have, because it was very funny: just a little anecdote.  My father just before he died asked me what I was going to write next.  So I said that eventually I’ll write a Gypsy book and he said, “Why Gypsy?”  So I said, “Well, you know, because of the Holocaust.  Because I grew up with Gypsies and so on.”  And he said, “Moris, you know, I’m very happy.  We have Gypsy blood in our family because we had women in our family who were very ‘liberal’”.

Chair:  Richard, would you have written Hunting Midnight if you didn’t decide at some stage, or come to that The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon or any of your other books, if you didn’t decide to make that journey from California to Portugal?  How much of moving to Portugal and going and exploring roots and heritage is there in your writing?  Why did you do it and what did you find?

Richard Zimler:  That’s a long question!  Yes, I mean moving to Portugal changed my life completely because I was living in California: happy in California.  Then some bad things happened in my life.  One of my brothers died from Aids in 1989 and after trying for a couple of years to save his life I was left completely traumatised and my partner, who is Portuguese from Mozambique, said that maybe we need to change.  So we really moved to Portugal to start over.  Sometimes you just need to start over.  And it saved my life.  I was able to, not forget my brother but sort of wave goodbye to him and move on and do some other things.

In Portugal I see Sephardic history.  I see history, maybe because I’m an American from a young country, I see history every day in the buildings, in the people, in what people eat.  So researching certain aspects of Sephardic history in terms of like food, for instance, is not very difficult because I can just know what Portuguese Jews ate back in the 15th century.  So that’s very easy. 

And I was talking about the Inquisition before: I see that every day in Portugal.  People really do think differently.  I was stupid enough, as an American, to think that everybody thought like an American, as we Americans sometimes believe about the British too.  But when I got to Portugal I realised no, people have different ways of looking at everything: sex, their lives, their parents, their children and their own bodies. 

In particular why I bring this up is that in Portugal there is a great difference between inside and outside that doesn’t exist in the United States.  For instance, if you’ve been to Portugal you know that people build huge walls in front of their homes.  You can be in Portugal as a foreigner and live there for 15 or 20 years and never be invited over to someone’s house for dinner, and be good friends with them.  What they will tell you about their own lives is completely different from an American.  After two minutes with an American you know he has herpes, he hates his mother, he’s just getting a divorce and he hurt his foot the other day, which is another problem!  But you can live in Portugal for 15 years without knowing anything intimate about someone.  They do not let you inside, physically and psychologically.

My theory, which I don’t hear from the Portuguese but they don’t want to talk about the Inquisition too much, is that the Inquisition did this.  They had 240 years of not being able to say anything in public about your interior life.  The only people you could talk to were possibly your own friends and family, but they could betray you too.  You built these big walls to keep people from seeing that inside you might be practising Judaism or Islam or something else, but outside you could wear a mask in public and be accepted for being a Christian like everyone else.

So, for me, just walking around, talking with my friends, watching TV, I see the Inquisition and so it is very easy for me to write about that.  Not easy: I mean I have to do a lot of research.  But it is very easy for me to enter back into the psychology of being a Portuguese Jew in the 16th century, in The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, and at the end of the 18th century in Hunting Midnight.  So, to answer your question, Portugal has opened up a whole new world to me of history and psychology and just ways of looking at your own life.

Chair:  I will take questions just a little bit later.  I just want to follow through on this.  Moris, is this something you recognise?  Is there any Mediterranean sort of common thread in what Richard is saying? 

Moris Farhi:  Very much so.  Certainly I think Richard’s book, also The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, I would rate as Mediterranean books, although Portugal is on the Atlantic but I would still rate it as Mediterranean!  There’s something quite wonderful about it.  It’s a very turbulent area, as we all know, but there is a wonderful Israeli writer who sadly died this year, Shulamit Hareven, and she’s got an amazing essay which says, “I am a Levantine”.  And, for me, Mediterranean is what the Levantine signifies: that it is an ability to live in a multi-cultural multi-ethnic society.  An ability to bear an enormous amount of tolerance, an enormous amount of prejudice as well, and they go hand in hand.  And I think that, you know, Richard has captured that, both in The Last Kabbalist and in this book.  From that point of view, if you read any Italian or Greek or Turkish or North African writers, Lebanese writers, you can actually see the amazing juxtaposition of the ability to live and the ability to suffer and at the same time the ability to embrace. 

I was very interested in fact in Richard’s second part of the book which is about slavery in the southern states of America.  It has, apart from this wonderful black African culture, it also had, I think, that Mediterranean impression. 

Chair:  And how did it feel to live in London and do all that writing in London?

Moris Farhi:  Very difficult, because every time you look out of the window it’s grey.  I don’t know: I think the older I get, the more Turk I become and I love living in London.  I think London is a wonderful place, but I hanker for Istanbul.  I hanker for all Turkey.  It’s my spiritual home.  So if things get really depressing, I sort of imagine the sun and the sea and the kebabs.

Richard Zimler:  We have a word in Portuguese for what Moris has just said.  It’s ‘sauda’ (?), it’s probably in Ladino as well.

Moris Farhi:  There’s an amazing thing that I was told in Portugal about the Inquisition.  I probably pronounce it badly but they have a dish called ‘porco com ameijoas’.  It’s pork with clams and this apparently is a dish that was called ‘platte di odio’, ‘the hate dish’.  Apparently originally it was remembered because in order to test Jews if they had converted, they said that a Jew in order to save his life might actually eat clams or he might eat pork, but he will never eat both at the same time!  And it’s delicious: it’s a wonderful dish!

Chair:  We’ll probably come back to one or two other questions I have for you but I think I would like to take some questions from our audience.  Please introduce yourselves.

Questioner 1:  I was lucky enough to visit Belmonte some years ago and I just wondered, Mr Zimler, whether you had any experience of that community and whether you had any time thought about doing research about them?

Richard Zimler:  Yes.  Let me just explain for those who don’t know that when the Inquisition started in Portugal in 1536, fifty years after it started in Spain, some of the Portuguese Jews obviously came overseas.  They were invited by the Sultan of Turkey to come to Istanbul and to Salonika and elsewhere.  But some fled up to the north-east mountains, to the most rural area they could find just to escape the long arm of the Inquisition.  Bel Monte is a small town in the north-east mountains, very rural, very poor until very recently.  They became what scholars call ‘crypto Jews’.  That is, they practised a Judaism that was unique to that area and had very little to do with Judaism as practised traditionally.  This was partially because they didn’t have access to any books and so it was an oral tradition transmitted usually by the mothers and, after 500 years of course, you lose a lot of traces of tradition.  So it was unique. 

I have been to Belmonte.  There’s a rabbi who has just come there from Chile, via Israel, and he is trying to work with the people there.  It’s become a very difficult situation, I have to say, because half the community wants to adopt traditional (whether we call it Sephardic or Ashkenazi) practice and half the culture wants to maintain their so-called crypto Judaism.  And they no longer talk to each other.  So it’s a very, very difficult situation at the moment and I feel very ambivalent about the situation because the rabbi asks me for help every now and then on certain issues, whether it’s to get a Jewish cemetery going or something, and I feel very ambivalent that since I don’t know the situation from the inside, so maybe I shouldn’t be sticking my nose in.  That maybe they need to work it out amongst themselves and maybe all foreigners should stay out until they figure out what they want to do.

My own opinion is that if they have practised their form of Judaism for 500 years, who am I to tell them that it is not the right tradition to practise and that they need to do something else?  That’s just my opinion.  So, I do have a little contact with that community but I’m very wary of even expressing an opinion about them.

Questioner 2:  I lecture in Sephardic culture at University College London.  In fact, my question follows on from the previous one.  I’m very aware of the situation of the Jews of Belmonte and in the return of many Portuguese to their former religion.  What I’d like to ask you, Richard, is this.  Particularly because of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, I know that you’ve become, to a certain extent, involved in the tours of Jewish Portugal and I wondered: Do you feel that this is something that should be done on a large scale?  It seems to me that there is a possibility that this will be almost achieving what Dom Manuel wanted to do in 1497.  It is antagonising the Christian population when they see affluent Jewish tourists coming in and pointing out these poor little former remnants, pointing them out in the streets of Belmonte or in Corvia or wherever.  Please, I’d like to hear more of your views on that.  Thank you.

Richard Zimler:  Yes, thank you.  It is a problem.  It is not a problem in Lisbon or Porto because they are very big cities so if we have tour groups come in, nobody cares.  It’s all diluted and there’s certainly no antagonism towards Jews in Portugal that I’ve ever experienced.  There’s a great deal of antagonism towards Americans that I have experienced, but not towards Jews.  In Bel Monte and that area, I think it is a problem because you have the Portuguese Tourist Board in New York sending people over.  You have tour groups from Britain going over.  You have rabbis from Chile going over, who don’t even speak Portuguese and who are trying to tell people what to do.  You have other rabbis from Israel coming over. 

There are two levels of resentment.  There is the resentment from the Jews in Belmonte, and there is the resentment of the people around them.  And I don’t know how to disentangle them in a sense, and so my reaction, for better or for worse, is to completely stay away and to not be another foreigner going in and telling them what I think they need to do.  I wish there was a moratorium on activity, in a sense.  And it is a very difficult situation because these Belmonte Jews practised their religion in secret for 500 years to the extent that when a French film crew came to film them, they said that they would allow themselves to be filmed and there is a video of it, on the condition that it never be shown on Portuguese television or in a Portuguese theatre.  That’s how frightened they are of the Inquisition coming back.

And so, when you have people that are that vulnerable and that frightened, and everybody coming in and trying to tell them what to do, I mean no wonder that half the community doesn’t speak to the other half.  So I don’t know if I’ve answered your question, but I do think that people ought to stay away.

Chair:  Can I just bring it slightly back to books again and just ask you: how are your books received in Portugal?

Richard Zimler:  My books are very well received.  When The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon came out, and for those of you who don’t know the background of the book, there is a pogrom that occurred in Lisbon in 1506 in which 2000 converted Jews were killed and burned in Rossio, which is still the main square in Lisbon.  So when my book came out, my publisher said to me, “Your novel could die an early death because this is something we don’t teach in the schools, that nobody here knows about.”  It was based on true events of course.  Quite the opposite happened.  People were so curious about it that I would have people coming up in the streets and asking me, “Were we really that bad?” which I found interesting that they still used the ‘we’.  And I had to say, “Yes, you were.”

So my books have been received very well.  Both of them have been huge best-sellers.  I get more publicity in Portugal than I get anywhere else in the world so I’m extremely grateful to the Portuguese and I’ll be very curious to see what happens when Moris’s book comes out in Turkey, because he has said that it’s written as a love affair, in a sense, with the Turkey that he knew and still knows.  Not everything is positive in it, but it is a book of such solidarity with Turkish history that I would be very curious to see what they make of a Turk who’s now fifty years in London coming back and writing this big, wonderful book about that history.  So it will be interesting to see when that comes out.

Chair:  I was particularly happy to read your account of it.  This is something that is not very much discussed in Turkey now, the property pacts in 1940.  You brought a lot of the not very much discussed, like the shady bits of recent Turkish history.  How will this be received?  What is in general the reaction of Turkish readers to your books?

Moris Farhi:  I don’t really know.  ‘Varlik’, this wealth tax that they imposed in 1942, and they imposed it on all the minorities and it was a rather fascist government at the time.  All the communists were imprisoned and the Communist Party etc. was banned.  So this was a measure that afflicted only really Jews, Armenians, Greeks, etc.  So that you know, the tax was imposed if, for instance, if you were worth £1000, let’s say, and you happened to be a Muslim Turk, then they’d tax you £1.  If you happened to be any of the minorities, they would tax you £100 or a sum that you could not even borrow.  So that eventually the men were taken into the labour camps to work out the debt they owed.  This was the blackest part of Turkish history vis-à-vis the Jews.

Simultaneously, they were saving Jews all over Europe.  Many Turkish diplomats were involved.  There were 28 transports from Paris to Istanbul carrying Jews from France who’d been escaping.  On one occasion in fact the Turkish Consul stopped a train which was going to Auschwitz, stopped it at the border and said that he would get onto the train unless the people came out.  That sort of thing happened, and something like about 200,000 Jews passed through Turkey overland and into Syria and onto Palestine.  My friend’s father, who was in the Jewish Agency at the time, was actually responsible.  So in some ways, I thought Turkey has saved countless Jews and yet there was that one bad period when there was this prejudice against Jews.  I thought that if you love Turkey, if you love anybody, you’ve got to accept the bad with the good and I thought that this was an important area. 

I do not know how it will be received.  I think there are some occasions when people want to suppress the Varlik thing.  But I thought it would be disloyal to Turkey if I did not write it.

Chair:  We’ll take a few more questions.

Questioner 3:  I got talking to my audiologist who was from Brazil and actually I wanted her to translate into Portuguese a letter I was writing to a former converse I’d met in shul in Lisbon and she expressed to me a burning resentment that her family had that the Catholic church, or the authorities in Brazil, had concealed from everybody that a great deal of the Iberian immigration to Brazil were former Jews who were escaping the Inquisition.  And she would have liked to have known about this and she felt a certain Jewish loyalty and gave me her brother’s address and so forth (who said about me, ‘Don’t lose him!’) so I wonder if you could comment on whether this is a widespread feeling in Brazil?  Do you know anything about this?  What is the psychology of it? 

Richard Zimler:  … Sometimes they went elsewhere, even to the United States, which is partially how one of the first Jewish communities in Charleston, South Carolina, started.  What I sense from Brazil from having been there and people writing me is that there is a huge curiosity about their Jewish background that they know nothing about.  I often get emails and letters from people saying, “My name is …...  Is that a Jewish name?  How do I research it?”  So I know there is this curiosity there about Jewish background.  Unlike Spain, and this is the last thing I’ll say about this, it is always assumed that the Portuguese Jews were expelled from Portugal, but that didn’t happen.  There was an edict of expulsion in December of 1496 but three months later the King closed all the ports of embarkation and the Jews were all converted.

I sometimes say that I live in the first Jewish country because everyone in Portugal has some branch, some great-great-great-great-grandfather or mother that is Jewish.  So there is this huge curiosity in both Portugal and Brazil about Judaism.  In Brazil there was the added complication of the period of the dictatorship which was a somewhat anti-Semitic dictatorship so the Jewish community in Sao Paolo did feel some fear about exploring their roots and exploring their Jewishness.

Questioner 4:  A more generalist question to both Richard and Moris.  You are both dealing with Sephardic subjects.  Sephardic culture has never penetrated the mainstream of the world’s host cultures in the way that Ashkenazi culture has.  I wonder if each of you, either of you, could give your own explanation or reason for why this is the case, if you agree with it.

Moris Farhi:  Well I’m very resentful of that because I think Sephardic culture is enormous.  Not in literature, because literature suffered a great deal under the Ottomans because although they published, and the Ottoman Empire allowed the first Hebrew press, but somehow they went more into poetry and music.  There is a wonderful rich heritage there.  I suspect, I think Sephardic culture is often associated with the Ottomans and some of the sick men of Europe, the retarded or backward Muslim countries and all that.  I think there’s a hubris in Europe of disliking other cultures and there is some sort of superiority complex that their culture is superior to the other cultures.  This is why I really would advocate that if you are really interested in Sephardic culture, there is for instance a Sephardic anthology coming out pretty soon edited by Ilan Stavans and if you look at the writers there, some wonderful writers.  Primo Levi, for instance, is Sephardic, Elias Canetti.  Elias Canetti went into German.  But there is an enormous Sephardic culture, particularly in music, particularly in poetry.  But that was because the Ottomans were never very keen on novels.  Poetry was the pure art.

Richard Zimler:  I think one of the reasons that there’s less attention for Sephardic culture is that simply in terms of population the Ashkenazi far outnumber the Sephardim.  And in a place like the United States, which for better or for worse determines a lot of media attention to books, music, everything, most of the Jewish community is Ashkenazi.  So I know that if my books, the absolute same books but written about Jews from Poland or Germany, I am quite sure they’d get a lot more attention there than they do.  This is simply because Sephardic culture is considered maybe something inferior.  That’s possible, but also something completely ‘other’.  They don’t know about it.  They don’t want to know about it.  It’s just too different.  They think it is too different, actually, in many ways.  It’s not so different, but that’s what they think.

Chair:  A couple more quick questions.

Questioner 5:  What a shame I haven’t read the books and it would have been wonderful if I’d read them and could talk about the book: I haven’t read it!  Anyway, from what I hear, especially from Moris this morning, really moved me because it shows the discrepancy between the image of Turkey given by the successive Turkish governments: lack of democracy, human rights violations and all the rest of it.  And now we have this book showing us the other Turkey.  That’s probably what you mean by Young Turk, which is a tolerant society, a wonderful country with liberal values, tolerant to all sorts of cultures.  That’s the people.  That’s the people in Turkey, predominantly.  Surely there are historical reasons why that image somehow hasn’t come through to the outside world.  I am glad: I hope that from what I hear from you this morning, that this book, in its own way, will help rectify that unfairness to the people of Turkey.  That’s what I believe.

As a second point, the issues like wealth tax and things, I think have ceased to be sort of taboo as in Turkey many other books have been written in more recent years.  There has been of course persecution of minorities in Turkey perhaps.  I disagree with Moris in the sense that it has been a sort of short, dark period in the ’forties or ’fifties where it was a blip.  I think it is a sort of deeper thing.  So far as the governments are concerned, there seems to be still suppression of certain minorities in Turkey but on the whole I am sure that book will be a great success in Turkey.

Chair:  Thank you very much for that.  I am going to close, I’m afraid.  We would love to go on for much longer.  Our time is up.  Just to remind you that Richard Zimler and Moris Farhi will be signing their books in the Ellis Room, next door.  We also have a Book Fair.

Thank you very much for coming and getting up early on a cold Sunday morning!  I enjoyed it tremendously.  I loved reading the books.  I can tell you that I missed my stop a couple of times on the Underground and ended up in Epping once, reading one of the books!  And that never, never usually happens because I am so keen to get home in the evening.  So they are very good books and I am sure you will agree with me when you read them.

Thank you very much, both to Richard and to Moris, and thank you.

END