The Expelled by Mois Benarroch Page B

immigrants arriving from South America. After five or six years, by intuition, they start realizing to where the wind blows and they begin to distance themselves from those who are not Ashkenazi, but that's normal and human. The immigrant tries to be like the others, such as the Arab in France, he shows his resemblance to the French by displaying his anti-Semitism, and so in a few years I lost many friends. That process was a bit baffling to me and even inconceivable. Of course, there were and there are always other reasons. Today they don't publish you because you don't sell, although you do sell, before it was because you weren't writing about socialism or the true Zionist values, values that mean that you can only write about the Ashkenazi society.
    Nowadays Jerusalem is peaceful it's been months and years, and that is something that in this city you simply cannot say or even think, because it seems that the moment you begin to think that peace is normal an attack takes place, that's why we don't talk about it. In summer, streets are full of tourists and you can't find a place to sit in cafes and restaurants.
    A-H came at 10 p.m., after having dinner with her family, she often called and asked if she could come or played hard to get, she was older than all of us, she was over forty. I had met her in a poetry workshop. When she arrived she would tell us she had a horrible week and that she had not written a thing, and she would make us beg again, “well almost nothing”, and then the bargaining began. She was good.
    “Yes, I wrote a little something.”
    “Come on,” the Uruguayan would say, “let's see what wonderful verses you bring to us.”
    “I can't believe you haven't written anything,” B-S would say, “there is always something.”
    I smiled.
    “Alright, she said after about seven minutes and a half, “yes I wrote something.”
    She wrote ultra-modern poetry with street language mixed with almost Biblical verses and that left us all stunned at that time. She would take out her notebook and read for half an hour or more, thousands of verses, which were always verses that she had not written during that week. D-S and I were prolific, but A-H was a machine gun of verses, she had no sense of criticism and her poems could be great or complete crap and that was of no importance. But I think that what always emanated from them was an unmet mature sensuality. I believe that those readings, hers and ours, were a sort of orgy and a frustrated sexual initiation of a mature woman towards students who were trying to find themselves.
    The sessions ended around 2 a.m. and A-H drove me home in her car. On the way, we engaged in small talk but mostly I talked about my virginity. She often told me that she was sure that with her I would get an erection, which I couldn't achieve in two previous attempts. It was all very theoretical until one day, when she stopped next to my house, I threw myself at her and put my right hand on her tits, then he leaned back and said she couldn't, that she was a married woman and other stuff. I didn't try again since that time and we kept talking about poetry and literature.
    I was part of that group, but I wasn't in it. I was the expelled one before I had even entered. Because what I wanted to write I did not write, or couldn't, or I didn't know what I wanted to write. What I tried to do was what every immigrant does, be part of the society in which he lives. But all that this society wanted was for me not to be part of it, or maybe I was, only in one way, by supporting what is not mine. The problems that interested them were not my problems, nor could they be.
    My problem was that I was part of an extinct race, I came from a society that had disappeared: the Moroccan Jews. But it was more than that. Tétouan was the last settlement of Sepharad. It was the last city still living that dream, which was also a nightmare and sometimes both at the same time, that distant and close dream that was