THE IMMIGRANT'S
LAMENT
by

Moshe Benarroch


An introduction

In the beginning of this century Mississippi was considered a "culturally-deprived"
area by the Western-oriented intellects of the United States. Only 50 years
later word spread that this was where the music of America would be defined and
develop. This ‘culturally-deprived’ area gave birth to the blues, and later to Jazz.

In Israel today, half the population comes from Arab countries. They are
considered an uncultured people, that is lacking culture. The story goes
that in the early fifties before the big emigration from Morocco, now the first or
second largest ethnic group in Israel, Golda Meir (prime minsiter of Israel in the 70's)
said: "bring them here and we will educate them". The answer she received was: "Do
you want to educate a man who knows all the writings of Maimonides by heart?".
(Maimonides is one the most important thinkers and law makers of middle-age Spain
Judaism). There are plenty of quotations from politicians as well as thinkers from
those dark ages, from Ben Gurion to Bialik, truly embarrassing, not that different
from ethnic racism in other countries.

These Jews were quickly defined as Orientals, sent to the worst parts of the countries,
depriving them from the right to decide for themselves, condemning them to a life
where attaining food was their main goals. After fifty years they became culturally
deprived.


In literature we find a large group of writers from Iraq, many born in the twenties,
however some in the thirties (for example: Shimon Balass, Sami Michael, Eli Amir),
and then none born in the forties and fifties. The sixties don't seem to fare better, but it
may be too early to decide. Those Iraqis born in the 20's received their education in a
culturally-embroiled Baghdad, were already writing in Arabic before they came to
Israel. Most of them switched to Hebrew in the fifties and sixties. This fact didn't
change their situation. In a country where the Arab-Jewish population is around fifty
per cent of the population this literature is considered an ‘ethnic’ literature as if
written by a people living on another planet. A parallel situation happened to the Jews
coming from the other Arab countries. In spite of them being put in the same basket
each Arab country has a different story, and the Jews within it have a different story to
tell. At the other side of the rope are the Ashkenazi Jews, most of whom came from
Eastern Europe, from one of the most culturally deprived countries, Poland. The level
of illiteracy there was higher than in any Arab country. Here in Israel they became the
Western culture, the others being the Eastern (while they were considered East-
Europeans). They established and built all the institutions in Israel. Since then they
have told their story. This is the story of Zionism, a movement that could see
everything but what it was directly in front of his eyes. First they didn't see
the Arabs ("we didn't know there were Arabs"), later they didn't see that those Arab
were becoming a people. They didn't see the Sephardim (the Jews who came from
Arab countries), and now they are not able to see that these Jews have a past, a
culture, and a literature, mostly that these Jews and Arabs have a different story to tell,
a different narrative, as to what happened in the past, specially in the last one hundred
years.

Israel is a democratic country so nobody can silence a writer, but they can
shut their ears, not hear what we are saying. The major publishing houses
have only Ashkenazi (Jews from Europe) as editors, even well-known Sephardic
writers receive strange rejection letter stating that the reason for not accepting their
books for publication is not literary but a different reason. I have received a few of
these letters. You can enter this race if your book tells the story of the Ashkenazi over
the Sephardi, or if it can be read that way, that is a book in which you criticize the
primitivism of these Arab-Jews. If fifty years ago some of your readers agreed with
the basis of your narrative, second and third generation Sephardim today are
convinced that in Iraq, Morocco or Libya the Jews had no culture at all.


I emigrated to Israel from northern Morocco in 1972. I was 13 years old then and I
was already way into this situation. In the beginning I considered myself an
European coming to the East, with all the arrogance of this attitude. I didn’t quite
understand the joke or compliment: ‘you don't look like a Moroccan’, while I looked
around and didn’t see any tennis courts, saw that Tel Aviv was a smaller city than
Tangier. My brother died a year later, one month after the beginning of the Yom
Kippur war, and we went to live in a big house with my grandmother who was not an
easy person.

This is when I lost myself for years. Probably, in the process, I became a poet. I
couldn't remember anything that happened to me before the age of 12. It was like
being taken out from a movie after the first fifteen minutes, being transported to
another hall, but not really knowing it. I couldn't make a sense of the first part and
couldn't understand the second part.

When I was 30, in 1990 I was having hearing problems, needed an operation. I didn't
want to through otosclerosis, so I decided on treatment through imagery. This is a
series of exercises in which you are asked to visualize different events, real or
imaginary. Like, for example, being in a calm sea and watching the algae move. The
important thing is what you see. In this exercise it may be a dog trying to castrate you
(I saw some of those), then the therapist will do more exercises to try and understand
who this dog is and why. These treatments opened the door to my childhood, starting
to revive memories. However, even today, I have only momentary flashes of my
childhood. Even after making a trip back to my hometown in 1996, I cannot
reconstruct a whole day in my life in Tetuan.

In my previous long poem published in Ygdrasil (march 1998) "Self Portrait Of The
Poet In A Family Mirror", written in 1990, I began to understand something was
wrong with Western culture in Israel and with the Sephardim. It was only when I
wrote ‘The Immigrant's Lament’, in 1992, in tears during the entire writing, that I
touched my soul. The movie started to make sense, my life started to make sense, I
could embrace myself, I could tell myself that I may not be that successful but that I
could love myself. I could also tell the story, I could be angry, I could love the world
again, I could forgive. I think that after more than fifteen years of writing I received
the real prize - that is writing something that can make sense of the puzzle of the
writer's own life.

The same prejudices still reign in cultural circles in Israel. I have not been able to
make any changes here. It was only this year that a publishing house in Israel (Bimat
Kedem) was established to publish the books of the Sephardim. They will publish my
first novel next year. This, I think, is a tragedy within itself, although it is a necessity
and I hope it works.

This long poem has become the most well-known of my works, parts it published six
or seven times, parts read many times on Israeli television. I even heard that it has
been given to cancer patients who seem calmed by it. Russian immigrants have
identified with my experience, and people from everywhere, even Israeli-born have
been able to understand their parents better after reading it. The institutions have not
shown interest, but this seems only logical.