Andalusian in Jerusalem

"Mois Benarroch is the best Sephardic Mediterranean writer in Israel today."

Haaretz Literary Supplement, 2020.

Prof. Habiba Pdaya.

 

 

The Jerusalem syndrome: a Spanish teenager decides to reveal a false secret to his closest friend and tells him he is a Jew. To his surprise his friend reacts with "I knew it!" as if this was the most well known secret in the world. In a matter of hours the whole school calls him the Jew. No denial or acceptance that he told a lie will change his nickname. This lie will lead him to be a respected writer till he finally writes an historical novel about the Jews. This novel is his first one to be translated and to his surprise it is translated into Hebrew. The novel gets him invited to a strange writer's festival in Jerusalem, where he meets an old, half senile woman, who looked like his recently deceased mother, and who is convinced that he is her son, who disappeared in the Lebanon War. He will also meet Charly, a Jewish-Moroccan Israeli writer, suffering from chronic discrimination who is doing his first steps writing a novel about Lucena in Spanish, his mother tongue, half forgotten in order to write in Hebrew. Jerusalem is at the center of Andalusian in Jerusalem, a short but intense novel where Madrid meets Jerusalem and the Jewish world becomes more fantastic than the novels of the writers who try to describe it. The Jewish past of Spain leads to Jerusalem and Spanish is at the heart of the Jewish world.