Raquel Says (Something Entirely Unexpected) Read Online Free Page A

the dream of a fifteenth-century mystic. People talk to each other and send photos from thousands of miles away.
    What were those two babies talking about? Maybe they promised to meet each other after turning forty, and promised to write fantastic books about the city where they were born and that their mothers longed so earnestly to leave in order to discover a new world. They promised to remember, even when all the others wanted to forget. They promised to bring with them the memory of everyone buried in the old cemetery, called the cemetery of Castilla. The Corcos and the Castiels, the Ibn Danans, the Hachuels, the Taurels, the Bentatas, and the Ben Walids; the male and female descendants of converts who returned to Judaism to be able to breathe air where everything was smoke. Today I tell you, Raquel, I tell you, my darling, I cry for them, I cry from their pain that I carry on my back. They are the ones that pain me the most. Then came the protectorate and the money, and with the money we forgot our Haketia, but above all we forgot that simple and innocent Judaism, that Judaism where God was one of us and one of ours. That Judaism where the rabbis did not need to impose themselves and they understood the conditions in which each person lived. They understood that we were human beings, fragile and sinners. I live in them and they live in me. Those rabbis were the true intellectuals of our lives, and they passed on to us that natural Judaism that no one will be able to change for hundreds of years. There, there is my pain and there is my happiness, that profound candle of happiness that no one will ever be able to put out. And thanks to them, everything always ends up as a smile in me. That smile is the truest thing about me. That smile that no one will be able to take from me.
    I arrived with that Judaism to Israel, where everything was different. There, all the Jews thought of another God and other rabbis, very different than mine, such that I couldn’t understand for more than twenty years that something here was not what I expected. It is more difficult for me to explain this to someone like Raquel who lives in Madrid and has never lived in Israel.
    It also makes me embarrassed to talk about the unbelievable discrimination, and on top of all that there will always be an anti-Semite who will use everything I say to kill me or my child, just as they always did with the prophets and with Jesus, or with Otto Weininger, because the worst thing about it is that, in spite of suffering from terrible discrimination, I am innocent enough to not accuse anyone of anything, and even to understand where things come from. 
    Because of that, when Raquel tells me I should give classes at a university or be an editor, I don’t know how to respond. Here, people born in Morocco or their descendants are people who cannot, by definition, be intellectuals. They are people who should do manual labor. During the fifties and up until the end of the eighties, all the Jews from Arab countries were sent to vocational schools to become carpenters or electricians. In those days, no one could imagine that a Moroccan could be a writer or a university professor. In the end, today the success of the system is complete. Sephardic Jews themselves will tell you that their children have no business being history professors. The universities have become closed circles where only the Jews from European countries, the Ashkenazim, teach or lead. Yes, there are some exceptions, and if they ever say there is discrimination they will probably be let go in less than a year, for administrative reasons, of course.
    All of this comes from Zionism being born in Europe, the same Europe of the nineteenth-century people who believed the people of the East were incapable of developing on their own. 
    The Jews who until two hundred years ago were Europe’s ‘orientals’ finally became Asia, the Middle East, and Europeans, and here they created a hell that only makes