The Expelled by Mois Benarroch Read Free Book Online Page A

a drunken night; they were unusual nights. Usually, the discussions were focused on theoretical, messianic and religious topics.
    In 1981, when the group was created, I was the most published member, and everything seemed to predict I would be a Cocteau and not a Baudelaire. I had already published a dozen poems in the weekly magazine of the Navy, BaMahané, a poem and a short story in the number two newspaper of Israel, Maariv, two poems in Hadarim magazine, in which they published the most famous poets in Israel, in that remote time when poetry was important and it sold in tens of thousands of copies, and it was debated, and two poems in Iton77, another prestigious magazine. The others were unpublished poets. But within a few years they all won awards and got published with the best Israeli publishers while I, with my insolent attitude, still hadn't published anything until 1994. I wanted to be a Cocteau, not only for his precociousness but for his Enfant Terrible, but the terrible thing was my luck and the attempt to move a literature that even today has no room for Les Enfants Terribles.
    Now I am even afraid to meet people, the nice and the polite ones are the worst. On every corner, they become my enemies. Each article, each word, each book creates more enemies. If there is a coup, my name would be the first to be exposed. By both the right and left-wing people. I am an extremist, but I'm an extremist with nothing more to it, or as someone said I'm a Moroccan extremist, as if being Moroccan was enough to cast you to the extremes of existence. But I don't need to be on my guard all the time, most of them, my future enemies, are scared of my name, they are sure that I'm going to hit them or that I'm going to scream or lose it like a mad dog. When we met, either because they see me at a literary evening or somewhere else, they tell me they didn't expect me to be so nice. Well, of course, I'm not saying I'm the most pleasant person on earth, but I'm sociable in society. What little society I had left.
    I must have realized it back in 1975 when I traveled to Spain to visit my cousin. I stayed there for a month. During that month, besides falling in love for the first time with Sara, I made tons of friends, and I'm still in contact with some of them. What happened in that month? I never stopped to analyze it. It scared me. The lone wolf had turned into a social animal. Things got worse in the next two trips in 1977 and in 1982, and then I stopped going to Spain. How could that be? I spoke fluent Hebrew and I was in "my" country, then how was it that in Madrid I made loads of friends and in Jerusalem I lived as a recluse, a leper, an expelled. I couldn't face that alarming dichotomy. But the years went by and the facts grew and were filled with branches.
    The expelled. That's the name they gave the Sephardim who arrived in Morocco after the Inquisition, and the Jews who lived in the country were called the settlers. The expelled considered themselves more important and in less than a hundred years they were able to impose, after endless arguments, their laws and their way of seeing Judaism. Especially when it came to Kashrut laws. That's why I was born an expelled person. Or I was possibly an expelled before I was born.
    I recall the word, acrobat. Words for me are like trees in my garden. Each word is a different time and stage of my life. We were acrobats when my brother and I jumped from our bedroom closet to the bed and my mother came screaming at us that we were acrobats.
    B-S walked around Binyane Hauma every two or three hours to check that there were no trespassers in one of the rooms. But we were the trespassers. We entered through a back door and we had to knock for several minutes because B-S was on the first floor and the door on the ground floor. Sometimes D-S went with him, I was scared of roaming around those stairs. I think I went with B-S just one time. In those days, D-S the Uruguayan, who had actually