Gates to Tangier Read Online Free PDF Page A

I'm not sure. Maybe I heard a lot of words but it was what they were thinking and I heard their thoughts. I could also say that I'm from Spain. Spanish is our language so many Jews in Tétouan and Tangier learn ­ ed to live this lie, above all those that said their parents were from Spain. Spain didn't hav ­ e many Jews in the fifties and even now there are very few. I'm surprised that more Jews don't return to Spain, maybe Franco kept this from happening and most went to France, in the years of mass emigration, the fifties, sixties, they had to leave in a hurry, leave everything, leave five hundred thousand years of history and go ­ forward. This is a gene ­ tic calling, incomprehensible and unexplained, as if an order, and not something you can decide yourself, and you can't say anymore if it was right or not, that you could have made other decisions, hundreds of parameters led you to the decis ­ ion to leave Morocco, colonialism, Zionism, Morocco's indepe ­ ndence in 1956, the attempted assassinations of King Hassan II, the messianic Zionism that the Moroccan Jews believed in deeply, and another thousand reasons, it seems like everything was turn ­ ed inside out in those few years in order to cause the Jews to flee Morocco.
    I can't even say if it is good or bad, it is beyond good or bad, it is just what happened, it is what happened, it was destiny, it is what built Israel.
    Without Moroccans, Israel wouldn't have existed in the fifties. No one wants to admit this, but it was a ne ­ ed that the Jewish Moroccans happily filled. Yet they ended up behind, or were left behind. They took away everything, above all they took away a good education system, the Allian ­ ce Française .
    What makes me laugh the most now is that Mor ­ occan parents are considered parents that don't worry about their children's education, when education was the very center of Jewish community life since the middle of the eighth century, and was the most important thing to the Jews, everything was sacrificed in the name of the children's education in order to help those that could not pay for their studies.
    In 1960, ninety-five percent of Moroccan Jewish children were in sc ­ hool. Ninety-five percent is an almost unbeliev ­ able statistic, fantastical. 80% of these were in Alliance schools, which opened even in the sm ­ all Atlas towns, the others were in reli ­ gious schools, and later the division is pretty clear. Those that went to France filled the universities, and those that ­ came to Israel didn't even finish high school. That means that we have to give a grade of F to Ashkenazi educat ­ ion, dear Ashkenazim , you have failed spectacularly! And maybe that is what you wanted, to fa ­ il in that respect, who knows.
    And my father left a son there, a memory of that la ­ nd, born a half year before his emigration, as if he couldn't bear to stay in the land where his son had been born.
    I heard of a cousin that had left Tétouan five years ago, one of the last, and when he arrived in Málaga he was diagnosed with cancer and died a year later. He couldn't imagine himself outside of his city. There are people who are more tied to the place where they are born than others, and my father left a son, a son who would grow up without seeing his father, he left a spermata ­ zoid, a root that would grow in his land for future generations.

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    "L et's stop for a moment, the world won't stop with us, it will keep going."
    "Where are you running to? Why are you in a hurry? Where are you taking us?"
    "To our deaths."
    "And why does the world need us to die?"
    "In order to run.”
    â€œWe are the gasoline. Our death is its energy. “
    â€œLike the cat that eats the fish."
    "Yes, but why the hurry, why can't it be slower?"
    "The speed of light. The world is afraid of our light.
    â€œIt is afraid that if we stay alive we will bu ­ rn it up.”
    â€œWe are its trees, we are the fruit of its trees, we are the seeds of its