Brown Scarf Blues

By: Mois Benarroch

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

WINNER OF THE YEHUDA AMICHAI PRIZE

"KAFKA'S HEIR, PERHAPS."

Jacqueline Kahanoff book of the year literary prize 2021.
A. EINSTEIN LITERARY PRIZE 2023.



Reeling from the deaths of two loved ones, an Israeli writer travels to Spain--his ancestors' homeland--for a conference of Sephardic Jews. In Seville, he finds a scarf that comforts him for thirteen days. Then, just as suddenly, it vanishes in Madrid. For the writer, the scarf becomes a symbol of loss: of goodbyes to things and people. He says farewell to the dead, and to all the people he never became and never will be.But just as he is letting go of his dreams, he meets a group of Spanish Jews who were lost in the Amazon for 150 years, whom he once wrote about in a novel. Did he merely make them up? Can imagination shape reality?Narrated through many voices and viewpoints, Brown Scarf Blues is a novella that spans countries--Morocco, Brazil, the United States and Israel--and languages--Hebrew, French, Spanish, Portuguese and especially Haketia: the Moroccan Judeo-Spanish speech that hangs on like a living-dead remnant of a vanished culture... the words and expressions left behind by a lost world.

“Another whole critical study, if there were world enough and time, might be devoted to the attitudes to Sephardic identity and culture in Spanish-language literature, but I must mention the novels of a Moroccan-Israeli novelist who writes in Spanish, Hebrew, and occasionally the Moroccan Jewish language of Haketia, Mois Benarroch. His Bufanda Blues (2016) and other writings such as La trilogía tetuaní (2021), a combination of three earlier novels, have led to his being hailed as the best Sephardic writer of Israel by the most highbrow newspaper of Israel. His most Sephardic novel is said to be the first one mentioned, a sad but humorous account of an Israeli writer’s journey to Spain to participate in a writers’ conference, and the story of finding and losing a comforting scarf over a period of about ten days. This rather thin plot line gives rise to meditations on the emotional state of a writer taken to Israel from Morocco as a young boy, the traumas of exile (from Spain, from Morocco); the eternally exilic condition of Jews, and the loss of a dear friend in Jerusalem, somehow melding in with the comfort and subsequent loss of the warm scarf, much appreciated during a cold Spanish winter, all in a semi-humorous and wry tone of regret, nostalgia, and search for identity, helped by his writerly vocation, but not enough to ally his pain. The “best Sephardic writer” often laments that the public does not buy his books, demonstrating that among the educated, reading public (Jewish, or in Israel) there is currently not much room for more than a token Sephardic writer. This one is determinedly non-profound, dwelling on superficial details of his adventure with the scarf, including a farcical conversation with a condemned converso at an auto de fe in Madrid, from which the victim escapes: overall the novel is something of a parody of novels of Sepharad with aspirations to historical profundity.”

Judith Roumani, Fiction: Writing Migration, Diaspora, and Modernity (Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies).Lexington Books ( 2022)