Perry Mason and the Woman of Rome

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Bernice and I recently ventured into Jerusalem. We had to go for a routine medical test, and decided to live dangerously, and combine the visit with a couple of other errands. One of these was to go to the excellent specialist music store on the main pedestrian precinct, to try to get for Esther’s wife Ma’ayan a book of sheet music for jazz piano. We had seen the book on Book Depository, but we agreed that we should support the privately-owned, specialist shop, particularly as it had only just reopened after lockdown. It is a shop that I love going into – although ever since Michael left home we hardly ever have an excuse to go in. The shop window always boasts a delightfully eclectic assortment of instruments, and the array of acoustic guitars, ouds, with the occasional cello or violin along the walls inside the shop, all softly illuminated from above, always leaves me wondering whether man has ever put wood to more beautiful use than when carving musical instruments.

When I went in, I saw that there were no books or sheet-music on display. I assumed they had all been moved to the upper floor. When I asked the owner about the book, he smiled ruefully, and explained that they no longer stock any books: that entire side of their business has been killed by the internet. He also agreed with me that, if he did not stock it, nowhere else in Jerusalem would. And so, regretfully, we had to order the book online.

Don’t get me wrong. Bernice and I are huge fans of Book Depository, with its frequent discount campaigns, its bargain offers, its no-argument replacement policy for goods that arrive damaged or do not arrive, its charming bookmarks. I even enjoy the fact that books are dispatched separately, as the order is filled: I place one order of a dozen books, I forget what I ordered, and then I get the frisson of opening 12 separate surprise presents, over the space of a couple of weeks.

But (and it is a huge but) Book Depository is not the second-hand bookshop on the corner of the Lower Cranbrook Road and Ilford Hill, where I browsed many miles of bookshelves from my early teens onwards. It was there that I fed my first ‘literary’ addiction, buying, reading and then selling back probably 25 or 30 of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason stories. Google Maps street view shows me that the site is now a children’s clothing store, cramped uninvitingly between Chicken Hut and Dixy Chicken. In the early 1960s, however, it was between a cobbler’s, if I remember rightly, and a haberdasher’s. (For those below a certain age, ‘cobbler’ was originally a pejorative term indicating someone who had no skill. This meaning survives – in stage portrayals of Cockneys, at least – in such phrases as ‘cobbled together’ and ‘a right load of old cobblers’. Later ‘cobbler’ came to be used specifically in the shoemaking trade for someone who could repair shoes but lacked the skill to make them from scratch. Haberdashery is what I believe the ex-colonials call ‘notions’: buttons and sewing thread, sequins and trim, and all of the other paraphenalia of needlework and dressmaking.)

‘My’ bookshop was a place of mystery and hidden treasure. As I opened the door, the bell that hung above it would tinkle lightly, and the owner would emerge, badger-like, from the gloom of the back office. The lighting and ventilation helped to create an atmosphere that suggested the shop had been burrowed out of a hillside.

I think for me the greatest mystery of the place – and of second-hand bookshops in general – has always been the ubiquitousness of Alberto Moravia’s Italian masterpiece, translated into English in the Penguin edition – The Woman of Rome. From 1963 until 1986 (when we came on aliya), whenever I went into a second-hand bookshop, I looked for a copy of The Woman of Rome, and I never failed to find one. I am still unsure what to make of this. Did it indicate that it was an extremely popular book, since clearly everyone owned a copy; or, since everyone was getting rid of it, was it an extremely unpopular one? I can’t offer any answers, I’m afraid. I never actually bought, or read, it.

There are at least four ways in which second-hand bookshops are far superior to Book Depository. First, and most obviously, every book is a potential bargain. Books are among that special group of artifacts whose infinite variety age cannot wither, nor custom stale. (Note to self: There’s a good turn of phrase in there somewhere; must play around with it and see if I can use it again.) As long as all the pages are there, and all of the text is legible, a dog-eared, eighth-hand Penguin paperback copy of Women in Love offers exactly the same glorious literary experience as a signed, hardback first edition.

An added benefit, for the obsessive reader, is that, whereas you might be tempted, having discovered John Steinbeck at age 15, to order online everything he wrote, a second-hand bookshop compels you to space out your acquisitions, buying a new title now and again, whenever one surfaces on the shelves, and thereby avoiding binge-reading. (Incidentally, this also makes it much easier to control your spending!) In this way, I enjoyed The Red Pony, for example, on its own terms, rather than comparing it unfavourably with Grapes of Wrath, as I probably would have done if I had read them back-to-back.

In addition, second-hand bookshops usually strike the perfect balance between order and chaos. So, for example, non-fiction is usually divided into science, history, travel, biography, and so forth, and fiction is arranged alphabetically by author. However, the arranging is done not by computer according to Dewey number, or by banks of data inputters, but rather, typically, by one day-dreaming bibliophile, whose efforts, furthermore, are often thwarted by customers returning books to the wrong place.

What this meant for me was that looking for another John le Carré was not a completely hopeless task, (although I could never decide whether he would be found between D H Lawrence and Harper Lee, or between Truman Capote and Lewis Carroll). At the same time, I always had to cast my net a little wider, in case something I was looking for had been bumped a little from its correct position.

However, on balance, I would say that the greatest advantage of the second-hand bookshop over Book Depository is serendipity*. I cannot easily ‘browse the shelves’ of Book Depository, and, if I do, I am very unlikely to stumble across something that has been misfiled.

In my second-hand bookshops, on the other hand, I have found a few absolute treasures that I had no idea I should be looking for. Almost always, it was the titles that attracted me. One day in the mid-1970s, for example, living in the cultural backwater of Bridgend, South Wales, I came across a title that simply begged to be bought, just to find out what on earth it was. And so I came to discover the utterly absorbing experience of reading Robert M Pirsig’s (the author’s name alone might have tempted me to buy the book) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have seen this variously described as ‘The best-selling philosophy text of all time’ and as an attempt to unify ’holistic, subjective perspective with analytical, objective perspective’. It is part road trip, part philosophical musing. If you had asked me in my twenties whether it was readable, and whether it was worth reading, I would have answered ‘Yes and yes!’ enthusiastically. I recently rediscovered it on my shelves and reread it. Let’s just say that it, or I, or perhaps the world, or perhaps two or more of us, have changed since the 1970s.

It was again the title that seduced me into buying Harlan Ellison’s subversive and notorious overview of American television in the late 1960s, The Glass Teat. Not only was the subject-matter stimulating and thought-provoking, but the direct, vernacular prose was both articulate and immediate. We didn’t talk or write like that in Bridgend in the 1970s, and we certainly hadn’t talked or written like that in Ilford in the 1960s, but it was thrilling and vivid and intoxicating. (Almost all of you know me well enough to be aware that the effect wore off pretty quickly….but for a brief moment there I was of my time.) Unlike ZAMM, which is how we cognoscenti refer to Zen and the…, Ellison’s work is, for me, as fresh as ever. It still leapt off the page and hit me between the eyes with full force.

When I last visited a second-hand bookshop, I did it in style. We took the kids on a roots trip to Britain, in 2013, and spent a few days in Swansea staying with very good friends. Micha’el was, at the time, very interested in shamanism, and had tried, with no real success, to find some books in Charing Cross Road. He had been very impressed by Foyles, but not so much by the limited helpfulness of the staff, and so I decided that I would take him to the shrine of books. From Swansea, we drove one day to Hay-on-Wye, which has become the second-hand book centre of the United Kingdom (and possibly the world).

This small riverside town that lies on the Welsh-English border has a population of about 1500, and boasts over 30 bookshops, some specialist, some general. Micha’el and I split up to visit a few, and then met up again in the largest shop, housed in a converted barn, two floors high, with a soaring ceiling, inspiring a sense of awe similar to what one experiences in the great medieval cathedrals. It was a three-hour round-trip drive, but it was very much worth it just to see the expression on Micha’el’s face when he walked into the emporium, and to hear his enthusiasm when he found an assistant who could discuss with him intelligently the various branches of shamanism on which they had books in stock.

I wonder when I will again get to a second-hand bookshop. There are such shops in Jerusalem; Micha’el even worked in one several years ago. However, unsurprisingly, the bookshops I love are the ones whose stock reflects the tastes of people like me: usually more widely read, and almost invariably more adventurous than me, but close enough to me to be able to stretch out a hand and allow me, by stretching out my hand beyond my comfort zone, to grasp the book that they are offering. Now, if Book Depository could only develop an algorithm that did that, our library would be doubled in size….and our bank balance would be halved. Just as well they can’t, probably.

Of course, a well-rounded life is one that combines sedentary reading with healthy exercise.

*Serendipity: now there’s a word with a fascinating etymology. King Barham V, you hardly need me to remind you, was a Persian king who ruled the Sassanid Empire about 1600 years ago. Around his reign there was woven a fantastical tale, which passed into Persian folklore and was published in Venice in 1557. The book was eventually translated into English as The Three Princes of Serendip (which is the Persian name for Sri Lanka). It tells the story of the journeys of the three princes, who ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. Enter, around 1750, Horace Walpole, a Prime Minster’s son, the architect of Strawberry Hill House (which was really the forerunner of all the grand Victorian public buildings in England) and the author of the world’s first Gothic novel – The Castle of Otranto. In his spare time, Walpole, enchanted by the tale of the three princes, borrowed the name of the princes’ birthplace to coin the term serendipity, meaning ‘the fact of finding interesting or valuable things by chance’. (Incidentally, Walpole is also responsible for the first recorded written use in English of over 200 other words, among them: souvenir, malaria, beefy and nuance.)

Enter a Messenger

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As is becoming traditional, I must start with some housekeeping (a blogger’s work is never done, and all that). You may be one of those who smirked at my pitiful attempt at Psychology 101 last week, when I pretended I thought I could get into the mind of the confidence trickster. If so, you might be interested in hearing, from the horse’s mouth, a first-person account of the motivations of the con man. This is a keynote address given by Frank Abagnale in 2013 to, I believe, a conference for senior executives in Federal government in the US, and it not only alerts you to the liberties that Spielberg took with Abagnale’s biography in his film Catch Me If You Can, but also gives you insight into the man himself. Of course, as you listen, a little voice inside your head keeps asking whether you can actually believe anything he says, but both Bernice and I found this a very entertaining way to pass 30 minutes. You can watch it on YouTube here.

And now to today’s main course. I feel like an actor with a walk-on, one-line part in one of Shakespeare’s histories. Picture, if you will, a stage peopled by men all named after counties, with the most powerful, who is either the most handsome and manly or, more interestingly, the most shrivelled and ugly, enthroned, downstage left. (If this is one of those trendy modern-dress versions, the nobles may also have been updated, and be named after some of the newer counties: My Lord Tyne and Wear, what news of Merseyside? He is at odds with Greater Manchester. On reflection, I think we’ll stick to tradition.) I enter, upstage right, decked out in doublet and hose and a suitably flattering codpiece, and holding a rolled and sealed parchment, bound with a bright scarlet ribbon. I stride purposefully across the stage’s diagonal, extend the parchment towards the nobleman, bow with a flourish, and deliver my one line: News from Portugal, my liege.

Yes, my friends. I know that you have been waiting anxiously for the next instalment of the property tax story. Well, here it is.

You will remember that Micha’el paid the outstanding semi-annual property tax by bank transfer to the Portuguese Tax Authority, but, unfortunately, because of an unsympathetic bank-teller, the payment was not accompanied by the requisite document reference number or my NIF (the equivalent of a social security number). Consequently, the payment was not credited to my account with the Tax Authority. As 31 May, the final date for payment, drew nearer, I decided that it would be politic first to make a second payment correctly, and only then, at leisure, to try to locate the first payment in the system and get it credited to cover the second instalment due in November. Micha’el, bless him, transferred the money (this time effortlessly and accurately, through an ATM) and, last week, I made my way, again, into the labyrinth of the Tax Authority website, following the trail of thread that I had carefully paid out behind me on my last expedition. I remembered Citizen Kane (it suddenly strikes me that it is probably unwise to publicise one’s answer to a security question on one’s blog, but it’s too late now), and meandered almost effortlessly to my personal page. There, in my message inbox, was a long and very official-looking message from the Tax Authority, which looked like, and, as Google Translate confirmed, actually was, a statement of payment received. My disproportionate sense of achievement can perhaps be ascribed to my relief at no longer facing the prospect of a kangaroo trial, and an indeterminate period inside a Portuguese jail.

And then (Why, oh why, does there always have to be an and then?), when I woke up on Sunday morning, I found, in my inbox, an email from the Tax Authority which refused to yield its secrets to my cursory glance; all I could make of it was 25 June and 50,000 euros. Ever the optimist, I immediately assumed that I was being given until 25 June to pay a 50,000-euro fine for non-payment of the 50-euro tax. However, I decided to run the email through Google Translate before waking Bernice and telling her that we needed to pack immediately and make our way to some third-world country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Portugal. What a surprise when I did indeed translate it. This is what I read:

On June 25, the first 2020 special drawing of the “Lucky Invoice” will take place. Three prizes worth 50,000 euro each will be drawn. To qualify for the draw, simply request the insertion of your tax number (NIF) on all invoices.

As I contemplate the convoluted, and, doubtless, multiple navigations through the website that I will need to go through in order to be sure that I have, actually, requested the insertion of my tax number on all invoices, I just know that that word ‘simply’ is going to haunt me.

Equally intriguing is the fact that the prize money is not to be awarded, as you might have thought, in crisp 500-euro notes in a delightful pastel lavender shade. Nor even, since the 500-euro note is no longer being printed, in crisp yellow 200-euro notes. (Apparently, in common with Canada and Singapore, Europe is phasing out its highest-denomination bill in an attempt to make things more difficult for international terrorists, who will now need two large suitcases to carry a million euros in cash, rather than managing with one medium one, as in the past. As if the life of an international terrorist were not difficult enough already!)

But, no. Scrap that image of Bernice and I falling back onto a water bed with huge quantities of banknotes fluttering to the floor around us. Apparently, the award will be given in Certificados do Tesouro Poupança Crescimento, which I must admit sounds very impressive. It turns out that these are Treasury Savings Growth Certificates (which sounds almost as impressive). So that’s today’s addition to my Portuguese vocabulary. Certificados do Tesouro is obviously Treasury Certificates; Crescimento is clearly Growth, as in crescendo and a crescent moon. In that case, by a process of illumination, Poupança must be Savings, although I can’t find any etymological hook to hang this word on, so it will just be floating around inside my head for a day or two until it swims out of reach and is lost to me for ever.

Speaking of crescimento, the kids’ vegetable nursery is coming along nicely – obviously benefitting from some tender loving care.

Catch Me if You Can…and You Could…and You Did

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(Quick piece of housekeeping. For the last two months, a technical glitch has prevented anyone leaving a comment. Being me, I naturally, assumed nobody was interested enough. Last week, the problem was rectified. I look forward to a flood of feedback this week.)

I don’t know about you, but I find true-life accounts of confidence tricksters fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, the fairly accurate film account of the extraordinary exploits of Frank Abagnale, who, posing as, among others, an airline pilot and a hospital doctor, forged payroll and other cheques worth millions of dollars. Leonardo diCaprio is immensely attractive as the con man, and Tom Hanks, as the stolidly determined FBI agent who tracked Abagnale for years, turns in a convincing and wonderfully observed performance. (When does he ever not?)

If you want to see whether Abagnale would have fooled you, watch the episode of television game show To Tell the Truth from 1977 that featured the real Abagnale and two other contestants, both posing as Abagnale, in an attempt to fool the panel. The relevant section is from 1:58 to 13:40.

On my morning walks a couple of weeks ago, I listened to a podcast from the BBC: a radio docudrama chronicling, over six 30-minute episodes, the story of Anna Sorokin, Russian-born, whose middle-class family moved to Germany, from where, after finishing high school, she escaped to Paris, and then, in 2013, New York, where she reinvented herself as Anna Delvey, an heiress about to inherit a multi-million dollar trust fund and looking to launch an arts centre complex in Manhattan. Over the next few years (and, for most of the time, by the seat of her pants and the skin of her teeth), she managed both to fool enough of the people enough of the time, and to talk her way out of enough tough corners, to enable her to live a millionaire lifestyle ($100 tips to busboys, champagne dinners in boutique hotels, taking three friends on an all-in two-week holiday in Morocco, staying at a $7000 per person per night villa). It is a fascinating story, as much about those she fooled and used as about Anna herself, and the blend of documentary and dramatization is very well-handled. It was directed by the masterly Sasha Yevtushenko (probably the only BBC Radio drama producer whose father featured on the cover of Time magazine for his achievements as a poet). You can hear it here.

Listening to it, I was struck by what I suspect may be a dilemma that many con artists face. Both Abagnale and Anna seem to have been seduced not only by the prospect of wealth and a glamorous lifestyle, but also by the attention and admiration that they would attract as a result of that lifestyle. Particularly with Anna, I feel that she wanted to be admired more than anything. This, I suspect, is also part of the reason why Abagnale chose such ‘sexy’ professions as airline pilot and hospital doctor. Unfortunately, the con artist is the one person who knows that what he is being admired for is a sham. Even sadder is the fact that the con artist knows that there is one genuine achievement for which he might be worthy of admiration: the extraordinary combination of social and other skills, and the dedication and energy, that he displays in maintaining the charade. The irony, of course, is that the only way the con artist can achieve recognition for that is to be exposed as a fraud. In Anna’s case, I wonder whether the one blatantly foolhardy decision she made at the end of her ‘career’ was deliberate, because she wanted the world to know what she had managed to achieve.

It was only after listening to the serial that I realized that I, in a very modest way, was involved in my own little scam, or, at least, deception, in posing as an expert on a range of subjects, including Portuguese history. And then, last week, my scam collapsed.

When Netflix come to film the story of my rise and fall, the screenplay I write (I’ve never seen the point in fantasising modestly, have you?) will contain three key moments, scenes whose significance is not immediately obvious.

The first is an apparently casual comment I made in my blog post of 24 March. After discussing the nature of my narrative construct, I wrote: So, bottom line: don’t take every word here as an accurate account: this is a blog, not a witness statement. This looks, in retrospect, like the kind of throwaway line, toying with the audience, that Orson Welles used so deliciously in his dazzling 1973 film essay about, among other things, art forgery and literary hoax – F for Fake.

Now we move back to December, and a conversation I had with my friend Seth, an amateur historian who wondered if I might be interested in seeing the PowerPoint presentation that he had put together after a Jewish heritage trip to Portugal.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when my nephew Saul WhatsApped me with the news that he has discovered that a work colleague of his is originally from Lisbon, can trace his family back through several centuries of continuous residence in Portugal, knows about both Belmonte and Penamacor, and is something of a history buff, even editing Wikipedia entries on the Jews of Portugal.

And yet, ignoring all these warning bells, I calmly put my head in the lion’s mouth by choosing, the very next week, to write about 1497 and the Belmonte community. My post was published at 9AM on 9 June, and, at 9:48, I received another WhatAapp from Saul, drawing my attention to what he called ‘one (perhaps) corrigendum’. (‘Corrigendum’! There’s a 400 shekels an hour lawyer’s word, if ever I heard one.)

Saul pointed out that his work colleague stated that the Jews were not expelled from Portugal, but, rather, the practice of Judaism was prohibited.

When my phone rang 30 minutes later, and I saw that it was Seth, I knew what he was phoning to tell me, even though he would have me believe he was phoning to enquire about the general well-being of Bernice and myself.

So, I checked back on my sources and quickly realized that I had leapt to a mistaken conclusion. So (and here we come to this week’s real subject), I believe that some of you may have been under a misapprehension after reading last week’s blog.’ Some of you may have been under a misapprehension.’ So much more civilized than ‘I made a false statement’, don’t you think? I’m considering applying for a job as a Government spokesman.

Oh, the hell with it. I was wrong! Satisfied?

Let me at least try to put the record straight. The story of the Portuguese monarchy’s treatment of its Jewish subjects at the end of the 15th Century is a little more complicated that I suggested last week.

In the wake of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, tens of thousands of Spanish Jews fled to Portugal, where King John II granted them asylum in return for payment. However, only eight months later, the government decreed the enslavement of all Jews who had not yet left Portugal. In 1493, King John deported thousands of Jewish children to the recently established colony of São Tomé in Central Africa, where many of them soon died.

King Manuel I, who succeeded John after his death in 1494, was a pragmatic man, who well understood the contribution of Jews to the Portuguese economy, tax-collecting, and professions, and was loth to lose that contribution. However, in 1497, Manuel married the widow of John’s oldest son, Alfonso. Isabella, his bride, was the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. (Do try to keep up at the back, there!) She had spent part of her childhood in Portugal, and subsequently had been very popular in Portugal during the years of her first marriage. When Alonso was killed in a riding accident, Isabella became convinced that his death was a punishment from God for Portugal sheltering Spain’s Jews rather than expelling their own. She became very religious, and followed an ascetic lifestyle of mourning. Although she had vowed never to marry, she was eventually persuaded to marry Manuel, on condition that he expel all Jews from Portugal who would not convert to Christianity. He agreed to her ultimatum, and they married.

However, Manuel still wanted to keep as many Jews as possible in Portugal, and so he devised a plan. He ordered that Lisbon was to be the only port of embarkation Jews could use. On March 19, 1497 (the first day of Pesach), Jewish parents were ordered to take their children, between the ages of four and fourteen, to Lisbon. Upon arrival, the parents were informed that their children were going to be taken away from them to be raised as good Catholics. Some children were literally torn from their parents, while other parents chose to kill themselves and their children rather than be separated. Eventually, many of the parents agreed to be baptized, along with their children, while others succumbed and handed over their babies.

Later that year, another 20,000 Jews came to Lisbon from all over Portugal, to prepare for departure to other lands. They were herded into the courtyard of the palace of Os estaos, and were approached by priests trying to convert them. Some capitulated, while the rest waited around until the time of departure had passed. Those who did not convert were told they would forfeit their freedom and would become slaves. More succumbed. Finally, the rest were sprinkled with baptismal waters and were declared New Christians.

This explains why there were so many anusim, or crypto-Jews, in Portugal in the following centuries, in contrast to Spain. Of course, the Portuguese Inquisition, which flared up intermittently until its eventual abolition in the first part of the 19th Century, ensured that those New Christians who were not prepared to give up their Jewish identity had to be very circumspect in their practices.

There! I feel much better for having confessed my sin. However, you should now be even more aware that what I write is not necessarily to be trusted. Sadly, the more we bend the truth, the more pliable it becomes.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone at the door. I suspect it may be Tom Hanks, wearing glasses with thick, black rims, so I’m just going to nip out the back to climb the garden wall and make my escape.

Before I go, here’s a young man who is still in the blissful state of being unaware that such a thing as human deceit even exists.

A Later Post

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You won’t recognise that title, but it is in fact a quote from my post of 10 December last year, which, by the time you read this, will be 6 months ago! At that time, I discussed the expulsion of Jews from Portugal, and ended a very brief account with:

The movement of Jewish populations triggered by the expulsions and persecution dramatically impacted what are now the districts of Castelo Branco and Guarda, including the town of Penamacor. However, I am going to leave writing about that until a later post.

My plan was to wait until Bernice and I had visited the town of Belmonte, before writing about it in detail. However, since we failed to make it there in our first two trips, and since we now have no idea when our third trip will be possible, and since I feel that, for the last couple of weeks, I have been treading water, and infuriating those of you who are only here for the Iberia (Double Diamond nostalgists click here) and couldn’t care less about my reading habits or my pseudo-intellectual pretentious pontifications about Art, and since I cannot think of anything else to write about Portugal, this seems like the perfect time to tell you about Belmonte. I apologise to those of you who are familiar with the subject, and even more to those of you who, unlike me, have actually visited the town, but I think it is a tale that bears repeating.

Our story begins in1497, with the expulsion of Jews from Portugal, after probably at least 13 centuries of Jewish life there. Following the expulsion, those Jews who remained faced either conversion to Christianity or imprisonment and execution. Of those who converted, some were not prepared to surrender their Jewish identity; their conversion was purely expedient, and they became crypto-Jews, or anusim. Over the years and the centuries, their identification with and knowledge of Jewish life understandably faded, until the 20th Century, by which time, at least as far as the rest of the Jewish world was aware, none of the anusim remained in Portugal.

By then, Jews had started to return to Portugal, the Inquisition having formally ended after 330 years, in 1821. Some affluent families of Sephardi Jewish Portuguese origin returned to Portugal from Morocco and Gibraltar, and, in 1904, the first synagogue to be built in Portugal since the 15th century was inaugurated in Lisbon.

20 years later, the most unlikely player came on the scene: Samuel Schwartz, a Polish Jewish mining engineer, who had studied in Paris and worked throughout Europe, settled with his wife and child in Lisbon in 1917, in order to put some distance between his family and the World War. While he was conducting surveys for potential tin-mining sites in North-East Portugal, he stayed in Belmonte, a town of about 7,500 people, less than 30 miles from the border (and about the same distance from Penamacor).

There had been a Jewish community in Belmonte at least since 1295, and possibly a century or more earlier. As was the case with other towns close to the Spanish border (including Penamacor), this community had been augmented in the wake of the Spanish expulsion in 1492 by Spanish Jews hoping that, after a brief spell in Portugal, they would be allowed to return across the border, or, failing that, when this specific wave of antisemitism passed, they would be able to steal back across the border into Spain. In fact, of course, the Portuguese expulsion of the Jews followed five years later, in 1497, and the Jewish community of Belmonte, together with all the others in Portugal, disappeared.

While Schwartz was staying in Belmonte in 1917, a chance remark from a shopkeeper led him to believe that there might still be Jews among the local population. He made enquiries, and eventually met a group of crypto-Jews.When he first encountered them, they were diffident and evasive. As he gradually won their confidence, they eventually shared their traditions with him, but refused to accept that he was Jewish. They had believed that they were the only Jewish community in the world. When he saw them lighting an oil lamp on Shabbat eve, and told them that Jews in other countries usually light candles, they were scornfully sceptical, declaring that candles were so fundamentally associated with Catholic ritual that it was inconceivable Jews would adopt them. 420 years of living a secret Jewish life, with no formal education, and with rituals being passed down within the family, had eroded the vast majority of their Jewish knowledge.

They knew no Hebrew, praying in Portuguese, and using a liturgy that bore only faint traces of the standard Jewish liturgy. They marked Shabbat and some holidays, not only by lighting oil lamps (in a place where neighbours could not see them), but also by refraining from eating pork, instead cooking beef and rabbit sausages, highly seasoned with salt to disguise the origin of the meat. They marked three holidays: Pesach, on which they ate matza, Yom Kippur, when they fasted, and Purim, which they marked principally by fasting. The Fast of Esther, in Jewish tradition, falls on the day before Purim; Purim itself is a very joyous holiday. They observed these holidays a day or two before or after the correct date in the Hebrew calendar – a tradition which probably arose so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Church authorities. At least one member of the community feigned an allergy to leavened bread, and ate matza throughout the year, so that his eating it on Pesach would not arouse suspicion. For the same reason, they would meet to play cards on Yom Kippur, specifically so as not to appear to be worshipping.

Eventually, Schwartz convinced them of his Jewishness by reciting the Shema, which is arguably the cornerstone prayer of Jewish faith. His audience did not recognize the Hebrew, except for the repeated word Adonai (the Lord), which was the only Hebrew word that had survived in their community. This one word persuaded them of his good faith. Incidentally, Schwartz noted that, every time he uttered the word, the older women in the community covered their eyes, as Jews do when reciting the first lines of the Shema.

Even after the Belmonte anusim had accepted that there were Jews outside their town, practicing their religion openly, they were initially reluctant to change their ways. Eventually, however, they sought to rejoin their fellow-Jews, and wished to affiliate with the rest of the Portuguese Jewish community. There were those in the wider Jewish world who were keen to return them to the mainstream Jewish fold. In Portugal, these included Schwartz himself, and also Artur Carlos de Barros Basto, a descendant of New Christians who had achieved importance in Portuguese national life and also espoused Judaism. Some British Jews also showed considerable interest in educating these Portuguese descendants of anusim and returning them to standard orthodox Judaism. Unfortunately, Schwarz and Barros Basto did not get along well and mutual antagonism and suspicion characterized their relations. At the same time, the British efforts did not bear fruit.

The Belmonte Jewish community is in many ways unique. It has very unusual practices, some of which I described earlier. Also unusual is the arcane selection of festivals that have survived in the community. It has been suggested that the fact that the Fast of Esther is one of the few holiday observances that survived in the community may be due to a readiness to adopt Queen Esther as a counterpart to the Virgin Mary, so venerated in Catholicism. Their celebration of Pesach venerates Moses in a similar way.

A more disturbing example of the community’s uniqueness is that, as a result of centuries of inbreeding, many of its members have endemic health problems, suffering from night blindness, among other afflictions. One family has a gravely ill daughter as a result of genetic complications. This endogamy has led to the community sometimes not being welcomed by the Jewish communities of Lisbon and Porto.

In the religio-political complex that is characteristic of official Jewish life in Israel (that shouldn’t have offended more than half my readership, should it?), the status of the Belmonte community members is not clear-cut. Some officially returned to Judaism in the 1970s, and opened a synagogue, Bet Eliahu, in 1996. There is a community rabbi from Israel, under the auspices of Shavei Israel (Returnees to Israel), an organization which seeks out and supports fringe Jewish communities. The members of the Belmonte community as a whole, however, have not yet been granted recognition as Jews. In a very real sense, it seems to me impossible to deny their Jewishness. Indeed, their achievement in sustaining their faith against incredible odds over 400 years is surely something essentially Jewish.

One astonishing prayer in the community’s liturgy is a 13-line rendition (in Portuguese, of course) of Maimonides’ 13 articles of faith. The hymn is very close in structure and content to Yigdal, which is the standard Jewish liturgy’s poetic rendering of the same 13 articles. In the words of a report about the community in the Israeli daily paper Haaretz:

One cannot help but wonder how this hymn survived. The mind boggles to think that Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, composed in the 12th century and chanted toward the end of the morning service on weekdays, became part of a Portuguese prayer recited by crypto-Jews who did not even know the Hebrew language existed and refused to talk to Schwarz because they believed that secrecy was integral to their religion. Incredibly, Maimonides’ “Thirteen Principles,” or the hymn based on it, has survived in Portuguese for 500 years; and they never even heard of Maimonides. Which shows how cultural values can live in dark and unknown corners for hundreds of years until one day they burst forth into the light, virtually unchanged, despite a change of language.

If you want to read or watch something more about this unique community, there are two resources I would recommend.

After serving as Israel’s fifth president, and then as Minister of Education and Culture, Yitzchak Navon left political life to pursue other interests. Navon was always a champion of Sephardi culture, and promoter of Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language derived from Old Spanish and spoken by Iberian Jews. He travelled to Spain and Portugal in 1992, to mark the 500th anniversary of the expulsion from Spain. He was accompanied by a TV film crew, and produced a 6-part documentary series. This included a visit to Belmonte, which you can watch
either with Navon narrating in Hebrew (no subtitles) here, (the visit to Belmonte starts around 45:07 minutes into the clip)
or with a narrator speaking Navon’s words in English, here (the visit to Belmonte starts around 53 seconds into the clip)

An interesting account of a visit to Belmonte, with a wealth of detail about the community’s customs and liturgy, appeared in Commentary in 1967. You can read it here.

And finally, here’s a Jew in Portugal pictured hiding from the authorities just a few months ago.

Art’s Art and Others’ (and Others)

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Confined to barracks for the last 13 weeks, Bernice and I have been devoting significant time to watching some of the offerings online of plays, (principally from the National Theatre), operas and programs on the visual arts. When we feel our eyes going square, we switch to reading. And when my eyes demand a complete rest, I turn to music. This artsfest has led me to muse about the nature of each of these arts, and, in particular, the relation of each to interpretation.

The art that lends itself most easily to interpretation may well be music. If you want to go along with me (it will take less than ten minutes, and hardly hurt at all), then please listen to this very straightforward (and fairly parve – neither meat nor milk) rendition of Dvořák’s best-known Humoresque. Now, hear what Art Tatum (for my money the greatest jazz pianist) does with the same delightful little jewel. You certainly don’t have to agree, but at least listen to his interpretation.

So, I hear you wearily ask, what’s the point? The point, I think – and bear with me here because, as always, I am making this up as I go along – is that as a performance art, music is, by definition, interpretational, and, given the nature and limitations of musical notation, music is arguably the art form most open to interpretation. This is true even if the performers are not rearranging the music or improvising on it, or playing a set of variations (as Tatum arguably is).

To illustrate this last point, listen to two mainstream classical performances of the Allemande from Bach’s English Suite No 1. The first is from Gustav Leonhardt, playing on a harpsichord from the period of Bach. The second is from Glenn Gould, idiosyncratic Canadian pianist. They are both playing all (and only) the right notes, and, unlike Eric Morecambe, in the right order. (If you don’t get that reference, click here, but only after you have read the rest of the blog.) Two questions: Do you feel that you have just listened to two versions of the same piece of music, or two different pieces of music? And how much of the effect that the music had on you is Bach and how much Gould or Leonhardt?

Another quick question: Is it possible that if Bach heard Gould or Leonhardt (or Dvořák heard Tatum), they would say: ‘A-a-ah-h-h! So that’s what I meant by that!’?

If I wanted to risk losing half my readers (if I haven’t already), I would now offer you Klemperer’s and Bernstein’s conducting of Mahler’s 5th symphony, and then, as the ultimate in how the same thing can sound different, Glenn Gould’s 1955 and 1981 recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: the same piece of music played on the same instrument by the same performer, but two completely different interpretations.

I am no musician, and not even very knowledgeable about music, but I can understand why some musicologists prefer to read a musical score rather than going to a concert or even listening to recorded music, with the coughs and chair squeaks mercifully absent. Only in their head can they hear what the composer wrote (or, I suspect, their own interpretation of what the composer wrote). They want the unmediated experience.

At the other end of the interpretative scale from music are, it seems to me, painting and sculpture. Here, the creator presents a finished work and the consumer’s interaction with it is almost completely unmediated. No performer presents the work to me. And yet, of course, the museum or art gallery chooses to display the painting or statue in a specific position in a specific room, next to specific other works, lit in a specific way. We can surely view all of these decisions as mediations or interpretations of the work, quite apart from any explicit notes displayed next to the piece or in an accompanying catalogue.

The question of background notes leads me to my next set of questions. To what extent, and in what ways, does knowledge of the artist’s biography contribute to (or perhaps influence) our appreciation and understanding of the work? For example, do we need to know about van Gogh the man in order to view, be moved by, appreciate, understand his work? And here come a few more troubling questions that follow on the heels of that one. I have long ‘known’ that Carl Orff was a Nazi sympathizer in the Berlin of the 1930s and 40s. Does this ‘fact’ influence the quality of his music? In background reading for this post, I have just discovered that the ‘fact’ of that sympathy is far less certain than I have always believed. Does my discovery of this alter the music qualitatively? If we were to learn tomorrow that Picasso poisoned and dismembered red-headed men in his spare time, would that change the nature and quality of his art, objectively? Or subjectively? Does the word ‘objectively’ have any relevance in matters of art, or is art appreciation all subjective, and the high esteem in which Rembrandt is held ‘proves’ his objective standing as an artist no more than the results of one general election (or even several general elections) prove the objective superiority of the majority party? No answers, people, just questions.

Perhaps halfway between music and painting comes theatre. I am sometimes tempted to think that theatre is as freely open to interpretation as music, but, on reflection, for me at least that is not the case. If I hear an interpretation of a piece of music, however far removed from the original, I feel the power of the original in it. Barry Manilow’s Could It Be Magic, for example, is still invested with Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, on whose melodic and harmonic frame Manilow hung his song. However, I have seen some theatrical interpretations that seem to me to have no connection to the essence of the work they are interpreting. I wonder whether that is because theatre operates at a more explicit, intellectual, verbal, literal level than music.

Despite that, clearly theatre is very much an interpretative art. Indeed, I expect practitioners of the art – directors and actors – would argue that there is no point in staging a play if the production does not have something new to say about the work. I also suspect that this is more true for theatre than for music. If we go to a concert specifically because a certain artist is performing a certain work, we may well be hoping to hear the songs or music we love played in the interpretation we are familiar with. However, we would probably not want to see Judi Dench reprising her performance as Lady Macbeth in an identical revival of the Scottish play. Most vivid in my mind, because I have seen it most recently, is the National Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in which Tamsin Greig played Malvolia (rather than Malvolio, as written by Shakespeare): turning this character (and also Feste) from a man into a woman not only seemed appropriate in a play that is so much concerned with gender identity and confusion, but also, for me, seemed to help the production to actualise its decision to expose the full force of the cruelty of the trick played on Malvolio/a and his/her subsequent incarceration.

Which brings us back, inevitably, to literature. Where does fiction, for example, lie on this spectrum of interpretability? At first sight, it would seem to be, like painting, complete in itself and not open to interpretation. Even more so than in a gallery, nothing mediates between the work and the consumer. For the reader, one page of black type on white paper looks almost indistinguishable from another.

I am tempted to think (and this may simply because I am a words person rather than a pictures person, but I don’t think so) that a great novel contains within it the possibility for a wider range of understanding and interpretation than a great painting does, or, at least, that more of this range is accessible to the general reader. This is partly because of the amount of space and time it covers – there are more words in a novel than brushstrokes in a painting, and very few people spend an hour a day for a month looking at a single painting, but such a parcelling of time is quite normal for reading a novel. I feel that it may also be because words are more equivocal, ambiguous, nuanced, than paint. It may, of course, also be because I, like most modern non-specialist consumers of art, am better educated and more experienced in interpreting novels than painting.

Certainly, the experience of reading aloud to Bernice over the last couple of months has made me far more aware of the way in which we, as readers, are constantly interpreting the books we read, in an effort to understand and possess them.

So, music, painting, theatre, literature – which is the greatest art? Fortunately, the pantheon of arts is not an Olympic Games. Each of the arts is a gold medallist and our lives are enriched by both the depth and the breadth of the art we consume. Of all the things we have binged on over the last couple of months, the arts may well be the least unhealthy.

And finally, for those who don’t read the blog but scroll straight to the bottom, here’s a couple of portraits of the artist as a very young man (taken three months ago). As you can see, I had the temerity to disturb him in mid-flow.

Mondries

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Let’s start by not explaining that title just yet, which will at least give you some incentive to read on until we do.

As I write these words, it is 12 noon on Sunday. It should be 10 o’clock in the morning, but it’s taken me much longer than usual to get myself going on this week’s post. Indeed, I think I am only here in front of the laptop today because a few people were kind enough to tell Bernice and myself that they particularly enjoyed last week’s offering, and because a friend whom I regard as a serious writer (as opposed to a dispenser of half-a-yard of assorted ramblings like myself) mentioned this week that my unfailing ability to deliver the goods week in, week out, inspires her to take up her own pen. This is an awesome responsibility, for which, at this moment, I don’t think I thank her. Still, I’ve started so I’ll finish.

This whole getting myself motivated thing is not helped by the reading matter currently on my bedside table. This is because, as luck would have it, none of the books I am reading is of the: ‘Good grief! Even I could do better than that!’ variety. Each one of them is the work of an author exhibiting complete mastery of his art or craft, and therefore, paradoxically, the worst thing to read if you are trying to write while being plagued by impostor syndrome in the first place. (For anyone unfamiliar with the phrase, impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which one doubts one’s accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. For some of us, it’s not so much a syndrome as a way of life.)

Anyway, let me share my current reading matter with you: all highly recommended (provided, of course, that you, yourself, are not at the moment trying, and failing, to write).

The first author, and perhaps the most daunting for me, is Bill Bryson, whose The Body – A Guide for Occupants I am thoroughly enjoying. I must apologise for coming so late to what is such a well-publicised book, but I don’t generally stay on top of the literary news; it was my clever daughter who read up about this attempt ‘to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us’, and, thinking, quite rightly, that it had my name written all over it, Esther and Maayan bought it for me for my birthday. It is endlessly fascinating, with an average of three or four scarcely credible facts on every page, and it is written with the easy charm, sense of wonder and delightful humour that characterise all of Bryson’s work. Why is it for me the most daunting read? Because, if I ever think that I might possibly be a writer when I grow up, then this is the kind of writer I might least unrealistically kid myself I could aspire to being, and reading the genuine article can lead to despair.

My only other criticism of it is that it places me, at least twice a day, on the horns of a dilemma: I can’t wait for Bernice to read it after me, and I really don’t want to spoil it for her, but at the same time so much of it is so astonishing or hilarious – or sometimes both simultaneously – that I want to read great chunks of it to her, even though I know I am in danger of spoiling her enjoyment of it when she does read it herself.

Next is James Joyce’s Ulysses, reading which was one of the items on my Retirement To Do list. I started off tackling this task with full seriousness, reading Homer’s Odyssey for necessary context, studying Jeri Johnson’s 50-page introduction to the 1922 text edition of Ulysses, and buying Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book as a guide to supplement the 250 pages of notes at the back of the Oxford edition. I am enjoying the read; indeed, I think I am enjoying it more as I gradually ease myself free of the perceived need to research every note, and just surrender myself to the sound of the text itself, and let it wash over me. By this means, I am starting to feel that, by the time I get to the end, I will begin to appreciate why so many regard it as such a great novel. I have also discovered that I enjoy it more if I read it aloud, very fast, in an appalling Dublin accent, although, of course, I can only do that when Bernice isn’t around, and, if I ever ride the buses again, I’ll have to refrain from declaiming there as well.

Which brings me to a practice Bernice and I have recently revived: one that we indulged in a lot in the early years of our marriage, usually lying in bed. I am referring, as you have probably guessed, to reading fiction aloud. I read Bernice the entire Jane Austen canon way back in the day; I firmly believe that reading aloud sets a measured pace that allows you to fully savour Austen’s sense of irony. Dickens, of course, begs to be performed as well – he set the unattainable standard for that himself, in his hugely popular reading tours. Ideally, Dickens demands a week’s pause between chapters. That is how many of his original ‘readership’ experienced each of his books: serialised, with one member of the family reading aloud to the household that week’s instalment from a literary magazine.

We revived this fine practice with Bernice’s surprise birthday present to me this year: Clive James’ epic poem Rivers In the Sky. I am sitting here wondering which is the more daunting task: describing this poem to someone who hasn’t read it, or describing Clive James to someone who does not know of him. Let’s start with the man. Over a period of 80 years, from the late 1780s, England sent her convicts to Australia. Then, in the 1960s, Australia sent England a string of larger-than-life characters, such as Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive James. This has to be one of the better deals England has ever made. If you need reminding who the first two are, or just want to bathe in nostalgia, you will find Humphries in the persona of Dame Edna here, and Greer in the persona of Germaine Greer here. (Be warned: the Greer documentary is X-rated.)

As for Clive James, he first rose to fame as the man whose weekly newspaper column of TV criticism was read by everyone, not only for its intelligent analysis, but also (and, to be honest, principally) for its often blistering humour. He once described the young body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking “like a brown condom full of walnuts”. After 10 years at the top of his game as a TV critic, during which James also published several collections of more serious literary criticism, he then, for some of us inexplicably, created and hosted a programme that celebrated the lunacy of the Japanese TV genre of human endurance reality shows, where contestants underwent such challenges as having their torsos smeared with fish food, before being lowered into a river stocked with hungry catfish. James presented this programme with a rather uniform mocking bemusement, and I never understood why he devoted so much of his time to (wasted so much of his time on?) something so insignificant. The answer, I now think, was that he found television, all television, fascinating, because he saw it as an honest reflection of life. He once wrote: “Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

Those of us who were upset that James was wasting his time and talents on this trivia need not have worried. At the same time as researching and presenting this series, and later a very successful series of travel programs, focussing on a different major world city each week, he was also teaching himself Russian, because he “could no longer bear not to know something about how Pushkin sounded”. He spoke several other languages, and published an English translation of Dante’s Inferno. He could talk intelligently for hours, and apparently frequently did, about his various passions, which included both Formula One motor racing and the tango. TV chat show host, presenter of documentaries, publisher of five volumes of memoirs and several novels, poet and songwriter, he was told, 11 years ago, to expect that he would die very shortly of leukaemia, and was then given ten more years through a miracle drug, ten years in which he produced a number of fine books, and many of his finest poems.

River in the Sky is an epic poem, mostly written in free verse, with some blank and some rhymed sections, In it, James, contemplating his imminent death, looks back to key events, people and places in his life, while also examining a range of cultural references broad and deep enough to make even James Joyce look only half-educated. It is 120 pages of the most dazzling, moving, witty, searingly honest brilliance, less a river than a rollercoaster.

It’s now 6 o’clock on Monday evening, and time to explain the title of this week’s post. Last week, I had little idea what to write about, so I tidied up some loose ends, fed off my readership, and called the resulting pot pourri Sundries. This week, I had even less idea what to write about: the problem continues, so we now have Mondries. I’m just praying this dire situation doesn’t continue for more than seven weeks.

Which reminds me of a piece of verse from the Look pages of The Sunday Times (dedicated readers will know that that is the London-based newspaper of that name). This piece lodged itself between the teeth of my mind in the 1970s, and no amount of probing with tongue and toothpicks has succeeded in budging it since then.

Three Times a Week
Monday:
Choosy
Wendy.
Thursday:
Heidi.
Saturday:
Cindy

And penultimately, some audience participation. I have three other books to tell you about. Shall I do that next week, or are you all booked out? Please let me know – below or by email.

And finally, here’s another reader in the making: over 8 months ago.

It Takes a Village to Raise a Child…

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…and, when times are hard, it takes a readership to write a blog. So this one is dedicated to you, various friends and family members, whose reactions to previous posts, and whose chance comments, will be providing the vast majority of today’s musings.

As I kid myself that you may not have noticed, the content of these posts has been getting a bit thin of late. (This isn’t, I think, true of last week’s post, which I have been clutching close to my chest since last December, when I first researched it, because I knew that I wanted to save the big reveal until Lag b’Omer.) The truth is that, like any self-respecting squirrel, I have to spend our time in Portugal stockpiling my amusing and fascinating insights into Portugal and my relation to it, and then hope that this store will last me through the bleak months of away-from-Taoness until we are next able to fly. So, when we returned from our first trip, late last November, I had more than enough chestnuts buried to see me through December and January. On our second trip, I had to hunt a little harder for supplies, having picked most of the low-hanging fruit the previous time. So, since our return to Israel in March, I have watched my supplies dwindle.

And now, just this week, we reluctantly cancelled our next trip. We had been due to fly on 8 June, but we eventually faced the fact that that was not going to happen. We are still fairly optimistic that we will be able to get to Portugal this summer. This optimism is based on a number of factors. Both Israel and Portugal seem to have fared better than average in handling the Covid-19 pandemic. Both Israel and Portugal are economically dependent on international tourism, and are therefore eager to reopen their borders as soon as possible. Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv) airport is scheduled to reopen on 1 June. We would be perfectly happy to spend our first two weeks in Portugal ‘isolating’ with the kids, and not going out. My travel insurance agent assures me that our policy would cover us for contracting Covid-19 while in Portugal. So, all things considered, we are hoping, and fairly hopeful, that we will be able to get there this summer.

Meanwhile, however, I have hardly anything left in my blog storehouse. So, let’s start today with some housekeeping.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the challenge of learning Portuguese, and about the amusement to be had from foreign-language phrasebooks. My good friend Joe contacted me twice after that post. First, he recommended to me Pimsleur’s foreign language online courses. I signed up and find myself making encouraging progress. The course is uncompromising in its presentation of dialogue at a pace of speaking that is frighteningly close to the real world, and I am amazed to discover that what didn’t sound at all like a language made up of distinct words two weeks ago is already comprehensible. I have explained to Bernice that, when we do next get to Portugal, we are going to go into a café and, when I ask her what she wants to drink, she had better say ‘Mineral water’, since that is the only thing I know how to order.

Of course, I cannot escape the niggling fear that, when we do get back to Portugal, I will discover that the Portuguese I am hearing bears as close a relation to the Penamacorean dialect as Received Pronunciation does to Geordie (or, if you prefer, as close a relation as Standard American English does to Appalachian mountain talk).

Joe’s second contribution was to remind me of a book I hadn’t thought about in a long time: English As She Is Spoke. In 1855, an enterprising Portuguese named Pedro Carolino had the smart idea of taking a previously published Portuguese-French phrasebook, and adapting it for Portuguese visitors to England, by translating the French phrases into English. At this point, at least two questions spring to mind. The second of these is: Why didn’t he translate the Portuguese directly into English, and cut out the French middle man? Hold that thought, while I ask the first question? Why did a man who had absolutely no knowledge of English think he was qualified to compile a Portuguese-English phrase book in the first place? I suspect he felt that there was a demand that was not being satisfied, and that this represented too good a business opportunity to miss. With regard to the second question (the one I asked first), I suspect there were no Portuguese-English dictionaries available, so he took what he could find, which was a French-English dictionary. In any event, this was a fortunate day for the world of letters, because the end result of Carolino’s labours was a book of which Mark Twain wrote: ‘Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.’ The gloriousness of the mistranslations cannot be described. Let me, instead, give you a couple of examples from the double-page spread that Joe sent me a photocopy of.

In response to a question about whether the road is safe to travel along:
It have nothing to fear, not in day neither the night.

Small-talk to one’s carriage companion:
Let us take patience. Still some o’clock and we shall be in the end of our voyage.

The post-publication story of the book is also interesting. In the years following its publication, initially in Paris, it went the mid-19th Century equivalent of viral in social media. Copies were passed from hand to hand among London society, for native English-speakers to marvel at its butchery of the language. It was eventually published in London and Boston 28 years later, as an entertainment. In 1969, it was republished, again purely for its entertainment value, and a revised paperback version was published in 2004, 149 years after its original publication. One can’t help reflecting that if it had not been such a glorious failure, it would never have been such a resounding success.

Indeed, it features in a favourite book of mine that celebrates such triumphant disasters of the human spirit: Stephen Pile’s The Book of Heroic Failures. Pile comments:

Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of ‘to craunch the marmoset’?”

This is an entry under the book’s Idiotisms and Proverbs, and represents the author’s attempt to translate the French slang idiomatic expression croquer le marmot, used to indicate waiting patiently for someone to open a door, with croquer referring to the knocking or rapping sound, and marmot, a term for the grotesque door knockers in vogue at the time.

And now, I think it’s time to give you Chapter 2 of the Tax Authority saga. I left you two weeks ago waiting for the arrival at our UK contact address of a letter containing the new password enabling me to go online in the hope of being able to verify that the payment made by Micha’el by bank transfer on our behalf had been correctly identified. (If you’re lost, and care enough, you can reread the post from two weeks ago.) A few days ago, the letter arrived, my contact read out the password to me, I went online, remembered that my favourite film is, apparently, Citizen Kane, and keyed in the password – a string of 12 letters.

Not accepted.

‘Aha!’, I thought, ‘I wonder if it is not upper-case, as I assumed, but lower-case.’ Keyed it in.

Not accepted. Followed by the dreaded: You have two more attempts.

Curses, I thought, or, actually, %&*&##@!!. (I never knew that a string of meaningless symbols substituted for a curse is called a grawlix, until today. This is now a word I will treasure, like aglet, which is that little plastic tube clamped onto the end of a shoelace to prevent fraying – as if you didn’t know.) Keeping calm as I breathed into a paper bag, I called my UK contact, to ask whether the password was upper-, lower- or mixed-case.

‘Upper-case. Couldn’t you tell I was reading it in my upper-case voice?’
‘Your voice always sounds upper-case to me.’

Back to the site, hoping that I had simply mis-keyed the password originally. Tapping out, letter by letter, cross-checking after each letter. Pressing Next. Waiting. Oh,that endless, gut-wrenching wait.

Success!

Of course, every success is only really the opening up of another opportunity for failure. I had now unlocked a website that stretched out before me like Hampton Court maze, except for the fact that it had no helpful hedge to keep on my left….or is it right?. Anyway, in an hour of stumbling through the pages I found my message board, with a very nice message reminding me that I had until 31 May to pay my tax, and a personal data page, where I was able to enter my email address and nominate it as my preferred means of communication. This produced an almost instantaneous result, in the form of an email notifying me that I had until 31 May to pay my tax.

At this point, I admitted defeat, sent all of the details to Micha’el, phoned him on WhatsApp and asked him to please call the authorities to ensure that they can locate and correctly assign the payment. For further developments, watch this space.

And finally, after last week’s photos of a chainsaw, I passed on to the kids a comment from a friend that: In Tennessee, most hillbillies wait until their kid is two before giving him serious tools. I’m pleased to see that they are taking this advice seriously.

This week’s post has been brought to you by the words idiotism, grawlix and aglet. Thanks, respectively, to Joe, Norma and Andrea B (and pleased not to disappoint you, Andrea S.)

Call That a Bonfire?!

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In any normal year, Monday night this week would have been a time in Israel for staying indoors and closing all the windows, because, as many of you know, Lag b’Omer started on Monday night. As with many Jewish traditions, just exactly what we are marking on Lag b’Omer is open to argument discussion: the ceasing of the plague that killed thousands of Rabbi Akiva’s students; the beginning, almost 1900 years ago, of the rebellion against Roman rule that was led by Bar Kochba, and supported by Rabbi Akiva; the death of one of the very few of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples to survive the revolt, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the putative author of Judaism’s major mystical work, the Zohar (which could be translated as Incandescence). Or, possibly, all of the above.

Hundreds of thousands, mostly ultra-orthodox, Israelis flock on Lag b’Omer to Mount Meron, to the grave of Rabbi Shimon, to celebrate the mystical secrets that he allegedly shared on his death-day, by singing, dancing, and, principally, by lighting large bonfires, evoking the spiritual light that the Rabbi brought to the world.

This ritual is replicated thousands of times, in every community in Israel, as teens and pre-teens indulge their pyromaniac tendencies. Indeed, from the day after Pesach, from Metulla in the north to Eilat in the south, no piece of wood that is not firmly nailed or glued in place is safe, and the streets are full of purloined supermarket carts laden with planks, offcuts, branches, all pushed by young boys, some not old enough to see over the handlebar.

Then, on the night itself, I don’t recommend driving down Road 1, the main artery in Jerusalem leading from the North and East. At one point, this road skirts the Old City walls on one side, and ultra-religious neighbourhoods on the other side; on Lag b’Omer, ranged along that side of the pavement, a series of huge bonfires blaze away between the traffic and the apartment buildings, and threaten both. If you’ve ever wondered what the height of stupidity is, look no further: it’s about 2 metres.

Or so I thought, until last year. Take a trip with me, now, through space, from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean to the Western end, and through time, from mid-May to late December, and join me at the madeiros of Portugal. Another religion, another tenuous tradition, and another set of bonfires.

In very many towns and villages throughout Portugal, in the days leading up to 25 December, piles of firewood are brought from the forest to the town square, where a huge bonfire is built, and lit, on 24 December, symbolically to warm the newborn infant child. Historically, the gathering of the wood was undertaken by young men about to be enlisted in the army. These days, the collection is non-gender-specific. Historically, there were two methods of collection. Generous landowners would have their contribution of wood paraded into the town centre, with festivities and glasses of the traditional wine-based spirit, jeropiga, all at the landowner’s expense. Less generous landowners would have wood stolen from their lands by the peasants, and these ‘offerings’ would be deposited in the town square at dead of night, with no ceremony. These days, the felling, sawing and transportation of the wood is a highly controlled process, coordinated with the Forestry Commission.

Ideally, the fire, once lit on the night of 24 December, should burn constantly for the next 12 nights. Over the years, quite naturally, rivalries grew up between neighbouring towns, as to which could produce the biggest and best madeiro, and it was not unheard of for the young bloods of one town to steal the firewood from the pile of a neighbouring town, again under cover of darkness.

A brief etymological aside. When I first encountered the word madeiro, which I assumed meant bonfire, my excitement was intense. The word for bonfire in Hebrew is medura, and the two seemed like cognates, words (often in two different languages) that have a common etymological origin and, in this case, an identical meaning. I suspected that the Portuguese Sephardic Jews had adopted the Portuguese word. However, my research revealed that medura is a word used by the prophet Ezekiel, and is from the root DOR (דו”ר) with the meaning circular. From the same root come the words dor meaning a generation, and davar meaning a postman, who delivers letters on his round. A medura, as any good boy or girl scout knows, is made by placing logs in a circle and then lighting them.

Now I was excited in the other direction: perhaps the Portuguese had borrowed the word from the Sephardi Jews. Alas, it seems not: madeiro actually means a log or beam, and is from the Latin materia, meaning wood, or material/matter, and ultimately deriving from the Proto-Indo-European for mother, presumably in the belief that all matter is born from the Mother.

So, I now have a philosophical question. If two words in different languages look very similar, and have the same meaning, but are not etymologically related, should we regard them as true cognates, or false cognates? At this point, I’m guessing that some of you don’t find this quite as urgent a question as I do, so let’s get back to the main theme of today’s meander.

I was interested to learn that Beira (the province in which Penamacor is situated) is the area of Portugal most ‘into’ madeiros, and that the string of villages and towns north of Castelo Branco are the most fanatical, and that the jewel in that crown, the biggest, tallest, longest-burning madeiro in all Portugal is the one gathered, erected, and ignited every year in Penamacor. On 6 December, the logs are brought into town, the bonfire is erected, and the Penamacor fire is actually lit on the night of 23 December, a day earlier than everywhere else.

The biggest, tallest, longest-burning madeiro. But what, exactly, does tall mean? Or, to repeat my question, what is the height of lunacy? Well, early last December, the kids took Tao down to the village square, when the bonfire had been erected.

I am informed that in Penamacor – in, you may remember, the heart of forest-fire country – the madeiro, which, as you can see, is erected less than two metres from buildings on either side of the village square, has sometimes been built over 10 metres high.

Incidentally, you can see a sign near the top of the woodpile. I originally assumed the sign, with its legend Malta 1999, was commemorating Penamacor’s gold medal in the Mediterranean Madeiro Games of 1999, held that year in Malta. However, it actually means Cohort of 1999, referring to the 20-year-olds who in 2019 took the lead in wood collection, and who were, of course, born in 1999. The background of the sign actually shows a pile of logs, each of which bears the name of one of the cohort.

If you’re interested, you can see how these logs arrive in town in the ceremony of the bringing of the firewood here (the actual parade starts around 2 minutes into the video).

Despite the fact that, once it is alight, firemen play hoses on the edges of the bonfire continuously, the kids decided it would not be responsible parenting to bring Tao down once the fire was lit, so I can only offer you some footage from the provincial news station. You can see the madeiro in all its glory here.

I mentioned responsible parenting earlier. In this context, let me share a couple of recent pictures of Tao with you.

Another birthday present?  You really shouldn’t have!
You mean it’s not for me?

Misfortunes

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François de La Rochefoucauld was a 17th Century French nobleman, best known for his published collection of over 500 maxims, mostly reflections on human behaviour and character. He did not pull his punches, and, in the introduction to his Maximes, he shrewdly wrote:

…the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities. After that I guarantee that he will be the first to endorse them and he will believe that they do credit to the human spirit.

I mention him only because I want to cite one of his maxims, by way of introducing this week’s ramblings:

In the misfortunes of our best friends, we find something that is not unpleasing.

It is in this generous spirit that I offer you the following story.

Let’s start at the very beginning. You basically don’t exist in Portugal until you get a NIF (Número de Identificação Fiscal, or Tax Identification Number). Without a NIF, you can’t open a bank account or buy property. So, of course, when I first visited Portugal for 4 days, principally to acquire the services of a lawyer, open a bank account and start the process of finding and buying a property, the first thing the lawyer had me do was acquire a NIF. To expedite this process, I had to furnish an EU address through which I could be contacted, which I did. All went smoothly, as you know, until…

A couple of weeks ago, tiring of reorganizing our  book collection (I can recommend by spine colour, for its aesthetic effect, and by original publication date, to remind yourself that Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries), I went into the Portuguese Tax Authority website, in the hope of changing our EU contact address to our address in Portugal. Navigation was actually fairly straightforward, since bureaucratic language in Portuguese is not that different from the English equivalent.

I started by providing my NIF, and then was asked for my password, of course. At that point, I realized that I had tried to sign in, rather than registering, so I started again. All went smoothly until I came to a page that I did not understand at all. A quick copy and paste into google translate established that I was being asked to choose a security question and provide an answer. Now, I am used to objective security questions that yield an unequivocal answer, such as my mother’s maiden name or the name of my primary (elementary) school. The questions I was invited to choose from, however, were all subjective.

What is your favourite film?
 Oh, I don’t know! Citizen Kane? Or is that a bit obvious? Les Enfants du Paradis? Just a tad prententious? (Not really pretentious François Truffaut once said that he would give up all of his films to have directed Les Enfants du Paradis. I can’t find the film online, but you can watch a charming 4-minute excerpt on youtube here.) It’s a Wonderful Life? Is that really the corny image I want to project?

What is your favourite book? Bernice suggested The Bible, on the grounds that I was more likely to remember that. I also felt that it was a good choice for the Tax Authority of a staunchly Catholic country.

What is your favourite colour? I don’t think I’ve got one.

I was beginning to feel completely characterless.

Next, I was asked to provide my password, again. Of course, I still didn’t have one, so I selected the option to set a new password. A popup informed me that a temporary password would be sent to my contact address. At this point I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

Then, a week ago, my UK contact informed me that a letter had arrived. I asked him to open it, and send me a photo of the contents. Of course, the disadvantage of this method is that I didn’t have a soft copy that I could paste into google translate, and the quality of the photo I was sent wasn’t good enough for my Translator app camera to identify the text accurately. All of this meant that I had no easy way of finding out what the letter was about. However, 20 minutes of deciphering, typing short phrases into google translate, comparing the letter with other documents in my possession and, alright, blind guesswork, led me to the conclusion that the letter was a demand from the Portuguese tax authorities for the first of two payments of the property tax due on our purchase of the house in Penamacor. Impressive, no? Either that, or it was an eviction notice…or possibly a two-for-one offer on Portuguese wine.  

Having established the nature of the letter, and understanding that the bill had to be paid before the end of May, I then turned my attention to the section of the letter that outlined Instruções sobre as formas de pagamento. Payment, I learnt, can be made at a Smart Multibank ATM. This is, by the way, an ATM at which you can pay bills, order theatre tickets, and perform other advanced transactions. Of course, you need to be in Portugal to do that, so this was not such a smart method for me. Payment can also be made by cheque, but we don’t have a chequebook, so that was out as well.

Fortunately – if that’s the word I’m looking for – the letter also gave the address of the Tax Authority portal, which I then visited again, in the hope that I could pay the tax online. After hardly any time at all, I navigated my way to a section that gave the Tax Authority details for bank transfer, and stressed the two items of information that had to be included as a comment in any bank transfer – my NIF and the document reference of the demand for payment.

Now we were cooking! Or at least in the advanced stages of food prep. I grabbed my phone and went into our bank account app, entered all the details of the transfer and advanced to the approval screen, where, of course, I was confronted by the message: Bank transfer requires enabling the Matrix functionality, which you have not done. Those of you take copious notes each week will remember that enabling the Matrix functionality requires receiving an SMS with a one-time code and keying it in at an ATM, and that we are unable to receive, when in Portugal, SMS messages on our registered phone, unable to reach an ATM when in Israel, and unable to change our registered phone. I am thinking that, on our next visit to Portugal, I might leave my debit card with Micha’el, request my bank to send me the SMS immediately after our return to Israel, and forward the SMS to Micha’el, for him to enable the functionality at an ATM. (Rereading this, I wonder whether I actually want to leave Micha’el my debit card and have him be the only person who knows the password for advanced functionality.)

Meanwhile, I had to find another way of paying the tax. It seemed to me that I had no choice but to bother Micha’el to pay it for us. So, I phoned him to explain the situation. He, of course, readily agreed, and I sent him the bank details and the two vital pieces of information (NIF and document reference number). Soon afterwards, Micha’el sent me a photo of the bank transfer confirmation. I immediately spotted that there was no mention of the vital information; when I asked Micha’el, he explained that he had tried to make the transfer from an ATM, but at some point had not understood how to proceed; he had then gone into the bank, and asked a teller to carry out the transfer. She was not very sympathetic, because she felt he should have used the ATM, and, as a consequence, although he had stressed to her the importance of the vital information, she had been fairly brusque, and had apparently omitted it. Micha’el suggested I email the Tax Authority with the vitals, and I thought to myself: ‘Well, that sounds straightforward’. (This is, as you probably realise, one of those dramatic irony lines that make you smile wryly when you watch the film for a second time.)

So, back I went onto the Tax Authority website, and looked for an email address. I couldn’t find one anywhere, but I did eventually come across, and was able to download, a file with contact details for all the offices, branches, departments and officials of the Tax Authority – addresses, office reception hours, phone numbers and email addresses. Fortunately, this was an Excel file, so I was able to filter the hundreds of rows and search for the department I needed. Less fortunately, the department I needed was not listed.

However, on another tab of the Excel file I did find the right department. Scrolling across to the column headed Email Address, I found that on this tab there was no such column. There was a phone number, and I could, I hear you suggesting, have just phoned the office.

If you live in Israel, you are very used to phoning a Government office and hearing, in Hebrew, ‘For Hebrew, press 1’, then, in English, ‘For English, press 2’, and so on, for Arabic, Russian and Amharic. In Britain, if I remember the last time I visited a hospital, interpreters are available for six or seven languages, and explanatory pamphlets are available in 20 others. Well, let me tell you, in my experience, Portugal is, by comparison, insular; indeed, I find Iberia as a whole is peninsular. When I was working as a technical writer for a large software company serving the telecommunications industry, I captured minutes for meetings working with clients in 20 or so different countries. I can only remember three instances when the meetings were not conducted in English. In Russia, following the mass immigration to Israel of Jews from Russia, our company always assembled a complete team of native Russian speakers: managers, software engineers and technical writer, and all meetings, emails, documentation were in Russian. The company touted it as our competitive edge over our rivals in America and elsewhere. In Austria, the client insisted on conducting meetings in German, although I am quite sure that the client participants all spoke reasonable English. In this case, the client wanted to ensure that it had the upper hand in meetings. In Spain, the client insisted on meetings and documentation being in Spanish, because the participants’ English was simply not good enough, and because insisting on using the Spanish language was a matter of national pride.

So, I knew that there was almost certainly no point in phoning the Tax Authority, not with my command of Portuguese and my collocutor’s likely command of English.

In the end, I found a page dedicated to non-residents and foreign nationals, which included an option to submit a question in writing. This seemed like my best shot. So, I composed a message in English, explaining the situation, giving details of the transfer and all the vitals, and asking for the payment to be credited to me. For good measure, I asked whether, at the same time, the Tax Authority could update my contact address to our Portuguese address, and also, in any reply, could use my email address rather than my postal address. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I pasted that message into google translate, pasted the translation into the message box on the website, and Hey Presto! I got the popup message: You have exceeded the maximum of 500 characters. There then followed 15 minutes of chiseling away the superfluous material, like Michelangelo, to reveal the essential message perfectly formed within, then google translating it and pasting the result. After four or five attempts, I finally got the Portuguese down to 520 characters, while still preserving an almost coherent narrative. I then discovered that the heading of the message did not count towards the 500-character limit, so I added my email address to the heading of the message and reached the magic 500.

Tolstoy can scarcely have felt a greater sense of achievement on completing the final sentence of War and Peace than I did when I hit Send.

Not 15 minutes later, my contact phoned me to say that a letter had arrived. It transpired that this contained the code for registering with the Tax Authority. He relayed the code to me, using our typical fumbling approximation of the NATO alphabet. (Michael McIntyre, who I know I have referenced before, has an amusing 2 minutes on this at the beginning of this clip.)

My pulse racing, I went back to the Tax Authority website, entered my NIF, was asked to choose a security question, selected What is your favourite book? and typed in The Bible. I then got a popup message: This is incorrect. Try again. This time I selected What is your favourite film? and typed in Citizen Kane. Success! I felt as though my each-way bet on the Grand National had come in second. Unfortunately, I forgot that this was an accumulator bet. I was next asked for my password, and entered the password my contact had given me. Incorrect password. You have two more attempts. It was only at this point that I realized that my second visit to the Tax Authority website had generated a new password to be posted to my contact address, whereas the password I had used was the first one generated, which I had subsequently rendered obsolete.

So now, I am waiting to receive my second password, and waiting to hear whether the Tax Authority is able to locate and assign my payment. A lot of waiting. Fortunately, I have several weighty books to read….and I’m not going anywhere, not even Portugal to see our grandson, who seems to be getting very grown up.

A Postilion Post

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If I’m at home by myself in Israel, and there is a knock at the door, my heart sinks. ‘Oh no!’ I think. ‘Now I’m going to have to answer the door and talk to someone.’ (For those of you who don’t know, I am, much of the time, one of those people for whom lockdown has legitimised the habits developed over decades.) On the other hand, if I am at home by myself in Portugal, and there is a knock at the door, it is a completely different experience. ‘Oh no!’ I think. ‘Now I’m going to have to answer the door and be completely unable to talk to someone.’

Last November, when Bernice and I were in Portugal, one afternoon, when the kids were both out, having taken Tao (and Shir, their business partner) with them, there was a knock at the door. I contemplated hiding under the table, but the salon window is right next to the front door, and I might have already been spotted, in which case my embarrassment would have been even harder to endure than my humiliation at being unable to speak a word of Portuguese beyond ‘Hola!’ and ‘Bom dia’. (It strikes me that it is less than efficient, if you are able to express only two ideas in a language, that they should turn out to be by and large the same idea!) So, I opened the door, gave an inviting smile and a welcoming ‘Hola!’, which in my anxiety was possibly just a tad louder than necessary, and waited to be plunged into total incomprehension.

The youngish man on the other side of the doorstep was not wearing any uniform or other clothing that might give a clue as to the nature of his visit; he was not standing next to a horse pulling a milkcart, or a van with a helpful picture of a household appliance or farm produce on it. He was not dressed in an over-bright rustic shirt and carrying a wicker basket of clothes pegs. He didn’t even have a wart on his nose and a large, shiny, red and green apple in his hand. In short, he was carrying no clues beyond a glossy, multi-coloured cardboard folder. I politely waited for him to finish his first sentence, then inquired ‘English?’, with what I planned to be an apologetic wry smile, but probably looked more like a simpering grimace. Wonder of wonders! Our visitor spoke enough English for me to understand that his visit was not unconnected to electricity supply. However, he seemed to be denying that he was a representative of EDP, our electricity supplier, and, when I invited him in to read the meter, he made it clear that that was not the purpose of his visit. (This was, of course, before I knew that, in Portugal, meters are not read by the supplier at the point of consumption.) He seemed to want to offer us a deal, but I could understand no more than that.

At this point, thankfully, Shir returned. Having spent some time in South America, Shir’s Spanish is not at all bad. When he suggested ‘Espagnol?’, our visitor happily graduated to a language he was more comfortable with. Over the next few minutes, Shir was able to understand that our polyglot friend was a representative of a rival supplier, and was indeed offering us a special deal, the details of which failed to leap across the linguistic gap between his and Shir’s Spanish.

At this point, doubly thankfully, Micha’el returned, and, with his Portuguese, was able to get almost the full story, which need not concern us here. My takeaways from this experience were three.

First: Micha’el’s knowledge of Spanish (from a few months in Ecuador), combined with the Portuguese he had by then acquired (2 months after arriving in Portugal), and enhanced by his ease and confidence and complete lack of concern over the possibility of making a fool of himself, all added up to him punching way above his weight in the spoken Portuguese ring.

Second: How many door-to-door electricity salesmen in Britain, I wonder, can make themselves even partially understood in two languages other than English? Perhaps things have changed in the 33 years since we left Britain, but I bet they are still pretty thin on the ground.

Third: Unless I am happy to continue to be humiliated over my inability to hold even a fragment of a conversation in Portuguese, I really must do something about learning the language.

And did I? Well, yes and no….but on the whole: Did I heck as like! (which translates roughly as ‘No’).

I did actually start (both Bernice and I did) an online Portuguese ‘course’. However, it soon became apparent that this was little more than sets of vocabulary lists, and was not what we needed. Bernice, of course, saw this more quickly than I did, and she dropped out a week or two before I finally saw the wisdom of her ways. My only gain from this experience was that I now know the names of the days of the week, which are actually very easy for a Hebrew-speaker to grasp, but, I imagine, as confusing for others as the Hebrew days were for us when we first came on aliya. Saturday and Sunday are Sábado (from shabbat) and Domingo (the Lord’s day). However, uncharacteristically for Christian countries, Domingo, Sunday, is regarded as the first day of week, and Monday to Friday are known by the ordinal numbers 2nd to 6th. (These ordinals refer to market fairs throughout the week, and, formally, the weekdays are Segunda-feira (2nd fair) through to Sexta-feira.) So, Monday is Segunda or 2a and Friday is Sexta or 6 a, just as in Hebrew. Depressingly, I have so far found this the only easy aspect of learning Portuguese.

Having tried the online course with little success, I found myself thinking about phrasebooks, and, in particular, the Portuguese phrasebook I remembered reading about in my youth, the one that opened with the sentence My postilion has been struck by lightning. Incidentally, if, like me, you have never been quite sure how a postilion differs from a coachman, a postilion ‘drives’ the carriage by sitting on the horse, or, if there is a team of horses, the front nearside horse. The post part of his title is a reference to the fact that he drives a post horse, so-called because it is one of the horses kept at the staging posts on post-roads, to be used by stage-coaches, which exchange their horses at these staging-posts, so as to always have a fresh team. (Incidentally, did you know that the Finnish have a word – poronkusema – for the distance that a reindeer can travel before requiring a bathroom break. What I do not know is whether this is a term used generically to indicate a rough distance, in the same way as a day’s ride from here is based on an estimated average, or it is a term used in comparative tests carried out by the monthly magazine What Reindeer: Dasher achieved a 40-km poronkusema on the open road, but Rudolf could only average 32.)

My postilion has been struck by lightning. Oh, how we laughed at the absurdity of this appearing as the very first example in an English-Portuguese phrase-book! Googling this book, in the last couple of days, I have discovered that our laughter may have been hasty.

First of all, what I always understood to be a Portuguese phrase-book is, variously, cited as Hungarian, Russian, French and Dutch, an indication, at the very least, that social media have always half-borrowed, adapted and distorted, whether wilfully or carelessly. The references to this phrase begin around 1916, and appear in the magazines Punch and New Yorker (the latter example penned by James Thurber). In addition, James Michener refers to it, Dirk Bogarde adapted it for the title of his autobiography, and the poet Patricia Beer wrote a two-stanza poem inspired by it, which you can read at the bottom of this post.

The reason for all of this interest, I am sure, is that the phrase sounds to our ears completely removed from real life. Under what circumstances, we ask ourselves, would anyone ever need to use this phrase? Indeed, Linguistics Professor David Crystal coined the term postilion sentence for language which, although grammatically correct, has little or no chance of ever being useful in real life. it conveys a structural meaning, and a lexical content, but that is all.

Just a little more research, however, reveals that our amusement may well be misplaced. First of all, for the English lady or gentleman undertaking a 19th Century European grand tour, the post-coach would have been the usual means of travel, and the postilion would have been a common element of the journey. Indeed, the post-coach and its positilion might have been among the first elements of foreign life that the traveller encountered abroad.

‘All very well’, I hear you protest, ‘but how likely is it that the poor postilion would be struck by lightning?’ Well, remember that, on his horse, the postilion would have been the highest point of the party – a perfect lightning rod. Indeed, travelling across open, flat country, he might have been the highest point for miles around.

My only question is: Who are we to imagine the traveller addressing the sentence to? A coach with a postilion does not normally have a coachman as well. The postilion himself is, if not dead, then at least unlikely to be in a mood for conversation. Perhaps our traveller is sharing a coach with strangers.

Before I finish, here are two other postilion sentences, both from genuine phrasebooks:
Czech: Who is this man/woman in my bed? (Who do you imagine you would address this to?)
Spanish: My tailor is rich. (I defy you to construct a conversation where this is the next sentence you want to say.)

And finally, as promised, here is Patricia Beer’s poem:

The Postilion Has Been Struck by Lightning

He was the best postilion
I ever had. That summer in Europe
Came and went
In striding thunder-rain.
His tasselled shoulders bore up
More bad days than he could count
Till he entered his last storm in the mountains.

You to whom a postilion
Means only a cocked hat in a museum
Or a light
Anecdote, pity this one
Burnt at milord’s expense far from home
Having seen every sight
But never anyone struck by lightning.