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.

Of Janus and Yossarian

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We start this week with a little housekeeping. A few people mistakenly believe that it was Churchill who described England and America as ‘two countries separated by a common language’. However, most of us know that it was in fact said by George Bernard Shaw. Except, as I discovered not long ago, it wasn’t…or, rather, it does not appear in any of his writings, and there is no contemporary record of his having said it. Of course, he could easily have said it. It is an astute observation about language, wittily and pithily expressed.

Anyway, whoever shaped this aphorism, I was reminded of it last week, when one of my readers – thank you, Norma – pointed out that the word nonplussed, which I used in my blog, has two possible meanings. The first is, as I intended, surprised and confused and therefore uncertain how to react. The second (informal, North American) is not disconcerted, unperturbed. I therefore apologise to any North American readers who were Britishly nonplussed by my British use of the word.

I was excited to learn about this, because it makes nonplussed a member of a quite exclusive club that I am very fond of, all of whose members are Janus words: words that have two opposite meanings. Among my favourites are cleave – to cut apart or, conversely, to adhere; let – to permit or to forbid (as in let or hindrance); fast – moving quickly or not moving at all. And then there is that group of verbs that can mean add to or remove from: for example, dusting a bookshelf is different from dusting a cake with icing sugar; similarly, can you say definitively whether a shelled nut or a seeded grape is one with or without its shell or seed?

Enough of this! None of it has anything to do with this week’s subject, which came to me in the small hours between Friday night and Saturday morning, If you read last week’s post, you may be able to work out what comes next. Because of the restrictions of the Jewish laws of shabbat, I was unable to reach for my phone and make a note of what had come into my mind….and, sure enough, when I awoke on shabbat morning, I remembered very clearly that I had thought of something to write about, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what it was. So, here we are, waiting for it to come to back to me and, meanwhile, vamping till ready.

While we’re waiting, let me tell you about the adventure Bernice and I had when we went to the bank in Castelo Branco in November to activate the advanced features of our Portuguese debit cards, to enable online purchases. This proved to be a surprisingly complex process, involving a level of security that we weren’t really used to.

To start with, when I first opened the account, and then, on our first trip together, when Bernice became a signatory, the charming bank official, having examined and scanned our passports, explained that we had to wait for a short time, while our details were sent to Police headquarters in Lisbon, to verify our identity. While we were waiting, the official told us that this was just a formality….usually. However, he said, just recently he had submitted details, and received a phone call five minutes later instructing him to keep the customer talking and on no account to allow her to leave the bank; the police would be there in a few minutes. This woman was apparently the prime suspect in a major international fraud investigation, and police had been trying to locate her in order to arrest her. For the rest of our time at the bank, we certainly took great pains to appear as little like international master-criminals as we could, and it apparently worked. 

The next stage in this process was for us to access our account online. To do this, we used the bank official’s computer, since we needed an internet connection, data roaming on our Israeli phones was out of the question, and the bank offers no public internet. This is in contrast to Britain. When we used to stay with my late mother-in-law, who did not have internet in Britain, we would have to wander down to the High Street and stand outside the local branch of Barclays Bank, freeloading on their powerful wifi, in order to access our email. I was always sure that we looked as if we were casing the joint!

Anyway, back in Castelo Branco, to access our account, we had to key in a 6-digit code that we had provided previously. The first time this happened, I had a few moments when I thought dementia had set in. The bank official pivoted his laptop to face me, and I could see a standard 10-key dialpad – an array of three rows of three digits each, with a tenth digit alone in the centre of the fourth row – for me to key in the code. I extended my index finger and tapped the 8 (Row 3, middle key). I was shocked to see that the digit displayed in the box was not 8, but 3. I deleted it, and was about to tap the same key again, when I looked more closely, and realized at the last moment that it was a 3. Feeling slightly giddy, I checked the other keys, and saw that they all contained the wrong digits. Sensing my confusion, the official explained that every time the keypad is displayed, it generates the digits in random order, so that the 6-digit code cannot be deduced from the position of the fingers on the screen. Fiendishly clever, but unbelievably disconcerting.

The final stage was for me to activate the advanced functionalities of the debit card by entering a second code that was sent in an SMS to my phone. As I mentioned earlier, at that time Bernice and I were using our Israeli phones – we did not yet have local (Portuguese) SIMs. The SMS was, of course, generated automatically by the bank’s computer system, and this led to a Catch-22 situation that I would have found amusing if it had been happening to someone else.

Time for another digression, I think. Joseph Heller didn’t intend the title of his book to be Catch 22. Throughout the writing process it had been Catch 18. Then, a few months before the scheduled publication of Catch 22, Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18 was published. Heller’s publisher wished to avoid any confusion between the two war novels, and so the number in the title was changed to the much catchier 22. (Personally, I think that anyone who confuses Mila 18 with Catch 22 has no business reading either of them….and especially not Catch 22!)

Be that as it may, the specific Catch 22 at the bank was as follows. I waited for the SMS to arrive. After a couple of minutes, I requested it to be resent. Nothing arrived. For some reason, while we were in Portugal, neither Bernice nor I could receive, on our Israeli phones, an SMS sent from Portugal. The bank official confirmed that he had encountered this problem with some other of his Israeli customers, but, subsequently, our Israeli mobile provider was unable to offer any explanation, and seemed completely unfamiliar with the problem. We thought, at one point, that it might have something to do with our being physically at the bank. The official explained that we could, in fact, activate the cards’ full functionality at any ATM, using the code sent to us by SMS. Needless to say, even when we were outside the bank, and back in Penamacor, we still didn’t receive the SMS. However, after our return to Israel, we received other SMSs that the bank sent. But, of course, when we are in Israel, and able to receive the code by SMS, we are a five-hour flight from the nearest Portuguese ATM, and the one-time code expires after ten minutes. So we can only use the code where we can’t receive it and we can only receive it where we can’t use it. To make this a perfect impasse, for security reasons the bank’s computer system does not support changing the telephone number that was associated with the account when it was first created.

When we are next in Portugal (how gloriously optimistic When and next sound, at the time of writing), we will need to discuss with the bank whether we can close our bank account and open a new one, and associate our Portuguese mobile numbers to it. Of course, that means that we will not be able to receive in Israel any SMSs sent by the bank. Not for the first time, I hear a weary voice whispering in my ear ‘First world problems’. I know, I know.

Before we close, let me share with you a picture of Tao and Tslil planting his first birthday present, an almond tree.

And finally (you see, we got through this post even without me having anything to write about), let me briefly acknowledge the elephant in all our rooms, and sincerely wish all of you and all of yours a safe and healthy week.

Stockpiling

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Well, there’s a topical….topic, eh? But don’t worry: I’m not going to harangue you about toilet paper or eggs. The stockpiling I am talking about is considerably more metaphorical than that. When I started writing this blog, I very quickly discovered that a) many of my best ideas came to me in the small hours, when I was lying in bed trying unsuccessfully to persuade my bladder that it really didn’t need emptying and b) many of those best ideas would, by the morning, have melted away like the snows of yesteryear (What a clumsy phrase, with its harshly sibilant ‘s’ and ‘z’ in ‘snows’ and its ridiculously excessive indulgence of ‘y’ and ‘e’ in ‘yesteryear’; how much more appropriately evanescent are the softly nasal, liquid, ‘nei…’ and ‘an…’ of ‘neiges d’antan’.)

The solution, I soon discovered, was to jot down a note on my phone. Once I had started to do this, I found myself diligently adding to it, both in real time when we were in Portugal, and while recollecting in tranquility in Israel. In very little time, I had a list of 15 or so topics; armed with this stockpile, which I have occasionally added to even in the last few weeks, I have never been at a loss for what to write about in my next post.

However, this morning, in one of the fits of obsessive-compulsive spring-cleaning that the current unpleasantness has brought out in me, I got out the metaphorical stepladder and climbed up to go through the entire list with a critical eye, stretching to retrieve those packets stuck at the back of the cupboard that were well past their sell-by date, pulling out a couple of cartons that I’d already served up at least once, seizing one or two jars that I decided I couldn’t possibly serve to a mixed audience. All of these I binned, and discovered that my stockpile had dwindled down to the literary equivalent of two tins of baked bins, a packet of stale crackers and the following (I hope slightly more appetizing) snack.

In that spirit of virtual cultural tourism that we are all, I suspect, seized by these days (before we settle down to watch The Lego Movie), let me guide you round Penamacor’s municipal museum. This is something of an anomaly, being funded not by the EU, but rather by the municipality itself. The museum was founded by the local council in 1949, with the sole and very specific initial intention of preserving Penamacor’s charter (explanation later).

After a long period of stagnation, a new director was appointed in 1982 to reform the museum. This reform has included stocktaking (you see how I’m sticking closely to this week’s theme) and dusting off the exhibits, rehousing the museum in the old Military Headquarters and carrying out extensive renovation, and finally mounting an entirely new major exhibition. The result is a museum that is a surprisingly handsome asset for the village, and that does not charge an admission fee.

The new exhibition is the first that visitors encounter when they enter the museum. It is devoted to the development of man’s measurement of time. This is a more appropriate subject for the museum than you might first think, given that the villagescape of Penamacor is dominated by the castle bell tower, and that the silence of the village is punctuated every quarter hour by the chiming of the bells in the tower’s belfry, and, on the hour, by the striking of the hours from that belfry. However, rather undermining the general thrust of the exhibit, which celebrates the accuracy of human timekeeping, the chiming on the hour of the castle bells is followed an aggravating one-and-a-half minutes later by the striking of the same hours from the main church’s belfry. Mind you, this could be viewed as testament to the message of the exhibit, since the interval between the two chimings is always an undeviating 90 seconds.

When I visited, not knowing anything of the museum’s contents, I was a little nonplussed (now there’s a word I don’t get to use anywhere near often enough) to be confronted as I rounded the first corner by a splendid photo of Big Ben by night (or rather, as the explanatory text explains, ‘the bell tower of the Palace of Westminster, which is popularly known as Big Ben, whereas Big Ben is , in fact, the 14-tonne bell‘). Anyway, this sight made me feel anchored, and I enjoyed the rest of the exhibit, which explained clockwork mechanism and traced the restoration of Penamacor’s clock towers, overseen by a renowned local horologist.

This exhibit led to a second room, a large hall divided in two by a row of potted plants. The first half of the hall houses a number of displays, behind glass. These include the development of the sword and the musket through Portuguese military history, a collection of historical coins, and a range of historical scientific instruments. In the centre of the floor space are two rather splendid 19th-Century carriages. This room served to remind me that Portugal was not always one of the poorer backwaters of Europe, but indeed enjoyed what can be regarded as a glorious, or, conversely, ignominious, history as a naval imperial power. As I walked round, I found myself humming Rule Britannia.

Incidentally, I spent many years lustily singing that anthem without once thinking about the arrogance of the lyric. Listen with me (the emphasis is mine).

When Britain first, at Heav’n’s command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land
And guardian angels sang this strain:

Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves
Britons never shall be slaves

The nations not so blest as thee
Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall.
……

You get the idea!

The second half of this large, airy room houses a collection of Christian statuary. I must confess that I gave this only a quick glance, because I had postponed my visit to the museum until a couple of days before we were coming back to Israel, and I only had 30 minutes before closing time.

Beyond the hall is a narrow vestibule, on the long walls of which hang what I imagine were the original exhibits: Penamacor’s charter and coat of arms, and a small exhibit devoted to Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, who, as the more attentive of you will remember, is Penamacor’s most famous son. Having devoted an entire post to Ribeiro Sanches, let me talk about the charter. The legality of any city, town or village in Portugal was established, in medieval times, by the granting of a royal charter, or foral. Penamacor’s foral was granted in 1209.

This included the institution of a rather splendid coat of arms for the city (as it was then), featuring the following symbols:

Crescent – marking the Moorish conquest

Scimitar – indicating that it is a military stronghold

Key – alluding to the castle being close to the border

Balled Cord – representing a single will in the defence of the national territory

Leading off this vestibule are two further rooms. One houses a collection of everyday household furniture and tools, including a splendid loom, and the other features examples of the taxidermist’s art, in the form of the most notable of the local fauna, arranged in dioramas. I hope the photograph captures the eerie lifelessness of the exhibits. What it does not capture is the darkess of the room, lit only by the light in the dioramas. I felt as though I had walked into the tunnel of a fairground ghost train, or onto the set of a zombie film. The most prominent creature here is the Iberian lynx, which, having died out in the wild in Portugal, has been bred in captivity and is being reintroduced in many areas of its natural habitat, including the Serra da Malcata, the range of hills east of Penamacor that form a national park and nature reserve.

That concludes our tour of the Penamacor Municipal Museum. Admission is, as I stated, free of charge, but, should you wish to tip your guide, you might care to visit the kids’ latest video on their youtube channel, which features some lovely close-ups of their land and their son (who also happens to be our grandson – did I mention that?)

On the Street Where We Live…Well, Sometimes

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I’m not really keen on using a song title from My Fair Lady. I agree that the film looks ravishing, with its Cecil Beaton costumes; Rex Harrison and Wilfrid Hyde-White are beautifully matched as Higgins and Pickering; Audrey Hepburn as Eliza manages a cockney accent that is considerably better than Dick van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins (mind you, that isn’t setting the bar very high) and Stanley Holloway is magnificent as Doolittle. The music is always worth listening to, and, in addition, the plot, much of the dialogue, and even many of the song lyrics, are extremely faithful to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, on which the musical is closely based. “And yet” (to quote from Accustomed to Her Face), there is, for me, a moment when it all falls apart in an act of outrageous treason to the story it has told. Let me explain.

At the end of the last scene in the play Pygmalion, Eliza, exasperated by Higgins’ imperious treatment of her, tells him that she will never see him again. He then asks Eliza to “order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman’s. You can choose the color.” Eliza disdainfully tells him to buy them himself and sweeps out. In a typically didactic epilogue, Shaw explains that Eliza marries Freddy. He prefaces this explanation with the following comment:

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. 

Perhaps it would be kindest to assume that Alan Jay Lerner did not read this sentence, because his book and screenplay display exactly the enfeebled imagination that Shaw writes about. At about 6:30 minutes into this clip from My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza comes sheepishly back to Higgins’ home, and, at about 7:15, when Higgins reverts to domineering type, Eliza simperingly gazes at him, in a cinematic moment that never fails to gast my flabber.

Okay. That’s the end of a rant that has been building in me for about 40 years, and I feel much better for it.

Turning to our home in Portugal (not so much a segue; more a tectonic shift), Tao is very much an outdoors kind of guy, which is probably a good thing, considering what his parents have in store for him. If he is upset (which is very rare), he always calms down if he is taken outside, and regularly during the day, when taking the saucepans out of the cupboard and putting them back begins to pall, or when he tires of hiding blocks under the sofa, he will ask to be taken out, either to the backyard or to the street at the front of the house. If he wants the back, then this is usually a two-centre holiday. He will almost certainly want to climb the outside metal staircase to the balcony leading off the kid’s bedroom, a climb which he takes in his stride; nevertheless, even though Tao is remarkably careful in his climbing, the climb leaves me with my heart in my mouth, since this is a fairly open staircase; I have to stay right with him, ready to grab. Bernice refuses to let him climb with her; her heart can’t take it. Tao’s reward for making it safely to the top is that he gets to test the friability of the soil in the pots on the balcony.

The second activity in this excursion is a walking tour of the flower beds that line two sides of the patio. These beds are currently home to, in order, a handsome Portuguese laurel bush, a mature lemon tree, a fairly immature loquat (shesek) tree, an aloe vera, a couple of roses, some more modest ground-cover flowers and a clementina tree.

On his walking tour, Tao, who is a very tactile child, needs to rub the leaves and petals of each of these plants; fortunately, he already understands the need to be gentle with them, and there are very few accidents.

On the other side of the patio, along the ledge of what is, in fact, the outside wall of our neighbours’ covered swimming pool, is an array of sawn-off milk cartons with various vegetables and fruits being grown from seed by Tslil. These also require a proper inspection, ocular and digital, as did the plum sapling that was a gift to Micha’el and Tslil from Esther and Ma’ayan. This tree has now been transferred to the land, and – very exciting – already has a plum showing. After a 15-minute tour, Tao is usually happy to go inside again.

At the other end of the house is the front door, and, beyond that, the street. The sounds of passing traffic aroused Tao’s attention from a young age. This is not entirely surprising: since the street is cobbled and narrow, the tyre noise from passing cars is considerable, and is trapped by the houses. Indeed, when we first arrived last October, I initially wondered whether the house was on the flight path to Lisbon airport!

Once Tao realised that the sound meant a passing car, he did not want to miss any of the action, and would ‘ask’ to be taken out, or at least to the window, to see this traffic. (It has to be said that cars are a relative rarity: we don’t exactly live on a main road.) Every Wednesday, we have the excitement of the gradual approach of what sounds like a Mr Whippy ice cream van. The chimes are, in fact, those a mobile shop, selling meat, fish, fruit, veg, and we can hear them a few streets away, 10 or 15 minutes before they reach our street.

If Tao can persuade someone (usually Bernice) to take him out to the street, then, as in the backyard, he has his set points of interest that he needs to visit. These include ‘the doll’, a life-size but very stylised, almost cubist statue of a young girl that stands on our neighbours’ porch. Next in order, continuing to walk up the street, are some lovely flowering shrubs a few houses along. And finally, the highlight of the tour: seven or eight houses down from us live a family who have a dog. The dog sleeps in a tent-like kennel outside the house-front, dines alfresco in the street, and spends the day sunning himself, often in the middle of the road.

We are very fond of him, partly, no doubt, because he looks remarkably like our dog, who died about 12 years ago, and who was a similar long-haired dachshund mix. Those of you who remember our dog must agree the similarity is striking: so much so that we actually call our Portuguese neighbour Chocky. Like our own Chocky, he is very fond of people, and, if you stop to pet him, he will go up on his hind-legs and hook his forepaws around your thigh, desperately clinging on to you and begging you not to leave. Tao loves going to see him, and we are reminded how, in Micha’el’s early years, when he and Chocky were a similar age, they were inseparable.

One day in the middle of our last trip to Portugal, when Tao and I were in the living room, we heard a sound from the street that neither of us could identify. It sounded like a fairly small power tool. When we went out to investigate, we found a municipal maintenance worker mowing the pavement. Our street, like all of the sidestreets in Penamacor, is cobbled; the cobbles cover both the roadway and the pavement; indeed, the only way to tell where the road ends and the pavement begins is to notice the very slight dip at the side of the road and incline at the start of the pavement. Between the cobbles grass grows; apparently, this grass is mown regularly with a strimmer. Tao was interested in this, but I was fascinated. I’ve never lived on a street where they mow the pavement before.

At first sight, Rua Pereira de Macedo seems a rather sleepy sidestreet, but, as you can see, it is in fact bursting with life, if you know where to look, and if there is no other action, you can always sit on your doorstep and watch the grass grow.