I daresay we all know at least the second line of this verse: Columbus sailed the ocean blue. However, for Jews, 1492 has an additional significance: it is the year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain. The Jewish communities of both Spain and Portugal had been founded over a thousand years before, and there had been long periods of stability, and even prosperity, in both countries, with monarchs appointing Jews to influential court positions, diplomatic, mercantile and financial, and with many Jews engaging in the free professions or working as skilled artisans.

I must confess that, until it became clear to me that Portugal was now going to play a significant role in my life, I knew little more than the above. If asked, I would have said that Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492; that the vast majority left, and, that, of those that remained, most converted to Catholicism (and were known as neo-Christians – cristãos-novos or conversos), and a few remained crypto-Jews (known also as anusim, or – in a term which is now viewed as offensive – as marranos).

It transpires that I was almost completely wrong. To focus on my major errors:

• Portugal was initially much more sympathetic to its Jewish population than Spain, and it did not expel its Jews until 1497, and then almost entirely for political reasons connected to an alliance by marriage of two royal families. It remained periodically more sympathetic in the following centuries. (It has to be said that being more sympathetic than Spain during that period is not setting the bar impossibly high.)
• However, over the next 300 or so years, there were a number of ‘spontaneous’ pogroms (often condemned by the monarch, with the perpetrators being punished), in addition to periodic programmes of systematic persecution (from forced conversion to auto-da-fe) within the framework of the Portuguese Inquisition.

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. If you want a full-length history of the Jews of Portugal, you will find a scholarly but very human account in the early chapters of Howard Sachar’s excellent Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim Remembered, which you can read about here.

The whole purpose of this long introduction is to explain that for us, indeed for any aware Jew, the whole question of moving (back) to Portugal has resonance. It is in some ways parallel to Jews moving to Berlin (although of course 500 years is a lot longer than 75, but then nobody ever accused Jews of having short memories). As it happens, Bernice’s maternal grandmother z”l (of blessed memory), a larger-than-life character and a wonderful woman, always claimed that her family had fled Portugal and come to England as part of the first group allowed back by Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17^th Century. Research by a relative of Bernice seems to corroborate the story, in part if not in its entirety, and those of us who always secretly thought it apocryphal owe her an apology. In addition, Tslil’s mother’s family came to Israel a couple of generations ago from Saloniki in Greece, an almost certain indicator that they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula some time earlier.

All of this meant that, for me, the act of attaching a mezuza to our front door in Penamacor acquired a significance above and beyond its regular importance. (If you missed my earlier post and are unsure what a mezuza is, you can find out more about it here.) Not just to be walking around a provincial town in Catholic Portugal, openly wearing a kipa, but to be standing in the street in broad daylight, reciting the bracha (blessing) aloud, and attaching a mezuza to our front door in a clear declaration of our Jewish faith, felt immensely satisfying. As Tslil said at the time: We’re back!

At the end of my last but one post, Bernice and I were standing on the doorstep of our new second home in Penamacor. Before we could knock on the door, our son Micha’el had opened it wide, and we stepped inside to a welcoming log fire, an even warmer welcome from Micha’el and his wife Tslil, and a more cautious appraisal from our 8-month-old grandson, Tao. We had been very anxious as to whether Tao would remember us from the five weeks the kids had stayed with us immediately before they left Israel for Portugal, five weeks earlier. Seeing him now, very quietly looking us over, we were not at all sure. However, within a few minutes, he came to us for a cuddle without any fuss, if still a little cautiously, and was soon all smiles, which is his default mood. Micha’el assured us that he clearly remembered us, because he was normally very shy with strangers. We thought Micha’el was humouring us, until later we saw how subdued Tao was with genuine strangers, and realized that he must remember us.

Content warning: Bernice assures me that I am allowed one grandfatherly dote, and, since Tao is the real reason we have embarked on this adventure (sorry, Tslil and Micha’el), I thought I would indulge in it sooner rather than later. Feel free to skip.

Tao is the happiest, most naturally curious, most intelligent child imaginable. He has inherited his father’s physicality, balancing happily on two feet and one hand while totally absorbed in exploring a toy with the other hand, and scaling the fifteen stairs in the house for the first time a few days after our arrival, with care and caution but complete confidence. Bernice reminded us that, when she took Micha’el to Tipat Halav (mother and child clinic) for his 10-month check-up, he started by climbing the filing cabinet, at which point the nurse decided they could probably skip the test for gross motor skills and balance.

Tao also has amazing focus and perseverance, and can spend five minutes trying, and failing, to take the large bowl out of his toybox, without giving up but without becoming angry or frustrated…and eventually succeeding.

He shows the same level of concentration when I sing to him. He quickly learnt that Hickory Dickory Dock, The Grand Old Duke of York and Ride a Cock Horse are accompanied by really fun actions, and starts laughing as soon as I begin one of them. After initially resenting yet another person laughing at my singing, I realized that he was relishing anticipation, which I was soon milking shamelessly, making him wait an unconscionable time between ‘The clock struck one’ and the accompanying ‘Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing’ at which point I gently shake my head and his body. While my mouth forms and holds the ‘B’ shape – lips turned in and pressed tightly together – Tao sits on my lap, watching my mouth as intently as if he were a cat tensed to pounce, patiently waiting for the mouse to emerge from its hole.

OK. That’s it for the dote.

On that first evening, we chatted with the kids, ate the last of our food from home, unpacked our new bed linens, made our bed, and collapsed into it.

Our Sages say that One who prepares on Friday, will eat on Shabbat. This is not simply a warning parallel to the famous verse in Proverbs: Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider his ways and be wise. It is also a reminder of how shabbat ideally shapes our entire week. We look forward to the coming Shabbat, anticipate its pleasures and ensure that we make the preparations necessary to be able to enjoy it. In light of all this, it is no surprise how much we enjoyed our first shabbat in Penamacor. Because we certainly prepared for it. We had bought the house furnished, and that included a kitchen with appliances, utensils and crockery and cutlery. This proved very useful to the kids, who are not observant Jews; it meant that they could move into a fully functioning house. However, since Bernice and I are observant, before we could use the kitchen we needed to kosher what could be koshered, and replace what couldn’t. So, on our first morning in the house, we launched our second military campaign.

Stage One of this operation was clearing out the old, and sorting it into three piles of utensils and equipment: what could be koshered; what the kids wanted to store for when they move to their own home; what was too shabby or too hideous or too arcane to be useful. This third was a very small pile, since Micha’el and Tslil fervently believe in recycling resources and are possessed of a fertile imagination that sees potential in the least likely objects. For Micha’el at least this is, I must confess, an inherited trait. It is only in recent years, and only to a limited degree, that Bernice has succeeded in persuading me that we do not have to keep every piece of bric-a-brac, in the fond hope that the day will dawn when all that I am missing to build my better mousetrap is an old broom handle and four rusty screws. For the best exposition of this syndrome I know, anyone who has somehow missed Michael McIntyre’s riff on the Man Drawer should watch it immediately, here.

Stage Two was an outing to the local corner shop, to buy an entire range of cleaning, scouring, scrubbing and disinfecting lotions, potions and implements. That was the fun part!

Stage Three was actually applying to the kitchen everything we had just bought. At school, I always preferred pure maths to applied, and the same is true of cleaning: the theory is so much more fun than the practice. Having said that, working as a team, and seeing the results, and knowing why we were doing this, made it all easier, and, in a relatively short time, we were done, and ready for the really fun part – unwrapping everything we had ordered online to be delivered to the house.

Turning to the 20 or so Amazon parcels, we started unpacking: a food mixer, a set of egg cups….and everything in between. As we unpacked, we were able to decide on where to place things, bringing all of our experience of setting up a kitchen together over 47 years, on seven different occasions (five very different homes, in two of which we renovated the kitchen after several years). Once we had finished, it was very satisfying to see Tslil’s delight at having a properly organized, fully equipped kitchen.

All that was missing now was food! However, that had to wait until the following day, and Bernice and I made do with pita and cheese that we had bought in the kosher shop in Lisbon, followed by fruit.

The only other task we achieved on this, our first full day in our new home, was to put up mezuzot…but that will have to wait for my next post.

At the end of my last post, Bernice and I were standing on the doorstep of our new second home in Penamacor, Portugal, about to be reunited with our son and his family, who had moved into the house from Israel five weeks earlier. I’m going to leave you waiting with us on the doorstep for a little longer, because, as it is always does, something more urgent has come up.

Just in case it is not immediately obvious to you in what way a blog post is like a gas bottle, let me explain.

In the house, we use bottled gas to heat the water, and to fuel the hob. On our second Sunday in the house, the gas ran out. It transpired that the kids did not have any spares, so Bernice and I set off in the car, with two empty bottles, to the hardware store in the centre of Penamacor. We very bravely told Micha’el he did not need to come, calculating that if two customers walk into a gas bottle supplier’s shop carrying two empty gas bottles, the supplier should be able to work out what they are looking for.

All well and good, except that the shop was closed, it being Sunday. In fact, I would have expected all shops in rural Catholic Portugal to be closed on Sunday, but it turns out that several of them open on Sunday afternoon. (Less reprehensible than going to Spurs on shabbat afternoon, I suppose.)

So, we had to wait for gas until Monday morning. This meant no cooking on the hob, no hot water for washing and washing up, and, for Tao, an experience that took Bernice back more than 60 years. The living room in the house is dominated by a large fireplace, in which, at this time of year, a wood fire is usually blazing. So, we built up the fire, put on the kettle, got out the large blue plastic bowl that the kids use as a laundry basket, and filled it with water from the kettle.

Soon, Tao was playing happily in his extemporized bath. Only one thing was missing: his favourite bath toy, the plug. Fortunately, it was easy to detach the plug chain from the bath and bring it in to him. Now, his joy was complete, although I don’t think he was quite able to work out why, when he lifted the plug up, the water level in the bath remained the same.

The following morning, Bernice and I went back to the shop and picked up two gas bottles. When we got back to the house, we suggested to the kids that, the next time a gas bottle ran out, they should change it for the spare in the storeroom, and immediately go down to the shop to buy another one!

And what, I hear you ask, has all this to do with blog posts? Good question. I thought long and hard about starting a blog, but, once I took the decision to start, I rather plunged into it. No sooner had I launched the blog, than people started asking when I was next going to post. Although I had several ideas of what to write in the second post, I had nothing on paper, and, as luck would have it, this was now the last few days of our stay in Portugal, so there was a lot to do. And shabbat in the middle. And group photos with the kids. And dashing off to photograph parts of the town that we had seen on our shabbat walk, and been unable to photograph because of shabbat. And sorting out what clothes to leave and what to bring back to Israel. And doing a final laundry.

Which is why you are reading this second post only a couple of days after we arrived back in Israel. However, I have learnt my lesson. Blog posts are like gas bottles. Write two, and, as soon as you post the first one, write another one. That way, you’ll never be caught out. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and write my next two posts.

For any of you who don’t know, our son Micha’el, daughter-in-law Tslil and grandson Tao (then six months old) moved from Israel to Portugal a couple of months ago, having bought 2.8 hectares of land (that’s about 7 acres in old money). Their plan is to join with others to share the vision of creating a permaculture-based eco-village. (If you want to follow their adventure, visit their YouTube channel here. Subscribing and liking would also not be a bad idea.)

As soon as the kids announced their plans, Bernice and I decided that we weren’t prepared to miss out on being a part of Tao growing up, and that we would aim to visit Portugal for a month at a time, three times a year. Once we sat down with the calendar, and factored in that we wanted to spend the major chagim (festivals) and our parents’ yahrzeits (anniversaries of their passing) in Israel, we decided on, roughly speaking, October-November, February-March and June-July (depending on the Jewish calendar). After a couple of days of reflection, we realised the near-impossibility of spending three months every year in an airbnb or hotel, packing and laundering clothes for a month at a time, keeping kosher in rural Portugal, and staying healthy, sane and married. The obvious solution was to buy a flat or small house in Penamacor, the town just over a mile from the kids’ land. (For reasons that I plan to explain in a later blog, property in the area is cheap, ridiculously cheap in comparison to  property in Israel.)

So, I paid a flying visit in June, and in four days I acquired a NIF (the equivalent of a social security number, and the sine qua non of bureaucratic life in Portugal), gave a lawyer power of attorney, opened a bank account, and viewed a half a dozen properties, one of which I thought ticked as many of our boxes as we were likely to get ticked. Five weeks later, after an experienced builder/renovator checked and approved the house, we exchanged contracts.

This meant that the kids could move straight into the house when they arrived in Portugal and live there while they are building their own home on their land.

And, three months later, we are out here with them on our first stay in our new house in Penamacor. This is certainly not the relaxed, indolent first year of shared retirement that Bernice and I planned, but, as the saying almost goes: Parents propose and children dispose. So far, we are really enjoying the ride, and I hope you will enjoy reading about it.

Content Warning

I am, in many ways, a prisoner of (or rather a voluntary inmate in) my past. The relevance of this to you, the reader, is that I am almost certain to pepper my writing with references to the popular culture of the lost England of the 1950s–1980s. I have no intention of stopping each time to explain these references. If you had the lack of forethought not to be raised in Britain, and/or the lack of consideration to be under 40 years old, then the problem, my friend, is all yours.

Acknowledgements

To our children, Micha’el and Tslil, whose pursuit of their vision started us on this bizarre journey.

To my wife,Bernice, whose diligent writing of her diary every evening has meant that my defective memory does not prevent me writing this blog of our first trip.

But, above all, to our grandson, Tao, whose childhood we have every intention of being a significant part of.