Tag Archives: Portugal

Quercus Suber and the Screwtop

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All this time we’ve been together and we haven’t once talked about cork. Can you believe it? No, I can’t either. The truth is, I planned to write about cork 11 months ago, and then something else popped into my head and drove it out. I really must buy a larger-capacity memory stick.

I’ve been pulling corks out of wine bottles for the last half-century, without giving a moment’s thought to the interesting questions: Why do they use cork to seal wine bottles? Where does the cork come from?

I’m guessing you erudite lot don’t think cork is off-topic; just in case you do, let me tell you that Portugal is the world’s largest producer of cork, being responsible for 49.5% of annual production worldwide. Another 30.5% comes from Spain, and the remaining 20% comes from other European and North African countries in the western half of the Mediterranean basin, whose temperate climate is ideal for these trees.

You don’t have to be in Portugal long to discover the cork trees, or cork oaks, as they are properly known, or quercus suber (which is ‘cork oak’ in Latin and therefore posher), or, in Portuguese, sobreiro. Although the main concentration is in the South, the trees are cultivated as far north as Penamacor, where they can easily be spotted in the mixed-tree forest. 25% of Portugal’s total forest area consists of cork trees.

In the south, over a million hectares are covered by the montado system, an ecologically balanced multi-functional agro-silvo-pastoral system, which has existed for over 1300 years; during all that time, the oak trees have been protected by law, and a Government permit is needed to fell any cork oak.

This three-function ecology, supporting agricultural crops, fruit-bearing trees (the oaks’ acorns) and also grazing land, ensures the continued viability of the soil, acts as a barrier to the desertification encroaching from the south, and produces over a billion dollars in export value of natural and agglomerated cork, making cork Portugal’s sixth most valuable export.

Being an evergreen, the cork oak also photosynthesises throughout the year, and captures an estimated 73 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of cork harvested. As if that were not enough, the cork forests provide a habitat for more than 130 different species of vertebrates and about 95% of all land mammals in Portugal, including the Iberian lynx that I encountered, stuffed, in Penamacor’s museum.  

As a result of all this, the montados are recognized as one of the 36 biodiversity hotspots in the world and have UNESCO-protected status. In addition, the cork oak was officially designated Portugal’s national tree in 2011.

There are two final environmental boxes that cork ticks.

The harvested cork retains the ability to absorb carbon dioxide, so your unvarnished cork noticeboard is actually helping the planet.

Because of its cell structure, cork does not burn easily. In addition, it produces no flame. It is, therefore, a very good fire retardant, which, in Portugal, is a significant advantage. You may remember I wrote many months ago about Portugal’s recent spate of forest fires.

Now, I’m the kind of person who can recognize a Christmas tree, even without fairy lights (although I can’t tell my spruce from my pine), a horse-chestnut (after a youth heavily invested in conkers), an olive (you can’t walk 50 yards in Maale Adumim without tripping over the roots of an olive tree), a loquat (we have one in our garden) and a cypress (we used to have one in our garden till it started encroaching on the flight-path of passing planes)….and…and…and that’s about it. However, I quickly learnt to recognize the cork trees around Penamacor, at least the mature ones, because of the extraordinary nature of the tree and the way the cork is harvested.

Cork is basically an outer bark of the tree. It can be stripped away, leaving the inner bark, without damaging the tree, and the tree then produces new cork, growing a new outer skin. The stripping of the cork is strictly regulated by law; only a mature tree (at least 25 years old) can be stripped; the width of the band stripped from around the tree cannot be more than three times the diameter of the tree; a tree cannot be stripped more often than once every nine years.

Since the trees have a lifespan of under 200 years, on average a tree will be stripped 17 times in its lifetime. The first and second strippings of virgin cork do not have a sufficiently regular structure, and are too hard, to be used for bottle corks. They instead are used for tiling and decorative items.

Let me illustrate how you can (at least, how I) identify a cork oak tree; it’s the one showing a lot of leg. The number that you can see on the tree in the foreground records the year in which the cork was stripped. Every year, one ninth of the trees are stripped, and this tree is from the last year of the nine-year cycle. (If you stand close, you can almost hear it shouting: ‘ I am not a number; I am a free tree’.)

So that’s the ‘Where from’; what about the ‘Why’?

Cork has a honeycomb cell structure which gives it remarkable insulating properties.  It’s flexible, compressible and elastic as well as lightweight, impermeable, durable and hypoallergenic. All of this makes it an ideal material for sealing a bottle of wine. And yet….

For white wines, and other wines designed to be drunk young, a completely airtight seal is ideal. This can be provided by an aluminium cap (screwtop). To the best of my understanding, if you keep your white wine for any length of time before opening, a screwtop might be the most reliable way of retaining the full flavour of the wine.

However, many reds are bottled in the expectation that they will mature in the bottle, and they are only ready to drink some time later, and may indeed reach their prime several years later. For this maturation in the bottle to occur, the wine needs to be exposed to some air…but not too much. If the right cork (and I believe this is a function of the exact degree of elasticity and compressibility of the cork, the tightness of the honeycomb ‘weave’) is married to the right wine, then natural cork does a better job than any other material of helping the wine achieve its full flavour.

The big disadvantage of cork is that it can (in a small percentage of cases) taint the wine, so that the wine becomes ‘corked’. How it does that is interesting. Cork, like any wood material, attracts fungal micro-organisms. If the cork has been exposed to certain chlorinated compounds (sometimes used in pesticides), these compounds can combine with the fungal micro-organisms to create TCA, which can be retained in the cork and later dissolved into the wine. While completely harmless and odourless in itself, this TCA can then distort the way our brain perceives smell, and make the wine taste, to us, like mouldy newspaper or wet dog. ‘I’m picking up notes of underripe strawberry and previously flooded basement.’ Remarkably, some people can detect TCA at one part per trillion, which is the equivalent of one thousandth of a teaspoon in an Olympic swimming pool.

However, just as chemistry created this problem, chemistry can resolve it. If you open a bottle at home and find it corked, pour the wine into a bowl lined with cling film. Leave for a few minutes while the non-polar TCA molecules are drawn to the chemically-similar plastic. Decant the wine from the bowl and you will find the essence of soggy doggy gone. (In a restaurant, of course, you simply summon the sommelier and inform him that the wine is corked. If the restaurant does not have a sommelier, you call over the waiter and tell him it stinks.)

Synthetic ‘corks’ avoid this problem, but do not have the same subtly imperfect hermeticity, and therefore cannot be matched as well with great reds.

So, that’s more than you may have wanted to know about cork.

There’s just one more piece of business today. A couple of weeks ago, some of you were impressed by Tao’s skills at breaking into kitchen cabinets. You will be interested to know that he has, since then, upped his game considerably.

To forestall any comments:

  1. Tao is entirely self-taught; he learnt this skill purely through observation.
  2. There are no caustic products in that cupboard. The washing powder and other products are home-made and not hazardous.

Nevertheless, I think we’ll be returning those child-proof locks and asking for our money back.

There’s Old….and Then There’s O-o-o-ld

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You find me in a dilemma. In recent months, I have, I hope, served well those of my readers who are happy to follow me along any whimsical byway. However, those who demand that I give at least a passing nod to my ostensible subject – Portugal (as is more than suggested by the blog’s witty title of Penamacorrespondent) – are, by this stage, probably feeling cheated. What am I to do?

My fund of anecdotes about personal encounters with Portugal is exhausted; until Bernice and I manage to get there again, I have only two choices. I can make stuff up (tempting, but rather risky, having already learnt the hard way what an erudite lot you are), or I can Google. So, this week’s post comes to you freshly but shamelessly milked from the internet; it will, of course, be filtered through the distorting lens of my particular and peculiar perspective.

Today’s basic fact, then, is that Portugal is old. I realise that this bald statement needs a little elaboration and context, so let’s talk about Montreal. When I started working as a technical writer, my first business trip abroad was to Montreal. When I mentioned this to friends and work colleagues, all the North Americans assured me that I would love Montreal because it was so old.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, and I certainly hadn’t thought this through, but, when I had a chance to look around the city a little, it wasn’t quite what I had been led to expect. There were a couple of charming corners, but it was mostly just a modern city. It was only when I had made several further trips across the Atlantic, and seen St Louis, Dallas, Seattle, Atlanta, and other cities, that I understood. For a North American city, Montreal is indeed unusually old. However, for a European who knows London, Paris or Budapest, Venice, Florence or Rome, Montreal is nothing very special. There’s old, and then there’s o-o-o-ld.

Since I count some ex-Montrealers (by birth or adoption) among my regular readers, I should hastily add that, over a number of later trips, I grew very fond of the city, resenting only the fact that on my winter trips (and, let’s face it, most trips to Montreal are winter trips, whenever you go), my eyebrows tended to freeze up.

It strikes me that different countries, different cities, wear their age differently. Almost all of my travel has been on business, to major cities, and my opportunities to explore have usually been restricted to one Sunday, or sometimes just one evening. This means that I have a snapshot of each city. Let me share some of those subjective, undoubtedly extremely incomplete, snapshots with you, and see how many other readers I can antagonize.

First, the difference between Athens and Rome. Athens was, for me, an unexceptional, shabby city, with rundown neighbourhoods apparently inhabited by men in vests and stray dogs. The Acropolis feels completely divorced from the city. However, I must say that, even though when I climbed it I discovered the Parthenon clad, mid-renovation, in scaffolding, I still found it to be a magical place that transported me back two and a half millenia, and allowed me to completely forget the city beneath.

On the other hand, the thread of Rome’s history is woven into the very fabric of the modern city. If you walk the city at night, every time you turn a corner you discover another church, or fountain, or ruin, stunningly but tastefully lit; you have a sense of a beautiful city that had a continuous and long-running historical importance.

Then there is Dublin, where you find isolated pockets of Georgian architectural splendour, single magnificent buildings or entire elegant streets: all memorials to the brief period at the end of the 18th Century when Ireland enjoyed prosperity. Of the centuries of poverty and obscurity on either side of that brief period, nothing much remains. From 1800, the city appears to have leapt to the 1990s, and a brief period of EU prosperity and expansion.

Of course, there is also London, where there are a mere handful of national treasures from before the Great Fire of 1666 – including the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, and Guildhall – but a wealth of glorious architecture from every period since 1666, starting with Wren’s churches. There are streets in Central London that you can walk down and view fine examples of architecture from every century from the 17th to the 21st. Whether you regard that as a ghastly mishmash or a glorious riotous celebration is a matter of taste.

Which brings me to Jerusalem, and Israel in general. London’s divider, 1666, is a very thin line; Israel’s is a great swathe. In Israel, if you find anything more than 120 years old, it will almost certainly be more than 2000 years old. The presence of the distant past is inescapable. Scarcely can a road be laid or an underground carpark built without some archaeological find being uncovered. Just in the last few weeks, a prehistoric copperworks has been unearthed, which may contain the earliest known example of a smelting furnace in the world. So far as distinctive city architecture is concerned, Israel’s World Heritage masterpiece is the Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, Israel’s first modern city.

Ah! I was supposed to be writing about Portugal, wasn’t I?

While Portugal cannot compete with Rome, or Jerusalem, it is old. As you explore its towns and cities, you can see buildings, intact or in ruins, that reflect the centuries of its history. As I have written earlier, Penamacor itself shows evidence of the last 900 years of occupation. Indeed, there is an important archaeological dig going on there at the moment.

Portugal is the oldest nation-state in Europe, in the sense that it has had the same borders since 1139, when Alfonso Henriques was proclaimed the first King of Portugal. England could have been a contender for this title; sadly it has been, in contrast to Portugal, unable to sit still over the last 400 years; instead it has been fiddling around, adding Wales and Scotland here, Ireland there, and then losing most of Ireland again. Throughout all of these upheavals, Portugal has remained constant and unchanging.

When you’ve been around that long, you acquire some other age records along the way. The English first gave military aid to Portugal in 1147, during the Siege of Lisbon, which ended with Portugal taking Lisbon from the Moors. After thinking about it for over 200 years, the two countries eventually signed the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance in 1373. Since then, they have been coming to each other’s aid against such common enemies as Spain, France and Germany. Even in the Second World War, when Portugal carefully maintained neutrality, it offered significant humanitarian assistance to Allied civilians and some logistic assistance to Allied military forces. The Alliance still stands, and is the oldest extant diplomatic alliance in the world.

Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon is the oldest bookstore in the world. It has been trading since 1732 (beating the Moravian Bookshop in Pennsylvania by 13 years). Of course, Bertrand has not been in the same premises all that time: It was forced to move in the aftermath of a massive earthquake, and has only been in its current premises since 1755.

And, finally, Portugal was the world’s first genuinely global empire. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas gave Portugal the eastern half of the New World, including Brazil and parts of Africa and Asia. Portugal’s empire actually lasted from 1415, when Cueta, a port on the Northern coast of Morocco, was captured, until 1999, when Macau was handed over to China.

The more I read about Portugal, the more it seems to have in common with Britain. There’s even the explanation of how Portuguese Jewish exiles brought fried fish to England (via Holland). The breadcrumb batter served to make palatable the fish that was fried on Friday to be eaten cold on shabbat.

Playing the Long Game

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Last week, I promised to keep you posted on the missing documents saga. You may remember that Micha’el was told that their package of original documents returned by the authorities had been picked up from Castelo Branco Post Office, although they did not know by whom; all they knew was that, whoever it was, it was definitely not anybody who had any right to pick it up.

Then, a few days later, a neighbour stopped Tslil on the street, and said: ‘By the way, there’s a package for you at the petrol station.’ 10 months in Portugal have taught the kids that things that make no apparent sense may still have a logical explanation. Sure enough, when they went to the petrol station, there was a parcel waiting for them, containing the documents. Apparently, the clerk who had addressed the envelope had omitted from the address both the house number and the village (Penamacor). Instead of (as it were):

26, Something Street
Penamacor
Castelo Branco

the parcel had been addressed to:

Something Street
Castelo Branco

It had therefore been sent to Castelo Branco, where the postman had, of course, failed to find the street. Realising the mistake, the authorities redirected it to Penamacor, knowing that there is a street of that name in the village. However, since it was missing a house number, the postman could not deliver it, and so he handed it in at the petrol station, to be claimed from there. ‘Why the petrol station and not the post office?’ you ask. Good question! If I had to hazard a guess, I would say because very few people go to the post office regularly, whereas everyone uses the petrol station, and the proprietor, knowing where everyone in the village lives, can mention to the next resident of the street who stops by that, when they see the Orlevs, they should tell them that there is a parcel waiting for them.

‘Why, then, did the postal authorities tell Micha’el that the parcel had been collected?’ you ask. Full of good questions this week, aren’t you! Well, you see, in order to leave the parcel at the petrol station, the postman had to get the proprietor to sign for it.As far as the Post Office was concerned, this meant that the parcel had been delivered. There you are, you see: a logical explanation. It may not make any sense, but it’s logical!

Every confrontation the kids have with Portuguese bureaucracy confirms what I said when we first made aliyah. We started off at an absorption centre: this was a wonderful arrangement, since, whatever bureaucratic nonsense we experienced on any given day, we would always be able to find someone among our neighbours who had had the same experience a few days, or weeks, or months earlier, and who could reassure us that everything would work out in the end. Despite that, someone or other (usually, you may be interested to know, an American – I just report the facts as they are; I don’t comment on them) would regularly rant about the Israeli authorities and their Byzantine bureaucracy and incredible inefficiency. Incidentally, the bureaucracy was indeed Byzantine, since much of it was a remnant of the days when this neck of the woods was part of the Ottoman empire. Israel even adopted a little of the Ottoman bureaucratic vocabulary, notably the splendid Turkish word for rubber stamp – gushpanka.  

Whenever I heard such a rant, I would respond in the same way. ‘Have you ever tried to immigrate to the USA? Ask someone who has what the process is like!’ This was, of course, in one sense, an unfair comparison, since we all, as Jews, enjoyed the Right of Return to Israel, which isn’t the case for most would-be immigrants to the USA. However, it is fair to say that no native-born national ever really appreciates how daunting the immigrant experience is. You know none of things that ‘everyone knows’; you only find the right way of doing something by doing it wrongly first; and, of course, you can’t really understand anything anyone says in an office, much less on the phone. The best pieces of advice we were given were: ‘Always bring a small child’ and ‘When all else fails, cry’. We have, of course, passed this advice on to the kids.

What I don’t know is whether Portuguese bureaucracy follows the British or the Israeli model. In Britain (in my experience), if a clerk in a Government office tells you ‘Impossible!’, there is no point in arguing. Even if what you are requesting is, in fact, possible, you will never get the clerk to admit to being in error, and, if it is impossible, then you will never get the clerk to bend the rules.

In Israel, by contrast, ‘Impossible’ is nothing more than the clerk’s opening gambit in a protracted negotiation. We once knew an immigrant from Britain who applied for an Israeli heavy goods licence, even though his British driving licence only qualified him to drive a car. He arrived at the relevant licensing authority at eight o’clock one morning, and, on being told that he was not eligible for a heavy goods licence, argued for an hour and a half, and then announced that he was not moving from the office until he had his licence. Those of you who live here will not be surprised to hear that he left the office at the end of the day with a heavy goods licence (which, thankfully, he never used).

Sadly, official Portugal sounds, at this point, more like Britain than Israel. However, Micha’el’s people skills are so good, and Tao is so adorable, that my money is on them. (Be honest: could you say ‘No’ to this child?)

I’m sure the kids will eventually achieve what they need to do in order to move on to developing the land as they want and achieving permanent housing. Fortunately, Micha’el and Tslil are keen players of Go, and so they know all about playing the long game.

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.

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.

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?)

Blog in the Time of Corona*

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*With acknowledgement to my nephew Saul, who was, for me at least, the first to compose a variation on a theme by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

By the time you read this, Bernice and I will have come to the end of the two weeks of self-isolation imposed on us when we returned from Portugal. We will then, seamlessly, have moved into an indefinite period of staying at home imposed on us as part of the general population, with a recommendation that I at least (as an over-70 with slight asthma issues) self-isolate completely. Having enjoyed two wonderful weeks exploring and redefining our relationship, we are more than a little reluctant to expose ourselves to the horrors beyond the front door, so we are planning to buy, where possible, online and depend on home delivery. As a consequence, the most dramatic change for us, when our two weeks are up, looks like being the chance to take our own rubbish to the municipal bin at the top of the street, rather than having to ask our wonderful neighbours’ obliging son. We are already arguing about who gets the privilege of first bin bag.

You will, I hope, understand that I am finding it difficult, in the current unpleasantness, to maintain the razor-sharp focus and single-mindedness that have characterised these posts to date, and I crave your forgiveness if I ramble a bit this week.

First, the big news. I know each of you has been on the edge of your seat over the residential status of Tslil and Tao; I can now put your minds at rest with the news that Tslil now has her visa, and so the kids are all set for the next few years, until they are entitled to apply for permanent residency status, and, ultimately, citizenship.

And now I feel a pensée coming on. When we were in Portugal last, I started to be aware that thinking about my blog was providing a ground bass to the unfurling melody of my life. In case ground bass is a term you are not familiar with…*

*Very long parenthetical comment here. As part of its desperate attempt to attract a younger audience, BBC Radio 3 (a station devoted to classical music and the arts) has issued guidelines to its presenters. Among these is a total ban on phrases such as: ‘Of course’ or ‘As everyone knows’, as in ‘As everyone knows, the young Bach walked the 400 miles from Armstadt to Lubeck to hear Buxtehude’s organ-playing’, or:‘Of course, by the time Mozart was my age, he had been dead for 35 years’ (pace Tom Lehrer –although when he first coined this joke, it was ‘dead for 2 years’, as Lehrer was only 37 at the time. 37!!! I’d give 33 years to be 37 again!)  Since I recognise that not all my readers are as fond of baroque music as I am, I have phrased the start of this sentence (I hope) sensitively.

In case ground bass is a term you are not familiar with, it refers to a short theme played on the bass instruments (typically a double bass in jazz or a keyboard instrument in baroque music), which is repeated without variation, and which serves as an anchor for a constantly changing upper-register melody. For a divine example, and as an excuse to hear Alfred Deller’s astonishingly pure voice, listen to Purcell’s Music for a While on YouTube. (Deller was the counter-tenor almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of interest in such music in Britain.)

Welcome back! So, what do I mean when I call my blog the ground bass to the melody of my life? Well, in Portugal, I found that, as each day unfolded, I was increasingly catching myself observing, as if from above, what I was experiencing , and mentally earmarking it for possible inclusion in a blog post. I was also starting to find myself ‘tweaking’ events when I wrote about them in the blog, to highlight a significance or sharpen the humour in an incident. I had even caught myself on one occasion attempting to consciously shape the event in real time so that it would make better copy. This intrigued me, and slightly disturbed me.

As I became conscious of the influence the blog was having on my life, I discussed with Micha’el the phenomenon that I was beginning to become aware of: to my relief, Micha’el recognised what I was describing, and also commented that he feels this is something that we all do all the time as we go through our lives, and we call it memory. The more I think about that, the truer it seems to me.

So, bottom line: don’t take every word here as an accurate account: this is a blog, not a witness statement.

With that last paragraph in mind, I feel emboldened to undertake an activity that seems particularly appropriate to this lockdown age, when increasing numbers of us are experiencing the world virtually. I want now to lecture you on Portuguese cuisine, which is a little like a fish offering to teach you how to ride a bicycle. Bound as I am by the laws of kashrut, I have savoured only three Portuguese ‘dishes’. The first is beer – which is perfectly drinkable, but whose most distinctive feature is that it is inexpensive.

Any serious discussion of food in Portugal has to start with Pastéis de Nata, the little custard tarts that are ubiquitous in Portugal. They even graced the breakfast buffet table of our hotel.

Each region has its own twist on the recipe, but for authenticity, one has to visit Belém, near Lisbon, and specifically the monastery there. Over 300 years ago, the nuns and monks used egg white to starch their clothes; this left them with large quantities of egg yolks on their hands, as it were. They therefore started baking egg tart pastries. (Faced with the same problem at Pesach, when I bake almond macaroons and cinnamon balls, I solve the same problem by making coconut pyramids with the yolks.) When they needed to boost their income, they started selling them.

Then, in 1834, they sold the recipe, and three years later, the Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém opened its doors, and is still selling the pastries 183 years later. I am reliably told that they are to die for, but I have no intention of making them, since they are very labour-intensive, and I would have no way of knowing whether I had captured the authentic flavour. 

Next, we have to talk about chestnuts, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, are very popular in Portugal. There was once, so they say, a soldier called Martin, who was posted far from home. On a cold winter’s day (bear with me, this does eventually lead to chestnuts), he saw a ragged beggar outside the gates, tore his own cloak in two and gave half of it to the beggar. For this act, he was canonized. His saint’s day is celebrated in Portugal on November 11, and tradition has it (according to the bank employee who was serving us on November 10) that in recognition of the soldier’s act of charity, the weather is always warm and dry on St Martin’s day (as indeed it was last November). In typical Portuguese fashion, the day is celebrated with food and drink. (I suspect that one of the reasons young Israelis like Portugal so much is that they find much that is familiar in the national character of the Portuguese.) In this case, the food is roast chestnuts. The chestnut tree is native to Portugal, and, when we were there in November, the ground was scattered with chestnuts. The supermarkets, on the other hand, were awash with them. On the day itself, marquees were erected in the municipal car-park, and braziers of chestnuts were roasted and eaten. As luck would have it (although my suspicion is that these things are seldom, if ever, determined by luck – many customs and religious traditions naturally arise out of the cycle of the year), November 11 is the first day that the new season’s jeropiga is deemed drinkable. This is a reputedly lethal drink made by adding aguardente (Portuguese brandy) to the residue of grapes from which all the liquid has been crushed to make wine. In English, this pulp is known as grape pomace; in Portuguese, as bagaço de uva, which sounds so much more exotic. Incidentally, the term ‘bagasse’ in English is reserved exclusively for sugar-cane pulp, which is used as a bio-fuel.

Another brief word on chestnuts. Apparently, until the potato took over as the main vegetable in a meal, the go-to accompaniment in Portugal was pureed chestnut.

And, finally, no exploration of Portuguese cuisine would be complete if it failed to talk about salt cod. Of course, no exploration of Portuguese cuisine would be complete if it failed to talk about octopus and pig…but there’s only so much that I’m prepared to write about. You cannot walk into a supermarket in Portugal without being battered about by cod (there’s a joke there, somewhere). Great chunks of salt cod are stacked, shrink-wrapped, in freezer cabinets; slabs of the stuff lie in flat cardboard boxes in the fresh fish department; whole sides hang on butcher’s hooks. The photograph below, taken in our local supermarket, may not look very impressive. While we were shopping one day, I decided to take a couple of photos with my phone, knowing that at some point I wanted to write about this, and no sooner had I started to take shots than a young assistant dashed out of the storeroom and made it very clear that photography was not allowed in the shop. Micha’el told me later that the Portuguese are very sensitive about taking photographs without the subject being aware, but it had, quite honestly, never occurred to me that the cod might object.

Incidentally, my more observant Israeli readers may have spotted, in the background, the origin of the modern Hebrew name for cod, which is bakala.

You may be puzzled as to why a country should abound with salted fish when 70% of its border is coastline, taking in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and nowhere in the country is more than 50 miles from the coast. My curiosity was certainly aroused. Let me save you the trouble of googling, and astound you with the breadth of my erudition. (An erudite person, in case you were wondering, is someone who can google faster than you.) Portugal is replete with recipes for salt cod. Almost any cod recipe will start by telling you to soak the fish, in order to leach out the salt. Some recipes recommend soaking for 6 hours, others for two days, changing the water after 24 hours. Of course, this only begs the question: How on earth did salt cod become such a staple of the Portuguese diet? My research has revealed that Portuguese fishermen, throughout the 16th Century, would fish the cod grounds off Newfoundland, and, naturally, had to salt the fish they caught to prevent it rotting on the voyage back. The attraction of the banks of Newfoundland was that the shoals were so plentiful and so thick that, in the words of one contemporary account, ‘We hardly have been able to row a boat through them’. Portuguese, Spanish, French and English fishermen would cross the Atlantic to catch cod, until the Portuguese first reduced their involvement after the English raided their fishing fleet in 1585, during the war with Spain, and then withdrew completely after the failure of the Spanish Armada.

The only question still begged that I can think of is: Why is it that, even though Portuguese fishermen stopped needing to salt cod over 300 years ago, salt cod is still a central pillar of Portuguese cuisine? However, as someone who spent four years reading, searching, experimenting and tweaking, until I found the recipe that made it possible for me to bake the exact brown bread (rye bread with caraway seeds ) that I had known in my childhood, I think I know the answer to that question. I can hear Topol in the background, with the whole company singing: ‘Tradition!’. (Surely there can’t be anyone who needs a YouTube link for that?!)

After all this talk of food, let me leave you with some pictures of a young man who already enjoys his food, and very definitely knows what he likes.

Feeding the Stomach and the Brain

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The challenge in writing my blog from Portugal is that much of our day is spent with Tao; so, when I sit down to write, my mind is filled with thoughts of him. I am acutely aware that banging on about one’s amazing grandchild can be very boring for the reader, so, instead, let me dedicate this week’s post to……my amazing children.

When Bernice and I first started talking about my then upcoming big birthday, I really didn’t want to make an event of it. I was eventually persuaded that changing your prefix is not insignificant. (That extraordinarily clumsy phrase ‘changing your prefix’ is a leaden attempt to capture the essence of the phrase in Hebrew. Area dialing codes in the Israeli landline phone system consist of zero plus a single digit – 02 for Jerusalem, 03 for Tel Aviv and so on. These codes are known as ‘prefixes’. The big transitional birthdays, from one decade to another – in my case, from 69 to 70 – are referred to as ‘changing prefix’.)

A large part of the reason why I was initially reluctant was that I didn’t want to celebrate without the family all being together. Our solution was to have a modest evening at home with our local friends, and then for Esther and Maayan to fly out to Portugal for a week, overlapping with our visit, so that we could celebrate as a family.

So the seven of us enjoyed the whole of last week together…and it was wonderful. The kids all went out into the country, to walk and do a little sightseeing, and also went to Micha’el and Tslil’s land a couple of times, leaving us to babysit. Apart from that, for most of the time, we didn’t do anything much, but just sitting around of an evening with the family was very special. Tao shared himself out between us very fairly, so that we scarcely ever came to blows, and I got to indulge in one of my favourite spectator sports, which is watching Esther and Micha’el – in recent years, Maayan and Tslil as well – simply enjoying each other’s company. To have two children who are, in many ways, so very different from each other, yet who are so close to each other, is a source of pure joy to me.

During the week, we all went to a vegan restaurant in Castelo Branco for what I imagined was to be a celebratory meal. (Good grief – I’ve turned into someone who blogs about what he’s eating!) I only mention this because we actually were photographed together, and I have been asked, offline, to provide some photos of the kids. Not the least enjoyable part of the meal for me was the bill: a mere 52 euro (under 200 shekels) for six adults.

Happy Families

The meal was initially made even more special for me by the fact that I was anticipating my birthday surprise. I didn’t know quite what to expect, although I was praying I wouldn’t get waiters bringing to the table a ‘shaving foam’ dessert replete with sparklers, while singing Happy Birthday, in Portuguese, off key. As the meal progressed, it gradually dawned on me that nobody was going to make a big thing – or indeed even a small thing – of my birthday. I can only hope that I managed to conceal my disappointment from the others.

However, I needn’t have worried, because the actual celebrations took place at home on shabbat. (Yes, our house in Penamacor does already feel like home, which is a lovely feeling, and a great relief, since when we bought it Bernice hadn’t seen it yet.) The kids took total charge, with the exception of Bernice’s signature curry and rice on Friday night and lasagna for shabbat lunch. We were also allowed to provide the wine.

Every Pesach during my childhood, my father, of blessed memory, would order some bottles of Israeli Carmel hock to serve at the festive meals. At that time, Carmel winery produced kiddush (sacramental) wine – syrupy-sweet red – and one or two dry wines. Buying the hock represented the triumph of optimism over experience: every year, Dad would open and pour the wine in eager anticipation, take an initial sip, and swear that he was not going to buy any next year…but he always did.

Since then, of course, Israeli wine has undergone several transformations, and is now at the point where many of its wineries have won international awards. Bernice and I always open a bottle for shabbat. I am guided in my purchases by a comment from Adam Montefiore – the English-speaking voice of Israeli wine – who advises that if you pay less than 25 shekels for a bottle of wine, you are paying principally for the glass bottle, and if you pay more than 150 shekels, you are paying principally for the label. Fortunately, there are many really enjoyable wines in the 35-65 shekel range, which is our particular sweet spot (although I can hear one or two of my readers tutting about our cheap taste).

When we first came to Portugal, in October, we picked up a few bottles of Portuguese wine at the kosher food shop in Lisbon. On our first two shabbatot, we tried two different wines: the first was execrable, the second barely drinkable. Some hasty online research revealed a European Kosher wine supplier based in Brussels, who ships throughout Europe, with free delivery if you buy a case (which can be mixed). So, I sat down one evening and looked through their list. I decided to give up on Portuguese wine but to stay with Iberia, so I ordered 12 assorted bottles of Spanish wines. I also followed my usual policy, of starting with the cheaper bottles, and only moving up-market if we didn’t enjoy them. A very sturdy and well-protected case arrived 3 days later, and, so far, we have enjoyed the bottles we have tried. To be honest, nothing has been as good as the Israeli wine we drink at home, but I regard this as an ongoing long-term research project, and it seems a little ridiculous to pay more here to drink Israeli wine than we do in Israel.

Anyway, back to our celebratory Friday night meal. After we had eaten in Castelo Branco, Esther (on the right in the photo), Maayan (on the left) and Micha’el went off to do their own thing, while Bernice and I drove home with Tslil and Tao. It transpired that ‘their own thing’ was buying the ingredients for the shabbat meals. Esther rose to the challenge of cooking in a strange kitchen magnificently, serving a chestnut and mushroom soup that both nodded at Portuguese cuisine’s love of the chestnut and was deliciously warming and comforting.

She then excelled herself with a dessert that, if you have a sweet tooth, was to die for (and, if you have several sweet teeth and no self-control, to die of) – a chocolate and caramel tart, served with whipped cream lifted by a hefty slug of amaretto.

This delicious meal was accompanied by an original creation from Micha’el, which I will come to in a minute. But just before I do, I have to give you a little background.

After our first decade in Israel, when people asked me what I missed of Britain, I could honestly reply that there was very little, apart from BBC Radio 4. In those days, we would listen to BBC World Service on longwave radio. Fortunately, there was a powerful signal relay from Jordan, which meant tolerable reception in Jerusalem. There were a couple of programmes broadcast on the World Service that I loved: One of these was Round Britain Quiz – a cryptic general knowledge quiz between teams of celebrity experts. In its heyday, the programme boasted several competitors whose erudition and powers of deduction were worthy of the questions set: Irene Thomas and John Julius Norwich being the most worthy. Over the years, the teams have become much less impressive, but the questions have pretty much maintained their high standard. There are only eight questions in each half-hour episode, but each question is multi-part, and answering it usually involves a fair amount of discussion among the team – and often hints from the question-master. If that sounds like your thing, you can sample the programme here.

As well as trying to answer quiz questions, I am, as some of you will know, very fond of setting quizzes. Over the years, I have carved for myself a niche, creating bespoke quizzes for family celebrations. When I started, 50+ years ago, this involved spending days in the reference library. These days, the research can be carried out online, which is much faster and more efficient (but less satisfying, to be honest). The art of a good bespoke quiz is to make it difficult enough to be challenging, but not so difficult as to make people give up, and also to tailor it sufficiently to the interests and strengths of the celebrant (the birthday boy or girl, or anniversary couple), so that they can do better than anyone else, while not making everyone else feel excluded. Apart from the frustration of occasionally having to reject a question as being too challenging for the audience, I really enjoy the craft of themed quiz construction.

Micha’el (in the middle in the photo, flanked by Tao and Tslil) presented us on Friday night with an exquisite quiz, just sufficiently challenging to keep us fully occupied between courses, but ultimately solvable. Everyone pitched in – except Tao, but I’m prepared to cut him some slack at this stage – and, between us, we cracked all of the questions.

Micha’el had brilliantly devised questions that played to some of my strengths; he had also included some questions that required a knowledge of Hebrew, and some that were focussed on Jewish tradition, while others were genuinely general knowledge. It was tremendous fun to solve the riddles, and immensely gratifying to see Micha’el sharing some of my passion for the genre, and matching, if not exceeding, my talent.

Let me leave you with a taste of the quiz. All of the questions were to do with 7 or 70. Here is one – general knowledge – question. If you can find the letters for the spaces under the pictures, you may then be able to fill in the answers 1–7. Please feel free to comment.

If you want to see what Micha’el does when he isn’t setting fiendish quizzes, you can follow his,Tslil’s and Tao’s youtube channel.