Brown Scarf Blues

A Sephardic Jewish writer comes to Madrid for a conference of Spanish-descended Jews, just after the deaths of his sister and his best friend. In Seville he finds a scarf that stays on his neck for thirteen days until, just as suddenly, it disappears, lost in Madrid. The scarf becomes an obsessive symbol of loss, of farewells to things and people. The writer says goodbye to the dead but also to all the people he has not been and never will be. He says goodbye to dreams. Meanwhile, he will soon meet Spanish Jews who were lost in the Amazon for 150 years, who he previously wrote about ten years earlier in a novel. Could he have invented that reality? Is reality the product of what we imagine? The novella spans countries-Morocco, Brazil, New York and Israel-and languages-Hebrew, French, Spanish, Portuguese and especially Haketia, the Judeo-Spanish of Northern Morocco that insists on surviving as a living-dead remnant of a vanished culture, as the words and expressions left...

Mois Benarroch was born in Tetouan, Morocco in 1959. At age thirteen, he moved to Israel with his parents and has lived in Jerusalem ever since. He began writing poetry at fifteen, first in English, then in Hebrew and finally in his native Spanish. He published his first poems in 1979. In the 1980s he was part of several avant-garde groups and was one of the editors of Marot magazine. His first book in Hebrew, whose title translates as Songs of the Immigrant, was published in 1994. He also put out two books of short stories, several books of poems in Hebrew, English and Spanish, and four novels. In 2008 he received the Prime Minister's Prize in Israel.
His published works in Spain include Esquina en Tetuán (Esquío, 2000) and in 2005 the novel Lucena (Lf ediciones). In 2008, Destino published his novel En las puertas de Tánger. And in 2010, Escalera published Amor y exilios.
Mois Benarroch, novelist, poet, translator, has been honored with the Prime Minister's Prize (2008) and the Yehuda Amichai Prize for Poetry (2012).