PARTISAN REVIEW
443
elegant coiffure of the "queens" sitting at the cafes in Algeciras wait–
ing for the ferry.
Gide's country, whooh hal Tangiers!
• • •
I write to a friend. " ... the very depth, the pitch horror, a city with
no history, customs, manners, the sweepings of everywhere tending
down into this sinkhole. After a day in it being clawed over by,young
boys, I fled to the synagogue, a whole street of them, directed by the
owner of the hotel who it turned out is Jewish (the Hotel Continental
which has Mogen Dovids in the iron work of its ballustrades and fierce
mosquitoes hiding in its closets) where I encountered on the Rue des
Synagogues, a tiny alley officially named thus which shelters about ten
little shuls, a shamus who leaped from a doorway seeing me eye an
old synagogue door and bore me off to make a minyan. Crumbling
houses of study, one filled with tarnished silver ornaments thick as a
field of flowers, swinging from the ceiling. Why am I here?
It
is all too
frightening and familiar, the haggling desperate energy of the streets
outside, it stinks of Dorchester, the Jewish ghetto I grew up in and I
can feel the Arab blood of a half brother, Ishmael, beating in my tem–
ples. I seek my clan. To be singular, chosen, in this mass.
•
• •
Fez. Here in the synagogue I met a hapless young old man living
out of a collection of homemade bottled soups and preserves in a
mouldy apartment on the top of a cracked and already collapsing mod–
ern apartment building, a suite where he invited me to stay. I ex–
plained that I had already taken rooms at the Hotel du C.
T.
M. The
grandson of Fasi rabbis, he had stayed behind while his family went on
to Israel. Most of the Jews had left. All the old synagogues in the Mel–
lah were shut and only a Gallicized middle class remnant remainecf in
a new synagogue in the better part of town. He was in real estate. How
was he doing? He shook his head, muttered in French, "The Arabs!
They sell for ha
If
price. Quarter price!"
At first it was sweet as he tried to guide me through Fez but he was
born luckless, a shlimuzzel, we got everywhere late, worn out, missed
the principal sights, waited for hours for buses that never came in the
incredible heat of summer African afternoons. He was ready to run
around all day with me but I ended up paying most of the bills. Yet
