mother and she said it has nothing to do with our family. I remembered going with my father to collect rent, but it turns out my father had a different building on Mohamed V Street, not in the Pasaje. And it felt like a very literary idea for the passage to be related to my family. Sometimes literature is more logical and perhaps even more real than reality.
Anyway, I was born and lived almost until age thirteen at 21 Maharaka Annoual Street, which before independence was called Consul Murphy Street, in a building with very pretty Andalusian architecture that my grandfather and his brother built in the 1930s. My grandfather, Moisés Benarroch, and his brother Abraham had a prosperous business called Benarroch Brothers that supplied the entire north with sugar, oil and flour. A lot of money passed through those hands, and with that money he constructed buildings in what is now downtown Tetouan. Many of the buildings were put up by Jews returning from the Americas with small fortunes.
Here is a good photo of the building.
I think the bicycle shop is still there on the ground floor. I lived one floor up, and from the little balcony you could see the edge of the Riff mountain range. My cousins lived one floor up from us and other cousins of my father’s one floor down, the Nahons and the Bibases. On our floor there lived a Muslim whose name I can’t recall, though I’m trying, who worked as a butcher. He was married but had no children and lived with his wife. Well, almost always, because sporadically he would fight with her and rip up the papers, in other words he divorced her according to sharia law, only to appear before the Qadi the next day and marry her again. According to local legend, one day the Qadi told them he would never marry them again, and then the butcher calmed down a bit. I think a great love story occurred in that home, very intense and romantic.
I don’t think you’ll remember the business my grandfather ran with his brother but maybe you’ve seen the Almacenes Sananes store that belonged to my maternal grandfather, who also lived on Maharaka Annoual Street, at number 5, I think, in a house that now contains a twenty-room boarding house for workers from other cities. The last time I went to Tetouan, in 1996, it was being renovated and I told the owner that the house had known great blessings and growth. My maternal grandparents had eight children. And it was a home filled with richness and much generosity. Every Friday my maternal grandfather became a sort of Jewish welfare bureau and all the needy started arriving in the morning to talk with him and complain and leave with a bit of paper money to get them through the next week or brighten their Shabbat. Around three o’clock it was the grandchildren’s turn, and we would all sit on the stairs and wait to be called one at a time, and we each were given some coins. Those who bore his name always got a bit more and there was a whole social hierarchy to the distribution, children of sons got more than children of daughters, boys more than girls, those who bore his name more than anyone, and so on... I think that’s where I first rebelled internally against the injustice of discrimination.
The whole family lived between Mouquauma Street and Mohamed V, as did nearly all the Jews who lived in the new city rather than the Jewish Quarter, in what we called the expansion district. It was a very familial life, filled with cousins and aunts and uncles. Then there was the school, the Ittihad Maroc, which we all called the Alliance, it was a Jewish school though there were also a few Muslim and Christian students. It closed in 1974. It was the first school ever founded by the French organization the Alliance Israélite, back in 1862. It was their first in what became a Jewish educational network spanning the whole Muslim world.
We usually walked to school but sometimes rode the trolley home, though we usually stopped at La Glacial, which at lunchtime was
Anyway, I was born and lived almost until age thirteen at 21 Maharaka Annoual Street, which before independence was called Consul Murphy Street, in a building with very pretty Andalusian architecture that my grandfather and his brother built in the 1930s. My grandfather, Moisés Benarroch, and his brother Abraham had a prosperous business called Benarroch Brothers that supplied the entire north with sugar, oil and flour. A lot of money passed through those hands, and with that money he constructed buildings in what is now downtown Tetouan. Many of the buildings were put up by Jews returning from the Americas with small fortunes.
Here is a good photo of the building.
I think the bicycle shop is still there on the ground floor. I lived one floor up, and from the little balcony you could see the edge of the Riff mountain range. My cousins lived one floor up from us and other cousins of my father’s one floor down, the Nahons and the Bibases. On our floor there lived a Muslim whose name I can’t recall, though I’m trying, who worked as a butcher. He was married but had no children and lived with his wife. Well, almost always, because sporadically he would fight with her and rip up the papers, in other words he divorced her according to sharia law, only to appear before the Qadi the next day and marry her again. According to local legend, one day the Qadi told them he would never marry them again, and then the butcher calmed down a bit. I think a great love story occurred in that home, very intense and romantic.
I don’t think you’ll remember the business my grandfather ran with his brother but maybe you’ve seen the Almacenes Sananes store that belonged to my maternal grandfather, who also lived on Maharaka Annoual Street, at number 5, I think, in a house that now contains a twenty-room boarding house for workers from other cities. The last time I went to Tetouan, in 1996, it was being renovated and I told the owner that the house had known great blessings and growth. My maternal grandparents had eight children. And it was a home filled with richness and much generosity. Every Friday my maternal grandfather became a sort of Jewish welfare bureau and all the needy started arriving in the morning to talk with him and complain and leave with a bit of paper money to get them through the next week or brighten their Shabbat. Around three o’clock it was the grandchildren’s turn, and we would all sit on the stairs and wait to be called one at a time, and we each were given some coins. Those who bore his name always got a bit more and there was a whole social hierarchy to the distribution, children of sons got more than children of daughters, boys more than girls, those who bore his name more than anyone, and so on... I think that’s where I first rebelled internally against the injustice of discrimination.
The whole family lived between Mouquauma Street and Mohamed V, as did nearly all the Jews who lived in the new city rather than the Jewish Quarter, in what we called the expansion district. It was a very familial life, filled with cousins and aunts and uncles. Then there was the school, the Ittihad Maroc, which we all called the Alliance, it was a Jewish school though there were also a few Muslim and Christian students. It closed in 1974. It was the first school ever founded by the French organization the Alliance Israélite, back in 1862. It was their first in what became a Jewish educational network spanning the whole Muslim world.
We usually walked to school but sometimes rode the trolley home, though we usually stopped at La Glacial, which at lunchtime was
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