Exodus: A memoir (22 page)

We stepped into the tiny room that constituted one of the only three restored synagogues in the whole of Spain. It was smaller than my first apartment. Etchings and carvings in the stone wall had been recovered, but otherwise there was nothing on display except for a brass menorah in a case on the platform.

“Why isn’t there any stuff?” Isaac asked me. I didn’t know what to say. We had been to so many lovingly restored cathedrals, all of which had been large and grandiose and had boasted many beautiful objects and artworks. He had a point.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe because everything was destroyed and they couldn’t find it.”

The synagogue didn’t take more than three minutes to walk around, that’s how small it was. A box asked for a donation of fifty cents on the way out. I remembered the pricey admission fee to La Giralda in Seville and felt irritated at the comparison. At the Sfarad House across the street, a similarly low fee was charged—and like the synagogue, the Jewish museum was incredibly small, with limited offerings.

I asked the man working behind the desk if he was Jewish, or if anyone who worked there was.

“Unfortunately no, ma’am,” he said apologetically in a strong accent, “but all of us care very much about the history of the Jewish presence in Spain and are working very hard to the interest of preservation.”

“So
are
there any Jews left in Córdoba?”

“Very few. We used to have eleven, but then the rabbi’s son went to England to study, so now we have ten.”

I couldn’t fathom how ten people managed to hold on to the idea of a community in the historic wasteland that was southern Spain. I had not come across any other reports of Jews in the region.

“But they are all older, and their children move away, so it is expected that there will not be any Jews anymore, in the next generation in Córdoba.”

“What about
la
convivencia
?” It was a term I had heard tossed around in every museum and tourist site. Spain was trying to rewrite the history of Andalusia by pointing to a nonexistent “golden age” of tolerance and claiming it was a model for peaceful coexistence in the modern world.
La convivencia
was the label for this idea, and I knew the museum employee would recognize it.

“Unfortunately it’s just an idea. It’s not really quite possible for Spain to recapture the time when many different cultures thrived amongst one another. That era was before Spain became a real independent state.”

Isaac was very excited to explore the museum and he raced ahead, calling to me when he saw something he wanted to show me. I was very pensive as I walked through the small house. Any one of the garments on display, of those that were real and not created based on a design that was surmised to be authentic, could have belonged to a man who was tortured and burnt at the stake.
Yet that feeling faded as I realized that almost everything in the museum was an “inspired restoration,” as opposed to a real found object.

I looked down at the one-sheet guide the man had given me. It talked about the history of Jews in Córdoba. We were now in what was still called the Jewish quarter, but according to the document, any homes that had once been occupied by Jews were destroyed by riots in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

On the way out, I pointed that out to the man. “So, if the so-called Jewish quarter was completely razed after the Jews had already been expelled, why still call it the Jewish quarter? Not even the ground I’m walking on is Jewish! It’s been inhabited by Christians for centuries.” He must have felt put on the spot. I’m sure no one had asked him that many questions.

“It’s called the Jewish quarter in memory of the people who lived here before.”

“But look around,” I said. “This is now your cool neighborhood! This is your SoHo, your Village, like we have in Manhattan. Do you have any idea how insulting it is to have your trendiest, most expensive neighborhood invoke the memory of the people who were oppressed and tortured here? Spain has made no effort to reach out to the Jewish community or welcome them back. The right thing to do would be to give this neighborhood to them. No wonder there are only ten Jews left.”

I wouldn’t live here in a million years, I thought. It would make me sick. I walked out of the museum feeling flattened.

“You’re upset because they don’t have any more Jews here, right Mommy?” Isaac asked.

“Yeah, I guess so. But I also thought there’d be more to see.
This was the biggest Jewish community in Spain. We’ve been touring mosques and churches everywhere—those weren’t destroyed. Why couldn’t they have left just a little bit behind for us?”

I was ready to leave, but on the way out of the quarter, now mobbed with model types sipping cappuccinos, I passed a small jewelry boutique. There were handmade Jewish stars on display in the window. The jeweler was an old man who didn’t speak English, but I pointed to the one I liked and he gave me the price. I laid the money on the table, and he opened the case and gently lifted the necklace from it. He looked at me, and motioned putting it on, a questioning look on his face.

“Yes, I want to wear it,” I said.

And I walked out of that shop with that star on my neck, not hidden under my sweater. I held my head high and walked down the street holding Isaac’s hand, making sure to meet everyone’s gaze. I was Jewish. My roots were right here.

When we landed back in New York, I felt for the first time in my life like a full container, one my grandmother would have said was worth opening a door for.

I still feel the need to establish my Jewishness immediately. “Can’t you tell just by looking at my nose?” I ask jokingly. “Hand me a bagel and shmear.” However, it is precisely in the parts of the world where Jews are underrepresented that I feel most Jewish. The irony of this does not elude me, of course. And yet, to discover my authentic Jewish identity, it feels almost as if I need to have a space cleared for me in which to do that, a space clear of preconceived
notions, empty of past or communal influences. Besides, there’s nothing like being surrounded by
goyim
to make you feel the need for a nose job.

One of the first things I did when I moved to New England was befriend one such
goy
.
Richard T. Scott had just moved into his new studio when I met him in the spring of 2012. Tall and slender, with red hair, freckled skin, and a high forehead, he looked distinctive and out of place in such a casual environment. He wore linen pants, aviator sunglasses, and wide-brimmed straw hats. He was a contemporary figurative artist, he said; and then his appearance made sense. The work that hung on the walls of his atelier seemed to combine the elegance of classical style with the disturbingly haunting subjects of the modern world. It was an odd yet moving juxtaposition.

Richard was ambitious, but until recently he had felt mismatched with the mainstream values of the art world. It was anomie, I told him—the experience of individual values mismatched with society’s as established by Émile Durkheim in the late nineteenth century. It was this precise experience that had led me to break from my own community, or so I believed, and what was driving me to the pursuit of my true self.

Richard had always been particularly inspired by classical painters such as Rembrandt and Hammershøi. But at the New York Academy of Art he was taught to admire modernists. After a period of frustration, he wrote a letter to the controversial Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, asking to study with him. To Richard’s surprise, Odd accepted him.

Eventually, Richard realized that there was a whole community of people who felt exactly the way he did, in the sense that their aesthetic ideals did not match up with what was accepted in
society. It was called the Kitsch movement, and Odd was the father of it. Created in protest against postmodern art philosophy, Kitsch embodied an aesthetically humanist position in what it saw as an antihumanist technological society. Artists who were acutely sensitive to this experience were drawn to the Kitsch movement, finding a home among people who similarly identified as pariahs and outcasts in the modern art world. They tended to prefer the use of classical techniques to paint contemporary subjects as a way of expressing their unapologetic love of beauty and how they valued its role in artistic expression. As I looked at the various works produced by Richard and his peers, I recognized the experience of marginalization and alienation as strong themes.

I spent many afternoons poring over the art books in Richard’s studio. I became fascinated with Odd’s work, more so when I heard the stories about him that Richard shared. Many of Odd’s portraits were of himself as the alien. In real life, he was one, having been essentially exiled from his home country. He was dogged by accusations of tax fraud, although it was plain to the Kitsch community that this was a ploy. Anything to destroy Odd, Richard told me. Norwegians are conformists, he said, and Odd isn’t afraid to be political, and they just can’t stand that.

Later Richard would tell me that a mistake in the government accounting had been discovered, that the amount of money really involved had become too negligible to legally pursue in court to the full extent that Norway had planned. “So they’ll give up now,” I said. “Odd will be able to go back to Norway.”

“I don’t think they’ll ever really give up,” he said. “I think Norway will always be looking for a way to get him, and Odd is always going to have to deal with that. But at least now he can return to his house on the Norwegian coast. He can go home.”

When I tried to meet Odd in his house outside Paris, I had to go through Richard, who had to go through Odd’s son, Börk. Odd never stayed in one location for long; always moving among his various homes. “Is he paranoid? Or justly afraid?” I asked Richard.

“Who knows?”

Odd had found a way to deal with his feelings of alienation early on, by surrounding himself at all times with people who shared his experience. He became a teacher. Potential students from all over the world could apply to study with Odd, living in his home for months or years at a time in exchange for assistance with Odd’s work. In this way, his homes throughout Europe were havens for refugee artists, young men and women escaping from worlds in which they felt misunderstood and coming to a place where they felt accepted. Richard had been one of those students. He had finished up a degree at the New York Academy of Art, where he had felt like the poor boy on scholarship who would never amount to much. He had worked for artists in New York City whom he didn’t respect. He had nothing back home in Georgia, where he had always been considered strange. New York had very little room for an artist who did not follow the mainstream. It was a professor who had advised Richard to write to Odd.

In the end, Richard became Odd’s best and most renowned student. The work he produced under Odd’s tutelage went on to gain international attention and catapulted him into a world where collectors and art critics fawned over him, and galleries competed to display his work. It was a sharp contrast to the tepid reception Richard had experienced in his early days, when his ideas were
dismissed because he lacked the credibility of education and parentage. I identified strongly with this reinvention, as I saw it. Both of us had experienced sudden and complete transformations in our lives.

In Norway and in Paris, Richard and Odd had slowly developed an intense master-student relationship, and Odd had then entrusted Richard with his estate in France for three years, during which time Richard had painted furiously. By the time I met him, he was avidly preparing for several exhibitions, all scheduled to take place within a three-month period.

Being prolific wasn’t enough for Richard, however. “I want to paint something great,” he said to me. “Not something that will sell, but something that will end up in a museum.” He often painted portraits for money, as he lived off his commissions. This required him to paint pretty things, as opposed to the more provocative work he felt drawn to do. “For once, I just want to paint something for myself, even if others feel it’s too disturbing.”

Then Richard asked me to pose for him.

“I want to paint a version of Rembrandt’s
The Jewish Bride
,” he said to me. He told me I was probably the first real Jew he had ever encountered. He felt he could now have the kind of access to the character that would enable him to paint not just the visage but also the soul. “I’ve always had a fascination with that painting. I’ve been looking for an inspired way to present that idea, something new, but still embodying the spirit of the original work.”