Blog Post

As I pre­pare the first piece for this blog, I am struck with how sim­i­lar this process is to the writ­ing of a work of non­fic­tion, in par­tic­u­lar of his­to­ry, and in still greater par­tic­u­lar, the his­to­ry of a spe­cif­ic place, time and peo­ple. Or maybe it’s more par­tic­u­lar to this book. Maybe it’s the way this writer bridges past with present and future, implic­it in the title and sub­ti­tle The Sephardic Jews of Spain and Por­tu­gal: Sur­vival of an Imper­iled Peo­ple in the Fif­teenth and Six­teenth Cen­turies. For if a peo­ple sur­vive, they have a chance at a future beyond the present. And as I was prepar­ing the book, search­ing in archives, writ­ing first and sec­ond drafts, I was sur­round­ed by the liv­ing proof that the peo­ple of whom I wrote did indeed sur­vive the past, as we who are read­ing, hear­ing, talk­ing about the events of 2009 have been brought to this liv­ing present and are peer­ing beyond.

Else­where on this site, I tell of three events of the past that launched my stud­ies of the Sephardic Jews: a child­hood mem­o­ry, sto­ries told me in con­fi­dence and the evi­dence in Iberia of their pres­ence and impact in the past. I tell how the grandiose idea of writ­ing a book was birthed by the dearth of avail­able read­ing mate­r­i­al. But it was the pres­ence of Sephardic descen­dants them­selves as col­leagues and friends that gave those stud­ies mean­ing and evi­denced that their his­to­ry goes beyond sur­vival into a very vibrant present that keeps becom­ing the future before we can look around. Their sto­ries of fam­i­ly and com­mu­ni­ty life move from the past into present and are retold to the chil­dren who are the future.

As one’s per­son­al time is always mov­ing and rel­a­tive, some of you will be read­ing this after the stroke of mid­night on Decem­ber 31, 2009, in fact, prob­a­bly most of you, as we’re still prepar­ing the site as I write this, although pret­ty close to launch time. I had tak­en for grant­ed the pres­ence of a blog as pro for­ma. Then I began to have sec­ond thoughts. What if I can’t think of some­thing spe­cial to write as fre­quent­ly as blogs seem to demand? Will I become as pos­sessed as I am some­times with email or Face­book, hav­ing to go online more fre­quent­ly to see if there are com­ments? Is there an oblig­a­tion to respond to com­ments? Or is there, con­verse­ly, an oblig­a­tion to allow read­er expres­sion with­out the blog­ger, like that ubiq­ui­tous mag­a­zine or news­pa­per edi­tor, always hav­ing the last word? What if there are peri­ods where I pre­fer to play with my grand­chil­dren or avoid the com­put­er or veg out?

It’s a whole new world out there and I’m leap­ing in, as the ten-year-old I was once leaped into the cold New Hamp­shire lake as the first step in learn­ing to swim. I did it both in ter­ror and in the promise of a greater good. Here goes…