The Inside of the Truth: An Interview with Ruth Knafo Setton author of The Road To Fez Counterpoint. 208pp. $23.00

by Judith Bolton-Fasman

Two years ago Ruth Knafo Setton sailed to Casablanca during a "Semester at Sea," her three-month tenure at the floating campus of the University of Pittsburgh where she taught courses in literature and writing. The trip to her native Morocco was the last port of call, and for Setton's lucky students it was an opportunity to experience the Jewish area known as the mellah with a teacher deeply connected to it. The Moroccan mellah is a formidable presence in The Road To Fez, Setton's recently published first novel. A pastiche of the sights and sounds, traditions and superstitions of Sephardic Moroccan Jewry, the book is also a compelling, old-fashioned story of forbidden love between a niece and uncle.

Brit Lek, eighteen-years-old, was raised by Moroccan Jewish parents in rural Pennsylvania, Her mother Sheba has recently died and Brit returns to mourn her in the family's ancestral town, the fictitious El Kajda. Soon after she arrives in Morocco, she falls in love with Sheba's younger brother, the brooding, sexy Gaby. In the book's first scene Brit and a family servant concoct a spell to seduce Gaby--a scene both brilliant and memorable for the way it melds the solemnity of ritual with the frenzy of slapstick.

Setton was born in Safi, a town on Morocco's Atlantic coast which, like El Kajda, is known for its sardines and pottery. In a recent interview with JBooks.com, Setton noted that El Kajda was "a composite of towns in Morocco with strong Jewish populations." And while The Road to Fez is not overtly autobiographical, certain details resonate in the author's life. Like Brit, Setton, who came to the United States at the age of three and a half, was brought up in rural Pennsylvania. Unlike Brit's family, who tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible--"No more Jews from Morocco. From now on we're Christians from Paris. A good choice," Brit's father tells her--Setton's family held fast to their Judaism despite being the only Moroccans in town. However, Setton asserts that "the converso experience [in general] has permeated the Sephardic psyche. We are used to a hidden way of living. It's probably the most Jewish way to live. One of the most autobiographical statements in the book is when Brit's father tells her to 'be invisible.' It was one of the first things my father told me."

Setton gradually makes that invisibility discernible through history, family lore and legend. The effect, a model of literary craft, is similar to watching a photograph develop. Her fascination with a seventeenth century martyr named Suleika also evolves in word and image. Buried in Fez, Suleika is considered a Sephardic Jewish saint whose martyrdom inspired many versions of her story. In one rendition, Suleika is kidnapped by her next door neighbor to become his second wife. In another, the Sultan has fallen hopelessly in love with her. And in another tale, the Arab boy next door forsakes his future to be with her. Yet the tragic outcome is always the same. Suleika is a heretic to fellow Jews for converting to Islam, a heretic to Muslims for renouncing her conversion. She is publicly beheaded, but soon after she rises from her grave and performs miracles. In more recent times, Suleika is a kind of patron saint to infertile women. Brit's mother became pregnant with her only child soon after a pilgrimage to Suleika's grave.

Suleika, though, is more than an icon in the book. Setton evokes the joy, the pain and the sexuality that were integral to Suleika's life and times. She reconstructs the medieval mellah, and tells how Jews were only allowed to appear publicly in black and were forbidden to have any footwear. The women were shut-ins, the men had menial, degrading jobs such as salting the heads of criminals before they were hung. "You know where the word mellah comes from?" writes Setton. "From melh, Arabic for salt." It's a perverse take on the Jewish holy deed, the mitzvah, of sacrificing animals during the time of the Temple. The men countered that humiliation by changing into white clothing at home, an homage to the purity of the Temple. Brit's grandfather, Papa Naphtali, conducts the family seder wearing white, the color of hope, of liberation. Refract that white light and one sees the colors of a Moroccan Passover. Setton recalls that her childhood Passovers were full of "food cues. My mother made the most incredible deserts for Passover. Those Pesach sweets were rich in beauty, color and sensuality."

Setton infuses her prose with that kaleidoscopic sensuality. She writes that the languages she knows are "broken, colliding: Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Berber dialects, French, Spanish, Ladino, English. We [Sephardic Jews] speak in slivers and fragments, pieces of a puzzle that will never fit. As we say a word, its meaning shifts; no becomes yes, and yes is usually no." Upon finishing her book, Setton realized how important it was for words to flow together in her narrative and she asked her publisher not to offset the foreign ones in italics. "All the languages in the book echo Suleika's story. Nothing would fit trying to put together a language of that life with disparate pieces. I wanted to emphasize the intermingling, to reflect the Sephardic state of mind. [For example], in one sentence there can be five languages, all of them having equal weight."

In that Sephardic state of mind, Setton reformulates the Four Questions. "When can we leave the desert, when will we be free?" reads one of them. The answers are open-ended, varying with each person who asks. Brit's journey into the desert is, in effect, a pilgrimage to another sort of Promised Land. Spending time in any desert, there are bound to be mirages. On their trip to Fez, Gaby and Brit become lovers, but Gaby warns her, "I don't want any illusions. There is no promised land, little cat. Every land is a promise, until you get there and enter."

But Brit heeds her father's words. "My father told me everyone who looked into the Promised Land came back with a different report of what he'd seen. One saw a rich green land, another saw a barren desert. Someone else saw fruit trees, another saw shepherds in a hill."

At first glance this may seem like a matter of perspective, but there is more at stake than that for Ruth Knafo Setton. "So much of the book," she says, "is about seeing who you are. It's about unwinding veils, peering through a fence, a keyhole. The power of the eye is a way to see inside of the truth."

And that is also the power of this first novel.
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