author’s note
I HAVE INVENTED very little in the stories and voices that weave through this book. Some of them I was told and have carried in my memory for a long time. Others I found in books. I discovered Willi Münzenberg while reading Stephen Koch’s El fin de la inocencia (The End of Innocence), and I followed his trail in The Passing of an Illusion by François Furet, a book as admirable as its title, and in the second volume of the memoirs of Arthur Koestler, Invisible Writing, and in a surprising number of Internet pages. I saw the beautiful name of Milena Jesenska for the first time in the amazing Cartas a Milena (Letters to Milena) by Franz Kafka, in an Alianza paperback that has been with me for a long time. It was that single name in the title of a book, Milena, that led me to discover its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, whom I found a few references to in Koch and in Furet, as a kind of minor character in a footnote. The two volumes of her autobiography, the French version of which I tracked down in the Seuil catalogue—Déportée en Sibérie, Déportée ä Ravensbrück—was quickly sent to me from Paris by my editor Annie Morvan. It is curious that in this dark affair of the hells created by Nazism and Communism there are so many testimonies by women: they have been vital to me; among them are Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam and especially Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg, whose name I read for the first time in an extraordinary book by Tsvetan Todorov that I discovered in English translation, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. I learned a great deal from Todorov by reading El hombre desterrado. I read extensively on the situation of the Jews in Spain in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, the tendentious and colossal study by Benzion Netanyahu, and from the much briefer and also more balanced classic by Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, not forgetting a book that to me seems extraordinary despite its extreme concision, Historia de una tragedia by Joseph Perez. My friend Emilio Lledó has read the extensive diaries of Professor Victor Klemperer in the original German: I know only the English two-volume version published under the title I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years. It is sad to think that books of such depth are virtually inaccessible to readers in Spanish.
It is questionable whether this book would have occurred to me or that I would have found the state of mind necessary to write it without two of the most decisive writers in my education during recent years. I am referring to Jean Améry and Primo Levi. I discovered Améry’s book about Auschwitz by accident, and without previous knowledge of its existence, in a bookstore in Paris in 1995. It was published under the title Par delà de la crime et le châtiment, and I have no indication that any Spanish publisher is interested in it. Thanks to Mario Muchnick, however, the Spanish reader has access to the great trilogy of Primo Levi: If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved. What one learns in these three volumes about human beings and the history of Europe in the twentieth century is terrible but instructive, and I don’t think it is possible for anyone to develop a full political awareness of the Holocaust or Holocaust literature without reading them.
There are other books, but the ones I have named are those that nourished me most fully as I wrote Sepharad. I have also tried to listen to many voices: among them I must name, with gratitude and emotion, those of Francisco Ayala and José Luis Pinillos; the resonant and jovial voice of Amaya Ibârruri, who one winter afternoon invited me to have coffee and told me some episodes in the extraordinary novel of her life; that of Adriana Seligmann, who told me about her grandfather’s nightmares in German; and that of Tina Palomino, who came to my home one afternoon when I thought I had finished this book and made me realize, listening to the story that she, unknowingly, was giving me, that there is always one more thing that deserves to be told.