Green Shoots

ON A TRIP TO MOROCCO'S ANTI-ATLAS MOUNTAINS TO TRACE HIS JEWISH HERITAGE, SAKI KNAFO UNTANGLES DETAILS OF THE PAST AND PLANTS NEW SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE

ONE OF THE FIRST STORIES

I remember is the one my father used to tell me about our family's origins. On our couch in Brooklyn, my dad explained that it began with my "great-great-great-great" grandfather, who lived in the Anti-Atlas mountains of southern Morocco. One day, all of the Jewish men in the village were ordered to convert (in my father's strange phrase) "on the pain of death". They refused. Fifty of them were burned alive in a bonfire. Our forefather, Maklouf, and his grown sons were among them, but his wife, whose name has been lost to time, fled the village with her baby boy. After weeks of trekking across the harsh terrain that stretched from the mountains down to the coast, she somehow reached the gates of her hometown, Essaouira, a walled port city at the crossroads of the great trading routes of the Atlantic and the Sahara.

In time, she recounted the saga to her son, Moshe, who grew up to become a scribe remembered for his beautiful handwriting. He, in turn, told it to his son, Yosef, a rabbinical scholar known for both his height and his humility; and Yosef told it to his son, David, a rabbi admired for his fairness as an arbiter of disputes, and David told it to his son, Isaac, a painter, writer and raconteur who memorised the poems of Cyrano de Bergerac and Victor Hugo. Isaac told it to my father, Hai, a conceptual artist who drove a cab in New York before landing a job as a renderer of pointillist pen-and-ink portraits for The Wall Street Journal.

One morning last May, my wife and our one-year-old daughter went for a dip in the pool at our resort in the beach town of Agadir while I set off for the place where it all began. As a kid, I had never imagined that the village of Oufrane Atlas Saghir was a location you could actually visit. And yet, there I was, heading south on the road that leads into the rugged Anti-Atlas.