Diaspora

I took this picture exactly seven years ago, in November 2007 in Yazd, the Zoroastrian clay city, somewhere in the bazaar neighborhood, in the labyrinth of indoor passages covered by garlands of domes. I published it here at río Wang two years later, together with another picture from Yazd – the third one was made in Shiraz, in the courtyard of the Vakil mosque, where we observed the cats playing during the silence of a lunch break –, as an illustration to the post, in which I introduced three beautiful Sephardic songs at the request of my friend, who had only heard commercial Sephardic music before that: the King Nimrod, the Dream of the Princess, and the Bride. I chose these pictures not only because of their oriental atmosphere, but also because it was here, in Yazd, that I first met Iranian Jews. They were women in colorful headscarves, who, recognizing in us the stranger, casually greeted us, and invited us to the bar mitzveh of the rabbi’s son. They roasted goats in the arcaded courtyard of a large medieval house, at the goldfish pool, and the diaspora came together even from the distant cities of Iran, there was an immense crowd.

Seven years later I came across this photo again. Browsing the web site of the Sephardic community of Santa Marta in Columbia, I reached the local publication Colonia Magazine – in free translation, “The Shtetl News”. And arriving at the bottom of the page, I also saw the elegant front page of the publication, which was decorated by iconic Sephardic pictures: a Star of David, a Seder table, a rabbi, a Sephardic band, a Jewish newspaper next to the coffee cup – and the indoor passage of Yazd, with the Zoroastrian or Shiite father, who carried in his arm his little son looking up to the light. And by stepping over to the initial page of the site, automatically resounded the song, which I had also started my post with: King Nimrod.

The picture found its way home.