Antonio Molina: Sepharad

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.