Catalonia Today review of No Regrets: A Life in Catalonia

At the age of fifty-two, I took my cat and flew off from the San Francisco Bay Area to a new life in Barcelona. I had gone salsa dancing, met and married a Catalan, and we were going to live in his hometown.

The adventures began before we even left, with the purchase, sight unseen, of an apartment in the Barri Gotic, and subsequent horrible discovery in a guidebook of what went on in that street. Then there was the shock of the deed arriving in the mail with a different price – a much lower price – than what we had paid.

Once there, things didn’t work out as planned and that set off an even greater adventure than I had bargained for. Things that should be normal weren’t: buying bedding, keeping drunks from peeing under our balcony, buying Chanukah candles in a country where there have been essentially no Jews since 1492.

"Autobiography is a notoriously difficult genre, whose authors often slide into rampant egocentrism or report details that may have mattered very much to them but are of no interest whatsoever to anyone else. Happily, Dvora Treisman has avoided such pitfalls and has produced an entertaining if sometimes melancholy memoir about her life in Catalonia, full of episodes which might appear trivial at first but in fact deftly push the narrative forward so that the reader is, more often then not, left wanting to find out what happens next."  From the review by Matthew Tree, in the June issue of Catalonia Today. You can find the review here.

You can purchase the book on all the Amazon sites, Barnes & Noble, Casa del Llibre, Come In Bookshop in Barcelona, and most brick and mortar bookshops in the U.S. and Britain.

Eternal Life in Girona

I recently saw a multiple-part BBC documentary on the art of ancient Egypt so with that fresh in my mind, I was interested to see the exhibit of ancient Egyptian funerary art, "The Secret of Eternal Life" currently on at the Caixa Forum in Girona.  Any excuse works since Girona is lovely and only a short train ride away, and a lovely train ride it is too.

The exhibit, from the Rijksmuseum Van Oudheden of Leiden, was good.  Not as grand as the King Tut exhibit of the 80s, of course, but I have my memories of that and, it is always interesting to see works of art in person.  And there’s something special about them when works are either (1) very famous and you’ve seen reproductions of them all your life or (2) the pieces are very very old.  The unfortunate thing is that all my photos of the exhibit were lousy, with some being only less blurry than others.   The good thing is that the ones I took from a moving train turned out decent.  Now I just have to figure how why that is. 

 

 

The Caixa Forum is owned by a
savings bank and run as a cultural
service to the public, free of charge

 

 

All Saints in Girona

The Onyar River

As the Catalan movement towards independence gathers force, I am continually surprised at the Spanish conservatives and how busy they are trying to instill fear in the public and do anything they can to thwart such a move.  Lies, threats, and clumsy political manoeuvres by Madrid are daily news stories, but at some point you get tired of it all.  So, since Girona is an interesting city (said to be very Catalan) with a river flowing through it and an historic Jewish neighborhood, yesterday I boarded the train and headed there to see the sights.

Catalan independence
is in style in Girona

Following the signs towards the historic part of town, across the Onyar River, and following a stream of people who seemed headed in the same direction but who looked like they knew where they were going, I followed the stream.  Early on this took me onto a broad pedestrian-only street filled with smart shops (although it was a holiday so they were all closed).   I’ve been to Girona before but not since I lived in Barcelona, so it’s been some years.  I moved to this area last June.  Why did I wait so long to make this trip?  It’s only half an hour if you catch the express train and about 35 minutes if you take the local.

I chose yesterday to make the visit because it was All Saints, Girona was in the middle of their big festival, Sant Narcis, and yesterday in particular there was an antique/collectibles fair being held somewhere in the historic section of town.

Making lace

I hadn’t brought a map and didn’t need one.  Just following everyone else brought me to it.  It wasn’t just antiques.  It was a large fair of art, handcrafts, food, and antiques.  The fair started alongside the river and then was strewn along the narrow side streets of the old town.  It was quaint and scenic, but became more and more crowded as I went on until the point where you couldn’t say I was following the stream of people.  I no longer had a choice and was simply being carried along by what was no longer a stream but a very big, slow-moving river.

Having moved along for a while in this river, I had second thoughts.  But by that point, there was no clear way of touching shore and to go against the flow was impossible.  I was trapped in a kind of Ikea nightmare. 

When I finally got to the antiques, it was also the end of the river.  It was still packed, but now there were escape routes.  So I poked around a little, but there were so many people browsing that you could hardly see.  Anyway, by then I was so fed up with the whole thing, besides the fact that Spanish antiques are either very expensive or they aren’t antiques at all but junk, that I took the escape route now open to me.  It just so happened that I had time to make my way back to the station (by another route) and catch a train home where, instead of having lunch out as I had planned, I could heat up a frozen pizza and watch the mid-day news.  At this point, the annoying news seemed a better bet than the moving human river in Girona.

 

Some of the words were missing from this
old Catalan saying:
Eat well, shit strong, and don't
fear death!

 

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño, Chilean poet and writer, has just had a street named after him in Girona, where Bolaño lived the last five years of his life. Girona is a very interesting small city off the Costa Brava. It sits at the confluence of the Ter and Onyar Rivers, has a lovely old quarter which still has some original Roman wall and which includes what was a call (Jewish ghetto) before the Jews were thrown out of Spain in 1492. Although they say it is one of the best preserved ghettos in Europe, when I visited, I didn’t find much evidence of former Jewish existence except some depressions beside doorways where mezuzahs used to be. Then again, the buildings are still standing, and it did give me a special feeling walking those streets, knowing that once a thriving Jewish community walked on the same cobblestones through the same narrow streets. For no reason that I know of besides her dark coloring, my mother always thought she descended from Spanish Jews. Maybe my ancestors lived there? The Girona call was once home to one of the most important Kabbalistic schools, with Nahmanides (Ramban) as its leader. The Jewish Museum, housed with the former call, is well worth a visit.


Bolaño (who was not Jewish) has become one of the biggest names in Latin American literature in recent years, especially with what they say are his two masterpieces, 2666 and The Savage Detectives. I don’t know if he is considered postmodern or avant-garde, or what. I’ve never read him. I’m posting about him here because I know he is very popular among my online book buddies. But the report on TV announcing the new street said that its situation suits him. It is an unfinished street in an unfinished new urbanized area on the outskirts of Girona. Some day it will be a real part of the city, but right now, it is just on the fringe.