Two Glatt Kosher meals on the flight to Casablanca
This is my first post about my actual trip to Morocco. I intend to tell a few stories about my preceding visit in Israel in separate posts to confuse readers and reminisce.
The flight to Casablanca from Rome followed an uneventful flight from Tel-Aviv to Rome. The only notable thing about the flight from Tel Aviv was that it was the first time I was leaving Israel during the day. In fact, because my previous flights from Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv) Airport were at inhumane hours like 3 a.m., I was sure that airport opened up at sunset and closed at sunrise.
After sipping a divinely golden cup of Tazza D’oro espresso at the Rome Fiuminico airport, I left for Casablanca. A French speaking couple sat next to me, and while I was debating whether they’re French but living in Morocco, French and just visiting Morocco, or Moroccan speaking French only, they were served boxes of Glatt Kosher meals. This hasn’t helped me enough with solving the puzzle but merely added a tangential piece of information to it. You see, Moroccans switch between Moroccan Arabic and French mid-sentence—it’s called Code-Switching, in case you were dying to know—whether they’re Jewish or Muslim. While being disgusted by the contents of their Kosher box, I was wondering if I should out myself as an Israeli, but then decide to hold off on that as I was fixing my meat and cheese sandwich. (Yum!) And besides, meeting French Jews is not all that novel, coming from Israel, where it seems Hebrew speaking Israelis are being outnumbered by French-speaking Jews. Exasperated Israelis even have a pet name for them, Tsarfokayim, consisting of Tsarfat, the Hebrew word for France, and the last syllable and a half of Maroko, Morocco in Hebrew. The source of this pet name is that many Jews who live in France emigrated from Morocco in the 1950s, probably finding the idea of immigrating to sunny, dusty, and culture-less Israel very unappealing at the time. Now they buy condos in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv and vacation there, indirectly forcing many restaurants and cafés to go Kosher to cater to their dietary restrictions. Sometimes, I guess, the forces of the free market don’t let one have a nice steak of the other white meat or enjoy a nice bowl of bouillabaisse. Oh well.
The couple was curious to know where I was from, because I was reading the The New Yorker but was also speaking in broken sentences in French sans an American accent. (I think it was Paul Theroux who made the observation that not-native English speakers, when speaking English in a good accent, will always resort to their native accent when pronouncing a non-English word.) When I fetched the Jewish (French?) lady her bag from the overhead cabin at the end of the flight, her husband said, “Il est un gentleman canadien.”, to which I replied, “Je suis Israélien aussi.” Their eyes widened and the man said his name was Mordecai and that they lived in Tangier. Then he called someone on the phone and spoke Moroccan. Aha! He’s a Tsarfokai! Just before we started moving towards the exit, he grabbed a case of violin from the overhead cabin and said in Hebrew “Kanar al ha-gag.“, meaning “Fiddler on the roof”. I guess some things are (J)universal.
