The poet Bartomeu Fiol was fascinated by the Jewish world as he made clear in his poetry book Càbales del call.
The call is a rather colourless place,
With dusty wood from hungry woodworm
And stone gnawed away by the weak sun, or the black sun.
Nevertheless, the call is also a sacred place
Like any other, right now, now and forever.
The call gives somewhere where we can hide from the rain
To a huge crowd of similar sorts,
Of varying feelings and thoughts,
Because any tradition there was annihilated
And discarded and attacked, a long time ago.
The call is nothing more than an imaginary place
That counters the habit of nightmares
Although they both belong to the past:
In nightmares there is nothing you can do
But, in the call, the past can become active now and then.
* The Call is Palma's Jewish quarter.
Càbales del call, 2005
Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by Joan Fullana.
(Palma, 1933 - 2011). The writer Bartomeu Fiol is a unique poet, who considered himself an outside regarding the literary world of post-war Majorca. Throughout his production, poetry is a means to approach reality a little better. He graduated in Political Science, and worked as a hotelier whilst at the same time developing a deep and dense poetic work, with no concessions to make reading easier and which displays his rebellion in the face of reality. Amongst the most common themes in his poetry, which was incredibly original and broke the mould, are the stress and strains of modern man, the passage of time, death and reflections on Balearic society. Within his work Fiol created the myth of Cavorques to represent Majorca as a physically and morally decayed society. Amongst his work there are highlights such as Calaloscans (1966), Camp Rodó (1973), which won the Ciutat de Palma-Joan Alcover prize, Calaportal de Cavorques (1985) and Cave carmina, cape canes (1998), celebrated at the Cavall Verd-Josep M. Llompart prizes. With Càbales del call (2005), one of his final works, Fiol won the Carles Riba prize, one of the most prestigious literary prizes for Catalan poetry. In this book Fiol approaches the collective indifference that has allowed Majorca to mistreat the Jewish minority; faced with this, he proposes the creation of an ideal Jewish quarter, where the stunted memory can be recreated.
The Jewish population that lived in Palma was concentrated in the area known as “El Call”, between the “carrers” (streets) of Sol, Montision and Seminari Vell. The Call was protected by walls and could be entered through four doors distributed around its perimeter. House were built around a kitchen garden and the people kept themselves to themselves, with their own rules and organisations. The growth in the population meant they had to buy houses outside of the walled neighbourhood, and that made them more vulnerable. Although they had maintained good relations with the Muslim and Christian populations for centuries, it was at the end of the 14th century that attacks on the Jewish population began and people were forced to convert. The Jewish community officially disappeared in 1434. Despite this, many continued to practise their religion in hiding and were condemned to death by the Inquisition. These persecutions against Jewish culture led to the loss of a good part of its architectural legacy.
