We Are Stories

This speech was read by the author on October 22nd, 2024, in Stockholm at the Berman Literature Prize Award Ceremony.

I am even more thankful, however, to everyone involved in the organization of this wonderful prize. To the members of the advisory committee. To the members of the jury who bestowed upon me this great honor: the writer Ingrid Elam; the writer and translator—now also my translator into Swedish—Hanna Nordenhök; the scholar and academic Na’ama Rokem; the German journalist, writer and translator Thomas Steinfeld; the journalist and literary critic Kaj Schueler; and the writer and publisher and bearer of good news Daniel Pederson, who was given the fortunate job of making one of those phone calls a writer most wants and needs but never expects to receive. And I am especially thankful, of course, to the Berman family—to my new friends Thomas and Catharina Berman, who have so graciously and generously established this magnificent prize, which since its inception has been celebrating literature and the Jewish tradition.

An important word, tradition, so strongly associated with both literature and Judaism; as a Jewish writer, I am but a small link in each of these two very long chains of brightness and wonders and beauty. A word, tradition, that is unfathomable without a deep understanding of history—it takes an endless amount of history, wrote Henry James, to make even a little tradition. A word, tradition, which inevitably makes me think of grandfathers, or rather, of my grandfathers.

I think of my Polish grandfather, my mother’s father, Leon, or Leib in Yiddish, who always told us that it was his phone number, and that he’d had it tattooed there, on his left forearm, in case he forgot it. As kids, growing up in the Guatemala of the ’70s, where phone numbers were also five digits long, we quickly understood not to ask him anymore. He didn’t want to talk about those five greenish digits crawling like caterpillars on his left forearm (69752), about how and where he’d gotten them, about the death of his two sisters and his younger brother and his parents in Lodz. He didn’t want to talk about the camps. And so, for many years, we didn’t ask him anything. And for many years he kept silent. Until finally, one rainy afternoon in the late ’90s, he sat down on his living room sofa and poured himself a glass of whiskey and started telling me his story. And as I heard him talking for the first time in 60 years about everything that had happened to him—from his capture in Lodz in November of ’39 while playing a game of dominoes with his friends, until his liberation from Sachsenhausen in April of ’45—I immediately knew that what my grandfather was doing was not only telling me his story, not merely talking to me about a Polish boxer and survival and the power of language—he was inviting me to take part in a much larger tradition. Or to put it in other words: He was giving me, right then and there, in that living room, my inheritance. His story was now also my story.

A story that would eventually, many years later, bring me here to Stockholm.

But the story that more directly brought me here today—about my other grandfather, my Sephardic grandfather, my Jewish Lebanese grandfather of whom I am the namesake—I started writing during a trip to Guatemala.

It was January of 2019. We were just visiting the country for a couple of weeks, and had been invited to spend a Sunday at my son’s great-grandfather’s chalet on Lake Amatitlán. Take a boat ride. Drink a few cocktails in the Jacuzzi filled with scalding volcanic water. Have a late, long, slow lunch. And as I listened to my wife tell me about the invitation, I knew that what she was really offering me—between the lines, of course, and perhaps without her even knowing it—was a day to read and write and work on my own. An entire day to myself. And so, in the early dawn hours, I said goodbye to her and my 2-year-old son and closed the door, and as I sat down on the couch with a first cup of coffee, I thought that the only thing more deafening than the sudden silence in the still barely lit apartment was my sense of unease at missing a Sunday in my young son’s life.

I quickly noticed a stack of books in front of me, on the small living room table, and one of them caught my eye. It had just been given to me by my father—not as a gift, but more to get rid of it, as if he did not want any evidence of those years, of that dark period in his life. A friend of his had given it to my father, according to the handwritten inscription on the title page, which said in Spanish: “To Joe Halfon, with the appreciation of always, and so that you may learn more, on pages 129 and 130, of the fateful days that your family must have gone through.”

I instantly flipped ahead and learned that the author of the book narrated on pages 129 and 130—in a first-person account—the story of my Jewish Lebanese grandfather’s kidnapping by Guatemalan guerrillas in January of ’67, and especially of the participation of one of the guerrilla fighters, a man named Percy Amilcar Jacobs Fernandez. And since Percy used to work in a local butcher shop, the author tried to explain on page 129, his comrades had nicknamed him Canción—the Spanish word for song.

And there it was. That word. That character. That story which now beckoned to be told.

I reached for a blue pen and a yellow, folded-up, already-stained sheet of paper that my son had left on the living room table, and writing quickly, almost with urgency, I began to scribble and cross out and rewrite some short sentences (by hand, something I never do), until I finally came to this one:

Le decían Canción porque había sido carnicero.

They called him Canción because he used to be butcher.

By that time, I had already searched my childhood for significant moments of my grandfather’s kidnapping, and tried to write about it. I felt that I was slowly getting closer to not only writing something about my grandfather’s life and his Jewish Lebanese identity, but to writing something about my country’s recent history, about its long and brutal civil war. And it was that one strange sentence which somehow articulated what I’d been feeling, and unveiled to me the book I was now supposed to write.

They called him Canción because he used to be butcher.

I didn’t yet know anything else. I didn’t understand that sentence at all—why would a butcher be nicknamed Canción or Song? But I immediately liked it. Maybe because of its rhythm. Or because of its sense of mystery. Or because it was as captivating and sweet-sounding and unexpected as an old cigar box guitar. Or maybe because it did what every literary sentence is supposed to do: open a door and half-smile and invite us to enter a secret, intimate story.

And that’s why I’m here in Stockholm today—because of that sentence. Or moreover—because of that story. Or moreover still—because we are stories. Where we come from. Where we’ve been. How we got here. It’s through stories that we enter the world. It’s through stories that we learn, and love, and then learn to love. And it’s through stories that we realize that we’re much more than just ourselves—that we’re part of something larger. A family. A group. A community. A nation. A people. A tradition. All of what we are, and all of what we’ve been, is stitched together by the stories we’ve been told and by the stories we’ve read and maybe, if we’re very lucky, by the stories we can someday write.