The Pillars of Hercules

Glatt indicates a specific sort of kosherness in meat. The word glatt is Yiddish for “smooth” and signifies that after the animal was ritually slaughtered by a shochet, its lungs were examined and found to have no punctures. It also suggests that in life it had no imperfections on its skin: a cow with no spots, a calf an even shade of brown, a monochrome chicken, a fluffy little prancing lamb, a goat that was above reproach. The opposite of glatt is trayfe (or terefah), meaning “torn”—and that could be a creature with a punctured lung, or a fatal laceration, or a suppurating wound. All this was discussed in the Talmud (which advocated the eating of several species of locusts, providing they were not trayfe). It was also somehow related to the idea of sacrifice—that if a lamb was worthy to be slain, it had to be the sort of lamb that would win a blue ribbon at a county fair. God loved you for sacrificing your best, most impressive animal.

Dietary laws fascinate me for the way they mingle good sense with utter foolishness. But for me the glatt concept was purely academic. I told the waiter I was not a meat eater and ordered fish.

My sea bass was grilled. It was a kosher fish, no imperfections, with both fins and scales. (Every fish that has scales also has fins, but not vice versa.) But when I stuck my fork into it the middle was still frozen and tasted trayfe. When I sent it back to be thawed and recooked, they obliged me. The bill was nineteen dollars—twelve handsomely engraved Gibraltar pounds—and so I complained, but it was no use.

Soon they would have competition from Mr. Wong and his joint-venture Chinese restaurant.

In the Jewish Social and Cultural Club a leaflet on a notice board announced Hillel Tours’ “Annual Trip to Spain.” It sounded as though this destination was remote—a journey to a far-off land—when in fact, if you walked down Bomb House Lane and looked west you could see Algeciras, and after a ten-minute stroll north you could spit to La Línea, where once there had been bullfights (Molly Bloom: “the bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear”).

But because Gibraltar has turned its back on Spain, Spain seems remote; and the Gibraltarian’s face is averted from Morocco. It seems irrelevant that Gibraltar occupies one side of the Bay of Algeciras. It is an inward-looking place, and in spite of its majestic position on the Mediterranean, hardly anyone seems interested in the water.

The exception to this apparent hydrophobia are the members of the Mediterranean Rowing Club, who scull a thirty-foot four-man boat called a yola, a very beamy craft made in Florence.

I went to the club, hoping to go for a row, but the Gibraltarians who showed me around said that the day was too windy.

“The prevailing wind is a westerly—a fresh, cool one, like today,” said Alfie Brittenden, one of the club’s rowers. “The Levanter is an easterly that brings humidity. Sometimes the Levanter makes a cloud form on the Rock.”

“Do you ever row across the Straits?” I asked.

“Occasionally we row to Morocco, for an annual charity event. But it’s very hard. There’s a four-knot current and rough water.”

“I was wondering whether I might bring my kayak here.”

“It would be suicide to try it alone,” Alfie said.

But another man at the club told me that I should not be intimidated.

“Ees there, Morocco,” he said. “Ees eesie.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You can’t loose eet.”

That night I went to the NAAFI at one of the military barracks near the harbor and watched a World Cup qualifying match, England versus Holland. The room was packed with hundreds of screaming, chanting England fans. At first England seemed to be holding its own. The whole room was united in its howling, but when Holland scored two goals in quick succession and England had no reply there was disappointment and then real anger among the soldiers who earlier had been screaming for blood. That loss cast a pall over Gibraltar, and the next day the Rock was in mourning for England’s interment by the Dutch.

Hearing nothing from Sir Joshua Hassan, I called his office and told him I was planning to leave soon. He apologized and said I could visit him that same afternoon.

He is the grand old man of the Rock, the father of modern Gibraltar. “Sir J. Hassan & Partners,” was on the top floor of a bank. On the wall of Sir Joshua’s office there was a large photograph of the man himself, at the time he was Chief Minister, addressing a vast crowd in Gibraltar’s main square. A framed charter signed by the queen. A gilded document: “We have inscribed your name in the Golden Book of Jewish Unity.” And a telegram from Prince Philip: “Congratulations on your well-deserved honour”—Sir Joshua’s knighthood.