ELLIN POLLACHEK, PHD. AUTHOR, EDUCATOR, ADVOCATE

The drive from the airport to my hotel was a visual shock. Instead of the crowds to which I had grown accustomed, there was expanse. The Indian sun, high in the sky bleached out Kerala’s squat buildings, leaving the sandy soil and sparse vegetation all but overexposed. Few people can stand its direct rays but those who do, do so daily and look more African than Indian. They are men who work on the land and the sea, affecting neither; simply using both as a medium, a tool for their livelihood. They are fisherman. Their bodies, slender and short, seem no more than patches of dark skin truncated by white dhoties and matching headscarves. Until recently the state of Kerala forbid men of lower castes to wear any clothing above the waist. The habit still prevails.

And there is silence. It frightens me. I feel encapsulated, separated from the land and its people, too much aware of myself.

My reasons for coming here are personal. It has nothing to do with the reputed beauty of the place. Cochin appeals my tribal instincts, an inclination that drives all people back to their own.My Jewishness goes beyond my intellect. It touches a core that even my highly developed rational mind cannot ridicule and when I read "Their race is dying out from inbreeding but they still huddle in one street, known as Jew Town, in Mattancheri" in Fodor's guide to India I knew I had to come here.

Cochin is the name given to a cluster of islands in the state of Kerala. The Jews first arrived here in 587 B.C. successfully fleeing the wrath of Nebuchadnezzar. Still more came in the first century A.D.when they escaped Rome's devastation of Jerusalem. Then again in the fifth century a Persian persecution drove the Jews out and a first wave took place in l492 when Kerala welcomed the Spanish Jews who were expelled from their homeland by King Ferdinand and his wife Isabella. With the exception of the Portuguese who, in the l6th century, publically ordered the murder of ever Jewish child and adult, the existence of the Jewish community has never been threatened. Yet the Cochin Jews like the Alaskan seal and the African black rhinosceros are becoming extinct. I don't know if I was more curious to find the reason why or to see a dying breed.

My first afternoon there was planned by the local tour office. A sultry day, I was grateful to be led about. The focus was on the beautiful glasslike surface of the Arabian Sea - and the synogogue. Cochin's four hundred year old synogogue is situated on the island of Mattancheri and is an important tourist attraction. I, above all, am a tourist - a sightseer in search of a Jewish soul. Although my driver was pleasant enough and considering that the country has no traffic laws, the ride was relatively smooth. Still I felt anxious and didn't know why.

Jew Town. The signs, printed in English and Hindi and posited over each doorway, surprised me. But that was what they-the Jews had named it: Jew Town. It is here that the business of Cochin is conducted.

Atmospherically it is like a carnival. Too many people and too many animals - all of common breeding. Smells of ginger, peppercorns and roasted coffee beans remind me that this is also the spice capital of the world. Open windows frame smiling women with golden earrings and heavy brass necklaces. Corners are glutted with large pushcarts seating old men in white turbans. Someone is playing a flute.

It is here that the famed Dutch East India Company flourished. I remember reading about it in grammar school. What I didn't learn was that a Jew, Ezekiel Rahabi, managed the company. He negotiated the pepper contracts for the Dutch and named the company's ships the Rachel, the Daniel and the Ashkolon. That was in the eighteenth century when almost one thousand Jewish families lived in Jew Town. In l979, when I arived only seventy people remained.

The closer we got to the synogogue the narrower the arteries become knotting together to form a tight network of nerve endings. Life was thick as blood and left no room for the silver machine which brought me there. My driver parked our car and we continued on foot. I hurried past the whisper of straw whips on route to the animal's hides. I noted the melodious clicking of tongues; men encouraging their mules to make haste. Occasionally I'd stop in my tracks, to take a picure or to rest, and half-naked children would surround me and laugh.

I followed my driver past a line of houses, light blue and white, each decorated with a six-pointed star that worked its way into the gate outside the paneless windows. I followed him past the rows of white voile curtains that danced into the street like souls evacuating a dead body. We moved past the doorless doorways, the unpeopled chairs and the unmanned bicycles. He took me to an unnaturally clean and uncluttered place. It was the end-dead except for a woman.

She sat in an open space; two walls and a ceiling formed a proscenium arch. Like a stage it stood two feet above the ground, open and vulnerable in its visibility. A mirror, dresser and bed stood inside. The woman sat in a wheelchair; her left leg, swollen and bandaged, was left like a parcel to sit on a chair facing her.

To me she looked like a Jew. Just another Jew. She wore it like a cross. I took in the housecoat, another identifying mark in a land of saris. I already knew the sound of her voice, her thick Jewish accent. I already knew her woe. She would have melted into Queens, Israel or even Russia perhaps. Anywhere but here. When she spoke it came out clear and British.

"Phlebitis," she said pointing to her sick leg. "It makes getting around difficult."

Her eyes smiled as she spoke. She was pleased by my visit, pleased by the idea of a young Jewess taking the time to visit the synogogue, for she like me, could always recognize a fellow Jew.

My driver left me to get the keyholder of the temple.

"It isn't easy getting old," she said waiting for a response. I had none. Then pointing an arthritic finger towards the bed she said. "Meet my husband." It was only then that I noticed the head atop the pillow. It was greyh and bare like the room and seemed drained of all lifeblood but the rises and falls in the coverlet indicated that the person was indeed alive.

"How do you do?" I asked.

"You've come to see the temple," she said.

"Yes."

"She's come to see the temple," the woman said to the dying figure." Would you like to come out and meet her?" I didn't hear a response.

"He says he'd like to rest. Perhaps later on." Then she directed her attention back to her husband. "They still come to see the temple. Isn't that nice?"

I was suddenly aware of the silence. I fet suffocated by it, by a sudden inability to speak. The word extinction reverberated in my brain. Do you know you're becoming extinct I wanted to ask and she might have asked me the same. Was my youth deceiving me into believing I was doing any more to perpetuate my kind that she had?

There is a permanent ache in having been born a Jew-even if you've been born after the Holocaust. Even if you're an American living in New York, even if you've never experienced discrimination. There is pain in being part of the chosen peiople even if, in fact, the Jews aren't chosen. There is such pain that many of us deny our religion- as if that would fix it. But all that we manage to do, those of us who are successful at it, is to create a new one. Freud called his psychiatry, Marx socialism and Jesus named it brotherly love.

We seem to be genetically predisposed to pain, to wandering and questioning. It is part of the self-torture that comes about as a result of being a stiff-necked people. Of thinking that you're special. Of being special. Exclusive and excluding, separated from other races, from yourself and sometimes from God.


Young boys with curious minds and good eyes saw me and approached me, first with trepidations and then without. They buzzed about me like black flies around sugar but within minutes I saw that it was not me that interested them at all but my cameras. Considered a luxury item by the government, India neither produces nor imports cameras, thus creating a need for a vast black market which is very well met. Standing there I was the display figure for my equipment. They hovered about silently looking for answers in the machines as I silently sought answers from the woman.

"Have you met Elias Koder?" the woman asked.

"No. Who is he?"

"He lives over here only," she said in that funny Indian way. "His brother S.S. has a house in Fort Cochin, not very far away. They are the Jews in charge of Jew Town."

"Will they speak to me?" I wondered aloud.

"Of course," she answered with a smile.

A stooped man with a thick limp and an oversized yalmulka appeared."My leg hurts. You know my leg hurts," jhe said to the woman. Then directing his attention to me he added, "Tourists are supposed to stop by between the hourse of ten and three. It's five o'clock now. I shouldn't have to work like this."

Part of my guilt was assuaged by the image. His bermuda shorts and rubber tongs added levity to his otherwise painful stance. I had never seen a man with a yalmulka wearing bermuda shorts before. He limped over to the heavy wooden door of the temple and unlocked its long wrought iron arm.

"I'll come back tomorrow," I offered.

"No, no," he said. "I'm here already. The damage has been done. I't's not your fault. She should have nknown better." As if the woman had put me up to disturbing him.

Unperturbed she announced, "This is Mr. Cohen." I stared at her hoping to form some sort of alliance against this man and his anger. Sensing my need her eyes met mine and she winked.

Inside the temple the blue and white tile floor created a cool base for my burning feet. Like a proud parent Mr. Cohen began showing me the treasures that surrounded us.

The chandelier: a spray of golden arms holding tulip-shaped belgian glas lights. The pupit: all circularly railed and raised by a stand of solid gold posts. The Torah: five books given to Moses directly by God. The Shofar: a ram's horn that the rabbi blows on Yom Kippur indicated the start of the New Year. Standing there its sound came back to me- a round of all the shofars all the world over being blown precisely at sundown.

Lastly Cohen showed me the copper plates which were given to the Jews four centuries after the birth of Jesus. Of these he seemed most proud. In them the Jews were promised a place in Kerala "so long as the world and mood exist."

"When we've all died the Indian government will make a museum out of the synogogue," Cohen said matter of factly.

With all the promises from man and God the Jews of Cochin are dying. Despite my embarassment, I cried. More as a bribe to God than anything else I dropped $l5 dollars in the poor box, shot two rolls of film and left.

"Come back tomorrow," Cohen called after me.



Elias Koder lives in the heart of Jew Town. Beyond the unlocked iron-grilled gate and cages of barking chichuahuas Elias sat wearing his pajama bottoms and smiling a friendly toothless grin. Age hadn't shrunk him a bit.

We were served ginger snaps which Elias couldn't eat - diabetes he said - and tea. As Cheerian and Koder gossiped I became frightening aware of something: I had no idea of why was there. I looked at Koder, his big Buddha like belly supporting his crossed arms and I didn't know what I wanted from him. Could I ask him about the Jews and their immanent extinction in Cochin? Dare I ask him about his death or what it means to be a Jew? The thought of discussing any of these issues made me uncomfortable so I sat quietly and stared. As lunchtime grew nearer he invited me to his brother S.S.'s house for lunch.


The Koder home, the real Koder home, is in Fort Cochin. Like a vision through a wide-angle lens it looms three stories high over the champagne-colored landscape its color a paradox in a land of non-violence. In fact, the Koder home is not Indian at all. It was wood-framed and structured and gabled in the land of Dickens and shipped to Cochin at the turn of the century.
Its windows - that they eixsted at all is an oddity - like the chandelier in the temple are crystal, imported from Belgium. Inside I was comforted by the warmth of the dark mahogony staircase and exposed ceiling beams. The main sitting room, decorated in turquoise and pink provided an emotional diversion. A large Chippendale table sat in the room's center displaying hundreds of black and white photos.

It was the appearance of chicken soup, beet salad and flanken that surprised me. Had it not been for the coriander and tumeric I would have thought I was dining at a Miami Beach delicatessen.

"It's a shame," Elias said. "We'll all be gone in twenty years."

They were fat. S.S.'s wife, Elias' sister-in-law, was the fattest of all. Her underarms, heavy with hanging flesh, swayed as she reached for another piece of chicken and tchipati. Her chins, pale and soft, provide fertile ground for wiry black whiskers. Her hair, colored black and cropped close to her head was showing strains of white. The image was fluid and massive, redundant with despair. Flesh upon flesh, fat upon fat. I stared with morbid fascination as she deposited chicken skin into her already oil-encrusted mouth.
Despite the layers of protection against it she, like the man under the coverlet, was dying. As if in defense of an inner demon; in answer to an inaudible voice that cried out for more, she was suffocating. In hopes of killing the monster she created a new one. She reached for a sweet and grunted.

"We married our cousins," S.S. said forcing my attention away from his wife. "We didn't want the money to leave the family."

S.S.'s wife, his second, was also his first cousin and not the mother of his children. Two of her grandchildren sat to her right: a girl of twenty and a boy of twelve.
The girl was blond and pock-marked, dressed in a sari and, like her grandmother, at war with a demon. She sat, ugly as a malignancy, plummeting food into her belly in hopes of postponing her inevitable demise. The boy was slender and dumb looking. After each mouthful of food his jawas dropped open and bits of chicken, beat and rise fell from his lips. Only when he became aware of the loss would he chew.

"Where will the money go when everyone dies?" I asked SS.

"To the government," he said with more than a touch of sadness. "We are very rich, you know. The Jews have millions of rupees. Unfortunately, the government has exact records of our funds and they will take it all. We can't even send money to our children in Israel. The government won't let a cent leave the country."
I looked around me for signs of wealth but all that I found was impoverishment. It was as obvious as the woman's illness, inbred like the marriages.
"There are children?" I asked soberly.

"Yes," the woman answered licking her fingers. "But we've sent them off. There were no men really, just a few girls so we sent them off to Israel to find someone. You can't expect a girl to go unmarried."

"So the Jews will live."

"Not here they won't." It was Elias this time. Then he added. "But the money will be gone."

Money. Had it really become their anathema, another karmic prophecy like the chosen people, spewing isolation and death.....as well as independence.

"How long have you been marrying within your family?" I asked.

"It's hard to say. We're all related now. The white Jews anyway. The black Jews stay within their own and we stay with ours."

"Have there been any intermarriages with the Hindus?" I asked.

"No," S.S. answered quickly, regarding me with suspicion. I could hear him wondering if such a question could really be asked by a fellow Jew.

"Lily tried to go out side the family," the fat woman said, fingering the sweet pulp of a tiny yellow banana. As if she had just told a dirty joke, the two brothers laughed.

Next door to Elias' house, next door to the barking chihuahuas, in the home of her niece, Lily Koder was recuperating. She had recently undergone eye surgery and although she normally lived with her brother and his fat wife, convalescing required that people pay more attention than the elderly couple could provide.When I arrived she was having tea with a friend. Her niece was preparing a dessert in the kitchen.

Lily Koder has once been a beauty. It shone through the worn paisley housecoat and the sloppy mules. It demanded that you ignore the ungirdled stomach and breasts. It was visible in the mood of her braids, tied in in emerald ribbons; a pentimento to G-d's earlier work. As she tilted her head to one side and smiled at me withholding a full, broad grin in favor of a more demure affect I felt her innocence. And a bitterness that comes from betrayal.I couldn't see her eyes. They were shielded from the light by dark green lenses.

"The women have been treated very badly," she told me.
"How so?"

"We were never asked anything. We were simply told. No one considered our feelings, what we liked or didn't like. It's very important that people know what's happened to the women of Cochin."

Lily's friend was visibly surprised. It was clear that Lily was a woman who rarely spoke her piece.

"It's important for the world to know how wealthy we've become. We weren't always, you know. The Jews that is. Our family was. The Koders. But fifty years ago the Jews of Cochin were still struggling. Now no one has to worry about money." She paused a breathless pause. As if she didn't say it now it wouldn't get said. "But look at us. We're old. The end of our line has been reached."

The pronouncement was soft and without acrimony. The blush of her cheek told me she was angry.Her body barely moved as she spoke. Occasionally her fingers, almost porcelain in their translucence, would rise from the table and touch her hair - the braids and emerald ribbons.

"But the children are in Israel," the friend said. "The line will continue there."

"There," Lily said in a tone recalling a previous time. "We sent out the few but what of here. The Jews have been in Kerala for over two thousand years. The Koders for over two hundred. In just twenty years we'll all be gone."

Her pain was viscose and hung in the air like a milky grey aura.

"I was a lawyer but I hated law. Hated it. But no one asked me what I wanted to be and I didn't care to tell them so I taught law instead of practiced it."

"What was it you really wanted to do?" I asked. What I really wanted to ask about were the men in her life.
"I wanted to work with children. Little children. All kinds. Jews, Christians, Hindus. But nobody asked. I could have afforded to. We didn't need the money. When I got older I left the law profession entirely and did volunteer work in the hospital. But it was all too late."

There was silence. Her niece had returned and then left again. Lily read my mind.

"There was a man once. When I was eighteen. But my family said he wasn't right for me. I suppose they were right. I was too young to know what I wanted."

"I didn't know that," the Hindu woman said.

"Oh, yes," Lily said proudly. "And thee was another, too." Then with a scandalous smile added. "He was one of your kind, an American."

"An American," the Hindu woman said quite amazed.

"You're so lucky to be an American born during this time," Lily continued, ignoring her friends surprise. "You grow up so quickly there. I never knew I was grown until it was too late. I was close to thirty before I felt I could take care of myself. By then I was too old, out of the running. You're very lucky you know. When did you move out of the house?"

Lily sipped her tea, frowned and added more sugar.

"When I was twenty-one," I answered.

"See," she called to her niece Sarah in the kitchen. Sarah was the mother of the boy who dribbled.

"I've never disagreed with you Lily," Sarah said emerging from the kitchen. "That's why Isadore and I sent Rachel to college in Trivendrum." Trivendrum was a more popular, less isolated resort town. She then placed a china plate filled with Jelabes before me.

Pretzle-shaped and orange in color, Jelabes are made of sugar syrup and flour, then deep fried and served warm. I reached for one and was immediately comforted by its sweetness.

"Rachel is Sarah's daughter, Lily informed me. "We had some time getting her to leave. She's come home twice, threatening never to return again to Trivendrum."

"But we force her," Sarah adds. "There's no future for her here."

Lily continued to speak and as she did I reached for another Jelabe.

"We baby our girls too much. Our boys too. But boys manage somehow. They go off. Look at Raymond."

The Hindu woman excused herself and left. It was getting late and I followed suit. I had a dinner date with Elias Koder and Mr. Cohen, a relative of the keyholder, but I knew I would return to Lily.

Elias Koder and Mr. Cohen arrived early. The conversation turned to Raymond.

"Has the Embassy given him permission to marry?" Cohen asked.
"Don't be silly," Koder answered. "That's why he's gone to America."

"Did you telex?"

"Most definitely." Then turning to me he said, "Raymond lived in Cochin all his life. A very nice boy really. Then he met this woman. She was part of a tour group that came here three years ago. For some reason she took a liking to Raymond. I'll nver know why. He's very dark and not particularly well off." He stopped for a breath of air and then continued. "I think he's crazy." Turning to me he said. "You're a modern American woman. What do you think of a boy from Cochin who has lived here all his life getting involved with a thrice-divorced American woman?"

Thrice-divorced!

"How old is this boy?" I asked.

"Well," Koder grumbled. "He's not exactly a boy. He is sixty."

"And the woman?"

"Maybe forty-five. She has two sons and three ex-husbands and she's smart. The second time she came to India she had Raymond meet her in another city. Then another time they met in Germany. Away from all of us. Tell me. What chance has this marriage of working?"

"Actually Mr. Koder," I said. "I think a sixty year old man is quite capable of making his own decisions. Don't you?"

"No. Not if he's deciding to marry this woman. We tried to stop it. I can't last. They wanted to marry here but I contacted the American Embassy in Delhi. They have a Jewish fellow working there. A nice young man. When I told him of the situation he agreed not to allow them to marry here. It can't work.

Again Cohen directed the question to me. "What chance has it of lasting?"

"I don't know."

"But what do you think?"

I think that he's escaped, that he's met someone whom he can touch. I think that he's found someone who will love him; if not forever then for a year or a month or a day. Someone who willpromise him immortality every time she looks into his eyes. I think that he is very lucky.

"The odds don't look so good," is what I answered. "But Raymond deserves the same chance to make a mistake as the next guy."

The dining room was then transformed by yellow, green and blue-colored gels. The garish dinner lights were dimmed and we were visually assaulted by a belly dancer, a scene straight out of a grade B movie.

"Were they a couple?" I asked.

"Who?"

"Lily and Raymond."

Koder guffawed.

"Lily had her love and it sure wasn't Raymond, was it?" The remark was direct toward Cohen but the man was too busy getting drunk to pick up on Koder's cure.

"She had her love," Koder repeated. "But he already had a wife."


The next day was to be my last in Cochin. My morning was free and so I returned to Lily. Although she showed surprise at my visit I knew that she was expecting me. It was before noon and the table was alreadyset for four o'clock tea. A dish of Jelabes brightened the otherwise bland setting. I reached for one a little too quickly.

"I hate to have anyone see me this way," Lily said adjusting her lightly printed housecoat and thin, brown braids. The ribbons were gone and with them, some of the vulnerable veneer.

"You look fine," I said reaching for another Jelabe.

"Good enough to photograph." then tentatively Would you mind?"

"Oh, you mustn't," she protested. "You must see the mikvah. That's what you should photograph."

Enclosed in an Edenous garden, under a fallen pistachio tree lay a half-empty mikvah. It seemed no more holy than anything else in the yard but Lily assured me that it was.

"Take a step down," she said and as I did the stairs, slippery with age and damp leaves, escalated my pace. A tree trunk saved me from holy sanctification.

"It was used in January," she said. "By a Rajasthani girl. She came all the way to Cochin just to use the mikvah and to be married in the synogogue. The wedding was very beautiful." Although I couldn't see them, I knew her eyes were glassy; sad with the past- or lack of it.We started back inside.

"There are other Jews," I said. "In India, I mean."

"Of course," she answered, her voice not shy at all.

"There are Jews in Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay. And there's that one family in Rajasthan. But they are few in total. The end of our line has been reached here and what's so sad is that we've brought it upon ourselves. At one time there were hundreds of Jews in Cochin. We had nine synogogues. Eight for the blacks and one for the whites. Now there is only one. The one you saw. The Paradesi Synogogue. We had to join together when there weren't enough men for a minyan."

In l540 when there were over 900 Jewish families in Cochin a letter was written to Rabbi David b. Abi Zimra in Alexandria. In it the question of intermarriage between those who were Jewish by descent and those who were the off-spring of male and female slaves was raised. The Jews have been following the dictate of no intermarriage ever since. The carried that separateness into their communion with G-d and only in recent yars, when they couldn't meet their quota of ten Jewish menover the age of thirteen to form a minyan have the whites allowed the blacs into their congregation.
I reach for another Jelabe and licked my fingers unsticky. I moved Lily from the window to the wall but no matter where I placed her she couldn't escape the harsh noonday sun.It abbreviated her torso and washed out her skin tones. It dug deeply into her lines powdering the soft fuzz on her cheeks - fossilizing the image, defining her - removing all possibility for illusion. It attracked her gracelessly; inhumanly but through it all I aaw the child, stricken and afraid.
I held the camera to my eye hoping to capture all of it but the camera, like the light, lacked a soul. It recorded the temple and the mikvah and the flesh. It held fast to the injustices of time offering no forgiveness.

"It's sad to see the end of the line," she said as I snapped some pictures. "But it's sadder still to lose the living, like Raymond."

"Who is Raymond?" I asked moving her from the chair to the couch. I was frustrated by my inability to make the camera see what my heart was feeling.

"He was one of our very best boys. But now he's with that woman. She's taken him on a tour. I know why he sees her. I know but...."

Her head fell and I saw the pain. It was the sickness that struck the fat woman but Lily didn't feed hers. She simply suffered.

I put my camera down - out of frustration - out of despair. Saddened by my lack of expertise in making the camera see what I saw, I repacked my equipment in preparation for my next flight to Madras.

"He wanted to marry her but we wouldn't allow it. We just wouldn't hear of such foolishness," she said and for the first time she sounded like her brothers. Lily turned her face away from me, towards the far wall. Her spine bit down into itself. Her posture, shortened by the light, resembled a fetus in its mother's womb. Then in a moment all the hautiness was gone.

My first reaction was to pull out my camera and record it. Her. But I stopped myself. What good would recording it do? Would it teach me anything? I had learned the answer to my question. And so had Lily. Long ago. And I knw that her sadness was not due to the fact that the Jews were dying but she had never lived.

"Please don't show the picture to anyone," she said.

I agreed and then, kissing her on the cheek, followed in Raymond's footsteps and left.