DAVID BENTATA

Chapter 20 - "NONO" VECCHIO I have spoken in my first chapter of David Hassan, a friend with whom I share the bond of same birthday as well as the same number of years we have been blessed to live. Seriously, there are several parallels between his life and mine. That also has brought us closer together. But there is another very close friend too, both mine and David's, and he may possibly not even need any introduction. His name is Isaac Tobelem, but he is known to one and all as Toby. 5 months younger than I, his birthday falls on the 29th of April and perhaps one day I can explain with his permission why the date is seared indelibly in my mind. But in this chapter, I will recall an incident we enjoyed together in the late 60s when the frontier was starting to get sticky. Toby was the receptionist at the Old Victoria Hotel, where Victoria House still reminds us of it at the beginning of Main Street. The Victoria Hotel was owned by the Falquero Family. Should Toby c...

  - Chapter 19   ONE MAN'S DECISION I must tread carefully when setting down this chapter. Though it involves a Police Inspector and me, others were with me at the time of the “crime”, all upright citizens today, and I do not want to besmirch their good names. This must have happened in the early 1970s. My passion for guns was there, even before my Gibraltar regiment days. I have always had guns in my possession, all with permits of course. What? Did you think I was some sort of Al Capone? I owned a .22-air rifle then, over from the days when the frontier was open and we could use it in the fields in Spain. When I mentioned it to the friends I was running around with at the time (mi panda), during those “Scalextric” days when we’d drive around and around Gib all Sunday, we thought it would be a good idea to have a target shooting competition up the Rock. So, I took it with me and we went to the area of Princess Caroline's Battery, well away from the road and from pass...

  Chapter 18 (Part 2) CHICKEN SOUP AND BORIS My Rockfreeze era had many ups and downs, much excitement and certainly funny incidents too. For example, one of the first times I stayed with Edgar and Trudy in Hampstead, we sat down to dinner and the starter was chicken soup. Let me tell you about chicken soup. It is called the "Yiddisher penicillin" among Ashkenazi Jews. I may as well tell you about Ashkenazi Jews, they are certainly not Gibraltarian. Our community is virtually 100% of Sefardi origin, Jews from Spain, Portugal, France and North Africa. Ashkenazi Jews are mainly Eastern and Northern European in origin. Over the centuries Jewish communities in the diaspora developed different cuisine even different languages. Classical Hebrew is a constant throughout, but Ashkenazis developed “Yiddish” a mixture of Hebrew and German. We do not understand them, but then again, neither do the most Hebrews nor Germans! (Nor would Moses himself !) Even in classical Hebrew, their...