For months, teacher Gloria Becker Marchick kept a secret — a secret so monstrous, so horrible that, had they known the truth, she feared her adoring students might have turned on her like marauding wolves.
Marchick’s secret: She’s Jewish.
Her students: Arab university freshmen.
She and they were thrown together back in 2000, when Marchick landed a Fulbright scholarship teaching English in Morocco, at Abdel Maalek Saadi University in Martil. She also attended Arabic Language School in Fez.
It was just in time to coincide with the start of the current intifada.
Marchick, 64, recounts her adventure in the North African nation in “Shalom in My Heart, Salaam on My Lips,” the story of a well-meaning woman forced by clashing cultures to live a lie. She will read from her book in Lafayette next week.
For American Jews who have never traveled to an Arab or Muslim country, Marchick’s account is instructive, fascinating and a bit repelling. The degree of anti-Semitism she encounters is nothing less than chilling.
Yet Marchick strove always to understand her students, and she says she grew to care deeply for them, despite the ever-present undercurrent of prejudice.
“My students loved me, and I loved them too,” she recalls. “I’d walk down the hall, and the girls would give me kisses on both cheeks, then run to class. They’d send coffee over to me and pay for it, even though they had no money. They’d invite me into homes. I realized that on a personal basis, they are warm, giving people.”
That didn’t prevent their exposure to nightly images on al-Jazeera and other Arab TV networks of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians in the West Bank and Gaza. The students’ ingrained anti-Semitism only worsened.
So what would possess a nice Jewish American grandmother from Orinda to leave friends and family to set up shop in such a place?
“I wanted to go there because the Moroccans saved 200,000 Jews from Hitler,” says an emphatic Marchick. “I wanted to learn about the Arabs. No one understands their thinking, how hopeless and how impoverished they are. In America, if you get an education, you have hope of a job. Not there.”
Her sense of simpatico runs deep. A lifelong teacher of English as a second language, Marchick had served as a Fulbright scholar before landing in Morocco, having also taught in Slovakia and Mexico. But, in essence, those countries embody a European sensibility. Not so in Morocco.
“In general, they speak with ‘musts,'” she says, “because they live in a country governed by a king and adhere to a religion that gives no choices. They say, ‘You must not eat pork. It is clear in the Koran.’ Not everyone there is religious, but they’re all Muslims, and even my irreverent friends fasted during Ramadan.”
Though intensely proud of her Jewish heritage, Marchick was warned by several colleagues to hide her identity. Thus, not only did she undergo the customary anxieties of any expatriate, but the stress of hiding her true self compounded her feelings. To relieve the strain and loneliness, Marchick kept a journal and corresponded by e-mail with friends and family at home. Those writings formed the first draft of her book.
“I didn’t speak the language, I couldn’t watch TV in Arabic, and all my colleagues were Arab. Until I established myself, e-mail and journaling were my outlets.”
Her book does read in part like the travelogue of an American abroad. She vividly describes the brilliant blue Mediterranean, the glaringly bright seashore, the roadside peddlers, coffeehouses, the streets of Tangier and Fez littered with donkey dung.
“I saw a lot of violence,” she remembers, “more physical fights than here, inhumanity towards dogs, disregard for handicapped, a real class society with the king at top. But I also pride myself on my sense of humor. I laughed myself out of a lot of bad situations and looked to find one good thing every day.”
But the one thing she couldn’t laugh away was the endemic Jew hatred she encountered all around her. Throughout her entire stay in Morocco, she never was able to reveal the truth about herself.
That didn’t stop her from seeking to dispel myths about Jews. “I told them not all Jews were rich, and that I didn’t know even one Jew who owned a bank or a newspaper.” Best of all, she told them that all of her friends had at least one Jewish friend. The students didn’t realize she was tacitly including them in that accounting.
Unfortunately, a serious (but temporary) eye ailment forced an abrupt end to her tenure in Morocco. Only upon returning to America was she able at last to reveal herself to a student, and that came in the form of an e-mail.
“One of my students wrote me and said the reason 9/11 happened was because the U.S. supports ‘Hebrew people.’ Back in the security of my beautiful America, I finally felt I had to write and say, ‘I am Jewish.’ Now he writes me and says ‘Shalom.'”