Anthropologists seem to have a special need to write their memoirs to set the capstone on lives spent observing, listening and speculating. Otherwise, their legacies are evanescent, as history rolls on and reveals the vanity of thinking they can “get it right” for all times and places. Lawrence (Larry) Rosen is part of a special moment in the genealogy of modern Morocco anthropology. In 1963, a group of American graduate students led by Clifford Geertz and his then wife, Hildred (Hilly) Geertz came to Sefrou, about thirty miles from Fez, and turned it over, under, and inside out to uncover what made Moroccans tick. Fascinated by its seeming frozenness in time, by the warmth and receptivity of its people, by the lushness of its gardens and the buzz of its markets, they stayed for months and later returned often to take the temperature of the town and reconnect with old friends. In the process, they reshaped in fundamental ways how social scientists interpreted Morocco, along with other parts of the Arab world that showed similar properties and characteristics.

Rosen's gratitude to the Geertzes is clear at the outset, where he dedicates his memoir to them as “teachers, scholars, and friends”, and even more at the end, where he gives thanks to Hilly, for showing him “how to do fieldwork”, and to Cliff, for teaching him how to think through ascending scales of perception. Indeed, the imprint of Clifford Geertz's personality is evident everywhere in this book: in Rosen's striving for the rich, poetic language of the master, and in his search for those symbolic nuggets of experience that when cracked open, render denser meanings. The organization of the book is simple, with portraits of each of the four leading characters – all men, all denizens of the marketplace that Rosen once frequented – dissolving into more layered forms. On the surface, none of them is particularly remarkable, but lurking beneath are the “entangled lives” promised in the title. These men – a farmer, a teacher, a notary, a cloth merchant, representing Berber, Arab, and Jew – serve as departure points for engaging talk about local history, Islamic law and practice, the market economy, Jewish–Muslim relations, and other topics that still hold interest for us today.

The first profile is of Haj Hamed Britel, “a Moroccan everyman”, a garrulous storyteller who was a cornucopia of information for the budding ethnographer. The photograph on page 42 tells it all: the Haj and Rosen lounging on a blanket in the Haj's garden, Rosen in Dylanesque bellbottoms and the Hajj in his white robes. American seeker meets Moroccan savant. The Haj's renditions of pre-1912 history garnished by his own inventions are mostly out of focus, but the young anthropologist accepts them en entier, adding his own insights derived from colonial historiography. No matter that the Haj's storytelling is fanciful; he perfectly grasps the principles of the Moroccan art of politics: alliance-building, ambivalence towards power, and the value of personal relationships. Indeed, the Haj's “history” is not history at all, but a useful entry point into the Moroccan political and social imaginaire. While we may not agree with Rosen that “in exercising one's imagination one may find its accord with reality”, (p. 82), we are nevertheless reminded by Haj Hamed's tale-telling how much Moroccan historiography has progressed in the past fifty years.

The second character is Yaghnik Driss, a religious scholar. Yaghnik's immersion in Islamic law is fertile ground for Rosen, who has made his own soundings on the same terrain. In the dialogue that ensues, the Islamic scholar transmits the stuff of local religious practice (belief in angels, jinns, saints, talking beasts, creation stories) to the American sceptic who tries to make sense of it all. The surprise of this chapter, however, is not the insights into Moroccan Islam, as we might expect, but rather the author's views on late-twentieth-century Moroccan politics. These were the “years of lead”, in which thousands were thrown into jail, tortured, and even murdered by the regime. Apparently, these events did not affect Yaghnik at all; according to Rosen, the terror “affected only those … in active opposition” (p. 144). But more recent evidence proves that nothing could be farther from the truth; Moroccans, even the most humble, were gripped by fear (hayba) and knew what was going on, thanks to tilifon medina (word of mouth). The takeaway from this account? One man's testimony, regardless of its worth, is not a good yardstick for the country as a whole.

Rosen's third character is the Berber farmer and businessman Hussein ou Muhammad Qadir, a vigorous man whose profile shines light on the changing fortunes of country people. Hussein's life underscores Rosen's central proposition that building networks is the route to success, even in the remote Middle Atlas. Hussein is a mine of information about landholding, farming practices, local saints, and tribal politics. In truth, these same topics were also dear to colonial researchers, but Rosen brings to them a postcolonial, situational slant, by placing them in the context of temporal flux. Insightful comments about Berber law and the crisis brought about by its extinction by the centralizing state after independence impart nuance into this richly detailed account of the rural Berber economy.

The last portrait is that of the Jew, Shimon Benizri, cloth seller in the market of Sefrou. Shimon's trajectory duplicates that of the 200,000 plus Jews who left Morocco after 1948. Rosen summarizes well-known facts about a millennium of Jewish–Muslim co-existence, and shows how a relatively rosy story turned into one that was quite black. The testimony of Shimon's wife and daughter, personalities marked by a strength that Shimon seems to lack, brings a welcome women's perspective. The women tell the story of the family's abrupt departure and arrival in Israel, where they were thrown into a whirlwind of unaccustomed hard labour and treated as inferiors by their Ashkenazi Jewish bosses. Shimon's suffering is palpable, and Rosen's visit with him in “the land of redemption” is the saddest episode in the book. Still deeply Moroccan in their customs and values, sharing an ingrained sense of reciprocity and interdependence that characterizes Moroccan social relations – the you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours mentality still intact – the Benizri family was truly lost in the maelstrom of the new state of Israel.

The departure of the Jews was an incalculable loss for Morocco – for both its Muslims and its Jews. While market raconteurs, Islamist teachers, and Berber farmers go on and on, the Jews are gone, and unlikely ever to return. Rosen speaks of a concert held in Los Angeles in 2007, arranged by UCLA anthropologist Susan Slyomovics, finale of a conference celebrating Clifford Geertz's life and work in Morocco, where both this writer and Larry Rosen were present. Muslim and Jewish musicians filled the auditorium with the strains of Moroccan music, holding the audience captive. This experience was repeated for me in Casablanca in March 2016, in a vast hall filled with tables laden with food and drink; onstage performers entertained a mixed audience of Moroccan Jews and Muslims for hours. It was impossible to tell who was who, everyone was caught in the spell of the music. After all the words are gone, the sound of music is all that remains.