Dark Corners of the City : BARCELONA: Jews, Transvestites, and an Olympic Season, <i> By Richard Schweid (Ten Speed Press: $16.95, hardcover; $9.95, paper; 205 pages.)</i>

Sketching a portrait of Barcelona at least partly in terms of its Jewish and transvestite populations, as Richard Schweid does in his colorful, quirky new book about the city, is not such a strange idea.

In “Homage to Barcelona,” the Irish writer Colm Toibin tells of seeing a transvestite discussing her domestic life with conventional housewives in a neighborhood bread shop one morning. They talked absolutely naturally to her, he notes, “as though she were one of themselves.” When she left, there was not a snigger or murmur of disapproval. Transvestites, Toibin realized, “were a part of the city’s fabric, its sexual heritage.” Indeed, they are highly visible in the Catalan capital, and seem genuinely appreciated in many quarters. When Robert Hughes, in his own “Barcelona,” observes the stylish transvestite prostitutes working behind the University of Barcelona, one of his Catalan friends adds admiringly, “ Son arquitectes “--”They’re architects.” This is high praise indeed in the city of Gaudi and Bofill.

As for Barcelona’s Jewish population, which is minute, its very lack of visibility says something about the city--and not something good. A Jewish community was founded here in the 2nd Century, and remained a vital part of Barcelona’s artistic, scientific and mercantile life for the next thousand years or so. At one point, as much as 10% of the local population was Jewish. In 1391, though--a century before the formal expulsion of Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella--anti-Jewish riots swept Spain, and those in Barcelona were particularly violent. Christians sacked the city’s Call or Jewish quarter, driving out or murdering most of its inhabitants.

Jews didn’t come back to Barcelona in any number until the late 1920s, after the Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera had offered citizenship to all returning Sephardic emigrants. (Sephardim are the children of the Spanish diaspora, Sepharadh being the Hebrew word for Spain .)

Today the city’s Jewish community numbers about 4,000--more like one-six-hundred-and-fiftieth of the total population than one-tenth. Ironically, though--and this is a point Schweid misses--it has become fashionable for Barcelonans to honor Judaism and laud Jewish contributions to the city in recent years--not necessarily out of good will, but as a way of stressing a distinctly non-Moorish element of Catalonia’s heritage, and thus emphasizing still further its cultural independence from the rest of Spain.

Schweid, a Tennessee-based journalist whose previous books are “Hot Peppers” and “Catfish and the Delta” (both also published by Ten Speed), is not a particularly elegant writer--a fact suggested even by his title, which is innocent of both rhythm and apparent irony. His text is salted with unfortunate metaphor (he calls Barcelona “a visual repast to walk through,” which sounds rather messy) and tortured locution (“Over the years, the drug problem had been treated from both the legalize-it and outlaw-it perspective”).

On the other hand, he has a keen eye, deftly capturing disparate facets of the city’s personality--facets by no means restricted to his title subjects--in anecdotes and apercu. In one touching passage, for instance, he watches a young girl leaving a park with her mother. She has been playing there with her granddaughter, and as she departs, he clowns for her, in a way, thinks Schweid, that seems to plead, “Remember me, remember me.”

Schweid is obviously a good listener, too, drawing out his subjects, often coaxing them to illuminate dark corners of their city--whether it’s the young transvestite prostitute who likes to dress up for “the aesthetic,” (but whom Schweid finds wearing unlaced Nike knock-offs instead of his usual high heels, because his feet are swelling and he doesn’t want to register with the authorities to receive medical care), or the 91-year-old Turkish Sephardim who recalls the Barcelona of the ‘30s, when on the Saturday before Easter, “there was not (an apartment) on this block where a woman didn’t come out on the balcony beating on a pot and calling, ‘Kill the Jews, kill the Jews.’ ”

The third element of Schweid’s title, the Olympics, doesn’t seem to interest him as much as the first two. A thick volume could be written on the ’92 Games--a volume full of intrigue and absurdity, populated as richly with buffoons and petty villains as with great athletes--but this isn’t it by a long shot. Schweid devotes comparatively few pages to the subject, discusses it without the insight he applies elsewhere and doesn’t even always get his facts right. It wasn’t Barcelona Mayor Pasqual (here misspelled Pasquall ) Maragall who announced that the city would host the event, for example; it was the International Olympic Committee, issuing a statement from Lausanne on Oct. 17, 1986. And the city’s vast urban renewal program wasn’t launched by that announcement, but had begun, with a billion-plus-dollar plan for a series of new “espais urbans” or urban spaces, in 1980. It almost feels as if Schweid stuck in the Olympics stuff to give some measure of timeliness to his book--and might have preferred to concentrate on the Jews and transvestites.

That raises a larger question, though: Why Jews and transvestites in the first place? Sure, they’re representative of certain aspects of the city--but why concentrate on those aspects? Is Schweid Jewish himself, or gay? Why was he attracted to these two segments of society and not two others? What does he think they tell us about the place that we wouldn’t learn from a book on, say, its Muslims and lesbians--or for that matter taxi drivers and fishmongers? If it’s not a strange idea to concentrate on the people he does, it’s not an obvious one either. An author can define his own terms, but he needs to make his case.