Leslie A. Fiedler offers here an account of a community Seder which he attended with his family last year in Rome, a city where, with Passover falling in Holy Week, the Jewish ritual of exile and longed-for return took on a special poignancy.
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It is difficult really to believe in Passover in Rome. By the time I had set out with my two older sons in search of matzos and a Community Seder, Holy Week was at hand, and the streets were full of tourists: the Germans (back in force this year) carefully avoiding every eye and speaking only to each other; the seedy herds of Austrians following their guides from crowded bus to crowded bus; the Americans resting between churches at chic sidewalk cafes. It was no use to remind my boys that, after all, the Last Supper was a Seder, too; nothing could redeem the sense of moving in loneliness against the current that flowed toward the great basilicas, the celebration of the tenebrae, the washing of the feet, and the final orgy of Easter Sunday when half a million foreigners and Romans would stand flank against flank, the visible body of Christendom awaiting the Papal benediction.
It does not matter that scarcely any Roman will confess to a belief in religious dogma—that Rome is also a city of anti-clericalism, with a statue of Giordano Bruno presiding over its busiest market; what is not believed is always and everywhere the same. And into each house before Easter is past, the priest will come with Holy Water and a blessing (only the most ferocious Communist will bar his way) to wash believer and non-believer clean for the new year. The rhythms of the year, the rhythms of life itself, are the rhythms of the Church; and to be outside those rhythms as an American and a Jew is to be excluded as no one can ever be in America, where one’s loneliness is what he shares with all his neighbors.
Yet the history and legend of Rome belong also to the Jews. My sons and I travel down the Corso where the ebrei were once forced to race against asses; we skirt the Forum whose furthest limit is the Arch of Titus, with its image of the defeated Jordan borne on a stretcher; and my oldest boy asks me if it is true that no Jew is permitted to walk under that memorial to the fall of Jerusalem. I tell him that this was once a commonly held belief, and that, for all I know, the Orthodox may still hold it; and I go on to recount the legend of how the Golden Candlestick of the Temple fell from the hands of a triumphal Roman procession into the Tiber. My sons argue about whether it was an accident or an act of God, and they make up a story about finding it again, gold in the black mud.
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But by this time the modern Roman synagogue stands behind us, dignified and ugly, “built,” as the guide-books say, “in an imitation Assyro-Babylonian style”!—and my mind has wandered off to the melancholy gossip I have heard lately about the former Chief Rabbi who has become a Catholic. I saw him once in the halls of the University where he now lectures, distrait and melancholy—or perhaps it is only that I expected, wanted, him to seem so.
An East European type, certain unofficial informants tell me, despised by the “old Roman” members of his congregation, he was left to bear the brunt when the Nazis came, to face the problem of raising the ransom they demanded. Almost all of the rich Jews were in hiding, my informants go on to explain, so that in the end it was the Pope who put up the money. Then, the war over, the aristocratic members of the congregation returned and began to conspire against their somewhat shabby leader, who therefore etc., etc. God knows whether any of it is true; but that the story itself should exist is enough to confirm my melancholy.
But today there are wreaths in front of the Synagogue, eight or ten of them draped with the Italian tricolor, their green leaves already dusty and turning brown, for they have been standing out since March 24, anniversary of the mass reprisals in the Ardeatine Caves, When sixty or seventy Jews, along with nearly three hundred other Romans, were killed by the Nazis. The monument to the dead, surmounted by the cross and the Jewish star, is brutally impressive (the Romans have never lost their flair for celebrating death); but more moving are the occasional small plaques on nondescript apartment houses—memorializing some individual victim who once lived there. His fellow tenants, though they may have stolen his furniture once he was dead, will never forget him.
It is better to concentrate only on the dead. We stand beside the wreath and try to ignore the jaunty youngster who approaches us with a “Shalom” and offers to show us what is left of the “old synagogue” on a lower level. He speaks the sort of American a hep kid would have picked up from our soldiers, and his approach is precisely that of a street peddler offering to sell you something or change your money.
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I try to tell my children something about the Ardeatine Caves, but I do not know the details they ask (What does the overhanging slab weigh? How old was the youngest victim?); and, anyhow, it is time to meet R. at the Portico of Octavia. More history. One part of the ancient portico has become the atrium of the church of Sant’Angelo, where for hundreds of years the Jews were forced on each Sabbath to hear a sermon urging conversion. Across the front of the church, in Hebrew and Latin, an inscription still thunders against the outcast and stiff-necked people. Beyond lies the old Ghetto; and since R. has not yet arrived, we walk through the narrow, sodden streets, where my boys are impressed by the smell of filth and oppression. I do not tell them that all the poorer quarters of Rome share equally that ghetto smell.
In a little square that opens with typical suddenness around a fountain, a woman smiles at us hopefully and says, “Shalom.” When we answer “Shalom,” we are surrounded by six or eight young men who appear out of nowhere. Each of them is the twin of the boy before the Synagogue; each has a genuine Swiss watch or Parker 51 pen to sell. My children haggle with them enthusiastically, and they ask us about America; until, even more suddenly than they materialized, they have all disappeared. We see only the soles of feet flashing down a twisting alley. Then we understand, for a cop is riding past, winking at us good-naturedly.
Meanwhile R. has come, and we discuss getting tickets for the Community Seder. He knows, he says, a certain kosher butcher shop where one can buy tickets from a man named Polacco; he has this on excellent authority. So we go on to the butcher shop where no one will confess to having heard of our Polacco. “Naturally,” the butcher tells us, wiping more blood off his hands onto an already sufficiently bloody apron, “there are many Polaccos. Which one, is the question, and What do we want him for anyway? Tickets for the Community Seder? Naturally, there are several Seders. Which one, is the questioni? Right or left, or—”
Right or left? In our bewilderment, R. and I consult each other in English; and some one taps me on the shoulder, draws me aside: a middle-aged man with a loud, impatient voice, who unexpectedly speaks excellent English. He is sure we would only be interested in the most Orthodox celebration. “Naturally, where you don’t have to worry about the food!” He turns aside to consult an elderly man with a beard Who has been pretending all along not to be with him; I think they are speaking Yiddish, but they whisper and I can’t be sure. “The price will be only—” The tickets are already in his hand, and he presses them enthusiastically into mine.
“But isn’t there another?” I ask.
His face loses a little of its not quite plausible friendliness. “Another Seder? Yes, there is one, not so kosher, for the younger men, very young—” He looks me up and down carefully, estimating my age. “Twenty, twenty-five-year-olds. If anyone wants such company!”
“But isn’t there one,” I insist, “officially sponsored by the Synagogue?”
He regards me now with open contempt. “Officially sponsored? Children! A Seder sung by school children—” He walks off, followed by his accomplice with the beard, who looks back at us scornfully.
“Aha!” the butcher puts in at this point, “you want the children. It’s the Polacco School you want, not Polacco!”
But R. isn’t satisfied. He turns suspiciously on the butcher. “The other butcher, isn’t he Polacco?” By this time, we do not know how many real or imaginary Seders there are, or what lies we may not be told in the interests of one faction or another.
“Him? He’s my brother. We’re Terracini.”
It had to be Terracini! Not that it isn’t a common enough name among Italian Jews: Terracina, Terracini—there must be at least twenty-five in the Rome telephone book, including the dealer in Catholic Church supplies; but R. and I are momentarily taken aback. Terracini is also the name of the Communist Senator who was one of the leaders of the recent rioting in the Parliament. That very day a session has ended with the Communists hurling inkbottles at the President of the Senate; and the day before, R. watched Terracini himself banging his desk with a stick in concert with his colleagues, so that the rollcall would not be heard. . . . And it was Terracini, too, who a couple of months before explained away at a meeting of Roman Jewish intellectuals the anti-Semitic trials in Prague, denouncing as a Nazi and hireling our friend Professor T., who rose to challenge his lies.
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But at last we have found the Polacco School, a yeshiva across the Tiber from the Synagogue, and Terracini is forgotten. The tickets and the matzos are being sold next door to each other; and the children are so delighted at reaching the end of our quest, that we are not even disturbed at the curtness with which the young women in charge treat us. Never have they been so busy, so important! “Speak up! Speak up!” They have no time to waste over our indecision.
While we try to figure out the difference between Swiss matzos and regular matzos, we are good-naturedly but efficiently mauled by the large crowd which struggles for first place with elbow and knee in the approved Roman style. They even look just like Romans, my children insist sadly; they don’t look like Jews at all! And the matzos are called azzime, and they, too, are different in texture and shape from what we are used to. Even the Pesach wine (we buy everything in sight, flour, meal, wine; there will be complaints when we get home, but who cares!) turns out to be the customary vino bianco from Frascati, not the syrupy red stuff to which the children have been looking forward. But afterwards we are all relieved and happy, balancing the awkward packages in our arms; and we smile with a new and perilous sense of having found a community as we pass others carrying similar packages.
Next door, the lady in charge is delighted to see us; there will be another American at the Seder, she tells us, a woman with a small child. We will be like manna to them, for neither of them can speak anything but English. The Seder will be wonderful, wonderful! If we listen we can hear the children practicing now. It is true; we can just make out their voices, faint and sweet. We are pleased to be so wanted; and as we depart enthusiastically, the friendly signora assures us that the rabbi himself will be there! It is to be the next night, and the children can hardly wait.
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Perhaps the rabbi was there, after all: we could never find out. It is true that there was at the head table a fine-looking, white-bearded old man, very genteel; but he could equally well have been an Italian Senator (even Terracini!), and he seemed throughout the celebration as bored as everyone else. The “American” woman turned out to be a South African who did not have a child at all, and she regarded the R.’s and us with dim hostility from the start. We arrived too early, of course, though we had allowed a hall-hour past the announced time; and so we began under the terrible burden of shame borne by the first guest. The children from the school were already at their prayers, dressed in the Italian student uniform; but the white-draped tables which formed a square around their long crowded one were empty; and the teacher who led them glanced up from his book to us with what seemed to me a look of annoyance.
It was hot and I walked up and down outside with R., watching the arrival of the other paying guests. They turned out to be mostly very old ladies who drove up in expensive cars and were helped trembling up the steps by their chauffeurs. If they participated at all in the Seder, beyond nibbling a little from each of the plates set before them, I certainly could not tell. They were quite obviously only performing an act of charity.
Three young men came in at the last minute, dark and reticent, but obviously more at home than we, though they confessed later to being Americans. They seemed quite familiar to me, the kind of good Jewish boys who refuse invitations to dinner because they have promised their mothers to keep kosher. After the Seder, they told us in horror about the heterodoxies of the Roman Synagogue, about which I can remember only the fact that it celebrates Bat Mitzvah, the equivalent of Bar Mitzvah but for girls! Imagine it!
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The Seder service itself was badly cut and extremely dull, despite the real charm of the children (there was one girl with the black, ugly-beautiful face of a Bedouin) and the freshness of their voices. The only emotion I could sense was the anxiety of the teacher that they get through it all without too horrible a blunder! The sacrifice was just a bone on a plate, the egg only something to eat; and the earnestness of the performing children (even the littlest ones did not squirm noticeably until the end) was cancelled out by the apathy of the paying guests. It was a relief when the voice of the young Bedouin broke and they all giggled; or when the pregnant young wife of the teacher, who sat at the head of the table, reached over to slap her own child, distinguished from the others by not wearing a smock.
Three buxom waitresses in pink uniforms trimmed with the shield of David dashed frantically about with bowls of water for washing, herbs for dipping, etc., but they never managed to get anything to us on time, chiefly because the old ladies took so long waving them away; and we were often passed by completely, to the distress of my boys.
The meal itself was served somewhat more efficiently, though, naturally, not until everything was satisfactorily cold. It was a completely Roman, non-Paschal meal: broth with pasta, slices of roast veal, and finally artichokes alla giudea, which is to say, Jewish style; for the Jews have long been famous as restaurateurs in Rome, and this is their most notable contribution to the local cuisine. It was somehow the last disconsolate touch! Whether the school children had the same fare or not was difficult to discern, for they did not eat off china, like the guests, but from a single metal bowl, like the setting in a prison or a Dickensian workhouse.
There was more singing after the meal, of course; and for this the parents of the children were let in, ruddy-faced working people, ruddier with washing and the excitement of seeing their offspring perform for the rich. They sat across from us on wooden benches against a farther wall, looking at the pale old ladies and parchment-yellowish rabbi-senator, not in hostility, but like representatives of a different species. Over their heads, a sign read in Hebrew: With a strong hand! And it would have taken a Strong Hand, indeed, to have brought us all out of Egypt together.
From this point on, the ceremony was speeded up until I could no longer follow it in the Haggadah I had brought along; the children had long since lost interest. Finally, the weary little students were permitted to sing one song in Italian and out of tune: the “Chad gadya,” into which they flung themselves with obvious relief, while their parents beamed in approval and the old ladies tried hard to smile. Only then, the teacher, who had conducted and prompted in suppressed anguish all evening, rose to explain the symbolism of the egg, the herb, the bitters; but conversation was general on all sides, and the chairs of the children creaked. Only his wife listened to him, earnestly, one hand resting lightly on her swollen belly—poised for the quick slap if her own child grew restive.
Afterwards, the old ladies and the bearded gentleman shook the hand of the teacher, who bowed gratefully like a superior servant, while the children trotted off, chattering, on the arms of their parents. I was ashamed to look at my wife or the R.’s, and I wanted even to apologize to my sons; but they were content, after all, for they had been able to wear their new skullcaps with the initials that their great-grandmother had sent them, and they had drunk two glasses of wine apiece. Next year in Jerusalem!
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There was not a bus or streetcar in sight. The Communist trade unions had called a strike for that day in protest against the new election law passed by the Demo-Christians despite inkwell-throwing and desk-banging. When we had come down to the Seder, there had still been some transportation available; but now everyone had decided to enjoy the stoppage with that frightening good humor with which a Roman crowd greets any disorder. They stood in groups on the street corners joshing each other about getting home, or sat at the tables of sidewalk cafes cursing the government of the priests. All the old ladies had long since been whisked back to the fashionable quarters by their chauffeurs, and no one was left who knew it was Pesach.
We could not even find a taxi, and the R.’s decided to walk. “Gut yontif,” we called to each other as we parted, but we did not believe in it. After three-quarters of an hour, during which the children grew wearier and crankier, a bus came lumbering along which would carry us within a mile of our house. On the long ride home, my wife and I argued bitterly, chiefly because I, for some reason I can no longer recall, refused to admit how miserable the whole evening had been. Finally, I was yelling so loud that the two other passengers were watching me, delighted to be so entertained. Despite it all, the children had fallen asleep, and had to be awakened for the hike home; but they were surprisingly cheerful.
We had almost arrived, when someone hailed us. It was an American girl we knew and her Italian husband, both Jewish, both very young, and determinedly liberal.
“A big day,” I said, thinking wearily of the holiday.
“The strike, you mean,” he answered. “We really tied them up tight! This should be a lesson for De Gasperi and the Vatican, too.” He seemed as enthusiastic about it as if he had arranged it all himself.
What was the use of arguing . . . ? “We’re just coming from a Seder,” I said to change the subject.
“A Seder! I’ll bet.” He laughed, hoping it was a joke.
“No—no—I’m serious. And tomorrow we’re having another—a real one at home, so the kids will really understand it.”
At that his wife could no longer bear it. “How can you do it?” she cried in horror, turning from me to my wife in search of an ally. “Do you mean to say that in this day and age you tell your children—” she could hardly manage to say it—“you teach them that we’re the Chosen People?”
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