Venice was, of course, the tourist’s Venice—the open ballroom of Piazza San Marco, the black swans of gondolas (twelve times the first day!), the spun tracery of palaces. For us, Venice was also the Jews, the descendants of Shylock.
Why this curiosity to visit Jewish quarters wherever we go? We are not religious, Frances or I; we possess little Jewish culture other than the folk-coloration of our immigrant parents. What do we share with Jews of other lands?—a sense of alienation?—are we bound positively by this negative?
Yet, we were in Venice and it was Passover and Frances wanted to attend a Seder. We walked along interlacing canals, and down dark narrow alleys, and across innumerable curving bridges until we approached the ancient Jewish quarter. Now and then a man passed us, carrying the familiar plush bag which contains the tefillin and tallis.
“Services must be over,” Frances said. “They’re already coming back from shul.”
Suddenly a voice hails us: Shalom! We turn around; a little man, middle-aged, shy, is smiling with friendly diffidence, but observing us carefully all the while as if Shalom were a magic word that would reveal our. secret coloration. “Shalom,” we replied; and the little man turned to his two companions and nodded triumphantly: “I told you the stranieri were Jews.”
He introduced himself (in Italian, of course) as Signor S.; were we inglese? he asked.
“No, americani.”
He was delighted. Would we permit him to serve as our cicerone?
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He led us through the Sottoportico del Ghetto, a narrow archway in a wall that circles a dismal slum area, the ancient quarter of the Venetian Jews. Now, many goyim have moved into the quarter, he told us (the word shining exotically in its Italian setting); besides, in Italy, he added with a shrug, you can’t tell ebrei from cristiani.
Services were already over at the old sinagoga but if we cared to, he would show us the interior. Facing each other across a tiny dreary square, flanked by medieval tenement houses with wash fluttering from the shutters, were two old synagogues—one used by the native Sephardim, one by the more recent Ashkenazi immigrants. Both dated from the 16th century, but from the outside they looked no different from the adjacent tenements. The interiors were rather commonplace too, except for the many copper lamps hanging from the ceiling.
I was neither surprised nor disappointed at the lack of beauty of the synagogues. How can one expect a church art to develop among a people whose laws specifically enjoin the creation of images, whose worship is of the spirit, whose tabernacle contains the omnipotent Nothing that so startled the plundering legions of Titus? Furthermore, an architecture presupposes a permanent sense of place; is it surprising that the arts of the Jews have been those they could carry in their heads as they fled the tempest?
Our guide interrupted my meditations. There was an even more ancient sinagoga, he remarked; the most venerable in Venezia. If we returned tomorrow, he would be happy to conduct us there. So we left the little piazza, and went to visit an old-age home which reminded me of the East Side Bialystoker Home where my grandmother had spent the last years of her life—the same withered old ladies; the same prefigurations of death already on those parchmentwrinkled mummy faces, the same scrawny sticks of bodies. But how astonishing to hear, from those blue lips, not Yiddish, but Italian!
We contributed a thousand-lire note to the upkeep of the home and then made arrangements to attend the Seder that evening—a special Seder given by the Jewish community of Venice for those poor children whose parents are unable to pay the cost of the traditional ceremony.
On the way back to our pensione, we passed again the little square where the two synagogues faced each other. On the wall of the Sephardic shut I noticed something I had overlooked before: a tablet in white incised stone:
Duecento Ebrei Di Venezia
Ottomila Ebrei D’italia
Sei Milioni D’ebrei D’europa
Da Cieco Barbarico Odio in Lontana
Terra Cacciati Martoriati SoppressiIl Ricordo Dell’ Atrocissima Offesa
All’ Umana Civiltà
Richiami Gli Uomini Tutti
Alla Santa Legge Di Dio
Ai Sentimenti Di Fraternità E Di Amore
Che Primo Israele Affermò Fra I Popoli(Two Hundred Jews of Venice
Eight Thousand Jews of Italy
Slx Million Jews of Europe
By Blind Barbaric Hatred in Distant
Lands Hunted Tortured Oppressed
The Memory of This Most Atrocious Of-
fense
Against Human Culture
Recalls All Men
To The Holy Law of God
To Sentiments of Fraternity And Love
That Israel First Affirmed Among the
Peoples)
A group of grimy urchins were kicking a calcio ball around beneath the tablet.
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In the blue dusk of that same evening we threaded our way back through the maze of Venetian streets to the old Ghetto under the dark sottoportico into the slum. Every time I passed through this three-yard-wide arch in the wall I felt that I was putting on again the yellow medieval circle; the word ghetto so flagrantly painted on the bricks. But the Italian Jews did not share my feelings; ghetto was merely a name for a venerable section of Venice; the word bore no emotional connotations to them. They used it as we might say East Side.
We arrived at the square just as the evening service was over; worshipers were coming down the synagogue steps with a holiday air, smiling and greeting each other with “Auguri! Auguri!” Signor S. was already waiting there with two dark-haired, pretty girls in their teens whom he introduced as his daughters. As we walked through the narrow streets toward the community center where the Seder was to be held, he told us that there had been thirteen hundred Jews in Venice before the war, most of them either in business or the professions. Two hundred of these had been taken by the Germans. Of course, they were never heard of again.
Later in the evening, I met a girl who had spent more than a year at Auschwitz. At the Seder she was flirting with a young man and laughing as if her year in a concentration camp was a nightmare that the daylight asserts never really existed. Signor S. himself had lost his aged mother to the Germans. About his wife he said nothing—I had not met her at the morning service, nor was she accompanying us to the Seder. I assumed our friend was a widower.
The Seder was like all Seders—the services chanted a bit more than in America, but the children—the only true citizens of the world—were setting up the usual infernal racket and paying no attention to the young assistant rabbi’s prayers. The Sephardic Hebrew sounded rather Arabic, with its flattened a’s and unaccustomed stresses, but far more curious was to hear “One Only Kid” sung, in lusty horse-opera style, as “Un Capretto.”
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The meal was poor, we missed the kneidlach soup and the carrot tzimmes; and the round homemade matzah was not only symbolically, but actually, bread of affliction. Poor Frances groaned audibly when the sweet ceremonial wine (a gift of the JDC) was swiftly removed from the table, once it had served its religious function during the reading of the Haggadah, and replaced by good old Italian Chianti. “E meglio per lo stomaco,” said our host, pouring me a tumblerful.
Obviously an important person in the community, Signor S. sat next to us at the official table on a little stage overlooking the hall. We were, I felt with some embarrassment, honored guests, fellow Jews from faraway America; we were, so to speak, on exhibition here on the platform and I dreaded the possibility that I might be called upon to participate in the service. A Haggadah had been set before me—in Hebrew and Italian—and I pretended to be reading along with the rabbi, watching him out of the corner of my eye, turning the pages when he did so. Every once in a while, Fran nudged my arm and hissed: “Turn . . . .”
During the meal, Signor S. questioned me about America.
Was it true that Roosevelt had been a Jew?
No, it was not true.
He thought a moment, then remarked with an air of certainty: “Ma, Lincoln fu un ebreo, senz’ altro . . . .”
No, I said, Lincoln wasn’t a Jew either.
But the beard? And the name “Abraham”? He seemed disappointed.
He was a very devout man, our Signor S., he prompted the rabbi with loud and happy wails; the next morning in the singagoga, where we had come to receive our gifts of several old and beautiful prayer books, we saw Signor S. carrying and kissing the Torah with tearful adoration. A very devout Jew—and a very proud Italian. He was rather taken aback when we complained about the monotony of the Italian diet. “What! There are two hundred different kinds of pasta!” He could not conceive of a society where some variation of spaghetti was not eaten every day. Yet he personally wanted to end his days in Israel; he had no desire to come to the United States; like most European Jews he had heard unpleasant stories about growing anti-Semitism in America. That didn’t exist here in Italy, he said proudly. The Italians were good people; the Church had helped save the Jews from the barbaric Nazis; he personally knew a priest in this neighborhood who had hidden Jews in his house and fed them.
But he felt unhappy about the lack of religious feelings in the younger generation. Sometimes they can hardly get a minyan together at the sinagoga. A devout Jew, Signor S . . . . But that evening, after the Seder, as we walked with our host and his two daughters to the vaporetto on the Grand Canal, Frances asked one of the girls why her mother hadn’t attended the Seder.
“O, Mamma è cattolica,” replied the girl.
Signor S. flushed; he had obviously not wanted the americani to know that.
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The next morning, we returned in time to attend the service in the Sephardic sinagoga. The shammes was a beardless eighteen-year-old; he wore his cutaway and high silk hat self-consciously. He scurried about assisting the rabbi to find for the visiting americani a beautiful old Haggadah illustrated with wood-engravings of the Exodus. Then, accompanied by Signor S. and the rabbi, we were led to the “ sinagoga veramente antica” on the third floor of a crumbling stone building in the Ghetto Nuovo.
This sinagoga was really delightful, the wood paneling darkened by age; the lunettes over the windows containing scenes from the Prophets worked in intaglio’d wood, inlaid like mosaic; the altar and Ark were intricately carved, numerous ornate copper lanterns swung from the ceiling like the censers of St. Mark’s.
I wondered about the beauty of this synagogue; I had never seen one quite like it. And then the explanation came. It had been redesigned, Rabbi P. told me with pride, by the renowned Longhena, the great 17th-century architect who had designed Santa Maria della Salute and other important Venetian churches. I remarked, quite deliberately:
Don’t you find it rather strange that Longhena, a church architect, should also have designed a synagogue?
“Ma, perchè?” replied the young rabbi with surprise. “Fu un artista.”
He went into the storeroom, dusty, laden with ancient talleisim, Spanish shawls used for the Tabernacle, and hundreds of musty leather-covered prayer books, falling apart with age. The rabbi selected for us several very old volumes still in good condition, and with these treasures, together with the beautiful ancient Haggadah, which had been proudly presented to us by the silk-hatted boy, we walked around the austere square of the Ghetto Nuovo (which is older than the Ghetto Vecchio). In medieval portals one could still make out the carved Hebrew letters, eloquent as half-effaced gravestones. We passed the fragments of a 14th-century Jewish pawnshop—now a fruit stand. The tawdry piazza was lined with miserable apartment dwellings, children danced around in the poverty and dirt, boys kicked a calcio ball.
I took a photograph of Signor S. and the young rabbi, and said goodbye. A few paces down the street, a beggar approached us, whining in that sickening, humiliating whine of professional beggars:
Me Jew. Me poor.
I gave him a few lire.
“Auguri,” he said, bowing to the ground. “Shalom.”
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