ACROSS THE ROOFTOPS OF THE GHETTO OF ROME

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.



My eldest son, Sabato, he is like a goat since he took his first steps—climbing whatever has been before him. In the beginning, he scaled the furniture in our little home. As he grew older, he scooted a chair to a window, slinked up and through it, and made his way outside. My wife, she could not control him. Whenever she turned her back, he scurried away to climb something. Most of the time, it was the wall in which the window is located that gives onto a tall tree beyond arm’s reach of it. The limbs of the tree provide him the means of disappearing among the rooftops of our cramped neighborhood. He is one of an ancient breed of climbers among our people, myself included when I was young, spawned by the stifling four walls that enclose us in this Ghetto of Rome, which has been our people’s prison during much of the time between the middle of the sixteenth century and now.

Jews have been counted among the population of Rome since a century and a half before the birth of Jesus, the Christian’s Jewish savior, and the ironies of our history here are ceaseless. First we were in favor, and then out of favor—in and out, in and out, our fortunes have varied over two millennia according to the mood and the politics of the separate ruling powers of the times. It is the same throughout this hemisphere of the world, where there are also Jewish ghettos—many of them—but the Ghetto of Rome holds the dubious distinction of being the oldest. Like its history, its boundaries are irregular, comprising about two thousand Jewish people at its inception in 1555, the whole of them shut behind a gated trapezoidal urban enclosure measuring a cramped, four blocks in size. At its longest border, edged up against the Tiber River, the quarter was then and is to this day perpetually damp and murky, our narrow streets, homes, and businesses infested with vermin inhabitants of waterways and their nearby areas. The river also guarantees that the ghetto is subject to incessant flooding. Diseases wrought by the forced overcrowding and unsanitary circumstances are rampant. Crushing poverty is our lot as well, because gainful employment among the larger society is denied to us. To state that our close and substandard living conditions are inhuman, is merely a restatement of our situation during most of our history.

            The very night of his Bar Mitzvah five years ago, not only did Sabato become a man, but he also transformed into a cat-burglar. I do not suggest that he indulges in breaking and entering. Certainly not! Soon after the authorities shut us inside the ghetto behind locked gates, as they do each evening, donned head to toe in black, Sabato creeps across the rooftops of adjoining habitats of our neighbors, drops to his feet outside the boundary wall, and slinks into the wider city. Darkness comes early at this time of year and the curfew hour begins soon afterwards. The darkness is intensified by the mandatory blackout—all windows and doors are shrouded in black cloth or by other means. Keeping to the shadows, and being careful to avoid the armed patrols that like cockroaches infest every corner, Sabato scours the sinister streets and alleyways for whatever he can find. That first evening upon his return, his black eyes shining triumphantly, he said to me, “Papa, look what I found for you! Now you will have many nights of good light as you study the Torah.” And from behind his back he produced four tall and thick, white candles, only slightly used. “I found them in the dust bin behind the Cathedral,” he informed me. The Cathedral has become one of his regular foraging sites. There he gleans an assortment of treasures, including medals of the saints, candelabras, and other religious articles. We trade them on the black market through a friendly Roman Catholic who acts as our trusted agent, which contributes greatly to the livelihood of our family. One of Sabato’s happiest finds was for his sister, Ada. The day of her Bat Mitzvah looming before her, she was mortified that she lacked a nice pair of shoes for the small ceremony we planned for her. God Himself, with the help of Sabato, provided. As Sabato stole down a pitch black street a few nights before, a pair of barely-used girl’s sandals beckoned to him on a doorstep of a house. He snatched them up and stuffed them in his rucksack. Later that evening, like the prince kneeling before Cinderella and placing the glass slipper on her foot, Sabato lowered to his knees and slipped the sandals on his sister’s feet. They were just the right size!      

Since Nazi Germany seized Rome two days after the Italian surrender to the Allies on 8 September, 1943, discrimination against us has been at a fever pitch yet again. Many of my close friends and associates have escaped the persecution by pulling up stakes and moving south in search of protection among places now occupied by the Allies. I am skeptical of such a drastic measure. After all, several non-Jewish Romans pooled their resources and helped us to meet the Nazi demand that we Jews hand over 50 kilograms (110 lbs.) of gold to them, a sum that we were promised would insure the freedom of 200 family heads marked for deportation to a concentration camp. It shows to me and many of my neighbors that the Nazis are only after loot, and as long as we can fork over commodities, we will be safe. Sabato sees it differently. He begs me to leave, but I cannot find my way to ripping my sickly wife and our other six children, the youngest of whom is still a babe in arms, from the only home they have ever known. I recognize that restless look in Sabato’s eyes—he is ready to go, to climb through the window, to scale the tree, and to escape across the rooftops and over the walls of this ancient ghetto once and for all, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me because I fear that if he leaves, we will lose him forevermore.

Even as I come to the end of this writing in my journal, the German security and police forces have sealed off the ghetto and announced that our final removal will soon be underway. “Papa!” my son exclaims. “Please, Papa come with me. I can get all of us to safety. We will go south and find protection among the Allies.” But it is too late. My wife and baby daughter would never survive such a journey. I feel certain that a concentration camp is our better option.

“I must go, Papa. I must join the co-belligerent forces and fight the Nazis.” His rucksack filled with his scant possessions strapped to his back, Sabato takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheeks. And then he bundles his mother in his arms in a goodbye embrace. One after the other, he kisses his brothers and sisters, and then he turns from us and disappears through the window. I run to it and through misty eyes watch my son scale the tree and step foot onto our rooftop.© 

Note: On October 16, 1943, the German Gestapo raided the Ghetto of Rome. At its outset, 363 men, 689 women, and 207 children, mainly of Jewish persuasion, were rounded up. Among that number, 224 non-Jews were released. It is recorded that two days later, 1,035 Jews were loaded onto Holocaust trains and shipped off to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Only fifteen men and one woman survived the bloodbaths of the deportation and internment in the camp. If the narrator of my story of historical fiction had actually existed, it would have been a miracle if he and his family had been among the survivors. Sabato, on the other hand, because I sent him south to the Allied encampments, very well might have escaped. I like to think that he would have made it to one of the British Isles or the United States soon after the end of the Second World War.



Image: LIFE IN THE GHETTO OF ROME - 1880 Watercolor by Ettore Roesler Franz

A Review of Paulette Mahurin's THE SEVEN YEAR DRESS

September 23, 2017, Columbus, Ohio

Submitted by Linda Lee Greene

A Remarkable Literary Achievement

Paulette Mahurin

I have just added another name to my list of favorite writers of World War II stories. Her name is Paulette Mahurin, an award-winning and best-selling author of several superb books. Her recent novel “The Seven Year Dress” is a marvel. I am a student of World War II. I have a library of books and movies on the subject. This excellent work of historical fiction will hold a special place among them.

Under madman Adolf Hitler and his equally mad horde of followers, European Jews and other “undesirables” were persecuted, tortured, and far too many of them executed in ways unimaginable, often in gas chambers in concentration camps. This exceptional novel recounts the story of beautiful Jewish teenager Helen Stein, forced into hiding from the Nazi’s in a basement, but when discovered finally, is sent to Auschwitz. In that death camp, she endures unspeakable cruelty at the hands of the SS, but also compassion, kindness, and friendship among her fellow prisoners. Ultimately, in that darkness, the strength of the human spirit is a beacon in this remarkable literary achievement.

Best-selling author, award-winning artist, blogger, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

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Readers and Writers Have Much to Learn from Author William Styron in His Sophie’s Choice

Finding the right title for a book is often the bane of an author’s existence. One highly successful present-day author is so book-title challenged that she runs contests among beta readers to come up with the best titles for her tomes. Author William Styron (1925 - 2006) didn’t have that problem, and of all of the great titles among his published works, the absolute spot-on one is Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979. Apart from the fact that it has found a home in the lexicon as an idiom translated as “faced with a forced decision in which all options have equally negative outcomes,” amazingly, those two little words hold within themselves the entire description of this 626-page novel. This is because contained in every major theme of this masterwork, Sophie is confronted with unbearable choices—she just can’t win, a consequence infecting everyone else around her—and of course, that is the seminal factor of the story. She is doomed, as is her paramour Nathan. An adjunct to the story is Stingo’s unlucky fate, as well—Stingo, the narrator of this story about three people in three separate rooms in a boarding house in post Second World War Brooklyn and the third leg of the ménage a trios around which the novel is constructed—Stingo, the young and naive writer whose life can only be construed as a portrayal of Willian Styron himself; Nathan, the drug-riddled, brilliant and charismatic lover; and Sophie, the beautiful and embattled Polish survivor of the Nazi terror, around whom the plot centers in regard to a tragic decision she was forced to make upon imprisonment at Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the war.

            Stingo’s Sophie’s Choice, to make use of the idiom here, was whether or not to woo Sophie, for whom he suffered an agonizing passion, or to honor his friendship with Nathan. A choice between his unbearable life or release through self-inflicted death was Nathan’s Sophie’s Choice. And Sophie’s options, or lack thereof, were fixed a handful of years before, specifically on the day she came face to face with the fascists' hideous ignominy toward life—her chances ruined by the blight it continued to cast on her life, as on countless others, for incalculable years following the war to defeat Hitler's evil regime.

Despite his unrequited desire to bed Sophie, and his failed attempts at love with every surrogate female who crossed his path, Stingo/Styron did walk away with a good story that found voice in the bestselling Sophie’s Choice, a winner of the US National Book Award for Fiction and the book widely considered his greatest literary achievement. Five years in the writing, the book was, says Styron, “suggested by a mere germ of experience. I had been living in a boardinghouse in Brooklyn one summer just after the war and such a girl lived on the floor above me; she was beautiful, but ravaged. I never got to know her very well, but I was moved by her plight. Then, about five years ago, I awoke one morning with a remembrance of this girl; a vivid dream haunted my mind. I suddenly sensed that I had been given a mandate to abandon the novel I had been at work on and write her story.”

Although deemed a modern masterpiece and a profound meditation on the foremost evil of the Twentieth Century, it is not without controversy, especially among those who consider some topics so heinous as to be unspeakable. A number of his detractors found Styron opportunistic and exploitive in this choice of topic, this one especially judged the third rail of letters. Styron answered his critics thusly: “No event could be so hideous that it would defy a novelist to trespass upon it. It was an episode in history that cried out to be explored, the ultimately challenging subject for a novelist.”

Bringing history to life in fiction can be tricky business. The central dilemmas of the authors of historical fiction are how to avoid coming across as pedantic, as well as how to bypass stiff and dry parroting of statistical information gleaned through research. The best advice I can offer in that regard is to study Styron’s techniques in this book. He couched his deep exploration of the history of the Nazi’s horrendous pursuit of a "Final Solution" in his characters—the actions of his characters revealed the history. He made an untouchable and unutterable story, real and describable by having his characters sweep the floors and vomit all over themselves and pee their pants.      

An additional literary device Styron used successfully, and an effective one often employed by writers, is the suggestion of background music to set a mood or design an ambience, and in this case, to announce Sophie’s presence or absence in her room. Nathan’s phonograph and enviable collection of long-playing classical records, housed in Sophie’s room, were crucial to the story. I last saw this method used in an outstanding book I read in recent months which I will review here in the coming weeks—a novel titled Those Who Save Us, authored by Jenna Blum, another book centered on Second World War Europe. 
         

I would venture a guess that far more people are familiar with the Academy Award-winning film of the same name than with the book. Although an outstanding film, one of the best, do yourself a favor and read Sophie’s Choice. Savor Styron’s intricate weaving of Stingo’s story, which the film downplayed, but which is the driving force of the book, lending it a full compliment of emotions and diversity of experiences that divert to lighter places, here and there, the heavy stream this novel follows. In addition, Styron’s elaborate prose is not to be missed…but keep your dictionary handy. Styron loved his polysyllabic words. Ha Ha!

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