Mortal terror, grateful hope

...it involves passionate perspectives...

...The relatives had somehow found Commonweal 24 April 1992: 15 out where he was living in Russia...

...Before 1938 Mussolini had described Germany as a "country of murderers and pederasts," and National Socialism as "savage barbarism...

...Until 1938 and 1939...

...In All's Well that Ends Well Shakespeare described that feeling neatly when he wrote: "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together...

...All of them experienced the same sort of ambiguous relationship with their country that Jews have been experiencing 16: 24 April 1992 Commonweal in many forms since A.D...

...But as his relationship with Hitler became closer, that closeness was reflected not only in the racist laws of Italy, and not only in the growing hatred directed against Jews in the streets and businesses of Italy, but also in the increasingly desperate feelings of Jews themselves...

...Anna's trip becomes one sexual adventure after another (in the time of your life, live, as Saroyan said in a much more innocent play), and Carl's becomes a mixture of art appreciation and international intrigue...

...But the story of the Jews in Fascist Italy is not only a story of people whipsawed between love and terror...

...In Don Juan Byron wrote: Hatred is the longest pleasure...

...One's name has, perhaps, the meaning one gives it, but it also has the meaning that its history gives it...

...They gave him permission, and when he got to Castle Garden in New York City an immigration official asked him for his name, and the boy said "Isidore Hallie...

...The name was an enduring bond not only with his past in Italy, but with his dead friend...

...Stille" means "silence" in German, and anonymity was the closest these two young Italians wanted to get to silence...

...And the further I read into Stille's book the more I came to believe that his name is a similar bond for him...

...Again and again my father has told me what his father told him about the murderous pogrom south of Daugavpils, and again and again he has told me what his father told him about the Irish missionaries who saved him, body and soul...

...70, when Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple there, brought the sacred Menorah from the Temple back to Rome, and was rewarded with the title of Caesar...

...Whether we like it or not, flesh-andblood people with their own perspectives write and read history and make ethical judgments...

...But all of the Jews in these stories felt the evertightening grip of the Fatherland on their lives...

...They were Christians and Jews from all parts of Rome—mostly people of modest means in these poverty-stricken times...

...One of the reasons Alexander Stille's story struck home for me was that it resembled the story behind my own name...

...There is one other character, the Third Man (one scene is a parody of the ferris wheel sequence from the Carol Reed movie), who is the doctor and everyone they meet in Europe...

...The outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness...

...Instead of the uniform greyness of the rainy day we now have the black stormcloud and the brilliant lightning-flash...

...But others want to understand what happened in Europe from 1933 to 1945 because the story of this period of time serves an important purpose: It writes ethics large by giving us names and places and stories of both murderous torturers and courageous helpers...

...They said that the most important thing in their lives was their devotion to the Roman Catholic faith...

...The Germans took the gold and the cash, and no hostages...

...When the leaders came back to their synagogue that afternoon they found a crowd of people carrying gold in dozens of forms...

...I am the product of good and evil people...

...And the further I read the more I felt—rightly or wrongly—that Stille and I share a more particular feeling: a lingering, complex feeling of mortal terror and grateful hope...

...In those years Mussolini's government published the racial laws that caused Jews to be fired from all governmental and military jobs, and banned them from all of the skilled professions...

...Carl and the other man in a trench coat flash teddy bears at one another, the secret signal of spies and homosexuals (perhaps undercover agents in either case...

...The boy then asked if he could take their name...

...For Stille, the axis of history runs straight through the intimate feelings of human beings the way a string runs through beads...

...Many of the wealthy Romans who gave gold did not give their names, and accepted no receipts, and one poor woman who used to sell candy in the streets took off her gold earrings, and said, "Take these...

...In 1941 Alexander Stille's father left Italy for America...

...the Di Verolis of Rome experienced it, for the most part, as inhabitants of the Roman ghetto, and as people more or less indifferent to the world of politics and war...

...By the first morning after Kappler's ultimatum only about five kilograms of gold were ready...

...On September 27, SS Major Kappler demanded fifty kilograms— more than a hundred pounds—of gold from the Jewish community of Rome...

...When he was about ten years old, they received a letter from America urging them to send the boy to his Jewish relatives in Chicago...

...the Foas, also of Turin, experienced it as anti-Fascists...

...others were deported to the killing camps of Central Europe and died there...

...As Aristotle put it at the very beginning of his Metaphysics, "All men naturally have an impulse to get knowledge...

...The string—the political and military events that occurred between Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922 and the surrender of the German forces in Italy in 1945— only line up and display the joys and the terrors, the twistings and the turnings in the minds of the people in his stories...

...That statement conveys the bitter beauty of the human condition...

...The other "Ugo Stille," who was a Catholic, stayed in Italy, and he was killed in one of the early actions of the Italian Resistance...

...I have read about the massacres of Jews during the Crusades, the burning and forced conversion of Jews in Spain (called Marranos, which means swine), and I have studied in great detail the torture and murders of more than a million Jewish children by the Nazis...

...Stille tells us how in Italy his father, a Jew, and his father's closest friend started writing a magazine column after Mussolini had promulgated the racist laws of 1938, laws that barred Jews from publishing their writings...

...but of course it would make no sense for him to become a Roman Catholic on his way to taking his Bar Mitzvah...

...The two of them separately and in warmhearted cooperation reached into all corners of the Genoa area to feed and to protect Jews after the Germans occcupied Italy on September 8,1943...

...One of those times was September 1943, when Rome was declared an Open City, and the Germans took control of it...

...Officials in the Vatican immediately agreed to lend it to them...

...At the very height of her passion, she heard a voice near her call out, "Damn the Jews...

...One of the martyrs of this period, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, put it this way in his classic book Ethics: Today there are once more villains and saints, and they are not hidden from public view...

...We have explored the upper and lower limits of spiritual possibility...

...Insistent, fragmentary memories goad us into finding out what really happened in our own lives, and dramatic public events make us want to know history...

...And what follows that first sentence did not disappoint me...

...Shakespeare's characters walk in our midst...

...But his image is too pat to express the agony of fear and buoyancy that my name carries with it for me...

...The Dutch boy who saved Holland by putting his finger 18: 24 April 1992 Commonweal...

...The two young men wrote their column under a pseudonym: Ugo Stille...

...Some of us are particularly interested in getting the story of Hitler's twelve-year empire straight...

...The missionaries bought my grandfather a new suit of clothes, and a boat ticket out of Riga for New York...

...For him the name "Hallie" was a bond with the people who had saved his life and who had refused to try to convert him to the faith that was so dear to them...

...They took him to their home in Daugavpils, and raised him as a son, without putting any pressure on him to become a Catholic...

...Believing this as I do, it was with pleasure that I read the first sentence of the introduction to Alexander Stille's Benevolence and Betrayal: "I owe both my name and my existence to Mussolini's racial laws...

...Because we are often curious about the stories of those explorations we are capable of learning how intimately our lives are intertwined with each other...

...To me my name is a reminder that, to use Stille's words, "I owe both my name and my existence" to murderous people and to loving ones, to Judaism and to Catholicism, to a wider community than any one ethnic or religious group...

...On the way to Riga the boy started to cry, and asked the people who had saved him what he could do to show his appreciation and his love...

...She pointed out that the stones were fake, but that there was a gram or two of pure gold in the earrings, and she wept...

...Like many aphorisms this one could be reversed and make as much sense: Loving is the longest pleasure...

...Vogel has a taste for odd images—sometimes gross ones...

...And the evil and the good that happened then have yet to be demonstrated with the impartial finality of a geometrical proof...

...Some want to do it mainly out of "an impulse to get knowledge...

...The Ovazzas of Turin experienced it much as she did, in the very midst of their own patriotic fervor...

...By this time the Jews knew what this threat meant—torture and death...

...In the nineteenth century my father's father was the only survivor of a pogrom against his tiny Jewish village south of Riga, in what is now Latvia...

...We hate in haste, but we love at leisure...

...From that time on my grandfather insisted that Hallie was his real, his only name...

...still others survived...

...But history, like ethics, involves more than lucidity...

...Given these circumstances, one might expect a maudlin mixture of sentimentality and guilt, but Vogel shares her brother's oblique humor, and the tears, when they come (and they did come in the theater the night I was there), force their way through the broad comedy...

...O ne day in 1936, after many of the Jews of Italy had shown their loyalty to Mussolini's fascism by praising him to the skies and by melting down some of their most precious gold and silver religious objects "for the Fatherland," Benito Mussolini formally declared the existence of an Italian Empire...

...He was a very young child, not more than two years old, sitting in the ruins of the village when two childless Irish Catholic missionaries happened to pass near the village, and heard him crying...

...The history of the Jewish Diaspora has given a particular sort of meaning to Shakespeare's words in All's Well: "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together...

...He gave the Jews thirty-six hours to assemble the gold, and he said that if the gold was not in his hands by the end of this time two hundred Roman Jews would be taken hostage and sent to Germany or the Russian front...

...And so we rack our memories, we ask our friends and relatives, and we read newspapers and history books, not always because it is useful or profitable to do these things, but also because we are just curious...

...He points out that the Jewish community of Rome was the oldest in the Western world, that two hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ there were tens of thousands of Jews in Rome, and that at Julius Caesar's death Jews kept watch and wept over Caesar's tomb out of gratitude for his tolerance...

...Tucked into the program and printed with the play in American Theatre (September 1991) is a letter from Vogel's brother, who died of AIDS in 1988, and the play ("To the memory of Carl—because I cannot sew") is a fantasy European trip which a brother (Carl) and a sister (Anna) share—a substitute for the trip that the playwright did not take with her brother in 1986...

...A young Jewess was listening to his declaration with love and pride...

...It is exactly such a pattern of acceptance and rejection that Stille shows forth in his stories about five Italian-Jewish families who lived in Italy under Mussolini's version of fascism...

...Their main regrets were voiced by the then Monsignor Repetto on his death-bed in Genoa in the summer of 1984: "If we only could have saved more...

...These feelings are the main topic of Stille's book...

...she found herself weeping with joy at the eloquence of ll Duce...

...But I have also seen across history— many stories of loyalty, of transcendent courage and generosity on behalf of Jews, so that the historical pattern of accepting and trusting Jews, and then rejecting them (especially in Spain, Germany, Poland, and Italy) has left me deeply ambivalent about the future of my grandchildren in this fickle species of ours...

...Creatures in our species can be as cruel as we can be kind...

...They wanted the boy to come to America so that he could have his Bar Mitzvah, and become a full-fledged Jew, the only survivor of his family...

...it is also the story of moments when human solidarity happened, when Bonhoeffer's "villains and saints" stepped forward...

...And there were heroes in Genoa—like Rabbi Riccardo Pacifici, the chief rabbi of Genoa, and Don Francesco Repetto, a gentle, powerful priest...

...And he points out that despite the ghettos, and despite the papal bull Cumnimis absurdum of 1555, which proclaimed the absurdity of having the enemyJew living in close association with Christians, and which made the ghettos more like prisons than neighborhoods, the Jewish people—who constituted less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the Italian population— have been living with other Italians in peace for two thousand years...

...All of them loved their country and found themselves more and more hated and hurt by the object of their love, their homeland...

...and the Schonheits of Ferrara experienced it in the Buchenwald concentration camp...

...The Jewish leaders, with all of this support from the people, decided not to accept the Vatican loan, since well before the deadline they had collected more than fifty kilograms of gold, and 2 million lire in cash...

...As their country moved closer and closer to Hitler's kind of fascism they found themselves more and more violently whipsawed by love for their country and fear for their lives...

...The whole story of a time when tens of millions of human beings—many of them small children—were murdered has yet to be told by a totally disinterested, objective historian...

...Each one of the five Italian Jewish families Stille examines experienced the love and the horror that this young woman felt, but each of them experienced it in a different way...

...We love in haste, but we detest at leisure...

...That journey—Anna's response to her brother's illness—begins with a preposterous transference in which she becomes the one suffering from the fatal disease—ATD (Acquired Toilet Disease), "an affliction, so far, of single schoolteachers" who get it from the toilet seats in their schools...

...The stories in Stille's scrupulous and lucid book bear this out, and teach us that there is some reason for realistic hope...

...Some were massacred in Italy...

...At that moment she felt at one with Italy, bound to her country just as her ancestors had felt bound to it for many generations...

...q STAGE FINAL ACTS 'WALTZ,' 'HOME,' & 'CLOSER' paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz, which played at the Circle Repertory earlier this year, must be the funniest AIDS play ever written—which does not mean that it is not an extremely moving one...

...Both hatred and love can endure...

...When I read it I thought: "Well, here is somebody who is telling us—up front—where he is coming from...

...When the war was over Alexander's father made "Stille" his legal name...

...Even though Vogel is not one for conventional exposition, she manages to establish Carl's disease in the first scene, to provide the unrealistic but very real base (the hospital in Baltimore) from which the imaginary journey emerges...

...Two Jewish leaders rushed to the Vatican and asked for the rest of the gold they needed...