The Rumours of War

Even with our forged identity cards, there were no rooms to be had in Rome for my father, mother, or me.

The streets were a cacophony of the rough Roman dialect of the Jews. Men hawked goods: used clothing, sewing notions, the stuff of rag pickers. Even though Mussolini had stripped the Jews of Rome of their peddler licenses, they managed, with one eye over their shoulder and the police looking the other way, to transverse the low-lying streets of the ghetto. At the synagogue, we were offered a corner, crowded among membranous scrolls, rare editions and palimpsests in Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, and Italian piled high, organized in some order known only to the rabbinical students and their teachers in the synagogue. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My father joked that this was where I’d become a bar mitzvah.

After only one night, the rabbi’s secretary bustled down into our hiding place to inform us, “Your visit must be terminated immediately.” The Chief Rabbi of Rome was concerned about the ancient manuscripts, but it was more. “Rabbi Zolli believes we are safe, but not with you here, not hiding foreign Jews.”

‘We’re from Milan,” said my mother. Her Polish-accented Italian revealed more. The secretary slipped some lire into my father’s pocket. “From the rabbi’s own hands,” she said, as if that made a difference. I was born in Milan, which did not make me Italian since my parents were born elsewhere, and so what could we do but leave?

That rabbi would hide throughout Rome during the war,...