Saul Steinberg

by Deirdre Bair

  HIS AMERICAN RELATIVES HAD PREVIOUSLY MADE contact with an Italian group known by the acronym DELASEM (Delegazione per l’Assistenza degli Emigranti Ebrei, the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants) and were hopeful that an on-site Italian organization could assist them. DELASEM, created by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities in 1939, carried official government authorization for the purpose of assisting Jews in Italy (whether Italian or foreign) to leave the country. Neither Steinberg nor his relatives ever mentioned that he received financial help from DELASEM, but he did receive the group’s advice and assistance throughout the time he tried to leave. Nothing much came of it before he went to Tortoreto, and he had all but given up on it.

  Suddenly, on May 30—and on his unlucky day, a Friday—he received a telegram from DELASEM telling him that his Portuguese visa had arrived. There was no mention of a transit visa for Spain (although it came a few days later), and he had just twenty days to get himself to Lisbon before everything expired. It meant that he had to fly, and a week of confusion followed until another Friday, June 6, when a letter from DELASEM in Rome led him to believe there was some question about his plane ticket. Steinberg was sure that, as it was Friday, there was still time for something bad to happen.

  He was calmer the next morning when he heard someone shouting his name from the street. It was his fellow prisoner Alois Gogg, joyous because they would both be allowed to leave for Rome the next day. That night their fellow prisoners gave them a royal send-off. First there was dinner, for which they pooled all their resources. Then they presented Steinberg with another of Walter Frankl’s drawings of the Villa Tonelli, signed by all his fellow internees. After that, Gogg gave them a muted violin concert—in the dark, as lights were turned off at nine o’clock, after which prisoners were supposed to be quiet.

  In his little book of reminiscences, Reflections and Shadows, Steinberg wrote that everyone walked with him and Gogg and their police guard as far as they were allowed, to the edge of the station, where the two were escorted onto a train bound for Rome. As it passed by the villa, all those left behind were up on the roof or at the windows, waving everything white they could find, including sheets and towels. In the wartime “Journal, 1940–42,” however, he tells a different story.

  Instead of going directly to Rome with Gogg, Steinberg got off at the next station and boarded the night train coming from Rome and went to Milan to spend a day with Ada. He made the trip “seated with all the perils, police, documents,” but arrived without incident and went directly to the Grillo. While he was in bed with Ada, Natalina Cavazza did his laundry, scolding him for taking such shabby clothes and worn-out socks to America in his one small suitcase. The next night he got back on the train, and this time he did go to Rome, to “a crowded train, a nameless hotel … saved from minute to minute by a miracle.” He stayed at the Hotel Pomezia on the Via dei Chiavari near the gate to the old Jewish Ghetto, in a room he shared with Gogg, where he drew another of his stark pencil drawings, as if he needed to fix every feature of it firmly in his mind so it would stay there forever.

  In later years Steinberg liked to tell a more dramatic story about how he fled—that he had no exit visas and “slightly falsified” them with a rubber stamp of his own making. In truth he had all the proper travel documents, affidavits, and visas that were required, and thanks to his Italian friends, he was flush with money. On June 16 he and Gogg were allowed to board the Ala Littoria flight that took them to Lisbon via Barcelona and Madrid. They stayed in Lisbon until June 20, at the Hotel Tivoli on the appropriately named Avenida Liberdade. Gogg, who was sailing on a later ship, came to the pier with another released internee named Isler, and they waved goodbye to Steinberg as he boarded the Excalibur, a ship of the American Export Line, with his small suitcase and two dollars in American money.

  On June 21, Hitler declared war on Russia; on June 22, the ship picked up fourteen Dutch sailors who had been in a lifeboat for fifteen days after their ship had been torpedoed; on June 23, they stopped in the Azores to allow “eight clandestine passengers” to disembark. After that it was a straight shot to New York on rough seas, and on July 1 the Excalibur sailed into New York Harbor. Cesar Civita was there with the New York Steinberg family, but they were not able to do more than greet Saul briefly. Henrietta Danson noticed sadly that his little valise contained only an extra shirt, a pair of socks, and an apple he had taken from the ship’s dining room.

  Despite Harry Steinberg’s plea to Mrs. Reyher of the Dominican Settlement Association that Saul be allowed to stay with his relatives until his departure, they were not even allowed to take him into Manhattan for an afternoon of sightseeing. He could only greet them before customs guards hustled him off to the barracks on Ellis Island, where he was interned until the ship for the Dominican Republic was ready to sail. He spent his first American Fourth of July there, so close to the New York he had dreamed of but still so far away that he could not even see the famed Manhattan skyline. By the time he sailed, Civita had joined the Dansons and Steinbergs to outfit him with everything he might need, including lightweight clothing and leather oxfords, the first he had ever worn. They also supplied him with an English dictionary, writing and drawing supplies, and, most important of all, various unguents and insect repellents to ward off tropical diseases.

  “They’ve brought me everything,” he wrote to his parents. “They are all very nice and polite and very attentive.” He told Rosa and Moritz that he wanted to start working as soon as he landed, as he believed he had the “hope and potential to succeed.” It was a brave boast made just before he boarded a ship on July 5, to sail off to a life he could not even begin to fathom.

  CHAPTER 7

  TO ANSWER IN ENGLISH—A HEROIC DECISION

  He is now in the Dominican Republic. He has no passport … it is very much to our interest that he come to New York … The question is, can we do anything to help things along.

  The voyage took eight hot and fretful days because the ship was delayed for three in Puerto Rico. When it finally docked at a small port on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, no explanation was given for why they were not going to Ciudad Trujillo, as planned, and everyone was ordered off. Steinberg discovered that Spanish was an easy language to learn for one who knew Italian, and he was able to speak enough to hire a car that drove him to the capital city through the inferno of midsummer heat. He arrived on July 13 and immediately became aware of how bribery and corruption fueled the government of the megalomaniac dictator, General Rafael Trujillo, who had even renamed the venerable city of Santo Domingo after himself. Steinberg was struck by the kaleidoscopic profusion of color in the local landscape, the abundance of tropical foods, and the bustle and fervor of the people who crowded the streets. But the strongest impression for a European coming from a colder clime was the intense and suffocating heat, and within days he was sick.

  He spent most of his first month in bed under a canopy of heavy netting, felled by malaria and trying to fend off voracious mosquitoes with a variety of the medicines and spray guns of Flit insect repellent his cousins had provided. He was in a pleasant enough hotel room, paid for by Cesar Civita, who sent fifty dollars every month as an advance against future earnings, and he still had a little left from the funds his friends had contributed before he left Italy, supplemented by what his uncle and cousins had given before he left New York. He drew his room in a letter to Henrietta Danson, complete with an arrow pointing to the green lizard on the floor beside his bed, which ate all the flies, roaches, and gnats who tried to invade it. “I shall try to answer in English—is an heroic decision,” he told her in his still imperfect command of the language, and he followed the declaration with an arrow pointing to a squib of his sweating self sitting at a desk with a large dictionary open in front of him. By October he had still not recovered from the malaria, but he tried to work, even though it was “impossible to be very well” in such a dreadful climate.

  Cesar Civita had arranged for
him to draw daily comic strips for Dominican newspapers, which he did because the pay was decent, even though none of them engaged his interest. He told Henrietta Danson that he had generated more good ideas for cartoons in a single afternoon in Milan than he did in an entire month in Santo Domingo. Otherwise, daily life was dull and he did little. He managed a daily ocean swim but was too lethargic to practice English; he thought the Dominican people “much primitive” and socialized only with other Romanian refugees, befriending an architect from Bucharest, Paul Rossin, and his wife, Tina, and brother, Pierre. He went to their home for meals or to pass evenings with them and other Romanian refugees, particularly a family named Godesteanu. They all knew each other from Bucharest, and talked frequently of Leventer, who had returned home hoping to work as an architect, and the peripatetic Perlmutter, who was rumored to be in Hollywood but was actually in Algiers. All the reminiscences overwhelmed Steinberg with a sense of what he had lost, as they brought back memories of other Romanian friends and summer outings in the countryside.

  By the end of his first month in Santo Domingo, he realized that he was getting a lot of good news, all coming steadily from the Civitas’ New York office. Gertrude Einstein, the woman who ran their office with the utmost efficiency, told Steinberg that Cesar had sold some drawings to various American publications, but the real excitement came when The New Yorker bought one and wanted more and Mademoiselle bought “four or five” for a double page in the Christmas issue and wanted another double-page spread for Valentine’s Day. He told his Danson cousins (still in imperfect English) that he knew of “the very goods English like Punch and Humorist, but I think The New Yorker is the top. Is very flattery for me.” Then The New Yorker asked for more drawings, and suddenly he had so many commissions that even doing work he loved became almost more than he could handle.

  He thought his malaria was cured, but by mid-October he was ill again and described himself as looking “like a x‑ray picture full with quinine, fever, etc.” He was in bed during another heat wave, which lasted through November and made him even more “ill and furious.” He had been in Santo Domingo for four months, and for more than two he had been bedridden and often unable to work. That was his chief frustration, but there was a long litany of others, starting with parcels of clothing the Steinbergs and Dansons sent from New York. Customs officials expected bribes, so they refused to give him a package containing trousers and shoes valued at $25 until he paid an unofficial “tax” of $19. Since he was against it in principle and short of money besides, he asked a Dominican acquaintance who knew the customs officials to offer a smaller bribe, which was successful.

  NO MATTER HOW SICK, TIRED, OR DEPRESSED Steinberg was, he always forced himself to write relentlessly cheerful letters to his parents, even to the point of stretching the truth by exaggerating how much money he was making and how, if his good fortune continued, he would be able to bring them “over here soon.” Hoping to placate Rosa, he adopted his Aunt Mina’s flowery style of letter writing and used her religious exhortations to preface almost every statement. His letters were full of expressions asking for God’s help or hoping that God would bless his various undertakings. The only unvarnished truth he told was to describe how his good fortune in escaping from Italy had made him so aware of his Jewish heritage that he fasted on Yom Kippur, not only for himself but also to honor his parents. And yet no matter what he wrote, it was not enough to calm his mother, who was convinced that her twenty-seven-year-old son was dejected and depressed and his spirits would rise only from being in her presence.

  After the United States entered the war, Rosa insisted that Saul was in greater danger in Santo Domingo than he had ever been in in Italy. She chose this moment to write hysterical letters to Harry Steinberg, alarming him and irritating Saul when he learned of them. Harry tried to pacify her by telling Moritz that “the main thing is to calm Rosa.” Patiently, and “especially for Rosa,” he described the peril Saul had faced in Italy, but she was still determined that he must return to Bucharest. Harry tried repeatedly to tell her that her wish for him to return was unrealistic, and he begged her to have faith that Saul would be successful and bring her “great naches,” using the Yiddish expression for the pride or pleasure a Jewish parent gets from a child. Rosa ignored everything he said, including his careful descriptions of how much Saul was earning, of his excellent diet amid the abundance of food, and of his pleasant life in a paradise that tourists paid handsomely to visit. She ignored everything, insisting that Saul was in danger, and at that point Harry lost patience, writing, “You don’t help him by being upset … on the contrary, you discourage him, and he has to be encouraged.” Whether Harry ever persuaded Rosa to calm down became a moot point, because mail service to and from Romania was severed, and for the next several years only an occasional cryptic message sent through the auspices of the National Society Red Cross of Romania reached any of them.

  ROSA’S OUTBURST PALED BEFORE THE WORST blow of all, which came just when Saul was weakest from malaria. Aldo sent a letter saying he could no longer keep it secret that he and Ada had had an affair. The letter was Saul’s first real contact with either of them since he arrived in Santo Domingo, and it left him reeling. They had written to him in Tortoreto and Lisbon, but mail delivery was sporadic, and for every letter he received, many others were either delayed or lost. One of the first things he did after landing on Ellis Island in July was to write a letter to Aldo begging for news. Aldo did reply in August, but Saul did not receive that letter until October, and the only news it contained was of the affair. Aldo said he needed to tell Saul because their friendship meant everything to him, and he begged Saul not to end it. Even though Saul was stunned by the confession, he did not wait to hear Ada’s side of the story before taking Aldo’s: “He makes it clear that she is the guilty one … that the thing lasted for a while, that it was he who ended it when he received the letter from me from Ellis Island. She had wanted to keep it secret.” In a fit of self-pity, he added “poor me.”

  Several days later he received two letters from Ada with her version of the affair. “She writes bullshit,” he decided. In her usual blunt manner, Ada was brutally frank about what had happened between her and Aldo. She took full responsibility, asking Saul not to “feel rancor toward Aldo because he certainly regrets it greatly.” She told him her “heart had nothing to do with it” and the encounter was purely physical. She insisted that she had controlled it and if she had not wanted Aldo, or anyone else for that matter, “no one would have touched me.” Ada was especially angry with Saul for believing that the only reason she had told him was that Aldo and perhaps some of his other friends had already done so. She insisted that she would have told him herself, probably sooner rather than later, but as he had done throughout their relationship, he needed to invent some reason to doubt her. She said that she had told him because she needed to get it into the open, but “as usual I did the wrong thing.”

  In response to Saul’s continuing criticism, Ada wrote several more letters trying to explain how little the affair mattered. He dismissed them as further attempts to justify herself, and he worked himself into melodramas as each one made him “suffer anew” and relive the shock and anguish of his first awareness of it. In these letters Ada tried to explain how it happened by describing how she had been thrown into constant contact with Aldo during the months when the two of them were working frantically to secure the money and transit visas Saul needed. She reminded him again of how she had written over and over to him in Tortoreto, begging him to write directly to her rather than addressing letters meant for the two of them to Aldo so that he could read them first. Ada claimed that Aldo had an irrational need to hoard Saul’s letters; he would not even tell her when he received them and would let her read them only if she found out from others that they had arrived. Aldo never volunteered that letters had come; even worse, he would not let her see the pages but would read them aloud and keep them for himself. Often, to find out if Aldo had re
ceived a letter, she had to go around asking other friends if they had heard news of Saul. If they had, she then had to track down Aldo, and that was never easy. She usually began at the Grillo, and if he was not there she went to his studio or various workplaces. Once she trekked to a nearby village where he was visiting his mother, and another time to a village where his sister lived. Ada tried to make a joke of it, albeit a grim one, when she told Saul how she had to involve Aldo’s entire family in order to get news of him.

  For whatever reason, Aldo did not like Ada, perhaps because he did not trust her. She hinted at Aldo’s resentment in almost every letter that reached Saul in Tortoreto, as if she hoped he would do something to resolve the situation. Usually she began positively, by describing the frenzy with which Aldo was working to establish helpful contacts within the bureaucracy, how he was raising money to pay “small fees” (that is, bribes), and how he would send her to Genoa while he went to Rome so they could save time and cut through red tape by pleading with separate ministries. It was not until after she praised Aldo’s efforts that she told Saul the truth about how they related to each other. Ada seemed puzzled by how cryptic and cold Aldo was to her, and how he was so uncomfortable in her presence that he would sometimes walk away abruptly in the middle of a conversation, leaving her to worry about what, if anything, he knew about Saul’s incarceration that he was not telling her.

  All that changed after Saul was safely on board ship for the Americas. As neither Ada nor Aldo was receiving mail from him, each contacted the other routinely to see if anything had arrived. Gradually strained conversation led to easy conviviality and then to unexpected intimacy. Ada told all this to Saul in the hope that it would be the end of his endless demands for her to rehash the details of the affair. She hoped he would soon tire of brooding so they could put it behind them, but his very next letter asked her to describe yet again every intimacy that had transpired. She begged Saul to realize how lonely she had been after he left and how she simply lost control of herself momentarily. She was not seeking to absolve herself of blame, but she wanted him to stop picking at the scab of something that should be allowed to heal: “You are making a big deal out of it, and you hurt me by dwelling on it.” Still, he was unable to let it go; “I have to vent,” he declared. Whatever he did to assuage his anger seems to have worked: several days later, when Ada sent a photo from Genoa of herself with her husband and dog, he merely commented that he had received it.