Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “Now,” said Hal, addressing Jessie with gentle seriousness, “you have certainly piqued my interest, and I’d like to hear more. I have an hour before I have to get back for my sixth-period class, and I wonder if you could answer some questions.”

  Jessie said that this would be fine, but he should eat his Reuben before it got cold.

  Hal took a bite from his sandwich, then extracted a pad and pencil from his pocket and prepared to take notes. “First, if you could tell me about the kind of life you led in Venice during that other time … Where you lived in the city, for example, might be a good place to start.”

  “We all lived in one area,” said Jessie. “Crowded in. It was a tight fit.”

  “The Jews, you’re talking about,” clarified Hal. He’d been reading up on the subject and had learned that during the Renaissance, Jews in Venice had been segregated to one part of the city—an island of its own, itself divided into two areas. “From what I read,” he explained to Jessie, “the Old Ghetto, also known as the Getto Vecchio, was settled later than the New Ghetto, but was called the Old Ghetto because it was located near an old foundry—getto, its seems, means ‘foundry’ in Italian.”

  “So what?” said Jessie impatiently.

  “Okay, okay. My question is, were you in the Old Ghetto or the New?”

  “The Old,” Jessie responded without hesitation. “The riffraff Ashkenazim were in the New. We were Sephardim—more high-class. From Spain by way of the Levant.”

  “I see,” said Hal, jotting this down. “Your family left Spain for the Ottoman Empire before settling in Venice?”

  “Yes. In Spain, they made Father’s family say they’d give up being Jews—that’s why they left. The Church had gotten so they couldn’t take a breath.”

  “The Inquisition: forced conversion, torture, burning at the stake for heresy?”

  “All that—and more.”

  “So your family were Marranos, secret Jews?”

  “Yes, but they stopped being secret when they came to the Levant. The Turks didn’t care—what did they know from the Church? You see, Jews and Arabs got along back then. They were both being pushed around, so they decided, why not get together and make like a partnership? The Christians would have to treat us right if they wanted to get their ships through. And that’s how Poppa became such a big macher. The doge needed him to make the negotiations with the Turks and work out the trade routes to the East.”

  “So he made his money from foreign trade negotiations, not by loaning at interest to individuals?”

  “That’s right. He lent money mostly as a favor. Three percent or less, he charged. It was the German and Italian Jews in the New Ghetto who charged more. Not that they had a choice. They didn’t have connections like we did. It was their living.”

  “But you were all confined to one area—the two ghettos surrounded by the canals?”

  “Yes, there was only one entrance and it was guarded by Christians. They used to lock up the gates to our part of town at night. I don’t know where they were afraid we would go. But it didn’t really mean anything to us. We paid the guards and did what we pleased. It was crowded, I grant you—everything on top of everything, six stories or more to the buildings. But we didn’t mind so much; it was snug, that’s all. There were plenty of synagogues and other things too: bookstores and salonieri, which were like our book clubs today; doctors and dentists to beat the band. A music school, very well thought of, even the gentiles came for lessons. And the shops—you name it, we had it. Jews weren’t allowed to make things but we could sell them. Strazzaria-shmatta stores, it meant—but high-quality merchandise. Also very popular with the gentiles. They came to shop or get a tooth pulled, maybe. For gambling too; that was very big.”

  “They had gambling in the ghetto?”

  “Sure. They used to come from all over, a regular Atlantic City. When they ran out of money, they came to Poppa for a loan. They knew he was generous and wouldn’t take advantage.”

  “It sounds like maybe your father shared more qualities with Antonio in The Merchant of Venice than with Shylock. Antonio was the character who lent the young man money in the play and from whom Shylock wanted to take his pound of flesh. He was supposed to be prosperous, generous, a good businessman, and a good friend.”

  “I suppose,” said Jessie doubtfully. “But he was a gentile; Shylock was a Jew.”

  “Yes, but authors sometimes spread qualities around among different characters. It could be that Shakespeare put some of your father into Antonio, even though the character was a gentile, and some of himself into Shylock, even though Shylock was a Jew. Maybe he felt cheated out of his bond—his right to you—and wanted to seek revenge on your father, the way Shylock wanted revenge on Antonio.”

  Jessie ruminated on this for a moment. “It’s a thought,” she said, “but I don’t buy it.”

  “All right,” continued Hal, taking another tack. “What about your mother? You haven’t mentioned her. What was she like?”

  “My mother died of typhoid when I was four. It was common to die young then, especially the women—some died of typhoid, some in childbirth, some from other things we didn’t even have names for. I barely remember her. As far as I knew, it was always Poppa and me. I ruled the roost. Nothing like the way it was made out in the play.”

  Hal nodded. “So you and your father lived alone. What was your relationship to the rest of the community?”

  “We were looked up to. Poppa was rich and had connections. We mixed mostly with the wealthiest families and of course with the rebbe. The rebbe’s son was a nice boy—they were going to send him to Padua to train in medicine, but later he decided he’d follow in his father’s footsteps and be a rebbe, too. His name was Leon Modena—maybe you heard of him? He became chief rabbi and had a big reputation for new ideas. He married my girlfriend Rivkah, though it was me he really liked. That’s what set Will off the first time.”

  “He was jealous of the rabbi’s son?”

  “Yes, he saw me walking with Leon in the Campiello and he assumed … that’s where the nasty sonnets came from. Later he wrote the others to make up for them.”

  “The others?”

  “I told you he wrote more to the lady than what you said.”

  “More than the twenty-seven we have?”

  “Way more than that. It was more like a hundred and twenty-seven.”

  Hal scribbled in the pad. “You mean as many as to the young man?”

  “At least as many. As I said, the young man was just a concoction.”

  “A conceit?”

  “Whatever. It was to make me jealous. And for spite.”

  “I see,” said Hal. “But let’s backtrack. You haven’t explained how you and—Will—met. I would have thought that as a woman and a Jew, you wouldn’t have had much opportunity to meet new people, no less famous London playwrights.”

  “You would think so, but you’d be wrong. Not having a mother was part of it. And of course Poppa being such a big macher and so fond of me, he let me do whatever I wanted and no one said anything. Let’s face it; I was spoiled. Like Margot.” She gave Hal a knowing look. “What did you think of Margot? Have you asked her out on a date yet?”

  “She seemed like a nice woman,” replied Hal, wincing slightly, “but no, I haven’t asked her out.”

  “She’s not so nice,” said Jessie, “but you should. She’s an interesting girl and very sharp. She’d liven things up for you, and you might help make her nicer.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you to say,” said Hal brusquely, “but if you don’t mind, let’s get back to your story.”

  “Okay, okay. So I met Will one day when he came to the house with Kit Marlowe and one of their friends who’d gambled away his money and wanted Poppa to give him a loan. Kit had been by before and we knew his story. He was a feigeleh, but talented, and had to leave England owing to some sort of political mishegoss. Poppa took him under his wing, lent him money, introduced him to people.
Kit was educated but an outsider too, like us, so we could relate. Poppa liked to argue with him the way he did with the rebbe: ‘Is the Bible true or made up?’ ‘Why did God do this and not that? ‘Who knows even if there is a God?’—that kind of thing. Then Kit started bringing his friends. Some wanted to borrow money, some wanted to look at me.”

  “So you were an attraction?”

  “I was nice to look at, yes,” said Jessie frankly. “I looked like Margot, but not as sharp-tongued. So everyone liked me.”

  Hal nodded.

  “So, like I said, one day they brought Will along. He’d just come in from London to meet with Kit about the plays. Kit was better educated and Will had him add some touches to make them more high-class. In those days, you had to appeal to high and low together. Very demanding. So Kit would add a fancy word here, a quotation there, some Latin maybe, and Will would give him a little money and take him to dinner. So one day, one of their friends had some bad luck with the dice and they came to Poppa for help, and maybe to show me off—they knew Will had an eye for the ladies. I was crossing to the rebbe’s house as they came and they stopped me and said, ‘This is our friend Will, just come from London. Won’t you give him a nice smile?’ Since when am I stingy with smiles? So I did, and the next thing you know, he was hanging around writing me the sonnets and telling Poppa how we should come to London for the business opportunities.”

  “Did you go to London?”

  “A few trips. I was already fluent in English—Poppa had had in tutors. And when we went, I even made some friends with the women there. They gave me their recipes and some pointers on how to dress. Will was very much the gentleman—took us to all the fancy places and to see a play he’d written about two families that hated each other.”

  “Romeo and Juliet?”

  “Yes. Stephanie did a beautiful job with that scene on the balcony. But who needs so much fighting? Like the Feldsteins and the Cutlers in Vineland: Rhona Feldstein fell for Michael Cutler, and her father said he’d kill them both if she didn’t break off with that lousy nogoodnik whose father had dented his Lincoln. Well, they eloped and of course the family got over it. Once the grandchild came, it was water under the bridge. Will’s play didn’t end so happy, which was a mistake, if you ask me. I told him, ‘People don’t want the children dying; it’s gloomy.’ At first he was offended, but later he said I had a point. So there you have it; we fell in love.”

  “And your father didn’t mind?”

  “He did. He said, ‘The man’s a fine man, a genius even, but you can’t like a nice Jewish boy, the rebbe’s son, he’s crazy for you? Take him; leave this playwright alone.’ So I tried to take his advice. Went out with Leon a few times. It didn’t take. But Will heard and so he wrote the nasty sonnets and the concoctions to the young man.”

  “And then?”

  “We got back together. Poppa said, ‘Okay, if it’s what you want. Maybe we can get him to convert.’ Will, you see, claimed he had some Jewish blood on his mother’s side, way back. It might have been made up, who knows? Making things up was his profession. But it played well with Poppa. ‘A little Jewish blood goes a long way,’ he liked to say.”

  “Hmm,” said Hal. “I’ve heard stories that Shakespeare had Jewish blood—but then again, there are stories that everyone has Jewish blood.”

  “That’s true,” admitted Jessie.

  “Though it would help my theory about his putting himself into the Shylock character,” noted Hal.

  “But Shylock was very Jewish, not just a little,” objected Jessie.

  “So then what?” prompted Hal, feeling that they weren’t getting anywhere discussing precisely how Jewish Shakespeare might have been.

  “And so it went on for a while. We had a good time: I’m happy, he’s happy. That’s when he wrote the other sonnets, the ones you don’t know about. He gave them to me for my birthday. I kept them under the floorboard of my room in a special box. A hundred of them, at least.”

  “Hmmm,” said Hal, “a stash of lost Shakespeare sonnets … . Very interesting.” He jotted something in his notebook, and they were both silent for a moment.

  “And then?” asked Hal, finally breaking the silence.

  “And then, I get the letter from the Stratford woman. Said how she was his wife, married him years ago, three children, one died. Called me a ‘Hebrew harridan’—that was the phrase. I remember because it had a ring to it.”

  “You felt lied to, betrayed?”

  “Yes,” murmured Jessie, seeming for a moment to drift off.

  “And to think of Saul Millman kissing that girl,” she remarked, out of the blue.

  “What?” said Hal. “Saul who?”

  “No, no,” said Jessie, shaking herself, “it’s Will I’m talking about. He’d been married to that woman and never told me. Hathaway, her name was—the English had names like that. They sound made up, but they’re real. Her letter came as a shock, as you can imagine.”

  “And what then?”

  “I broke off, what do you think—I’m going to be with a married man? A gentile was bad enough, but married with kids?” Jessie had grown agitated. “What do you take me for?”

  “No, no,” said Hal, trying to calm her. “I understand.”

  “That’s when he wrote the play smearing Poppa and me. I know it was because he was hurt and wanted to get back—but still, it was a low blow. I never spoke to him again.”

  “He tried to get back together?”

  “He tried. He had Kit Marlowe come by with some sort of fa-chochta story: it wasn’t us, just a coincidence, happens all the time, like his play, The Jew of Malta.” She paused here to explain: “That was a play Kit wrote about a nasty Jew and his daughter—he told Poppa when they first met that it wasn’t so much against Jews as we might think and that besides, he wrote it before he met us. We gave him the benefit of the doubt.”

  Hal nodded, obviously familiar with The Jew of Malta.

  “Anyway,” continued Jessie, “Kit said that Will was just stealing from his play: ‘Just because he never went to Cambridge, he thinks he has to write everybody else’s plays better,’ Kit said. ‘Don’t take it so personal; it’s not about you. I’m the one should be insulted.’ But he couldn’t convince me. I knew what it was about. It was smearing Poppa and me out of spite.”

  “And that was the end?”

  “Oh, I heard through the grapevine how he felt bad and added that speech for the Jew, which they said was a great thing for the time. It was a good speech, I grant you, but it didn’t cancel the rest.”

  “So you kept track of him? You watched his career?”

  “I kept abreast. We went to London again a few times for Poppa’s business, and I made a point to slip away to see the plays. I knew what he was saying in them. The one in Denmark with the Jewish characters—that was spite again. My cousin Golda’s husband was Guildenstern, and Poppa’s partner was Rosencrantz. In the play, they betrayed the hero, didn’t they, and he had them killed? Just another way of getting back. Guildenstern was a very nice man; traded in fine fabrics. We used to visit sometimes on Sunday afternoon … .”

  “To get back,” said Hal.

  “Oh, yes, as I said—eventually he softened. Had enough with the spite. Wanted to make peace. In the one with the black man: He shows how you can get carried away and how being an outsider makes for problems.”

  “Othello.”

  “And the plays he wrote at the end were his way of saying: ‘I’m sorry, I wish I’d done different.’”

  “The late romances: plots of contrition and reconciliation.”

  “The girl on the island, that was his picture of me from another angle. Poppa was the magician and Will was the wild animal that tried to take advantage. And the other one, with the jealous king who kills his wife and then has her come back to life—that was saying he was sorry for being jealous and wishing there was a second chance.”

  “The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale.” Hal nodded.


  “He wrote me kind letters then. He was, when all was said and done, a decent man. It just wasn’t meant to be between us. Who knows, but maybe I served him better by having broken off. He could make with me whatever he wanted.”

  Hal nodded. “You were his Dark Lady, his muse: Jessica, betrayer of her father; Miranda, loyal to her father.”

  “Yes—but always underneath it was the Jewish girl from Venice.” Jessie wiped her eyes with the corner of her napkin. She looked across at Hal and then down at his plate. “What’s the matter,” she said, pointing to his sandwich, “you don’t like your Reuben?”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It gradually DAWNED ON CARLA THAT THE BAT MITZVAH WAS meant to exist in two kinds of time: real time, which was fleeting and unpredictable, and recorded time, which was fixed and eternal. The whole point in hiring a photographer and a videographer was to embalm the thing in the process of its taking place—a strange, even morbid paradox that she tried not to dwell upon too closely.

  She had originally thought of asking an orderly at Mark’s hospital, known to be good with a digital camera, to take the photographs, and have some of the cousins pass around the family’s camcorder for the video. But that idea had been nixed by her friend Jill.

  “You can’t have just anyone do the photography and video,” said Jill. “You’re going to have this forever. Stephanie will want to show it to her children and grandchildren.” (The words forever, children, and grandchildren seemed to crop up again and again in the planning of the bat mitzvah).

  When it was put that way, Carla felt obliged to consider the professional options available.

  For the photographer, two candidates appeared to dominate the field. One was a middle-aged man who had been doing Cherry Hill bar mitzvahs for a hundred years and who took photos in the conventional mode (Grandma crying with pride while hugging embarrassed bat mitzvah girl; bar mitzvah boy sloppily cutting cake under mother’s distressed eye; friends of bar mitzvah boy, grinning malevolently, holding him aloft in a chair, etc., etc.). This photographer’s work was predictable, but predictable had its merits. Besides, he was known to be a genius with an airbrush. A couple of women at the JCC, no beauties, had praised him for making them look stunning.