Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “Or you can have something written inside. That’s what he did. He gave me one like it once—put in a line from one of his poems.” She paused, gazing at her daughter, who had fastened the locket around her neck, then added an uncharacteristically philosophical aside: “Probably things reappear all the time, only we don’t recognize them. We’re too caught up in what’s going on at the moment to feel the past right there in the present.” She grew silent, then resumed her more usual, straightforward tone. “Anyway, I think you look beautiful. Just like I did when he took me on the canal the first time and kissed me.”

  “Mother!”

  Still, Margot had to admit that she felt good wearing the dress and the locket. The room itself was a jewel box—with its gold-leaf wallpaper, antique desk, and canopied bed, its velvet curtains swagged along the casement windows. They were overlooking the canal and could see the magnificent façade of a church across the way.

  “The Church of Salute,” said Jessie, gazing out at the edifice. “Very grand.”

  When they went down to the bar, where the group had congregated for a late-night snack, everyone turned to look at Margot.

  “The locket is a gift from my mother,” she said, embarrassed. “She bought it because it reminds her of one she said he gave her.” Margot’s voice had only a trace of mockery in it; she could feel herself falling under the spell of Jessie’s fantasy.

  Hal stared silently, but Anish was quick to express admiration. “You look like a Gritti princess, or at least a Franco Zeffirelli Juliet. All you need is your devoted Romeo, a role that I slavishly beg to occupy.”

  Margot laughed and gave a regal bow of her head.

  Anish proceeded to introduce himself and his colleague, Felicity Gardencourt, a very thin, pale woman who looked as though she had spent too much time eating tuna fish sandwiches in library carrels. Felicity was the product of a New England family, straight out of a Hawthorne novel, for whom sublimation was as much a part of the family inheritance as the pewter cutlery and the drafty, large-shingled house on Cape Cod where the Gardencourts congregated each August for uncomfortable family gatherings. Like Anish, Felicity was an assistant professor at Yale, respected for her excellent monographs on the Italian Renaissance, though not for her teaching style, which tended to be short on the kind of animation required to keep undergraduates awake. In the words of the Yale Student Course Review Guide: “This woman needs to get a life.”

  Nonetheless, as a Renaissance historian with a thorough grasp of the minutiae of her field, she could certainly be useful in tracking down a lost manuscript from that era.

  Hal immediately began interrogating Felicity on specific historical points. Jessie had said she was thirteen at the time she visited the palace with her father to meet the Vatican ambassador, which would have put her visit at around 1588 or ’89—since she first met Will, she said, when she was seventeen, in 1593. Did Professor Gardencourt know what the palace was being used for in 1588?

  Felicity seemed well versed in the subject. “Doge Andrea Gritti built this palace for himself in 1525 and continued on as doge until 1534,” she explained. “After that, the building was used for a variety of diplomatic purposes, including the housing of the Vatican ambassadors, frequent visitors to the region.”

  Hal and Margot looked at each other. “Would there ever be occasion for a Jew to meet with the Vatican ambassador?” asked Hal.

  Felicity responded without a pause. “The Vatican negotiated with the doge and the Venetian trade council on a variety of matters. Since the Venetians relied on trade with the Ottoman Empire, who in turn used the Jews as intermediaries, the Vatican was obliged to deal with them as well.”

  “So you’re saying that Levantine Jews occupied a role of importance in Venice?” asked Hal.

  “Yes,” replied Felicity. “Of course, the debacle involving Joseph Nasi set things back a bit, but that happened earlier than the period you’re referring to.”

  “Nasi,” said Jessie. “Poppa said he was a meshuggener.”

  “Meshuggener?” queried Felicity. Yiddish terms had apparently not penetrated her library carrel.

  “It’s Yiddish for a crazy person,” elucidated Hal.

  “I don’t know that that quite captures the nuance of the word,” protested Margot in a sudden renewed desire to place Hal in the wrong.

  “It’s the gist,” intervened Jessie.

  Felicity nodded in apparent agreement and proceeded to elaborate: “Joseph Nasi was a member of the wealthy Mendes banking family of Lisbon and Antwerp—a Marrano who ingratiated himself with Suleiman the Magnificent and his son and heir, Selim, rulers of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-sixteenth century. He was briefly named ruler of the island of Naxos and hoped to become king of Cyprus. His attempt to drive the Venetians from Cyprus failed, however, when the Turks were defeated at Lepanto, after which there was a backlash against the Jews in Venice. Talmuds were burned and Jewish movement in the city was closely monitored for several years afterward.”

  Everyone in the group had begun to shift restlessly. Felicity’s tendency to deliver long expositions in a relative monotone, with no sense that her audience was falling asleep, was notorious at Yale. Some of her more inventive students had taken to imagining her in black leather holding a whip. But mental imagery could go only so far, and most ended up with their heads on their desks.

  Fortunately, Jessie intervened again. “When we first came here, Poppa had a time cleaning up the mess that man Nasi made. Not that I remember; I was still a baby.” She paused. “Kit said Nasi was the subject of his play.”

  “The Jew of Malta,” clarified Hal for the company.

  “Thank God Poppa and his cousin came along to set a good example and make things right with the doge.”

  “His cousin?”

  “Daniel Rodrigues, a nice man but also a wheeler-dealer. Used to bring me gold bangles from the Orient. Said I shouldn’t say where I got them.”

  Felicity took this up. “Daniel Rodrigues was another wealthy Marrano, but one who maintained good relations between the Venetian state and the Ottoman Empire. He eventually opened up trade routes to the East, convincing the trade councils of the feasibility of ignoring and, in some cases, countermanding Vatican law.”

  “Yes,” said Jessie, “he and Poppa did all that.”

  “And your father’s name was?” prompted Hal.

  “Avram Rodrigues. But she wouldn’t know about him.” Jessie nodded toward Felicity. “He didn’t like to put himself forward. He used to say, ‘Let Daniel get the covet, make the appearances. Me, I’m content to stay in the background.’”

  Felicity took out a pad and began taking notes. “It’s something to look into,” she observed. “Other family members may well have been involved in some of Rodrigues’s trade negotiations; there may be no record of such involvement, but it would be interesting to search the annals for possible references.”

  “Well, I think that’s enough background for now,” said Hal. He had noted that Jessie had begun to look tired. “We all need to be fresh for our adventure tomorrow. Let’s get an early start and agree to meet for breakfast at seven. As for you”—he looked at Jessie affectionately—“you need to get a good night’s sleep. I’m counting on your daughter”—he glanced quickly at Margot and then, just as quickly, looked away—“to see to that.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The next MORNING AT SEVEN THEY ALL GATHERED FOR breakfast in the hotel’s lavish dining room. Hal and Anish, both excited about the forthcoming adventure, were in high spirits and launched into a debate about literature—more or less a standing argument they had had since college. It was Anish’s view that James Joyce was the beginning of the end of western literature, while Hal was Joyce’s energetic defender.

  The debate flared up now as they stood selecting from various delicacies at a central buffet table. Hal argued that Anish was too deeply “colonized” to recognize revolutionary genius and innovation. “Let’s face it, as the product of
cultural imperialism, you’ve come to identify with the oppressor. It’s the Patty Hearst syndrome.”

  “Spare me your PC posturing,” responded Anish irritably. “We’re not undergraduates anymore. Why are you American-born liberals allowed to have free will and I, an Indian-born conservative, am not? It sounds to me like classic colonialism masquerading as moral righteousness—just another turn on white man’s burden. As for my openness to new ideas, I’m the first to recognize originality when there’s something more to it than gimmickry. Mrs. Kaplan’s thesis has captivated me, for example. I see a basic intellectual design to the thing, which is more than I can say for your Mr. Joyce, who merely opened the door for every posturing fool who could concoct nonsense and call himself an artiste.”

  “But Joyce was a great artist and a great innovator,” protested Hal. “He was trying to encompass the entire history of civilization, of language, of meaning itself within the frame of his literary enterprise.”

  “Well, then, he was trying to do too much,” pronounced Anish dismissively. “Give me Jane Austen’s fine brush any time.”

  “And what about Milton, Tolstoy, Melville? What about our own fellow, Shakespeare—they all took up rather a large canvas, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You confuse epic scale and imagination with babble and pastiche. That pantheon—and I am not prepared to grant them all equal greatness since, as you know, I feel there’s been a sad falling off since the age of Samuel Johnson—but at least those you mentioned were determined to communicate with some semblance of clarity and logic. No, it’s these gibbering monkeys of modernism and postmodernism that I have no use for. They think that by speaking nonsense they speak all tongues—that the less clear they are, the more they say. And there are always snobs and suckers—forgive me if you fall into those categories—willing to agree.”

  Margot, who had been standing nearby next to the trays of Parma ham and fresh fruit, intervened at this point: “So, Anish, if you’re so opposed to Hal’s views, how come you continue to be friends?”

  “Views have nothing to do with it,” responded Anish with surprise, as if it would never have occurred to him to think that they did. “Our friendship is based on character, not opinion.” He had entirely changed his tone, dispensing with “views” and warming to the idea of praising his friend. “Hal is someone I respect and trust—indeed I love. He is the honnête homme, as Molière’s Alceste called his friend Philinte. I hold him in my ‘heart’s core,’ as Hamlet held Horatio.”

  “That’s right,” joked Hal, “I’m the hero’s best friend. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.” He darted a glance at Margot.

  “Hal is comfortable with ambiguity,” continued Anish, determined not to let Hal’s jokes get in the way of his exposition. “Look how he’s managed to deal with your mother’s situation. He neither believes nor disbelieves; he accepts. There’s a bit of the Zen master about him.”

  “Ommm,” said Margot, putting her hands up in yogi fashion and making everyone laugh.

  “Enough already.” Hal cut short the conversation. “I can see that our guide is restless and eager to be on her way.”

  In fact, Jessie had barely touched her breakfast and was sitting at the edge of her chair, staring into space. She had slept soundly, but had awakened with a premonition of something momentous about to happen.

  They caught the vaporetto at the steps of the hotel. It snaked up the canal, eventually arriving only a few blocks from the ghetto. Hal, who was holding the map, led the way as they walked through the cobbled streets. At one point Jessie paused and stood stock-still. She pointed to a small stone building. “There,” she said, “was where Jacopo Robusti lived. Poppa thought he was a great genius.”

  “The home of the painter Tintoretto,” clarified Felicity, nodding.

  They proceeded onto the little bridge that led over the canal to the area of the ghetto. A carving of two lions marked the arch leading into the area.

  “The lions of Judah,” noted Jessie, peering up.

  “In actuality,” corrected Felicity, “the lions were the insignia of the Brolo brothers, who originally developed the area before it was made into a settlement location for the Jews. But the later inhabitants appropriated it as the expression of their own identity,” she added, as though giving Jessie permission to have made this historical error.

  Having crossed the bridge, they entered the large campo of the so-called Getto Nuovo, or New Ghetto (though actually the first one settled). The stone houses were built very high. Although the general effect was picturesque, one had to consider that living conditions were not very pleasant.

  “It’s where the poorer ones lived,” explained Jessie. “We didn’t mix with them much, except for the shopping. You could get some good buys if you knew where to look,” she said to Margot.

  Felicity pointed to the top of one of the buildings. “That’s the Scola Grande Tedesca on the top floor. It’s the German synagogue, and the oldest in the ghetto.” Everyone craned their necks. They could make out a Hebrew inscription. “There are two other synagogues in this part of the ghetto.” She pointed to the upper levels of two other buildings in the square.

  “Yes, they built them on the top to be closer to God, as they liked to say,” said Jessie, “but really where else could they go? There was no room. But this isn’t where we lived. We want to go this way.” She had gotten ahead of Hal, and now led them through a narrow, cobbled street into a smaller area.

  As they arrived into this small square, Jessie breathed a sigh. “Here we are.”

  Everyone stopped and looked around. Jessie had an expression of excited recognition on her face. It was the Getto Vecchio, or Old Ghetto, named for the old foundry that had once been there.

  “It looks the same,” she said, “but without the decorations. We used to have flowers in the windowboxes and brass plates on the doors. Sometimes there were banners hanging for the festivals or to announce the special programs. Always they were giving lessons or having meetings: concerts, lectures, talks, you name it. And so much noise: people playing instruments, arguing philosophy, gentiles walking around in fancy clothes with their servants. But now it’s quiet, like ghosts live here.”

  Felicity stepped in with the supporting commentary. “There were six thousand Jews in the ghetto during the sixteenth century. Half were killed by the plague in the seventeenth. Centuries later, those who remained were destroyed during the Holocaust. Only about six hundred Jews live in Venice today, with perhaps sixty living in the ghetto area.”

  “There’s our synagogue,” interrupted Jessie, pointing to a large yellow stone building.

  Everyone turned to look.

  Then, suddenly, Jessie’s eyes began darting back and forth as though trying to locate something. She grasped Margot’s arm and seemed for a moment to lose her footing.

  “Are you okay, Mom?”

  “Yes, yes. It’s over there.” Jessie had grown quite pale and was shaking. She pointed to a building in the corner of the campo, and the group followed as she made her way toward it.

  As they approached they could see the words GAM GAM on a sign at the front of the building. Closer inspection revealed it to be a restaurant, apparently the only one in the ghetto. A small placard in the window pronounced that it was run by the Chabad of Venice and offered glatt kosher food, from lunch to dinner, Sunday through Thursday, and on Friday, from lunchtime to two hours before the advent of Shabbos. A small note indicated that it also offered Shabbos dinner, free of charge, to interested visitors.

  “There must be a big demand for kosher food,” noted Margot, “given they’re almost always open.”

  “Unfortunately, they’re not open now,” said Hal, looking at his watch. It was only nine-thirty, and the sign said the restaurant would open at twelve-thirty. He had been in a state of barely suppressed excitement as they entered the small campo, and to have this final lap of his journey delayed was clearly a source of frustration. “We’ll need to kill a few hours
and come back,” he said, trying not to sound disappointed and smiling reassuringly at Jessie.

  “So what do you want to do?” asked Margot, glancing at the group around her, though avoiding eye contact with Hal.

  “Felicity and I noticed a bookshop we passed on our way from the vaporetto stop,” said Anish. “It seemed to have some interesting reference works on the city that Felicity, with her eagle eye, thought might be useful. I’m keen to have a closer look. What do you say we meet back here around one? It says twelve-thirty on the sign, but in Italy, you have to allow leeway for picturesque tardiness.”

  “I’d like to take a gondola on the canal,” said Jessie softly. “I think it would be a nice way to pass the time.”

  Hal nodded agreeably and took Jessie’s arm, while Margot shrugged and followed behind them. They made their way out of the campo to the side of the canal and hailed one of the more brightly painted boats, replete with a dark-eyed, striped-sweatered gondolier, who kissed his fingers at them, his eyes lingering predictably on Margot.

  It took some maneuvering on the part of both Hal and Margot to get Jessie comfortably settled in the front of the boat. They then took their places opposite her, as the gondola began its slow sweep up the canal.

  “Very nice,” sighed Jessie, “just as I remembered. The buildings, though”—she pointed across to the rows of stone buildings at the edge of the canal—“they don’t seem as high.”

  “They say Venice is sinking,” noted Hal. “Lately, an inch or more a year. If the process dates back to your period, I can imagine you’d notice a difference in the size of the buildings.”

  Jessie did not seem interested in dwelling on this observation. She had been gazing around her, the soft splash of the oars appearing to lull her into a dreamy state. Margot and Hal sat quietly next to each other, taking care to look scrupulously at the sights and not at each other. Riding in a gondola in Venice was the most clichéd of tourist activities, and yet both felt moved by the experience. A slight shiver passed through Margot. It was December and there was a chill in the air, but she was not so much cold as possessed by the eerie romance of her surroundings. She could feel the slight brush of Hal’s jeans against her leg.