The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

  Together you and George planned your father’s memorial service, choosing relics to be displayed on the commemorative altar – a folding banquet table draped with a red tablecloth, the same items that you’d been gathering after the service when the strange wintry woman confronted you with the information that your father was Jewish.

  The subject had been raised before. There had been that remark by a cousin in Italy, and there’d been other suggestions, rumors of distant Jewish origins in Austria – or was it some Slavic nation? The one time you’d asked him directly, your father, great scoffer that he was, scoffed at your inquiry, dismissing the suggestion offhand. Aughh, don’t be ridiculous, he’d said, or something like that.

  So neither side of your family was Jewish? you asked him.

  He’d been sitting in his rocking chair when you asked. At first the question didn’t seem to register. When it did, it didn’t faze or catch him off guard in any way. It was as if you had presented him with an absurdity, a dish of ice cream sprinkled with electronic resistors. Your father pursed his lips, shook his head.

  Aughh, he said. We were Catholic.

  Yes, I know that, but might some of your ancestors have been –

  Oh, no no no, he’d said, shaking his head vigorously (more vigorously, you would think in retrospect, than necessary), grimacing the way he did when entering lakes and other bodies of water to swim. Then the dismissive wave, as though your interrogations were a housefly pestering him. And that had been that until that woman at his funeral.

  DO YOU SEE her? you asked George soon after the woman had gone.

  Who?

  That woman who was just here talking to me.

  No. Why? Who was she?

  An old German woman. She just walked up to me and said, “Did you know your father was Jewish?”

  Your brother nodded dully.

  Do you know anything about this?

  I’ve had my suspicions, he said.

  Like you your twin had questioned your ancestry. He’d even done some research. The findings added fuel to his suspicions. Before he’d re-invented it as “Selgin,” your twin explained, your father’s surname had been Senegaglia or Senigaglia. Senigallia is the name of a port city on Italy’s Adriatic coast, George went on to say. With very few exceptions, Italians who share their last names with those of port cities are – if not Jewish – of Jewish origin, George said.

  How long have you know this?

  At least twenty years, said George with a shrug.

  Where did you learn it?

  One of our cousins probably told me (the same maternal cousin, you assumed, who had noted the downward curve of your nostrils). Then I checked up on it. It’s true. Senegalia was a common Jewish surname. It’s been around at least eight hundred years, since the Renaissance. Papa’s parents were either Jews or descended from them.

  Did you ever try to talk to Papa about this?

  I tried. Once.

  And what did he say?

  He insisted that there was no connection whatsoever, that his family’s surname had nothing to do with the port city, that it was just a coincidence.

  A coincidence? And you believed him?

  Why shouldn’t I have? He’d never lied to me before, not that I knew of.

  How come you never talked to me about this?

  Why should I have? Anyway, I didn’t think it was that important.

  You didn’t think it was important?

  No, I didn’t.

  Why would our father have told some German woman that he’s Jewish but not his own children?

  I have no idea, George said as he packed away your father’s typewriter. And honestly I don’t give a damn.

  You don’t think it’s strange?

  Who knows? Maybe she forced it out of him. Gestapo tactics. Ve hev ah veys.

  That’s not even slightly funny.

  It all makes perfect sense if you ask me, George said with another shrug. Our pacifist Anglophile Papa cozying up to his Teutonic Fräulein. Maybe he wanted to appease her. Like Neville Chamberlain and Hitler.

  IN THE TERRACED backyard of your mother’s house, you spoke with Clare, one of your two half-sisters, who had come up from Washington, D.C., for the service. In your whole life you’d seen her and Ann maybe a dozen times, almost as infrequently as their father.

  Ann and Clare had both married Jewish men. Ann’s husband, Jim, with whom she lived in St. Albans, Vermont, was a Columbia graduate and lawyer. Clare married Paul Wolfowitz.8 Unlike her sister, Clare was a practicing Jew, having converted to Judaism after her marriage.

  The former ambassador to Indonesia and Dean at Johns Hopkins, future Undersecretary of Defense for the second Bush administration.

  You told Clare about the strange woman and her claim, which you called “crazy.”

  There’s nothing crazy about it, Clare said. Papa was Jewish.

  You’ve known all along?

  Since I was a teenager. Why? Are you just realizing that now?

  Did he tell you?

  God, no. Papa never talked about it. We just sort of figured it out.

  You and Ann?

  Clare nodded.

  How?

  Clare shook her head. She had a gaunt pretty face with your father’s large deep-set eyes and aquiline nose. There were lots of clues, she said. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put them together.

  Why would he deny it in the first place?

  I’m sure he had his reasons. Being a Jew wasn’t exactly easy back in those days – not that it ever was. His mother converted to Catholicism. She hired a series of English nannies for him. I guess he took her desire to assimilate to the next level. Papa always thought of himself as English, since he was little. I think he fell in love with one of his nannies. When he came here and changed his name, that was it, the last step on the way to reinventing himself. By then there was really nothing left of his Jewish past for him to deny, not consciously, anyway.

  He lied to us, you said. To me and George.

  What did you ask him?

  We asked him if our ancestors were Jewish.

  You might as well have asked him if they were primates. Anyway, I don’t think he lied. I’m sure he didn’t think he was lying. When he said his family wasn’t Jewish, I’m sure he believed it. I’m sure he never thought of himself as a Jew. It just wasn’t part of his self-definition.

  Clare’s theory made some sense. Still, it seemed paradoxical if not perverse that both daughters of a man intent on eradicating his Jewish origins married Jews. The far-flung apples had found their way back to the tree.

  I still don’t get it, you said. If it were anyone else I’d understand, but Papa? He was always so rational. He worshipped at the altar of logic and reason. They were as close to an almighty god as he ever got. He was honest to a fault.

  No kidding, said Clare. He could be brutally honest.

  How could someone as honest and rational turn a blind eye on facts?

  To you it may seem irrational, Clare replied. But you need to look at it from Papa’s perspective. From his perspective the idea of being a Jew made no sense. To our father that would have been irrational. It just didn’t compute. As far as Papa was concerned he was an English atheist.

  YOU SPOKE WITH Ann, your other half-sister. Her version of things differed.

  We knew nothing – ever, Ann said. If Clare knew anything, she must have learned it very recently. I sure didn’t know, though I’m not exactly shocked either. I mean I knew the whole thing about Italians with place names of cities and all that. Jim’s mom pointed that out to me.

  Your mother-in-law?

  She was on a mission. For years she did her best to convince me that our father was Jewish. She kept a dossier, a whole file folder filled with newspaper articles about Jewish Italians clipped from the New York Times. She’d photocopy and send them to me. But I paid no attention to them or her.

  Why not?

  She was a Jewish mother-in-law. Naturally, she wanted my
father to be Jewish!

  That’s about all I knew, Ann said, that and that Papa left the Catholic Church when he was eighteen. The nuns kept refusing to answer his questions about science.

  For sure our mother couldn’t have known, Ann went on. If she’d known she would have told us. We were the only non-Jews in our neighborhood. Eighty-sixth and Riverside. One day, I remember, we were celebrating United Nations Day. Everyone in our school class had to stand up and say where their parents were from. All the parents of our classmates were Holocaust survivors. Clare and I stood out. We didn’t belong. We’d have given anything to say we were Jewish.

  * * *

  WITH GEORGE BACK IN GEORGIA, IT WAS LEFT TO YOU to scatter your father’s ashes. You considered scattering them along one of the many abandoned railway beds your father took you and George hiking along when you were seven or eight, possibly in the craggy tunnel where a hornet once bit you on the cheek, assuming you could find it.

  Instead you scattered the ashes under a laurel bush at Huntington State Park, a few dozen yards from the big rock from which you and the teacher plunged naked to swim to the island with the miniature stone decorative lighthouse. As you scattered the ashes, a sudden gust blew them over the tips of the nearly new white sneakers you were wearing, the ones your father bought for himself the day he suffered his first stroke.

  You were carrying the empty plastic urn back to the car when it struck you that all that remained of your father now were memories that time, too, would scatter like dust. Then there’d be nothing left.

  As you drove back to your mother’s house, you vowed to learn all you could about your father.

  * * *

  WORKING AT A SERIES OF DESKS STREWN WITH PHOTOGRAPHS, newspaper clippings, letters, patent applications, immigration records, and other documents, bit by bit, like an air crash investigator reconstructing the fuselage of a downed passenger jet, you pieced together the shards of your father’s past.

  BEGIN EACH CHAPTER WITH A VIGNETTE, MEMORY, INSIGHT, idea … something close to narrator’s present life – like letter writing. Episodes of present inform/reflect the past.

  Style: The simpler the plumage, the more elaborate the bower; the simpler the bower, the fancier the plumage.

  Nothing in particular (nothing really) happening at all with these words. Poems don’t do anything. Not supposed to. “I, too, dislike it.”

  I’d like to abandon everything I’ve believed about writing and start over. A new tack. Like a sailboat coming around. Here we go! Watch out for the boom! First, I’d do away with all forms of dramatization, the first step toward sentimentality, that greatest of evils. And then the whole idea of heroes and even of protagonists and characters. In this new style of writing there’d be only the narrator, no one else. Huysmans got it right. The narrator as anonymous voice making declarations. The world is as pronounced, nothing more or less. I narrate, therefore I am. Scene-painting is garbage. Things just are. Not as the nouveau romanists had it or tried to have it, objectively, but as a series of stated perceptions rather than as objects. Too late for objectivity. Narrator as the voice of subjective truth, declaring things not as they are but as they appear to be.

  I don’t build a house without predicting an end to the present social order.

  F. LLOYD WRIGHT

  Every angel is terrible.

  RILKE

  The diminishment of the sense of wonderment that comes with age is no less perilous than the loss of memory, agility, sight, hearing, or any of the other senses, but more tragic. A chunk of potato at the end of a fork is an insignificant object to an adult; to a four-year-old it rates among the Seven Wonders of the Natural World. If four-year-olds could write what they think and feel they’d all be poets.

  Shadows playing like vermin on the sidewalk.

  A sunset equivalent in its palette to embarrassment.

  How psychic storms churn the bottom silt of the mind with its vast riches and sunken treasures. The power of touching bottom.

  Let me go with my dark darling into myself.

  DICKEY

  Mother’s ashtray (“Leave alone de ashtray!”), the centerpiece of the coffee table, the sun of our childhood solar system. A four-sided porcelain cube, each side displaying the package design for a 1920s Italian cigarette brand: Macedonia / Due Palme / Seraglio / Edelweiss. In addition to her lipstick-stained cigarette butts, mom’s ashtray held within its corners the essence of the Mediterranean, a whisper of the Levant, the dry winds of the sirocco: the four angels holding back the four winds of the earth. Long after she quit smoking it remained there, on that coffee table, a symbol of her exotic origins, until she hurled it at the mirrored cabinet across the room during one of her fights with Papa, smashing it to bits.

  “NULL TYPE COMPARISON REFLECTOMETER”

  XXV.

  The Supreme

  England, Summer 1934

  How to be happy, to invent ourselves,

  shedding the inertia of the past?

  SVETLANA BOYM, The Future of Nostalgia

  ACCORDING TO BIRTH ACT NO. 332, AS WITNESSED AND recorded by Giuseppe Silva, official of the Stato Civile acting as delegated Secretary of the Mayor, in the year One Thousand Nine-Hundred Twelve on the second day of February at 3:10 p.m. in the Town Hall of the City of Milan,

  there came before me one Guido Sinigaglia [sp.], of Austrian citizenship, age forty, employee, residing in Milano, to inform me that at 11:45 a.m. on the 28th of the prior month in the house located at Via Legnano 28 to one Giulia Treves of the upper class (his wife, living with him) was born a baby boy whom he did not present to me, and to whom is given the name: Paolo Guiseppe.9

  “To the act noted above were present also as witnesses Enrico Bordiga, aged 49, a building superintendent, and Antonio Tognotta Galli, aged 42, also a building superintendent, both residents of the town.

  “Having received evidence of the birth of the child for health reasons the informant was excused from bringing the child before the Mayor’s secretary.”

  According to a handwritten note appended years later to the lower margin of the birth record, Sinigaglia Paolo Giuseppe was “considered to be of the Hebrew race, because he was born of parents considered to be of the Hebrew race, as resulted in the racial census of 22 August 1938.”

  * * *

  YOUR FATHER DESCENDED FROM TWO PROMINENT FAMILIES, both Jewish: the Senigaglia or Sinigaglia family on his father’s side, the Treves family on his mother’s.10

  Spellings of my father’s original surname conflict. The birth record spells it Sinigaglia, with an i; according to nearly all other documents and records, it’s Senigaglia, with an e.

  The Senigaglia name is most probably of Roman origin, dating back to 1215, when the Fourth Council of the Lateran decreed (Canon #67, “Jews and excessive Usury”):

  The more the Christian religion is restrained from usurious practices, so much the more does the perfidy of the Jews grow in these matters, so that within a short time they are exhausting the resources of Christians. Wishing therefore to see that Christians are not savagely oppressed by Jews in this matter, we ordain by this synodal decree that if Jews in future, on any pretext, extort oppressive and excessive interest from Christians, then they are to be removed from contact with Christians until they have made adequate satisfaction for the immoderate burden.

  Over the next few centuries, many Roman Jews left Rome for smaller villages and towns where they established small usury banks. One of these towns was Senigallia (or “Sinigallia,” in Old Italian) in the Provence of Ancona on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Much of that town’s appeal to Jews lay in its proximity to water, which provided an open escape route and made them feel safer.

  After 1503, however, following further decrees against Jews (including one requiring them to wear yellow badges), many fled Senigallia in favor of smaller, more hidden interior towns. One of these was Gorizia, a commune north of Trieste that to this day is heavily populated by Jews. Many of your relatives are to be fou
nd in a cemetery there.

  It was in Gorizia that our grandfather, Guido Senigaglia, was born along with ten brothers and sisters. Among these were Arrigo Avraham Senigaglia, who, together with his sister Lucia Lea, perished in Auschwitz in 1943. Another was Gilberto Senigaglia, a Trieste physician/gynecologist who presided over the births of James and Nora Joyce’s children. He may also have tutored Joyce in Italian.11

  “The reason I write in Italian to Giorgio,” Joyce wrote years later in a letter to his daughter, “is not to conceal anything from your keen swift flashing and infallible eye but because when he was introduced to me 30 years ago by Dr. Gilberto Sinigaglia [sic] I said: Toh! Georgio. To which he replied: Baaaa boooo. Our conversation has continued in that tongue.”

  Babu = a Hindy gentleman + babbo (daddy), illuminating the phrase “the boys of wetford hail him babu” in Chapter 1.6 of Finnegans Wake.

  As for his brother Guido, your father’s father, he worked for the now defunct Credito Italiano in Milan. He was a punctilious record keeper, keeping track of every penny earned and spent, spending hour after hour in his study balancing his books. In the evenings he’d play Scopa and Briscola with his mother-in-law, and though the stakes were extremely low and no money passed between them, Guido Senigaglia took careful note of their wins and losses in a blue ledger book kept strictly for that purpose. Having never achieved his lifelong dream of being promoted to director of the bank, he died in his sixty-sixth year, in 1934. No record exists documenting the cause of this meticulous record-keeper’s death. Still, no evidence suggests that he was run over by a tram.