The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  On April 15, 1944, Bert boards the 11,500-ton HMS Circassia for the crossing from Egypt to Italy. Searchlights, he writes, “deftly flick their swift fingers across the face of the sky.” Five days later he catches his first sight of Europe, “a tongue of brown and green land stretching into the Ionian Sea.” For a couple of weeks, as his unit gets organized and awaits orders, he remains in southern Italy among meadows of poppies and fruit trees. He writes a short story called “Forbidden Fruit,” about a friend killed picking cherries from a booby-trapped tree. The entry for May 4, 1944, reads: “I could not help wondering at the chain of circumstances that should bring me—plain-routine, rut-living Bertie Cohen of Johannesburg—to be driving in a cumbersome truck through a rural part of southern Italy.”

  Bert skirts the carnage of the battle for Monte Cassino, abandoned by the Germans in mid-May after repeated Allied assaults. He gets there on July 21, 1944, as he heads north toward Rome, and notes:

  Poor Cassino, horror, wreck and desolation unbelievable, roads smashed and pitted, mines, booby traps and graves everywhere. Huge shell holes, craters filled with stagnant slime, smashed buildings, hardly outlines remaining, a silent sight of ghosts and shadows, and the notorious Continental Hotel guarding the long approach of Highway 6 to destruction and havoc beyond belief. Pictures should be taken of this monument to mankind’s worst moments and circulated through every schoolroom in the world.

  He has taken a brief detour to Capri, to try to find the family there, and reaches Casa Julmira, built by Zera’s artist husband. It is a beautiful house hewn into the hill, looking out on the Faraglioni, the island’s iconic spurs of rock. Nobody is there. Nobody knows where the family is or if they are alive.

  In late July, Bert reaches Rome, liberated a few weeks earlier. He and a friend leave their vehicle in an army parking lot and walk a mile to the Colosseum. It is a hot summer’s day. Bert is carrying a huge kit bag crammed with food he plans to offer to the family—if he still has one. Bert has an address for Assja and her husband, Felix Tannenbaum, and their two children, Elena and Mya: Via del Parco Pepoli. Outside number five stands a short, haunted-looking man with startling blue eyes, a bald pate, and a bush of gray hair on either side of it.

  “Is this the house of Mrs. Tannenbaum?”

  “Bert, are you Bert?”

  He and Felix rush into the house. The diary continues: “Bertila! Bertila! Assja sat up in the bed with wild staring brown eyes and shuddered with wide arms. She hugged me and hugged me, weeping and sobbing. I was moved acutely. It was difficult to soothe her. She recovered slightly and begged eager questions about the family.”

  Bert is struck by young Mya (who would become a concert pianist and later music critic at Corriere della Sera), with her “wonderful eyes and lovely mouth and red dress.” He calls her “Mee.” Dinner is served at eleven p.m.

  Platters of macaroni followed by tongue which I had brought, a gay and jolly meal. We went down to the “piano flat,” which Elena and Mee share, quite the most beautiful room I know with big deep brown chairs, a dim diffusing light, fat candlesticks. Little Mee played the piano for us very beautifully. She does not seem to strike the keys; rather she strokes the keys and so conjures from them a rapture of melody with the light caresses of her hands. We talked about more happiness and sorrow. We heard of the indomitable courage of these two frail women, Assja and Zera, who preferred to hide like lions and not like rabbits when the Nazi Germans bestrode Rome, and they lived in a world of underground intrigue.

  The Italian branch (left to right): Elena, Assja, Felix, and Mya

  I know the Rome apartment, that “dim diffusing light.” As a Rome correspondent in the 1980s, I spent many happy hours in it, unaware, then, of shared roots in Žagarė and my uncle’s desperate wartime search for his Jewish family in Europe. Mya the pianist married a Polish Jew, Riccardo Landau, and had a daughter, whom they named Assja.

  When the younger Assja and I meet in Rome almost seven decades after the wartime meeting of her mother and my uncle, she gives me a box of photographs found discarded in the attic of the Via del Parco Pepoli (now renamed Via di Villa Pepoli). One catches my eye. It is of four children sitting on a rock on a beach in the sun. Two girls sit on either side of two boys, one of whom is seated, the other kneeling above him. Who are they? What is this photograph discovered by chance in a house on Rome’s Aventine Hill?

  A photo I found in Rome of my father, Uncle Bert, with his hand on my father’s shoulder, and their sisters, Selma and Ann

  I know the faces of those young boys and the girls also seem familiar. It takes me some minutes to realize that the kneeling boy is my uncle Bert, with his hands on the shoulders of my father, Sydney, flanked by their sisters, Selma and Ann. So much has been effaced. The photograph, stumbled upon by chance in Italy, is evidence of life before the scattering, obstinate proof of a story almost forgotten because it seemed better that way.

  Three months after reaching Rome, my uncle was in Florence. Toward the end of his long life, he wrote a brief account of how, on October 14, 1944, the small brown bird that became known as Ishbel settled on his shoulder there and stayed for five days. He recounts how the bird remained as, near Castiglione dei Pepoli, “artillery fire toward the German lines punctuated the night sky and throughout the night the intermittent roar of an American Long Tom, with an echo like rolling thunder, was heard”; and how old Florentine women thrust grandchildren toward him to be blessed; and how an American soldier took a photograph of him with the bird near the Ponte Vecchio. He writes:

  Not five minutes after the photograph had been taken my bird took off and flew across the river that, as the photograph shows, is at least as wide as the Thames at Westminster. I watched it as it flew southward, without so much as a backward glance, and in less than a minute it was out of sight. I stood, dumbfounded, and waited for several minutes before resuming a lonely walk along the right bank of the Arno. I felt bereft. Some fifteen minutes later, as I approached the Lucchesi, I was looking out over the river when I saw a bird flying in my direction. Unbelievably it alighted on my left shoulder. “Where on earth have you been?” I asked angrily, but without being able to suppress my elation. To this day the question remains unanswered.

  Like Noah’s dove, Ishbel returned to my uncle. In Bellagio, I told the poet Mary Szybist the story of Bert and the bird. Later she wrote a poem called “Another True Story” about the incident, part of her collection Incarnadine. The poem concludes:

  Saint Good Luck. Saint Young Man who lived through the war. Saint Enough of darkness. Saint Ground for the bird. Saint Say there is promise here. Saint Infuse the fallen world. Saint How shall this be. Saint Shoulder, Saint Apostrophe, Saint Momentary Days. Saint Captain. Saint Covenant of what we cannot say.

  I pass through the Damascus Gate into Jerusalem’s Old City. Here Jews and Palestinians rub shoulders still, between the market stalls piled high with oranges and dates and pomegranates and almonds. Palestinians emerging from the Al Aqsa Mosque move toward me on El-Wad Road in a vast throng. They run straight into a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews headed toward the Western Wall, and at that moment, out of the Via Dolorosa, a crowd of Philippine Christians emerges, carrying a heavy wooden crucifix and pausing outside the Armenian-Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Spasm.

  It is an impossible scene, funny even: the three great monotheistic religions jostling, maneuvering around the crucifix in the packed alley. The act of mingling seems natural enough. Yet these convergent religious passions can boil up as suddenly as overheated milk.

  Resentment seethes beneath the harum-scarum surface. Israel annexed East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War of 1967 but concluded, conveniently, that international law forbade imposing one country’s citizenship on another. So Arabs in the annexed territory were granted the status of permanent residents of Israel but not citizenship. The Palestinians of Jerusalem, consigned to limbo by Israel, know the score.

  I make my way down to the Western Wall, the only remnant
of the Second Temple, destroyed in 70 CE by the Romans. Davening Jews wedge prayers scrawled on slips of paper between the massive stones. The wall buttresses the Temple Mount, where King Solomon built the First Temple of the Jews in about 950 BCE, and King Herod expanded the Second. After conquest by Arabs in 638, the Temple Mount became the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque. The exquisite Dome of the Rock was also built there by a caliph over the Rock of Foundation, believed by Jews to be the spiritual junction of heaven and earth and later identified by Muslims as the place from which Muhammad ascended to heaven to receive the Koran from the Angel Gabriel.

  As in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, the two faiths, Judaism and Islam, are interwoven, their holiest places braided together. Nearby, for the third great monotheistic faith, Jesus Christ, the son of God, was crucified. The three religions can no more be disentangled here than the historical argument of Jew and Arab over claims to the Holy Land can be won. What matters is not victory in argument but the victory of coexistence.

  In South Africa, thanks to Mandela and de Klerk, the long and hard road of coexistence has been embarked upon. The two leaders heeded, decades after they were uttered, the words of Bobby Kennedy in Cape Town in 1966, addressing all the people of South Africa:

  But the help and the leadership of South Africa or the United States cannot be accepted if we—within our own countries or in our relations with others—deny individual integrity, human dignity, and the common humanity of man. If we would lead outside our borders, if we would help those who need our assistance, if we would meet our responsibilities to mankind, we must first, all of us, demolish the borders which history has erected between men within our own nations—barriers of race and religion, social class and ignorance.

  Here barriers harden still. At one corner of the plaza in front of the Wall is the entrance to the Dome of the Rock. Hangdog tour groups gather. A sign says, VISITORS WITH PEACE-MAKERS [sic] SHOULD CONSULT SECURITY. Another sign from the Chief Rabbinate says, ACCORDING TO TORAH LAW ENTERING THE TEMPLE MOUNT AREA IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN DUE TO THE HOLINESS OF THE SITE. The prohibition on Israeli Jews entering the Temple Mount is partly political. Ariel Sharon’s visit in 2000 ignited the Second Intifada. It also relates to the religious requirement that entry to the area where the First Temple once stood is permissible only in a state of purity.

  I stand in line, pay a fee, and get a ticket. As a Jew of the diaspora, I am permitted entrance. I climb the rigged causeway up onto the wide expanse of sacred ground. The air feels washed, clear, and bright. Winds out of the desert bluster here and there, whistling over the ancient stones. There is Al Aqsa against its cypresses. There is the Dome of the Rock, an octagon within an octagon. At its entrance a Palestinian official bars my entrance as a non-Muslim. I find a wall to lean against, feel the warm sun on my face, the cleansing wind.

  I shut my eyes. Once again, as in Cape Town, my mother comes to me and a conversation ensues:

  “You know, I have empathy for people who are suffering or in pain. They are familiar. When I found myself in war zones, in Lebanon or Bosnia, it was easy to write about the wounds of people, physical and psychic. I understood loss with a great facility, and the agitation of memory. All wars become wars to go home. I had a sixth sense about the intersection of wider events and personal plight. In the same way as I began to understand that Jewish displacement across the twentieth century—the story that was ours even if we pushed it away—had a connection to our suffering.”

  “Do you think so, darling? Well, I suppose we did just try to put all that behind us. It was the past, Jewish or not. I did often feel like a fish out of water. The English have a way of letting you know you are from elsewhere. I got tired of all the throat-clearing and lowered voices. I ached for something that was so hard to articulate. But in the main, we were blessed. I always thought life was a gift. We must be stoic. We must look forward and make the best of things.”

  “I have found that if you dig at all into people who are depressed, you find that their distress at some level is linked to a sense of not fitting in, an anxiety about where they belong. Freud got the sex, but he did not get the belonging issue.”

  “I don’t know about that, darling.”

  “You loved Dad very much, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, I did. I would have done anything for him.”

  “He was distraught when he lost you, inconsolable.”

  “I know that through everything he loved me. Everyone’s vices are intrinsic to their virtues. Your dad was no exception. Even when his patience ran out, even when he was cruel, he loved me because I had touched the most sensitive point of his nature. That love endures somewhere. It was very pure.”

  She waved toward the hills and roofs of Jerusalem and turned a smile full of love toward me.

  “Sometimes still I can feel what it was, the love you and Dad had for each other.”

  “You know, darling, if you dislike existence, then death is your release. That is how I feel. Without death there is no resolution. Life becomes a mirror with no back to it. In the moment of passing, I had this light-headed feeling. Somebody was asking me: Who are you? I laughed—I could not remember. That was such liberation. I was free of the flesh that holds you captive.”

  “Often I have tried to imagine how you suffered. Your suffering appears to me as a featureless expanse. The difference between sadness and depression is the difference between feeling and unfeeling. And I want to make a cocoon of comfort for you.”

  “It’s over, darling, all over now. And look at the beauty around us—the heedless children, the human circle of hope. Do not underestimate the power of hope. Remember the silver ripples on black water, and remember that even falling leaves dance. Remember the brightness of the waves cresting! Look at the kite, how it swoops through the light!”

  I open my eyes. My mother is gone, my reverie over, and all I know is the pleasure of the moment, the “covenant of what we cannot say.” I feel whole, not a thought in my head, part of a single chain. I watch an Italian tourist wandering around with a purple sarong over his shorts. I watch boys and girls, the messengers of a new order, kicking a football among the ancient graves. Acceptance—it comes down to that, for acceptance may be bountiful. Epiphanies are overrated. They tend to fade; better the lucid pursuit, in full knowledge, of a full life. This is how I came to this point, and to this place, by this looping road, from such anguish, and I am still alive and full of hope, filled with love. The children’s insouciance, their use of the ruins as goalposts, makes me think of the poet Yehuda Amichai’s lines about redemption coming for all the peoples of the Holy Land only when a Jerusalem guide tells his tour group:

  “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”

  The youthful voices rise and eddy, carried by the undivided wind. Peace is theirs to imagine and to will. I skirt the game, take in the shimmering city, and descend step by step toward the covered market—garlanded with delicacies, alive with the chatter of human exchange—in search of sustenance.

  Acknowledgments

  The writing of this book involved the excavation of memory. Many helped me in my endeavor to restore the past. I met with great kindness and generosity from family, friend, and stranger alike. I cannot thank them all by name. Some who gave profoundly of themselves prefer to remain anonymous.

  I began work on the book during a month spent in Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Thanks to Stephen Heintz and Rob Garris for making this delightful interlude possible. Thanks also to Nick Burns of Harvard University for offering me a Fisher Family Fellowship at Harvard’s Belfer Center, and to Cathryn Cluver for her help there. To write a twice-weekly column for The New York Times is a demanding privilege. For my liberation to write this book, I thank Arthur Sulzberger and Andy Rosenthal. Serge Schmemann and Stephen Dunbar-Johnson gave me remarkable support throughout, for which I am deeply grat
eful.

  In Lithuania, my thanks go to Paulius Ambrazeviĉius, Sarah Mitrike, Rod Freedman, Valdas Balćiūnas, Sara Manobla, Rose Zwi, Dovid Katz, Cliff Marks, Joy Hall, Christine Beresniova, Saulius Sužiedėlis, Antony Polonsky, Mejeris Mendelson, Vidmantas Mendelson, Simon Gurevicius, Jonathan Berger, and Zofija Kalendraitė. Special thanks, for their patience and understanding, to George Gordimer and his wife, Dorothy, encountered in New Jersey through our Lithuanian connection.

  In South Africa, Trevor Sussman, of blessed memory, his wife, Bernice, and their children were extraordinarily hospitable. Thanks to Sydney Adler, Lynn Adler, Robbie and Di Lachman, Mark Lachman, Myron and Jan Pollack, Brett Pollack, Greg Mills, Terry McNamee, Joe and Isa Teeger, James Teeger, Susan Teeger, and the late Nadine Gordimer. I am grateful to the staff of the S. A. Rochlin Archives (formerly the South African Board of Deputies Library and Archives), particularly Naomi Musiker. Sebabatso Manoeli was a remarkable and resourceful assistant in my research in South Africa. Andrew Levy, with whom I exchanged ideas before I began writing, ushered me deep into the mysteries of South Africa and my family’s existence there.

  In Israel, I am grateful to Alex Levac, Sherry Anski, Salam Fayyad, Shlomo Avineri, Amos Oz, Jodi Rudoren, and the staff of the New York Times bureau.

  Thanks to Jonathan Katz, Marion Underhill, Ed Vulliamy, David Bernstein, Constantine Phipps, Mary Szybist, Richard Bernstein, Assja Landau, Christopher de Bellaigue, James Lasdun, John Field, Peta and Rollie Moskowitz, Kara Moskowitz, Daniel Wolf, Maya Lin, Jose and Amalia Baranek, Charlie Competello, Kati Marton, Erroll Jacobson-Sive, Jane Danziger, Mary Warshaw, Eve Polecoff, Tessa Weber, Noreen Weber, George Packer, Robert Worth, and Dexter Filkins for support, sustenance, and, in some cases, critical counsel on the manuscript. Freya Berry helped my research in London in important ways. Lark Turner did remarkable work over many months to help me uncover, organize, verify, and chronicle the events related here.