by Deirdre Bair
While Steinberg was working diligently to survive in Milan, he was also investigating various options for where to go when he could no longer stay in Italy. The country did not officially enter the war until June 10, 1940, and as his Romanian passport was not due to expire until November 29 of that year, he counted on having a brief margin of safety during which he would try to renew it. He never imagined that he would become officially stateless, but several weeks after Italy entered the war, Romania was sliced apart as Soviet forces occupied the Bessarabia region, Hungary tried to grab Transylvania, and Bulgaria wanted Dobruja. In September, King Carol II abdicated and fled, leaving his nineteen-year-old son, Michael, as king. That same month Michael was deposed when the Iron Guard, led by General Ion Antonescu, established the ultra-right National Legionary State and Antonescu declared himself conducător (Romanian for duce or führer). Antonescu ordered the guard to destroy opposing political parties, murder dissenting intellectuals, and launch punitive assaults against Romanian Jews. Praised by Hitler for his “glowing fanaticism,” Antonescu allied the country firmly with Nazi Germany, leaving Steinberg to fear that he was about to become both stateless and trapped.
He was frustrated and angry with himself for not leaving “a year, two ago, when everything was simpler,” and berated himself for the “big mistake” of not getting his degree sooner. His “biggest anguish” was that if he had taken the degree on time, he could have repaid his parents’ sacrifices by settling them in “a comfortable life, without worries or woe.” Another possibly dangerous complication arose when it appeared that he would have to return to Bucharest to serve in the Romanian army. His original military classification was with the “1914 contingent,” which until now had always been exempted from the draft, but with Germany dictating Romanian policy, there was some internal confusion about whether this ruling still held. A letter to his parents spelled out his hope of deferring military service as a means of prolonging his passport until February 1941, but he did not explain how he planned to do this, and there is no record that he ever tried. Instead he concentrated all his energies on getting out of Italy and started to think seriously about the United States.
The first person who encouraged him to make the move was his friend Cesar Civita, who worked for the publisher Arnaldo Mondadori throughout the 1930s as the editor of a literary magazine, Le Grandi Firme. Steinberg met him through two of Civita’s colleagues who were his friends, Cesare Zavattini and Gino Boccasile, the designer responsible for much of the magazine’s distinctive art. Cesar and his brother, Victor, were born into a wealthy Jewish family that had been in Milan for generations, and both wisely recognized the need to flee to Paris as soon as the racial laws were passed. They urged Steinberg to do the same, but he told them he was content in Italy and hoped to remain there.
The two Civita brothers soon realized that Paris was no safer than Milan, so they left for New York in 1939. Cesar stayed until 1941, when he went to Buenos Aires to become Walt Disney’s representative for all South America and later the founder and successful publisher of Editorial Abril in Buenos Aires and in São Paulo, Brazil. Although Cesar Civita’s name was on their firm’s New York letterhead, it was Victor who remained there as a talent agent for international artists and writers, Steinberg prominent among them. Well before they got to the United States, the Civita brothers began to sell Steinberg’s drawings to magazines as varied as Life, Mademoiselle, and Town & Country. Julian Bach, later a distinguished literary agent, was then a young editor at Life, and it was he who made the proud claim that he was Steinberg’s first American publisher, “in terrible times, 1940.” Bach wanted drawings of France’s Maginot Line, which Steinberg provided from his imagination, as he had never seen photographs, and which (as Bach remembered) “to our mutual horror, collapsed between the time the drawings went to press and were published in the magazine.”
Steinberg’s luck was better with Town & Country, where the editors raved about his drawings, and he received further encouragement when Cesar Civita wrote from South America that Brazilian publishers were interested in his work. This was very good news, because they accepted almost everything he submitted and then paid promptly. Despite the perilous political circumstances, Steinberg was earning at least part of his keep, and as long as there was transatlantic traffic, he thought he could count on checks arriving from time to time.
Meanwhile, Saul’s American relatives had been corresponding with Moritz and Rosa about sponsoring his immigration to the United States. Moritz’s brothers, Harry in New York and Martin in Denver, both agreed to sponsor him and contribute money toward his passage. Soon after Cesar Civita arrived in New York, armed with the address given by Saul, he visited Harry Steinberg to plot strategy. Cesar described the bureaucratic flood of paperwork they would have to navigate in order to bring Saul to New York, but Harry, on behalf of his entire extended family, was willing to do what needed to be done, not only for Saul but also to help Moritz, Rosa, and Lica to immigrate. This plan was short-lived because the Romanian political situation made it impossible for them to leave, but there were still possibilities for Saul to travel through neutral countries, so they continued their efforts.
Harry was fortunate that his daughter Henrietta, the charming thirteen-year-old who posed next to Saul in family pictures when she visited Romania, was now well connected in terms of bureaucratic niceties. She was married to Harold Danson, an employee of Paramount Pictures, who was familiar with all sorts of international avenues of communication, and she was also private secretary to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., a man-about-town related to the original commodore of the same name, a relationship he used often to further his career. He made contacts with all the right people and published a newsletter, Vagabonding with Vanderbilt, that fell somewhere between a travelogue, a political tip sheet, and a gossip column. This well-connected Vanderbilt had influential contacts in Washington as well as New York, and he agreed to use them on Saul’s behalf.
The Dominican minister plenipotentiary in Washington told Vanderbilt to contact James N. Rosenberg, who was president of an organization called the Dominican Republican Settlement Association, headquartered in New York and working with the approval of the dictator Rafael Trujillo to grant asylum to European Jews. Rosenberg put Vanderbilt in direct contact with his colleague Mrs. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, who had seen and liked Steinberg’s work in Life and was eager to help her friend, “dear Neil” (as she called Vanderbilt), get him on a ship as soon as possible. There was, however, one major obstacle to overcome: Jews were most welcome in Santo Domingo as long as they paid the Trujillo regime $1,000 for each immigrant’s first year in the country and $500 for every year thereafter. The Denver and New York Steinbergs pooled their money and raised much of the necessary sum, while Harold Danson gathered letters from various banks for the U.S. Department of State to certify and forward to the Dominican authorities.
As the extended family geared up to expedite Saul’s transit, he was working his way through his own bureaucratic nightmare, his fears intensified by the Italian government’s rush to round up all civilians who were considered a danger to the Fascist regime. This category ranged from political dissidents to harmless foreign students like Steinberg, who, through no fault of their own, found themselves trapped.
Daily police roundups became standard operating procedure on weekdays (but not weekends, when the relevant branch of the government did not work). Steinberg was sure he would be arrested after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs singled out Hungarian and Romanian Jews as particular undesirables who had to be “expelled from the Kingdom.” He had been living in a room above the Bar del Grillo, but he often slept somewhere else, sometimes at the studio Aldo shared with Luciano Pozzo. Ada and her girlfriends had apartments throughout the city, and various friends from the publishing and design worlds allowed him to sleep at their homes. Andrea Rizzoli let him hide out in the Bertoldo offices, Arnoldo Mondadori took him into his family’s capacious apartment, and Giovanni Guares
chi loaned him a bicycle to use for quick getaways.
Steinberg knew that the roundups always took place between six and seven in the morning, so he got up early, washed and dressed quickly, and hopped on the bike to ride around town as if he were an ordinary Milanese citizen going to work. Even in such perilous times, he saw the city with an artist’s eye: “The air in Milan was excellent…the light was beautiful, and I saw something I had never seen before, the calm and silent awakening of a city.” He usually returned to Bar del Grillo a little after seven, knowing that if the police had not come by, he was safe for another day. He had breakfast and went back to bed for a nap, satisfied to have “a whole free day ahead of me, more than a vacation, almost a life gained.” He did this for the better part of a year, sneaking out through the back courtyard when the police came early and he could hear them coming up the front stairs. Carla, the youngest of the four Cavazza sisters who owned the bar, laughed as she told him how one of the policeman, “like a real Sherlock Holmes,” felt the bed and declared it “still warm.”
While Steinberg was on the lam, he was working hard to secure both the necessary travel documents and the money to pay for his voyage. Harry and Martin Steinberg and Harold Danson all contributed; Aldo gave what he could, as did Cesare Zavattini, and Cesar Civita gave advances against earnings and made sure that money owed from various publications arrived promptly. Still, he was dealt a crushing setback in the spring of 1940: with most of the money in hand, and despite a letter from Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., to the American consul in Naples requesting a U.S. visa, his application was rejected because the Romanian quota had already been filled. Cesar Civita tried briefly to obtain a visa for Ecuador but gave it up when someone—Henrietta Danson, Vanderbilt, or perhaps Steinberg himself—came up with the idea of using the Dominican Republic as a temporary haven until he could get to New York.
Steinberg knew of other Romanian Jews who had been granted asylum in Santo Domingo, and he had already gone to Genoa to put in his application at the consulate. It was on file there when a letter, perhaps composed by Henrietta but signed by Vanderbilt on June 1, 1940, arrived in the office of “The Minister of the Dominican Republic” in Washington, D.C. Vanderbilt asked the Dominican consul to cable his Genoa counterpart to ask him to secure an entry visa for “a very talented and worthwhile resident” whose agents and editors guaranteed that he would earn “a considerable amount of money in the United States, which he will, naturally, spend in the Dominican Republic.” The Washington consul’s reply was a curt rebuke, saying it was “out of the question” for him to contact his Genoa colleague, as he had “no jurisdiction over any European consul.”
A period of wild uncertainty, confusion, and travel followed, as Steinberg tried to get the transit visas that would permit him to board a ship of the American Export Lines. Harry and Martin Steinberg and Cesar Civita gathered the money in New York to purchase a ticket in his name on a U.S.-line ship, and it was being held for him in the Lisbon office. All he had to do was get to Lisbon. From July 26 until November 27, 1940, Steinberg raced back and forth across several countries, trying to put his travel papers in order. He did acquire a visa from the Dominican Republic in Genoa, which enabled him to obtain a tourist visa from the Portuguese consulate in Milan; he went to Rome several times to secure a transit visa from the Spanish consulate to use on his way to Lisbon; and he had to secure a second Spanish transit visa as well, specifically for the brief time he was in the Barcelona airport. He also needed a letter from an American consul (which he got on another trip to Rome) that guaranteed an “affidavit of travel” so that he could book passage on a ship that docked in New York, where he would transfer to another, which would take him to Santo Domingo. And after all that racing around, just when it seemed that everything was in order and he could depart, none of these documents mattered, because the Portuguese government denied his tourist visa.
Portugal was being flooded with Romanian Jewish refugees, and the Salazar government was worried that there were not enough ships to carry them to other countries even if they had the necessary money and documents. With everything else in order, Steinberg was shocked when stony-faced customs police would tell him only the official reason, that his application had expired. He never learned the real reason, that “Romania is facing a serious problem … of disposing of an undesirable, numerous and mounting population of the Jewish race.”
All Steinberg knew of these political machinations was that he had been denied a visa in Lisbon. Undeterred, he contacted the Portuguese consul in Milan again, and on August 29, 1940, that consulate disregarded a new secret memorandum that had been issued in Lisbon and granted him a transit visa. What the Milan officials ignored and Steinberg did not know was that Salazar’s government was so alarmed by the huge influx of European Jews from many countries that they had issued a secret directive closing the border entry points. Thus Steinberg became an unwitting victim of police secrecy and silence: when he landed at Sintra airport on Friday, September 7, after a flight from Milan, he was told to take the next flight back, and no reason was given.
As if being sent back to Italy were not bad enough, he was convinced that the Lisbon authorities had confused him with “another Steinberg, a Communist Steinberg, on their list.” Being labeled a Communist was a red flag in every country he needed to pass through on his way to immigration, and once labeled as such, he would find it nearly impossible to have the stigma removed. Even though such a mix‑up was never proven, it made a convenient excuse as he headed back to Milan in abject despair.
Steinberg never learned about the secret directive of Salazar’s secret police and spent the rest of his life thinking that he had somehow lacked one or more of the proper travel affidavits for the United States. As soon as he returned to Milan, he started all over again to round up a new set of documents, casting widely for help. He even enlisted the aid of the Panamanian consul, who told him to go to Rome and deal directly with the Romanian legation. He took the overnight train and spent three hours in the waiting room the next day, but when his turn came, his passport was not renewed and he was not told why. The most likely reason was that without it, he would have to find his way back to Bucharest, where he could be drafted. That was never an option for Steinberg, but as long as he had to stay in Rome overnight, he went sightseeing.
When he returned to Milan he had further bad news from the Spanish consulate. His transit visa through Spain had been revoked because he no longer had a valid Romanian passport. Now he was not only stateless but also unable to leave Italy. To deal with the misery, he began to keep a cryptic diary-journal of his travails, something he would do off and on for the rest of his life when he needed to think things through and sort out how to deal with them. On December 6, 1940, he noted that it was almost three months since he had been sent back from Lisbon on that dreadful Friday, September 7. He remembered this date for the rest of his life as his “most dramatic disaster, my Black Friday.” He also remembered the “other Steinberg,” who might have kept him from leaving; what hurt most about this confusion was what he decided was an “accusation of bad faith,” that is, that he had not been honest. But he refused to dwell on it: “enough” was his last written word on the subject.
His natural tendency toward superstition now became focused on Friday as the day that “more and more often brings me bad luck.” He had gone to Rome for the Spanish transit visa on a Friday and to Lisbon hoping to board a ship on a Friday, and both times he had been turned back. However, when December 6 arrived, it was “a really black day Friday.” He had never been religious, but uncharacteristically he prayed: “God will help me get through these years.”
There was unrelieved misery on every front. On November 10, Romania was devastated by an earthquake so severe that it caused damage as far away as Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. Bucharest was less badly damaged than other Romanian cities, and the homes and shops of the Steinbergs and their relatives were relatively unscathed. They were terrified for Saul
’s safety when they listened to Romanian radio and heard reports of the air raids and bombings in Milan, while he tried to convince them that he was in good health, had enough work, and was not in any real danger. It was still hard to write cheerful letters when he was feeling far from optimistic. He told the diary, “I am anxious right now, as I always am when something eludes me and my desire for it grows stronger.”
The ship he hoped to sail on, the Siboney, was due to leave Lisbon for New York in twelve days, and he had to face up to the fact that he would not be on it. The police roundups had become infrequent, and in depression he began to sleep until noon. When he woke up he read, first, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), “a great and fine book,” and then The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. He felt “more and more empty in the head,” and when he finally roused himself to wakefulness, daily life was all “malaise.”
Money was getting tight again, so he could not afford to indulge in self-pity for long. He courted Giovanni Mosca at Bertoldo with an early Christmas gift of painted wood blocks, possibly one of the earliest examples of the wooden books, pens, tables, and boxes for which he would become famous later in his career. Unfortunately, when Mosca was unable to send much work his way, Steinberg’s general financial strain resulted in a brief falling-out with Aldo Buzzi. He was now sharing a design studio with Luciano Pozzo, but they did not have enough work for themselves and were too poor to be able to pass any along to Saul. He found this difficult to accept and told the diary, “I would not treat a friend this way.”