Finding Myself in an Italian Tablecloth

It is strange how a combination of events and objects can bring the past home again, spanning long periods of time in a moment. I'm hardly the first to recognize this: Marcel Proust wrote a masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past based on this notion. The recent death of chess genius Bobby Fischer, that reclusive Holocaust denier and half-Jewish anti-Semite, together with the revelation that Ron Paul, the iconoclastic Republican candidate had at one time written or supported anti-Semitic articles under his own name, somehow fused with a grey organdy tablecloth hidden away in a linen closet in our apartment, and brought about some sort of time travel into my own past. I won't glorify it by calling it an epiphany, but in a funny way it was akin to one.

My wife and I have been trying to simplify our cluttered lives by giving away, selling, or donating to charity "stuff" that fills our closets and no longer has a place in our everyday life. We came upon the tablecloth as we investigated the back of that linen closet which contained some broken antique lamps, ancient perfume bottles, and other never to be used again items. The tablecloth was wrapped in fine tissue paper and seemed as crisp, and new as the day it had been purchased. It had seen little if any use during its 50-odd year history. My wife observed that nobody uses such tablecloths anymore, least of all organdy ones with white hand sewn flowers on them. Together with its 12 matching napkins it had been bought by us as a gift for my mother-in-law in 1953 when my wife and I were on our honeymoon in Florence, Italy. It had come into our possession a few years ago when my mother-in-law died in her early nineties. Somehow, we couldn't add the tablecloth to the pile of give-aways. As I studied it I knew at once that it had a special meaning for me and the reason could be traced to a dinner party in a dilapidated villa in Fiesole, outside of Florence many years ago.

We were on our wedding trip when we arrived in Florence without hotel reservations -- my lifelong bad habit, and, after checking into a modest railway hotel, we visited the museums, saw the required Michelangelo and Botticelli, we purchased inexpensive gift shop reproductions of Fra Angelica saints, gilded and glued on to wooden panels, together with some hand-tooled leather goods as souvenirs for our families back home. The dollar was strong in the fifties, nothing cost a great deal for an American in Europe, one could live comfortably there on 10 dollars a day, or so the guide books told us. Leaving a museum we came upon a small linen shop where we hoped to purchase some table linens for my wife's mother who had asked us to buy her a new table-cloth in Florence.

The woman who owned and ran the shop introduced herself as the Contessa Montevello, or Montebello, I don't quite recall, but Contessa she surely was. She was an elegant grey-haired woman in her late forties who spoke English with an Oxford accent, ever so faintly tinged with an Italian rhythm. It was evident that she was not by birth or custom a shop-keeper; this was the result of the war which turned royalty into peddlers, long before the arrival of the Ralph Laurens, the Tommy Hilfigers, and the Diane von Furstenbergs who turned peddlers into royalty.

The Contessa showed us a variety of hand-made cloths she had for sale, treating each item with the reverence reserved for the very best merchandise made for the very best clientele. My wife selected a muted grey and white organdy table-cloth and napkins knowing that this would please her mother's simple taste. "A wise choice," the Contessa declared, commending my wife for her judgment which had rejected the brightly embroidered linens. As she wrapped the tablecloth in tissue paper and ribbon, the Contessa then asked me what I did in the world and I told her that I was a recent college graduate, a writer, or at least an aspiring one. "Wonderful!" she exclaimed. You must meet Jamie Hamilton. He's visiting me with his wife, my cousin, the Contessa Pallavicino. You'll adore Yvonne and Jamie, and they will love you," she assured us, looking with approval at my beautiful bride. She went on to explain that Jamie was better known as Hamish Hamilton, the successful British publisher and one time Olympic rowing champion, the publisher of such authors as John Paul Sartre and Albert Camus; just part of his long list of literary luminaries. I had heard of this man and I was impressed. More than that, I entertained the hope that someday he might publish my work in England should I ever write a novel.

"You'll come to dinner tonight?" the Contessa asked, less a request than a command. The Contessa took down our address so that she could send her driver to pick us up. When she discovered that we were staying in the railway hotel she declared it fit only for whores and anarchists, not for a charming young couple and suggested a beautiful but inexpensive pension nearby into which we moved as soon as we returned to the hotel. We packed our heavy leather wedding-gift luggage, placing the tablecloth carefully inside, encased in the tissue paper to keep it from creasing.

Early that evening we were picked up at the pension by an elderly man in chauffeur's livery. He held the door open to a large, ancient, gleaming, black Bentley with enormous bug-eyed headlights, ushering us inside where we sat on deep maroon leather upholstery. It was like being seated in a fine old theatre rather than an automobile. So this was Europe! The real Europe, where struggling aristocracy managed to keep up the appearance of luxury by living on pride and willpower alone. We were having a Henry James adventure; a young American couple on their first time abroad, dining with an impoverished Italian countess, and who knew where this could take us? Intrigue awaited as layers of motivation would be peeled away and we would see the worldly heart of old Europe. Better than that, we were Zelda and Scott without the drinking, the breakdowns or the despair. Being in our very early twenties, everything seemed possible. One day you're living in a fleabag hotel, that same night you are on your way to a Contessa's villa in a luxury auto to meet a famous British publisher and his aristocratic Italian wife.

It was dusk as we drove through the Fiesole woods in that enormous black vehicle, down a long gravel driveway bordered by conifer trees towards a villa with just the right amount of peeling stucco and faded geraniums in old stone pots, where the Contessa stood waiting to welcome us in her pre-war silver lame evening gown. She hooked her arms between ours and led us inside the villa to meet the other guests. The great drawing room was furnished with ancestral paintings, old tapestries and tattered sofas and chairs, many of which had horsehair stuffing peeping out of the torn upholstery, betraying the aristocratic indifference of the owner as much as her poverty. The Contessa explained that the Germans had requisitioned her villa during the last days of the war and that they had done much damage to it, damage she could not afford to repair. She was currently renting out a whole wing of the villa to some rich Americans; and noisy and disagreeable as they were, she would rather do that than sell this home, one that had been in her late husband's family for hundreds of years. "The war took everything, you know," she said, without further explanation. We assumed that the "everything" she referred to included her husband, her wealth, and her former life. It was less than seven years since the end of WWII, and we understood that not only working class Italians but many in the Italian aristocracy had suffered much from Mussolini's fascism, and the Allied bombing of Italy.

Jamie Hamilton proved to be as charming and erudite as the Contessa had claimed he would be. I won his approval by praising an inexpensive edition of Middlemarch that he had published several years before; one with colorful, marbleized end papers. I owned a mildewed copy of that book which bore his company's trade name, having picked it up in a second-hand bookshop in Bermuda during a school holiday. His lovely, aristocratic Italian wife had a warm, welcoming smile and a genius for putting a self-conscious young couple at their ease, advising us as to what we should see, where we should eat, and what we should avoid in Firenze. We were seated near the Hamiltons when halfway through the meal Jamie Hamilton asked me, "Have you read many Italian writers?" I replied that I had enjoyed the works of Italo Svevo, Carlo Levi and Alberto Moravia, hoping to impress him with my knowledge of European literature, while in truth I had just exhausted the names of the only three Italian authors I knew. It was then that my hostess, the Contessa laughed, as if she was about to betray a wicked secret, remarking, "You mean Smitz and Pincherle?" I looked confused. She went on; "Those are their real names. They are all Jews, hiding behind distinguished Italian names, all except Levi who couldn't conceal his wretched origins no matter how hard he might try. No Italian is deceived by this. The Jews will do anything to hide their true heritage. It's quite disgusting, but fortunately they are always found out. Communists -- all of them. If I can forgive the Germans anything, which is not easy after what they did to Italy, I can forgive them for getting rid of so many Jews." I waited for Jamie or his wife to respond, to argue with her, to contradict her statement, but no one said anything. They went on eating and drinking undisturbed as the Countess ended her diatribe and flashed her smile at me, satisfied that she had improved my education in the true nature of Italian writers.

A bit of personal background here. Although I had been raised with the knowledge that my family was Jewish, my parents wanted their children to enter into the mainstream of American life and we were raised in upper middle class comfort in New York City, with only a minimum of religious education. If we had any larger identity other than as a family, it was as New Yorkers. While growing up in the city I had never come up against any anti-Semitic remarks. This was during the early '40s in America, a time of Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh, vicious anti-Semites who had a wide following during the Depression and years after. Hardship, I've learned, doesn't often make people better, it just makes them harder. And hard times seek out easy victims for blame, and the Depression was one of those times. But growing up in a cosmopolitan city, a city with a large Jewish population, had sheltered me from overt signs of bigotry, although once as a 10-year-old on vacation in Miami with my family we passed a sign on the Kennelworth Hotel reading "No Jews or dogs allowed." When I asked my father about it he simply said that these people were idiots and I should pay no mind to that sign. And I didn't.

When I was a small child my mother had made the mistake of renting a beach house in a Long Island resort town that she later learned was "restricted." I was told years later that we children were shunned by the neighbor's children when an elderly immigrant aunt of ours had come to visit, her presence revealing our Jewish origins. But never before in my personal life had I heard anyone make an anti-Semitic remark. I was neither ashamed nor proud of my background. I saw no reason to be proud of anything you didn't create like your religion, your race, or your appearance. But I was not so naïve as to think they didn't matter in the world. My wife who was also Jewish had that Swedish, Garbo-like beauty that was so admired in America and elsewhere at that time, and beauty, great beauty often trumps bigotry. And I did not "look Jewish" in the parlance of the day -- a horrible expression -- but true for those who had preconceived notions as to how Jews, the most varied of people, actually looked. Many took me for a young Italian, even in Italy people first spoke to me in Italian, something that pleased me, and disappointed them when I replied in English or opened up my small phrase book to reply. I wanted more than anything to blend in wherever I was so I could watch and listen and take mental notes for the future masterpieces I was sure to write. And here I was in this villa in the Fiesole, when all the artifice of civilization was peeled away like the villa's rotting stucco, and I was staring into the face of a deep, ugly racial hatred.

I didn't plan it. Without thinking I rose from my chair and turned to my wife saying, "We have to go, love." Everyone looked up at us surprised. The Contessa asked if I was ill. I replied, "No, not ill, merely Jewish." She looked stunned. I repeated my remark in a more direct way. "I am a Jew. My wife and I -- we're both Jewish."

I don't recall if it was the Contessa or Jamie Hamilton who responded, "Really, I thought you were Canadian." On any other night I would have laughed at the absurdity of that remark but this was no night for laughter. I realized that I never wanted to be defined by anything but my own character and my own talents, and I believed that I had gone beyond race and religion when I immersed myself in world literature, but I had been faced by a challenge that night for which there was only one reply, identifying oneself with the despised group.

The Contessa offered us her driver to take us back to the pension but I refused her in a steely show of controlled outrage and independence. I would not be beholden to her for anything, not even a lift back to Florence. We nodded goodbye to Jamie Hamilton and his wife without the customary handshake and made our way out of the villa. It was now a very dark, starless night and I realized soon after we reached the end of the driveway that we would have to make our way through a road in the woods to the main highway, and that road had many forks and turnings. Need I add that we were soon miserably lost in those woods? We were Hansel and Gretel without the trail of bread-crumbs. It took us two hours to find our way to the nearby main highway when I finally saw the distant lamplights on the roadway through the trees and we headed towards the lights. We finally flagged down a bus and made our way back to Florence.

Somehow, looking at that table-cloth again, and reading about Bobby Fischer and Ron Paul brought this whole misadventure back to me with such clarity. It seems that anti-Semitism often sleeps late, but it always awakens and it never dies. I have spent a lifetime believing that I am a part of the family of man, and avoiding the formal religious aspect of life, finding the beliefs of others something I accept with ease but without any desire to partake of those beliefs. I realize that for many this reveals my great limitations of mind and spirit; and that for them my life is narrow and circumscribed, without spiritual comfort or the hope of redemption. Since religion is to me so divisive, it seems responsible for much of mankind's misery as much as it offers comfort, and I regard all organized religion as a drowning pool in which I don't want to swim. But on that dark night in the Fiesole outside of Florence I knew that I was a Jew, and that I could not live with myself if I did not declare it openly in response to that ugly table talk, the kind of talk that had previously led to the death of millions of my fellow Jews. I knew that I would not have been spared by my love of books or my wife's beauty had I lived in Europe during the war years, certainly not by the likes of that Contessa. That night I was no New Yorker, and I was certainly no hero. I was simply someone who had found a moment of clarity, a discovery that would stay with me for life; and all because we had purchased that organdy table cloth in Florence. And so, the other day, I decided to keep the table cloth as a reminder of times past, a time when I learned that I was not Scott Fitzgerald, not Italian or even a Canadian, no citizen of the world, but that I was simply, inexorably me.*

*The preceding was adapted from Spotless, a memoir by Sherman Yellen -- a work in progress.

Comments

[cinemaven]

What an excellent post.

I was born in Scotland to parents who were a mixed marriage there, Protestant father and Catholic mother. Their union caused so much trouble that they immigrated to Canada when we were young and I was raised to respect all religions. I was told that religion is often an "accident of birth" and it was up to me to choose mine when I became an adult.

That said, I didn't get much opportunity to meet many people who were any different to myself until I met my husband-to-be and was introduced to his amazing mother. She was born in Odessa and at 15 she was taken from her family by the Germans and she spent the next 4 years in Spandau work camp. Her days were spent being bussed to various factories (Bayer aspirin is one of the companies that benefitted from her slave labour) and in the evening, the women would be given mounds of clothing ... they were told to pick apart the seams to search for contraband and she knew that it was the clothing of those who were sent to die.

That knowledge was painful for her because when her father was sent to Siberia because he had a Macedonian passport, it was the Jewish woman upstairs who kept her mother and the three girls alive. Every day she would come down with the excuse that she'd cooked too much food and would they please take it off her hands.

When my husband and I were getting married, my mom-in-law asked me my feelings about religion so I explained what I was taught. She took my hands and wept and told me that if I would raise her grandchildren to believe that, it would make her very proud since she also believed that religious intolerance and ignorance were responsible for most of the world's ills. We just lost her in November and it's such a big loss but having known her was an inspiration for her whole family.

[anfractuous]

In the Contessa's case, anti-semitism was an irrefutable badge of culture; she would have been remiss if she had neglected to inject it reflexively into conversation. Under normal circumstances, her guests would have all awarded her a few trifling points for her obligatory, and to their minds, pro forma remark.
You spoiled it all by being there and making a big fuss, as if the presence of an actual Jew could negate 2000 years of unreflecting prejudice. I'm sure your umbrage only provided your hosts with another amusing tale, and did not, as you no doubt hoped, send them scurrying into the shadows with shame.

[TheWesternBreed]

I knew an older married couple, she Jewish, he WASP. (Apparently he had been willing to marry her in a Jewish ceremony, but not a single rabbi in San Francisco was willing to perform such a ceremony--this was in the late 1950s. But I digress.) Anyway, a few years later they were at a cocktail party at a black college in Atlanta, and when they left she marveled to him: "You know, we were the only white people there!"

To which he replied with perfect timing, so I was told: "What do you mean, 'we'?"

[WilliePilgrim]

I hope that somehow, even if we'll never know when or how, that they've learned from a valuable lesson in life, and that you have found forgiveness for the grave ignorance of your hosts. I know I can be incredibly insensitive and ignorant at times. Have you ever been like that? Many extraordinary people admit that they have. It reminds us all that any time we can all be guilty of stupidity..or is it just most of us? Once we have learned from these lessons, it would be small to shut the door.
I regret that you somehow have attached that to Ron Paul's record of public service and honest discourse even when he may be wrong, like any human, and hope you realize that in doing that you've turned something very noble into something somehow less and approaching the merely political. Too bad, but this too can be a lesson for anyone to learn. I can appreciate that you may not agree with his politics and that's honestly fine with me. Are you OK with forgiving or will it be another kind of gift, one we can't give away and weighs at our shoulders, bringing them down. Cheers.

[janmarie]

Good story except for the part about Ron Paul 'supporting' anti-semitic writing. Not true and from your writing you should know that it's not nice to make false allegations about others.

[ZioKai]

Your memories have triggered a flood of memories of my own, some of which I'll share. Suffice to say I know Italy. I found that kind of secret racism and anti-semitism to be as common as its opposite in that country. It comes from different types, either wealthy rightists whose families had been Fascists, from neo-rich middle class people whose families had been poor and even from common working class people, even those who were "Communists." Even people who otherwise were quite nice, would occasionally surprise me with comments like those of your contessa, usually delivered "sotto voce" i.e. in a lowered tone of voice.

Once, after there had been a bombing in Israel carried out by Palestinian terrorists, a group of Italian Jews made a public demonstration of support for Israel in Piazza San Babila in Milano, known then and now as a Fascist neighborhood. (It's just down Corso Buenos Aires from Piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini was hanged upside down after he had been shot and killed trying to escape to Switzerland.) I approched some young men wearing yarmulkes and holding Israeli and Italian flags and expressed some support for them. I explained that I was American and was used to diversity and free expression. They were wary of me but thanked me. As I walked away I heard some bystanders muttering, "...e che cazzo..." loosely translated, "...what the f..." A few years later, on that same spot, a rightist government of Milan erected a hideous black fountain in Fascist style.

One of my students in an English conversation class was the late Arminio Wachsberger, a holocaust survivor who later gave his story to the Survivors of the Shoah project. He told some of his stories to the class. God rest your soul, Arminio.

But as much as I found racism and anti-semitism in Italy, I also found their opposites, in public and in private. Think of the Oscar-winning film "La vita è bella" or "Life Is Beautiful" as the most famous example.

[elion10]

Maybe it hit you so hard because you were of the very blood she was denouncing..

But - we can hope - that one day- everyone would rise as you did- whether they were "Jewish" or not..

Replace jewish with every persecuted group-

and one day- when man has evolved toward our better nature- one day we would all rise.

[Robert59]

I've never understood the animosity towards Jews. And I don't think I ever will. All I know is they as a people have made a greater and more positive impact on the lives of others than any other group I can think of.

So few in number and so great and many their gifts to mankind.

Some prejudice I understand as a result of being maltreated (e.g., blacks towards whites, Hutus against Tutsi, even Palestinian against Israeli), but the people you were dining with, what maltreatment had they suffered at the hands of a Jew?

The minds of many bigots are hard to fathom.

[RTIII]

Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

People need to see that their prejudices are false realities and for that to happen, they need to have direct experience with the group they appear to hate. A few times in my life I have had such opportunities. My strategy has been to engage them politely, use their remarks as talking points to explore their views, exploring how we in the room were or weren't like those things, finally, after they were well pleased with me, revealing in their own words the falseness of their prejudice. Yes, it's a challenging road and doesn't always have a positive effect at the time. But I strongly believe that running away from prejudice solves nothing.

[fabrom]

It was mid 60's. I lived in NYC with my new husband who was Norwegian from Minnesota. We made a trip there so that his family could meet me. One uncle, a well to do potatoe farmer in North Dakota, drove my husband and me around his thousands of acres. In the distance, I saw some shacks and asked the uncle what the shacks were. He told me that his Mexican migrant workers lived there. I asked why they had to live in such awful shacks. He told me that the Mexicans were pigs and didn't mind living like pigs. I ordered him to stop the car. My ancestors came to New Mexico from Mexico in the 1600's. In my family we still consider ourselves Mexicans. I told my husband that I would not ride with a bigot and he should come back to get me. About an hour later, my husband came for me. Sitting out on the flat field of potatoes for that hour I had time to think about people like the uncle. I would not want to live inside their heads or hearts. It would be a barren ugly place. What choking limits they set for themselves. What a pity.

[jbgnyc]

Sadly, your story doesn't shock me. In the late '70s, on my first trip to Florence, a German-expat friend with whom I was staying near Fiesole, took me to visit some Italian count or other noble with a villa nearby. My friend ,touting me as a returning daughter of Italy, bragged about the Count's olive oils. All I noticed was a small vintage photo quietly on display in a sitting room of someone in a Nazi uniform. My grandfather, an anti-Fascist Catholic, had fled Mussolini 50 years before, after having been arrested for speaking out. I felt sick and stunned that such a photo even still existed.

[ArchAngel]

I have a very similar 50's story.

My mother was having tea and coffee with several other housewives in the D.C. suburbs. (A typical 50's activity.)

The women began an anti-semitic discussion.

My mother calmly said: "You know that I am Jewish."

In reality, she was a Hoosier German Protestant.

[wbfree]

That was and is a powerful statement that you made to the Contessa, a courage we should employ today.
This is a digression of sorts, we are indeed of the family of man, the labels we acquire of our own volition and the ones foisted upon us are really just that, labels, they mean nothing, and only serve to further divide us. Our power and the absolute beauty of our potential is squashed with those labels and they only serve to give power to those who continually seek to divide us. The freedom of idea and free discourse can propel humanity to a place of beauty and peace if we realize one thing, we are all in this together, and using our intent (a very powerful word) can bring this about. At 66 years old I still believe this with all my heart.

[Antigone]

It may come as a surprise to some that more than likely everyone on the face of the earth has had their ethnic backround slammed in polite company... I, too, have experienced this even in Jewish company that I am related to by marriage. Surprised. Most of us dismiss the remarks and don't drag them up to make money after an experience of 40 years or so ago. I, too, do not look like my ethnic backround or talk about my religion...If this was the worst experience of your life...call yourself lucky.

[Beaux510]

I had an oddly similar experience in Rome in 1993, minus the royalty, publishing magnate and ride in the Bentley.

A group of 4 Italian medical students invited me for dinner, as we were eating they asked me of the accuracy of Italian American stereotypes (oh, the irony) and being Italian in the States. My Italian, at the time was quite good and I could pass for Italian, but I replied " I'm not Italian, I'm of Syrian descent". They sat slack jawed. One muttered to his roomate "jew", and the conversation stopped. I guess, arab - Syrian, was close enough to be considered semitic. After a few very awkward mimutes of being ignored I introduced them to an American phrase, "Fuck you very much" politely, to which I got no response, got my jacket and left.

I'd been the target of discrimination before but that time affected me more than any other.