Movies `A Far Cry . Recalls Life
in Ghetto of Renaissance Venice
Renaissance Venice painted on
canvas can be lovely indeed. But
for the Jew, a ghetto was a ghetto,
was a ghetto.
Earl Rovit, in his second novel,
"A Far Cry" (Harcourt, Brace and
World, 757 Third, NY 10017), has
captured with great power and elo-
quence the mood of Venice in her
blossomtime, when merchant ships
plied the Mediterranean, and Jews,
whose money kept the ships mov-
ing, were suffered to exist in tene-
ments of an Italian vintage. A
horror well known to Jews through
the ages—the lie of ritual murder
—is recreated by Rovit through an
aging Jew, "a merchant of Venice,"
tortured for a slaying he did not
commit.
Rovit's book is more than a his-
torical novel, however. He weaves
into alternating chapters a story
of contemporary life: a 20th Cen-
tury Jew, self-deified, lies dying
of cancer in a hospital bed. He is
a martyr to his own failure as a
man, just as Lazzaro dello Stro-
golo, broken by his jailers, is a
martyr to inhumanity.
It was Rovit's intention to play
off one story against the other,
blending the two widely separ-
ated lives of dello Strogolo and
Sheldon Pfeist. Whether he fully
succeeded in his intention is
debatable. Nevertheless, the at-
tempt is imaginative, and the
writing superb.
As Pfeist lies in his hospital bed,
his imaginings carry him afar. He
becomes other men:
"Pfeist, S., copy clerk, Warsaw,
defunct. I made myself smaller
and smaller as the Gretto con-
tracted around me until I achieved
absolute subtraction at Treblinka."
The contractions of the ghetto
are seen in Venice three chapters
later, when a Venetian nobleman
is found murdered on a ghetto
doorstep.
". . . the crowd in the Piazzetta grew
thicker as the afternoon drew on. Their
fears hardened into metal and the bells
withheld their bronze voices. The
rumors twisted and swelled into ob-
scene shapes, collecting the city's dank
soot, the black wind that whistled in
from San Michele bearing the odor of
clay and crumbled bones, the stifling
anxiety that lay like a living stagnant
pool in the depths of the city's heart.
Sacrificial murder. The Jews. The Pass-
over. Sacrificial murder. The phrases
swelled into the - single bulbous shape,
and the syllables cooled and stiffened,
and the brittle stem snapped off. The
fear-blown nightmare had become
knowledge. Sacrificial murder! The
rumor was whole and complete now,
freed of its frenzied human sources.
The fears and silences of the terrible
day had burst into truth."
The truth, of course, is that one
nobleman had murdered another
and left the corpse in the ghetto.
But in such times, truth was
irrelevant.
"After all, it was a well-known fact
that the Hebrews were accustomed to
practice human sacrifice as a part of
their Passover celebrations. Human
blood—Gentile blood—was required for
the token libation that they drank to
their dead ancestors. That they baked
into their festival bread. Forbidden for
centuries to continue this unholy sacra-
ment, they had their own ways of
evading the law and fulfilling the com-
mands of their secret books. Christian
children had been kidnapped, in some
cases even purchased outright from
roaming gypsy bands and had been
slaughtered in accordance with their
barbarous rites, their blood drained
from them as you would slit a bladder
and the poor flesh flung down wells
or burned in kilns. There were docu-
ments of proof in Sevilla, in some of
the cities of southern Germany. The
Last. Supper, for example. Was it not
their traditional Passover observance?
And was our Saviour not the gentle
victim of their hellish need? All men
knew about this custom of sacrificial
murder, but here— here in queenly.
Venice where they have been accepted
and tolerated to live in our midst
almost as though they were decent
Christian folk! Here, right here in
Venice! Let them test the strength of
their ducats to protect themselves now.
Let them perform their Oriental spells.
They will surely feel the pure strength
of Christian retribution!"
Holy Week hysteria could bode
ill for the patricians of Venice,
who recognize that "the financial
structure of Venetian trade de-
pended indirectly upon the Jewish
bankers, and if force were needed
to keep the mobs under control,
then force would be applied. And
yet, simple prudence dictated some
kind of reprisal for these bloody
acts that had stirred up the people.
Carlo Gritti was confident that a
suitable weapon would be placed
in his hand so that he could satisfy
the people's lust for blood without
endangering the delicate financial
balance on which the power of
Venice rested. Scapegoats can
always be found, he thought . . . "
And so, one is found, and he
dies, even before the fires of the
auto da fe can be lit for him. But
there is grandeur in dello Stro-
golo's death as he whispers out the
eternal words, "Shwa Yisrael
Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehod."
There is grandeur, too, in the
procession of 50 ghetto Jews who
dare to march out in the streets of
Venice to say the mourner's kadish
for their fallen brother.
"Leone Vitore looked around and
behind him at the men of the ghetto.
He was disappointed in the informality
of the procession .. .But then he slowly
realized that there was already a dark
awesome power in the straggling pro-
cession—a power even in its disorder-
liness. A dark river was flowing
through the grey Venetian streets,
formless, without nicely squared cor-
ners, without the glint of steel or the
canopies of streaming pennants. It
didn't matter. The river was flowing
by itself, flowing steadily, driven by its
own concealed heart. The prayer shawls
and the long wide-sleeved robes
fluttered with a constant casual move-
ment, heads bobbed up and down and
slippered feet scuffed stone, but the
river was inexorable, low, steady and
it would move where it was going.
They shambled, their backs were bent
. . . but they were men after all . . .
"The fifty Jews prayed together, each
reciting the service in his own time,
his own accents . . . Each of them was
alone in his prayers, individually be-
seeching, individually unworthy, and
yet they prayed together with a satis-
fied knowledge of the stake that each
possessed in the communal prayer . . .
Their chant had a dark power which
moved them like a current in the blood,
an intimacy with death, a resignation
before the unimaginable distance that
separates man from the source of his
terrors and desires . . . "
Rovit has written a terrifying,
vivid novel . . . indeed, as terrify-
ing and vivid as Jewish history
can be.
C. H.
literary History Packed Into Daughter's
Recollections of Humorist Sholom Aleichem
Sholom. Aleichem—Sholom Rabi-
nowitz—seems to have gained even
greater popularity posthumously.
He was acknowledged as the great
humorist in his lifetime. He is not
newly acclaimed, even if "The
Fiddler" seems to be a vehicle
for greater popularity.
The distinguished record of the
eminent writer is excellently de-
picted in the biography of Sholom
tv
.,›
r••
t 6
Postage Stamp Issued
In Sholom Aleichem's Memory
by Soviet Union in 1959
P'10
Aleichem by his daughter, Marie
Waife - Goldberg, published by
Simon and Schuster under the title
"My Father, Sholom Aleichem."
It is an intimate story and its
value is immense for its thorough
outline of the great writer's life
experiences, his views on the at-
titudes and habits of the heroes
of his tales, his relationships with
writers in many lands, including
Israel Zangwill in England and
Mark Twain in this country.
As a matter of fact, much of
what Mrs. Waife-Goldberg has
compiled in presenting the bio-
graphical details about her father
offer us a partial history of world-
wide literary activities.
There is, for instance, this refer-
ence to the Zangwill-Sholom Alei-
chem meeting, based on a descrip-
tion by Sholom Aleichem's son-in-
law, Isaac Dov Berkowitz, in his
memoirs, "Unsere Rishonim":
"Zangwill knew of Sholom Alei-
chem from the little of his work
that had been read to him in the
original by others. His attitude to-
ward Sholom Aleichem was most
cordial, as to a colleague working
in the field of humor, close to the
mainspring of Jewish life, and he
invited him for several days to his
rich summer place outside London.
Sholom Aleichem accepted the in-
vitation, visited the Zangwills at
their country home, but remained
there no longer than was absolute-
ly necessary for the proprieties.
Sholom Aleichem must have felt
Israel Speeds Help to Bolivia Flood Victims
the humiliating contrast between
these two Jewish humorists, the
one deriving from the poverty of
Whitechapel having climbed to the
position of world fame and English
gentleman, in the ease and secur-
ity of his estate in the beautiful
countryside, and the other, a rich
man of Kiev, who had given up a
life of wealth to serve a 'White-
chapelly' people in poverty and
homelessness."
Mrs. Waife-Goldberg adds her
own comment to this that "Berk-
owitz may have exaggerated my
father's mood a little, but it was
certainly in his character to extri-
cate himself from such an atmo-
sphere as soon as it was politely
possible."
Immediately following this
item in the interesting tribute by
a daughter to her father is this
item: "My father did find a con-
genial atmosphere in the home
of a Dr. Frank in London. This
was a non-Jewish family whose
daughter had become enamored
of Jewish literature and had
learned enough Yiddish to trans-
late stories by my father and
other Yiddish writers into Eng-
lish. Her translations were most
inadequate, practically a verba-
tim rendition, but they helped at
least to call the attention of liter-
ary people to the burgeoning Yid-
dish literature."
Would that the author of this
splendid book had looked more
deeply into the story of Helena
Frank. Some of the translations of
Yiddish poems by the most emin-
ent Yiddish writers are from the
pen of this wonderful non-Jewish
lover of Yiddish about whom so lit-
tle has been written. At any rate,
the recognition in "My Father,
Sholom Aleichem" even so briefly
given draws attention to her.
Then there is Mrs. Waife-Gold-
berg's account of her father's visit
in this country, the headline in one
of the Jewish papers "Sholom Alei-
chem Comes to Extend `Sholom
Aleichem' " and his introduction to
Mark Twain by Justice Samuel
Greenbaum who presented him as
the "Jewish Mark Twain," to
which Samuel Clemens replied,
"Please tell him that I am the
American Sholom Aleichem." In
her evaluation of her father's
works, the author states:
"In contrast to Mark Twain,
my father never quarreled with
the human race; he only made
fun of the pettiness of some of its
members, which he blamed not
on their human nature but on the
artificial circumstances s u r -
rounding them. His world never
closed in on him; there was al-
ways the horizon, and the great
beyond; and the time was always
the dawn. America was much
too large to be judged by a few
isolated instances, and while he
rejected some of the parts, he
accepted the whole,"
Many fascinating incidents are
recorded in this volume, and the
reader acquires a better under-
standing of the shtetl depicted by
Sholom Aleichem, of the charac-
ters like Tevye, of Jewish life in
the Old World,
These intimate accounts appear
in the properly titled chapter "The
World My Father Came From."
This work delineates an author's
life and experiences and links the
hero in this biography with other
authors. It is, in a sense, a history
of Russian Jewry in the time of
Sholom Aleichem. It is a commen-
tary on an able observer's view of
America.
To a large degree, it is also a
collective review of all of the writ-
ings of Sholom Aleichem.
"My Father, Sholom Aleichem,"
informative, delightful, is a brill-
iant account of an eminent parent.
It is a glorious tribute to the vast
Yiddish literature which has been
enriched by the heroic figure so
well depicted in this book.
Sholom Aleichem wrote a lul-
laby for his children. It is a
warm expression of love and one
of the fine evidences of a
father's deep love for his off-
spring.
This volume devotes consider-
able space to the role of Sholom
Aleichem in the theater, his plays,
his interest in dramatic art, and
—
x
7- *
SHOLOM ALEICHEM
in this connection it is . recalled
that two of his plays opened on
the same night in New York under
sponsorship of rival producers --
"Stempenyu" and "Pasternak the
Scoundrel." His family then was
in Switzerland and he reported to
them on the successes of the two
plays which he attended on suc-
cessive nights on New York's East
Side.
Of interest now in connection
with the publication of "My
Father, Sholom Aleicheni," is
the shipping by the book's author
from the vaults of Irving Trust
Co. on Wall Street, New York,
of trunks filled with Sholom
Aleichem memorabilia. They are
being presented to Beth Sholom
Aleichem, the new center re-
cently built in the eminent
humorist's honor.
Mrs. Waife-Goldberg is the wife
of the prominent Yiddish writer,
B. Z. Goldberg, editor of the_
Jewish Daily Day.
Campaign Aids Israeli Blind
Col. Alfredo De Rio (second from left), Bolivian consul general in New York, gives his nation's
thanks to Magen David Adorn, Israel's official Red Cross service, for its swift response to Bolivia's call
for aid. On Feb. 19, a few days before the great national carnival, heavy rains swept flood waters out of
the mountains to virtually inundate the cities Trinidad, Santa Cruz and Sucre, causing heavy damage
and leaving thousands homeless and exposed to the dangers of epidemic and disease. Roger Rosen-
garten (right), administrative director of American Red Mogen Dovid for Israel, the support and supply
wing of Magen David Adorn, was on hand with Col. Del Rio to speedily arrange for transfer of the life.
saving shipment to a La Paz bound plane.
A blind student in Israel finds that the world is not so big after
all. Special equipment and other aids for the sightless are provided
with the funds that Detroit raises in its 1968 Allied Jewish Campaign-
Israel Emergency Fund.
48 Friday, March 29, 1968
—
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS