Part Three: The Weight of History

 I stayed in the apartment three days and three nights. I saw some of the people who lived in the building; they were Italians and probably not Jewish either. But there was a dense vibe in the space; both in the building and in the whole ghetto. Some people don't believe in such things, but the place had a strong and compressed pull, like it hadn't been aired out from that time. Hard to explain, but it was tangible, like they were still somehow around.

Mostly I felt I was there as an insider, both from staying there and sharing the faith.  I also felt like an observer to what had happened there, and as a visitor. Often I felt like I was watching it all through glass.

I went on a tour of the synagogues. I don't usually have a tolerance for those kinds of things but I wanted to this time. We learned that the word "ghetto" derived from the iron foundries located there ("ghetta") in the 14th and 15th centuries. It was a convenient area to use because it could be closed off easily from the rest of the city. There were synagogues hidden in the buildings, although everyone knew they were there. They were "signaled" to those looking from the street by having five long windows in a row on the top level, representing the five books of Moses.

Even though people were free to leave the city during the day, they had to wear special yellow (and occasional red) circles or scarves on their clothes to identify them. In the mid-1600s, there were about 4000 Jews living in a space roughly equivalent to two to three city blocks. Apartments were added either by making another story (although 6 or 7 was the city limit), or more often by lowering all the ceilings.

The ghetto existed for more than two and a half centuries, until Napoleon conquered Venice and removed all the gates. Many Jews chose to stay there and live though. I think I understand this. While I was 'living' there, I started to realize that the isolation and persecution also created a community and a sense of strength in each other. They had only other members of the community every night, and they had a common identity and rituals and ways of life. There must have also been a security in that. There probably was also a bond that came from all being equally vulnerable to the persecution, and their uncertainty about the future. Even when they were allowed to live elsewhere, they knew how they had been regarded, and I can't imagine it would be appealing to risk hostility or wariness with new neighbors, moving into their turf.

Before the War, there were about 1300 Jews living there. Two to three hundred were deported by the Nazis to the camps. Only 8 survived.


On the tour, we went to a synagogue that shared a wall with my building. We started to walk past my door, and I nudged the women next to me on the street. "This is where I am staying," I said, emphasizing the last word. "Are you KIDDING me?" they said, and the strength of their reaction was validating. "We were just talking about what it must be like to live here now and are sort of freaked out about it."

After the tour I invited them back. They kept expressing disbelief and awe and overwhelm at how it felt to be inside the place. One of them wondered how many people had lived in the apartment space, guessing the numbers had been very high. The other said it was strange and a little bothersome to her that now there were a few restaurants and stores and so many people did not realize what the area really had been in the past.

It was meaningful for both them and myself to share our feelings about being there. The whole time I stayed there, it was hard to not constantly picture what it was like to be there hundreds of years ago....who had slept in the same room I was sleeping in, who had sat around the table in the main area, why the closet there had a strange shape and what it had been used for originally. When I opened my windows, I watched tourists two floors below, pointing upward, taking pictures, looking at maps and guidebooks for what they were seeing. The tours going into the synagogue next door were walking on the same cobblestones that groups of men had walked on to go to services in the 16th century. I looked at the large well and imagined the women using it for washing, children running around. Everyone knowing everyone, their lives revolving around the small space again and again every night. The feeling every day of having to be back there at a specific time, and being closed off from the rest of the world then.


One time I walked out of the entrance and there was a woman taking a picture of it. She smiled at me and took a photo of her husband standing there next to it, both of them acting like it was super-fun. "It's kind of intense, don't you think?" I said. "What do you mean?" she said. "Well, this is the entrance to the ghetto." "I know," she said, excitedly. "Well, ghettos are where all the Jewish people had to live. This was locked at 7:00 every night; they were locked inside it." "Oh!" she said. She had not known this. She had thought it was just a cute area of the city. She seemed a little disappointed that it had a sobering history and now she had to think differently. 


I kept thinking of D's mother, who had lived in hiding in Venice during the war for one and a half long years. I had asked the tour guide about that and she said people who lived in hiding often stayed on the rooftops during the day, where they could not be seen easily. She said some lived in hiding in the countryside too. The ones in the ghetto were crammed into very small spaces. His mother had been the same age as Anne Frank. She had survived, but he said that the experience dramatically shaped her life to this day.

I told D. I had stayed in the ghetto. I told him I had thought of his mother a lot while I was there, and what it must have been like for her. He said, "Every time I am there, I feel the weight of history."