Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashonah)

I receive an invitation to celebrate the Jewish New Year with an Italian family. A woman calls, introduces herself as Ruth Ianello, and says that she and Doctor Ianello would be honored to have me share Rosh Hashonah dinner with her and her family at their home after services at the synagogue. She is proud of her yearly tradition to open her home to Jewish travelers far from family and friends—and would my husband and I join them? She got my name from one of the letters I wrote from the US to the Jewish Community Center in Florence.

“How kind of you to ask us. We’d love to come.”

She gives me instructions: I am to take the #14 bus to Via dei Macci and walk from there to the synagogue—I shouldn’t have too much trouble, I can ask directions along the way and I will easily see the large green dome of the shul as I approach it. After the services, I am to look for her daughter, Rachel, (“A heavy-set girl with long curly hair—everyone knows who she is”), and then I am to come home with Dr. Ianello, their son and her daughter. Ruth won’t be at services herself. She’ll be cooking.

When I tell Joe we are invited to join an Italian family for the Jewish New Year, he reminds me that Friday is the day he and Nicoletta are taking the class for an all-day trip to Pisa and Lucca: Pisa to see the Leaning Tower, and Lucca to see the ritual procession of the “Volto Santo”—a festival in which the entire community turns out to follow the carved wooden statue of Christ through the town.

“I don’t want to miss Pisa!”

“Then come with the class.”

“But I don’t want to miss Jewish New Year services or the dinner!”

“It’s up to you,” Joe says. “Just decide.”

Just decide. This is one of the recurring ordeals of my life. Sometimes I wish I were a puppet on strings controlled by someone wiser than I am, more knowing, and more certain of what is “good for me.” In other words, I want someone to tell me what to do.

My general technique for making decisions is to propose scenarios for myself for each of the issues in question. (Later I always find out how completely wrong they are, that I didn’t come even halfway close to guessing what the experience would be like.) But that never stops me from trying. This time I imagine myself in a state of total anxiety—how will I know where to get off the bus? How will I find my way to the “sinagoga israelitca” as the shul is designated on the map? Once there, how will I find the “heavy-set girl with dark curly hair”—and how on earth will I ask anyone where she is if I can’t speak Italian? (Dov’è Rachel Ianello? Will that be enough to have someone lead me to her?) On the other screen of my mind I project the Leaning Tower, the bus trip to Pisa through the glorious countryside (if I don’t go, Joe will sit on the bus with Nicoletta and who knows what could happen?) Then there will be the movie-like procession (I think of the movie “We’re No Angels”), the archetypal Christ-on-the-Cross being carried through the city, the magnificence, the pomp and circumstance!

But I already know I will choose the dinner with real people, to hear about real life in Italy and to see it with my own eyes. Ruth Ianello is an archetype herself, one of thousands (she told me this on the phone) of American girls who come to Florence as students, fall in love with Italians, and marry and spend their lives here.

“I’ll go to the synagogue,” I tell Joe. “I’ve already seen the Leaning Tower in the movies. In fact, we have a little plastic model of it somewhere at home. We also have a Pisa-drinking glass that tips over.”

“I remember,” Joe says. “Your iced-tea spills into your lap.”

I call Ruth Ianello and tell her my husband has another commitment. Can I bring anything to the dinner?

“Nothing at all. Everything is accounted for. But perhaps, since you’re a writer, you could bring me one of your books.”

“I’d be delighted,” I tell her.

What I don’t account for in my imaginings is that Joe will leave the apartment at 7 AM on the designated day, and that I will be here alone till 6:30 at night, at which time I will strike out on my own for my adventure. It’s only 8 AM and I am already lonely. I packed Joe a sandwich of prosciutto, lettuce, tomato, “senape” (mustard), and “maionese” along with a plastic jar of “succo di pera” and the closest thing I could find to potato chips. When I kissed him good-bye, I said, “Try not to come home and tell me it was the most wonderful thing you ever saw, that you had the best time you ever had in your life.”

“You could still come,” he reminded me.

Now, to compound my doubts, a jackhammer begins shaking the walls of the building. I can feel the vibrations in my very teeth. The noise is too loud for the Fiat body shop, and too close to my skull. I go out on the small back terrace and see workmen are carrying into the back yard of one of the apartments below me an entire bathroom: toilet, bidet, bathtub, sink. A remodel is beginning. I assume it will go on for months.

I close the glass doors to the terrace and climb into my bed with the Walkman radio. I tune it till I find the Beatles singing “It’s A Hard Day’s Night”—but not loud enough to drown the commotion from below.

By late afternoon I have gone up and down to the roof terrace three times, I have taken a long bath in the long bathtub, and I have ridden the “ascensore” down to the ground floor to check the mailbox. I decide to cut my hair, which is something I have done over the years to get myself through a crisis. There is not much to cut, since it is already short and curly. But it’s something to do. Then I take another bath, wash my hair, blow it dry with my dual/voltage hair dryer, choose my outfit for the evening, and actually get ready to leave the apartment. But I feel too hot in the dress I’m wearing. I change to another outfit, and then another. Now I’m hungry because in America it’s dinner time. But I’m not even close to a meal for hours. I eat a few tangerines and set out—finally—for the “sinagoga israelitica.”

On the bus I witness an archetypal ritual of a different sort than Joe will find tonight in Lucca. I am seated opposite two handsome Italians, young men with the three-day-beard-stubble-look that so many young Italian men cultivate. At the next stop a young and gorgeous woman gets on the bus, very tall, very blonde, very exotic. She stands (there are no seats and the young men surely do not offer her one of theirs) between the men, holding onto the loop-handle hanging from the bar above her head. She’s wearing extremely tight black pants of a silken, stretchy fabric, so tight in fact that at the top of her legs the seam seems to dissect her body in two. Her shoes are high black clogs, raising her already tall form to a formidable height. She stands between the two young men and with her free hand keeps brushing her long blonde curls from her eyes. The men look up at her, look her up and down, look at one another…and smile. The smiles they exchange are thrilling, conspiratorial, and lascivious. The bus speeds along, the young woman swings and sways on her handle, oblivious, or so she appears, to the reaction she is causing. The young men can’t look at her enough and can’t smile at one another too much.

It’s lovely, but makes me a little sad. No Italians are going to smile this way at me these days.

But Via dei Macci has just passed, we are already—I fear—at Via Guiseppi Verdi if my map is correct. I push the red button, make my way to the middle door and I get out. I have my usual encumbrances with me: sweater, fanny pack, backpack (with camera), water bottle, and the book of my short stories for my hostess. In the street I consult my map, with no idea at all in what direction to walk.

“Can I help you?” and there beside me is the gorgeous young woman in the tight black pants speaking in a charming accented English. I am somehow astonished that she speaks at all—I thought she was just an angel tempting men and inciting them to lust. But here she is, bending over my map with me, pointing this way and that to the direction of the synagogue.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Yugoslavia, I am a student of art.”

Ah yes, I think…but there is more beauty and art in the young women of Florence than in all its museums.