The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read Online Free PDF Page A

in fact it certainly was: one of the many adventures and joys those marvellous late spring mornings ofadolescence poured out on us.

Chapter Four

    As far as I personally was concerned, in any case, my relations with Alberto and Micol had always been rather more intimate. The understanding looks and familiar waves they gave me every time we met at school alluded only to this, as I knew perfectly well, and were something to do with us and us alone.
    Rather more intimate. But how, in fact?
    Well, of course, in the first place we were Jews, and this would have been more than enough, apart from anything else. Let me make myself clear: we might have had nothing at ah in common, not even the little that comes from having sometimes chatted a bit. But the fact that we were what we were, and that at least twice a year, at the Passover festival and at Yom Kip-pur, we appeared with our respective families all at once at the same street door in via Mazzini-and it often happened that, having gone through the door together, the narrow hall beyond it, half in darkness, obliged the grown-ups to much hat-doffing, handshaking, and polite bowing, although for the rest of the year they had no other occasion for it: as far as we children were concerned, this was quite enough, whenever we met elsewhere, and above all when there were other people about, to make our eyes cloud or laugh with a quite special feeling of complicity and connivance.
    The fact that we were Jews, though, inscribed in the registers of the same Jewish community, in our case hardly counted. Because what on earth did the word “Jew” mean? What meaning could terms like “community” or “Israelite universality” have for us, since they took no account of the existence of that more basic intimacy-a secret intimacy that can be properly appreciated only by those who have had it- derived from the fact that our two families, not from choice, but through a tradition older than any possible memory, belonged to the same religious rite, or rather to the same “school” ? When we met at the synagogue door, generally as darkness was falling, after our parents had exchanged embarrassed greetings in the shadowyporch, we nearly always ended up mounting the steep steps to the second floor together, where, crammed with all kinds of people, echoing like a church with organ music and singing-and so high up, among the rooftops, that on some May evenings, when the side windows were wide open to the sunset, we would find ourselves steeped in a kind of golden mist-was the large Italian synagogue. Only we, beingJews, of course, but Jews brought up in the very same religious rite, could really understand what it meant to have our own family pew in the Italian synagogue, up there on the second floor, and not in the German synagogue on the first floor, which, with its severe, almost Lutheran gatherings of prosperous Homburg hats, was so very different. Nor was that all: because, even supposing people outside strictly Jewish circles might know that there was an Italian synagogue different from the German one, with all the subtle distinctions this implied, socially and psychologically, who, apart from us, could have been in a position to give precise details about, say, “the via Vittoria lot”? This referred, as a rule, to the members of the four or five families who had the right to use the small separate Levantine synagogue, also called after the city of Fano, on the third floor of an old dwelling-house in via Vittoria: the Da Fanos of via Scienze, in fact, the Cohens of via Gioco del Pal-lone, the Levis of piazza Ariostea, the Levi-Minzis of viale Cavour, and a few other odd families: all rather peculiar people, in any case, faintly ambiguous and inclined to keep themselves to themselves, people whose religion, which in the Italian synagogue had become popular and theatrical in an almost Catholic sense, a fact that was clearly reflected