The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read Online Free PDF

in the character of the people, who were mostly open and optimistic and what you might call very “Po Valley”, had remained essentially a half-secret, exclusive cult best practised at night, by a few people gathered together in the darkest, least known alley-ways ofthe ghetto. No, no: only we, born and brought up intra muros, as you might say, could know and really understand these things: which were terribly subtle, of course, and maybe quite beside the point in everyday life, but none the less real for that. As for the others, all the others, not excluding school friends, friends played with as children and loved incomparably more (at least by me), it was hopeless to think ofbringing them into anything so private. Poor souls! As far as this sort of thing was concerned they just weren’t in the running at all, they were all sentenced for life, every one ofthem, to a rough, simple existence at the bottom of chasms, unscalable chasms of ignorance, or-as even my father said, grinning amiably-the life of “negri goim”.*  Poor perishing Catholics” in the dialect of Ferrara Jews
    So, when we happened to meet, we went up the stairs together, and all went into the synagogue together as well.
    And since our seats were next to each other, up there, close to the semicircular enclosures surrounded by a marble banister in the middle of which arose the teva,  or lectern, of the rabbi officiating, and both with a good view of the imposing black carved wooden cupboard where the scrolls of the Law, called sefarim, were kept, we clattered together across the resonant pink and white lozenges of the synagogue floor. Mothers, wives, aunts and sisters had parted from us males in the entrance hall. They vanished, one behind the other, through a small door in the waU that led into a dark little room, from which a spiral staircase led up to the women’s enclosure, and very soon we would see them peering out through the holes in their hen-coop grating, right up under the ceiling. But even like that, reduced to the males-which meant me, my brother Ernesto, my father, professor Ermanno and Alberto; and sometimes signora Olga’s two bachelor brothers came from Venice for the occasion, the engineer and Dr. Herrera-we were quite numerous. In any case we carried some weight, we mattered: so much so that at whatever moment in the ceremony we appeared in the doorway, we never managed to get to our seats without arousing the liveliest curiosity all round.
    As I have said, our seats were close together, one behind the other; we in front, the Finzi-Continis behind. So that even if we had wanted to it would have been very hard to ignore each other.
    Attracted by their difference just as much as my father was repelled by it, I was always very careful to notice any movement or whisper from the seat behind us. I was never still for a moment. Either I would be whispering to Alberto, who was two years older than I was, it was true, but still had to “go into the mignan",  yet in spite of this hastened, the minute he arrived, to wrap himself up in the great talcd of white wool with black stripes that had at one time belonged to his grandfather Moise; or professor Ermanno, smiling kindly at me through his thick spectacles, would with a movement of his finger invite me to look at the copper engravings illustrating an old Bible he had got out of the drawer especially for me; or else I would listen, fascinated and open-mouthed, to signora Olga’s brothers, the railway engineer and the T.B. specialist, chatting together half in Venetian dialect and half in Spanish (“Cossa xe che stas meldando? Su, Giulio, alevantate, ajde! E procura de far star in pie anca il chico . . .”** “What are you reading? Corne on, Giulio, get up! And try and make the child stay on his feet too. . . .”  and then stopping suddenly to join loudly in the rabbi’s Hebrew litany: in fact, one way or another I was nearly always