I didn"t want to accept the reality, the betrayal, the way dearest Italy turned into Romania, h.e.l.lish homeland. How lucky I was to be saved!
Until late 1937, Mussolini mocked the German idea of racial purity and held a "sovereign contempt for n.a.z.i racial doctrines." It was not until after the conquest of Ethiopia, when his military forces were burdened with obsolete arms and equipment and his currency and foreign exchange severely straitened, that he discovered what a useful political tool anti-Semitism could be to persuade ordinary citizens to accept a severe austerity program that would let him prepare for war.
Starting in 1938, new laws came thundering down upon the heads of the 40,000 to 70,000 Jews who had lived in Italy since the Roman Empire. Early that year, the Ministry of Popular Culture began a harsh campaign instructing the press to publish articles about how Jews had insinuated themselves into influential positions and professions at every level of public life, thus destroying the purity of traditional Italian life and work. The general public did not pay much attention to this campaign, because Jews in Italy had been highly a.s.similated for several centuries. Thus, when the Manifesto della Razza (Manifesto of Race) was proclaimed in July and state-sponsored anti-Semitism began, most Italians were at first puzzled, then dumbfounded by all the new laws.
Intermarriage between Jews and "Aryans" (as Mussolini now proclaimed Italians to be) had long been commonplace, but henceforth such marriages were forbidden. Jews who had become citizens after 1919 were stripped of citizenship. Jews could not own land or hold property above a certain value and could not employ Aryan domestic help. All foreign Jews except those over sixty-five or those already married to an Aryan Italian had to leave the country within the next four months or face expulsion by force, and this included foreign students like Saul Steinberg.
The educational system was in chaos as Jewish faculty members were fired, Jewish students were forbidden to attend public schools, and textbooks by Jewish authors were banned. Jews were expelled from the military and forbidden to practice professions unless their clients and patients were also Jews. In November, Jews were banned from membership in the Fascist party, and the following year they were forbidden to work in journalism. Widespread puzzlement gave way to panic as one confusing and contradictory edict followed another, and Steinberg was caught in the thick of it.
On August 6, 1938, the Ministry of National Education declared that, starting in September of the academic year 193839, all Jewish students, even those previously enrolled in universities, would be forbidden to attend cla.s.ses. One month later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs partially reversed the decision, decreeing that foreign Jewish students who had been enrolled for the previous academic year could continue their studies until they earned their degrees. There were several months of confusion until January 1939, when the Ministry of National Education took charge once again and amended the law to allow foreign students to stay in Italy until they completed their degrees; the hitch was that those who were behind would not only have to catch up, they would have to finish by the end of that academic year. For Steinberg, it was a staggering problem of nearly insurmountable proportion.
Since 1936, when he began to draw for Bertoldo, he had done what Ada called "the usual: delaying until the future." He had stopped studying and going to any cla.s.ses that were not required and had taken (and pa.s.sed) only one of the seventeen necessary examinations, which meant that if the government enforced the most recent law, rather than allowing it to be ignored, as so many of the previous ones had been, he had exactly one year to take and pa.s.s sixteen examinations, get his degree, and get out of Italy. Coupled with the problem of earning the degree was the impossibility of earning money: his last signed cartoon appeared in Settebello in September 1938, just after Jews were forbidden to work in journalism. Once again, except for the occasional loan of a few lire from Aldo, an infusion of cash from Ada, or an under-the-table commission sent his way by friends, he was almost entirely dependent on his parents.
The grit, determination, and overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility that was characteristic of the adult Saul Steinberg began during this year, as he focused all his energy and attention on two major tasks: attaining his degree and supporting himself. His friends were not about to let him go under, and they gave him work when they could. The aristocratic Erberto Carboni set him to making preliminary sketches for the Studio Boggieri design staff, sometimes preparing finished presentation drawings for clients, sometimes making precise mechanicals for printers. One project that survives is an advertis.e.m.e.nt for "Dynamin [gasoline], the Super Sh.e.l.l," in the newspaper La Stampa.
Steinberg"s friends at Bertoldo and Settebello did not desert him either, as unsigned drawings and cartoons that appeared in both papers during the next several years bear his signature totems and subjects. He tried to draw constantly and studied only when not working to earn money. Even though he knew from the beginning that he "could never become an architect because of the horror of dealing with people that architecture involves," he still felt the moral obligation to complete the degree, partly not to disappoint his parents but also because of his sense of responsibility about finishing whatever task he started. Steinberg took his exams at the last possible moment he could, and by the spring of 1939 he had taken and pa.s.sed all sixteen. In the Italian university system during his student years, the highest pa.s.sing grade was 30 and the lowest was 18. Steinberg"s grades were surprisingly good when the subjects centered on drawing, as in courses like Gi Ponte"s interior design and decoration (27) and scenography (26), but he barely pa.s.sed when the courses were mathematical or scientific, and those grades lowered his final average to 20.5. It was the same when he took the esame di laurea, the qualifying exam before the doctoral thesis: he barely pa.s.sed, with 65 out of 100.
The esame was a special project that had to be designed and built in four days, during which students were confined to a sequestered area of the school to live and work. If accepted, the esame became the basis of the tesi, or thesis. Steinberg"s subject was "Architectural and urbanistic organization of an urban center; Development of a representative building." He designed and built a theater, but even for such a rigidly delineated academic endeavor with strict rules about what could be done, he could not resist adding a touch of the comic: on the drawing that showed the building"s entrance, he added a stick figure straddling a cow and holding in his outstretched hand a lance pointing to the building. When his examiners asked why it was there, he claimed he needed it to "indicate the proportions." They accepted the project, stick figure and all, but his whimsy did not stop there. He made an even more grandiose-and illegal-gesture when he signed the official doc.u.ment declaring that he was now a doctor of architecture; instead of writing his full name, as required by law, he printed his last name only in large block capital letters, the signature he had used for all his cartoons. No doubt he was letting his professors know that the name they had seen many times in Bertoldo or Settebello was all he thought necessary for identification.
On March 1, 1940, he sent an exultant telegram to his parents: "I did well. I am an architect." On March 5 he told them he was "officially and in the name of the King proclaimed a doctor in architecture." He did not tell them how angry and upset he was to find that he had been given "a diploma of discrimination and prejudice." Saul Steinberg, son of Moritz and born in Romania, was officially proclaimed di razza Ebraica ("of the Jewish race"), which rendered his diploma as worthless as "the fake Bodoni" typeface used to print "the fake parchment." No matter that his degree was certified by Vittorio Emanuele III, "King of Italy and Albania, Emperor of Ethiopia"; as long as it said "of the Hebrew race," he could not practice his profession in Italy even if he wanted to.
The insult rankled for the rest of his life. In 1985 he exchanged copies of their diplomas with Primo Levi, who said his own was "symmetrical to yours and just as anachronistic." Steinberg told Levi that he had never, ever used the t.i.tle doctor of architecture and had been lucky not to have worked in the profession: "The Kingdom of Italy? Finished! Albania? What a joke! Emperor of Ethiopia! What cruel and stupid times. All vanished." Even "the doctor of architecture has vanished," he concluded. "Only Saul remains, son of Moritz, of the Jewish race."
THERE WERE "CRUEL AND STUPID TIMES" in 1940, but Saul still had to make a living while he plotted how to escape from Italy. "Dad writes that I"m avoiding his question, about what I will do after I receive my diploma," he wrote to his parents, trying to evade a direct response to their uneasiness. However, he had to tell them at least part of the truth: "There is nothing certain and it"s hard to do what I would prefer," which was to resume the life he had enjoyed as a successful cartoonist. After the ordeal of getting the degree, all he could do to recover was "to sleep and eat a lot," but he could not afford to relax for long, because he had to pay the taxes that universities charged on top of tuition, as well as other taxes imposed directly by the Italian government. Moritz and Rosa sent one thousand lire, which was supposed to cover the taxes and leave enough for his living expenses until he found work, but he was still short and had to add the rest from his earnings. It was "pretty painful to have to part with 2,000 lire." Still, he was blithe: "I have no money but I"ll get out of it." Several weeks pa.s.sed before he wrote to his parents again, saying he was still unsure about work and did not rule out returning to Bucharest. Whether he was telling the truth or providing a sop for their fears, he was never serious about returning to Bucharest, especially after he started to work again in Milan-surrept.i.tiously, to be sure, but steadily.
He kept a partial list of the work he did between the spring of 1940 and the end of 1941, and it showed a variety of projects, including five cartoons sold to "other newspapers or magazines," plus the "useless and ridiculous work" of submitting cartoons and captions directly to Bertoldo even though he was convinced the authorities would shut it down (which they did) after "one more issue and then that"s it." Pietro Chiesa of the design firm Fontana Arte threw a commission his way to design something to ornament a piece of furniture, and he made "a nice drawing with bottles and flowers." His friend Vito Latis, another Jewish architect constrained by the racial laws to work only for Jewish clients, was commissioned by a family named Sacerdotti to design a villa in Rapallo, which Steinberg dubbed "Milanese Bauhaus." The commission Latis gave him was far more remunerative: to make a painting for a large wall in the house, of a typical Ligurian beachfront complete with restaurants and stores, strolling couples, and swimmers.
While Steinberg was working diligently to survive in Milan, he was also investigating various options for where to go when he could no longer stay in Italy. The country did not officially enter the war until June 10, 1940, and as his Romanian pa.s.sport was not due to expire until November 29 of that year, he counted on having a brief margin of safety during which he would try to renew it. He never imagined that he would become officially stateless, but several weeks after Italy entered the war, Romania was sliced apart as Soviet forces occupied the Bessarabia region, Hungary tried to grab Transylvania, and Bulgaria wanted Dobruja. In September, King Carol II abdicated and fled, leaving his nineteen-year-old son, Michael, as king. That same month Michael was deposed when the Iron Guard, led by General Ion Antonescu, established the ultra-right National Legionary State and Antonescu declared himself conductor (Romanian for duce or fuhrer). Antonescu ordered the guard to destroy opposing political parties, murder dissenting intellectuals, and launch punitive a.s.saults against Romanian Jews. Praised by Hitler for his "glowing fanaticism," Antonescu allied the country firmly with n.a.z.i Germany, leaving Steinberg to fear that he was about to become both stateless and trapped.
He was frustrated and angry with himself for not leaving "a year, two ago, when everything was simpler," and berated himself for the "big mistake" of not getting his degree sooner. His "biggest anguish" was that if he had taken the degree on time, he could have repaid his parents" sacrifices by settling them in "a comfortable life, without worries or woe." Another possibly dangerous complication arose when it appeared that he would have to return to Bucharest to serve in the Romanian army. His original military cla.s.sification was with the "1914 contingent," which until now had always been exempted from the draft, but with Germany dictating Romanian policy, there was some internal confusion about whether this ruling still held. A letter to his parents spelled out his hope of deferring military service as a means of prolonging his pa.s.sport until February 1941, but he did not explain how he planned to do this, and there is no record that he ever tried. Instead he concentrated all his energies on getting out of Italy and started to think seriously about the United States.
The first person who encouraged him to make the move was his friend Cesar Civita, who worked for the publisher Arnaldo Mondadori throughout the 1930s as the editor of a literary magazine, Le Grandi Firme. Steinberg met him through two of Civita"s colleagues who were his friends, Cesare Zavattini and Gino Boccasile, the designer responsible for much of the magazine"s distinctive art. Cesar and his brother, Victor, were born into a wealthy Jewish family that had been in Milan for generations, and both wisely recognized the need to flee to Paris as soon as the racial laws were pa.s.sed. They urged Steinberg to do the same, but he told them he was content in Italy and hoped to remain there.
The two Civita brothers soon realized that Paris was no safer than Milan, so they left for New York in 1939. Cesar stayed until 1941, when he went to Buenos Aires to become Walt Disney"s representative for all South America and later the founder and successful publisher of Editorial Abril in Buenos Aires and in So Paulo, Brazil. Although Cesar Civita"s name was on their firm"s New York letterhead, it was Victor who remained there as a talent agent for international artists and writers, Steinberg prominent among them. Well before they got to the United States, the Civita brothers began to sell Steinberg"s drawings to magazines as varied as Life, Mademoiselle, and Town & Country. Julian Bach, later a distinguished literary agent, was then a young editor at Life, and it was he who made the proud claim that he was Steinberg"s first American publisher, "in terrible times, 1940." Bach wanted drawings of France"s Maginot Line, which Steinberg provided from his imagination, as he had never seen photographs, and which (as Bach remembered) "to our mutual horror, collapsed between the time the drawings went to press and were published in the magazine."
Steinberg"s luck was better with Town & Country, where the editors raved about his drawings, and he received further encouragement when Cesar Civita wrote from South America that Brazilian publishers were interested in his work. This was very good news, because they accepted almost everything he submitted and then paid promptly. Despite the perilous political circ.u.mstances, Steinberg was earning at least part of his keep, and as long as there was transatlantic traffic, he thought he could count on checks arriving from time to time.
Meanwhile, Saul"s American relatives had been corresponding with Moritz and Rosa about sponsoring his immigration to the United States. Moritz"s brothers, Harry in New York and Martin in Denver, both agreed to sponsor him and contribute money toward his pa.s.sage. Soon after Cesar Civita arrived in New York, armed with the address given by Saul, he visited Harry Steinberg to plot strategy. Cesar described the bureaucratic flood of paperwork they would have to navigate in order to bring Saul to New York, but Harry, on behalf of his entire extended family, was willing to do what needed to be done, not only for Saul but also to help Moritz, Rosa, and Lica to immigrate. This plan was short-lived because the Romanian political situation made it impossible for them to leave, but there were still possibilities for Saul to travel through neutral countries, so they continued their efforts.
Harry was fortunate that his daughter Henrietta, the charming thirteen-year-old who posed next to Saul in family pictures when she visited Romania, was now well connected in terms of bureaucratic niceties. She was married to Harold Danson, an employee of Paramount Pictures, who was familiar with all sorts of international avenues of communication, and she was also private secretary to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., a man-about-town related to the original commodore of the same name, a relationship he used often to further his career. He made contacts with all the right people and published a newsletter, Vagabonding with Vanderbilt, that fell somewhere between a travelogue, a political tip sheet, and a gossip column. This well-connected Vanderbilt had influential contacts in Washington as well as New York, and he agreed to use them on Saul"s behalf.
The Dominican minister plenipotentiary in Washington told Vanderbilt to contact James N. Rosenberg, who was president of an organization called the Dominican Republican Settlement a.s.sociation, headquartered in New York and working with the approval of the dictator Rafael Trujillo to grant asylum to European Jews. Rosenberg put Vanderbilt in direct contact with his colleague Mrs. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, who had seen and liked Steinberg"s work in Life and was eager to help her friend, "dear Neil" (as she called Vanderbilt), get him on a ship as soon as possible. There was, however, one major obstacle to overcome: Jews were most welcome in Santo Domingo as long as they paid the Trujillo regime $1,000 for each immigrant"s first year in the country and $500 for every year thereafter. The Denver and New York Steinbergs pooled their money and raised much of the necessary sum, while Harold Danson gathered letters from various banks for the U.S. Department of State to certify and forward to the Dominican authorities.
As the extended family geared up to expedite Saul"s transit, he was working his way through his own bureaucratic nightmare, his fears intensified by the Italian government"s rush to round up all civilians who were considered a danger to the Fascist regime. This category ranged from political dissidents to harmless foreign students like Steinberg, who, through no fault of their own, found themselves trapped.
Daily police roundups became standard operating procedure on weekdays (but not weekends, when the relevant branch of the government did not work). Steinberg was sure he would be arrested after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs singled out Hungarian and Romanian Jews as particular undesirables who had to be "expelled from the Kingdom." He had been living in a room above the Bar del Grillo, but he often slept somewhere else, sometimes at the studio Aldo shared with Luciano Pozzo. Ada and her girlfriends had apartments throughout the city, and various friends from the publishing and design worlds allowed him to sleep at their homes. Andrea Rizzoli let him hide out in the Bertoldo offices, Arnoldo Mondadori took him into his family"s capacious apartment, and Giovanni Guareschi loaned him a bicycle to use for quick getaways.
Steinberg knew that the roundups always took place between six and seven in the morning, so he got up early, washed and dressed quickly, and hopped on the bike to ride around town as if he were an ordinary Milanese citizen going to work. Even in such perilous times, he saw the city with an artist"s eye: "The air in Milan was excellent...the light was beautiful, and I saw something I had never seen before, the calm and silent awakening of a city." He usually returned to Bar del Grillo a little after seven, knowing that if the police had not come by, he was safe for another day. He had breakfast and went back to bed for a nap, satisfied to have "a whole free day ahead of me, more than a vacation, almost a life gained." He did this for the better part of a year, sneaking out through the back courtyard when the police came early and he could hear them coming up the front stairs. Carla, the youngest of the four Cavazza sisters who owned the bar, laughed as she told him how one of the policeman, "like a real Sherlock Holmes," felt the bed and declared it "still warm."
While Steinberg was on the lam, he was working hard to secure both the necessary travel doc.u.ments and the money to pay for his voyage. Harry and Martin Steinberg and Harold Danson all contributed; Aldo gave what he could, as did Cesare Zavattini, and Cesar Civita gave advances against earnings and made sure that money owed from various publications arrived promptly. Still, he was dealt a crushing setback in the spring of 1940: with most of the money in hand, and despite a letter from Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., to the American consul in Naples requesting a U.S. visa, his application was rejected because the Romanian quota had already been filled. Cesar Civita tried briefly to obtain a visa for Ecuador but gave it up when someone-Henrietta Danson, Vanderbilt, or perhaps Steinberg himself-came up with the idea of using the Dominican Republic as a temporary haven until he could get to New York.
Steinberg knew of other Romanian Jews who had been granted asylum in Santo Domingo, and he had already gone to Genoa to put in his application at the consulate. It was on file there when a letter, perhaps composed by Henrietta but signed by Vanderbilt on June 1, 1940, arrived in the office of "The Minister of the Dominican Republic" in Washington, D.C. Vanderbilt asked the Dominican consul to cable his Genoa counterpart to ask him to secure an entry visa for "a very talented and worthwhile resident" whose agents and editors guaranteed that he would earn "a considerable amount of money in the United States, which he will, naturally, spend in the Dominican Republic." The Washington consul"s reply was a curt rebuke, saying it was "out of the question" for him to contact his Genoa colleague, as he had "no jurisdiction over any European consul."
A period of wild uncertainty, confusion, and travel followed, as Steinberg tried to get the transit visas that would permit him to board a ship of the American Export Lines. Harry and Martin Steinberg and Cesar Civita gathered the money in New York to purchase a ticket in his name on a U.S.-line ship, and it was being held for him in the Lisbon office. All he had to do was get to Lisbon. From July 26 until November 27, 1940, Steinberg raced back and forth across several countries, trying to put his travel papers in order. He did acquire a visa from the Dominican Republic in Genoa, which enabled him to obtain a tourist visa from the Portuguese consulate in Milan; he went to Rome several times to secure a transit visa from the Spanish consulate to use on his way to Lisbon; and he had to secure a second Spanish transit visa as well, specifically for the brief time he was in the Barcelona airport. He also needed a letter from an American consul (which he got on another trip to Rome) that guaranteed an "affidavit of travel" so that he could book pa.s.sage on a ship that docked in New York, where he would transfer to another, which would take him to Santo Domingo. And after all that racing around, just when it seemed that everything was in order and he could depart, none of these doc.u.ments mattered, because the Portuguese government denied his tourist visa.
Portugal was being flooded with Romanian Jewish refugees, and the Salazar government was worried that there were not enough ships to carry them to other countries even if they had the necessary money and doc.u.ments. With everything else in order, Steinberg was shocked when stony-faced customs police would tell him only the official reason, that his application had expired. He never learned the real reason, that "Romania is facing a serious problem ... of disposing of an undesirable, numerous and mounting population of the Jewish race."
All Steinberg knew of these political machinations was that he had been denied a visa in Lisbon. Undeterred, he contacted the Portuguese consul in Milan again, and on August 29, 1940, that consulate disregarded a new secret memorandum that had been issued in Lisbon and granted him a transit visa. What the Milan officials ignored and Steinberg did not know was that Salazar"s government was so alarmed by the huge influx of European Jews from many countries that they had issued a secret directive closing the border entry points. Thus Steinberg became an unwitting victim of police secrecy and silence: when he landed at Sintra airport on Friday, September 7, after a flight from Milan, he was told to take the next flight back, and no reason was given.
As if being sent back to Italy were not bad enough, he was convinced that the Lisbon authorities had confused him with "another Steinberg, a Communist Steinberg, on their list." Being labeled a Communist was a red flag in every country he needed to pa.s.s through on his way to immigration, and once labeled as such, he would find it nearly impossible to have the stigma removed. Even though such a mixup was never proven, it made a convenient excuse as he headed back to Milan in abject despair.
Steinberg never learned about the secret directive of Salazar"s secret police and spent the rest of his life thinking that he had somehow lacked one or more of the proper travel affidavits for the United States. As soon as he returned to Milan, he started all over again to round up a new set of doc.u.ments, casting widely for help. He even enlisted the aid of the Panamanian consul, who told him to go to Rome and deal directly with the Romanian legation. He took the overnight train and spent three hours in the waiting room the next day, but when his turn came, his pa.s.sport was not renewed and he was not told why. The most likely reason was that without it, he would have to find his way back to Bucharest, where he could be drafted. That was never an option for Steinberg, but as long as he had to stay in Rome overnight, he went sightseeing.
When he returned to Milan he had further bad news from the Spanish consulate. His transit visa through Spain had been revoked because he no longer had a valid Romanian pa.s.sport. Now he was not only stateless but also unable to leave Italy. To deal with the misery, he began to keep a cryptic diary-journal of his travails, something he would do off and on for the rest of his life when he needed to think things through and sort out how to deal with them. On December 6, 1940, he noted that it was almost three months since he had been sent back from Lisbon on that dreadful Friday, September 7. He remembered this date for the rest of his life as his "most dramatic disaster, my Black Friday." He also remembered the "other Steinberg," who might have kept him from leaving; what hurt most about this confusion was what he decided was an "accusation of bad faith," that is, that he had not been honest. But he refused to dwell on it: "enough" was his last written word on the subject.
His natural tendency toward superst.i.tion now became focused on Friday as the day that "more and more often brings me bad luck." He had gone to Rome for the Spanish transit visa on a Friday and to Lisbon hoping to board a ship on a Friday, and both times he had been turned back. However, when December 6 arrived, it was "a really black day Friday." He had never been religious, but uncharacteristically he prayed: "G.o.d will help me get through these years."
There was unrelieved misery on every front. On November 10, Romania was devastated by an earthquake so severe that it caused damage as far away as Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. Bucharest was less badly damaged than other Romanian cities, and the homes and shops of the Steinbergs and their relatives were relatively unscathed. They were terrified for Saul"s safety when they listened to Romanian radio and heard reports of the air raids and bombings in Milan, while he tried to convince them that he was in good health, had enough work, and was not in any real danger. It was still hard to write cheerful letters when he was feeling far from optimistic. He told the diary, "I am anxious right now, as I always am when something eludes me and my desire for it grows stronger."
The ship he hoped to sail on, the Siboney, was due to leave Lisbon for New York in twelve days, and he had to face up to the fact that he would not be on it. The police roundups had become infrequent, and in depression he began to sleep until noon. When he woke up he read, first, Manzoni"s I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), "a great and fine book," and then The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. He felt "more and more empty in the head," and when he finally roused himself to wakefulness, daily life was all "malaise."
Money was getting tight again, so he could not afford to indulge in self-pity for long. He courted Giovanni Mosca at Bertoldo with an early Christmas gift of painted wood blocks, possibly one of the earliest examples of the wooden books, pens, tables, and boxes for which he would become famous later in his career. Unfortunately, when Mosca was unable to send much work his way, Steinberg"s general financial strain resulted in a brief falling-out with Aldo Buzzi. He was now sharing a design studio with Luciano Pozzo, but they did not have enough work for themselves and were too poor to be able to pa.s.s any along to Saul. He found this difficult to accept and told the diary, "I would not treat a friend this way."
To further complicate his life, there was Ada. They fought, they argued, they made up. They spent entire days in bed while he sated himself, then he pouted because she preferred to spend evenings with her girlfriends rather than with him. He was irritated while they lolled in bed because she spent too much time chattering about silly, ordinary things he didn"t want to hear about. In a better mood, they met in restaurants for tea and went to movies, which he adored, particularly American films like Stagecoach, with John Wayne, and Jamaica Inn, with Charles Laughton. By the end of April 1941, he referred to Ada as his "dear girl" and didn"t know how he could function without her radiant presence in his life.
And then, just before her birthday at Christmastime in 1940, Rosa threatened to complicate his life even further. She pretended to be worried about how he was scrambling to survive in Milan, but in truth she was more worried about his possible emigration. Rosa was determined to get to Milan so she could "take care of him," probably a euphemism for persuading him not to go. He tried to calm her down with a letter full of repet.i.tive statements about how well he lived and worked and how he always "tried to do everything in the best way possible." He a.s.sured her that he had many friends and was "not really alone and without any support."
Saul was never a diligent correspondent, but when he did write to his parents, he was always careful to give only as much information about his attempts to leave Italy as he thought they could handle; otherwise, he a.s.sured them repeatedly that even though the winter was cold, he had enough warm clothes; he ate regular, healthy meals; and his work brought in enough money to keep him going. Moritz and Rosa wrote far more frequently, and the letters (particularly hers) were filled with flowery complaints of sleepless nights, panic attacks, "fears and woes." When Moritz wrote, it was to beg Saul to write more frequently so Rosa would calm down. Fortunately for Saul, if Rosa did make any concerted effort to get to Milan, it came to naught. The exchange of letters during these years set the pattern for how Saul and his parents would relate to each other for the rest of their lives, with Rosa imploring him to write, Moritz begging him to do so to placate her, and Saul responding only when he could no longer avoid it.
POGROMS BEGAN IN EARNEST THROUGHOUT ROMANIA shortly after the New Year in 1941. Thugs rampaged through the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, but Moritz"s shop was in a courtyard and not as badly damaged as those that fronted the street. Moritz kept the girls who worked in his factory inside until the attacks were over, so n.o.body was injured and nothing was lost. The Olteni (Christian natives of southwestern Romania) who kept the dairy store on the corner surprised the Steinbergs by aiding them with much-appreciated "Gentile kindness." The attacks, however, were merely the start of sustained persecution. Mail censorship had already begun, so communication even with another Axis country like Italy was slow and sporadic. Jews were still allowed to read newspapers, but soon their radios were confiscated, and shortly after, deportations began.
Meanwhile, in Milan there was a genuine possibility that Steinberg would be sent to prison. Even though his Romanian pa.s.sport had expired in December, he was more or less ignored by the various ministries that monitored the status of foreign students. The local police knew he was still around, but no higher authority told them to arrest him, so he was left alone. He actually formed cordial relations with some of them, particularly "a certain Captain Vernetti," who arranged for him to have "postponements" from arrest or deportation. It also helped that everyone from Buzzi to his colleagues from the Politecnico and his friends in the publishing world had influential friends or relatives who worked within various government agencies and were eager to help him. He wrote in his diary that 1940 had been the worst year of his life, but even so, he was proud of having earned his degree, taught himself enough English to make out what a newspaper article was about, and had his drawings published in distinguished American periodicals. Despite these triumphs, he was still certain that 1941 was going to be a bad year, at least at the beginning.
He was not surprised when a telegram from the prefect of Milan arrived at the Grillo on February 21, 1941, stating that the Ministry of the Interior had been informed that the former student Steinberg who had been "warned to leave the Kingdom" was still there. Steinberg went to the ministry to affirm that he would be more than happy to leave the kingdom, but even though a "tight-lipped" American vice consul had granted him a transit visa to pa.s.s through the United States, he had not yet been able to secure the new ones that would allow him to pa.s.s through Spain en route to Portugal. He was in the frustrating position of trying to line up a stack of legal dominos in order to make them fall in order, but on every occasion the one he needed to start the tumble was missing.
There must have been other former foreign students who fell into this curious Catch-22 situation, but a specific file was compiled in Rome devoted to resolving the situation of the "Ebrei stranierei," the foreign Jew "Steinberg Saul, di Moritz." His case created such a bureaucratic muddle that the prefect of the ministry in Milan did not know how to resolve it and had to cable the head office in Rome to ask for "directives." Rome told Milan to "formulate concrete proposals," and two weeks later the prefect decided that, as "the foreigner in question is unable to leave the Kingdom, he should be a.s.signed to a concentration camp." By the time Steinberg received this decree on April 16, he had resigned himself to going.
THE SYMPATHETIC CAPTAIN VERNETTI WAS THE officer who arranged the details of his arrest. On April 17 he told Steinberg to put his affairs in order and to report back in one week, prepared to be sent immediately to a detention center, most likely Tortoreto, a small town in the province of Teramo on the Adriatic coast. Steinberg spent a frenetic week trying to clean up all the loose ends connected with his various projects. He rushed to put final touches on the panel for the Sacerdotti villa in Rapallo, submitted cartoon captions for Bertoldo, drew one "vignette" for Settebello and two for the magazine Tempo. He presented himself as scheduled to Captain Vernetti on April 24, only to be told that the police were not ready to receive him and he could have two more days of freedom. He spent them with Ada, mostly in bed, rousing only to take her to the movies and eat at the Bar del Grillo.
On Sunday morning, April 27, promptly at 10 a.m. he presented himself to Captain Vernetti in the local police station, San Fedele, and one hour later they were on their way by taxi to San Vittore al Centro, the main prison in Milan. Steinberg was placed in a holding cell with thirty-six other prisoners, all of whom slept on the floor. The next day he was transferred to the second floor of San Vittore and placed in a cell with a Soviet Russian named Zessevich, who had already been incarcerated for fifty-six days, and a Hungarian named Erdos, who had been there for fifty. Both were being held "under suspicion," a vague generality that meant their papers were not in order, but they were in no hurry to be repatriated or to fight in the war. They were content to pa.s.s their time in what was, for them, the relative comfort of a Milanese prison, even though they were housed among common criminals who lived there under the most primitive, unsanitary, and unhealthy conditions.
Steinberg helped them pa.s.s the time by creating a deck of playing cards "with tobacco papers, bread crumbs and soup ... all drawn with a copying pencil." For the red ink needed for hearts and diamonds, they p.r.i.c.ked their fingers and used blood. When they tired of cards, they had tobacco and other entertainment, such as a variety of daily and Sunday newspapers, a sports journal, and one devoted solely to comic strips. They could buy jam, chocolate, dried figs, walnuts, beer, wine, cheeses, bread, and warm milk. They had cigarettes, but matches were chancy; they had soap and were permitted showers every other day or so. Cells were inspected around 3 p.m., and there were three nighttime checks. Soup was served at eleven, with two small loaves of bread for each prisoner, and from nine to ten they were permitted to walk in the prison grounds. All in all, it wasn"t so bad. Steinberg knew he would not be in San Vittore for long so he did not try to settle in, spending his days instead in genuine terror that he would be sent not to Tortoreto but to Ferramonte di Tarsia, a far harsher camp in the southern province of Cosenza, Calabria.
ALTHOUGH BOTH ITALIAN AND GERMAN CAMPS were called concentration camps, the main difference between them was that the Italians interned but did not exterminate. Those confined to Italian camps ranged from persons deemed dangerous to the Fascist regime to citizens of enemy states and everyone else who fell between the cracks of official bureaucratic rulings, including foreign students who overstayed their welcome. The two major categories of detainees, however, were Jews (both Italian and foreign) and political dissidents who were outspoken in their distaste for fascism.
There were also two different cla.s.ses of internment. "Free" meant that the person was sent to a small village or town and had to find a way to live there at his own expense. Spouses or family members could join the offender, who had to report for curfews and roll calls but was otherwise free to go about his business. Steinberg was in the other cla.s.s, the one sent to the so-called concentration camps, where prisoners were segregated by s.e.x, lived in collective housing, and were permitted only limited contact with outsiders. Most of these camps were in the isolated mountainous regions of central Italy or in the even harsher mountains of the most backward provinces in the extreme south. He was greatly relieved when he was finally told that he was going to Tortoreto, one of the better camps, in east-central Italy. It was near enough to Milan that Ada, Aldo, and some of his other friends would have a fairly easy time trying to visit and packages sent by mail were more than likely to be delivered.
On May 1 at 9 a.m., he was taken down to the main floor at San Vittore, where he was allowed to telephone Ada and tell her where he was going. In her inimitable fashion, his "dear girl" already knew it and had gone to Ferraro"s, the shop near the Grillo where they usually bought food and other provisions. Steinberg was put into a taxi with two policemen as escorts and taken to the railroad station, where a small group of friends gathered to see him off. Aldo was waiting with his luggage and their friend Dr. Pino Donizetti, who brought a large sack full of various medicines, especially quinine against the rampant malaria that plagued the camp. Ada was there too, her eyes nervously scanning the crowd for a glimpse of him, and she made "a little jump" when she saw him. He noted, as he always did, what she was wearing: "gray overcoat, black dress with her aunt"s brooch." He kissed her "lightly, wet mouth, she cries. I won"t see her anymore. Dear Adina."
Escorted by policemen from Sicily, he and the other prisoners were put on board a train for the relatively short but roundabout journey to the Abruzzi, which would take several days. They went from Bologna to Rimini, where they were taken off the train long enough to eat lunch in a workers" cafe, then ushered back on to ride until midnight, when they arrived in Ancona. The prisoners were herded into the railway station waiting room and told to sleep as best they could, but Steinberg managed to get out long enough to buy a stamp and a postcard to send to his parents. He told them he was "constantly on the road in my attempt to leave [Italy]," but he didn"t tell them he was writing while on his way to an internment camp. At 6:30 a.m., another train took the prisoners to Tortoreto, and Steinberg caught a brief glimpse of the sea before he was taken to his final destination.
THERE WERE ACTUALLY TWO SEPARATE CAMPS in Tortoreto; Steinberg was in the one called Tortoreto Alto, and the other was Tortoreto Stazione. Each camp had its own separate governance and police security, and supervision was, to say the least, casual. At Tortoreto Stazione, a corporal and four other patrolmen from the local station occasionally patrolled the grounds or made roll calls at the Villa Tonelli, where the prisoners lived. It was a large, ramshackle building built in the Moorish style and represented a castle. Steinberg called it "a truly romantic prison," consisting of ten rooms on the first floor, ten on the second, and nine other supposedly habitable rooms. The authorities deemed it suitable to hold a maximum of 115 inmates, but conditions were so primitive and unhealthy that when Steinberg arrived it was overcrowded with just 79. Most of the prisoners were officially labeled German Jews, and twenty-four had already been interned for two years.
In 1940 the Villa Tonelli"s sewage system, bathing, and toilet facilities were supposedly improved, but in 1941, while Steinberg was there, the building had no running water owing to a lack of water pressure; inmates were permitted to shower once every week to ten days, using buckets of cold water raised from the well that also provided their drinking water. Sewage was still disposed of in nearby cesspits. There was an infirmary of sorts consisting of three cots, supervised by the local "health officer," whom everyone took care to avoid. A primitive kitchen provided meals that prisoners ate in a refectory, and those who had friends or family to bring them extra food were exceedingly grateful and considered themselves lucky. The government allowed a daily stipend of a few lire to prisoners who had no family to bring them food or money. In later years Steinberg liked to tell friends that the pope supplemented the stipend with an extra six lire every day "as an allowance, and for his own peace of mind." They needed this money because they had to buy so much of their food in order to survive.
"There was quite a traffic in bread," Steinberg remembered, "fresh bread, dry bread, all kinds of bread. Gra.s.s and herbs, a bit of onion," all were scrounged to make "bread soup, bread pies." He thought himself lucky to be sent there in May, when it was warm and easy to forage.
The main problem for the detainees was how to pa.s.s the time. There was a large garden in front of the house, and prisoners were permitted to walk in it. They could see the townspeople through the fence, particularly the women, "virgins full of pa.s.sion ... all those bulging curves ready to explode: bosoms, backsides, and so forth." Apparently some of the girls looked back at the prisoners. Many years later, one who lived next door to the Villa Tonelli remembered the "romantic young man who fascinated all the girls on account of his good looks." They flirted through the fence, calling for Paulo, the Italianization of Saulo, the nickname Steinberg was given by his friends in Milan, or Saulino, as Ada had called him before she coined the lover"s nickname Olino, or "mi Olino caro." The "enforced abstinence" within the camp made Saul pine for Ada: "Adina, always thinking of her. At nights I put my head under the covers and start to think. I greet her, Hi Adina ... poor dear Adina, I love her very much."
There was an interesting collection of fellow prisoners, and intellectual and cultural life flourished as well as it could under such circ.u.mstances. Steinberg befriended two of the prisoners who were Austrian Jews: the violinist Alois Gogg, who became a professor of music and director of a symphony orchestra in Wisconsin under the name of Milton Weber, and Walter Frankl, the architect and elder brother of the famed neurologist/psychiatrist Dr. Victor Frankl. When the inmates came up with the idea to send something sarcastic to Mussolini to "thank" him for the minuscule daily food allowance, Frankl made a tongue-in-cheek drawing that showed the Villa Tonelli surrounded by small blocked-in s.p.a.ces where each prisoner could write his name. They intended sarcasm with a proclamation of the word Duce! at the top of the page in large block capitals, followed by a statement that the detainees were profoundly grateful for the stipend and wished to offer their stupendous thanks for such a magnanimous gesture of "human treatment." Their sarcasm continued as they saluted Mussolini again at the end with another large block of capitals: "Viva l"Italia!"
Steinberg spent his first few days reading books that others had brought with them, especially those he found in the English language. He liked Huckleberry Finn, particularly the part where "Tom Sawyer takes off his hat as if taking the lid off a box of sleepy b.u.t.terflies." It may have been one of the earliest images that sparked his imagination for so many of the drawings that showed startling objects erupting from inside a person"s head. But he soon tired of reading, and when he became acquainted with a number of prisoners who had worked in journalism or the arts and who were still trying to practice their professions from prison, he knew he needed to follow their lead and get to work. He was beginning to settle into the place, even getting used to smoking Popolari, a coa.r.s.e brand of Italian cigarettes. He bought a brush and some paints and within ten days had finished a "still life on a table in the foreground, in the background, rooms, families, the usual things. The self-portrait on the table, not bad, all a little messy and confusing in color."
He had begun to draw dal vero whatever he saw in San Vittore, and he continued with pa.s.sionate intensity in Tortoreto. At San Vittore, to conserve paper, he had put three drawings on one page. On the left was his cell, number 111 on the second floor of San Vittore, with everything in the room carefully labeled and explained. He wrote the names of his cellmates on the mattresses on the floor, noting that two were made of straw but his was not. In the center on the cell floor was the carefully labeled water jug, washbowl, soup dish, and wine carafe. In the middle drawing, a shadowy outline of a man stares wistfully up at a large barred window, and in the right-hand drawing Steinberg surrounded a barred cell seen from the exterior with writing that depicts the hours when everything happens in the prison: milk at eight, soup at eleven, and three bed checks at night. At Tortoreto he was in Room No. 2, a large dormitory with ten other prisoners. He drew it in stark black outline, depicting dejected male figures sitting on beds with their few belongings hanging limply on the walls behind them. Here and there, several desk tables and chairs are scattered. The aura is one of nothing to do but kill time, and there is an intense impression of tired, bored men, waiting for something to happen. By May 28, Saul noted in his diary that he had sent two tempera drawings to Aldo and if he did not soon leave, he would "die of heartbreak."
Actually, heartbreak or toothache-he was not sure which would get him first. He had suffered, and would continue to suffer throughout his life, from every sort of problem with his teeth. When the pain was too severe to endure, prisoners were allowed to go to the dentist in Tortoreto Alto. Steinberg had had several cavities filled by this dentist, but the pain persisted, and a week later he was convinced it might kill him. Naturally, this was the exact moment when his travel dominos all lined up perfectly and were ready to fall.
HIS AMERICAN RELATIVES HAD PREVIOUSLY MADE contact with an Italian group known by the acronym DELASEM (Delegazione per l"a.s.sistenza degli Emigranti Ebrei, the Delegation for the a.s.sistance of Jewish Emigrants) and were hopeful that an on-site Italian organization could a.s.sist them. DELASEM, created by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities in 1939, carried official government authorization for the purpose of a.s.sisting Jews in Italy (whether Italian or foreign) to leave the country. Neither Steinberg nor his relatives ever mentioned that he received financial help from DELASEM, but he did receive the group"s advice and a.s.sistance throughout the time he tried to leave. Nothing much came of it before he went to Tortoreto, and he had all but given up on it.
Suddenly, on May 30-and on his unlucky day, a Friday-he received a telegram from DELASEM telling him that his Portuguese visa had arrived. There was no mention of a transit visa for Spain (although it came a few days later), and he had just twenty days to get himself to Lisbon before everything expired. It meant that he had to fly, and a week of confusion followed until another Friday, June 6, when a letter from DELASEM in Rome led him to believe there was some question about his plane ticket. Steinberg was sure that, as it was Friday, there was still time for something bad to happen.
He was calmer the next morning when he heard someone shouting his name from the street. It was his fellow prisoner Alois Gogg, joyous because they would both be allowed to leave for Rome the next day. That night their fellow prisoners gave them a royal send-off. First there was dinner, for which they pooled all their resources. Then they presented Steinberg with another of Walter Frankl"s drawings of the Villa Tonelli, signed by all his fellow internees. After that, Gogg gave them a muted violin concert-in the dark, as lights were turned off at nine o"clock, after which prisoners were supposed to be quiet.
In his little book of reminiscences, Reflections and Shadows, Steinberg wrote that everyone walked with him and Gogg and their police guard as far as they were allowed, to the edge of the station, where the two were escorted onto a train bound for Rome. As it pa.s.sed by the villa, all those left behind were up on the roof or at the windows, waving everything white they could find, including sheets and towels. In the wartime "Journal, 194042," however, he tells a different story.
Instead of going directly to Rome with Gogg, Steinberg got off at the next station and boarded the night train coming from Rome and went to Milan to spend a day with Ada. He made the trip "seated with all the perils, police, doc.u.ments," but arrived without incident and went directly to the Grillo. While he was in bed with Ada, Natalina Cavazza did his laundry, scolding him for taking such shabby clothes and worn-out socks to America in his one small suitcase. The next night he got back on the train, and this time he did go to Rome, to "a crowded train, a nameless hotel ... saved from minute to minute by a miracle." He stayed at the Hotel Pomezia on the Via dei Chiavari near the gate to the old Jewish Ghetto, in a room he shared with Gogg, where he drew another of his stark pencil drawings, as if he needed to fix every feature of it firmly in his mind so it would stay there forever.
In later years Steinberg liked to tell a more dramatic story about how he fled-that he had no exit visas and "slightly falsified" them with a rubber stamp of his own making. In truth he had all the proper travel doc.u.ments, affidavits, and visas that were required, and thanks to his Italian friends, he was flush with money. On June 16 he and Gogg were allowed to board the Ala Littoria flight that took them to Lisbon via Barcelona and Madrid. They stayed in Lisbon until June 20, at the Hotel Tivoli on the appropriately named Avenida Liberdade. Gogg, who was sailing on a later ship, came to the pier with another released internee named Isler, and they waved goodbye to Steinberg as he boarded the Excalibur, a ship of the American Export Line, with his small suitcase and two dollars in American money.
On June 21, Hitler declared war on Russia; on June 22, the ship picked up fourteen Dutch sailors who had been in a lifeboat for fifteen days after their ship had been torpedoed; on June 23, they stopped in the Azores to allow "eight clandestine pa.s.sengers" to disembark. After that it was a straight shot to New York on rough seas, and on July 1 the Excalibur sailed into New York Harbor. Cesar Civita was there with the New York Steinberg family, but they were not able to do more than greet Saul briefly. Henrietta Danson noticed sadly that his little valise contained only an extra shirt, a pair of socks, and an apple he had taken from the ship"s dining room.
Despite Harry Steinberg"s plea to Mrs. Reyher of the Dominican Settlement a.s.sociation that Saul be allowed to stay with his relatives until his departure, they were not even allowed to take him into Manhattan for an afternoon of sightseeing. He could only greet them before customs guards hustled him off to the barracks on Ellis Island, where he was interned until the ship for the Dominican Republic was ready to sail. He spent his first American Fourth of July there, so close to the New York he had dreamed of but still so far away that he could not even see the famed Manhattan skyline. By the time he sailed, Civita had joined the Dansons and Steinbergs to outfit him with everything he might need, including lightweight clothing and leather oxfords, the first he had ever worn. They also supplied him with an English dictionary, writing and drawing supplies, and, most important of all, various unguents and insect repellents to ward off tropical diseases.
"They"ve brought me everything," he wrote to his parents. "They are all very nice and polite and very attentive." He told Rosa and Moritz that he wanted to start working as soon as he landed, as he believed he had the "hope and potential to succeed." It was a brave boast made just before he boarded a ship on July 5, to sail off to a life he could not even begin to fathom.
CHAPTER 7.
TO ANSWER IN ENGLISH-A HEROIC DECISION He is now in the Dominican Republic. He has no pa.s.sport ... it is very much to our interest that he come to New York ... The question is, can we do anything to help things along.
The voyage took eight hot and fretful days because the ship was delayed for three in Puerto Rico. When it finally docked at a small port on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, no explanation was given for why they were not going to Ciudad Trujillo, as planned, and everyone was ordered off. Steinberg discovered that Spanish was an easy language to learn for one who knew Italian, and he was able to speak enough to hire a car that drove him to the capital city through the inferno of midsummer heat. He arrived on July 13 and immediately became aware of how bribery and corruption fueled the government of the megalomaniac dictator, General Rafael Trujillo, who had even renamed the venerable city of Santo Domingo after himself. Steinberg was struck by the kaleidoscopic profusion of color in the local landscape, the abundance of tropical foods, and the bustle and fervor of the people who crowded the streets. But the strongest impression for a European coming from a colder clime was the intense and suffocating heat, and within days he was sick.
He spent most of his first month in bed under a canopy of heavy netting, felled by malaria and trying to fend off voracious mosquitoes with a variety of the medicines and spray guns of Flit insect repellent his cousins had provided. He was in a pleasant enough hotel room, paid for by Cesar Civita, who sent fifty dollars every month as an advance against future earnings, and he still had a little left from the funds his friends had contributed before he left Italy, supplemented by what his uncle and cousins had given before he left New York. He drew his room in a letter to Henrietta Danson, complete with an arrow pointing to the green lizard on the floor beside his bed, which ate all the flies, roaches, and gnats who tried to invade it. "I shall try to answer in English-is an heroic decision," he told her in his still imperfect command of the language, and he followed the declaration with an arrow pointing to a squib of his sweating self sitting at a desk with a large dictionary open in front of him. By October he had still not recovered from the malaria, but he tried to work, even though it was "impossible to be very well" in such a dreadful climate.
Cesar Civita had arranged for him to draw daily comic strips for Dominican newspapers, which he did because the pay was decent, even though none of them engaged his interest. He told Henrietta Danson that he had generated more good ideas for cartoons in a single afternoon in Milan than he did in an entire month in Santo Domingo. Otherwise, daily life was dull and he did little. He managed a daily ocean swim but was too lethargic to practice English; he thought the Dominican people "much primitive" and socialized only with other Romanian refugees, befriending an architect from Bucharest, Paul Rossin, and his wife, Tina, and brother, Pierre. He went to their home for meals or to pa.s.s evenings with them and other Romanian refugees, particularly a family named G.o.desteanu. They all knew each other from Bucharest, and talked frequently of Leventer, who had returned home hoping to work as an architect, and the peripatetic Perlmutter, who was rumored to be in Hollywood but was actually in Algiers. All the reminiscences overwhelmed Steinberg with a sense of what he had lost, as they brought back memories of other Romanian friends and summer outings in the countryside.
By the end of his first month in Santo Domingo, he realized that he was getting a lot of good news, all coming steadily from the Civitas" New York office. Gertrude Einstein, the woman who ran their office with the utmost efficiency, told Steinberg that Cesar had sold some drawings to various American publications, but the real excitement came when The New Yorker bought one and wanted more and Mademoiselle bought "four or five" for a double page in the Christmas issue and wanted another double-page spread for Valentine"s Day. He told his Danson cousins (still in imperfect English) that he knew of "the very goods English like Punch and Humorist, but I think The New Yorker is the top. Is very flattery for me." Then The New Yorker asked for more drawings, and suddenly he had so many commissions that even doing work he loved became almost more than he could handle.
He thought his malaria was cured, but by mid-October he was ill again and described himself as looking "like a xray picture full with quinine, fever, etc." He was in bed during another heat wave, which lasted through November and made him even more "ill and furious." He had been in Santo Domingo for four months, and for more than two he had been bedridden and often unable to work. That was his chief frustration, but there was a long litany of others, starting with parcels of clothing the Steinbergs and Dansons sent from New York. Customs officials expected bribes, so they refused to give him a package containing trousers and shoes valued at $25 until he paid an unofficial "tax" of $19. Since he was against it in principle and short of money besides, he asked a Dominican acquaintance who knew the customs officials to offer a smaller bribe, which was successful.
NO MATTER HOW SICK, TIRED, OR DEPRESSED Steinberg was, he always forced himself to write relentlessly cheerful letters to his parents, even to the point of stretching the truth by exaggerating how much money he was making and how, if his good fortune continued, he would be able to bring them "over here soon." Hoping to placate Rosa, he adopted his Aunt Mina"s flowery style of letter writing and used her religious exhortations to preface almost every statement. His letters were full of expressions asking for G.o.d"s help or hoping that G.o.d would bless his various undertakings. The only unvarnished truth he told was to describe how his good fortune in escaping from Italy had made him so aware of his Jewish heritage that he fasted on Yom Kippur, not only for himself but also to honor his parents. And yet no matter what he wrote, it was not enough to calm his mother, who was convinced that her twenty-seven-year-old son was dejected and depressed and his spirits would rise only from being in her presence.
After the United States entered the war, Rosa insisted that Saul was in greater danger in Santo Domingo than he had ever been in in Italy. She chose this moment to write hysterical letters to Harry Steinberg, alarming him and irritating Saul when he learned of them. Harry tried to pacify her by telling Moritz that "the main thing is to calm Rosa." Patiently, and "especially for Rosa," he described the peril Saul had faced in Italy, but she was still determined that he must return to Bucharest. Harry tried repeatedly to tell her that her wish for him to return was unrealistic, and he begged her to have faith that Saul would be successful and bring her "great naches," using the Yiddish expression for the pride or pleasure a Jewish parent gets from a child. Rosa ignored everything he said, including his careful descriptions of how much Saul was earning, of his excellent diet amid the abundance of food, and of his pleasant life in a paradise that tourists paid handsomely to visit. She ignored everything, insisting that Saul was in danger, and at that point Harry lost patience, writing, "You don"t help him by being upset ... on the contrary, you discourage him, and he has to be encouraged." Whether Harry ever persuaded Rosa to calm down became a moot point, because mail service to and from Romania was severed, and for the next several years only an occasional cryptic message sent through the auspices of the National Society Red Cross of Romania reached any of them.
ROSA"S OUTBURST PALED BEFORE THE WORST blow of all, which came just when Saul was weakest from malaria. Aldo sent a letter saying he could no longer keep it secret that he and Ada had had an affair. The letter was Saul"s first real contact with either of them since he arrived in Santo Domingo, and it left him reeling. They had written to him in Tortoreto and Lisbon, but mail delivery was sporadic, and for every letter he received, many others were either delayed or lost. One of the first thing