A Large Albatross
Rome, unhurried.
“This must be it. It’s Piazza…” I pronounce it three times in my head before trying it out loud. “Piazza Capizucchi!” I say it with all the finesse of someone who last took a Spanish class in the 10th grade.
“‘Piazza’ is just the word for ‘town square’ in Italian,” Daniel explains. “Wrong piazza.”
I unfold one more strip of the plastic-coated map in my hand and mutter to myself that if I could just connect to some kind of a wi-fi network with my aging Palm pilot I would be able to pull up directions in fifteen or twenty minutes.
“We’re close, I’m sure.” Daniel isn’t as winded as I am but I can tell that he, too, is feeling the punitive drag of cobblestone beneath our twinned rolling suitcases. It’s already one in the afternoon and while the sun isn’t yet threatening to set, the crush of oncoming Sabbath gnaws at us. We’re supposed to get settled at the “Kosher B&B” in time to shower and connect with the hosts about dinner. But even the streets of Rome project a kind of oppressively unanxious attitude about timing: we’ll get there when we get there.
There’s a small kosher bakery and pizzeria called Buono on the corner, and we figure that Jews anywhere know Jews everywhere and we’re quite hungry by this hour, dinner be damned, so we step inside. Except that what we really do is roll inside, awkwardly announcing our touristy selves with fistfulls of map and a flash of our freshly-purchased Roma Passes to hop around the city. The shopkeepers look fully unsurprised and greet us boisterously in American-speak. “Welcome, buongiorno, howdy! You’d like some real Italian pizza, your first, yes?” We agree to be fed rewarmed slices from the sunny pans of square-sliced baked goods, some stacked with potatoes and most glistening with oil and rosemary sprinkles.
“You’re looking for the wi-fi?” One of the operators eyes me knowingly as I conspicuously dance around the floor, pointing my signal-poor phone as I go. “Yes, I was, and thank you very much if you could please give me the password,” but really, I explain, it’s just a vehicle to connect with our host. I give the address and she says yes, of course, it’s in the piazza just six blocks over and because nothing is simple Daniel walks over alone and returns fifteen minutes later to report that he’s rung the bell a few times but there’s no answer.
“Ah, this is no problem and he’s never there anyway,” the shopkeeper replies and we wonder why, then, they’d not said something in the first place but no one here seems worried. There’s a flurry of Italian exchanges and someone pulls out a phone, and ten minutes later there is our amiable host. “Cutting it close!” He announces this as he breathlessly offers to help carry our bags over to his place.
“Tomorrow morning,” he says as we walk over to his place, the cool air hitting our necks with a pleasant calm, “you will go to the Libian Synagogue for services, and I will meet you there to introduce you to your hosts for lunch.” The Libian synagogue is the best and we’ll see the lunch is worth the walk, and we shouldn’t worry about anything.
Dinner that night is by the Chabad family, third-generation emissaries who host Jews from around the world every week in a corner of what must be their home but looks honestly larger than the pizza shop we’d visited earlier that day. There’s a long banquet table oriented diagonally across the low, wide room, and it’s filled with antipasti and crostinis and squat crystal pitchers filled with ruby wine and liquors. There’s a round of formal introductions among the dozen guests, all of us visiting from disparate countries. We smile wryly with downcast eyes as the rabbi and his wife explain the basics of the Sabbath rituals. “And what do you do?” “Oh, we’re graduate students in history, which is why we’ve flown here on our February break from our studies in Israel.” This is what we say instead of explaining that we’re rabbinical students because there’s an uninvited heat, an estranged challenge that comes from introducing our crazy liberal theology, or at least that’s how it’s gone in Orthodox Jewish settings in the past and really, all we want is some good Italian food and kind company.
“Ah, graduate students.” Good, good, say the hosts and the other guests, and no one asks questions as by then several young kids have joined the table and we delight in their youthful energy, which lingers at the table even past 9:30 PM when we excuse ourselves as we’re ready to collapse, well aware that we’re departing before the formal grace after meals and in any case we don’t mind appearing a bit radical to keep up with our shady alter egos.
We wake to the hiss of a radiator and dress for synagogue which requires us to have guessed well when packing about both the weather and sartorial norms, and we’re suave and hopeful that the warm woolen neutrals were well-chosen. When we arrive it’s already well past the start of services but nothing has yet begun. The building itself is a long L-shape, the smaller of the two legs devoted to a women’s section and the rest of the building is actually brimming with men who mill about and spill down the steps. It’s loud enough that we cannot even tell, really, when services themselves begin but at some point they do, and a Torah scroll is pulled out for the reading. A kind greeter welcomes us and says that it’s a bar mitzvah, and it’s “not a short service, not that it ever is!” The custom, he elaborates, is that the 13-year-old at the center of the festivities will in fact be chanting a very short selection from the scroll such that every man present will be honored with saying the blessings before and after that portion. We glance at the enormity of the crowd and the greeter laughs and says, “Don’t worry — we start serving refreshments even before we’re halfway through.”
True to his word, not 30 minutes later a large mobile vestibule parked in the plaza beyond the chapel rolls up its aluminum siding with a loud crash. There’s plate-passed appetizer service of small sausages and calzoncini with olives, and cured slices of meat next to roast peppers and sardines. We try to act casual and calm as we quietly grunt with pleasure at this feast which feels unearned but we’re welcomed fully into the swirling crowd of guests with hearty offers of mazal tov. We’ve just grabbed two cold green bottles of porter to wash down this feast when Daniel is clapped on the back by our B&B host, who’s just arrived.
“Shabbat Shalom!” He greets us and tells us we should follow him to meet our lunch hosts for the day, and we grimace as we glance at our wristwatches and realize that we’re now expected to eat another meal. We begin to protest but he leads us insistently to the back corner of the property where several men are huddled around a cholent pot, taking generous bowls of the slow-cooked stew and immediately offering us a couple shots of Schnapps. We demure, and manage to get aware with polite sips of a shared sampler of the thick soup, and here was Benny, our host. He speaks no English so he greets us in Hebrew, which serves better than Italian at least. “It’s a bit of a long walk back to our place but my daughter, she’s a caterer, she’s prepared something really wonderful, really wonderful indeed, you’ll love.”
We regulate our breathing and our stomachs on the long stroll to lunch, half-listening to our host as we take in the busy city that surrounds. He and his wife own a dress shop, he explains, and their daughter and her husband have just opened up a small kosher bakery, not the one we’ve visited already, you should see how many kosher bakeries we have in town now but anyway our daughter’s is a cupcake shop and you should visit, after the Sabbath, of course! She’s a chef and a trained baker, and when we arrive it’s the best and worst of all worlds in that the place smells beyond terrific and we still cannot imagine another bite entering our mouths, so engorged are we from our impromptu al fresco brunch. We play with our food politely and my God it’s delicious but we sip and nibble and listen as the daughter tells an elaborate and apparently funny story in Italian. We speak not even the least bit of Italian but the story itself is clear enough from the similarities to Spanish and her broad playacting gestures. She’d been in the shower, it seemed, when a huge bird landed outside her window, scaring the wits out of her. We laughed lightly along with the table and she turned to us and apologized in broken English and said that she must try to retell it so that we’d understand. Oh we got it, we think, but she insists on doing her best to translate and she does until she gets to the final sentence.
“And I look outside and there is — landing just there — there is a very big, oh, a gabbiano, a — come si dice? — a huge…” Yes, yes, a seagull — same as Spanish, we say, but she’s unsatisfied and she waves at the back door and her father goes back and retrieves from seemingly nowhere a small, plump boy, perhaps a neighbor? A nephew? They frantically retell the story and ask the boy to translate. He nods solemnly, and turns to us: “It was a huge albatross!” We laugh wildly, uproariously, and we practically cannot catch our breaths from the humor of this random young man and his extravagant vocabulary and I’m certain they think we’re laughing at the tale itself. It all works: the moment, even the food, this patchwork gathering and fervent hospitality.
Over the next few days, we visit each of the establishments owned by Benny and his family: the cupcake shop (scrumptious!); the dress shop; even the art gallery that the son-in-law runs in the heart of the old Jewish ghetto. For every cold marble memorial to a world centuries past, there is a warm moment in which we are family: enfolded, welcomed, embraced. As we stand in a crowded espresso shop making our final farewells, we dawdle a bit to honor the unhurried pace of this distant, now familiar city. Grazie, grazie, we offer.
“You are welcome,” they say. “You are always welcome.”
