The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read Free Page A

name of Barchetto del Duca: all very fine, admittedly !-and all the more so since Moise Finzi-Contini, who deserved full credit for realizing he was on to a good thing, had obviously got it for the proverbial song. So what?- he continued, straight away. Did Moise’s son Menotti, rather pointedly nicknamed “the crazy apricot”, after the colour of an eccentric fur-lined overcoat he wore, really have to transfer himselfand his wifeJosette to a part of town that was so much out of the way, so unhealthy even now, so imagine what it must have been like then!-and so deserted, besides, so melancholy, and above all, so very unsuitable.
    Well, it was all very well for the parents, who belonged to a different age, and in any case could perfectly well afford the luxury of investing whatever they liked in old stones. And it was especially all very well for Josette Artom, who came from the Treviso branch of the family ofbaron Artom (a magnificent creature, in her time: a busty, blue-eyed blonde whose mother came from Berlin, an Olschky). Apart from being so crazy about the house of Savoy that in May 1898, shortly before she died, she took it on herself to send an admiring telegram to General Bava Beccaris, who had fired on the Milanese socialists and anarchists, poor devils, and a fanatical admirer of Germany in the days of Bismarck’s spiked helmet, she had never bothered, since her husband Menotti, eternally at her feet, had installed her in her Valhalla, to disguise her own dislike of the Jewish world of Ferrara, which was too narrow for her-so she said: or, however grotesque such a thing might appear, her own fundamental anti-semitism. But professor Ermanno and Signora Olga (he a scholar, she a Herrera from Venice: which means she was born into a very good Sephardic family, of course, but one that was financiaUy not too sound, although fearfully orthodox) : what sort of people did they think they’d become? Real, top-level aristocrats? Of course, of course, they had lost their son Guido, their first child, who died in 1914, aged only six, after a lightning attack of American-type infantile paralysis, against which even Dr. Corcos could do nothing; and what a terrible blow this must have been to them: to her, signora Olga, especially, who never went out of mourning from that time on. But apart from this, wasn’t it really that, what with one thing and another, living exclusively on their own had made them swollen-headed too, and had given them the same absurd whims as Menotti Finzi-Contini and his good lady had had? Aristocracy, my eye! Instead of giving themselves such airs, they’d have done very much better not to forget who they were, and where they came from, since there’s no doubt that Jews-Sephardic and Ashkenazi, western and eastern, Tunisians, Berbers, Yemenites, and even Ethiopians-whatever part of the world, under whatever sky history might have strewn them, were and would always be Jews, which means closely related. Old Moise certainly gave himself no airs! No delusions of grandeur for him ! When he was living in the ghetto, at 24 via Vignatagliata, in the house where he had wanted to end his days, come what might, resisting the pressure ofhis haughty Trevisan daughter-in-law, who was impatient to move to Barchetto del Duca as soon as possible, he went out shopping himself every morning in piazza delleErbe, with his shopping-basket tucked cosily under his arm. And it was he, for this very reason nicknamed a! gatt, * *[ “The cat”: Ferrarese dialect.]who had pulled the family up from nothing. Because if it was quite true that “that” Josette came down to Ferrara with a big dowry, consisting of a villa in the province of Treviso with frescoes by Tiepolo, a fat cheque, too, and of course jewels, plenty of them, which on first nights in the theatre, against the red velvet background of her private box, drew the eyes of the entire theatre on her and her