Same Europe, Different Country
I can’t think of a better photo to begin writing from Milan than this. “Silvio, we’re here,” or so my terrible Italian renders this smart dig at Berlusconi. A language I once had a reasonable grasp of as a child living here in the early 1970s, both Jennifer and I plan on becoming far more fluent than we are at present. Granted, we have an excellent grasp of both French and Spanish, so we’re not badly off. Still, one can only go so far responding, as I am often inclined to do, as though we are back in San Francisco, ordering burritos.
We moved into our apartment on Thursday night. The end of ten days of travel, during which we drove to Milan from London and back to return our rental, it was a remarkable relief to finally enter our new home. The 1600 miles of highway we covered did not catch up with me until this weekend when, after having spent a day of ferrying things up from our basement storage space, I felt as though I’d been placed inside a concrete bodysuit. I don’t know if I can remember a time I ever felt so tired.
Like Israel, like America, my family history here is deep, my interest in it partly personal, partly political. In other words, business as usual. Nevertheless, Italy is not a geography I’ve acknowledged as being influential, though I do mention it in my first book, Jerusalem Calling. My father worked in the Genoa area for nearly twenty years, my brother David frequently traveling to Milan for close to a decade. I did my own small part, exporting experimental and hip-hop records to distributors in Rome and Pisa during the early ’00s.
One story, consistently retold by at least two generations of Schalits, concerns our longstanding ancestral relations in the country. In Venice, to be precise, apparently beginning not long after the Spanish Inquisition, lasting, or so the narrative goes, until the late 18th century. Another anecdote is about a relative of ours named Enrico Schalit, a cantorial composer from either Mantova or Padua, if I remember the story correctly. I’ve never taken the opportunity to get it all straight.
During the time we’re here, I’m going to collect these stories, and place them in proper context. For the moment, I’ll assume that their relative consistency means that there is some truth to them, and that its just a question of determining what’s more plausible than not. In the interim, I’m savoring the significance of having retraced, however inadvertently, both my brother (18 years my senior) and father’s respective footsteps. Not to mention, of course, my own.