Giorgio Bassani, Within the walls

On a cold and sleety afternoon I read Giorgio Bassani, Within the Walls, on wartime Jewish Ferrara, and, weary, complexed, found myself unable to follow all those names of streets and squares, along city walls where sometimes the country leaked in. Ferrara is an island in my mind, hardly close to anything, not even Bologna which is geographically not far down the road, or Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. My auntie Fay sent us a postcard from Rimini in the 1950s. That's as close as I can get. Why am I reading about Ferrara? Why not Ballincollig? Ferrara had Jews. Why not Cork? Cork had Jewtown. Which sounds blunt and jeering. Ghetto sounds fine in Italian. David Marcus grew up in Jewtown, and he is one of one or two Jews in Ireland who noticed I am Jewish too.

When I examine my take on the politics and the idea of the tribe, I think the first was the truest. My adolescent uncertainty as to who was fighting whom and why, persists. Atrocity, betrayal, and fear, do not alter. Tribes do not alter. None of this do I understand. Fascists and Communists. These are boiling words. Berets and beards. Rallies and manifestoes.

On a cold and sleety afternoon I read Giorgio Bassani and wander about like the half-dead in wartime Ferrara, along the Corso, across the Piazza, wearing the mantle of a confusion not entirely mine.