Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (9 page)

EIGHT
One Night at the Risiera

But of course it was Jews that the passage of those trains along the waterfront always brought to my mind. Even now, when I see in memory’s eye a last dingy wagon of the 19£os, trundling away towards the old fish market, I see too the lights of more dreadful trains disappearing into the eastern forests on their way to Auschwitz. In my mind Jews and Trieste go together, and the long and fruitful association of the two has made the city what it is—or at least, what it seems to me to be in those moments, ten minutes before the hour, when the idea of it bewitches me. In Habsburg times people in Vienna considered Trieste a Jewish city, and in a way I still do.

They say that you can take a Jew out of exile, but you can never take exile out of a Jew. Actually, for a hundred and fifty years the Jewish diaspora in Trieste was for the most part happy and successful. In many ways Jews did set the style of the place. They were encouraged to settle here from the first years of its Habsburgian expansion, under Maria Theresa. They had already proved their cosmopolitan value in the development of other European ports—Livorno, London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Bordeaux: in this brand-new mercantile enterprise, on the edge of a continental empire, they would be especially useful. Generous privilege induced them to come: freedom from restrictions imposed upon Jews elsewhere in the empire, exemption from military service, guaranteed freedom of worship and investment. Rich and educated Jews were undoubtedly preferred.

The Trieste Jews formed an imperial category of their own, and they flourished mightily. If Italians, Germans, Englishmen, Slovenes and Croats provided maritime skills, and Greeks commercial know-how, it was above all Jews who built the financial structure of the new Trieste. They very soon became prominent in the Chamber of Commerce, and they dominated the insurance business, which was to be a main source of Trieste’s wealth and influence. Jewish families formed part of the social elite—at the foot of the Old City there was a small walled ghetto with schools and synagogues, but most members of the community lived outside it, and fashionable Jewish houses were fashionable indeed.

Jews were prominent here as nowhere else in the empire. An extraordinary proportion of Trieste’s artists and intellectuals were Jews or part Jews, often from business backgrounds—as early as 1797 Pope’s
Essay on Man
was translated into Hebrew by Joseph Morpurgo, an insurance tycoon whose family name was to become a synonym for wealth in Trieste. Joyce had many Jewish friends in the city, and when he came to write
Ulysses
, which was inspired by Trieste almost as profoundly as it was by Dublin, he called it “an epic of two races.” So powerful and prosperous did the Jewish community become, over the generations, that in 1912 it built for itself one of the biggest and most opulent synagogues in all Europe, magnificently positioned in the very heart of the city, around the corner from the Caffe San Marco—where many of its congregation were familiar customers, and which served kosher food for them.

This was the first synagogue I ever entered in my life. It was a splendid building, built so the guide-books say in the Syrian-Babylonian style, but more convincingly neo-Byzantine. It had a high central dome, castellated towers and a huge rose window in the form of David’s star, and it was richly endowed with holy objects. Unlike so many other synagogues in Europe, it did not hide itself away unobtrusively, or try to look more or less like a private house. It was majestic and unmistakeable, and every passer-by knew it to be the proud temple of the Hebrews.

It was still very splendid when I diffidently strayed into it in 1946, still suggestively oriental beneath its high echoing dome. The occupying German army had closed it for a time and used it as a bullion deposit, but it was undamaged, and a chaplain of the Jewish Brigade of my own army had helped to officiate at its re-opening. Yet I sensed that it had lost its magic. Its fabric was decayed, its treasures were nowhere to be seen, and even its holiness seemed subdued. Presently I realized that there was a good reason for this. It was because almost all the Jews of Trieste, almost every one, had been driven away or murdered.

WHEN the bad times came in the 1930s, Trieste played an honourable role in helping the Jews of central Europe to escape their fate. There were then about five thousand Jews in the city. Zionism was strong here already, and the community (secretary, Carlo Morpurgo) formed a Committee of Assistance chiefly to get Jewish emigrants to Palestine. Train after train brought them in their thousands to the quays, where in the ships of Lloyd Triestino they sailed to the Promised Land in British-ruled Palestine, or at least to the Americas. Trieste acquired a further cognomen—the Port of Zion. A new little synagogue was established especially for transients, in the Via del Monte on the flank of San Giusto hill, and some of them went no further after all, but decided to stay in the city. Many more spent a few days or weeks here, awaiting a passage, and among them was Albert Einstein.

Most of Trieste’s own Jews did not board the ships. Until 1938 they had not much reason to. The Fascist government in Rome did not trouble them, and all their institutions functioned: the hospital, the charitable societies, the infant schools, the rest home, the summer camp up at Opicina, the Fascist Youth Group . . . After 1938, when the Italians brought in racial laws of their own and the British clamped down on immigration into Palestine, the Trieste Jews could not leave even if they wanted to, and so it was that in 1943 history caught up with them. It was the fourth year of the second world war, and the Italians then turned against their German allies and signed an armistice with the western Powers. Instantly, the very next day, the Nazis took over Trieste. Several hundred Jews escaped into Italy, or to Switzerland. A few hid in Trieste for the rest of the war. Some seven hundred were called to death or deportation.

At San Sabba, where Joyce watched the scullers race, there is a former rice treatment plant, a bland enough place among the jumbled installations of the industrial port, wound about by elevated freeways. Trucks forever rumble by it, on their way to and from the piers. This banal group of buildings is where the Nazis committed the ultimate evil of Trieste. They used it as a police barracks, and then converted it into their only extermination camp in Italian soil—except that they did not regard Trieste as Italian territory, but declared it an integral part of the Reich. When I was first in Trieste the Risiera of San Sabba must have been far less obscured by industrial developments, but I never noticed it there and nobody ever mentioned it to me; yet in the previous two years hundreds of Jews had been exterminated there, and many more selected for deportation from which they never returned.

I hate to go there now. It is one place in Trieste that speaks of the tragic rather than the poignant. Although it is now an Italian national memorial and a tourist site, with its bare walls and shadows, its death chamber, its vile cells and the site of its crematorium, it still feels menacingly terrible to me. As it happens it stands not far from the city’s Jewish cemetery, where in happier times Jews had passed to a more proper end. Going there in 1911 to the funeral of a friend, Joyce had seen its graves and tombstones with prophetic vision. “Corpses of Jews lie around me rotting in the mould of their holy field . . . black stone, silence without hope . . .”

THERE was a time when I used to say that if I were a Jew, I would certainly be a Zionist. I had soldiered in Palestine under the British Mandate, and had thought it was the Arabs, not the Jews, who were getting the raw deal there; but watching the young Israeli army storming through Sinai in the first of its wars fired me with romantic sympathy for the little State. Later I changed my mind again, and realized that the Jews I most admired were those Jews of the diaspora who had not abandoned their pride of origin, who were closely bound together by history and culture, by a love of words and music and debate, but who were essentially supra-national, extraterritorial citizens of the world. It is their spirit, diffused but inherent, like a gene in the chromosome, that makes me think of Trieste as a Jewish city still.

Jews are still around here, too. Their old ghetto, in the area behind the Piazza Unità, has mostly been destroyed in civic development, but what remains of it, as in many another former ghetto of Europe, has become rather trendy. Excellent bookstores, antiques shops, art dealers and picture restorers abound, and there is a Sunday flea market. On Via del Monte the transients’ synagogue houses a Jewish museum, presided over by a rabbi from the Great Synagogue, and there is a Jewish school next door. Here and there, though, abandoned medieval lanes survive, awaiting demolition, and their tall shuttered empty houses, their lamps, chains, padlocks and stray cats, are reminders of more cruel times. Only the other day in the old ghetto area I saw three raggety buskers sent packing by the police, and as they packed up their cases, humped their instruments under their arms and trailed away towards the waterfront, I thought they looked very like poor Jews of long ago, being herded off to railway trucks.

I used to know a woman in this city who, by some accident of ill-fortune, had spent a single night in the Risiera at San Sabba. She told me that in retrospect that one night seemed as long as all the rest of her life put together, just as what happened to the Jews of Trieste in 1943 may well last longer in the collective memory than all their years of successful exile.

NINE
Borgello, Kofric, Slokovich and Blotz

“We are the eastern limit of Latinity and the southern extremity of Germanness,” a Mayor of Trieste told me long ago. He might well have said that they were the western extremity of Slavdom, too, but perhaps that would then have been politically incorrect. Any Mayor of Trieste has to think ethnically, because this city is not simply a junction of political frontiers, it is an old fusion of bloodstocks. Today its population is overwhelmingly Italian, but I am told that when its football team goes to play in the Italian south, its players are still cat-called as Slavs or Balkans. Trieste is of Italy, but not altogether of it, and nothing could be much less like the effusive, song-singing, tricky, sun-burnt, fast-driving and volatile Italian of the world’s imagination than your average Triestino.

A look at passing faces will confirm that. In the countryside around Trieste live many Slovenes of purest blood. Within the city are thousands of utter Italians. But for generations this place was a melting-pot of races and types, and its faces show it still. There is the straight northern Italian face, firm but a little dreamy; there is the Germanic Austrian face; there are faces with high cheek-bones and slightly slanting eyes that speak of Hungary; there are fair-haired, blue-eyed Balkan faces. Very few of them are absolute, though. They are all mixed up, a tinge here, an echo there. The hybrid human is the norm in this city. Mayor lily’s paternal grandfather was from Transylvania; his grandmother was half-Irish and half-Austrian. Maestro Banfield-Tripcovich of the tugs and the Opera Verdi was the son of an Austrian of Irish descent, by a Slovene countess. Temperaments merge here too; Slataper the poet said of himself that blended in his character was Slavic nostalgia, German certainty and an Italian instinct for harmony.

Any list of Trieste names, in almost any context, is bewil-deringly multi-ethnic. Take for instance a war memorial slab beneath the walls of the citadel, up on San Giusto hill. The most summary run of your eye down its roster will show you a Borgello, a Slocovich, a Brunner, a Sylvestro, a Zottin and a Blotz. The orchestra that played Smareglia’s
Nozze Istriani
, last time I was at the opera, included violinists named Ivevic and Leszczynski, a cellist called Iztpk Kodric, Neri Noferini a horn player and an oboist named Giuseppi Mis Cipolat. Down the generations many Triestini have had their names ethnically adjusted, too, as a sort of first step towards genetic reconstruction. A Topico might become a Topić, a Kogut turn into a Cogetti. It depended upon the political circumstances of the day, and upon economic opportunity. Sometimes a change was made by order of the State, sometimes it was made as an explicitly personal statement. Italo Svevo, for instance, was born Ettore Schmitz: his
nom de plume
told everyone that he was Italian by loyalty but was born in Swabia, and combined in himself elements of both their cultures.

In all this Trieste was a microcosm of the empire. In a fractious moment Joyce once complained that the Dual Monarchy contained a hundred races speaking a thousand languages, and Mussolini thought its successor State of Czechoslovakia ought really to be called Czecho-Germano-Polono-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia. In my library I have an Ethnographical Map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, printed in Germany in 1896, which is a patchwork of faded multichrome blodges—pink for Germans, buff for Slovenes, dark green for Slovaks, light green for Poles, blue for Italians, mauve for Rhaeto-Romanes. I can’t quite make out the colour of Trieste, but it looks sort of orangy.

WHAT is race? God knows. Even the word is ambiguous. Is a race ever the same as a nation? Can a nation be multi-racial? Can a race be defined by language? Can it be acquired? Does it depend upon colour? Is it affected by culture? How does patriotism apply to race? Can you feel truly patriotic for your place of residence, while feeling alien to its race? Or is patriotism really just racial pride? Suppose you are half-Italian and half-Slav, the most common cross in Trieste. Are you less Slovene if you don’t speak Slovene? Are you more Italian if you support AC Milan? Whether racial characteristics are inherited or environmental, whether they are ineradicable or adjustable, whether they should be fostered or discouraged, admitted or denied, whether patriotism is racially innate or historically acquired—these are matters I often think about in this city.

I am myself a racial half-breed (father Welsh, mother English), and I have experienced some of the lesser quandaries of a condition that has been so common here. Many a Triestine dilemma has also been endemic in Wales, where problems caused by the arrival of the English nearly a thousand years ago have never been resolved. So many upwardly-mobile Slovenes of Trieste came to use Italian that it became as much a badge of class as of ethnicity, and similarly it was far more posh in Wales, until a few years ago, to speak English than Welsh. How many Joneses have become Iwans, how many Ifors spell their names Ivor, how many chapel-goers migrated to the Anglican Church, specifically to declare an allegiance or get on in the world? Some of my own children have preferred to spell their names in the old Welsh way, Morys, and I would do the same if I hadn’t left it too late.

However there has been one fundamental difference between the Triestine and the Welsh circumstances. The native Welsh have resented the intrusion of the English not just on historical, linguistic or political grounds, but as a matter of instinct: they have disliked them as a people—the bloody
Saeson
, the Saxons. But for generations, it seems, problems of race did not disturb the Triestini. There was political antipathy between subjects and rulers, Italians against Austrians, perhaps religious prejudice too, but there appears to have been little purely ethnic bigotry. It does not arise in the Triestine literature I have read, and all the nineteenth-century travellers appear to have admired the easy inter-racial jumble of the place. There were entirely Slav quarters of town in those days, and nearby villages of the Karst were entirely Slovene in race as in language. Jews, Greeks, Serbs, Germans and British all had their own temples or churches. There were Armenians and Turks around. Yet one hears of no race riots or pogroms, senses no bigotries, and in 1908 the same man was choirmaster of the chief Jewish synagogue, the Greek Orthodox Church and the Serbian Orthodox Temple.

It was when the old empire collapsed that racial zealotry erupted. When the Italian government arrived in 1919, and wanted to make Trieste as Italian as possible, it banned all Slovene schools and turned a blind eye on violence against Slavs—the Balkan Hotel, the centre of Slav cultural life in the city, was burnt down by a mob with the connivance of the police. Conversely, when the Yugolavs arrived in 1945, and wanted to make the city entirely Yugoslav, they opened the Slovene schools again and obliged many Italians to change their names. There were violent race riots during the years of uncertainty, when nobody knew whether Trieste was to be Italian, Yugoslav or a Free City; in those times the world’s predominant image of the place was of furious mobs, flying one banner or another, swarming through the Piazza Unita shouting ethnic slogans.

Today the question of race seems to have lost most of its bitter force. Black street vendors from the old Italian colonies of Africa are familiars of the town, pressing newspapers upon passers-by, sitting over their invariable collections of leather goods or wandering into the Caffe San Marco, muffled in scarves and balaclavas, to sell lottery tickets. Chinese entrepreneurs have acquired many of the shops of the
borgo teresiano
, identifiable by the paper lanterns that hang outside them, and offering motley stocks of clothes, knick-knacks and probably under-the-counter substances. And the still substantial Slovene minority, 8 percent of the whole, has its own schools and cultural centres, its daily newspaper and its theatre. The Slovene language has official parity with Italian, making this formally a bilingual city, and although there is no longer a specifically Slovene quarter of town, still the further you walk out towards the perimeter of the city, the more Slav it feels.

Of course inherited antipathies are not dead. Seventy-five years after the event hundreds of Slovenes attended a ceremony to remember the burning-down of the Balkan Hotel. Many of the Italians who came here as dispossessed refugees from Istria, when the Yugoslav Croatians and Slovenes took over the peninsula in 1954, cherish an ineradicable resentment against all Slavs, just as so many of the French
colons
driven out of Algeria can never forgive an Arab. I am told there is latent anti-Slav feeling, too, among older citizens in general. When the laws guaranteeing equality of language were instituted I stumbled upon a neo-Fascist meeting of protest, and very unpleasant it was: to raucous music and fluttering flags a strutting demagogue shouted hatred into a loud-hailer—biligualism, he screamed, meant there was no future for Italians in Trieste, no jobs, no hope, and his skin-head lieutenants, in long shorts and running-shoes, offered inflammatory leaflets to passers-by.

They found few takers, though. It seems to me that such popular prejudice as there is in Trieste nowadays is much more diffuse. A rabbi told me once that although he did occasionally feel tremors of anti-semitism, he believed it to be only a symptom of a vague general suspicion of difference—“if I didn’t wear this hat and this beard, I’d probably never sense it.” The chief resentment I myself detect is directed against the flood of new settlers from southern Italy, on the grounds that they are changing the character of the city with their noise, bad manners and disorderly conduct.

For half a century now Trieste has been politically relaxed, and the vicious racism of the twentieth century has faded like a bora blown out. The later Cold War generally ignored Trieste. The wars of Yugoslav succession passed it by. Economically it no longer matters much whether you are Slovene or Italian by origin, especially as by now the chances are that you are a mixture of both, with perhaps some Austrian or Jewish thrown in, or an American or British gene left by a transient soldier long ago. I noticed the same at home in Wales—that when people felt they were achieving some degree of national fulfilment, racial bitterness subsided. Even that most intractable kind of racial antipathy, the mutual fear and distaste between people of different colour, fades when political and economic circumstances are the same for both sides. Could it be that racism is a sort of historical invention, a Satanic hoax?

Trieste remains, nonetheless, an ethnic enclave of sorts. It first became part of an Italian State as the result of a secret agreement during the first world war, when Italy was induced to join the western allies by the promise of Trieste, Istria and the Italian town of Zara, now Zadar, on the Dalmatian coast. Istria and Zara were transferred to Yugoslavia after the second world war, and if racial logic had then prevailed Trieste would not now be an Italian city either, but the port of Slovenia—Trst. The natural ethnic frontier (if one is to go by language, the only acceptably measurable standard) ran well to the west, half-way to Venice—the final eastern line between the Habs-burg empire and the kingdom of Italy. Trieste was just a predominantly Italian-speaking city in a Slav territory, no more anomalous in its setting than the heavily German city of Riga in Latvia or the Polish Vilnius in Lithuania, both alien urban centres with an indigenous peasantry all around. As it was, Yugoslavia was obliged to spend vast sums of money developing the port of Rijeka, formerly Fiume; and when Yugoslavia disintegrated, half a century later, Slovenia had to develop its own outlet to the sea—the port of Koper,
quondam
Capodistria, only just out of sight from Trieste itself.

REMEMBER that war memorial, up on the hill of San Giusto, with such an enigmatic variety of names upon it? I puzzled over that slab when I first went to Trieste because it claimed to honour the dead of the first world war, but neglected to say which country they had died for. Here, evidently, race and patriotism did not always go together. The father of that honoured Italian citizen Baron de Banfield-Tripcovich was a hero of the Austrian air force, fighting against the Italians in the first world war. He was called “The Eagle of Trieste,” and was ennobled as Baron of Trieste by the Dual Monarchy, but when the war ended and Trieste became Italian he was imprisoned as a traitor. There are still ancients in Trieste who parade with their medals and banners as veterans of Franz Joseph’s armed forces—I went to a church service of theirs once, and their solemnity and stately moustaches would have done credit to the
lamparetti
. On the Karst live many old soldiers who fought with the Yugoslav partisans in the second world war, and who carefully tend the village war memorials, still with the star of Communism on them, that remember once irreconcilable enemies of Italy. There are people in this city whose grandparents were born Austrian, whose parents came into the world as Italians, who were themselves born as citizens of a Free Territory and whose children are Italian again. A few miles away, just across the border, aged citizens have been governed in their own lifetimes by Austrians, Italians, Germans, Britons, Yugoslavs and Slovenians.