Are We There Yet? by David Levithan Read Free Book Online

in Hebrew school. Perhaps that adds to the mystery and helps them approach in a strange state of wonder. Elijah is drawn to the paintings of Orsola—is she a martyr or a dreamer, a saint or a princess? He has no way of knowing. He asks Danny, and Danny mumbles something about enigmas. There is a happy complicity in their ignorance.
    After an hour and a half, the Madonnas begin to look too much alike, and the Jesus babies are growing more grotesque in their bald adultness. Danny and Elijah are both losing sight of the details—it is harder to focus, and Danny is becoming restless. He wants to get to the synagogue in time for the noon tour. There will be more time for Art later.
    They both agree on this.

A city presents many different faces, and it is up to the traveler to assemble the proper composite. Venice seems, at first, to be a simple enough city to render. It is the canals, the basilica, the shutters on the homes. It is the gondolier's call and the beat of the pigeon's wing and the church bell that chimes to mark the passing of an hour. To many people, this is all, and this is enough. A tourist does not want to be weighed down by realities, unless the realities are presented as monumental stories.
    It takes a traveler, not a tourist, to search for something deeper. Travelers want to find the wavelength on which they and the city connect.
    Danny is drawn to the ghetto. None of his immediate ancestors ever set foot in Venice (or Italy, for that matter). None of his friends have ever spent time there. He has never read or dreamed about life in such a place. And yet this is the destination he has chosen within a city of destinations.
    (Elijah comes too and is moved and affected, but not in the same way. This is not what he has visited for. For him, the city is much more elusive, and will not know where he wants to be until he actually gets there.)
    According to the museum in the ghetto, eight thousand Italian Jews were sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust.
    Only eight of them returned to Venice.
    This is the fact to which Danny attaches himself. If the ghetto itself is the bell, this fact is the toll.
    The word “ghetto” comes from the Venetian
jeto
, which means “foundry.” The island upon which the Jews originally settled was formerly a foundry area (Danny learns). But the Jews, newly arrived from Germany and Eastern European countries, couldn't pronounce the soft
j
and instead called it
geto
. In the sixteenth century, the Jews were locked in from midnight to dawn; they became usurers because most other businesses were prohibited. (
Hence Shylock
, Danny thinks.
The Merchant of Venice
was the closest he came to finding meaning in Shakespeare in college.)
    At one point in the ghetto, Jews had to wear yellow hats or scarves whenever they went out. Danny notes the color yellow—how can he not? The past reverberates so clearly, later on. Yellow hats, yellow stars.
    As Elijah waits in the courtyard, Danny stands in the shade of a Sephardic synagogue—still in use, saved from the World War II bombings by an ironic alliance made between the Germans and the Italians. People begin to gather for the tour— a small, quiet group, almost all of them American.
    The inside of the synagogue is dominated by black woodwork and red curtains. There is a separate section for women— a shielded balcony, high beyond the pulpit. The guide jokes that this means women are closer to God. Only the men laugh.
    The guide goes on to say that there are now 600 Jews in all of Venice. Danny feels his somberness confirmed—how else can one feel when surrounded by such a majority of ghosts? You can find sorrow in the arithmetic, and you can find a bittersweet hope.
    After the synagogue, Danny sees things differently. It's not that he's religious—at best, he would like to believe in God, ifonly he could believe it. Instead, his identity asserts itself. He sits in the plaza outside the temple and thinks about the 600 and what a