Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration

4 Notes from a Life in Transit

75 4 Notes from a Life in Transit russian etruscans In Etruscan Places, first published in 1932, D. H. Lawrence briefly mentions Ladispoli in the chapter titled “Cerveteri”: “We arrive at Palo, a station in nowhere, and ask if there is a bus to Cerveteri. No! An ancient sort of wagon with an ancient white horse stands outside. Where does that go? To Ladispoli. We know we don’t want to go to Ladispoli, so we stare at the landscape. Could we get a carriage of any sort? It would be difficult. That is what they always say: difficult! Meaning impossible. At least, they won’t lift a finger to help. Is there an hotel at Cerveteri? They don’t know. They have none of them ever been, though it is only five miles away, and there are tombs.” Lawrence arrived from Rome at the Ladispoli-Cerveteri train station and rode, in some sort of an antiquated omnibus, to Cerveteri, known for its tumoli, the Etruscan entombments from the eighth century b.c.e. As far as I can tell, Lawrence never actually set foot in the town of Ladispoli, which shares a train station (Stazione di Palo Laziale ) with its inland reliquary neighbor, Cervetori. Unlike Lawrence, who traveled around the area of Italy known as Lazio in search of vestiges of the Etruscan past buried under the ruins of a less distant Roman past, we, the Jewish refugees from the USSR, didn’t have the choice of sidestepping Ladispoli. Like Lawrence, however, we had but a vague idea of how to find accommodations. Back in the 1970s several seaside towns around Rome had been designated as holding sites for the Jewish refugees who preferred the mercantile prospects of the New World to the ancestral passion calls of the Promised Land. During the peak years of the middle to late 1970s, 76 Ladispoli when tens of thousands were leaving the Soviet Union, and many of those thousands were going to America and Canada, Ostia and Ladispoli swelled up with the “Russians.” I still wonder why Ostia, the seaport of ancient Rome, and Ladispoli, an innocuous seaside resort, had been identified as suitable points of transit for the Jewish immigrants knocking at the gates of the New World. Like the bored legions stationed outside Rome and ready either to sail off and conquer the world or to march into the Eternal City, we languished in the uncertainty of our futures. Ready for action, my parents and I had been thrust into two months of involuntary, anxious restfulness in the Russian fiefdom by the Tyrrhenian Sea. in the summer of 1987, as the Soviet Union slouched in the back seat of the palliative reforms that eventually brought about its dissolution , the emigration numbers were just beginning to pick up. We were still a feeble creek as compared to the torrents of the 1970s—or to the massive outflow of the late 1980s–early 1990s. In the summer of 1987, most of which my family spent in Italy awaiting our American refugee visas, Ladispoli was the place where the JIAS officials expected us to move after a couple of weeks in the bowels of Rome. About twenty-five miles up the Tyrrhenian coast, Ladispoli was a sleepy seaside town where middle-class Romans owned weekend homes and condos. There the Jewish refugees would rent rooms and apartments and wait. Sometimes the waiting took three or four months, sometimes even longer. We couldn’t afford to purchase a guidebook, nor did we have access to libraries, so in addition to the bits of ancient history that I’d known prior to coming to Ladispoli, what I’d scraped together about the Etruscans came from Anatoly Shteynfeld. Shteynfeld deliberately stayed out of the sun, and his dominant color was that of dusty cobblestones . Depressive by natural inclination, Shteynfeld was disheartened that summer at his prospects for finding an academic job in America . From the first days in Rome, where we stayed at the same hotel, Shteynfeld had chosen me as a student in his open-air academy. During the first three weeks in Italy, in Rome and later in Ladispoli, he would Notes from a Life in Transit 77 lecture me, in bits and installments, under the porticoes, at shady street corners, under a beach umbrella. I confess to being torn over Shteynfeld. I admired his vast knowledge , his rhetorical talent, and his...