Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

Paolo Milano

83 Paolo Milano hat was a name to reckon with, when I first heard it uttered by the jeunes filles flitting through the French and Italian hall at Brooklyn College. He was a Jewish Italian exile from Mussolini, publishing in Partisan Review and reputedly a devastating ladies’ man. He taught at Queens College and occasionally gave a lecture at Brooklyn where the girls, who had given up their neighborhood Jewishness for Proust (well, they kept that version of Jewishness but didn’t call attention to it, and accepted Milano’s), swooned. Or so I was told, mostly by Mary Doyle Curran, a colleague of his at Queens a little while later. I know Mary thought he was wonderful; anything else at this point is just conjecture. On my first trip to Italy in 1963, I looked up a colleague in Rome, Joe LoPreato, an anthropologist spending a year there while writing a book on the Calabrian peasantry. He drove me around the town in a Fiat 600, spitting out the shells of fava beans, showing me the landmarks. It was great. We stopped at a famous literary cafe on the Piazza del Popolo where he pointed out the beautiful women and whatever celebrity was present (was one Alberto Moravia?). Suddenly he said, “There goes Paolo Milano!” Where, where? All I saw was his back, ducking quickly around a corner. In pursuit? I was not actually to see him until about fifteen years later. My wife and I had decided that Rome just had too much T 84 to take in at any one visit, so we tried to see only one Rome at a time: classical Rome; churches and paintings of the counterReformation ; Hawthorne and James’s Rome; Fascist and modern Rome. One year in the late seventies we “did” feminist and Jewish Rome. The entry to the feminist side was literary. Because she herself was a writer and poetry editor of MR, women poets and writers were glad to befriend Anne and invited her one night to one of their meetings. One of the women we had met earlier was a Sicilian poet, named something like Femina, with wild, wonderful Circe-like red hair. Those were the days. I drove Anne to the address, parking in a nearby alley for an hour while she met the writers en masse. I sat in the car, closely watched by two police parked right behind me the whole time. I wondered why, then realized: it was still the era of La Lotta Continua, the Red Brigades in Germany, and all that. I sweated it out, Anne returned, and we left without incident. Jewish Rome was more interesting, to me, poignant but less frightening. Sig. Milano was part of that. At Mark Mirsky’s apartment in New York I had met Elena Mortara, a teacher of Jewish American literature at the University of Rome, who was a visiting lecturer for a semester in one of the city colleges. If the name resonates, it is because she is from the Mortara family, one of whose children was kidnapped in the mid-nineteenth century as a young boy by the Catholic Church and raised as a Catholic. The case is still a source of pain and anger in the Italian Jewish community. Her husband was a leader of the Roman Jewish community when we visited there. Elena showed us around including the lovely, classical synagogue, on whose front a tablet recountPaolo Milano 85 ing the crimes of the Nazis against the Italian Jews is fixed, impossible not to elicit tears (“Crime horribile” as Malamud puts it in “The Last Mohican,” his best story, set in Rome). I asked if she knew Paolo Milano, who had retired to Rome, and indeed she did. Would she phone him and ask if he would receive us? Yes, and thus it was set up. We took a streetcar to get to the apartment building, a nice middle-class structure on a busy street. Up the elevator and admitted to the apartment by Milano’s man, a gentle six-footer. We took in the elegant two-story apartment before Milano entered from a side room, on the arm of his man. He was surprisingly short, thin and very frail, but with a large, most beautiful head and face. He said he had been ill for a while, and was therefore wearing, as he had for several days, only...