Vogue USA - 09.2019

258 SEPTEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM

caressingly smooth, seemingly artless but drawing you in, like

a whisper, with the promise of intimacy. She was just 19 when

De Sica cast her in the role she’d later call “my consecration.”

And behind her character’s exquisite manners and teasing

provocations, I sensed something implacable—a fierce loyalty

to the past, combined with an almost savage independence.

In fact, Sanda’s Micòl represented a new chapter in my own

ongoing negotiation with myself, over what my own Jewishness

would mean to me.

T

here had been no one like Micòl in the petit bourgeois

Jewish enclave where I’d grown up on the South Shore of

Long Island (a place I longed to escape, and later a past

I quickly abandoned). My family was not at all religious—

no one protested, for example, when I abandoned once-a-week

Hebrew lessons at our Reform synagogue in favor of Saturday-

morning cartoons—nor, for that matter, were we very big on team

spirit. We were all too busy trying to stay afloat, each of us clinging,

like survivors of a shipwreck, to separate bits of the refuse left

behind in the wake of my mother’s early death. At seven, I was the

youngest, and I clung the hardest to the memory of a woman whose

outlines faded with each passing year. My ancestral knowledge

barely stretched back a single generation.

Oh, to be so cherished and sheltered, looked

after by servants who knew you as a child,

followed everywhere by the now-toothless Great

Dane who’d once seemed to you a giant; to grow

up nicknaming the rare, towering palms your

grandmother had imported from Rome to plant

in your family’s vast garden. As an adolescent,

I had learned to relish the freedom my family’s

neglect had furnished me with, but Micòl’s

liberty seemed to me far more precious. Her

every look and gesture telegraphed the radical

self-assurance of someone who could not be

more intensely rooted in place, or more beloved.

Her Jewishness ran just as deeply. That

identity was not something she wore on her

sleeve (at least not until she would be forced to do so, with

the obligatory yellow star). Yet even while she led a secular,

assimilated life—pursuing an advanced degree at the university,

socializing with a very mixed group of friends, pausing from her

tennis game to eat little ham sandwiches—her position as an

outsider colored all her interactions and everything she touched.

I thought of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis for the first time in

decades two years ago, when a group of white men holding torches

marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, on a summer evening,

chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” By that time, after long

stretches of living abroad and a couple of decades in downtown

Manhattan, I’d found a home on the Upper West Side, just around

the corner from the grand Romanesque- and Byzantine-style

synagogue, built in the pre-Crash 1920s, where my son had recently

become a bar mitzvah.

My own religious education remained scanty, my Hebrew

fragmentary, and I still found sitting through Saturday-morning

services a challenge. But as a family we had come to value this

intellectually rigorous, traditional yet egalitarian and socially

progressive congregation, whose acts of kindness and charity

stretched throughout the broader urban community. I wondered,

watching those men in Charlottesville, if my very mixed

neighborhood was a (considerably less elegant) version of the

Finzi-Contini garden—a kind of waiting room, a protected

enclave in the face of coming violence.

Since then, I’ve witnessed our nation’s public discourse

coarsening and anti-Semitism surging on both the political

right, where one might most expect it, and on the left, enabled

in each instance by unseemly equivocations. The assassination

of 11 members of the congregation at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life

synagogue last fall made its own, horrifying incursion into

new/old patterns of hatred. The next evening, as people of all

denominations rushed to show their support, our synagogue’s

huge, two-story sanctuary was filled to overflowing, and the line

to get inside it stretched around the block twice. (People waiting

began to sing, I was later told, and rabbis held services in the

street.) Inside, my son and I listened as individuals and clergy

members—Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others—offered

healing words of solidarity and prayer in memory of the dead.

Micòl Finzi-Contini held on to her elegance, pride, and fierce

individuality in the face of polarizing and murderous violence.

Yet we know how her story ended, in the ashes of the Shoah. We

have to write a different ending for our own—

standing together as we open wide the gates of

our garden, forming new alliances against old

enemies, not letting the latter’s hate define us.

O

ne evening out of the blue, and

many years after we’d last spoken,

my college boyfriend called me.

He’d seen my byline in a national

newspaper, attached to a story with a Paris

dateline, and found my number. He’d married

his Sanda look-alike, he told me, and was

teaching English literature at a small college;

they’d just had their first child.I offered my

congratulations but kept the conversation brief.

And Sanda? As a teenager (née Dominique Varaigne) she

had horrified her strict, middle-class French Catholic family by

attending art school. She was just 16 when a phone call—that

voice again, like woodsmoke dipped in honey—persuaded

French director Robert Bresson to cast her in her first screen

role. By 20, she’d been married and divorced. The next year she’d

give birth to her only child, a boy (“my connection to eternity,”

she said later in a interview), with French actor and director

Christian Marquand.

In the half-century since, she’d worked quite regularly in both

film and theater, though she’d long since faded from my view;

I’d read that she divided her time between Paris and Buenos

Aires. Recently, though, while I was watching Saint Laurent,

director Bertrand Bonello’s fashion biopic, an actor appeared

whose face, though lined, looked strangely familiar—and when

she spoke, her voice was unmistakable. In the film, Sanda plays

Yves Saint Laurent’s impeccable mother, Lucienne, enveloping

with tender maternal solicitude that wild child of the 1970s, the

kind she herself had once been. @

As an adolescent,

I had learned to

relish the freedom

my family’s neglect

had furnished me

with, but Micòl’s

liberty seemed to me

far more precious

Nostalg ia