While Grandpa scans the menu, I scan the street for the guy who’s going to change our lives. It would help if I knew exactly what he looked like, but all I’ve seen is his tiny Gmail photo. Every dark mop of curls sends my heart thudding into my rib cage. I tap my phone to check the time—again. It’s still five minutes before two, but I didn’t want to be late for the reason Grandpa and I flew halfway around the world.
“Pronto?”
I drag my eyes off the strangers traipsing along the cobblestones. The waiter’s here to take our order. With an apologetic smile, I gesture to one of the empty seats across from us. “Stiamo aspettando il nostro amico.” We’re waiting for our friend.
“Qualcosa da bere mentre aspetti?” he asks.
I turn to Grandpa. “Do you want something to drink while we wait?” Since we touched down in Rome yesterday morning, he’s been letting me do all the talking: to the cab driver, to the woman who owns the apartment we’re renting, to the staff in every restaurant and café. I’m not sure whether it’s that he can’t speak the language anymore, or he just doesn’t want to—and I’m too afraid of upsetting him to ask. All I know is I’m grateful that Mom spoke so much Italian to me growing up, and that I took it these first two semesters of college.
“Tell him I’ll take a cappuccino,” Grandpa mumbles.
Wincing, I ask if cappuccinos are still available, knowing full well we’ve just committed a major faux pas. Italians don’t drink milk in their coffee after eleven o’clock in the morning.
Sure enough, the waiter shakes his head. “Non nel pomeriggio.” Not in the afternoon.
“That’s fine,” Grandpa mutters to me. “I’ll have an espresso.” Interesting that he didn’t wait for me to translate.
I smile up at the waiter. “Un caffè espresso per mio nonno, per favore.” An espresso for my grandfather, please.
He nods and heads inside, leaving Grandpa and me to continue our waiting game. Grandpa crosses his arms over his chest and leans back in his chair. He lets out a sigh that ruffles his bushy gray mustache—a sigh that seems to contain a lifetime of sorrow.
I go back to scanning the street for Tommaso, praying I haven’t dragged us into some kind of wild-goose chase. What if this whole thing is a scam? Scams are pretty sophisticated these days. Maybe Tommaso is a con artist who makes a living by posing as an innocent university student, telling naive Americans he’s found some long-lost family heirloom, and luring them to Rome so he can rob them. It seems like a lot of work, though, when you could just rob someone local. Not that I condone robbing anyone, from near or far. Oh god, I’m anxiety spiraling. I sweep my long, coppery hair into a ponytail so I have something to do with my hands; it feels good to get it off the back of my neck, which is damp with sweat in the June heat. I’m not really worried Tommaso is going to rob us. I’m just scared that if anything goes wrong, Grandpa’s going to freak out and fly home.
It’s a miracle he’s here to begin with. Grandpa was born in Rome, but you’d never know it from meeting him. Whenever the topic of his childhood comes up, or even something random about the war, his face goes slack and a mist seems to pass over his eyes. It’s like he temporarily checks out of consciousness.
The one and only time I asked him how he survived—I was in tenth grade, and working on a family-history project—Grandpa got up from his armchair and shuffled into the kitchen, muttering about needing a drink. (“Could’ve told you that would happen,” Mom said, almost smugly.) Grandpa goes by Ralph—not his birth name, Raffaele, which I glimpsed on his boarding pass at the airport—and I’ve never heard him utter a word of his first language. In his defense, he was only six when he came to America to live with cousins after the war, but clearly there’s more to his rejection of all things Italian than having spent most of his life stateside.
For most of my life, Mom claimed she’d long ago given up on trying to learn what happened in Grandpa’s past, but that wasn’t true. Deep down, she’d never really moved on. In my senior year of high school, when the tests came back and the doctor said she had three months to live, Mom started asking Grandpa questions again. No matter how much she begged for the truth, Grandpa said she should focus on getting better, not “things that happened a lifetime ago.”
But Mom didn’t get better, and she died without answers—died without ever understanding why her father had always been so closed off, even to his own family.
Between the scraps of evidence Mom was able to gather and my own exhaustive research on Rome’s Jewish population during World War II, I know a few concrete things about Grandpa’s childhood. He was born in September 1938, the year Italy introduced “racial laws” banning Jews from going to school, working certain jobs, and marrying people of other faiths. The war started the following year, with Italy eventually joining in 1940—on Hitler’s side. Grandpa was five in September 1943, when Italy abandoned its alliance with Germany to join the Allied Powers instead, and Germany responded by occupying Rome. On October 16 of that year, Grandpa’s mother, father, and two sisters were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, along with over a thousand other Roman Jews. Only sixteen of those deported survived.
I still don’t know how Grandpa got away, or where he went instead, but he was the only member of his immediate family to escape the roundup—or so we thought.
Everything changed early one Saturday morning this past April. I was at my favorite desk on the second floor of the college library, making headway on my final paper for my Modern European History class, when an email
whooshed into my inbox from a name I’d never seen before: Tommaso Reni. I was planning on ignoring it, as I was in the middle of typing eight thousand words on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but then I noticed the subject line: “Question about Bruna Mosseri.”
Bruna Mosseri was the older of Grandpa’s two sisters. Besides the fact that she’d died in the Holocaust, I didn’t know anything about her. Leaning in closer to my laptop screen, I opened the email.
Dear Lilah,
I apologize for the strange message. My name is Tommaso Reni, and I am a university student in Rome, Italy. My great-grandmother, Violetta Pellegrini, died in Rome in 1944, during World War II. I have always wanted to know more about her, but I have never succeeded in finding any information.
I’m writing to you because you might be able to help me. While cleaning out the apartment of my grandmother (Violetta’s daughter, Carla), I found a locket. Inside the locket, there was a note that mentioned Violetta’s death. It was written by someone named Bruna Mosseri.
Searching online, I found the article you wrote for the Hamilton Spectator about Holocaust Remembrance Day, where you mention a great-aunt from Rome named Bruna Mosseri. I am wondering: Is it possible your great-aunt wrote the note I found in the locket?
Any information you have would be very helpful! Photos are attached.
Ciao,
Tommaso
My arms were covered in goose bumps by the time I finished reading the email. This past summer, before my freshman year of college—or as I always think of it, my Summer of Darkness, when my world was shattered but I was trying to hold it together for Dad and my two little brothers, and there was no more school to distract me from just how painful this was—I’d made myself a promise: I would do whatever I could to get those answers about Grandpa. It was partly for Mom, because of how badly she’d wanted to know, but there was also more to it than that. Losing Mom had been a brutal reminder that life was fleeting. Who knew how much time
Grandpa—or any of us—had left? If—when—Grandpa died, the truth about our family would die with him. Mom’s death had left a violent gash in the fabric of our family, but maybe it was still possible to stitch up the other holes. And maybe I could be the one to do it.
Here was someone whose family might have known mine—someone who could lead me to the answers Grandpa had never been willing to share. I read Tommaso’s message again. This time, something in the email gave me pause.
Tommaso said his great-grandmother Violetta had died in Rome in 1944. Grandpa’s family had been deported in 1943. I didn’t see how Grandpa’s sister Bruna could have known about a death that occurred in Rome the following year. That said, how many women named Bruna Mosseri could there have been in Rome at that time? I had no idea how common a name it was. Chances were slim that reaching out to Grandpa would amount to anything, but I still forwarded the email to him, choosing my words carefully.
Hey, Grandpa,
Hope you’re having an awesome day!!
So, this is totally random, but I just got this email from a guy in Rome, asking if your sister Bruna could have written a note he found in a locket. The catch is that the note mentions something that happened in Rome in 1944, so it was probably written by a different Bruna Mosseri, but I figured it might be worth showing you. Sorry to bother you if this is totally irrelevant!! Love you!!
Xoxo
Lilah
Later that night, I was watching my roommate’s a cappella concert when I got a phone call—from Grandpa. He’d never called me once in my life. As people around me gave me the side-eye (“Sorry—so sorry!” I whispered) I leapt to my feet and dashed from the auditorium to answer him. At first, when I said hello, there was no response. Then I realized Grandpa was crying. Through tears he managed to tell me he recognized the locket as well as the handwriting on the note inside.
They both
belonged to Bruna.
The revelation could only mean one thing: Bruna must have also escaped the October 16 roundup.
I thought of the promise I’d made after Mom died, in my Summer of Darkness. My heart thudding, I threw out a bold suggestion: that Grandpa and I go to Rome this summer to figure out what happened to Bruna. I was stunned when he said he’d think about it. Before the locket, he probably would have hung up on me for uttering the word “Rome.” The next day, Grandpa called me back. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
Now here we are. Looking for answers—and for Tommaso.
Grandpa grunts as he stirs sugar into his espresso. “Where is this guy?”
Anxious about Grandpa potentially getting up and leaving, I quadruple-check my last messages with Tommaso. We’re on Via Bocca di Leone—mouth of the lion—at the exact restaurant where we agreed to meet at two p.m. today. “I don’t know. He must be running a few minutes late.”
“Hmph.” Deep lines crawl up the bronze skin of his forehead, and his spoon rattles when he sets it down on the saucer.
Via Bocca di Leone is a narrow street between two stretches of old buildings the shade of ripe apricots, their stucco crumbling at the edges. Many of the buildings have ground-floor restaurants marked by giant potted plants and colored awnings, their upper floors dotted by windows with wooden shutters thrust open to greet the day. A flower truck manages to squeeze down the lane, the mountains of fresh blossoms quivering as it trundles over the cobblestones, close enough that I feel a whoosh of air against my arm.
When the truck passes, a guy around my age is rounding the nearest corner. He has a shock of dark curls, shorter on the sides and longer on the top. They cascade down his forehead and hang over his eyes in a way that would definitely stress me out, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He walks with a leisurely step, his backpack slung over his left shoulder and bouncing jauntily against his side. He wears a rumpled white linen shirt pushed up to his elbows, and olive-green shorts that hit mid-thigh, showing way more leg than I’m used to seeing on American college boys. When he sees us, he picks up the pace, jogging the rest of the way to the table.
“Ciao. I am so sorry to be late.” He drops his
backpack onto the chair opposite Grandpa, who reacts with a jolt. Worry flashes across our visitor’s face, his eyes darting back and forth between the two of us. “Wait. You are Lilah Tepper and Signor Mosseri, no?”
“Sì. Yes.” Smiling, I get to my feet and hold out a hand. “You’re Tommaso?”
“Yes. It is a pleasure to meet you.” As he shakes my hand, his other palm finds the bare skin of my shoulder peeking out from my white sundress. Tommaso surprises me by taking a step closer and kissing each of my cheeks: first the left, then the right. The dark scruff along his jawline tickles my skin. He steps back and pushes his fingers through the ringlets that fall over his forehead, revealing green eyes that bring out the olive undertones of his skin.
When I showed Tommaso’s initial email to my roommate, Claudia, the first thing she did was screenshot his Gmail photo so she could zoom in on his face. “Oh, he’s hot,” she declared.
I squinted at the image. “Maybe.” I hadn’t even thought about dating since Mom died. Most days it took everything in me to drag myself out of bed and get ready for class. (As much as I wanted to burrow under the covers of my twin-sized dorm-room bed, I didn’t want my grades to slip and give Dad another thing to stress about, when he was already navigating single-parent life with the twins.) On the rare nights I went out with Claudia, she’d point out all kinds of cute people for me to talk to, but I was always numb to the prospect—like flirting was a switch on my body that didn’t work anymore.
Tommaso turns to Grandpa, who’s still seated. “It is a pleasure to meet you, too, Signor Mosseri. Thank you for traveling all this way.”
Grandpa waves his hand in the air dismissively. “There’s no need for ‘Signor.’”
“You can just call him Ralph,” I quickly chime in. “Right, Grandpa? Ralph is fine?”
“Yes.”
“Lilah and Ralph,” Tommaso declares. “This works for me.”
He pushes in my chair for me as I sit down. “Oh—thank you,” I stammer. No one my age has ever done that for me back home. It’s every person for themselves in the Hamilton College dining hall, where you often have to prowl the aisles between tables for upward of ten minutes, waiting to pounce on an open seat like a lion catching its prey.
Tommaso plops down across from me, a giant grin on his face. “I cannot believe you are both here.”
andpa sitting across from Tommaso. We’re total strangers, and yet our family’s histories are intertwined like the ancient roots of a tree.
“I have been so excited to show you in person.” Tommaso reaches over, unzips his backpack, and pulls out an unmarked wooden box that fits in the palm of his hand. He sets it down in the middle of the table.
I look at Grandpa. “Do you want to do it?”
With a curt nod, he reaches forward. His hands shake as he opens the lid. Mine do the same, in my lap. I scoot my chair to the left so we can look at it together.
Wow.
Tommaso sent photos of the locket, but seeing it in person is a whole new experience. About an inch and a half long, the golden pendant is shaped like an oval and embellished with intricate carvings and gleaming jewels. A ring of vines forms the outer border, enclosing a garden of filigreed flowers, their petals made of royal-blue sapphires. The biggest flower, in the middle of the pendant, appears to have a diamond at its center. It’s stunning.
“And here is the note I found inside.” Tommaso reaches into his backpack again, this time producing an envelope, which he slides across the table like a spy transmitting top-secret materials. Grandpa opens the envelope and pulls out the scrap of paper, torn around the edges and lined with creases from the years it spent folded up, hidden away. He holds it out so we can both read the cursive handwriting.
Non mi perdonerò mai per la morte di Violetta.
Carla merita di avere questo medaglione, non io.
—Bruna Mosseri
I will never forgive myself for Violetta’s death.
Carla deserves to have this locket, not me.
—Bruna Mosseri
Grandpa sniffs. As he looks between the note and the locket, his honey-brown eyes well with tears, fogging his wire-frame glasses. After setting down the items, he takes off his glasses and cleans the lenses on the hem of his gray polo shirt. My hand hovers for a few seconds above his shoulder before I work up the courage to let it rest there. Grandpa looks at it, as surprised as if a parrot had suddenly landed on him. Seemingly okay with it, he turns back to the locket and the note.
“What are you thinking about, Grandpa?” I ask gently.
His voice is thick. “I don’t know how, but they’re hers.” He feels for the clasp, fidgets with it for a second before easing the locket open. The tiny round frames are empty. He touches the center of each one. “She used to keep family photos inside. Must’ve taken them out.” Grandpa closes the locket again and cradles it in his palm.
I turn to Tommaso, who shakes his head and lowers his voice so that only I can hear. “When I first emailed you, I did not realize how much it would mean to your grandfather.”
“How much it would mean to me, too,” I whisper. “Thank god I forwarded your email to my grandpa. For a second I was ready to accept that you must be looking for a different Bruna.”
There’s a rebellious glint in Tommaso’s eye. “We must never accept defeat.”
The waiter comes to take our order and returns soon after with appetizers for us to share. There’s crusty bread topped with creamy burrata and anchovies, a bowl of plump green olives coated in olive oil and red chili flakes, a bright green salad with juicy tomatoes under a mountain of paper-thin prosciutto. The ingredients are all things I’ve tried before, and yet I’ve never experienced flavors like this back home. From the olive oil to the tomatoes, it’s like each piece of food has the volume cranked up to max level. I literally moan when my teeth sink through the cheese into the bread beneath it.
Grandpa dips a morsel of focaccia in olive oil, places it in his mouth, and closes his eyes. He chews it slowly, like it’s a meditation.
“What do you think, Ralph?” Tommaso asks.
A few seconds go by before Grandpa opens his eyes again. “It’s good.”
“Just good?”
good.”
We all laugh.
I can’t believe how easy this is, all of a sudden. Seeing the locket in person really did something to Grandpa. The thick stone wall that usually surrounds him seems to be eroding, and I’m eager to ask him more questions. “Did you eat this kind of stuff growing up?”
“This kind of stuff?” Grandpa snorts. “No.”
Note to self: Think before bombarding Grandpa with a billion and one questions. Of course he didn’t eat like this. “Oh, duh. Sorry. Food was rationed, right? Even before the war?” I’ve read about food shortages in Italy under Mussolini, the Fascist dictator who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943. When his people were hungry, Il Duce, as he was called, claimed Italians were strong, and didn’t need as much sustenance as their portlier Northern European neighbors.
“Mm-hmm,” Grandpa replies. “After the racial laws, my parents couldn’t work. We didn’t have much money, so we ate whatever we could find.” He holds up a piece of prosciutto with his fork. “I might have had meat once, twice in my whole childhood. But not pork. My parents kept kosher.”
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