After the old gate of Latina had closed and after I had submitted my application at the Emigrant Center of the American Consulate, there followed a period in which any piece of information could become a hope. I did not yet have a secure path, and Rome was, at the same time, a provisional shelter and an administrative labyrinth.

During this stage, Anca continued to look from New York for ways to speed up my departure for the United States. Out of these attempts came episodes that now appear to me mixed together: ridiculous and humiliating, comic and saving, full of improvisation, but also of generosity.

The first attempts to organize a new life

A few days later, I received a phone call at the Di Rienzo boarding house from my aunt Anca. Meanwhile, she had asked all her acquaintances how her nephew, a refugee in Rome, might speed up emigration to the United States. Being married to Tibi, a Jewish doctor, and being themselves emigrants from Romania, her circle in New York included many Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe and who, in order to reach the United States, had benefited from alternative routes facilitated by international Jewish organizations such as HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) or Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee). Even Tibi's sister, Bebi, had benefited together with her family from such a route when, having left Romania in 1963 as emigrants bought out by their relatives in the United States in order to reach Israel, they had waited for several months in Rome, in an apartment provided by a Jewish organization in Piazza Vittorio, until they received the visa to emigrate to the United States. Anca gave me the names of the two organizations over the phone and asked me to contact them for help.

HIAS and Joint

I set to work. I found the telephone numbers and addresses of the two organizations: HIAS in Via Regina Margherita and Joint in Via Messina, and I made the respective appointments. On the appointed date, September 9, 1989, at 12 o'clock, I went to HIAS for an interview. Arriving early, I was able to realize the complexity of the responsibility assumed by the organization. The corridors were full of people sitting on chairs and standing, waiting their turn, each with his own story, each with his own hopes. I took a place in a corner of the room and entered into conversation with others who were also waiting to go in. I learned a great deal of information I had not known until then. HIAS is an American Jewish nonprofit organization that provides humanitarian aid and assistance to refugees. These had initially been Jews from the USSR, and later people of other nationalities, religions and ethnic origins as well. After Vienna, Rome became the HIAS center for refugee allocation activity. The Jewish exodus from the USSR had been the organization's main concern until precisely that year, 1989, when a relaxation of tensions between the great powers led to a change in U.S. immigration policy and therefore also in the activity of the allocation center in Rome. In previous years, as the number of emigrants in Rome had increased, significant delays had been recorded in processing emigration applications, and the time between the refugees' arrival in Rome and the HIAS interview had increased to three weeks. By the summer of 1989, the total visa-processing time lasted 70 to 80 days. This situation had been worsened further by the refusal by INS (the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service) to grant refugee status to an increasing number of applicants. So I could hardly have arrived in a worse situation.

Then my turn came for the interview. I was invited into a room with three people seated at a table, ready to interrogate me in any language I might have spoken, but not Romanian. I preferred English. One of the three asked me for my name, date and place of birth, nationality and my objectives as a refugee. I answered, and we reached the crucial point of the interview.

An invented or presumed origin

“Are you Jewish?” my interlocutor asked me.

“Sure,” I answered, as Anca had taught me.

I should open a parenthesis here. In general, I do not like to lie. Rather than lie, I prefer not to answer a question directly, or to keep silent. Preparing myself to be asked about my ethnicity, I clung to a particularity of my genealogical tree, as far as I knew it. I do not have a known grandfather on my father's side. That is, according to his birth certificate, my father was an illegitimate child. He had only a mother, a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Solovăstru, a Romanian Transylvanian village near Reghin, who, at the time of my father's birth, was in Budapest, the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which then also included Transylvania. The legend, which I knew from my mother, says that my grandmother was a maid in the house of a wealthy Jew in Budapest and that it is very likely that this Jew was my grandfather. So, breathing a sigh of relief that I did not have to lie, I accepted this legend as true and decided to declare myself Jewish. But, as the Romanian saying goes, “the reckoning at home does not match the one at the marketplace.”

“Is your mother Jewish?” my interlocutor asked.

“No, my father is Jewish. His father, my grandfather, was Jewish,” I replied, very proud of my origin.

“Are you circumcised?” he asked me, smiling.

“No,” I answered, somewhat embarrassed.

All three burst out laughing.

“Never claim again that you are Jewish, because in fact you are not,” my interlocutor admonished me, this time seriously. He then explained to me something I had not known until that date: Jewishness is transmitted through the mother, that is, Jews are born of Jews. In addition, and this I did know, eight days after birth, newborn Jewish boys must be circumcised.

“And under these conditions, can't you help me? Do you help only Jews?” I implored him.

“We are sorry, but we have very many applications from Jewish families, so we cannot take care of others,” my interlocutor answered in an indifferent tone.

“Do you think Joint could help me?” I persisted.

“Certainly not. They are in the same situation as we are,” he replied.

Disappointed and somewhat ashamed, I returned to my room at the boarding house, feeling that the walls of Rome were closing in on me more and more tightly. That evening I phoned Anca and told her about the interview. She remained disconcerted for a moment, clearly disappointed by my lack of skill in defending my interests. Then she consoled me, telling me not to be discouraged, since other opportunities would soon present themselves.

Panella and the Burberry trench coat

Anca continued to send me 500 dollars every two weeks for the boarding house and for other expenses that appeared on the horizon, taking into account, for example, that the cold season was approaching, while I had come from the country with only T-shirts and short-sleeved shirts. That is why, a few weeks after my arrival in Italy, Anca tried to equip me for winter by taking advantage of the arrival in Rome of a friend of one of my uncle Tibi's patients. He was a wealthy American of Italian origin named Alessandro Panella, who lived between New York and Miami. Anca asked him to help me buy some clothing for my winter wardrobe, after which she told me by phone that on September 13, at 11 o'clock, I should meet Panella at the bar of the five-star Excelsior Hotel on Via Veneto. I hurried to wash and iron the only decent shirt I had, as well as my rather worn jeans. I arrived there at the appointed time and found Panella with his wife, a tall blond American woman, undoubtedly much younger than he was, waiting for me at a table in the elegant hotel lobby. I introduced myself, confirming that we could speak English. They offered me coffee with pastries, were kind to me, listened to all my troubles, were moved by my situation and tried to give me advice.

“I have a friend here in Rome who can help you,” Panella said. “He was a police commissioner at Fiumicino Airport and is now retired. He still has many acquaintances in the police.”

“Thank you, that would be very important. I don't know anyone here in Rome,” I said, rather dejected.

“His name is Giovanni M. He is Neapolitan, like me, and I have known him for many years, from the time when business forced me to fly often to Italy. Here is his telephone number. Tell him you are calling on my behalf,” Panella said, rising from the table with his wife and signaling me to follow him. “As for you, I still have something to do at your aunt's request,” he continued.

Leaving the hotel, he called a taxi waiting in front of it and invited me to accompany them. No sooner said than done: we got into the taxi and, in a few minutes, we were in front of a Burberry store in Piazza di Spagna, which we entered after getting out of the taxi. Panella, who moved easily through the elegant shop, pointed me out to the salesman and asked him to bring me a trench coat in my size. The salesman came with a navy-blue trench coat made of waterproof gabardine, with a detachable checked wool lining, a true splendor. Laughing inwardly, I could already see myself wearing it when I went to have lunch at Caritas. Panella paid the bill, congratulated me on the trench coat, and we parted. For him, it was “mission accomplished.”

Of course, I phoned Anca to tell her about the meeting with Panella and to thank her. When I reached the episode of the trench coat, Anca asked me: “He bought you only a trench coat?” “Yes,” I answered. “Hm. And how much did it cost? So I know how much money I have to give him,” Anca asked me. “Well, about 600 dollars, I think,” I answered, lowering a little the amount actually paid by Panella. “What, is that trench coat made of gold? Who ever heard of a 600-dollar trench coat?” Anca got angry. “They were right to say he is a mafioso,” she vented.

Since then, I have worn that trench coat on all festive occasions, whenever I had to be elegant, and it has never disappointed me. Even today, after so many years, I wear it with pleasure and, dressed in it, I am very elegant, even too elegant for our times. “You pay well, you sit in front,” as the Romanian saying goes. For me, the navy-blue trench coat became more than a simple garment. It was a symbol of my new life in Italy, an object that protected me from the cold and from the uncertainty of the future.

Conclusion

These episodes did not solve my problem of emigration. HIAS and Joint could not help me, and the Burberry trench coat did not change the precariousness of my situation. Yet they were part of the mechanics of survival: telephone calls, recommendations, meetings, small forms of material support, attempts to find a breach in a system that was closing precisely when I had reached it.

Looking back, I see in these attempts not only the improvisation of the emigrant, but also the way in which a suspended life sometimes holds on to apparently minor details: the name of an organization, an appointment, a telephone call, a coffee in an elegant hotel, a trench coat too expensive and ridiculously unsuitable for the Caritas canteen, yet later transformed into a sign of unexpected continuity.

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