Captivity

By György Spiró and Tim Wilkinson

“Captivity is a complex and fast-paced tale of Jewish life in the early first century, a sort of sword-and-sandals saga as reimagined by Henry Roth. The narrative follows Uri from Rome to Jerusalem and back, from prospectless dreamer to political operative to pogrom survivor—who along the way also happens to dine with Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate and get thrown into a cell with a certain Galilean rabble-rouser. Hungarian György Spiró’s deft combination of philosophical inquiry and page-turning brio should overcome that oft-mentioned American timidity toward books in translation.” —The Wall Street Journal, Best Books of 2015

A literary sensation, György Spiró’s Captivity is both a highly sophisticated historical novel and a gripping page-turner. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., between the year of Christ’s death and the outbreak of the Jewish War, Captivity recounts the adventures of the feeble-bodied, bookish Uri, a young Roman Jew.

Frustrated with his hapless son, Uri’s father sends the young man to the Holy Land to regain the family’s prestige. In Jerusalem, Uri is imprisoned by Herod and meets two thieves and (perhaps) Jesus before their crucifixion. Later, in cosmopolitan Alexandria, he undergoes a scholarly and sexual awakening—but must also escape a pogrom. Returning to Rome at last, he finds an entirely unexpected inheritance.

Equal parts Homeric epic, brilliantly researched Jewish history, and picaresque adventure, Captivity is a dramatic tale of family, fate, and fortitude. In its weak-yet-valiant hero, fans will be reminded of Robert Graves’ classics of Ancient Rome, I, Claudius and Claudius the God. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Oct 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781632060211

Book preview

Epic Praise for

CAPTIVITY

"Captivity is a complex and fast-paced tale of Jewish life in the early first century, a sort of sword-and-sandals saga as reimagined by Henry Roth.... Hungarian György Spiró’s deft combination of philosophical inquiry and page-turning brio should overcome that oft-mentioned American timidity toward books in translation."

—The Wall Street Journal, Best Books of 2015

"‘BEN HUR,’ BUT BIGGER AND BETTER.... Captivity draws you in with its pageant of the classical world, but by the end it also turns out to be a profound meditation on what Judaism meant, and means."

—Adam Kirsch, Tablet

"With the novel Captivity, Spiró proves that he is well-versed in both historical and human knowledge.... Literature is a serious game. So is Spiró’s novel."

—Imre Kertész, Nobel Prize–winning author of Fatelessness

Remarkable... A faithful, fantastically informed, and extravagantly detailed picture of one of the most turbulent and consequential moments in human history.

—Rabbi David Wolpe, Los Angeles Review of Books

Deliberate, evocative, and richly detailed.... A thoroughly impressive literary feat.

—Publishers Weekly (lead starred review)

A visceral new form of epic history... [Spiró’s] technique is a welcome innovation for historical fiction in general, and perhaps the drollest scholarly introduction to the first century yet.

—Jack Hatchett, Jewish Book Council

A truly classic grand novel and captivating reading.

—József Keresztesi, Hungarian Literature Online

"Brilliant, picaresque novel of Jewish life in the first century... A winning and thoughtful entertainment, somewhere between Lives of the Caesars and The Tin Drum."

—Kirkus Reviews

[One of the] best independent press books of 2015.

—Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire

"Monumental... The level of detail is stunning; Mr. Spiró seems to know absolutely everything about the first-century Mediterranean world.... [Captivity] never loses steam.... You can read it as a parable of the Jewish condition amid the modern empires of Europe, or you can simply lose yourself in the ancient setting it so comprehensively describes."

—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

An exciting and engrossing epic that richly rewards the reader.

—Bradley A. Scott, Foreword Reviews (five-heart review)

Passionate and academic, overflowing with detail, thoroughly engrossing, it’s a powerful, important work. Tim Wilkinson, a past PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize winner, has done a great service to modern literature by tackling this behemoth of a novel.

—Jon Sobel, Blogcritics

A literary juggernaut well worth the effort... Told with stunning detail... Spiró manages to combine the intellectual rigor of history with an entertaining, pathos-charged narrative.

—Alex Brubaker, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"György Spiró’s novel Captivity, beautifully rendered into English by Tim Wilkinson, is a work of ambition—almost literally, not only metaphorically, titanic.... The life’s achievement of a major Hungarian literary talent... The long-awaited capstone to Spiró’s career as a writer."

—Ottilie Mulzet, Quarterly Conversation

A fabulous, at times astonishing picaresque tale... You can imagine a Yiddish Dostoevsky with hints of Woody Allen.... It is a stunning achievement.

—Omaha Dispatch

"Beyond bringing to vivid life a decisive human era, Captivity offers a meditation on man’s fate in an absurd world."

—Michele Levy, World Literature Today

An incredible page turner, it reads easily and avidly like the greatest bestsellers while also going as deep as the greatest thinkers of European philosophy.

—Aegon Literary Award 2006 jury recommendation

A masterpiece.

—László Márton

Contents

Maps

I. From Rome to Jerusalem

II. Judaea

III. Alexandria

IV. Rome

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Maps

‌

I

From Rome to Jerusalem

You’re setting off for Jerusalem the day after tomorrow!

Uri woke with a start.

His father was standing over him.

Uri raised himself up on his rags, picked up the scroll that had slipped from his hand to the floor, and looked up apologetically from where he was sitting. An awkward smile played across his lips, as it did whenever he was caught doing something, and he always was caught, even if it wasn’t anything bad.

His father fidgeted a bit in the gloomy nook, the gray February afternoon throwing light from the yard on his stern bearded features, his prominent cheekbones, his deeply set eyes; the little square thrown onto the wall happened to be gleaming just above Uri’s disheveled, greasy hair. His father was standing there somberly, no longer looking at him but gazing at the yard. He turned on his heels and pushed aside the carpet that hung over the doorway, so forcefully that it conveyed his deep-seated disgust at his son, at his own position, with Creation in general.

Uri had not yet fully regained consciousness; he was merely ashamed of what his father had caught him doing: falling asleep while reading. He had a habit of taking a nap in the afternoon, and even though he had nothing to do and was quite free to withdraw to his hovel and go to sleep whenever he wanted, he felt guilty about it nevertheless. It was as if reading were a penance, a humiliating duty, for some ancient sin that he had not even committed. Yet he liked reading; it was the only thing that he really liked to do.

Scroll in hand, he got up on his feet, stretched his aching back, turned his head around and cracked his neck, shrugged his shoulders repeatedly, bent down, then gazed out the window.

Uri shivered in the damp and chilly darkness of Rome in early February. Images from his dreams were still drifting around in his mind, sinking ever deeper like fish burrowing into the Tiber’s mud and merging with the murky halos in the yard. The dream cannot have been altogether disagreeable, because a pleasant feeling lingered, a hopeful image, though there was no point trying to recall it. It was as though his real living was done in his dreams. There were people sauntering around in the yard, but too far off to recognize; he saw them only in blurred outline. At this hour of the day they were probably women, because the menfolk were still going about their business.

Uri had poor eyes.

His leg was bad too. Ever since he was small, walking hurt his feet and ankles. His back usually hurt also. His right hip had turned out bigger than the left, but it was his eyes that were plagued worst of all: he was very near-sighted. It had not always been so. Up to the age of ten or eleven he had been able to do all the things the other boys his age could do, but at some point he dropped out of their games, moved less assuredly, squinted, and leaned ever closer to the scroll when he read. It had not bothered him at first, coming on so gradually that he had barely noticed; it was just that he often had headaches.

Eusebius, the teacher who took care of him and ten or fifteen other boys in the house of prayer (that was what the community paid him for), told Joseph that, in his opinion, Uri had poor eyesight. Joseph had protested: no one in his family had poor eyesight, his son included. The teacher just shook his head. Joseph’s firstborn was his only son; his wife had not become pregnant again after the second girl was born, so the teacher realized that Joseph was in a difficult position.

That evening his father had interrogated him.

Is it true that you don’t see well? he asked pointedly.

He walked over to the farthest corner in the main room and asked how many fingers he was holding up. The main room was not all that big, but even so, the hand was a long way off, and it was dim as well. The oil lamp was barely flickering, but it gave off a lot of fumes, and that too was bothersome. Uri sighed and chose at random: Two. From the silence that followed, he could tell that he had guessed wrong.

That was when relations with his father started to go downhill.

He had always been the precious boy, the only whole person Joseph had managed to sire. He was the favorite. His father had been proud that his son knew how to read and write before other boys his age; he had boasted about him and had also started instructing him in the logic of business, as if he were already an adult.

His father repeated the experiment half a year later. Uri confessed then that he could not see how many fingers his father was holding up.

Because you don’t want to see! Joseph had shouted angrily.

That sentence had haunted Uri ever since.

From that point on, his father avoided him. He did not want to see that his son could not see. Doctors claimed that dried gum from the balsam tree had a beneficial effect on cataracts and shortsightedness, and as Joseph had once traded in, among other things, balsam and dates, and was at that moment still receiving them in shipments from Judaea, he instructed Uri to place over his eyes every evening a poultice soaked in a watery solution of powdered balsam gum. Uri diligently applied the compresses and was nauseated by the smell of the balsam, but his eyesight did not improve. Another six months, and Uri still could not see how many fingers his father was showing. Joseph hinted that he should stop with the poultices, since balsam was expensive.

Uri was relieved and also despondent.

He could read all right; indeed, if he screwed his eyes up tight he could even see farther away as well, and if he looked through a funneled hand he could even see for quite a distance, albeit only over a tiny area, but honestly quite a long distance. He tried that out a lot when he was alone, because, bit by bit, he retreated to the little hovel, rarely even stepping out into the courtyard, which he could see quite well, everything being so close. He would stare out at the yard through the cracks between his fingers, which also helped him to see the far-off corners.

It was a spacious courtyard, impossible to tell where it ended; in truth it had neither beginning nor end.

Houses on the far side of the Tiber—the Transtiberim in Latin, though the Jewish population referred to it simply as Far Side, as if they were looking back at themselves with pity from somewhere else, from Rome proper, even a bit disparagingly—had originally been built contiguous with their yards. They had formed a single elongated, complex, erratic, winding system of dwellings and alleys on the old-time Far Side. Because the Jews constructed their houses as they had in Palestine, with the windows and doorways opening only onto the inner courtyard, all that existed to the outside world was an interconnected wall. As a result, what had come into existence was an endless, seemingly impervious single-story zigzagging system of fortifications, spiked at irregular intervals with strong gates, both secretive and exotic to anyone not familiar with this part of the Transtiberim. Yet it was well known that the Jews lived a wretched existence: leprous Jews would beg around the Porta Capena, at the beginning of the Appian Way, for all to see, and many found themselves in that part of town, given that the main gateway to commerce on the southern side of the city was outside the nearby Via Ostiensis. Produce was cheaper there than around the Forum, so half of Rome shopped there. It would also have been obvious that haggard people with stooped backs swarmed around with their pitchers, bearded and in worn sandals and frayed togas: they were going for drinking water because the aqueducts supplied Far Side with polluted water, good for nothing more than irrigation, if at all. Requests had been made from one generation to the next, but they were not granted better water by the city, and in districts that were blessed with a better water supply, outsiders had to pay the locals good money for what the latter received free of charge. The water of the Tiber was drinkable in theory, but the Jews considered it unclean, especially when, from time to time, it overflowed with corpses, so they did not drink it or even wash with it. They preferred water from cisterns, and there were some benighted souls who, obeying the religious precepts of their ancestors more strictly than most, considered water from any other district impure, so their families were also prohibited from using it. There might well have been something to it, though, because the water in those lead pipes left a grayish scum on the children’s skin, who turned out slower and dimmer than the others.

Lepers, incidentally, were treated decently: they were not expelled from the community but had a fairly spacious pen designated as their dwelling place, minimal rations were provided, and they counted on tzedakah, or charitable funds, or at least on a charity bowl of victuals for immediate relief, which even the most destitute and needy visitors can count on from a Jewish community anywhere. But because lepers were impure, their family was not allowed direct contact and could only shout to them from a distance, and the afflicted were obliged to smash to pieces the single-use clay vessels provided to them by the community, and, to the great delight of pottery merchants, to bury the pieces three feet underground. That aside, they were free to move around, even go beyond the walls of the Jewish quarter to beg like any other sick person. They too were obliged to go to the house of prayer, but not only were priests forbidden to touch them, they were not even supposed to see them, lest they become unclean themselves, so the lepers had to stand throughout the services in a dark corner walled off by planks; they arrived earlier than the priest and left well after. Because there were so few priests, their cleanliness was safeguarded by the most ancient and stringent regulations. As descendants of Aaron, they were sent from Judaea to Rome for the more important festivals to confer blessings, and afterward they would return to Jerusalem. In the course of time they also sent out a few Levites, who could not themselves become priests but could act as priests’ assistants: it was they who blew the shofar, they who did the singing and played the music, they who collected the taxes. The ritual butchers and slaughterers also came from their ranks, so there were more of them in Rome than there were priests.

Apart from their religious activities, the priestly families and Levites had no say in the life of a community. Unlike back East, the rich and respected families in Rome did not cede important decisions, so many of Rome’s Levites asked to be sent back to Jerusalem, and the Roman municipal administration was only too happy to oblige. In their place, others came from the ranks of the lower priesthood and the lower Levites (for it seems that, even there, not everything went so swimmingly for all priests and Levites), and after a bit of administrative maneuvering they were generally allowed into Rome, especially if wealthy Jewish families vouched for their subsistence. The officials of the magistracy could breathe easily, because they would not be obliged to hand out free grain to the newcomers and their families. After all, people like that arrived with family; indeed, that was largely the point of leaving the Holy City and traveling out to the impure Diaspora. But after a few weeks or months, they would get fed up with the climate in Rome and go back to Jerusalem; then either somebody else would be sent to replace them or not. In time, a few Levite families settled down and got rich, mostly through the ritually pure oil and wine that they imported from Judaea and Galilee.

Rome’s non-Jews were not very interested, to tell the truth, in how the population on the right side of the Tiber lived.

There were many small ethnic enclaves in Rome, and outsiders had no awareness of them, and the Jewish enclave was not among the larger and more important ones either: in a city of around one million, it accounted for no more than thirty or forty thousand, the majority of them the gradually liberated progeny of the slaves who were sporadically carried off to Rome. They did have synagogues, however, twelve of them, one of which was on the Appian Way, where they also had an underground cemetery, a catacomb. Counting on eventual resurrection as they did, they did not incinerate their dead like the foolish Latini. Seven of the prayer houses were along the road to Ostia alone, the thoroughfare by which goods delivered by sea reached Rome by land.

The first of the temples, named for Marcus Agrippa, the Roman potentate who had given patronage to the Jews, was built almost a century before and was still standing. Although Uri’s family did not go there, Joseph had shown it to his young boy, telling him the tale of the first convoy of Jewish captives, who refused to work until the Roman slaveholders accepted the Sabbath as the slaves’ day of rest; they would follow the law laid down by their religion at all costs, and they wanted their own temple. A number of them were killed on account of those demands, but even then the rest would not relent. Uri clapped his hands in delight at hearing this, and he resolved to be that brave if ever needed.

He also rejoiced when his father related that the lords had paired their males and females off to boost the ranks of their slaves, but the Jewish men would only go along with it if any non-Jewish women with whom they were designated to multiply first converted to Judaism. Later on, to simplify matters, women were imported from the Jewish part of the empire. Herod the Great, king of the Jews and a friend of Marcus Agrippa’s, established good relations with Emperor Augustus and managed to finagle permission to ship women in to Rome. There were prostitutes and thieves and women with the clap among them, but they were Jewish and there was no need to bother converting them.

Shipping them cost money, however, his father recounted, and that is something that no state power likes. Herod the Great and Emperor Augustus realized that, and before long this fount of women dried up.

Under Roman law, the descendants of slaves were supposed to inherit their master’s religion, but the Jews were unwilling to propagate on those terms, so an exception had to be made. Non-Jewish slaves were not granted the same concessions, so they loathed the Jews, which was nothing new; ever since Alexander the Great conquered the East, non-Jews who lived there had always resented the Jews and the special treatment they demanded, appealing each time to prerogatives that they had won under Persian rule. It was one thing if they all fell, Greeks and Jews alike, under foreign—Persian—dominion, but another thing altogether if the Jews came under Greek sway but for centuries refused to accept it. Since both the Greeks and the Jews had fallen under Roman dominion, the Jews regarded Rome as a Babylon, paying it homage in practice more zealously than did the Greeks. The female slaves, incidentally, were glad to turn Jewish: they knew that Jews, unlike Greeks or Romans, would never abandon a child. There were even some male slaves who converted, calculating that the Jewish communities would contribute to their manumission, and there were indeed some cases of Jewish converts freed in this manner. The only thing that may have given them pause was circumcision, a painful procedure for an adult, and not without danger. The women, though, were not threatened with clitoral resection, since the Roman Jews did not demand it, so there were droves of Syrian, Greek, Arab, Abyssinian, Egyptian, German, Gallic, Hispanic, Thracian, and Illyrian women, and female slaves of other origins who became Jewish in Rome, to the greater glory of the One and Only God, giving birth to Jewish children in the zigzag ghetto of Far Side. And since the Transtiberim—which was not even fenced in at that time, already considered part of the city by government bodies, albeit unofficially—was inhabited not only by Jews but also by people of various conquered nations, for the surplus daughters who became Jewish converts it was often only a matter of moving a few houses away, so they were even able to visit their parental households, should they so wish. Not that they had much wish to: their non-Jewish families were generally more than happy to be rid of them, and they made that quite clear. In any case, the women became part of the husband’s family forever, with no ties of any kind to their parents’ family—on that score, Roman and Jewish laws were in accord. A girl who converted to the bosom of the One and Only God could only be thankful that her parents had not cast her out as prey for wolves or men, or strangled her at birth.

That is how a Jewish Diaspora took root in the capital of the empire.

Joseph considered it an injustice that he must live on foreign soil, as technically speaking everyone who did not live in the Holy Land was unclean, and that was a blemish no water could wash away. But, then, it was not the first time this had happened in Jewish history, he said, and he pointed out to Uri that the Roman Jews were much better off than those back home, as they well knew; they acted rather like a sizable permanent legation in Rome, and if they traded shrewdly, and Rome and Jewry were bound by ever more threads, as was predestined by necessity, they were only doing what the Creator had seemingly intended them to do.

The winding interior courtyard had originally been a single labyrinthine system. Fortification had arisen spontaneously in the open space—although the wealthiest, as is the custom wherever Mammon is master, were separated from the communal yard with high walls and indeed had special guards to protect them—may money be cursed eternally—especially now, because an ever-increasing number of Rome’s Jews were rich, and an even greater number were getting poorer. There might have even been a connection of sorts between the two phenomena.

The original Far Side stood right in the center of the Jewish quarter, with new houses built around it, but in recent years rich entrepreneurs had started building multistory tenement blocks. Joseph feared that, one of these days, their own ramshackle shed would be cleared away, along with the small huts around it, and replaced by four- or five-story buildings. That is what had happened in the non-Jewish areas immediately next to Far Side, where Egyptians, Syrians, and Greeks from Asia Minor lived just as wretchedly as most Jews, and they went around the Jewish area just as comfortably as in their own.

The reason the yards had become a single, capricious, erratic space was that, on holy days, Jews were not allowed to wander more than two thousand cubits from their home. A cubit measured roughly forty-five centimeters, but it might be somewhat longer or shorter depending on the size of the forearm, since a cubit was the measure from the elbow to the fingertips. In other words, on holy days Jews were not supposed to go more than a meager half-mile from their home.

And the Jews had lots of holy days, starting with the four main festivals every year, each of which lasted for quite a few days. Then there was the Sabbath, each week from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Even then, people wanted to go more than two thousand cubits, which is only a few hundred paces. They wanted to visit neighbors, to chat and gossip, none of which is prohibited on a holy day as long as no work is being done. Chitchat is hardly working, as the Creator himself is well aware, and he no doubt jabbers with his archangels, since everyone knows he got his own work done in six days. So people joined their yards together, which meant that they were able to cover not two thousand but ten thousand cubits, festival or not, without leaving their own yard, or at least that was what they told their Creator, who had to accept the perfection of their reasoning. This is how the Law was outwitted by the Jews of Rome, much like the other approximately five million Jews in the world at the time; that is to say, they adhered to the Law because they respected it to the letter.

A special ordinance was laid down on this crafty sanction, a joint ruling, with various fine subclauses, one pertaining to Rome. It stipulated that the one-time Far Side counted as a single courtyard, and people were allowed to do within it anything they would do in their own home, even on the Sabbath or during festivals. There was fierce debate over whether the ruling also applied to new housing constructed outside the walls of Far Side, with some arguing that the whole of Jerusalem counted as one combined courtyard, and it was permitted to deliver certain things within it, even on the Sabbath, whereas others opposed, saying that Rome was not a Jewish city, nor was Transtiberim (or Traseteberin, as they generally pronounced it in those days, with the nasal before the s disappearing and the word clipped, the end result being the Trastevere, the name by which this district would still be known two thousand years later). The whole of Rome was unclean, Far Side too, according to those who sought a return to the basic principles of the faith, themselves being impure, just like every Jew in the Diaspora. But be that as it may, the inhabitants of the old Far Side continued to reap the benefit of the blessed ruling.

In this labyrinth of a yard that was Far Side, there was no need to resort to that pious deceit that almost every Jew in Judaea committed, before the holy day began, by setting out a meal two thousand cubits away to signal that this was the boundary of a household, so when the holy day was in force they were permitted to go a further two thousand cubits from those provisions. This way, too, they were adhering to the Law—whichever suited them. That trick could not be employed in Rome, because any food left out would have been instantly stolen. The outside world corrupts the inner; intensive Jewish society was wrecked by pantheistic (hence godless) Roman society, and lamentations could be wallowed in on that account. It was typical Latin stupidity that their first emperor was still under the misapprehension that Jews eat nothing on the Sabbath, as if it were a day of fasting! Even after decades this was still raising eyebrows among Rome’s Jews, who prayed on the Sabbath in their houses of prayer and listened to interpretations of the Torah and the Scriptures of the prophets, but the essence was nevertheless the communal meal, the costs of which were covered by the communal tax. Festal food could not be skimpy: there had to be meat and wine on the menu, likewise vegetables and fruit, to say nothing of unleavened bread. Poor families would have very little to eat for the rest of the week, but on the Sabbath they could eat their fill, and for free, through the good offices of the community.

The rationale, therefore, for this singular form of architecture may have been primarily religious—to be more specific, an injunction against death by starvation—but neither was the fortified structure entirely irrational.

When Emperor Tiberius decided, fifteen years before, that adherents to the cult of Isis and the Jewish faith should clear out of Rome, the Roman mob got wind of the news and tried to lay siege to this mysterious system of walls, but because they had no grasp of the whole, they were unable to force their way in. The Jews defended themselves by firing arrows and throwing javelins from the flat rooftops.

They had to leave their homes in Rome all the same, with Joseph fleeing with his wife and three-year-old Uri.

They withdrew to the hill village of Ariccia, twenty miles from Rome, to a stable with a leaky roof. Joseph cleaned out the manure and plowed, his wife strewed straw and litter, and Uri spent the whole day chasing poultry. But six months later, thanks to the kindly Roman notable who was their patron, the freed Joseph being a client, the father and family were able to return to their ransacked, wrecked home.

Apart from the four thousand unmarried Jewish men who were called up for military service and taken off to Sardinia, supposedly to ward off gangs of robbers—though the climate and homesickness finished more of them off—virtually all of the Jews with families drifted back, bit by bit. In total, a couple of hundred were killed by the robbers in the country, and the Emperor Tiberius was no longer issuing such strict edicts.

The houses were repaired, the furnishings slowly made good. Not that there was much to replace, given how poor the Jews of Rome already were.

Uri recalled almost nothing about being dragged away for the first time—only the smell of chicken droppings, his father placing him on his shoulders and carrying him long distances, which felt so good that he would dream about it even now, at the age of seventeen. In his dream, he wished he would wake up to see his father standing above him, saying, Come on, my boy, hop on my shoulders again.

All that remained of the temporary exile was that his mother, Sarah, would still cry out from time to time at the memory of an elegant utensil she had once owned. It had been tucked away and not returned by the non-Jewish freedmen, also clients of their patron. She would moan on and on about that. The truth is that several of them had been honest enough to hand back the valuables that had been deposited with them, and to this day the family still ate out of such vessels, as the father would sometimes note, though that did not hinder Sarah in her lamentations.

These days, his father no longer looked up, but dourly spooned in his food. If he ever looked at his wife, at the repulsive sight of her kerchief-covered head, profound disgust shot from his eyes: it was not the thieves he hated, but her. And he held his tongue. Divorce was difficult for a Jew in Rome: there were so few of them. Divorce was easy in Judaea, and that was not just hearsay but written law: if anyone found another woman more beautiful than his wife, that was, in itself, sufficient grounds for divorce. A man could divorce, and he could even drive his wife away if she undressed, which was not permitted on certain occasions. But then, Judaea was not a border castle for Jewry but the body of the nation, and all sorts of things were possible there. In Rome, Jews could marry their cousins, unlike the Latini, because their numbers were scant. In Judaea and Galilee it counted as incest and was forbidden. On the other hand, a Roman widow was under no obligation to marry her dead husband’s brother, which was still compulsory in Palestine.

Uri’s father never spoke about that half-year of privation. The story went around that the whole exile was caused by four vile, thieving Jews who, by some means, were able to win over Fulvia, wife of Saturninus, the senator, and to wheedle cash from her to purchase costly carpets for the Temple in Jerusalem. They absconded with the money, of course, and an incensed Fulvia reported this to the emperor, and Tiberius in turn flew into a rage.

From other variations that Uri heard, however, he suspected it was only a pretext for expelling the Jews from Rome, on account of Germanicus.

Germanicus, the famous general, was a nephew and adopted son of the emperor’s, but Tiberius took offense at him and packed him off to the Eastern provinces. Germanicus had made the mistake of setting off from Syria to Alexandria, even though Egypt was a no-go area for all Romans of any rank, seeing that Egypt, as every street urchin in Rome knew, was Rome’s bread basket: it was the source of the free grain, of which Jews who had been granted citizenship also partook. Anyone who disturbed Egypt would bring serious famine down on Rome. Antony had been the last to try it, but his navy was defeated at Actium by Octavian, who became the Emperor Augustus. He then prohibited Roman senators and legionnaires from visiting Egypt. Tiberius must have presumed that Germanicus, passing through Judaea, had cut a deal with the Jews living there that they would stand by him if a war were to break out with Egypt. Indeed, it is quite certain that this was his thinking. Otherwise, why not expel Egyptians, who lived separately from the Jews in Transtiberim, along with the Jews? Germanicus, subsequently, was fatally poisoned. The rumor was that the emperor had dismissed the previous governor of Judaea, Valerius Gratus, for meeting with Germanicus, although it would have been difficult for him not to meet with the emperor’s adopted son when he was wandering around Judaea. The matter was of little importance, one governor being much the same as another viewed from Rome. But this particular event did become noteworthy because the emperor waited seven years before relieving Gratus, which was not a sign of forgetfulness but rather, according to political analysts, precisely the opposite: he never forgot and sooner or later would take vengeance for sure. It was unusual, by the way, for Emperor Tiberius to replace procurators and prefects, choosing rather to leave them in place on the principle that a well-fed tick sucks less blood than a hungry one.

It may well be, though, that the previous prefect got mixed up somehow in the Sejanus affair.

Agrippina the Elder is another oft-cited example. She was Germanicus’s very popular widow, who, fourteen years after her husband died, was starved to death by Tiberius. It wasn’t like that, interjects another political commentator: banished to the island of Pandataria, Agrippina went on a hunger strike, a centurion poked out one of her eyes, then she was force-fed, on Tiberius’s orders, but incompetently, and that’s what caused her death. What does it matter? She was murdered. The Jews are just as up on Roman gossip as any other nation, and they have just as many worthy political commentators.

Uri was interested in history; all tales with twists and turns interested him, and he read countless works of Greek and Latin authors in his little alcove. There he was left alone and could spend the whole day musing and piecing things together. The images he saw in his waking dreams were sharp and bright, almost palpable. Imagination is a great thing, if someone has it.

He could read Greek, because their neighbors in the Jewish quarter had Greek as their mother tongue, and most Jewish boys in Rome answered to a Greek name. They brought it from Palestine, where Hellenization had proved most successful in the area of language, and they had passed it on to their successors in Rome. Cultured Latini spoke more polished Greek, but this was also Greek: Jews spoke the same Greek as the Greeks themselves; it was impossible to tell them apart from their pronunciation.

Joseph and his family were exceptional in that they also spoke Aramaic at home, which was related to Hebrew, the original but by then extinct language of the Holy Scriptures. There was a somewhat calculated dimension to this: Joseph had the view that as long as it was necessary to do business with commercial agents who spoke only Aramaic, his children should learn it too.

Rome’s Jews had, for some time, spoken neither Aramaic nor Hebrew, and the Hebrew texts had been translated into Greek for the congregation in the house of prayer. A Greek translation of the Old Testament was already in existence: the Septuagint, which seventy-two scholars translated in seventy-two days on the island of Pharos in Alexandria about two centuries before. At home, left to themselves, everyone would read aloud from this Greek Torah. It was not permitted to recite the Holy Scriptures by heart, lest one commit the grave error of misremembering a text and saying something other than what was written: that might have unforeseen consequences for the whole of Creation. In the house of prayer, on the other hand, Hebrew texts were translated impromptu in front of the assembled community, and of course a person was not forbidden to learn by heart that day’s reading from the Septuagint, provided he pretend to understand the Hebrew and translate from that.

It did not occur to Uri as a child that his mother’s knowledge of Aramaic was somehow unusual, and that other mothers spoke better Greek than she did. It was only as an adolescent that he reflected on the fact that his mother was called Sarah, which was a name, as he was well aware by then, often bestowed on proselytized women who had converted to the Jewish faith. By that time, however, he was not on good terms with his father, so he did not ask if Sarah was Jewish by birth, and there was no way he was going to ask his mother, with whom he had never had a good relationship. She took such care to abide strictly by the religion of her husband and son.

If Sarah was not originally Jewish—as her religious overzealousness suggested, because fresh converts were always that way—then she must have been born a slave and Joseph must have emancipated her. Given Joseph’s business acumen, he would have chosen a slave girl who spoke Aramaic, which meant she would have come from Syria or Babylon. Uri assumed that his father, who had been orphaned at a young age, could not have been prosperous enough to land a Jewish girl, for even if he had waived a dowry he would not have been much of a catch, and so he had been obliged to marry a slave girl. Under the laws of Palestine, this meant that he, Uri, as the son of a proselytized slave girl, would be of very lowly status over there in the Old Country, because his mother’s descent would apply to him too. He might not be a slave or new convert, and he would count as an Israelite, but one of the least esteemed. It was a stroke of luck to have been born a Jew in Rome, where only the paternal lineage was taken into account.

For Uri, learning Latin was not easy.

The young people of the Jewish quarter spoke only a broken Latin; they rarely crossed over to the other bank of the Tiber, where Rome itself lay. They contented themselves with the frenetic life of Far Side, and they could get by perfectly well with their native Greek any time they ventured over. Even the non-Jewish inhabitants of Far Side spoke Greek, or else they spoke a language that no else understood.

The Jews had a habit of writing Latin with Greek letters, which came readily to them. They learned the Hebrew alphabet as well, of course, which they called Assyrian lettering, so that they would at least be able to read the Sh’ma for themselves in their daily prayers and, when necessary, the psalms, if called upon in the house of prayer. Occasionally elements of all three alphabets would be mixed up in a single sentence, even a single word. Uri was fond of that sort of mixture, and he did not transpose Latin or Greek texts into Hebrew lettering out of negligence or ignorance or even just for fun. He devised abbreviations in all three languages for himself, to copy things more quickly if he was loaned a particularly interesting scroll for a few days. He would omit vowels or diacritical marks, so that his shorthand was legible to no one apart from himself, and, a few months later, not even to himself. He would write pure Hebrew texts with the left hand from right to left, Greek and Latin with the right hand from left to right, and he had no idea why that was. He was amazed when he discovered, from a scroll, that systems of Latin and Greek shorthand already existed; others had invented them just like him; he happily learned those too.

Gaius Theodorus. When he was small, he had first written down his official name this way, then as Uriel, which means the Lord is my light, and was only used within the family: no one else knew what he was called at home.

Officially, his father was not Joseph either, but Lucius Ioses.

Gaius was the forename of their patron, while Joseph had adopted Lucius from the patron’s father, who had freed Joseph’s father. That was the custom; the forename of a Jewish freeman, which was often the only name he had, was the same as his patron’s, as a result of which the Jews of Rome had primarily Latin and, second, Greek names and virtually none had a Semitic name. The very fact that Joseph’s father gave him a Semitic name is significant: he found slavery hard to endure and longed to be in Palestine, though he had never seen it, as he too was a slave born in Rome, and indeed his father before him.

The Jews of Rome, then, had Latin and Greek names, but they were still Jews: they did not eat unkosher food, they observed the Sabbath and the festivals, and they prayed sedulously and in accordance with the rules.

If ever he was not reading or copying, by screwing up his unaided eyes Uri could see roughly as far as three doors along in the zigzagged, crisscross yard, and between his fingers up to six or seven doors along. He wanted to have keen eyesight, as his father’s remark had cut him to the quick and still rankled; there were times when, trying his eyes out in the morning, he may have seen more clearly, perhaps, but by evening he had to conclude that he was still not seeing well enough.

Not long before, he had fabricated a contraption for himself out of a wooden board that could rest on the ridge of the nose, so that he did not have to look through his fingers all the time: he bored two small holes to look through, and when he was wearing it on his nose and looking through the holes he did get a nice, if very restricted, view. The view was nice because everything was sharper and more stable, relatively speaking, than when he simply peeked through his forefinger and thumb; in fact, it was just as good as when he looked through the splayed fingers of both hands held in front of his eyes.

The plank had the extra advantage that it could be held in place with just one hand, but he dared not show himself outside his own hovel with the nose-board, because people would have laughed. Indeed, he did not even dare to stand close to the window, with the device on his nose or not, because it was known throughout the yard, just like everything was known, that he was in the habit of hanging around and gazing out; in fact he was mocked on that account, and even his father had told him to lay off: Spying is despicable, was what he said, so Uri would spend long periods of time loafing deep in his alcove, as far as he could get from the window, and he hoped no one outside could make him out in the gloom. There was a story told about a weak-eyed but rich Latini who was able to see everything clearly by skillfully holding a ground diamond before his eyes and looking through it. But Uri had never encountered anything of the kind; indeed, he had never seen a gemstone at all.

He feared going totally blind.

Blindness was not common in the labyrinthine yard, and anyone who went blind did not roam around outside, but people could sometimes be heard saying that this person or that had been struck down in that manner by the wrath of the Lord. Blind people, unless they were trachomatous, were not segregated; they were not regarded as unclean, merely unfortunate. Uri brooded for days and weeks and months on end about whether the Lord had marked him to be blind, or if it was simply a case of his having so much else to do that he was not paying attention, or maybe even Satan, or more likely Fate, intervening to cause this affliction. Uri held an assortment of Judaeo-Greco-Latin notions about it because he had read a lot. What he really did not understand was why he had not been born blind from the outset, if that was his fate. Had the Lord changed His mind after He was already underway? What sort of considerations could be driving Him? he wondered. Uri raked through the memories of his childhood but could not identify a single transgression so massive that he would have to be inexorably blinded on its account; when he looked back, even with the best will in the world toward the Lord, he could find nothing in his actions.

The most obvious explanation was also the boldest: the Lord did not concern Himself with anyone, even His Chosen People; all that had been entrusted to Him was the task of the Creation and getting the stone tablets delivered by Moses to His people. That explanation was not something that came from any original thinking on Uri’s part: the Lord Almighty was cast in the same terms collectively by the Zadokite sect of Roman Jews, also called the Sadducees, who accepted only the five books of Moses and nothing else, nothing handed down in the oral tradition, and that was also the official position of the high priests in Jerusalem: the Creator had generously created the world, and mankind as part of it, that it should exist, but He had no further say thereafter; everyone was free to do with his life as he wished, within the bounds of the Law, though naturally anyone who broke the Law would be smitten down.

Man lived as best he could, then died, and there was no Hell, no Heaven, the way the primitive Jews imagined over there in Palestine; there was no transmigration of souls, as the primitive Pharisees also believed, as no one rises up from the dead, or only after the coming of the Messiah, but that was still a long way off. We have not suffered enough yet to be forcibly washed, his father had said once, as had gullible Palestinian Jewish people of the land, the spiritually impoverished am ha’aretz, with their purblind, narrow-minded, and pernicious notions, which commercial travelers returning to Rome’s Jewish quarter from Palestine would often recall, disapprovingly, with a shudder.

Uri, in his hovel, spent a lot of time mulling over resurrection, coming to the conclusion that if the Creator had just a touch of compassion He would make resurrection possible, and he, Uri, would meet with many fair, clever, and wise people who had lived before he was born, and would also live after he was dead, and they would carry on a timeless discourse, rich in ideas, in a fragrant and radiant space without time, after the Last Judgment, where bodies become weightless and painless, and human bodies that had been restored by magic would float and fly even without wings, as he pictured himself doing in his most delightful dreams as, so to speak, a foretaste of existence after the Last Judgment. It was rational, even natural, for that to be so, because if there were no resurrection with Judgment Day and the end of time, an individual’s life would not have the slightest meaning at all.

Uri passed his time either with his eyes screwed up, gazing out at the life of the yard, happy at least that he could see at all, or else he read.

He did not need to be instructed in anything; he would have been able to instruct others, but he had no desire to do so, even though his father had asked him. If he did not count as a fully able-bodied man, let the community draw at least some use from him, and anyway teachers were paid, which was not a point to be sneezed at. His teacher, Eusebius, who was fond of Uri and rated his abilities highly, had also encouraged him, but in vain: Uri hated anything to do with the community.

Others could see well; he couldn’t.

Others did not have a head and feet and back that ached with pain.

Others were able to chew well, whereas he could only chew on the right side, because the teeth on the left side did not clench and had started to come loose, which was a sign that he was going to lose them. It was terrible, on the other hand, that the permanent incisors projected so far forward that he could not close his mouth properly, though admittedly they allowed him to whistle superbly through the gap that could be formed with his tongue, and sometimes people would greatly admire that, but he would rather have had normal teeth.

Other boys the same age were not going bald, as he had been since sixteen.

Others were not born freaks, as he was. It might not have been visible to everyone, but that is what he felt like, and that is what he became.

It was not solely on account of his physical problems, however, that he shut himself away in his hovel.

Around five years ago, when his eyesight had been better, not long after his bar mitzvah—his ceremonial initiation into manhood by the synagogue—he often went on strolls on the other side of the Tiber. In Rome, Jews could go wherever they pleased, and Uri, thanks to his grandfather, who had scraped together the money from his work as a slave to pay for his manumission, got married, begot a son, then died straight after—thanks to him, the grandson, Uri, had been born a Roman citizen.

Jewish though he was, he was a Roman citizen with full rights, so he did not pay the taxes that were imposed on non-Romans and non-Italians. Indeed, he was given money by Rome: through his patron’s intervention, he was awarded the tessera, which he was entitled to under the law since the age of fourteen, although the magistrate was perfectly able to string this out for years if some big shot did not snap at them. He had drilled a hole in the small lead token and wore it hidden under his tunic, slung low on his neck so it would not be stolen, and he would feel for it compulsively at frequent intervals.

If he showed it at the biggest distribution center on the Campus Martius, he would receive the monthly ration of grain that was due to paupers of unemployed Roman freedmen, the libertines who were capable only of begetting children—plebeians, as they were also called. Meat he would obtain on the right side of the Tiber, at home, as on the other side it was not possible to procure kosher meat; that was also where he drew the wine ration. A few taverns on that side let it be known that they also held stocks of kosher food and drink, but the public was banned from those taverns by the Roman gerousia or synedrion, or Sanhedrin as it was called in Judaea, the council which met at irregular intervals to decide on the affairs of the various congregations, as it had an interest in seeing that one and all purchased the produce of the official Transtiberian Jewish slaughtermen, and should only drink wine that was sold by the powerful Jewish wine victualers of Rome. It was possible to make an even bigger profit on wine than on meat because drinking wine was compulsory on feast days; wine victualers also sold the two-handled flasks, fired from white clay and freed of impurities, from which the wine was supposed to be drunk. Romans, both Jews and non-Jews alike, drank a lot of wine because wine did not loosen the bowels, whereas water often did. Somehow, the same victualers who shipped pure olive oil from Palestine to the Roman communities, as the use of Italian oil was judged a capital offense, were upheld time and time again by the leadership of the congregations, given that substantial numbers of wine and oil importers were to be found among the elders.

Uri self-righteously consumed a good deal less of the ration than he was entitled to by its regulators, so that he too, along with his father, could consider himself a breadwinner. On the days his ration was to be handed to him, the whole family would be with him, which is to say his father, mother, and two sisters; together they would all carry their allotment back home. The wealthier among them would go with a handcart; the rest would take sacks and wicker baskets, because a handcart was too expensive. At times like that, Uri was happy that, through chance, thanks to a grandfather he had never seen, he was able to help his family. His father had also never seen his own father, because Joseph had been just a few months old when Thaddeus died at the age of twenty-five—five years earlier than the average life span for a slave (those long years of hard labor he had sweat out to pay his redemption bond cannot have done his health any good).

If a Jew was scheduled to receive his monthly grain ration on a Saturday, or a Jewish feast day, he was allowed, under one of the still-active decrees of Augustus Caesar, of blessed memory, to go pick it up on a Monday, or whenever the holiday ended; the decree had not been repealed by Tiberius, even after he had expelled the Jews. There were Jews with a tessera who had kept a low profile in the vicinity of Rome during those months, but brazenly stole back into the city. The municipal administrators, long-faced, had to dispense their allocation, because without an order of exclusion they were obliged to do so. There were some banished Jews, it was said, who threatened to bring a lawsuit against the reluctant official, and in the end the official had given way, even though he could have called out the sentinels to arrest the hectoring Jew. The world was crazy; it always had been, and it would remain so until the coming of the Messiah.

In truth, Joseph could have been a Roman citizen himself, because three children of his had been born there, and Augustus’s decree that the parents of three children should be awarded citizenship was still in effect. Uri had tried to persuade his father to apply for citizenship, on account of his children; he would no doubt be granted it with his patron’s intervention, which would mean that he too could have a tessera.

Joseph, however, was unwilling to do that.

Things are fine the way they are, Joseph said. Uri kept nagging until his father finally said he would rather work for the money, because some very big issue might come up one day, some really important business, and he would call for Gaius Lucius’s assistance on that, but until that happened he did not want to pester him, lest they resent him for asking unnecessary favors.

Uri saw that it was no use arguing and never brought the matter up again. He wondered what the very big business might be. Did his father fear another expulsion?

Often Uri would take a stroll on his own over to the far bank of the Tiber to Rome, the true Rome, and gaze around. He made his way there from beyond the river. For some strange reason, the Jews always lived beyond some river or other; their very names—the Hebrews, ones from beyond the river—said as much. In Babylon they had also lived on the far bank of the Euphrates, before they were allowed to head home, to the West.

He sauntered around and stared out with nothing to do, being unfit for physical labor. People finally gave up on him when the congregation’s members persuaded Joseph to try him out as a roofer: that was easy work. Uri was acrophobic, though, with no head for heights, and on the very first day of work he fell off and broke his right arm. The arm healed, and in any case his left arm was fortunately the nimbler one; he already wrote Hebrew and Aramaic with the left hand, and now he took the opportunity to learn to write Greek and Latin with it, as well. Ever since that accident, his father was left in peace.

Then Joseph came up with limeburning, also a good profession, but Uri rebelled and started yelling: not only would he not be a limeburner, he would never be a glassblower either; he would rather die. That shook Joseph, who had himself started out as a glassblower, or rather as a goldsmith, because Jews were the only ones in the Roman Empire who were able to blow glass around figures of filigree gold thread, and without another word he left his son to rant on for a few minutes longer, jumping up and down and even threatening to sign on as a longshoreman.

He was not serious about that; with his aching legs and lousy back he would not have lasted a day lugging those loads. Aside from tanning, that was the lowliest work a Jew would undertake. The pay was bad, but if you had a tessera it was possible to sustain a family with several children on the handouts and the extra income from dock work. That was to say nothing about pilfering a bit of the cargo when the supervisor was not watching, and he would not be looking, so long as he also got a share of the swag.

In principle, a Jewish worker was not supposed, on religious grounds, to steal from a Jewish consignment, but a non-Jewish one was fair game. It might be hard to tell, though, what came from Jews in Judaea or Alexandria and what had not. Anyway, goods were no longer Jewish if they were not destined for a Jew; the destination would taint them. Wages were low, families were big, and necessity teaches a man to steal; the Lord Almighty does not support those things, but they were deaf to the Word of the Lord; to harm those who deny Him can be construed as a divine action. The Jewish longshoreman, therefore, filched as much as the rest, as much as they were able. Besides, how many had already filched from a consignment while it was en route! And that was nothing

Reviews for Captivity

[stravinsky-544320 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

fairly dry, though I did occasionally care about the protagonist's journey. oh, and the ending was pretty damn sad...always a plus.