Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life

By Nancy Ludmerer and Peg Alford Pursell

Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life is historical fiction based on the life of the title character, who was confined in the Jewish ghetto in Venice from her birth in 1592 until her death forty-nine years later. Sarra's father supported her secular as well as her Hebrew educ

• Language: English
• Publisher: WTAW Press
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987719701

Nancy Ludmerer

Nancy Ludmerer's stories appear in Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, New Orleans Review, the Saturday Evening Post, and many other journals. They have been translated into Spanish, read aloud on public radio, and have won prizes from Masters Review, Carve, Pulp Literature, and others. Her story "The Loneliness Cure" won Orison Books' Best Spiritual Literature Prize for fiction and appears in Best Spiritual Literature, Vol. 7, 2022. Her short memoir "Kritios Boy" (Literal Latte) was cited in Best American Essays 2014 and other nonfiction appears in Vogue, The American Lawyer, and Green Mountains Review. Ludmerer's debut collection Collateral Damage: 48 Stories won the 2022 Snake Nation Press's annual fiction prize.

Book preview

DOORS

March 29, 1516. The date they locked us in. Over seventy-five years before I was born. Every night, from sunset to sunrise, the Jews must be confined. Two heavy wood doors, dark and streaked with moisture, reinforced with iron bolts, keep us in; one door on the Ghetto side of the bridge, the other opening onto the rest of Venice.

Today is my eighth birthday, February 13, 1600, and I am feeling more important than perhaps I have a right to. Father is allowing me to go with him into Venice proper. Yet still I want to linger in bed, eyes closed, imagining the day ahead, a day that will be like no other. Four-year-old Diana tugs my hand, shakes my shoulder, and whispers, Sarra! Come on!

By the time the marangona bell sounds from San Marco at seven, we are dressed and ready. Slowly, magnificently, the doors creak open. My sister and I race up the bridge and gaze into the murky canal, the brownish-green moss swaying far beneath us.

Father joins us, smartly dressed. He wears even his yellow hat with flair. Father pats Diana’s curly head, tells her one day it will be her turn to go with him, and then he and I walk hand-in-hand to the traghetto stop. I turn and wave to Diana before she disappears from view. I hope she does not spend the day moping.

From the traghetto Father points out the sights: the ornate facade of this church, the unusual spires of that one; the shiny-eyed red mullets arrayed in the Rialto fish market stalls beside lemons as big as a man’s fist; the sculpted faces adorning the newest bridge, made of limestone, each face sadder than the next—except for one smiling visage. Perhaps the face is smiling in honor of your birthday, Father says. I know he is teasing, but the thought pleases me nonetheless. There is so much to take in. I try not merely to look but to remember, to keep the images in my mind.

On our return, we pause in Piazza San Marco to look up at the clock tower with its signs of the zodiac, its sun and moon, its gilded lion. I name the lion Aryeh. I tell Father I will invent exploits for Aryeh. Father says I have a good imagination. Now we must go. Subito! he says. It is nearly curfew.

THE ROOM AT THE TOP IN THE GHETTO NUOVO

It is my favorite room in our home, four flights up. A terrazzo floor and wooden rafters; high ceilings; large casement windows. A faded fresco remains on one wall from the family who lived here before us. It depicts a mother and child or perhaps mother and children—there seems to be one baby with another shadow infant behind it. Perhaps the fresco represents a Biblical scene but not even Father is certain.

The other rooms are low-ceilinged and cramped, having been subdivided horizontally to accommodate new families, refugees fleeing the Inquisition. Eight floors in a building that used to have three. By now, the Senate has realized that confining the Jews to this narrow strip, this northernmost blasted island, has consequences. Not only for the Jews but for them. The Jews build upward, adding floor on top of floor, and cast their Jewish gaze on Venice from their tenement windows.

A solution is found. A solution, Father says, is always found. Laws are passed: walls made higher, windows blacked out. Balconies bricked up.

But the new laws are not strictly enforced, at least not right away. Father teaches me in that favorite room in the late afternoon, when the low sun through the windows gives everything a patchy red glow. We sit beside one another on a velvet-upholstered bench, or he sits in his leather chair and I cross-legged at his feet. Sometimes his musician friend plays the lute. Father asks if I want to learn to play, and I do. His musician friend is Salamone Rossi, a famous composer, who says he will try to get one of the girl pupils at the Ospedale della Pieta to teach me.

Alas, the girls are not permitted to come into the Ghetto to teach. Eventually, Father finds me a music teacher, a poor Jewish girl named Rachel Hebrea Cantarina who has taught herself to play and does not even own a lute. She