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anxiously awaited, Dr. Levi’s voice, as a rule so colourless, would suddenly take on the prophetic tone suited to the supreme, final moment of the beracha.
    “jevareheha Adonai veishmereha,” the rabbi solemnly intoned, bending almost prostrate over the teva, after * “Bigotry” in the dialect of Ferrara Jews.
    covering his towering white berretta with the taled.
    “Come along, boys,” my father wouldsay then, gaily and quickly, snapping his fingers: “Come along in!”
    Escape, in actual fact, was perfectly possible. My father’s hard sportsman’s hands could grab us by the scruff of our necks, and me in particular, very efficiently. Although grandfather Raffaello’s taled, which he used, was vast as a tablecloth, it was too worn and too full ofholes to guarantee that his dreams were hermetically sealed. And in fact, through the holes and tears the years had wrought in that immensely frail material that smelt so old and stuffy, it wasn’t hard, at least for me, to watch professor Ermanno as, there beside me, one hand on Alberto’s dark hair and the other on the fine, blonde, fluffy locks of Micol who had dashed down from the women’s enclosure, he repeated, one after the other, and keeping behind Dr. Levi as he did so, the words of the beracha. Above our heads my father, who knew about twenty words ofHebrew, the usual ones used in everyday speech, and would never have bowed down, anyway, was silent. I imagined his face looking suddenly embarrassed, his eyes, half sardonic and half intimidated, looking up at the unpretentious plaster-work on the ceiling or at the women’s enclosure. But meantime, from where I was, always newly envious and newly surprised, I watched from below professor Ermanno’s wrinkled, sharp face that looked transfigured at that moment and his eyes that, behind the glasses, I would have said were full of tears. His voice was thin and melodious, perfectly in tune; his Jewish pronunciation, frequently doubling the consonants, and with the z, s and h much more Tuscan than Ferrarese, came filtered, at two removes, by his culture and his class. . . .
    I looked at him. Below him, for as long as the blessing lasted, Alberto and Micol never stopped exploring the loopholes of their tent as well. And they smiled and winked at me, both of them oddly inviting: especially Micol.

Chapter Five 

    Once, all the same, inJune of 1929, the day the results of the exams were put up in the school hall, something special happened.
    My exam results were far from satisfactory, and I knew it.
    Although Meldolesi had done all he could for me, and had even, quite against the rules, managed to question me himself, in spite of this I hadn’t managed to get anything like the marks that usually appeared in my school report. Even in literary subjects I ought to have done very much better. Questioned in Latin on the  consecutio temporum, I tripped up over a hypothetical sentence of the third type, that is “of unreality”. And in Greek I had stumbled just as badly on a passage of the Anabasis. Well, of course, I caught up later in Italian, history and geography. In Italian, for instance, I did well on The Betrothed, and on the Ricordanze. *  Memories,  a famous poem by Leopardi. And I recited the first three verses of Orlando Furioso without a single slip, and Meldolesi, dead keen, let rip with such a loud “Fine!” that it made not only the other examiners smile, but me as well. But on the whole I must admit that even in literary subjects my results weren’ t up to my reputation.
    The real disaster, though, was in maths.
    Since the previous year, in form IV, algebra had simply refused to get into my head. And besides, I had always behaved pretty meanly with signora Fabiani. I did the small amount of work needed to get the minimum marks, and often not even that minimum, relying on Meldolesi’s unfailing support for my results at the end of term. What could