Chapter Three - Re-Storying The Venice Ghetto: The Refugee in Times of Global Crisis

Summary

In the summer of 2016, at the invitation of Shaul Bassi of Beit Venezia—an organization that carves out a “home,” a refuge, for Jewish culture in all the folds of the labyrinthine city and in particular within the discrete space of the Ghetto itself—a dozen early-career scholars from the United States, Europe and Israel arrived by vaporetto to contemplate the complex legacy of the Ghetto 500 years after its founding. Since these water taxis are the only alternative to foot traffic in a city without cars, we reached Venice's shores by water. Stepping off the swaying boats, we encountered the majestic city—the splendor of San Marco's square, the intricate façades of buildings the layered histories of every point on the map—and immediately lost ourselves in its tangled alleys. We found and lost our position over and over again as we literally read the Venice Ghetto “in place,” tracking our movement through space via the stories and memories housed in the contours of the urban fabric.

The Venice Ghetto calls for a specific type of memory work—an attention to what kinds of stories attach themselves to the iconic site. In order to capture the particular way in which the Ghetto asks us to read its cartography, we developed a method of “reading in place”:

The Ghetto of Venice is at once deeply entrenched in a specific, physical site (a point easily mapped cartographically) and characterized by its flexibility. … The flexibility of allusion that the Venice Ghetto embodies and the importance of its geographic specificity call for a kind of “emplaced” memory work that we are calling “reading in place.” Our practice of “reading in place” was prompted by the site of the Venice Ghetto. We weave together the highly symbolic physical site with the many powerful stories, both real and imaginary, that orbit its locus. Reading in place—the act of joining stories and geography—added more texture and projected another fictional and imaginative layer onto the original site. (Sharick et al. 2019, 134)

Traversing the Ghetto's streets, we pulled its memories into the present, weaving them into a tapestry of meaning against a wall of pressing contemporary concerns—an experiment to re-story the Ghetto as a site of productive work in the present. As Beit Venezia's mission statement emphasizes, “The Venice Ghetto was founded in 1516 as a place of segregation.