"Monte Saint Angelo" di Arthur Miller

Monte Saint Angelo was published in Harper's Magazine in March 1951. Arthur Miller, the American author and playwright, describes in this short story, the trip of two American friends, Bernstein and Appello, in the North of Puglia.



The couple of friends travel in the land of origin of the family of one of the two. After visiting Lucera, they head towards Monte Saint Angelo, where it seems, there lives an old aunt. They are travelling on a noisy old Fiat.

"You're crazy, you know that? You've got some kind of ancestor complex. All we've done in this country is lookfor your relatives. I mean it, you really have a lust for your history, don't you."
"Well, Jesus, I'm finnally in the country, I want to see all the places I came from. You realize that two of my relatives are buried in a crypt in the church up there? In 1100 something."

Bernstein observes from the plain Mount Saint Angelo on the summit of a small mountain and thinks it looks like a small old lady who lives on the rooftoop for fear of thieves.

"Whoever built that was awfully frightened of something," Bernestein said, pulling is coat closer around him.

The Gargano offers various and in a certain way even similar emotions to the two friends: they both seem to feel at home in this place. Appello discovers in the obscurity of a crypt, on an old slab, the proof of the existance of his ancestors, founding monks of the Sanctuary.
And something strange seems to click in Bernstein's heart, an Austrian Jew, who in the turbulent Europe of the Second World War, has lost all his relatives.
In a small trattoria Berstein observes, in the slow gestures of a fellow guest, a middle-aged man, very wrinkled in the face, seated at a table close to theirs, old gestures which reveal to him a tender and tragic history .
The man, they find out, lives in a nearby village, and dresses like the men of the area, black jacket, dark brown trousers, heavy leather shoes.

But he wore a black hat, wich was unusual up here where all had caps, and he had a tie.

Bernstein observes him, after the meal, as the man orders a freshly baked loaf of bread which the man then delicately wraps in a brown paper formerly opened out to smoothen the creases. He follows the gestures of the man with great curiosity as the latter ties his bundle with a piece of string.

Bernestein took a breath. There was something a little triumphant, a new air of confidence and superiority in his face and voice, as though now for the first time it was he who had the private secret and was at home.

"He's Jewish, Vinny," he said.
Vinny turned to look at the man. "Why?"
The way he works that bundle. It's exactly the way may father used to tie a bundle. And my grandfather. The whole history is packing bundles and getting away. Nobody else can be as tender and delicate with bundles. That's a Jewish man tying a bundle.

The man's name is Mauro di Benedetto, and when the two men speak to him he says he doesn't know who the Jews are and asks for information.

"Are they Catholics? The Hebrews?"

He says that the man repeats the same gestures he has seen so many times done by hait by his own father.

I have a route I walk, which is this route. I first did it with my father, and he did it with his
father. We are known here for many generations past. And my father always got home on Friday night before sundown. It's a manner of the family I guess".
"Shabbas begins at sundown on Friday night", Bernstein said when Vinny translated. "He's even taking home the fresh bread for the Sabbath. The man is a Jew, I tell you. Ask him, will ya?"

A Jew, who didn't even realise he was one, repeated the same gestures and rites os which he ignored the significance; every Friday he hurried down from the mountain towards his house before sunset taking with him a loaf of freshly baked bread. The visitors look on him as a nameless traveller who follows routes taught to him by generations of men.
This made Bernstein feel proud of his discovery.

Of what he should be proud he had no idea; perhaps it was only that under the glacial crush of history a Jew had survived, had been shorn of his consciousness, but still held on to that final impudence of Saturday Sabbath and a fresh bread.

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