Yentl and Me

I wrote a long overdue letter to Aldo Izzo today, thanking him for showing me round the Ancient Jewish Cemetery on the Venice Lido. Aldo runs the PR for the Jewish Community in Venice and has pretty much singlehandedly supervised the restoration of the cemetery, the cataloguing of newly discovered or excavated monuments and so on. An amusing vignette, or at least I think it amusing. Leo, my Jewish pal in Venice, was convinced I'd have to pay a fortune for a guided tour of the cemetery. "You will have to pay..." he said, loading the P-word with about four thousand years worth of Hebrew fatalism. In the event, on the strength of my forthcoming book about the Lido, Aldo insisted on giving me a free tour of both cemeteries, the Ancient and the nearby Modern in Via Cipro. "You're lucky," said Leo. "The last person he lets in for nuthink is Barbra Streisand."