The first time I learned of the Bible was when my grandmother physically attacked it. She had wrested it from my mother’s hands, opened it, and started tearing handfuls of dense onionskin pages in two. I was almost 7 years old, and this happened in Ladispoli, a town outside Rome where Jews, formerly Soviet and suddenly stateless, would spend several months in an administrative purgatory, discarding their Israeli visas for visas that would allow them to enter less holy but more peaceable lands—America, Canada, Australia.
