Alexis Rappas
Tedium, seldom disrupted by the excitement procured by the rare promising document, is what one can associate archival research with. Nothing prepares for the conflicting emotions that can overwhelm the historian, when sifting for example through the records of the German-Italian administration of the Dodecanese, in this instance on one day in July 2013. These papers were admittedly somber in themselves. They mostly consisted of lists of the items belonging to the Jewish community of Rhodes –the main island of the Dodecanese–, which members had been dispossessed, with characteristic Nazi thoroughness, prior to being shipped to the death camps. But it was one small pink envelope that affected the present author in ways one thought impossible in the comfortably dull environment of the archive. In it was a large, rusty key, with a tag mentioning its owner, Rosa Alhadeff and her address, Via Malatesta, No. 30. Four Rosa Alhadeff are singled out in the inventory identifying all Rhodian Jews exterminated by the Nazis, all of whom perished in the death camps between July and September 1944, three of whom at a comparable age (47, 48 et 56 years old) (Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea).

Fig. 1. Rosa Alhadeff’s key (Γενικά Αρχεία του Κράτους–Δωδεκάνησος 1944/195: Verbali dei denuncianti).
The Nazis, who occupied the Dodecanese in 1943, retained the Italian civil servants already in place, so the records under their administration were written in Italian. Hence the file in which the envelope was found bore the ominous title Verbali dei denuncianti– Records of the informers.
Historians more or less regularly encounter emotionally challenging documents; a death sentence, a petition from a distraught family, even an order to commit mass murder. Yet the manner in which these are expressed, formally and in writing, and the immediate textual environment in which they are submerged, a corpus of dry official correspondence, are often designed to create an emotional distance between the events being reported and the person reporting them. As Michael Herzfeld noted (Herzfeld 1992), the very purpose of bureaucracy is the production of indifference, best suited for dispassionate, supposedly rational, administrative action. The archive –from the Greek arkhè/αρχή, authority– is intended to bring, however arbitrarily, order to the chaos of life. It operates what Ranajit Guha terms a clinical separation between the author of the document and “the site and subject of diagnosis.” (Guha 1988, p. 52). Chronologically distant from the events they are studying, historians are thus further alienated from them by the very nature and purpose of their sources. The work they do to interpret the past is therefore more often cognitive rather than affective, even when their very interest in the topic under scrutiny may have initially been motivated by more than just intellectual curiosity.
The incongruous presence of an object among written –even handwritten–documents shatters that distance and conjures the past in a radical way, shifting the attention from a search of meaning to one of experience. What was held in the hands of the historian, that July, was not just a key to a building; it was the gateway to the intimacy of a family. Profound sadness was felt at the knowledge that the reason this key made it to the archive was because its owners had been spoliated and murdered; but also the uneasiness of the potential intruder, another trespasser about to break into a home to which they had not been invited. As Rebecca Bryant reminds historians in her study of Cyprus refugee homes, that which is intimate to a family is supposed to remain secret for outsiders (Bryant 2010, p. 53); such is the duality of meaning of the Freudian concept of Heimlich. As a consequence of this uneasiness, the present author has never, until now, returned to that envelope and that key, even when evoking, in research, the deportation and annihilation of the Jewish community of Rhodes.
What brought him back to it was the suspicion that an emotional reaction, perhaps tainted with some self-righteousness, might be clouding, if not stunting, the understanding of this specific key. When processing these ideas, a famous Sephardic song called “La yave [llave]/Suenyos d’Espanya [Sueños de España] taught in high school by a Spanish language teacher came to mind:
| “Ónde està la yave ke estava en el kaxun?
Mis nonus la truxeron kon grande amor La dixero a luz fijus, estu ez il korason De muestra kaza d’Espanya Suenyos d’Espanya” |
“Where is the key that was in the drawer? My forefathers brought it with great love They entrusted it to their sons, this is the heart, Of our house in Spain, Dreams of Spain” |
As Levy, Olazabal and Varon-Vassard showed, many Ladino songs and poems evoke the keys that the Sephardim supposedly took with them on their road to exile in 1492 as a reminder of the homes they left in Toledo (Lévy and Ozabal, 2015; Varon-Vassard, 2021). Whether the legend is true or not is less important than the function played by the key as a means to reassert Sephardic identity. It is a link to the lost homeland, the collective recollection of which bolsters the sense of communal belonging. Others, most famously Palestinians, have also used housekeys as, in Dima Saad’s words, “metonymic fragments of home and of the self, as vessels of identification and belonging” (Saad 2019, p. 58). Could it be that the key found in the envelope was precisely such a relic?
It is premature to risk an answer at this stage. But considering this object, its trajectory, real or imagined, and its ultimate fate, opens new vistas on the notions of belonging, identity, and community, one that far exceeds the narrow confines of an understanding of a key as the emblem of property ownership. “The minuscule,” once wrote Gaston Bachelard, “is one of the refuges of greatness” (Bachelard 2012, p. 154). In that sense, the experience of its unexpected discovery, out of place –unheimlich/uncanny–, as it were, in an administrative file, is perhaps even more harrowing.
Sources
Milan, Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC), https://ebreidirodi1944.cdec.it/en/advanced-search/
Rhodes, Γενικά Αρχεία του Κράτους-Δωδεκάνησος (records of the German-Italian administration of the Dodecanese 1944/195: Verbali dei denuncianti)
References
Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace, Paris : PUF « Quadrige », 2012 [1957].
Rebecca Bryant, The Past in Pieces. Belonging in the New Cyprus, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 45-86.
Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Joseph Josy Lévy and Inaki Olazabal, “Chapter 6. The Key From (To) Sefarad. Nostalgia for a Lost Country,” in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds.), Anthropology and Nostalgia, New York: Berghahn Books, 2015, p. 139-154.
Dima Saad, “Materializing Palestinian Memory: Objects of Home and the Everyday Eternities of Exile,” Jerusalem Quarterly 80, 2019, p. 57-71.
Odette Varon-Vassard, Des Sépharades aux Juifs grecs. Histoire, mémoire et identité, Paris : Éditions Le Manuscrit, 2021.
