Adam Schell ties tomatoes to Jewish history

Believe it or not, Jewish boy created salsa pomodoro

By PAUL HAIST

article created on: 2010-03-02T00:00:00

There was no tomato sauce in Italy until the 16th century. Tomatoes were new to Europe then, courtesy of Christoforo Columbo who reputedly brought the fruit east across the Atlantic, although some say it was stout Cortez.

As for the sauce, salsa pomodoro, it is a humble but courageous young Ebreo named Davido who gets much of the credit. Davido and his grandfather Nonno fled the Jewish ghetto in Firenze with the seeds of il pomodoro that Nonno had secretly brought back from the New World when he sailed as a bean counter with Columbus. Nonno was a refugee from the Inquisition in Spain.

From the later haven of Firenze’s ghetto, grandson and grandfather settled in the golden fields of Tuscany where they farmed tomatoes. Their choice set in motion events that led to tomato sauce and Italy’s everlasting renown in connection with that culinary confection.

Yes, the Jews are responsible for tomato sauce and much else that is good about the tomato—even pizza.

The Jews are responsible, that is, if we are to believe Adam Schell, whose first novel, “Tomato Rhapsody, A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit,” appeared last year, just as its author, his wife and their son fled Los Angeles to settle in Oregon.

In “Tomato Rhapsody” Schell reports and embroiders history in ways that make the reader scratch his or her head and wonder what is true and what is not. As well, he also riffs on William Shakespeare in a tale that is richly romantic, comic, bawdy and freighted with universal import—all like the bard—and reminiscent of “Romeo and Juliet” and, perhaps more so, of “Much Ado About Nothing.”

“Tomato Rhapsody” is much ado about tomatoes and things—including other people—that are or were forbidden to us. It is a celebration of justice and the inevitable triumph of good over evil. It is a celebration of the mystery and beauty of life and all the goodness we find in it.

And it is a cookbook that, if only you could put the story down, would send you in search of heirloom tomatoes, fresh basil, olives, olive oil, pecorino and crusty baguettes.

Davido is betrothed to a Jewish girl in Florence, but he is smitten beyond redemption when he first encounters Mari, a Catolico village girl with a gift for curing olives. It was a magical meeting, the sweetly handsome young Davido and the heart-stopping beautiful young Mari, beshert for one another like olives and tomatoes. A most prodigious salading they would make, were they allowed.

But, like Romeo and Juliet, the would-be couple is star-crossed. Apart from their religious differences, there is Mari’s evil and avaricious stepfather who would marry off the girl to someone able to pay a handsome dowry. Then, too, the villagers fear the tomato as deadly poison, like the forbidden fruit whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe. And the villagers feel pretty much the same about Jews: Heaven forefend that their fairest daughter should marry one. Opposition to intermarriage was alive and well on both sides long ago in this story.

The love story and the subplots—including a fool who is wise among the wise and royalty in disguise among the groundlings, all like Shakespeare—are best left for the author to relate.

It is especially worth noting that, also as in Shakespeare, much of the language in “Tomato Rhapsody” is verse or verse-like.

The rural villagers are called rimatori, because, like Shakespeare’s characters, they speak in rhymes, a fact that takes the reader by surprise at first but thereafter never seems contrived or unnatural.

Here is an example that should be ample:

“Cupid, curs’d, meddling Cupid!” bemoaned Davido, ‘tis no wonder thy name so rhymes with stupid. Pudgy, errant, pedant, fat with impish rhyme and reason, to set my eyes upon the fairest treason and shoot me full of this seditious nectar turning me to Paris when tradition demand me Hector. Oh, curs’d Cupid, such poor aim as to miss by a mile and set an Ebreo heart upon a Gentile.”

Schell said the rhyming came to him in one of the early scenes involving two key characters, Giuseppe and Benito.

“It just started coming out in rhyme,” he said. “That was the most enjoyable and incredible and most challenging part of the novel. There are pages there that I might have spent 40 or 50 hours on.”

The novel was nine years in the writing.

Schell was living then what he called a hyphenated life, getting by as an olive and grape picker in Tuscany, a coffee picker in Guatemala, a producer of short films and commercials and a yoga teacher in Los Angeles. Somewhere in that time he picked up a master’s degree in creative writing from Antioch University, this following an earlier career as a linebacker at Northwestern University where he was named a B’nai B’rith college football Jewish All American.

The time in which the novel is set, according to Schell, is a time when the Italian language was still taking shape out of Etruscan and Latin.

“Etruscan, like aspects of ancient Greek and the ancient Basque language and the ancient Hungarian language, had rhyming aspects to it,” said Schell.

“The novel takes place in this kind of interstice…this awkward integration when the Italian language is figuring itself out. It has for the most part (figured itself out) in the cities, but it hasn’t yet in the bucolic countryside towns. It set up a nice dichotomy for the two different worlds—the linear world of the city where the people did not rhyme and the bucolic more romanticized life in the country,” he said.

Schell is the son of a rabbi and a fashion model. Like most of the characters in his novel, he has opted for a rural life. He and his wife migrated to Bend about a year ago.

Life in Los Angeles was weighing on the couple as they were about to become parents, he said. They decided to visit his wife’s parents in Dallas, the one in Oregon.

We were leaving Dallas on Wednesday, July 23,” he said. “As we were rolling into Bend…I get the call that Random House is making the offer on the book.”

It was as if it was meant to be, he said. “We knew that we were meant to be there.”

Now, with his wife Tracy and their son Asher Alexander, Schell is at work on his next book in Bend where he also teaches yoga. The next book is a prequel to “Tomato Rhapsody.” It is the grandfather Nonno’s story, his and that of the rabbi from Pitigliano—little Jerusalem in Italy, their youth and life at the time of the Inquisition. The book is due out in 2011, part of Schell’s two-book deal with Random House.

There is plenty of time to read its predecessor, which is recommended for anyone who appreciates Jewish history, Italian cuisine, comedy high and low, literary whimsy and the distinguished tradition of English letters.

Schell has made various author appearances in Oregon. He said he’s “happy to talk to any book club.” Learn more at his Web site, adamschell.com.