ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question:  What could Jewish women in 18^th-century Rome do that Catholic women could not?

Joie Davidow is the author of half a dozen nationally-published books, as well as an editor and writing coach. Her memoir, Marked for Life, was published in 2003, and her short novel, I Wouldn’t Leave Rome to Go to Heaven, was published in 2008. An Unofficial Marriage, a novel about the author Ivan Turgenev’s love for the prima donna Pauline Viardot, was published in 2021.

Davidow grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in music, then earned a Master of Music degree from the New England Conservatory. Aspiring to be an opera singer, she went to Rome to study. She later moved to Los Angeles, where she co-founded the alternative weekly newspaper L.A. Weekly, and the magazine L.A. Style. In 2005, she moved to Rome, where she co-founded the weekly online magazine InRomeNow.com. She currently teaches creative writing workshops and works as a freelance book editor.

Joie’s most recent book is Anything But Yes. It is a historical novel based on the true story of a young Jewish woman’s struggle to defend her identity in the face of relentless attempts by the Catholic Church to destroy it. It takes place in Rome in the year 1749, when the Jewish community was confined to a ghetto.  In the book we not only read about Anna del Monte’s personal confrontation with the Catholic authorities, but we also learn about the traditions, food, social structure, and dialect of her community, thanks to the author’s extensive research into life in the eighteenth-century Roman ghetto.