Kathryn A. Kopple

Stefan Mortara

 

In a curious dialectic, it may be that the best case for the Mortaras might have been the argument that they dared not confront. Would it have been best to raise Edgardo as a Christian?

 

S. Lubet, Nothing but the Truth

 

 

Imagine you, a respected lawyer, coming to speak to me of all people about the other Mortara — Edgardo.  These days, when I have so few friendly visitors, it pains me to disappoint you but whatever resemblance exists between a nineteenth-century priest and the person before you is mere coincidence.  That I am named Mortara means that my father's ancestors came from the Lombard town of the same name, originally called Pulchra Silva by the Romans and later, with the coming of Charlemagne, Mortara, which, roughly translated, means "place of death".  Not quite Golgotha, but you get the point.  These days, people go there for the risotto and goose sausage.  I made the trip once, in the late '70s with my wife Sofia, and returned to the States looking like a stuffed goose myself.  I had the appetite of two men when I was young and later in life it showed.  Now my hair is white and there's hardly enough meat on my bones for the hyenas to make a decent meal of me.  Perhaps there is some comfort to be had in that, since even in this decrepit state I am fond of this body and not at all eager to part with it.

 

But I digress.  You asked what I thought of the other Mortara.  Far be it for me to answer a question with a question, but what does it matter?  The actors in that episode of history are long dead.  The father passed away in the 1870s and the mother a decade or so later.  Their suffering in that unfortunate business is undeniable.  I imagine the fear—the horror—of opening one's door in the black of night to find the Papal officers brandishing orders to remove your six-year-old son from his home.  Of course, the Church was only doing its duty.  As for the parents, they should have taken greater precautions.  What were they thinking!  Hiring a Catholic girl to nurse their Jewish son.  The girl—Ana Morisi—panicked when she thought the little boy was dying.  She did what any Christian in those days would have done and baptized him.  She kept the secret four long years but then, when she fell under suspicion, could no longer ignore her conscience.  She confessed:  she had taken it upon herself to baptize the Mortara boy.  After that, there was no way out, nothing else for the authorities to do but to take the boy from his parents.  Edgardo's parents tried every tactic possible to get him back.  They wept, begged.  They contacted powerful rabbis, the Rothschilds came to their aid, even the French tried to broker Edgardo’s release.  The protest that raged across Europe!  Can you imagine?   Edgardo—convinced of his destiny—refused to heed his parents' pleas to return home. He became a priest, his loyalty earning the affection of the pope, who said to him:  "It is at a high price that I make you my son."

 

And that, as they say, was that.  Mortara the priest was well on the road to becoming a saint and would have been canonized long ago were it not for the universal protest of the Jews.  In this they enlisted the Protestants, who have sought the downfall of the Catholic Church across the centuries.  Intelligent Jews understood this, of course.  Letters were written to the pope by Jews deploring the interference of the Protestants in the affair. Nowhere was this collusion more evident than here, in the United States, where Jews and Protestants joined forces to tarnish the reputation of the Church, claiming that Egardo was kidnapped and tortured. Brain-washed.

 

So much anti-Catholicism.  So little regard for the wishes of Edgardo.  Poor man.  He dearly desired sainthood.  His piety, his sermons in which he recounted his miraculous conversion, and his enduring faith all confirm this.  He asserted, in Church documents, that after his removal from his parents’ home he was beset by demons and reported under oath that it was his mother's doing, that she was possessed.

 

What a case!  What a story.  There was a time when I could think of little else but Edgardo Mortara.  I suppose it was the coincidence of our names—something that I have already explained.  I was raised in the Church, you see, so I haven't acquired the anti-Catholic fervor that pervades our culture.  I never doubted that the parents were at fault, not the Church, which acted in accordance with Canon law.  Perhaps you have read somewhere that I too am a baptized Jew?  You may already know that I was adopted as a child.  In retrospect, it seems inconceivable to me that my Christian mother and father would not know that I was of Jewish blood when they took me into their home.

 

Sadly, my Jewish parentage was revealed to me in a most unpleasant manner.  Unlike other children at the Catholic school I attended, I was circumcised—a fact that was made public one afternoon by a group of boys who had been spying on me in the latrine.  Mortified, I vowed to speak to no one of what happened.  Noticing my pensive mood and poor appetite, my mother devised a simple scheme to get me to tell her my troubles.  She set out a bowl of cherry ice, handed me a spoon, and sat—smiling, patient—until I broke down. How I managed to communicate the details through my shame and blubbering I shall never know.  Worse yet, by the time I had finished spilling the sordid details—the jeering, the pointing at my genitals—she could scarcely look me in the eye.

 

My ordeal was just beginning, for that night I could hear my parents speaking in distressed voices through the thin wall that separated my room from theirs.

 

"Adelaida, Adelaida," my father said.  "What does it matter?  Little Stefan is here with us now; he is our only child, our beloved son.  Have you ever known a child with a better heart than our little Stefan?"

 

"I swear, Victor, on the Blessed Mother, I hold nothing against the boy."

 

"Of course!"

 

"So you see my point.  I never meant for something like this to happen.  Yes, I had my doubts when we adopted him, but I put them aside for his sake.  Now I'm not so certain."

 

"If you it didn't trouble you before, why should it worry you now?  So the boy was teased.  These things happen all the time.  Stefan is with us now.  Do not worry yourself so."

 

"He is in great anguish, Victor.  Something must be done to help him.  He is very worried."

 

"Please, Adelaida, let it rest.  Do nothing.  Just go along as you always have."

 

"How did I know you would say that?  But that is your way, Victor.  You never think of the consequences of doing nothing."

 

"It is better to do nothing than do harm."

 

"No, Victor, something must be done."

 

Something must be done.  I would never forget those words.  They chilled me to the bone.  I clapped my hands over my ears but I couldn't shut out the anguish in my mother's voice.  

 

"Victor, you know how fond I am of the boy.  You know that I would raise him no matter what.  But ever since he came to me I…"

 

"I am afraid of where this is going," my father said.

 

"Hush!"

 

"You are going to tell me that God has spoken to you again."

 

"You can mock me all you like.  But you can't mock God.  God does speak to us, Victor.  He speaks to us all the time.  It's up to us to listen."

 

I could hear my father groan.

 

"So God speaks to you, does he?"

 

"Yes, Victor, God speaks to me."

 

"Does he always speak to you or only at certain times?  Does he speak to you when you are trussing the chicken?  Or putting out the trash?  Is he speaking to you now?"

 

"He speaks to me when I am at Mass, if you must know.  But then you wouldn't because you rarely go to Mass, do you!" 

 

"I am busy working.  Have you forgotten that one of us must see to it that there is roof over our heads and bread on the table."

 

"You are a good man.  Yet that is not enough for the Church."

 

"Spare me."

 

"Do you care at all to know what I am thinking?"

 

"You see.  These are your thoughts, not God's."

 

"During Mass, I realized that our boy should be raised in the faith into which he was born."

 

"What are you saying?"

 

"We cannot make him a Christian if that is not God's will.  We should give him back to Catholic Charities, so they can find a Jewish home for him."

 

"Give him back!  We have adopted the boy.  Legally, he is our responsibility.  Think of the damage that would do to him!  You can't simply send him back to the orphanage.  It's impossible."
 

"I can't raise him as a Catholic, Victor.  I see that now.  How do we know that he is able to share our faith?  How do we know that he can be raised to be a true Catholic and not…"

 

"Not what, Adelaida?  He is our child.  We are Catholic, so he is Catholic.  It is as simple as that."

 

"I thought so too once.  Now I am not so sure.  These things have a way of turning out all wrong.  If we aren't careful, he might do something horrible—something for which he can never atone.  What good would we have done him then?" 

 

"Keep your voice down.  What if the boy hears you?"

 

It was far too late for that.  I could hear every word. 

 

"I think we should ask Father Miranda what he thinks." 

 

"For the love of Christ, Adelaida.  Father Miranda will tell you that the Catholic Church has been in the business of conversion for hundreds of years.  Certainly, we honor our religion by raising this boy in the light of the one true God and Redeemer.  Listen to me!  Now I sound like you.  You make too much of religion.  Haven't you ever heard the expression that to love well you must love in moderation?You should be more moderate in your beliefs."

 

"You sound like a Protestant, Victor.  And that is worse than anything."

 

"Worse than being a Jew?"

 

"Much worse.  What do the Jews know of Christ?"

 

"Regardless, you will not speak of this to Father Miranda or to anyone else.  There is no need to take things any further."

 

"And keep secret the fact that Stefan was born a Jew?"

 

"What good would it do to broadcast this to the world?  Stefan is a sweet child.  Let him live his life in peace."

 

The subject was never mentioned again.  If my mother harbored misgivings, she kept them to herself.  At times, I noticed a look in her eyes that worried me, as though a cloud had settled over her deep blue irises.  These I realized were tears.  It saddened me, of course, to see her so, but I later came to accept this unspoken mourning on her part.  She lived her Catholicism so genuinely; the slightest stain on her Christian life a source of affliction.

 

Her piety, humility—the twin pillars of her faith.  She prayed and obeyed, a good Catholic from sun-up until sundown.  I did my best to follow her example, filling my hours with devotion and liturgy, the smell of chapel incense clinging to me wherever I went.   

 

So you see I knew the truth all along.  It was I who chose to remain in the bosom of the Church.  I refused to accept that I was a Jew.  I was a child, living the life of a child, in a home that was secure, with a good father and a caring mother.  Of course, there were moments when I was plagued by uncertainty.  The essence of who I was came from another place, in the history of another people and another religion.  What did I know of that religion or those people?

 

And then my mother, may she rest in peace, passed away.  I mourned her death and yet I felt liberated.  The time had come for me leave home, the small town where I spent my childhood, and pursue my studies.  I decided to become a history major, not an unusual choice for someone with an uncertain sense of his own past.  In the middle of a rather dull class on the Battle of Lepanto, a young woman sitting next to me passed me a note:  she wished to get to know me better.

 

Her name was Sofia.  She was the daughter of a prominent family, several of her kin high-standing members in business and politics.  Over watery diner coffee and sticky pastries, she told me that she was drawn to me because I had a kind face.  I returned the compliment, adding that I thought her very pretty.  When she reached for my hand across the table, the touch of her skin against mine reminded me of how little physical contact I had experienced.  I was a stranger to the most basic expressions of human affection.  For more years than I could count, I had held myself back, unable to touch or be touched.  I was frozen inside.  Frozen with fear.

 

One night, I found Sofia in a deserted corner of the library studying for final exams.  She looked so intent, as if hypnotized by the page before her, and did not seem to notice when I slid into the seat next to her.   

 

"Sofia," I whispered. "Do you love me?"

 

"I am very fond of you," she said, her voice calm, as if she'd been expecting the question all along.

 

"Would you still care for me even if I had a terrible secret?"

 

She closed her book and turned to face me.  "What could be so terrible?"

 

"I am a Jew, Sofia."

 

"Stefan!  How could such a thing be possible?  Every evening you go to Mass and again on Sundays, on Holy Days, you fast and, before communion, you make confession.  About what I have no idea. You refuse to give me so much as an innocent kiss.  It hasn’t been easy.  I have done everything to make myself attractive to you.  I even bathed in a special herb I bought from an astrologer in the hopes that you would come around.  But nothing!"

 

"Sofia, you must believe me.  I had no idea myself."

 

I explained to her that I had been circumcised as an infant.  How the boys saw me in the men's room.  How they pointed and jeered.  I told her that my mother considered giving me away because I was adopted and she knew that I was a Jew.

 

"I have carried this secret my entire life."

 

Sofia looked at me with the greatest pity in her eyes.  "We all have secrets.  My ancestors were pirates and mercenaries.  After they bought their titles, they became rich slave-traders and murdered their own blood for money."

 

"It's not the same," I responded. "Your ancestors were Christians.  No matter what they did, the Church forgives them."

 

"The Church forgives many things.  Why should it not forgive you?  After all, you were a child, an infant.  What could you have done about it?"

 

"So you have no…no…reservations?"

 

"Reservations?  Can't you see how the world has changed?  These things are not as important as they once were."

 

"You can accept me then as I am?"

 

"Haven't you been listening to what I have been saying?"

 

"What if I disgust you?"

 

"Ah, you are too good to be believed!  Do you think I am so squeamish?  It is too flattering."

 

"You are not a virgin?"

 

"Of course, I am a virgin!  I am also a grown woman."

 

"So you think you could endure such a thing?"

           

"Really, Stefan, the way you put things.  This is a new era.  We don't place women on pedestals any more."

       

We married and moved into a house with a sunny kitchen; pots of marjoram decorated the windowsill; the extra bedroom was transformed into a study.  With Sofia at my side, I felt I could do anything.  I graduated from college and attended law school, where I earned accolades and prizes, as well as some undeserved notoriety for a paper I published on the Mortara case.  What can I say?  The legality of the case intrigued me.  I was of a more intellectual and scholarly frame of mind than most of the students in my class, and Mortara’s story made for exciting reading.  I spent a hot and muted summer buried in the university library studying scholarly tomes and even the occasional polemic.  The publication of the article earned me an unexpected write up in a Zionist paper—which, I might add, vilified me.  Looking back, I realize that it is not an easy thing to review the catalogue of human suffering and maintain one's objectivity.  I felt for the boy's Jewish family, of course.  They acted very foolishly.  I suppose with a slight twist of the facts I might have argued in their favor.  And yet I never doubted that the Church had scrupulously observed important moral and religious principles:  the boy had been baptized, regardless of the moral character of Ana Morisi or the secret nature of the ritual.  Edgardo Mortara was a Christian.  End of story.

 

I left law school with my J.D. and was immediately recruited by a large firm.  The offer was flattering, I admit, but I had my eye on politics and went to work for the Justice Department.  Sofia too was busy.  She abandoned her dissertation to raise our three sons.  Wonderful boys.  I would have liked for a more traditional religious upbringing for them but my wife was a modern woman.  I will say that she became more and more eccentric as time went on—her interest in the occult bursting into a full-blown obsession with clairvoyants, new-age groups, and even a stint in Israel with a well-known Cabbala teacher.  I have always blamed myself for her turning to Cabbala.  She was fascinated by my secret past.  It caused her to seek answers outside of her culture and faith.  It saddened me when she told me that her teacher said that I might be suffering from some karmic disorder and that I should subject myself to a healing ceremony. I flatly refused and Sofia became very agitated.  She said that I needed to be careful, that these Cabbalists possess tremendous powers.

 

One day, shortly after that, I was eating a ham sandwich when a man I'd never seen before walked into my office.  He was bloated, his completion greenish-yellow, his eyes unexpressive.  He asked if I "had a minute" and, swallowing the last gluey bit of my ham and mayo, I wiped my lips on a paper napkin and invited the gentleman to be seated.  He pulled up a chair and, without bothering to introduce himself, asked me about my job, my marriage, whether I had children.  I answered the questions tersely, if politely, not at all eager to divulge the personal details of my life.  He then pulled out a file from a battered briefcase and handed it to me.  I opened it.  There was my name, Stefan Mortara, and a copy of the article I had written so long ago.  I closed the file and handed it back to the man.  For the life of me, I couldn't fathom the reason for his visit.  It did occur to me that this was the 1990s. Israel was often in the news—for the worse I might add.  An odd sense of panic came over me.  Who was this man?  From the JDL?  Or the CIA?   I decided to put him off by saying that I wrote the article a very long time ago.

 

"It was a diversion, that's all.  I don't think you should make too much of it."

 

"Kind of a weird way to get your kicks.  Don't know too many people who defend the kidnapping of a young boy from his home."   

 

Was he sneering?

 

"I couldn't argue against the Church without distorting the facts.  I don't dispute that we would approach this case in a very different way in this day and age."  I glanced at the clock on my desk.  "Now if you will excuse me." 

 

He gave me a cold, insinuating look.  "How would you like it if Edgardo were your son?"

 

"I'd rather you didn't speak of my children."

 

"I'm just saying that if it were your kid—"

 

"We can't make the rules up as we go along to suite our whims or the prevailing fashion.  Now I must ask you to excuse me."

 

Without offering to shake hands, he walked back out the door.  I never heard from him again.   

 

A week later, I locked the door to my office and made my way across the avenue.  For some reason, I was overcome with a vague sense of melancholy.  I recalled how, in the late afternoon, after I finished my work, the light coming through the window would make an effusive show of the simple facts of my life:  the stout desk of polished walnut, the shelves heavy with books bound in leather and cloth, and the silvery motes that swam in the air.  At such moments, the modest space I called my office was transformed into a sanctum. I realized that, given a window with a decent view and sufficient light, a man could endure any amount of privation and solitude.

 

These were my final thoughts as I turned the key, the tumble of the lock a final "adieu" before I left for the day.   In the semi-darkness, the city streets looked spectacularly Gothic:  the branches of the trees scraping in the wind, the spires of the Cathedral black against the sky.  These sights only added to my gloom, but I pushed forward.  A man hurrying in my direction stopped and asked me the time.  He was tall and gaunt, with a wooly black beard and long hair that gave him a prophetic air.  I remember thinking that there was something odd about him.

 

That evening, Sofia and I ate a light supper, after which she went upstairs to draw her evening bath.  I got a fire started and settled down with a good cognac and the ethereal strains of Mahler for company.   I closed my eyes and drowsed.  A loud bang, a shot, awoke me.  I hurried from the room and up the stairs.  Immediately, I recognized him—the same man who had passed me on the way home.  He dropped the gun and rushed for me.  Why he dropped the gun I can only guess.  I had the impression that he wanted to get his hands on me.  He was tall, tough as shoe leather, and his bony fingers dug into my neck.  My trachea buckled, the blackness of his eyes grew wider.   I was disappearing into that blackness when he lost his grip and the light rushed back in.  I grabbed at him and we stood, locked in each other's arms, imprisoned there.  It seemed as if we would go on like that forever, his beard slipping off as I clawed his face, the dull blows at my ribs.  I tried to get a good look at him but he never gave me a chance.  He attacked me with his teeth, the smell of his skin oily and rancid.  What a monster!  And then, he pulled back his head and spat at me, the saliva stinging my eyes.  I let out a cry of rage, broke loose and lunged for him again.  We tumbled, first him over me, then I over him, our bodies landing hard against the steps, the two of us hanging on to the other to stop falling.  I never doubted that he wanted to kill me.

 

The next thing I remember is the bright sunlight through the window.  I didn’t know it at the time but Sofia lay dead in the upstairs bedroom.  The intruder was nowhere to be seen.

   

­­­­­­­­­

The prosecutor has convinced the jury that I killed my wife and tried unsuccessfully to kill myself.  What an absurd theory.  I loved my wife.  No one believes me when I say that she was murdered—perhaps by a foreign agent.  Indeed, the whole case brought against me is preposterous, a dime-store novelist could do better, and, even in fiction, a plot fabricated out of such obvious ironies and false symmetries would strike the reader as unbearably convenient.  Men don't go killing their wives every day.  If the police had done their job and searched the house for the murder weapon, they would know that I am telling the truth.  The beard was discovered; it achieved a certain mythic status, a prop in a drama staged for the jury's entertainment.  It was said that I had worn it the night of the murder to disguise my features.  How utterly absurd!  I have shaved every day of my life since I was sixteen.  Had I chosen to disguise myself, a beard is not the first thing that would have come to mind.  Can you imagine me in a beard!  How unflattering. 

 

I wish there were a way to prove my innocence.  Don't get the wrong impression.  I am grateful to my sons.  I know that they want me to appeal the verdict.  What did they call it?  Ineffective assistance of counsel based on the fact that my lawyer failed to try for an insanity defense.  Is that why you asked me about the other Mortara?  Honestly, I don't see the connection.  I believe that Edgardo fell in love—with his protectors, the Church, its rituals and music, with the Pope he called his true father.  Yes, yes.  Only love explains his refusal to return to the arms of his grieving Jewish mother.  Nothing else.  Were I to try to deny it I would have to betray that love—to betray myself, my parents' memory, my marriage to Sofia.  Everything.  How am I doing?  Except that I don't sound particularly insane, do I?  Do not allow my unforgivable ignorance to blind you to Edgardo's splendor.  I am not qualified kiss the hem of his robes.  We will never be equals, not even in death.  Do you really believe that, if I had lived my life differently, Sofia would be alive today?  How is that possible?  In God's eyes, or so I am told, we are all unique.  When I step into the execution chamber, I will die as Stefan Mortara, although how I came to be that person exceeds my comprehension.  Like most men, I am essentially a stranger to myself. I wish it were otherwise but I am only human, made of skin and bones, in need of air and oxygen to survive.  Even at this dark hour, however, I find that I have no taste for miracles.  I do not need the water to turn into wine.  Instead, I ask myself:  if man solved every mystery related to his physical reality, would he still yearn for transcendence?  If God is the ultimate mystery, he must also be the solution to all mysteries.  Like most men, I am a mystery.  I would like to live in this condition of ignorance a bit longer.  I do not want to die and yet I will not appeal the verdict.  Consummatum est.  But what am I saying?  It will never be finished.

 

 

Kathryn A. Kopple is a specialist in Latin American literature (NYU, Ph.D.)  Her poetry and prose can be found in the 2012 Fall Issue of The Threepenny Review, Construction Lit Mag, Philadelphia Stories, Sleet, The Hummingbird Review, Danse Macabre, Metropolis, Contemporary Haibun Online, Hayden’s Ferry Review blog, Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Art, 100 Word Story, among other publications.

Translations, scholarly work, and reviews can be found in Buñuel: 100 Years: It's Dangerous to Look Inside (MoMA), Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, World Literature Today, Agni Online, Exact Change Year Book, The XUL Reader, 5+5, The Four Quarters Magazine, Metropolis, Seneca Review, Sonora Review, These Are Not Sweet Girls, and The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. "Disorder in the Court: Acting-Out Injustice in 'Inherit the Wind'" is forthcoming Hablar Derecho, an international anthology on law and literature edited by CIDE, DF.

 

She is a regular contributor to Unusual Historicals, a blog devoted to historical fiction.  She is also the author of Little Velásquez (Mirth Press, 2012), a novel set in 15^th century Spain, and translator of Marosa di Giorgio’s La liebre de marzo / The March Hare (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2013).

 

 

 

Ed Coonce
LiteralVille
 
            In LiteralVille, where the city motto was “We Say What We Mean, And We Mean What We Say,” a crisis was brewing. The popular idioms “I’m sweating my balls off,” and “I’m working my ass off,” had, through some quirk of nature or random act of evolution, become reality.
            The LiteralVille PD sent out ball and ass retrieval teams to comb the streets and wooded suburban areas in an attempt to reunite those affected citizens with their recently departed parts. The success rate so far was very low. Something had to be done.
            Mayor Grampy McDoom called an emergency city council session.
            “Listen up everybody, we got a problem. I know each and every one of you has a friend or relative who has been affected by literalism. We are open to any and all suggestions. The citizens are looking to us for solutions. Anyone?”
            The Reverend Harry Harkwell, the leader of the Chipmunks for Jesus, spoke up. “It’s because of all those fire walking, fornicating, trilateral post modernists! I suggest we round them all up! Then we’ll get to the bottom of this!”                He dropped his trousers and whirled around with a theatrical flourish, pointing at his flattened rear end, now missing both buttocks. “Look what they did to me!”
            The council members gasped, oohed and ahhed.
            “Please...help...me?” The Reverend was in tears.
            “S’pose we do find your ass?” asked Lurleen, the East Hell Midget Jell-O Wrestling Champion. “How would we know it was yours?”
            “Well,” replied the Reverend. “The left buttock has a tattoo.”
            “OK, what kind of tattoo?”
            The Reverend paused. The room was silent, waiting. His response was muted, nearly inaudible. “Butterfly.”
            The house erupted in laughter, several post-modernists pointed their fingers at the Reverend and hooted.
            “Everybody calm down!” Charlie Sheen had been sitting quietly, observing. “I think I know how to fix this.” He pointed to Clyde, the city’s maintenance supervisor, who was sitting in his chair snoring. “Wake him up.” Someone shook Clyde. He’d been dreaming about better times, before his testicles had been “disappeared.”
            “What we need to do,” continued Charlie, is to change the name of the city.”
            “What are you talking about?” Mayor McDoom was incredulous.
            “Simple, we change it from LiteralVille to FigurativeVille.”
            It took a few moments, for the irony of it all to sink in. The Fire Walking Trilateralists made a motion for a vote, the Fornicating Post Modernists seconded it, the vote was taken, and those in favor of the name change prevailed.
 
            Ten miles away in the East Hell Science Center, Professor Hanover Klingst threw down his pencil and flipped the switch for the Literal Ray to “Off.”
            “Drat!” he fumed. Sometimes his experiments were a resounding success, usually not. “Time to reboot,” he always said. He took a long drink of Old Bastard Ale and fell asleep, dreaming of a world that somehow actually needed his inventive genius.
           
 
Ed Coonce is an Encinitas, California artist and published short story author and poet currently working on his third anthology, “East Hell Boulevard.” A USMC Vietnam veteran, he studied printmaking at the Coronado School of Fine Art under Monty Lewis, a WPA muralist, anthropology at San Diego State, acting with Monty Silverstone, and screenwrote and played the leading role in Play Mountain Production's “Sheep and Wolf” a finalist in the Oceanside International Film Festival 2012. He hosts East Hell Writers and is a screenwriter, actor, and Creative Director for Theatre Arts West. He will have a one man show, The Art of a Writer,” at the Encinitas, CA, Civic Center Gallery in October and November 2014.