Excerpt from Book:
1
Once upon a time there was a puppetta.
What’s a puppetta?
Definition coming.
And what’s its name?
Read on, dear reader, read on, and soon
you will know.
Maybe even sooner than that.
My name is Tinocchia.
You notice I don’t begin this true
narrative, this memoir, by opening with the
words, “Call me Tinocchia,” in imitation of that
popular American novel about a great whale.
But if you like whales before long you
will meet a great fish.
Tinocchia has a familiar ring, doesn’t
it? I’m a puppetta, that is, a girl puppet (a
boy puppet, he’s a puppetto). Yes, Tinocchia
is a
rather strange name,
I know, so un-Italian. No other girl in
Italy has it, but you must agree that it has a
thoroughly Italian sound.
You see, my name is a clever Hebrew
concoction thought up by my Papa. Everyone calls
him Giuseppe, but I call him by his Hebrew name,
Yossi.
Yossi’s good friend, Gepetto, was also a
woodworker like my Papa. Some years ago he
created a puppet, actually a marionette, to whom
he gave a name – well, I don’t have to tell you,
for everyone, as the famous puppetto himself
would cleverly say, it’s a name that everyone
knose.*
Soon thereafter Gepetto invited Yossi to come
take a look.
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*In
the original, “conaso”,
a pun conflation of the two Italian words,
conosce
(knows) and
naso
(nose).
If
conaso
is separated into two words –
con naso
– it can also mean “with nose”. My rendition,
“knose”,
is but a pale attempt at recreating the
anonymous author’s brilliant Italian word play.
This inspired Papa to make a puppetto
too.
Me.
To
name me. Papa Yossi played with the Hebrew word
for “baby”,
tinok,
and with a nod to his friend’s creation, he
called me Tinocchia. Much later he would tell me
many more fascinating details about my name and
its links to the Hebrew alphabet, and even to
the opening words of the Torah.