“Anything But Yes”: A Novel of Anna del Monte, Jewish Citizen of Rome, 1749

Anything But Yes is the true story of a young woman’s struggle to defend her identity in the face of relentless attempts to destroy it. In 1749, eighteen-year-old Anna del Monte was seized at gunpoint from her home in the Jewish ghetto of Rome and thrown into a convent cell at the “House of Converts”. Very few people know the story of the Ghetto, or the abduction of Jews to convert them to Catholicism. Young girls and small children were the primary targets. But Anna del Monte was strong, brilliant, educated, and wrote a diary of her experiences. The document was lost for more than 200 hundred years, then rediscovered in 1989. Anything but Yes is also based on Davidow’s extensive research on life in the eighteenth-century Roman ghetto, its traditions, food, personalities, and dialect.