Growing up Dago

I'm 3/4 Italian.

My dad's full-blooded, both sides of his family having come from Sicily; my mom's 1/2 on her father's side. Growing up, I was lucky enough to have known my mother's grandfather until I was into High School. I knew he came over on the boat when he was 12 or 13. I knew that he came knowing no English, that his family settled in Pennsylvania and then moved to Akron to work in the rubber factories.

Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond knows that Italian heritage is overwhelming. Family's--or at least my family-- stayed closely knit, remain closely knit through multiple generations and branches. Being Italian-American dominated my childhood. We made gallons of pasta sauce to freeze every summer, we danced tarantellas at every wedding, we celebrated Christmas Eve as only good transplanted Italians can.

Growing up I was always fascinated by family history. I loved knowing exactly where my family came from; I loved that I had so much Italian blood running through my veins when most people in my generation are decidedly American mutts. I loved looking at old photographs and hearing stories about where ancestors settles and how they made their livings in a new country. I wanted desperately to speak the language (I still do) and to go back to the old country.

When my plane landed in Milan in June of 2000, I was only the second in my family ever to go back there. (My mom had gone in the 70s.) Not to the towns from which my family came, but to Italy more generally. For two months I marveled at the landscape, the food, the beauty of the people. I suddenly understood that the decision to immigrate was a more monumental one than I will ever understand. Despite what must have been overwhelming poverty or economic uncertainty, to look back at the Mediterranean coast for the last time must have been heart-breaking. I loved everything about Italy, two months later I seriously considered not getting on the return flight. When I took J back there in 2005, landing in Milan after three days in Paris felt strangely like coming home. Despite wanting to see more of Europe, I consistently ache to go back to Italy and can't imagine planning any trip across the Atlantic that does not include a stopover somewhere on the Italian peninsula.

Growing up I couldn't not identify myself as Italian, but so much of this came directly from my great-grandfather. He was the one living link that we had to the old country. As he aged, living alone until his early 90s, he seemed to regress back into some sort of strange peasant lifestyle, cooking whatever was available each day in a pressure cooker while he tended his goats and chickens. Perhaps it's because no Italian grandmothers survived in my memory, perhaps it's because our family is so decidedly patriarchal (or at least that's what the women lead the men to think), perhaps it's because I was so very short sited, but I never really considered the women.

And then, two nights ago I wandered onto the Ellis Island homepage and discovered them all over again. We had always thought that my great-grandfather came over first, with his father. But on the Ellis Island website, you can search for your ancestors and see scanned ship manifests. He actually came with his mother--one of the thousands of Maria's that left Europe in the early part of the twentieth century.

Sometime in June of 1913, Maria Figurelli left the port of Naples with her 4 living children. She was only 2 or 3 years older than I am right now, but her children ranged in age from 12 to 2. She had $60 to her name, she could not read or write, she left no addresses for friends and family remaining in Italy. Sometime in June 1913, she boarded a boat with four children and every expectation that she would be able to make her way to a husband who waited for her in Williamsburg, PA.

Did anyone meet her at the docks? Had she had any contact with her husband who left almost a year earlier? Did she travel with friends or alone? The ship's manifest tells us none of these things, but it uncovered for me a new story to figure out. For so long my focus had been on the men who made a new life here. Now I think about women not much older (and on my father's side far younger) than I am now and what strength they must have had to come.

The Best of Wishes, From Afar

When I was growing up, the closest thing I had to a sister was my cousin, A. She had two sisters of her own, so I counted myself fortunate that she still needed and wanted a "best cuz." When we were very young, we were inseparable. We wore matching bikinis in the summer, explored the wonders of my grandma's attic and basement when no one was looking, and led our rag-tag group of cousins in any number of ridiculous antics. One summer we made a movie- a terrible, wonderful version of Cinderella set during WWII. We, being too large to be properly matched to one of the two boys available to play the prince, played the stepsisters. In the movie, you can see how goofy we were together. In my favorite scene, we do a random dance, and you can see the dust from my grandma's newly seeded lawn flying in the air.

But we grew apart somehow once we got into high school--or was it college?? I really can't remember, and I really can't tell you why. We lived almost 200 miles apart by then, and in many ways were in very different worlds. She wore Abercrombie, and in my jealousy, I pretended I thought it was ridiculous of her. I remember going to her High School Graduations--she invited me, but after that, we were never really close.

When I got engaged, to everyone's great surprise, there was quite a bit of discussion about who the bridesmaids should be. I wanted my younger cousins and friends. My mother wanted me to ask A. Actually, I'm not sure that she really wanted me to; she needed me to to keep up appearances. Because there was that whole growing apart thing that seemed to bother my grandmother terribly. "Just go talk to her. She's just shy, like her mother," I was told. I'm not sure if she was ever prodded to talk to me as well, but somehow I doubt it.

I didn't really want to ask her-not because I didn't like her or because I didn't want her around, but because I didn't know her any more. She, unlike me, had gone off to college. She had a life that I could only imagine, because there were no more letters written in pink and purple pen making their way between Toledo and Akron anymore. I knew that my mom was pushed to ask a cousin to be her maid of honor when she wanted her friend. I hated that she was putting me in the same position, but I buckled and said that I would have her in the wedding party.

I'll never forget the day. It was at our big fat Italian family reunion. My mom had called her brother to make sure that A came. She told him that I had something to ask. I was shaking. Absolutely shaking. J had taken one of the kids down to the bathroom and my mom was pushing, "Do it now. Do it now." So I asked. And she turned me down flat. And I was still shaking. She told me that we weren't close, as though I was unaware of it. She told me that I should only have people I was close to in my wedding. And I was shaking.

From anger. From embarrassment. From hurt. (Because who, really?!, gets turned down when they ask someone--a family member--to be in their wedding.)

And for months and months I was so angry at her.

At least I thought it was her that I was angry at. Looking back later, with a bit more perspective, I realize she gave me the best gift that she could have given me--the wedding party I had always envisioned. I realized that we were both just tangled up in some larger dance between siblings who wanted their parents' approval. My mom said that I won that day-- that I showed myself to be the better person. I'm not sure that she was right. She won. She showed herself to have the better daughter-the one who is more obedient and who does for her family as she should. But I don't think I won.

So many of my happiest childhood memories have A. in them. And now we do not talk. We're cordial to one another now. (After the rejection I wasn't so cordial.) But we do not talk. We do not reminisce and we do not laugh about those old times together. And that is completely and utterly my fault. I was the one who made every decision to distance myself, who let myself be put in an un-winnable situation, who made the decision to act self-righteous after that situation exploded the only way it could have. I made our Cinderella movie into a DVD last Christmas as kind of a peace offering. Perhaps it helped. Perhaps not.

Today I learned that A. is engaged. She posted the story of the proposal on her myspace page--and what a proposal. Reading it, I almost cried with happiness for her, but I also couldn't help but feel a little sad. Because I don't think there's any way to fix the break we've had. All I can hope for is cordial, and maybe cordial someday will turn into friendly. Who knows.

But I wish her only the best. That she finds happiness beyond her dreams with the man she has found to make them real. That she has the wedding she wants--with no drama or squabbles. That she has the marriage she deserves. I wish her and her's what our dear friend wished us on our wedding day- The quiet miracle of a beautiful life together.

Will the Humanities Save Us?

In a recent NY Times piece, Prof. Stanley Fish writes that the arguments for the humanities' purpose or usefulness are all unnecessary. It is not, he writes, necessary for the humanities to fill some sort of role that university accountants can tick off to rationalize their continued funding. In part, I whole-heartedly agree. The humanities do not have to be "useful" in order to be valuable. They do not need to fill some role that the general, anti-intellectual American public can point to and say, "Yes, I see now why it important to keep paying those people to read silly books and plays."

What I do not agree with, however, is the idea that the humanities can't fill an important role in our society. Just because they should need to be "practical" doesn't mean that they don't have the potential to be useful. They are, after all, what humanizes us--what separates us from other animals. They need not always have transformative properties, but the can at times transform us.

Case in point-- literature has made me who I am now in many ways, not the least of which is my outlook about social justice and equality:

I grew up with parents who joked that today should really be called "James Earl Ray Day," with a family who believed that while Martin Luther King never did anything bad himself, he "got all the other ones riled up to cause problems," with a family culture where the word "nigger" was a normal term thrown about in conversations. I remember, when I was very, very young, my grandpa taught me a song about a "Nigger in the Woodpile." I must have known it was bad, that I shouldn't be singing it, because I went and hid on our steps by myself to sing it, where I was promptly caught and punished by my mother. But things were never straight forward; the same mother who punished me for singing that song also told me once that interracial marriage was, basically, against the bible--the different tribes of Israel or some such thing.

The way my family dealt with race always bothered me, but I never understood how to deal with it. I also believed much of it-- bought into it, because it was all I really knew.

And then I read Beloved. I hated it the first time through--I didn't understand it at all. It made me angry, so I read it again. And I understood. And in understanding, finally, the story of a mother who would rather kill her own children than see them slaves, I began to understand where I stood. In the telling of that story, I was fascinated by the radical departures of traditional European narrative to tell what was a radical and subversive story. For the story wasn't only that the mother would rather see her children dead than slaves, it was that slavery stripped her of her very ability to understand that she was the best part of herself, that her very humanity had been taken away.

I fell in love with African American literature, which caused my mother no small bit of anxiety. I could tell that she was uncomfortable with my original decision to study ethnic literatures and mostly relieved when my dissertation turned out to be about of dead white men. But it's still a dissertation about race-- about how whiteness and masculinity became the most important aspects of American literature.

And it wasn't until I studied rhetoric that I began to understand Dr. King's utter, dazzling brilliance and power.

Studying these texts transformed me, changed me. They allowed me to become the person who visited that hotel turned museum in Memphis and could understand what the country truly lost on that day when one racist white man took away yet another soul dedicated to equality, freedom, peace, and hope.

It's not that literature should be held accountable to perform these transformations, but there is that possibility there. And that possibility for positive transformation is important. Dr. King understood the possibility inherent in language to change the world. He used it brilliantly, even if his time with us was all too short.

About Christmas

I know it's a bit early to start thinking about the holidays, but for my family, Christmas is a huge deal, laden with traditions that haven't changed for eons. And this year things will be very different.

Since I can remember, it wasn't really Christmastime until my brothers and I, arms filled with presents,trudged across the snowy yard to my grandparents house and walked through the door to be greeted by the heat of the kitchen and the sounds of three men (who otherwise never cooked) cooking. We never drove. If the snow was too deep, we would simply walk down the (usually unplowed) street, because my parents didn't want to add their car to an already filled driveway. And it never felt like Christmas until I smelled the heavy scent of fish frying and the warm sweetness of homemade tomato sauce. I can remember one year wishing that I could bottle that scent, because even as a child I understood that this particular tradition was somehow too singular to last into my adulthood.

But the most important thing about the whole Christmas Eve experience was the sheer amount of chaos that defined it. Christmas Eve has never been an optional holiday; in fact, it was the one holiday when all of my mother's brothers would show up with all of their children, without exception. It started as 10 or so people, but with new marriages and new children, the count is now up to 26. My grandparents don't have a large house. I'm fairly certain it's a fire hazard to have so many people in such a small space with so many ovens working at the same time. Yet somehow they fit us all in, even if it means that half of us eat in the front room rather than the dining room.

Because Christmas Eve centered around two very important activities--eating and opening presents. Like any good Italian family, the meal was based around fish. Fresh, perch breaded in soda crackers and pan fried, bakala prepared any number of ways, whiting, smelt, a tomato-based calamari soup, stuffed squids, and shrimp. The fish was only the beginning, though. There was always some sort of pasta dish, the sauce always homemade from the tomatoes in my grandparents garden, freshly made Italian sausages, meatballs, crusty rolls, and froscia--an egg dish something like a fritatta that contains ricotta cheese and either spinach or dandelion greens.

In the last few years, the meals have become more emotional. Rather than simply forcing the youngest grandchild to say grace, he's given an impromptu toast that has brought him to tears before the meal starts. We all smile at him and pretend we don't see, and then start passing the food--always to the right--and ladling our paper plates with three days' worth of work and love.

Since he was old enough, my baby bro went to help the men cook the meal as well. He'd stand with them by the pans of frying fish and help with anything that needed done. Once he started culinary school, he started bringing his own creations. One year a tuna con fit with some sort of heaven drizzled on top. Last year, the most delicious pesto-crusted lamb chops; hundreds of dollars of ingredients were devoured before we could ask for seconds. And baby bro is always the consummate buffer. He knows just which buttons to push and just how to diffuse stressful situations--especially where my mother is concerned.

But this year will be different, because this year, he's probably not going to make it. He will be in California, being a grown up and probably working through the holidays. And if Christmas Eve will seem less immense without him, Christmas morning will be something else entirely.

I can't begin to imagine what it will be like to have my brothers and our kids at my parents for Christmas morning without D. What's the point of relating the story about the year he was so excited to get underwear that he held them up for a picture if he's not there to laugh about it? And who will diffuse the tension and stress when time seems to be running out? What will the point of all those presents be when someone is missing?

It's no surprise that the holiday traditions will have to change--J and I knew this long ago. This year Baby Bro won't be back, next year it will be us who won't make it for the festivities. Negotiating the creation of new traditions will be especially challenging for my family, because they have been so stable and unchanging for so long. I want to be excited about the prospect of those changes. Maybe we can alleviate the stress and tension. But I can't help but feel sorry for my own children, because I know that these traditions were something singular, and because I know that you can't ever repeat the past.

That Dear Octopus from Whose Tentacles We Never Quite Escape

The past weekend has been busy for us because we've been surrounded by visitors--all from my family. Little man had a blast--so many people to play with and perform for. And we had a pretty good time, too.

But visits from and visits to my family back in Ohio seem to get more and more bittersweet for me, because they often illustrate the growing differences between the family I came from and the family we're trying to create. See, I have a very very close family. I'm talking Christmas Eves with 23 people sitting around 1 table in a moderately small house--every single year...without fail. And, like most people, it comes with it's share of dysfunction. I grew up in a big, Italian family where my grandfather ruled (and continues to rule) as head patriarch. And I grew up less than40 yards away from my grandparents. I still can't quite understand why it is my mom doesn't see the similarities between us and "Everybody Loves Raymond." My
husband is even more dumbfounded.


Growing up that close to my grandparents came with certain perks. My grandma makes killer pies and cookies, and I was always my grandpa's girl growing up. They were like a second set of parents to me. In some ways, I feel closer to them than to my own parents.

The real problem is that since growing up, moving away, getting an education, and starting my own family, there are certain things that I believe that just don't line up with the family line. For instance, Hubby and I have always decided that our little family comes first. This isn't the case for my huge Italian family. We also have decidedly different views about politics. My grandfather, for instance, is never without Fox news on the TV or some right-wing pundit on the radio. After Hurricane Katrina, for instance, a friend of his gave him a "funny" little CD that made fun of the plight of those displaced by the storm. It made my stomach turn. We also have very different ideas about raising kids and discipline. They shake their heads and laugh when we say we're not going to spank Little Man. "You'll see," they say, as they laugh. What they don't understand is that we have seen--and we are even more determined not to spank...or yell. These subtle differences wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that I know too much about the family politics. I was always the little kid listening quietly to things I shouldn't be hearing. I know how the guilt trips and subtle digs work...I know what happens behind the scenes when someone doesn't perform up to the expected standard.

So for me, family visits have become bittersweet because I'm usually screaming inside about things that I just can't change. The racist, sexist, or homophobic jokes. The swatting of little bums (not my child's, but still). And part of the reason I can't say anything is because it's none of my business. But a bigger part is that I've always been opinionated--I've always had a bit of a big mouth--and I know that any opinion I have that's different than theirs will be taken as me being a 'bitch' or 'stuck up' or the fact that I think too much. Maybe that was true when I was a teenager...but I still think the label isn't deserved. Speaking up would just prove them "right." I try desperately to prove them wrong.

The hubby and I are faced with balancing our own beliefs against theirs in the most non- confrontational way possible. It may be a long way off, but I know that there will come a day when one of the lines that the Hubby and I have decided upon will be crossed--some one will yell at Little Man or make a racist remark around him or (god forbid) smack him--however gently--on his little behind. When that day comes, I will be forced into action--an action that no matter how reasonable or benign will forever alter my place in the family. But I haven't quite gotten to that point of not caring what they think. To get to that point means achieving an emotional distance I don't really want. In some sense, not caring what they think entails not caring about them.

The mafia isn't that bad. Step out of line they just shoot you. There's definitely worse.