L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2015 www.italoamericano.com 10 STEVEN VARNI The two lands designated in the title of Joseph Luzzi's new non-fiction book My Two Italies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) are embodied, on the one hand, in the rural southern traditions that his two Calabrian immigrant parents maintained in suburban Rhode Island throughout his childhood in the 1970s and '80s and, on the other, by the illustri- ous Florentine culture of Dante and Michelangelo that Luzzi has devoted himself to studying, teaching and writing about as a distinguished Professor of Italian Studies. Luzzi's book is an exemplary, lively, and thoughtful tale of the immigrant experience in America. But it also provides insightful discussions of such topics as the relations hip betw een Italian an d Italian- American culture, contemporary Italian society and politics, and how themes explored by Dante 700 years ago continue to exert a profound influence on the many Italies we inevitably talk about when we talk about Italy. I had the good fortune to interview Professor Luzzi last week via Skype. SV: Your parents, like so many immigrants to America, grew up in the rustic south of Italy. But your father's experiences as a young man a r e quite partic- u l a r , involving near death as an Italian pris oner of war in Germany, marriage to and then abandonment of his pregnant G erman w ife, and, back home in his home- town in Calabria after the war, a staged rape attempt of your mother to assure he would not lose her to a rival suitor. N ow , s uch things —along with others like the butchering of goats and pigs you witnessed as a child in your own backyard in Rhode Island—are the harsh realities of our forebears' lives. But there's a tradition that we don't talk about such things out- side of the family. You write poignantly about how much your father kept to hims elf in America, and it makes me won- der how hard was it for you to let such things out in the book? LUZZI: I never took lightly what it meant to tell stories of my family that they themselves said so little about, and that they might prefer to keep private. In fact, before I published this book I called my best friend and said, "I don't know if I can do it, these are family secrets. Is this the right way to repay a family that sacrificed so much for me?" My friend's reply was that, first of all, the story is told in a spirit of generosity and not criti- cism or judgment. And, second, readers will understand that this was a very different time, a very different culture. Then I thought that the alter- native to telling their story was silence, and oblivion. That these people who meant so much to me, and w hos e s tory is both unique to themselves and repre- s entative of s o many others whose journey and struggles have not been recorded, would simply be forgotten. So, yes, it was a hard thing to relate some of the more violent and even somewhat cruel aspects of my family's history, but the alternative of silence, oblivion and forgetfulness, was much worse. That's true death. SV: You write that even thou- sands of miles (and years) from their hometown your parents never ceased to be Calabrian. But the question of establishing your own ethnic identity wasn't so easy, was it? L U Z Z I : When I was grow- ing up I w anted, like most kids, to fit in. Which meant, to be American. Now, I was born and raised in Rhode Island, but at lunch other kids in my class had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, while I had a pepper and egg sandwich, which w as dripping oil and w hich, compared to theirs , kind of reeked. Now the pepper and egg sandwich might actually taste a whole lot better, and I'd certain- ly be the envy of today's "food- ies." But back then I wanted to live w hat I th ought of as an "American lifestyle," not the Calabrian one of my parents. At the same time, though, I also didn't feel Italian, as I knew that the southern Italy of my par- ents was not represented in the images of Italy on television or in movies or in art books. Nor did I feel Italian-American, as that culture—of Little Italies, of certain dishes and festivals—is the product of the mass emigra- tion of the early 20 th Century. My parents and older siblings came over in the late '50s, and a lot of the struggles the early immigrants faced weren't issues for us. Nobody ever discouraged us from speaking Italian, or Calabrian, for example. U ncomfortable as it may sometimes have felt growing up between these three cultures, though, it was helpful in writing this book. It allowed me a useful bit of distance from each of them. But by the time I finished writing it I learned two things. First, that I wasn't actually writ- ing a book about living between cultures, but a story of immigra- tion and exile. My family had been s ubs is tence farmers in Calabria, but that land was my father's as America never was. I had s tudied D ante's famous writings on the pain of his own exile, but writing this book real- ly brought together, or brought home, you might say, what I had read and what I had grown up with. And, second, though many of the book's readers have been of Italian descent, I've also heard from a lot of readers who are not, and for whom the story also resonates, recalling aspects of their own family's experi- ences. It's been a concrete reminder of jus t how many Americans have this in their family background, how important it is for so many of us. Moreover, by the time I finished writ- ing this book any ambiva- lence I'd felt grow- ing up, any des ire to escape from my family's past, had been replaced by a new appreciation and reverence for them and their traditions. SV: You mention in the book that as the son of immigrants you don't have the romantic notion of the mother country that many Italian-Americans do and that your own seven-year- old daughter probably will, dis- tant as she is from the hard reali- ty of your parents ' lives . Giacomo Leopardi is one of the great Italian writers you talk about in your book, and it was he who famously asserted that life was hardly livable without a certain degree of illusion. To love Italy must we squint at cer- tain realities, reducing it to just a garden of eden under the Tuscan Joseph Luzzi's Two Tales: an inter view sun? Or can we accept complexi- ties—like those that drove so many of our ancestors to leave Italy in search of a better life—as you come to do in the course of your book? LUZZI: Well, illusion cer- tainly plays a central role in Leopardi's writings, but there are two ways of looking at the term. One, is that it's all just lies and fals eh oods . But w e can als o think of it in terms of imagina- tion, of make-believe as it is practiced in the arts. And I think it's the second version that is important. I don't think it has to do with kidding yourself, or accepting a false version of Italy, because I'm always amazed when I meet Italians—those who live in the country and know all about its problems—by their great love of nation. In spite of their com- plaints, they love it there, and so often it comes down to some- thing I noticed when I visited my family in Calabria. My Uncle Giorgio was very poor growing up. He'd been a shepherd, then a rail worker, never had much money, lived very modestly. And yet one day he quoted to me from Dante, a couple of lines about "Ugolino lifting his mouth from the grue- some meal…." Now this wasn't a literary man, he'd had very little educa- tion, in fact. Yet these lines had stuck with him, and I think it's because art, and literature, and the food, is a large part of what it means to be Italian. Even if you're not a member of the elite culture, it's everyw here you go—in the architecture, in the Joseph Luzzi. Photo credit: Roy Volkmann cooking, in the facades of the buildings. This world of created beautiful things is just part of what it means to be Italian. And I think this is related to Leopardi's idea of illusion, the fact of being surrounded by such splendors and creations of the imagination. This idea of a world in which imagination and cre- ativity and illusion-making has resulted in so much splendor and art and living culture can't help but have an effect on you. F or 700 years , going w ay back to Dante's time, people have been expecting the collapse of the Italian political system. But there's something incredibly resilient about the Italian peo- ple's ability to withstand politi- cal crises, and I think part of this comes from the unifying force of Italian culture. Even in those centuries before there was a uni- fied Italy. Of course I also know that Leopardi was inclined to be very nihilistic in his use of the word illusion. But this idea that art can be such an important part of everyday life, whether it's the customs of the tavola italiana or other facets of what I call "the fine art of being Italian," contin- ues to have a strong pull on a great many people. Both those with, and without, an ancestral connection to the country. It's what keeps all of us going back. Italian culture, finally, is a great mystery that to this day keeps generating different responses. We never figure it out, but, hopefully, our responses to it are interesting or enlighten- ing, worthy of the country and people that inspire them.

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