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Robert Casillo Maria Concetta Costantini University of Miami Università degli Studi G. d’Annunzio

Luciano Iorizzo Michael LaRosa Professor Emeritus, SUNY Oswego Rhodes College

This is the inside Rita Ciresi Martino Marazzi of your Front Cover. University of South Florida University of Milan

It will be BLANK Donna DeBlasio James Morone unless you selected Youngstown State University Brown University ‘Inside Cover Printing.’ If you did, that art will appear on your Cover Proof. Ferdinando Fasce Martha Pallante UniversityPROOF of Genoa Youngstown State University Please Note: The edge lines simply show the outer edge of the Edvige Giunta Maria Galli Stampino pages and center of the book. These lines, and the New Jersey City University University of Miami words “PROOF” on each page, will NOT print on your finished books. Kathleen Zamboni McCormick SUNY Purchase

Copyright 2016 Carla Anne Simonini & Carol Bonomo Albright ISSN 096-8846 Cover photos provided by Casa Italia Library Chicago Presbyterian Church of Our Savior Chicago Heights ca 1938 Mothers, girlfriends, wives and sisters display their blue and gold stars representing the neighborhood boys in the US military. 194323rd and Wallace, Chicago Heights. Italian americana

In Memory of Founders, Ernest S. Falbo & Bruno A. Arcudi

Volume XXXVII Number 2 Summer 2019

Italian Americana, a cultural and historical review devoted to the Italian experience in the New World, is printed in cooperation with Loyola University Chicago.

Editor-in-chief Co-editor & Review Editor Carla A. Simonini John Paul Russo Department of Modern Languages Department of Classics Loyola Unversity Chicago University of Miami Chicago, IL 60645 Coral Gables, FL 33124

PROOF Fiction Editor PROOF Poetry Editor Christine Palamidessi Moore Maria Terrone

Fiction Editorial Review Team Poetry Editorial Review Team Robin Ray Steven Reese Barbara Poti Crooker Editorial Assistant Thomas Slagle

Founded by Ernest S. Falbo and Richard Gambino Past Editors: Bruno A. Arcudi and Carol Bonomo Albright Poetry Editor 1994-2003: Dana Gioia Poetry Editor 2004-2016: Michael Palma

An international peer reviewed journal, ITALIAN AMERICANA is published semiannually at Loyola University Chicago. Email address: [email protected] Table of Contents i

Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor...... v

Notes on Contributors...... ix

Articles Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader Sandro Corso...... 99

“Curious Victories”: The Famous Murder Case of Maria Barbella and Italian- American Women in the Press Between the 1890s and 1910s Marina Cacioppo...... 119

Poetry Introduction Maria Terrone...... 141

Leopardi’s Lament: On an Ancient Funeral Monument PROOF Translated byPROOF Eamon Grennan...... 143 Featured Poet: Grace Cavalieri Essay, “A Child of Two Cultures”...... 147 Oh My Father...... 150 The End...... 151 May Day...... 152

‘Tis of Thee Dante Di Stefano...... 154

Marriage Bed Julia Lisella...... 155

Preemptive Elegy Elton Glaser...... 156

Anniversary Joey Nicoletti...... 157 ii Italian Americana Table of Contents iii

Night Shift, Big Steel Let’s Wake Up, Italics!: Manifesto for a Glocal Future Jim Scutti...... 159 by Piero Bassetti Review by Ioana Raluca Larco...... 198 Turning Up Moonstruck Janine Certo...... 160 Facing toward the Dawn: The Italian Anarchists of New London by Richard Lenzi Evening Comes to Long Island Sound Review by Ferdinando Fasce...... 200 Fred Muratori...... 161 At Home in the New World: Essays by Maria Terrone Caddies, 1929 Review by Ilaria Serra...... 201 Maryann Corbett...... 162 Between Two Worlds: Sicily and America by Luisa LoCascio Pyromania Review by Maria Serena Marchesi...... 202 Connie Post...... 163 The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers, and Life La Bailarina by Richard Russo Gabriella Belfiglio...... 164 Review by Marc C. Amodio...... 203

Nihil Obstat Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages: Essays on Italian Prose Narrative Michelle Reale...... 166 and Theatre edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin Review by Maria Galli Stampino...... 205 December 31 Simona CariniPROOF...... 167 PROOF Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists by James B. Nicola Review by Cristina Giorcelli...... 206 Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction Ladies Man The Fireflies of Autumn and Other Tales of San Ginese Philip Cioffari...... 171 by Moreno Giovannoni Review by Mariaconcetta Costantini...... 210 An Epistolary Friendship: Louise DeSalvo through Her Letters Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge...... 177 “I Heard You Paint Houses”: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt Review by George Birnbaum...... 213 Reviews Review Essay: A Phenomenology of the American Spirit La Lirica I (Odi, Sonetti e Canzunetti) by Giovanni Meli The Unreal McCoy by Virginiana Miller Review by Joseph Russo...... 214 Review Essay by Simone Marchesi...... 187 A Day in June by Marisa Labozzetta Review Essay: Pop Formalist: Ned Balbo and The Perseids Review by Roxanne Christofano Pilat...... 216 3 Nights of the Perseids by Ned Balbo Review Essay by George Guida...... 194 *Note. Owing to a printing error, the previous issue was numbered incorrectly as Volume XXXVIII No. 1 (Winter 2019); it should be Volume XXXVII No. 1 (Winter 2019) and cited as such. The current issue is correctly Volume XXXVII No. 2. Letter From The Editor v Letter from the Editor Carla A. Simonini

Dear Readers:

I must begin this letter with a correction and an apology. As we prepared the last edition of Italian Americana we were straddling production between Youngstown State University and our new home at Loyola University Chicago. Somehow, we missed an error in our printing proof, which caused the journal to go out incorrectly labeled “Volume XXXVIII Number 1 Winter 2019.” Please note that this was an error, and the issue should have been labeled “Volume XXXVII Number 1 Winter 2019.” You will note that this current issue reflects a return to our proper sequence, Volume“ XXXVII Number 2 Summer 2019.” We have alerted all of our subscribing libraries and apologize for any confusion this may have caused. We are very pleased to bring you the properly numbered Summer 2019 issue, which features some changes reflective of our desire to continually broaden the ways in which we fulfill our mission to explore the Italian experience in the New World. Our first article, “Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Organizer,” was submitted to us by Sandro Corso, the Education Office Director at the Italian Consulate General in Chicago. In PROOF his present position,PROOF Dr. Corso is responsible for promoting and supporting Italian language programs in Chicago-area schools, and his background and training are in literature and sociolinguistics. He in fact holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, and previously was a professor of Italian literature (for more information, see our “Notes on Contributors” section). His article on Florence Scala, however, is not a literary analysis but rather a biographical portrait of a Chicago-born woman whose life story challenges conventional notions of the role of woman in Italian-American culture. Corso learned about Florence Scala after assuming his consular position, and his meticulously researched article about her life presents a contemporary Italian homage to the legacy of an Italian American of an earlier generation. It also offers a unique perspective on the history of Taylor Street, Chicago’s “Little Italy,” thus providing a fitting tribute toItalian Americana’s new home. Our second article is an examination of sensationalized murder cases involving Italian-American women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marina Cacioppo, a scholar from the Università degli Studi di Palermo, Sicily, has conducted extensive research utilizing primary sources, newspaper articles in particular, to analyze how after being cast by the press as protagonists in high-profile murder trials certain Italian-American women effectively became “transnational subjects,” tossed between the conflicting vi Italian Americana Letter From The Editor vii cultural forces of traditional Southern Italian culture, American democratic felt. We are very pleased to be able to share that spirit with the original ideals, and the emerging feminist movement. immigrants’ English-speaking descendants, in the form of Eamon Grennan’s In our poetry section, editor Maria Terrone brings you another new very moving translation. feature—poetry in translation. We are very honored to be premiering Eamon In our poetry section we are very pleased to bring you our featured Grennan’s translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s early nineteenth century poet, Grace Cavalieri, who in her professional life has pursued a multi- poetic work “Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale, dove una giovane faceted career as a poet, playwright, and radio broadcaster. Her opening essay morta è rappresentata in atto di partire, accomiatandosi dai suoi,” which delves further into the characteristic diversity of Italian-American identity. Grennan has translated as “Leopardi’s Lament: On an Ancient Funeral Descendant of a northern Italian Jewish family, and with an immigrant Monument.” You may wonder why we have chosen to feature an Irish- grandfather that arrived in the US wielding a doctorate, rather than a pick and born poet’s translation of one of Italy’s most renowned literary figures in shovel, Cavalieri presents a contrasting yet no less valid Italian immigrant a journal dedicated to the Italian-American experience, to which I would narrative. And yet still, she recalls her ex-seminarian maternal grandfather respond that we are here again working to broaden the ways in which we brandishing an apron while preparing Italian specialties for a rather rough seek to fulfill our mission. Grennan is a highly acclaimed poet and essayist, and tumble American clientele in Trenton, NJ. “Tomato Pies, 25 Cents,” the and he also won the PEN Award for poetry in translation for Selected Poems first poem she shares with us, is offered in his memory. Cavalieri has also of Giacomo Leopardi (Princeton University Press 1997). But in addition to forged connections to her Italian heritage through literature, by working with citing his stellar literary credentials, we welcome him to the pages of Italian Italian translators and engaging in multilingual poetry events supported by Americana as an Italophile and a transnationalist. Born in Dublin, Grennan the Italian Embassy in Washington, DC. She has most recently been honored spent a year in Rome before enrolling in a doctoral program at Harvard, and as the tenth poet laureate of Maryland. he completed his award-winning Italian translations during his long tenure In our Fiction and Essay section we have another departure from our as a professor of English at Vassar College. Certainly his personal story, too, typical protocol. We normally require that all of our creative writers be of is part of an evolving definition of the Italian-American experience. Even Italian descent and ask that they reference their heritage in the biographical more compelling, though, is his choice of poet. information that accompanies their submissions. This is in keeping with the Not only is PROOFGiacomo Leopardi considered to be one of the greatest original founders’ PROOFdesire to provide a dedicated forum in which the works poets of the nineteenth century, in Italy and abroad, he is also one of the of Italian-American writers could be reviewed without any ethnic bias, 1 literary figures associated with the tradition of alirica civile (“civil poetry”), which was not the case back in the early 1970s. Our current issue breaks in which Italian literary greats, such as Dante and Petrarch, evoke through from this long-standing tradition with our inclusion of a personal essay by their verses a sense of Italianness that transcends geo-political borders. Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge, “An Epistolary Friendship: Louise DeSalvo Historians and social scientists who study the Italian-American experience, through Her Letters.” As our readers likely know, Louise DeSalvo was a many of whose scholarly works have been published in Italian Americana, prize-wining Virginia Wolf scholar and memoirist, with much of her work often focus on regionalism and the late date of Italian unification (1861) focusing on Italian-American themes. Her memoir Vertigo (Penguin, 1997) as reasons why the immigrants generally lacked a sense of Italian identity. is one of the most widely taught Italian-American books, and numerous Leopardi’s poetry offers an alternative perspective—i.e. that it is through other Italian-American writers cite her as having influenced their own their diversity, and not in spite of it, that the people of the boot-shaped careers. But it is the theme of another one of DeSalvo’s popular books, peninsula have always held a sense of themselves as “Italians.” Italy, more Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our so than any other modern nation, effectively willed itself into being through 1 its literature; for centuries Italy’s writers and poets, Leopardi included, The introduction to Helen Barolini’s The Dream Book: An Anthology of passionately proclaimed an Italy that did not exist in any material form. Writings by Italian American Women (1985) provides a detailed analysis One could argue that the largely illiterate laborers who formed the bulk of the many obstacles that Italian-American women faced in their attempts of Italian immigration to the US would not have been reading poetry, but to get their works published. In the preface to the revised edition (2000) what Leopardi and other writers did was to capture in their verse a distinctly Barolini recounts having received a letter from a reader of her novel Italian spirit that even the most common of the peasant class would have Umbertina (1979) who wrote that he was drawn to the book due to her name, noting “a novel by a woman with an Italian surname is rare.” viii Italian Americana Notes on Contributors ix Lives (Beacon Press, 2000) that gives rise to an unlikely friendship nurtured Notes on Contributors between Freeman-Coppadge and DeSalvo across the years, largely through written correspondence. DeSalvo passed away last October, succumbing to her long-term battle with cancer. Freeman-Coppadge’s essay is an eloquent Sandro Corso is a double graduate of the University of Cagliari, Italy tribute to both her literary and personal legacy, and it connects to the poetry of (Modern Languages and Italian Literature). He received his MA at Ca’ Leopardi in its exploration of how a sense of identity can be shaped through Foscari University (Venice, Italy) in Linguistics and Teaching Theory and the process of writing. his PhD at University of Edinburgh, UK (Comparative Literature). His Christine Palamisessi Moore, our Editor for Fiction and Creative most recent publications include essays on travel writing (“The Quest for Nonfiction, skillfully pairs Freeman-Coppadge’s essay with a work of short Identity,” Cambridge Scholars, 2016; “The Invention of Sardinia,” Cirvi, fiction, “Ladies Man” by Philip Cioffari. The story is a vignette, following 2014) and foreign/second languages (La Nuova Italia-OUP, SELM-Garzanti, two young men out for a night on the town in the Bronx of the 1950s. The and Loescher). He has taught Italian and Sociolinguistics at the University of voice is distinctly male, the story-telling terse and deceptively simple, and Edinburgh, UK (2002–2007). He currently holds the position of Education yet the frame it provides to Freeman-Coppadge’s essay is the protagonist’s Attache’ for the Department of Italian Language Promotion at the Italian unexpected connection to a woman as impetus for self-reflection. It is through Consulate General, Chicago. a non-conventional relationship with a woman that both Freeman-Coppadge and Cioffari’s protagonist embark on the journey towards understanding Marina Cacioppo is a tenured researcher at the University of Palermo. themselves. She teaches American literature and culture, focusing on ethnic identity, Last but certainly not least, our Book Review Editor, John Paul Russo, particularly in immigrant writings from the 1890s-1930s. She has published once again has curated a diversified collection of books representing different on Italian-American detective fiction and autobiography, and her current genres and subject matter. Of particular note is Ilaria Serra’s review of Maria work, based on archival research conducted while a Fulbright scholar at the Terrone’s debut essay collection, At Home in the New World (Bordighera Press, Calandra Institute, concentrates on the Italian-language press in New York 2018). Without giving away too much, Serra characterizes Maria’s work as “a during the period of mass migration. little Italian AmericanPROOF gem,” and I, for one, could not agree more. PROOF As always, my heartfelt thanks goes out to the entire Italian Americana Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge is the fiction editor at Oyster River Pages staff, especially our section editors Maria Terrone, Christine Palamidessi and a high school English teacher. His latest work appears or is forthcoming Moore and John Paul Russo, and our exceedingly diligent and competent in More Queer Families (Qommunicate Publishing), Embark Literary editorial assistant, Thomas Slagle. Journal, and Hippocampus Magazine. He lives with his husband and their son in Maryland.

Philip Cioffari is the author of the novels: Catholic Boys; Dark Road, Dead End; Jesusville; The Bronx Kill; and the story collection, A History of Things Lost or Broken, which won the Tartt First Fiction Award, and the D.H. Lawrence Award at the University of New Mexico. He is the writer/ director of the film, Love in the Age of Dion, which won Best Feature Film at the Long Island International Film Expo, and Best Director at the NY Independent Film & Video Festival, among other film festival awards. The story, “Ladies Man,” is adapted from his new novel, If Anyone Asks, Say I Died from the Heartbreaking Blues. He is professor of English at William Paterson University. http://www.philipcioffari.com x Italian Americana Notes on Contributors xi

Our Poetry Contributors: Maryann Corbett lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and is the author of four Eamon Grennan (Leopardi translator) received the PEN Award for Poetry in books of poetry, most recently Street View (Able Muse, 2017). Her work has Translation for Selected Poems of Giacomo Leopardi (Princeton University won the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize Press, 1997) and co-translated Oedipus at Colonus (Oxford). His many and is included in The Best American Poetry 2018. A fifth book, In Code, is volumes of poetry include Still Life with Waterfall (Graywolf), awarded the forthcoming from Able Muse in 2020. Lenore Marshall Prize, and his latest, There Now (Graywolf and Gallery), winner of the 2016 Pigott Prize in the Listowel Literary Festival. He is also Dante Di Stefano is the author of Ill Angels and Love Is a Stone Endlessly the author of a book of critical essays: Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the in Flight. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in American Life 20th Century. For many years, Grennan taught at Vassar College and in the in Poetry, Best American Poetry 2018, Poem-a–Day, Prairie Schooner, The Graduate Writing programs of Columbia and NYU. Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Along with María Isabel Álvarez, he co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People: Poetic Featured Poet Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate, is the Responses to Trump’s America. author of 24 books and chapbooks of poetry; her latest collection is Other Voices, Other Lives. She has also written 26 produced plays, with Anna Elton Glaser has published eight full-length collections of poetry, most Nicole: Blonde Glory, the most recent, and Quilting the Sun opening in recently two books in 2013: Translations from the Flesh (Pittsburgh) and The NYC this fall. Cavalieri founded “The Poet and the Poem” for public radio, Law of Falling Bodies (Arkansas), winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas which she has produced and hosted for 42 years. She is the poetry columnist/ Poetry Prize. His paternal grandmother was a Lala, from Sicilian immigrants reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Among her to New Orleans. many honors are the Associated Writing Program’s “George Garrett Award,” the PEN Fiction Award, and The CPB Silver Medal. Julia Lisella’s books include Always, Terrain, and Love Song Hiroshima. Her poems appear frequently in journals and anthologies including Alaska Gabriella M. BelfiglioPROOF lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her partner, toddler, and Quarterly Review,PROOF Gravel, Ocean State Review, Nimrod, Exit 7, Salamander, four cats. She teaches self-defense, conflict resolution, karate, and tai chi to VIA and others. Most recently she co-edited the essay collection Modernist people of all ages throughout the five boroughs. Belfiglio’s poem “Erasure” Women Writers and American Social Engagement. She teaches at Regis won the W.B. Yeats Poetry Contest. Her work has been widely published College and co-curates the IAWA Reading Series in Boston. in anthologies and journals including Radius, The Centrifugal Eye, The Potomac Review, and Lambda Literary Review. www.gabriellabelfiglio.info Fred Muratori is the author of three poetry collections, the latest being A Civilization, issued by Dos Madres Press in 2014. His poems and prose Born in Perugia, Italy, and a graduate of the Catholic University of the poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Poetry, Denver Sacred Heart (Milan, Italy), Simona Carini moved to California as an adult Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, and and there graduated from Mills College (Oakland, CA). Her poetry, flash Barrow Street, among others. He is the selector for English and American nonfiction, memoir and food writing are published in several venues. She literature at the Cornell University Library. lives in Northern California and works as an academic researcher in Medical Information Science. Her website is https://simonacarini.com Joey Nicoletti’s most recent book is Boombox Serenade, which is forthcoming from BlazeVOX Press this fall. His work has appeared in various journals Janine Certo is an Italian-American poet (Calabrese & Napolitana on and anthologies, including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain, paternal side) whose poems appear or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Review, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, and other Books. A graduate of the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program, Nicoletti publications. Her debut poetry collection, In the Corner of the Living (Main teaches at SUNY Buffalo State. Street Rag, 2017), was first runner-up for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She is an associate professor at Michigan State University. Connie Post, whose maternal grandparents were born in Italy, was Poet Laureate of Livermore, California. Her work has appeared in Calyx, River Styx, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. Among her honors are the 2018 Liakoura Award and the 2016 Crab Creek Review Poetry Award. Her first full-length book, Floodwater (Glass Lyre Press, 2014) won the Lyrebird Award.

Michelle Reale is a professor at Arcadia University. She is the author of 10 poetry collections including the most recent, Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019). She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the founding and managing editor of Ovunque Siamo: New Italian- American Writing.

Jim Scutti lives in Vero Beach, Florida near the Indian River. He practiced law for 33 years, concentrating in the areas of Securities and Corporate Law prior to retiring. Now he devotes most of his time to writing poetry and fiction and reading. His poems have appeared in Comstock Review, Slant, The Main Street Rag, Common Ground Review, and FutureCycle Poetry, among other venues. Articles PROOF PROOF Florence Scala 99

Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader

Sandro Corso

Editor’s note: Florence Scala (1918–2007) was a Chicago-born Italian American woman whose life story belied the prevailing stereotypes attributed to her ethnicity and gender. In 1961, a period when Italian Americans were criticized for displaying a lack of civic engagement and Italian-American women were viewed as being confined to the domestic realm, Florence became one of the primary organizers of a campaign launched in opposition to the city of Chicago’s announced plans to demolish a large portion of the Near West Side, the city’s “Little Italy” and Florence’s home. But what began with a cause close to her heart, fueled, in Florence’s words, by “intuition and anger,” eventually transformed into a life-long commitment to community activism aimed at advocating for Chicagoans facing threats across the city. Sandro Corso’s article provides a detailed account of her life story.

Family and Education (1918–1946) Florence Scala’s father, Alex Giovangelo, was born in 1878 in Torino di Sangro (in the province of Chieti, Abruzzi) as Alessandro Giovannangelo. PROOF He arrived in PhiladelphiaPROOF in 1915, where some people from the same village already lived. In Europe World War I had broken out the previous year. Italy would join soon, and he probably wanted to avoid being drafted. Quite soon, being an independent person who did not like the limitations he felt were imposed on him by his extended family, he decided to settle elsewhere. For no particular reason he chose Chicago, where he started working in a Van Buren Street tailor shop—Scotch Woolen Mills, which was affiliated with Hart Schaffner & Marx. He started hand-sewing the lapels of men’s suits, living very frugally in the Near West Side and saving as much money as he could. Although he had socialist ideas, he was never involved in the labor movements which took root in that area. When he had made enough money, he set up a men’s tailoring business of his own on West Taylor Street with an associate. His wife, Teresa Scardapane, who in the meanwhile had arrived in Philadelphia, was able to relocate to Chicago. They lived in a boarding house with an Italian family, and she helped with the business, especially ironing. It is around that time that Florence’s father changed his surname to Giovangelo—not to make it more acceptable to the Americans, or to mark the beginning of a new life—but apparently because it was too long and he had issues with the delivery of his bills. 100 Italian Americana Florence Scala 101

Florence Catherine was born in 1918, and two brothers, Ernie Florence was contributing to the community newspaper and was introduced and Mario, followed. Her father was quite educated compared to most to congressman Roland Libonati, who managed to have her employed on immigrants: he had completed high school in Italy, was quite proficient in the draft board. She worked there for three years and met Chick (actually literacy and numeracy, had taught himself to speak and read English, and Pasquale) Scala, a man who had moved from the neighborhood to Congress was interested in such subjects as geography, astronomy, and history. Her and California but regularly visited relatives in the Near West Side, including mother, in contrast, could only speak Italian (as it was spoken in Abruzzi) Rose, one of Florence’s best friends. Florence was nineteen and Chick in his and write with difficulty. Florence and her brothers learned English when early thirties; they started to date for a while and then they married in 1942. they went to elementary school at Andrew Jackson, a few doors from 1030 After a few months he was drafted and left to serve in the Pacific theatre West Taylor, where the family moved after Alex bought out his associate’s (Burma). He came back in 1946. share and purchased a new three-story home with the shop on the first floor, and a window where he would hang his men’s suits, looking out on the street. Florence went on to High School at McKinley, at Hoyne & Adams. Early Experiences as an Activist (1946–1960) The school’s most famous alumnus is Walt Disney, who attended the school During the war many people had made money and some areas in cities, between 1917–1918 and was the school magazine cartoonist. Author and including Chicago, had been improved. But most neighborhoods—the broadcaster Studs Terkel attened McKinley as well. The school was the home Near West Side was one of those—were even worse than during the Great of the Washington Irving Society, known for its debates, literary programs, Depression. Being short of money, Florence and Chick decided to live on the and social hour gatherings, as well as for the school magazine, The Voice. second floor of the Giovangelos house at 1030 W Taylor. Chick found a job as The family lived quite a conventional life. They were not wealthy but a bartender at The Storm in the Near North, and worked till 4 a.m. Florence, led a hardworking life with a certain dignity and decorum. Their opportunities who had occupied her time taking a variety of courses and volunteering to socialize were few, due to their long work hours—Alex and his wife during her husband’s absence, got more involved in community work. rarely finished working before 9 p.m. The Giovangelos, however, would The neighborhood showed obvious signs of decay and neglect. Homes meet with their neighbors at weekends in two places: the church (first Our had gotten shabbier; some were in a condition of absentee ownership. The Lady of Pompeii andPROOF then Holy Guardian Angel) and Hull House. Florence PROOF streets were dirtier, with trash heaped at street corners and taken maybe once attended mass regularly with her mother, but she spent most of her free time in a fortnight. Businesses were less in number and less thriving, many had at Hull House. At the time Jane Addams’s Visiting Nurses paid charitable closed down as a consequence of the Depression first, and of the war just visits to immigrant families in the neighborhood to check on the health of the after. Everything was spiraling downward, including the neighborhood’s children, or to discuss such subjects as healthy habits for children. Florence youth, whose favorite pastime was to walk around with BB rifles to shoot remembered years later that on one such visit the nurses said “Oh, no!” when rats. There were also examples of poor land use, such as the establishment Teresa told them that on cold days the children would have eggnogs shaken of small manufacturing and delivery companies in residential areas, which with wine. The nurses would also invite both the children and the adults resulted in noise and traffic of big trucks pulling in and out all day. to the classes being offered at Hull House. As a teenager Florence enjoyed A few members of Hull House proposed that something be done to courses of singing, painting, drama, and dance, while her parents attended help the community. After months of discussion, in 1947 the Temporary citizenship meetings. Organizing Committee for the Redevelopment of the Near West Side was After high school, in 1936, it was quite natural for Florence to become formed, which was renamed Near West Side Planning Board in 1949. Both involved in community work through her Hull House connections. The first Florence, who was the only woman, and her brother Ernie were members job she got, for $ 50.00 a month, was in the Federal Theatre Project: “...it of the board. The objectives of the organization—the first citizen housing was a project that gave jobs to down-and-out writers and actors, dancers, committee in the Nation—were to involve ordinary people in the decisions musicians - Studs Terkel worked in the Writers’ Project.”1 The family was about urban planning, and to co-operate with city planning authorities to not wealthy enough to support sending all the children to college, so Florence implement projects of urban improvement. left the university for a time while her brother Ernie went to the University Two men were crucial in shaping Florence’s awareness as a community of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By the time World War II broke out, organizer in this period: Eri Hulbert and Saul Alinsky. Eri Baker Hulbert III 102 Italian Americana Florence Scala 103 was a nephew of Jane Addams. He was born in 1905 in Albuquerque, New on interacting with the institutions and on increasing the participation of the Mexico, and moved to Chicago with his family the following year. He spent people by educating them as a means to advance democracy. Alinsky, on the several years as a resident of Hull House and studied at the University of other hand, advocated contraposition and striking back. Florence, like Ernie, Chicago, where he received his PhD in 1932. After working in education, was an unconditional admirer of Hulbert. But she started to have doubts Hulbert took a job as Chief of Project Services for the Federal Public when the Hull House Board seemed to be willing to abandon or dissolve Housing Authority from 1942–1946. From 1946–1947, he served as chief the Near West Side Planning group. In 1955 Hulbert committed suicide, regional representative for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation and Ernie took over as Executive Secretary of the Planning group. Florence Administration in China. Back in Chicago, he was employed by Hull House was devastated. She believed that Eri’s suicide, and later Ernie’s heart and became the executive secretary for the Temporary Organizing Committee attack, were a consequence of the stress accumulated in the contraposition for the Redevelopment of the Near West Side, in 1948 and 1949. From 1949 with Hull House. When the Trustees of Hull House accepted $875,000 in until he committed suicide on May 3rd, 1955, Eri was the Director of the Near compensation from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to allow West Side Planning Board. Hulbert was also the author of several articles and the demolition of most of the Hull House buildings to make space for the pamphlets on tenant selection, race relations, relocation, and urban renewal. University campus in Chicago, Florence and Jessie Binford were the only He also gave lectures on housing and planning at the University of Chicago ones, in March, 1961, to oppose the decision. and Roosevelt University. Years later she would recognize that “Eri’s way was the wrong way. It Saul David Alinsky (1909–1972) is generally considered to be the was not the wrong way, it was actually the right way, but it was not going to founder of modern community organizing. He is often noted for his books, work. That’s where my conflict is within me, but I realize now that you’ve Reveille for Radicals (1949) and Rules for Radicals (1971). After graduating gotta play hardball from the beginning.”3 in Philosophy and majoring in Archaeology at the University of Chicago, he in the 1950s began turning his attention to ghettos, beginning with Chicago’s South Side area of Back of the Yards and later visiting ghettos in California, An Involuntary Leader (1961–1964) Michigan, New York City, and several other “trouble spots.” He was …people knew I was active with the Near West Planning Board, considered by manyPROOF a troublemaker and even a public enemy, definitions and a womanPROOF came and knocked on my door. This was when that he welcomed as his method consisted in contraposition and in arising I was in the middle of mopping my kitchen, and she said, controversy. The following passage provides a synthesis of his manifesto: “Florence, what are we going to do about our houses? Are we going to fight? Are we going to do anything?” I was mopping The American Radical will fight privilege and power whether my floor and not thinking about anything except finishing the it be inherited or acquired by any small group, whether it be mopping. political or financial or organized creed. He curses a caste system which he recognizes despite all patriotic denials. He will I said, “I don’t know, Lee.” She said, “We got to get together! fight conservatives whether they are business or labor leaders. We got to get together!” 4 He will fight concentration of power hostile to a broad, popular democracy, whether he finds it in financial circles or in politics. To make sense of the unprecedented and unexpected reaction of the The Radical recognizes that constant dissension and conflict is Halsted-Harrison fishwives—as Florence Scala’s followers were called with 2 and has been the fire under the boiler of democracy. contempt—we have to step back to early February 10, 1961, when Mayor In 1960 he co-founded with Apostolic Church Bishop Arthur M. Brazier The Richard J. Daley announced plans to build a new campus for the University Woodlawn Organization (TWO), which used confrontational tactics against of Illinois on the Near West Side. He availed himself of a law which allowed the city administration to try to tackle neighborhood decline, preserve cities to clear neighborhoods that had been previously declared “Slum and housing and open jobs for residents, contrast unfair credit practices by Blighted.” Indeed, it was the Near West Planning Board that had encouraged retailers, and preserve schools in the area. the Ward Aldermen to ask the City to designate the area as slum in order The differences between the two leaders are apparent: Hulbert relied to facilitate access to low interest loans to refurbish their homes. But now 104 Italian Americana Florence Scala 105 they felt the City had double-crossed their intentions and even betrayed 1959. If the plan was not changed, the new school would be torn down only them, as the decision to tear down a substantial part of the district came two years after it opened. The church and annexed school were in fact part of after many people had spent their own money to renovate their premises. the R-10 demolition project. A neighborhood assembly was hosted at Holy Six months earlier, when the University of Illinois had shown interest in an Guardian Church by Father Italo Scola. area in Chicago to build a campus, Father Scola of Holy Guardian, Ernie The following day, February 14, 1961, according to Chicago’s Giovangelo and 1st Ward Alderman John D’Arco went to talk to Mayor American, 500 people marched on City Hall, led by Florence Scala, but to Daley. He had denied that there was any intention to clear land in the Near no avail. By February 15 the nine trustees of the University of Illinois had West Side, as there were more convenient areas for the new UI campus, such accepted the Harrison-Halsted area for the campus construction, despite as Goose Island, Meigs Field, or Garfield Park. protests of both Near West Side and Garfield Park residents—although for For the Near West Planning Board, Daley’s announcement that the opposite reasons. In Garfield Park the campus would be welcome, and the Halsted-Harrison area was to be razed amounted to the failure of incessant residents hoped the decision would be changed. According to an editorial of efforts over the years to maintain an open dialogue with city officials, as the Austin News on February 22, “Not only is this one of the worst possible advocated by the board’s Executive Secretaries, Eri Hulbert and Ernie sites that could have been picked for the campus, but the mistake has been Giovangelo, and in accordance with the principles of democratic participation made ludicrous by putting the institution in the neighborhood that didn’t want pursued by Hull-House ever since Jane Addams started her programs. The it and denying it to the one community that had worked to get it for three Planning Board members felt exasperated, and the group just dissolved. years. If any further proof is needed that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ here it It was at that moment that Florence, yielding to the insistence of fellow is.” For Florence this was the demonstration that the citizens’ reactions had neighbors (particularly Lee Valentino) thought that stronger methods were been too weak. She therefore started her crusade as leader of the Harrison- necessary, as dialogue had not paid off. Halsted Community Group, which for months fought the city at every step. In fact, the Near West Side Neighborhood was one of the oldest Actions included picketing and putting pressure on Daley through marches residential areas in Chicago and many families had lived there for more than and protests: in October 1962 the picketing lasted a whole week. a generation. The fact that activists of the Near West Side Planning Board Most organizations and businesses in the neighborhood supported had begun co-operatingPROOF with the Housing authorities as early as 1949 to have the Harrison-HalstedPROOF group. According to a Chicago Tribune report, in the portions of the district demolished, and had accepted that it was designated month of April about fifty women (men were officially at work, but arguably first as an area to be redeveloped by rehabilitation and spot clearance (May feared retaliation from the City) took part in a sit-in at the Mayor’s office. 1956), then as a slum and blighted area in September 1956, did not imply They overthrew desks, scattered council journals on the floor, and hurled that they had ever considered that most of the neighborhood—that is, the insults at Daley. Scala told the angry crowd that the mayor was “going to part west of the Harrison-Halsted Tract with the exception of Hull House— understand what it is like to live in a real democracy.”5 would be torn down. On January 16, 1958, the Land Clearance Commission On May 22 the Chicago’s American estimated that as many as ten had adopted the Harrison-Halsted Redevelopment Plan, calling for the re- thousand people faced forced displacement. Confronted by protest, the City development as a residential area for moderate income families. The Plan decided to accelerate the tearing down program. The Committee was only was approved by the City, the State Housing Board and the Housing and successful in delaying the razing of the Guardian Angel church and school Home Finance Agency (HHFA). Four months later HHFA entered into a until after graduations, but bulldozers and wrecking balls were working loan-and-grant contract with the Land Clearance Commission for the intensely. In a short time, the district became a waste land of rubble. Over carrying out of the project. By mid-1960, most of the Tract had already been the following months, the support for the Committee crumbled. Many cleared, and some residents and business owners of the Harrison-Halsted residents negotiated compensations and accepted relocation. The trustees of Tract had relocated to adjacent areas with the expectation of returning after Hull House, despite the strong opposition of Jessie Binford and Florence the neighborhood had been redeveloped. Some of the residents had even Scala, accepted compensation and renounced any action. Rev. Italo Scola of contributed to the building of the new Holy Guardian Angel parish school, Guardian Angel was removed, so the Committee was deprived of the support replacing the one that had been destroyed for being in the path of the South of the parish. The archdiocese refused to back the Committee. Monsignor Expressway, which was completed and inaugurated by Mayor Daley in Egan, who had played a role in the South Side movement, told Florence 106 Italian Americana Florence Scala 107

Scala that he did not think the situation of the Italian community was residential redevelopment area, and 3) this proposed re- comparable to the black districts: “You’re not going to have any problems designation of the land use infringes upon the individual rights in relocating: you’re not black people. Black people have problems in granted by the Constitution by arbitrarily removing private relocation; you’re going to be able to move anywhere and everywhere you taxable property from the tax rolls and consigning it to the State. want,” was his reply.6 Cardinal Meyer appeared to have both favorable and unfavorable advisors, so he took no standing. Even Saul Alinsky, who had As the protest letter had no effect, the complainants decided to sue the been successful in organizing the residents’ protest in the Back of the Yards Illinois State Housing Board, authorizing a committee of attorneys “to bring area, accepted to meet Florence but turned down her proposal to join the a suit either in the nature of injunction, an action of declaratory judgement, Committee. Many businesses, including some which received visits from or otherwise, as they in their discretion deem best to restrain any unlawful 7 City inspectors to have a very close look at their activities, accepted $25,000 taking or depreciation of property values.” They considered the team of compensation to move. Despite faltering support and indecision, Florence Leon Shapiro and Rugen, Lightenberg & Goebl, who offered their services realized that there was only one direction to take, and it was forward. for an initial estimate of $15,000, but eventually hired Overton, Marks, Simons & Houghtelling, who had their studio at 105, West Adams St. They agreed not to hold individual plaintiffs liable to them for legal fees, Court Litigation and Political Commitment (1961–1963) but rather for donations to the Harrison-Halsted Community Group, Inc., The Harrison-Halsted Community Group considered the idea of taking the and filed a 139 pages suit on behalf of the Harrison-Halsted Community litigation to Court, namely to the Federal Court of Appeal and to the Illinois Group, which had been incorporated as an Illinois not-for-profit corporation Supreme Court, in an attempt to invalidate the land transaction from the and designated representative of all 282 individual plaintiffs. About half of City to the University of Illinois, on the grounds that residents would lose them were residents or had businesses in the area, and 104 owned property. their property without just compensation, that inadequate provisions were Other individual plaintiffs were listed as parties plaintiff because of their made for relocating families, that much of the area could not be classed as reliance on past promises. George Overton’s strategy was to file a suit for slums under the federal clearance laws, and that the City had broken faith declaratory judgement and injunction in the US District Court, and resist the PROOF condemnation proceedingsPROOF started by the local Urban Renewal authorities in with them by switching plans to redevelop their area for residential use to conversion for a campus. Also, members of the Black and Mexican minority the State Courts. groups were at that time extensively discriminated against in housing, and the As a whole, the proceeding was rather twisty. The Housing University site project would force them out of the area with no possibility Committee of the Chicago City Council held a hearing on the protesters of finding homes in unsegregated areas. on April 13, 1961. They were permitted to make statements, but not to The litigation officially started with a letter to the City of Chicago, subpoena documents or cross-examine City and Land Clearance officials. which was circulated among residents to sign, days after Mayor Daley’s The hearing had no effect, as on May 22, 1961 the Chicago City Council announcement about the plans to clear the district—instead of redeveloping issued ordinances approving the University site project plans. The State it for residential use of low-income families. The protesters articulated Housing Board, however, announced it would hold hearings of its own on their complaint in a declaratory form, which echoes the incipit of the US the designations of Roosevelt-Blue Island and Congress-Racine Tracts. It Constitution: was agreed, upon demand of the Harrison-Halsted Committee, that they would produce and cross-examine witnesses, both for the City and the Land We, the undersigned, as Citizens of the State of Illinois and of the Clearance Commission. The hearing by the State Housing Board convened United States of America, protest the selection of the Harrison- on July 21, 1961. On July 27, after less than two days of testimony and Halsted Community in Chicago, Illinois, for the University of before objectors had an opportunity to present their evidence, the Board Illinois Campus Site because: 1) it will disrupt the family life, abruptly truncated the hearing. Objectors petitioned for a new hearing, but ruin the small businesses, destroy schools and the Hull House the Board announced the University site project plans had been approved in the City; 2) it will endanger the total National urban renewal and submitted to the HHFA for final approval. The objectors filed briefs with program which is supported by the tax dollars of all Americans – HHFA, but its administrator ignored them. Finally, on March 21, 1962, the since the Harrison-Halsted Community is a properly designated administrator of HHFA announced to the press that he had not only approved 108 Italian Americana Florence Scala 109 the projects, but also entered into loan-and-grant contracts. On April 20, that questions arising from the taking of property by condemnation for State 1962, the suit was filed to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, purposes are ordinarily matters for determination by the State courts, and adds which rendered its opinion on November 28 of the same year. that the defendants, (HHFA, the Chicago Community Conservation Board, The final decision of Judge Duffy was anticipated by the opinion of the Chicago Plan Commission, the Illinois State Housing Board) were non- Judge James B. Parsons of the District Court in two opinions issued May suable in that they were “administrative departments of the government,” 21 and, following presentation of an amended complaint, June 11, 1962. and therefore “not truly juridical persons but are strictly representatives of In his preliminary remarks, the Judge stated that the case called him to the government, who may not be sued in evasion of sovereign immunity.” find a conciliation between two compelling principles: on the one hand the He ruled that the community group “failed to raise a substantial federal consideration that in “a Giant and Growing City [that] must continually question” to justify the federal suit, as “questions arising from the taking revise itself” one cannot hold back ages at a time when, within a generation, of property by condemnation for State purposes are ordinarily matters for people would be subscribing for commercial flights to the moon and give determination by the State courts.”9 up their homes—a treasure which was the fruit of past efforts—to make The case was therefore brought to the Supreme Court for writ of space for Moon Ports and airborne private vehicles; on the other hand, the certiorari. The opinion of the Court was rendered of February 26, 1963. The democratic values and civil liberties that guarantee that the government Judges concentrated their attention on the question whether the condemned will not transform itself into a tyranny for the citizens as individuals, which land was in fact slum and blighted. The other objections raised were defined include the right of fair play from the government, the process of the law, the “extraneous issues,” on the grounds that the claim to hearings or reviewing right not to be deprived of property, and that if this is necessary for public regarding the designation of an area, or the use of the land after confiscation, use, that a compensation is given in dollars and cents. In his decision, Judge was not recognized by law. The Court argued that more than half of the Parsons states that he will refrain from solving the serious conflict, “for to Near West Side showed “dilapidation, obsolescence, overcrowding, faulty do so would be to deal in philosophy and political theory, and not in law,” arrangement or design, lack of ventilation, light and sanitary facilities, and although he shows sympathy with the fine citizens who presented the excessive land coverage, deleterious land use or layout” and was therefore complaint, he affirms that no substantial federal question is presented, and detrimental to the public safety, health, morals, and welfare as “slum and that the District CourtPROOF may take jurisdiction only if the Circuit Court of Cook blight walk hand PROOFin hand with juvenile delinquency, spread of contagious County had been empowered.8 Plaintiffs, however, insisted that the District diseases, crime and immorality.”10 As regards the rights of the petitioners, Court had jurisdiction of the suit as per Section 10 of the Administrative the judges argued that the rights of a group of citizens (the residents) cannot Procedure Act, and that they had standing to raise the question of federal be substituted to the public interest. They concluded that “no substantial law as the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) had violated a series error was committed and the judgements of the circuit court of Cook County of provisions of the federal Housing Act and the regulations and directives, are affirmed.” depriving them of their property without due process of law and without just A short time thereafter also the Court of Appeals returned to the subject, compensation. in response to a writ for certiorari after Judge Duffy’s pronouncement. Judge F. Ryan Duffy in his opinion of November 28, 1962, showed Solicitor General Archibald Cox reported the previous rulings, and argued again some sympathy with the plaintiffs as he recognized there had been a that, in substance, the complaint was not about the project, but that it had breach of faith by various public officials, resulting in an abrupt change in been accomplished without proper regard of the people most directly plans from a typically urban renewal plan to the campus project. However, interested. As regards the standing to sue issue, he voiced quite surprising he held that the plaintiffs did not have a right to judicial review of the Agency considerations: action, pursuant to Section 10 of the Administrative Procedure Act, as they had presented no objection, and in fact favored, the original slum clearance Other and perhaps more important practical considerations program, but voiced vigorous objections when the plan for redevelopment of counsel against testing the issue of standing in this case. One the area was changed from residential and commercial uses to the University cannot overlook the enormous consequences of halting the of Illinois-Chicago campus project, because it would better serve the interests present project at this late stage. One of the areas involved, of the community, but that the public interest prevailed. Finally, he stated the Harrison-Halsted tract, is now almost fully cleared. Commitments have been made. Federal funds totaling almost 110 Italian Americana Florence Scala 111

3 million dollars have already been expended. A reversal of the the dirt and dust of urban renewal,” as M.W. Newman put it.13 Florence and plan, or even a prolonged delay, would result in extravagant Jessie forcibly accepted defeat this time. Florence Scala told reporters that waste and serious economic injury to innocent third parties. /…/ she was through with politics. She added that she was proud “of the manner neither can we properly ignore the confusion and disorder that in which the community met the challenge with dignity and understanding will ensue if the program is further held up. 11 of the fundamental issues” and that she would go on helping them to accept the forces of change and relocate. The long legal battle had cost $35,000, and It is not surprising that such considerations were not accepted by petitioners. they still had $800 to raise to pay for bills and legal costs. Jessie Binford, In substance, they were told “yes, you may have been right, but now it’s too whose residence had been pulled down, was by this time eighty-five and late so injustice may go on.” And not all lawyers agreed with the conclusions utterly disappointed. She was the daughter of a Quaker who had co-founded 12 of the Courts. The Yale Law School professor, Jan Deutsch, asked George the city of Marshalltown in Iowa: she would retire and try to put her life Overton if he would give him the trial records in 1967. At the time he was together there. Florence would not return soon to her home, which had been starting his distinguished career and needed it to use in a lecture. Overton, on bombed and gave her the “heebie jeebies.”14 authorization of Florence Scala, sent him the voluminous records. Meanwhile, Ernie had gotten married and occupied the back flat in 1030 West Taylor, until the family moved to California. This allowed Florence The Aftermath and the Restaurant Years (1964–1990) and Chick to use the second floor of 1030 West Taylor. Chick worked as a bartender at a fashionable Rush Street bar, The Storm, and was generally ...finally I began to see he was making it into a nice little place, back around 4 a.m. Florence was able to devote time to the Committee and then I began to study Italian cookbooks. I didn’t know a during the day, and assisted her mother, whose bedroom was next to hers. damn thing about it. I didn’t know a damn thing so I had to learn. 15 One night a pipe bomb went off on the Giovangelos’ door steps. The police told her that the house would be patrolled. There was little damage, but it As of April 1, 1963, the lodgings at Hull House had to be vacated by order was a warning. A few nights later a more powerful bomb destroyed the back of the City. Jessie Binford and Florence were the last to leave the building. porch, broke the windowPROOF glasses, and the door of the first-floor room where Jessie died shortlyPROOF thereafter. Florence spent some time trying to put her life Alex slept was blown in. He was really scared; he had no doubts that it was together, everyday walking her dogs to contemplate from behind the barriers somebody who did not like Florence’s commitment, as this happened the the ruins of her neighborhood, with a few distant fires here and there. She week following the day-and-night picketing of the City Hall offices. Alex did go back to live at 1030 West Taylor, where her parents and siblings told her daughter that the situation was not sustainable for an elderly couple: still lived. Her parents, both in their 80s now, needed assistance. Ernie still he was eighty-two, and his wife was ill and confined to bed for most of the worked for the City and momentarily occupied the rear flat with his family day. Florence and Chick joined Jessie Binford as residents at Hull House, until he relocated to California in 1986. Mario was working for the Pullman whose buildings were among the last still standing. Every morning she went company, had purchased a home in Lexington and would go to live there. to assist her mother, but at night the assistance was provided by Alex. A Chick still worked as a bartender in the Near North Side. Although Florence couple of months later, Alex asked Florence to move back home. One night had announced she was through with politics, she was not really able to be after Florence left, and Jessie Binford was out, bulldozers were sent to tear idle—1963 was characterized by contrasting signs of hope and tragedy in down the Hull House buildings. the US, in particular for civil rights. In February 1963 there were polls for the 1st Ward Alderman. Florence The Civil Right movement was taking strength in the Chicago South ran as a write-in candidate. She was badly defeated, with a proportion of 9 Side. Martin Luther King had established strong links with Chicago. In to 1. That was another blow; confirmation that the community had turned its 1956 (less than two weeks after his family home in Montgomery, Ala., back on the Committee. was bombed) he uttered a sermon at Chicago’s Shiloh Baptist church, On May 13, 1963, the US Supreme Court finally ruled against Scala which he called “A Knock at Midnight,” calling on churches to be active and Binford. At the time, only a few families still lived in the neighborhood, in times of crisis. Florence had met him at this time, when the West Side which looked like a bombed landscape: “In what is left of the neighborhood, Planning Organization invited him. On that occasion the black members of disgusted people pick their way amid broken glass bricks, debris fires and the Organization “questioned him very carefully about what he wanted to 112 Italian Americana Florence Scala 113 do there, they made it clear that he was coming into their turf... King was In 1976, at age ninety-eight, Alex Giovangelo passed away. Two months quickly put in notice that, sure, he would be able to get cooperation from later Teresa passed too, without even being aware that her husband had died. this community, but he would have to understand that they would have to Florence lost her job as a picture editor for Encyclopedia Britannica (which work together as equals in this setup. He accepted that; he said: Oh yes, I she never liked, though) and started working as a volunteer coordinator for do understand I’m coming as a guest.”16 A decade later (January 7, 1966) he the Department of Mental Health. She enjoyed that job, as her task was would rent an apartment in North Lawndale, as part of his project to take the coordinating the district hospitals in the State. But when her parents were movement north, and merged with Al Raby’s Civil Rights movement in the gone, and Chick lost his job as a bartender, she started to regret spending the South Side to give life to the Chicago Freedom Movement. best years of her life fighting, and not spending time with her loved ones. But it was the assassination of JFK on November 22 that year that What’s more, troubles never come alone. Mario lost his job at Pullman, and pushed her to overcome disillusionment and to get back to action. The fight Chick lost his. Also, she found that before being a tailor shop, the premises for the Harrison-Halsted was over, but there were other civil cases to support at the first floor of 1030 Taylor Street hosted a tavern. All circumstances and defend. She made contact with members of the Black community in seemed to lead her to open a restaurant, and that’s exactly what she did. They Roosevelt Road, where there was unrest due to plans to tear down the did almost all the work themselves, using old woodwork from Hull House, neighborhood around the Maxwell Street market. She started to attend the buying furniture, dishes and silverware at restaurants which had to close West Side Christian Parish and proposed herself as a community organizer. (notably Toffanetti on Randolph). Mario (who had a knack for the visual The IVI (Independent Voters of Illinois) and the IPO (Independent Precinct arts) did the stained glass and painted a very nice mural: a view of Florence Organization) accepted to support her—it was the only way to have an from Michelangelo Square. The name of the restaurant was quickly decided: organized support against the Machine. In August 1963 she took part in the Florence. They employed a cook and opened in 1980. The investment was big Washington demonstration for the Civil Rights. Now she was happy to $50,000, compared to the $300,000 it would take hadn’t they done all the take part in the protest, and meet White House staff with members of her work. Florence did the supervising and worked in the kitchen. Mario did the group, and explain the situation in Chicago. dining room, he sat people, took orders, and served at tables. Chick poured She decided to run again for Alderman. She campaigned in wine at the back of the restaurant. The family was re-united. predominantly BlackPROOF precincts, not all of them friendly, and some became Finally, she seemedPROOF to have succeeded to put her life together. She was threatening after the Marquette Park march in August 1966, where able to see all friends, and look back to the fighting years from a distance. Martin Luther King was hit and knocked down by a rock hurled by white She had been defeated twice in Court proceedings and twice in the race for supremacists. She took part in all the setup but did not take part in that Alderman. But she had no regrets. To a journalist of the Chicago Sun-Times Chicago march. She was scared. It was a hard campaign, which gave the she said: “We lost the things we went after, but we helped to open the courts impression of being close—the chief TV commentator, anchorman Len to these iniquities. In that respect, I would say it was not a loss. And we O’Connor, recognized that she was ‘putting up a good fight’ against banker came so early as a group, before the civil rights movement. We were a model Perrillo—but she lost again, although she was able to get a third of the votes. for other community groups, black or white, to fight regardless. We at least In April 1968, in the aftermath of King’s assassination in Memphis, stood up and said: ‘No, you did it wrong.’”18 She was especially happy when rioting erupted in the Southside, in the Robert Brooks homes area. “I she met her old friends. Studs was one of the most affectionate. In 1967 he remember I was washing my windows on the stairs and I just heard these had written a dedication to her on one of the most successful books of his, cars going up and down the street with their horns honking and people very Division Street, America (1967), which read: “To Florence - The heroine upset, everybody with their lights on showing identification with the fact of this book - Jane Addams and Jessie Binford still live - in you. With deep that they were protesting...”.17 She went to Shiloh Baptist Church to see what admiration, gratitude and affection, Studs.” These feelings would not be was happening, but she was told by a friend that white people were not diminished by time. Again in 1980, on the internal cover of the copy of his welcome. Again, she was scared. She went home and never came back. For American Dreams: Lost and Found he presented to her, he wrote: a second time, and this time for good, she was defeated and disillusioned. For Florence Pictures of this time show she began gaining weight. This time she did not Oh Florence, how often you’ve announce she would leave politics. She just did. been the heroine in my works. 114 Italian Americana Florence Scala 115

You are what all the possibilities of Geyer in the Chicago Scene, titled her article “The Heritage of Jane Addams: the human race is all Florence Scala Fills the Void.” And if Florence could not avoid listening to about. With love, unsolicited compliments, she could not help feeling embarrassed. Studs. For a long time, every time Chicago movements rose against City Although the restaurant kept her busy all day, she never abandoned her fight planning, her name was mentioned. In 1992, for example, The Lake Calumet for justice, though, even if her fight was reduced to a lower scale. Steven residents protested against a $10.8 billion plan for an airport, which implied Giovangelo told me that her rebellious spirit emerged if she was provoked, razing homes and businesses. She felt too old to take the lead of movements, both publicly and in private. She identified Latinos, especially Mexican, as but she was always happy to assist, encourage, and advise. To Patrick Reardon the most neglected immigrant community. She hired Mexican personnel of the Chicago Tribune she confirmed that she had no regrets: “I never felt it in her restaurant, in particular a cook. Once she heard two customers was not worth it. It was worth it to lose that naive way of looking at things, to speaking disrespectfully of the Mexican boy in a southern Italian dialect know that you always have to be suspicious and prepare for the worst when 20 she understood, and she rebuked them harshly. They never dared to show you’re dealing with politicians.” disrespect to the Mexican boy again. She often took care personally of the One of her last fights, in 2001, was in favor of the Roosevelt library, staff: as they could not speak English, she would go with them to city offices, with a very difficult access as its door was on the highway, to relocate it on or to Court to explain traffic incidents. But this period of her life came to Tailor Street. She got involved in the project, and for the first time she joined a a natural end. Chick died in 1986, while sitting on an armchair watching community group after the Harrison-Halsted days. But she felt the energy that a ball game. She began feeling guilty for not having spent more time with had animated her during the protest and the restaurant years was no longer the him. Mario was beginning to feel dissatisfied with the job, “he loved and same. It became clear that her real fight was against cancer. She passed away hated it.” Again, she was haunted by doubts. Maybe she was just aging and on August 28, 2007. needed time for herself. The restaurant closed in 1990. Notes Death and LegacyPROOF (1991–2007) 1 Scala, Florence. “FlorencePROOF Scala”, in Eastwood, Carolyn (ed.). Near West Side Stories: Struggles for Community in Chicago’s Maxwell Street Neighborhood. My father and mother believed in it when they came to this Chicago:Lake Claremont Press, 2002, p. 148. country, was that no matter what happened, in the end, right was 2 going to prevail. It’s just hard to come to grips with the fact that Saul D. Alinski, Reveille for Radicals, Un. of Chicago Press, 1946, p. 25. it isn’t always so. It isn’t. 19 3 Scala, Florence, op. cit., p. 178. 4 Unlike back in 1964, when she tasted the bitterness of defeat, in the Scala, Florence, op. cit., p.166. restaurant years she tasted victory. Not only many of her friends who had 5 “Florence Scala 1918-2007”, The Chicago Tribune, August 29, 2007, p. 12. left the neighborhood, but also some of her former foes came to eat at her 6 Scala, Florence, op. cit., p. 175. restaurant. Mayor J. Daley, who had succeeded his father, was one of them. 7 Some developed a totally new relation with her. Joe D’Angelo, a lawyer she Florence Scala Collection at Richard Daley Library, University of Illinois at held responsible with working with Daley to implement the UIC project, Chicago, Special Collections, Box 2, Folder 3. told to her he had been inspired by her to try and save at least a part of 8 Memorandum Opinion and Order of the District Court Dismissing the the West Side district. Monsignor Egan, who had denied his help in 1961, Amended Complaint, entered June 11, 1962 (Appendix C). publicly said he regretted he had not helped Florence Scala. She always 9 Chicago Daily News, November 29, 1962, p.3. played down compliments, however. There were a number of articles which 10 credited her (alas too late) for what she had done. Previously only Studs The Supreme Court of the United States, no. 861, October Term, 1962. Terkel had regularly extolled her story in his books in which she emerges as Harrison-Halsted Community Group, Inc., et al., Petitioners, v. Housing And his absolute heroine, among other unknown Chicago heroes. Georgie Anne Home Finance Agency et al., on Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. 116 Italian Americana Florence Scala 117

11 Ibid. “Call It ‘Poor Judgment’: Residents Shocked, Angry at U. of I. Site Decision”. The Garfieldian, February 15, 1961. 12 Deutsch was born in Katowice, Silesia, Poland in 1936. After receiving a B.A., Ph.D., and J.D. from Yale, he clerked with Justice Potter Stewart and Catrambone, Kathy and Shubard, Ellen. “Researching Taylor Street: practiced law at Jones, Day, Cockley & Reavis in Cleveland from 1964 to Chicago’s Little Italy”, in Candeloro, Dominic and Gardaphé, Fred L. 1966 with future Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and joined the Yale (eds.) Reconstructing Italians in Chicago. Chicago:Casa Italia, 2003. Law faculty in 1966. He was a long-time professor in Yale Law School until “Church Must Move Again for U. of I.”. Chicago’s American, February 11, he became Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law Emeritus and Professorial 1961, p.3. Lecturer at that school. Deutsch’s two most famous published works are “Florence Scala’s Fight: Renewal without Representation”. U.S. Catholic Selling the People’s Cadillac: The Edsel and Corporate Responsibility (Yale 30, July 1964, pp. 20-25. University Press, 1976), a diagnosis of social ills as seen through the lens of a failed automobile, and a 1969 article, “Neutrality, Legitimacy, and the Candeloro, Dominic. Italians in Chicago 1945-2005. Charleston:Arcadia, Supreme Court: Some Intersections Between Law and Political Science,” 20 2010. Stan. L. Rev. 169, on fundamental rights vs. opinions. He died on May 19, DiStasi, Lawrence. “How World War II Iced Italian American Culture”, in 2016. DiStasi, Lawrence (ed). Una Storia Segreta. The Secret History of 13 “A Tragedy Called Progress Stalks UI Stalks Site,” Chicago Daily News, Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II. April 6, 1963, p.6. Berkeley:Heyday, 2001, 303-312. 14 Chicago’s American, May 14, 1963, p.7. “Editorial Note,” Hull House Social Service Review 36, no. 2, June 1962, pp.123-127. 15 Scala, Florence, op. cit., p.190. “Florence Scala, on UIC’s encroachment into the Little Italy neighborhood”, 16 Scala, Florence, op. cit., p. 187–8. youtube.com/watch?v=bxvYNOSCzCM , Web 06.14.2019. 17 Florence had visited the capital city as a young girl, on invitation of Eleanor PROOF “Florence Scala talksPROOF with Studs Terkel Part 1”, studsterkel.wfmt.com/ Roosevelt, whom she met on the occasion of a visit to Hull House. When programs/florence-scala-talks-studs-terkel-part-1 , Web 06.14.2019. Florence came back home she told her family that she could not believe that in Washington the blacks had to change sidewalk if they met whites, but could “Florence Scala talks with Studs Terkel Part 2”, studsterkel.wfmt.com/ not do anything about that. programs/florence-scala-talks-studs-terkel-part-2 , Web 06.14.2019 18 Chicago Sun-Times, July 5, 1982, p. 7. Geyer, Anne Georgie. “The Heritage of Jane Addams: Florence Scala fills the Void”. Chicago Scene, January 1964, pp. 22–27. 19 Scala, Florence, op. cit., p. 196. “Hull House Fights Razing for Campus”. Chicago’s American, February 11, 20 “Neighborhoods fight over new airport has familiar ring to it,” Chicago 1961, p.3. Tribune. March 2, 1992, p. 12. “Interview with Florence Scala” studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interview- florence-scala?t=NaN%2CNaN&a=%2C , Web 06.14.2019. Works Cited Leach, Tom. “Women Join in March at City Hall.” Chicago’s American, Alinski, Saul. Reveille for Radicals. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, February 14, 1961, p.10. 1946. Oppenheim, Carol. “How 10,000 Face Eviction.” Chicago’s American, May Alinski, Saul D. Rules for Radicals. A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. 22, 1961, p. 6. New York:Random House, 1971. “Neighborhood’s fight over new Airport has familiar ring to it”. Chicago “Civic Groups to Protest U. of I. Site.” Chicago’s American, February 11, Tribune, March 2, 1992, p.12. 1961, p.1, 3. Scala, Florence. “Florence Scala”, in Eastwood, Carolyn (ed.) Near West 118 Italian Americana Curious Victories 119

Side Stories: Struggles for Community in Chicago’s Maxwell Street “Curious Victories”: The Famous Murder Case Neighborhood. Chicago:Lake Claremont Press, 2002, 119-197. of Maria Barbella and Italian-American Women “Studs Terkel interviews Florence Scala” encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/ pages/410114.html , Web 06.14.2019 in the Press Between the 1890s and 1910s Terkel, Studs. Division Street: America. New York:Pantheon Books, 1967. Terkel, Studs. American Dreams: Lost and Found. New York:Ballantine Marina Cacioppo Books, 1980. Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy “UI Campus for W. Side Nearer As Court Acts.” The Chicago Daily News, November 29, 1962, p. 3. In the early period of Italian immigration to the United States, women were “We’re Not Discouraged” [editorial]. The Austin News, February 22, 1961, almost invisible. Emigration itself was a preeminently male experience; p.1 women had a subordinate and ancillary position, typically following their husbands or relatives after a few years to help with the household and “West Side Site Selected for U. of I. Campus.” Chicago’s American, February generate supplementary domestic income. It was taken for granted that 11, 1961, p.1. these women were silent and passive presences moving in the background, United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit, no. 13860, Nov. 28, 1962. confined as they were to the private sphere, constrained by patriarchal Old Harrison-Halsted Community Group, Inc., et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, World codes of behavior and often victims of abuse. v. Housing And Home Finance Agency et al., Defendants-Appellees. In stark contrast, American women—the “New Woman,” the reform The Supreme Court of the United States, no. 861, October Term, 1962. movement women, the suffragists, cycling women—were continually at the Harrison-Halsted Community Group, Inc., et al., Petitioners, v. center of attention of the newly born popular press, or yellow press, which Housing And Home Finance Agency et al., on Petition for a Writ was concerned with their ideas about politics and alcohol consumption, their of CertiorariPROOF to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh fashion, if they shouldPROOF practice a sport and if so which one, what they should Circuit [includes Brief for the Respondents, Reply Brief of Petitioners, wear while cycling, what they liked to read, etc. Effectively, women were a Supplement of Petition for Writ of Certiotari, Appendices to Petition new audience for the new press. for Writ of Certiotari]. Indeed, the lives and stories of some Italian women were brought to the public’s attention when they became protagonists in sensational murder cases featured in both Italian and mainstream papers which otherwise virtually ignored them. The stories of these abused women, who rebelled and killed their abusers and oppressors and then were acquitted or pardoned, show a fascinating picture of individuals who are able to exercise a certain degree of agency and, in a curious way, change the course of their lives. In my research on the Italian-American press, I was surprised to find six similar cases between 1887 and 1911: Maria Barbella (1895–96), the subject of this article, is the most famous one, but there are also the lesser known cases of Chiara Cignarale1 (1886–88), Pasqualina Robertiello2 (1891), Giuseppina Terranova3 (1906), Antonietta Tolla4 (1905–06) and Angelina Napolitano5 (1911). These cases, which I first located in Italian-American newspapers such as L’Eco d’Italia, Cristoforo Colombo, and Il Progresso Italo-Americano, also found space in the mainstream press; their emergence coincided with the rise of yellow journalism, and with Hearst and Pulitzer fighting for a bigger audience by producing more and more sensational 120 Italian Americana Curious Victories 121 news. These stories were sensational because they epitomized the clash of excuse of showing her his new apartment on East 13th Street, he throws her immigrant and mainstream cultures, but they were also able to capture the to the ground and rapes her again. At this point, she knows that there is no attention of feminists, who saw in these disenfranchised, ignorant women going back to her parents. The two live together for a month until that fateful the embodiment of social oppression, as well as racists and nativists, who April 26, the day of the murder. Maria loves him, in spite of everything, saw in them the incarnation of a menacing genetic degeneracy. These stories and relentlessly tries to convince him to marry her; but, as time goes by, created a contentious ground over which ideas, beliefs, and stereotypes of it becomes clear that he is seeing other women and, consequently, has no the time came together in dialectic proximity, catalyzing new alliances as intention of marrying her. During this time, he has become more and more well as discursive formations. violent and abusive and, on that morning, he announces that he is going back On April 27, 1895, Maria Barbella, 22 years old from Ferrandina in to Italy that night and leaves the house to go to the Tavolacci bar on 13th Basilicata, violently enters the public scene in the pages of all the New York Street. Desperate, Maria follows him to the saloon where he is playing cards dailies (the Times, the Journal, the Herald, the World, L’Araldo Italiano, with another Italian and asks him again to marry her. The answer, “Pigs get L’Eco d’Italia, Il Progresso Italo-Americano): married, I don’t,” is the last straw (“He Invited His Death” 11). After the killing, she calmly goes back home to change her clothes and waits for the she threw her right arm about his head, grasping it firmly, and police. drawing it back. With the other hand she drew the razor across his neck. She pressed the steel into the flesh with her thick powerful hands. (“He Invited His Death” 11)

It is the climactic moment of the sordid story of Maria Barbella, a “short, dumpy and flat faced…tailoress” who was “without the slightest pretentions of comeliness,” and Domenico Cataldo, a “worthless bootblack,” “the man who wronged her” that was presented in the style of a lurid melodrama (“Killed the Man WhoPROOF Wronged Her” 6). When Maria meets Domenico on PROOF her way back from work in November 1893, she is living at 163 Elizabeth Street with her parents and siblings who had emigrated eleven months before. She has never been courted before, so she is flattered. Domenico presents himself as quite a catch: he claims that he has a thousand dollars in the bank and is ready to settle down with the right woman. After a few casual encounters in the street, she allows him to escort her home, and he proposes to her. She has no reason not to believe him, but he keeps making excuses not to meet her parents, to the point that her father forbids her to see him. She changes her place of work to avoid running into him, and they do not see each other for over a year. In March 1895, the love story resumes. He convinces her that he has missed her greatly, and they start going out again in secret. One afternoon, he convinces her to go to a saloon with him and offers her a soda. The drink must have been spiked and, the next thing she knows, she wakes to find herself in bed with Domenico in a room upstairs from the saloon. Maria is Recorder April, 27 1895 dishonored now, and she demands to be married immediately. He convinces her to go home that night, promising that he will get an apartment and All the newspapers in New York and across the entire Northeast, eventually marry her. Three days later, when they meet again, she insistently both Italian and mainstream, covered Maria’s story in all its sordid and asks him to come clean with her parents and to marry her, but with the gory details. After the fact, Maria is presented as unaffected by the brutality 122 Italian Americana Curious Victories 123 of the murder, as calm as could be in the police station, telling the story by their reporter—but, they argue, this is precisely why she should be unemotionally to the writer and journalist, Bernardino Ciambelli, who was acquitted of the murder because she can bear no individual responsibility for acting as an interpreter. For the New York Times, “in her demeanor, she is the her actions (“Maria Barbera” 1). Here, the terms of the rhetorical opposition personification of vengeance satisfied” (“Maudlin Sentiment in Parallel” 16). are reversed: Italy is the origin of Civilization itself, and America is the place For the reporter from the World, she looks “satisfied with her work,” does of blood-thirsty barbarism, epitomized in lynchings, such as those of 1891 in not understand what the fuss is about, and feels her actions were “just and New Orleans, and the rampant use of capital punishment. The article states: right” and that “no harm could come to her.” Maria and her community—her “quando un paese che osa proclamarsi grande e libero crede nell’efficacia “friends” who had heard about the killing but “did not think it strange” (“He dell’assassinio legale e vede di buon occhio il linciaggio non si può avere Invited His Death” 11)—are represented as being wrapped up in a primitive, fede in una giustizia . . . che è la negazione di ogni equità” (“When a country Old World mentality of righteous vengeance that supersedes the laws of which dares to proclaim itself great and free believes in the effectiveness of the State, an alternative culture that, to the eyes of the American public, legalized murder and approves of lynching, we cannot trust in a justice . . . threatened the very fabric of society from the inside. For the yellow press, that negates all equality”; “Povera Barbera!” 1).9 In fact, it is only when the Maria’s sordid story presents an opportunity for higher sales as it strikes a trial goes horribly wrong and Maria is sentenced to death by electrocution chord with the American public whose interest in “The Other Half”6 had that Italian papers start organizing mass meetings to sign petitions and raise recently been piqued by the work of Jacob Riis and others. money for her. From the very beginning, newspapers mobilize a rhetoric of savagery vs. civilization, vendetta vs. justice, epitomized by the accidental change of Maria’s last name from Barbella to Barberi7 (barbarian); this rhetoric becomes even more marked after July 11 as the trial begins and Cesare Lombroso’s recently published theories are used to describe her as a born criminal. The whole trial centers on the criminal rather than on the crime, in perfect keeping with the theories of positivist criminology of the Lombroso school,PROOF which also contended that “race served as an essential PROOF element to the etiology of deviancy” and that “the dangerousness of an individual was evaluated through his/her evolutionary development.” Her presumed animalistic and primitive characteristics are put under scrutiny and highlighted by the press (Wong 48). When she first appears in court, the Herald stresses the “predominance of the animal nature. Her jaws are heavy, the forehead is low and the ears stand out prominently”; she is presented as a confirmation of Lombroso’s theories on female offenders and thus obviously guilty of the murder (“Maria Barberi on the Stand” 5).8 These characteristics are naturalized as indicators of criminality and are applied to Italians in general in their assumed criminal inclinations. While Italian newspapers such as the Araldo decry such generalizations, they do not counter the idea that Barberi, herself, is a “natural” criminal; instead, they even emphasize her degenerate qualities in order to further their agenda of unconditionally defending the Italian people and civilization. For them, Maria is by no means the product of Italian blood and culture, a heroine of the code of honor and revenge. Instead, she is a degenerate individual who fits all Lombrosian physical and psychological characteristics New York World, November 21, 1896 of the born criminal, as Maria’s mother herself confirms when interviewed 124 Italian Americana Curious Victories 125

The trial was a farce. A bored jury listened to the monotone voice of an incompetent interpreter; Maria looked like she was in a trance and did not understand what was going on around her: “She might just as well have been a deaf mute for all knowledge she has of the whole court proceedings,” wrote one reporter (“Maria Barberi Guilty” 1); the public defender, Amos Evans, chose the wrong line of defense and decided to play the culture card in an attempt to evoke sympathy (Ferraro 17); Judge Goff instructed the jury to boil the judgment down to the issue of premeditation, excluding all mitigating circumstances (such as provocation) and most of the witnesses in her favor, leaving the jurors with only one possible outcome: convicting her of murder in the first degree, which at that moment meant death by electrocution. Immediately after the conviction, though, Maria received a landslide of public support. The only voice against this nearly unanimous backing was the New York Times, which dismissed all this solidarity as “maudlin sentimentality” and defined Maria and her relatives as a “dangerous type” from a dangerous “class and family” (Editorial 4). Aligned on Maria’s side were Italian communities from across the US, suffragists, philanthropists, and social reformers, as well as death penalty opponents, each with its own agenda. Petitions were circulated and funds were raised on her behalf; for example, Bernardino Ciambelli wrote a three-act drama about her story, Per l’onore, for a benefit performance given by the Majori and Rapone Italian Dramatic CompanyPROOF (“To Aid Maria Barberi” 6). In particular, well- PROOF known suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Susan B. Anthony (left), Marie Barberi (center) and Mrs Livermore, and Ellen Battelle Dietrick, used Maria’s case as an example to Mary Livermore, New York World, July 29, 1895. reinforce one of the central points of their advocacy: that as long as women spending fifteen months in the Tombs and Sing Sing, emerges in journalistic were excluded from participation in the political and judicial systems, there accounts as an entirely different person “from the dull trembling peasant would always be double standards, as Maria’s blatantly unfair conviction girl” of the first trial. According to the World’s reporter, Dorothy Dare, clearly showed. In the words of Cady Stanton: “The girl didn’t have a fair Maria “has developed into an intelligent young woman. She speaks, reads trial because she was not tried by a jury of her peers. The judge was a man and writes English” (“Barberi Trial Begins” 14). In a sort of before and after and the laws are made by men” (“It Would Be Murder” 6). comparison that even includes illustrations of her transformation, Maria But while such an incredible mobilization of public opinion certainly is depicted as having undergone a complete makeover, both physical and helped, the most decisive intervention was that of the feminist philanthropist, intellectual. At the first trial, her eyes were dull and empty, but now they are Countess Cora Slocomb di Brazzà, who heard about Maria and came all “bright and full of speculation”; before, she was inert and apathetic, but now the way from Friuli to assist her. The Countess secured the first-rate legal she “watched everybody and listened to every word that was spoken.” Her representation of Frederic House and Emmanuel Friend, who filed an appeal original “barbarism” has been replaced by a civilized attitude: whereas in the on the grounds of Judge Goff’s bias against Maria, offering their services for first trial she was compared to an Apache squaw who “did not understand free. In addition, she started a massive press campaign, having personally anything that went on around her” and portrayed as the descendant of a gone to see the directors of all the major papers to convince them that their family and culture that were “poor, ignorant, superstitious, firm believers in editorial lines should be in support of Maria (see Pucci). the vendetta,” now she is “alive to every changing impression” and “regrets When the new trial started on November 17, 1896, Maria, after her crime.” This end result of “higher mental development” is described as 126 Italian Americana Curious Victories 127 a product of her contact with “kindly influences” and education “by gentle The hypocrisy of the media’s construction of this rhetoric of self- women” (“Barberi Trial Begins” 14). transformation is exposed here, and its underlying assumption of the This transformation from near monster, with “una faccia quasi superiority of American culture and civilization is also detected and targeted bestiale con il naso spaventevole da africana, e con gli occhi torvi e un by the Italian paper. The World’s feel-good story of this poor benighted tantino storti,” (“A rather beastly face with a horrible African nose and with barbarous Italian being transformed through benign American institutions of sinister and slightly crossed eyes”)10 to fine “young lady”—“una figurina reform and education plugs into the American ethic of self-transformation, da café ‘chantant’ con occhi intelligenti, col naso regolare” (“A café and this was certainly a selling point for the yellow press. In the wake chantant figurine with intelligent eyes and a regular 11 nose”) —seems so of the massive support that Maria’s case received from the progressive overblown to the reporter of the Eco d’Italia that he makes fun of the taste part of society, including feminists and the press—especially the yellow for sensationalism which characterizes the drawings that appeared in the press—opportunistically shifted from constructing Maria in terms of innate mainstream papers: “Ecco, conveniamo pure che l’America sia la terra dei primitivism, the signs of which were inscribed on her body as immutable, prodigi, e che qui la carcere [sic] sia un istituto di perfezionamento fisico . . . natural characteristics, to emphasizing transformation, improvement, change. ma che di un rospo si possa fare alle Tombs un angelo, non ci va giù” (“Well, The earlier racialized regime of representation was being superseded by the we can agree that America is the land of miracles and that here prisons are competing discourse of women’s emancipation and social reform. institutes of physical improvement, but that a toad can be transformed into an The massive press coverage and the convergence within it of discourses angel in the Tombs is hard to swallow”; “Cosas de America: Maria Barbera of social reform and feminism may have helped direct public opinion towards Trasformata in Carcere” 2).12 a favorable attitude, and this in turn might have influenced the course of Maria’s second trial. On the other hand, somewhat paradoxically, the line of defense chosen by her lawyers, House and Friend, made use of the very idea of degeneracy that had circulated in the first trial; but instead of using it to imply guilt, they turned it into an indication of her being not guilty, claiming that Maria suffered from a form of hereditary epilepsy and that PROOF such a disease wouldPROOF render her unable to be held legally responsible for her actions during an epileptic episode. As Thomas Ferraro points out, “House and his team had found a way to turn the racial primitivism hounding Maria to her advantage” (20). The imagery used to depict her changed from racial primitivism, comparing her to an “African” and an “Apache squaw,” which supported the thesis of her innate criminality and thus guilt, to images of degeneracy and mental illness. Her characteristics and those of her family were pathologized to support the thesis of her lack of responsibility. In the end, the strategy was successful as she was found not guilty by the jury. Paradoxically, as a new Maria who has undergone a speedy process of assimilation (and, indeed, humanization) emerges, images of phrenological and physiognomic studies of her and her family’s heads and hands, as well as family trees showing the incidence of epilepsy in her family, begin parading in the press, especially when expert phrenologists are called to the bar by both the prosecution and the defense. The trial becomes hugely popular, with the public—especially women—lining up to see the spectacle and Maria’s performance in it. Indeed, people even wait in line for hours New York Journal, November 28, 1896 to see a wax statue of Maria on display at the Eden Museé. She had, in a nutshell, become a celebrity. Maria Barbella’s story was made into at least 128 Italian Americana Curious Victories 129 two theatrical pieces, one in Yiddish by the playwright Morris Horowitz done it without her deliberate contribution. One can only speculate about (Moishe Ha-Levi Ish Hurwitz) entitled Marie Barberi, a Soul on Fire, which how aware Maria was of the lucky convergence of all these cultural forces was performed at the Thalia Theatre starting on December 19, 1896, only a that came together to help her escape her predicament. Did she understand few days after the end of the second trial (Pucci 274), and one in Italian by that, after touching the lowest point, in which all was lost, she was getting a the playwright Edoardo Pecoraro entitled Maria Barbera, which must have second chance not only to save her life but also to finally take advantage of a transatlantic relocation she almost certainly had not personally chosen, and to have the chance to emancipate herself to some extent and emerge as an individual? Certainly, the transformation of Maria described by the papers suggests a certain amount of agency.

PROOF PROOF

New York World, 21 Novembre 1896

She must have wholeheartedly chosen to present a transformed self at the new trial when she accepted the help of Warden Sage’s wife at Sing Sing, where she managed to learn to speak as well as to read and write in English in New York World, November 21, 1896 just nine months. She or her lawyers must have understood that this strategy would help sway public opinion in her favor, but she may also have had her been very popular among Italian Americans across the US since we find own motives, perhaps of gratifying the efforts of her progressive friends to it performed in Baltimore in August 1899 (“An Italian Drama” 7) and in secure their continued support. California in 1903 (Durante 330).13 She must have understood, with the help of her lawyers, just how At this point, the real question is: what was Maria’s role in all of this? important the press was for turning people to her favor and, just as the Certainly, her lawyers played a big part in exploiting both the argument of press had exploited her sensational case, she may very well have exploited self-improvement and that of genetic determinism, but they could not have them to cultivate a sympathetic relationship with the public. Through their 130 Italian Americana Curious Victories 131 pages, for example, she presented her newly reformed self through letters that it is really her behind it, as an agent acting in her own interests, and not and interviews that, under the guise of a confessional communication to the under the direction of others. He sees Maria “as an object and an agent,” reader, clearly in hindsight laid out her defense and her lack of culpability— and cannot believe that someone under the direction of others could explain all the while never forgetting to thank everybody who she could possibly things in the way that she did, “giving the impression of having been . . . thank, especially “the many good women” who had come to her in her time blinded and bewildered by her emotions so that she saw and yet did not see of trouble and who “make me love America” (“Maria’s Own Sad Story” 12). . . . [recalling] events as if they were the phantom of a dream, heard but yet heard not . . . she conveyed, in her own infantile or imbecile way, how it is possible to act without being in the least conscious of what one is doing.” The fact that she articulated and sustained this testimony during six hours of exhausting cross-examination by highly-skilled prosecutors without being “crushed and annihilated” convinces him that, “in some way or another, she had defended herself. She had made, me at least, feel that she ought not to be held accountable” (Hawthorne 8).

PROOF PROOF

New York World November 22, 1896

Thrust into the public eye, she embraced her status of celebrity and did not do a bad job of studying every gesture, every movement, both at the trial where she looked poised and self-controlled as she wept in silence, as well as during the frequent jail visits of reporters, where she was typically found conspicuously crocheting or reading a novel in the sweltering heat of the “summer in the Tombs” (“Summer in the Tombs” 19), looking civilized and industrious (“Summer in the Tombs” 19; “Fears Death Chair” 14). When asked by the press to comment on her situation, she was wise enough to politely decline “on the advice of her counsel” (“Barberi Trial Begins” 14). But the moment in which her performance—her ability to convince, seduce, and resist, and her newly acquired awareness of how a trial really worked—made a real difference came during the cross-examination described by Julian Hawthorne for the New York Journal. Though he is New York World November 19, 1896 clearly suspicious of possible artifice, Hawthorne is so taken by her testimony that his skepticism is overcome, more than anything by the fact that it seems 132 Italian Americana Curious Victories 133

she continued her narrative path toward American individualism and female agency. Though extreme, stories such as Maria’s allow us to catch glimpses of After the trial, as she continued to occupy the pages of the papers the contemporary condition of Italian immigrant women and their encounter across the country, her transformation was completed and even extended with America, its institutions, its values, its ideologies. Their stories, in effect, to her family and environment. On December 26, the New York Journal are depicted as a sort of dramatization of an emerging individuality. Although presented a portrait of Maria spending Christmas at home with her family, the lines of defense utilized, including hereditary insanity, portrayed these which was in stark contrast to earlier images which emphasized their ugliness women as dull, passive deviant victims of their backward culture and bad and abjection. The journalist noted that, although poor, “the Barberis largely genes, the stories they told and the performances they gave suggest a certain possess the quality of neatness” and proceeded to describe all the decorations amount of agency, and their “curious victories” (Ferraro 9) demonstrate a of the house made according to the artistic tastes of the various members certain ability to negotiate between the southern Italian culture of honor and of her family to welcome Maria (“Maria Barberi’s Happy Christmas” 2). their emergence as individuals who can change the course of their lives. But her transformation was not limited to aesthetics. It extended to moral Maria, and other women like her, as transnational subjects, were caught qualities as well when she helped save a woman’s life: “The mantel of a in the interplay of three major cultural forces: the transatlantic relocation of heroine fell on the shoulders of Maria Barberi” (“Maria Barberi in Role of the residual southern Italian culture of honor (which pushed them to enact Heroine” 1–2) as she “fearlessly rushed to the assistance of a fellow woman a vendetta), the dominant American democratic ethos of justice (which and neighbor who was burning on the balcony” (“Maria Barberi is Now characterized the trial), and the emergent feminist and reform movements a Heroine” 1). Maria showed bravery, altruism and “presence of mind” as (which provided the opportunity for transformation). These women were she ran to rescue the woman, carrying a blanket to suffocate the flames, and somehow able to negotiate these forces and find a space for individual helped remove the burning clothes with her bare hands. Later, an image of affirmation, using these tragic circumstances to their advantage. a handwritten letter was published in the New York Journal expressing, in At the same time, the press and the dominant strata of society used her authentic imperfect English, how deeply sorry she was for the conditions these feel-good stories of transformation and rebirth to tell a happy story, of the injured lady in spite of the efforts to save her. It is difficult not to constructing a reassuring narrative of immigration in which even the think that she continued to cultivate this privileged and mutually beneficial most alien, pathological,PROOF and deviant immigrant is moldable, educable, relationship with thePROOF press which allowed the press to continue exploiting and assimilable; in these depictions, American society is presented as a her popularity while at the same time she was able to rehabilitate herself benign melting pot in which willing immigrants can be infused with the in the eyes of the public as a valuable member of her community. Within dominant values of individualism and personal responsibility, as well as the Italian-American community as well she seems to have fully reacquired respect for democratic institutions and law and order. Of course, while in her honor. Less than a year after her acquittal, she married a man from her Maria’s rather unique case the situation is complicated as she benefitted village, and her “trouble and the trials in court made no difference to him” from these discourses to the point of not only escaping the death penalty (“Maria Barberi is Mrs. Bruno Now” 1). but also becoming a sort of celebrity, these discourses of assimilation were Before falling into obscurity after 1902, when we encounter her for not necessarily so “benevolent” when considering immigrants more broadly. the last time at Mrs. Foster’s funeral (“Les Miserables at Mrs. Foster’s Bier” Through these extreme stories, the mainstream press was reinforcing the 26), we see Maria a few more times, showing that she retained her status of dominant view of a single, linear ascending path upward from immigrant, celebrity for a while longer. She demonstrates that she has certainly learned backwards, ignorant, clannish and criminally-inclined, to American, which to understand and navigate the judicial system when she appears in court unequivocally asserted the superiority of American dominant values and on behalf of her 16-year-old brother, John, who had robbed a candy store aimed at limiting socially acceptable identities, practices, and ideologies, with a friend, pleading with the Judge “that he be spared from punishment for both immigrants and women. In the end, Maria Barbella was accepted promising to see that he mended his ways,” and even acting as an interpreter as rehabilitated by her community, and both her vendetta and trial provided for the parents of the other kid involved in the same crime. But what is more a lesson in civic education and had a sort of cathartic function in the eyes interesting at this point in her trajectory is that she has somehow gained the of both the Italian-American community and the general public; indeed, status needed to participate, in her own way, in political debate, advocating mainstream papers continued to follow further developments in her life as against the death penalty. After her trial, she had maintained genuine interest 134 Italian Americana Curious Victories 135 in the social issues of the death penalty. She was reported to have attended 12 with the complicity of her aunt, who limited her contact with the external (even taking her husband with her) at least two famous murder trials in world to a minimum and made her work long hours for her boarding house which the defendants risked the capital punishment: Martin Thaw’s (“Ran business. Her trial started on May 15, 1906, and the defense chosen by Mr. Short of Witnesses” 7) and Martha Place’s (“The Chair Not for Women” 6). Palmieri, her lawyer, was temporary insanity caused by the extreme conditions On January 23 and February 12, 1899, during Martha Place’s trial, she gives of brutality, abuse, and isolation she had been forced to live in. Initially, she was two interviews in which she shares her views on the matter and in which characterized as passive and apathetic, degenerate by inheritance—“Parents she is clearly given the role of the expert. Empathizing with Mrs. Place, and Grandparents drunkards on one side and epileptics on the other” (“Plea for she describes the sensation of being constantly watched and living in the Girl Slayer” 3)—but later it is noted that, in spite of her young age, “as the trial shadow of the electric chair: “you see always before you the straps that tie progresses she has become more animated”(“Girl Aids in Defense” 3). She you. You smell the burn like meat that cooks.” She affirms that, after having is consulted by her lawyer when defining the criteria to choose the jurors— experienced that feeling, she cannot accept that the life of a person be in they had to be fathers with daughters—and is assertive, vocally expressing the hands of twelve men who have power of life and death over you, and her disagreement with being re-examined by a lunacy commission: “I will that imprisonment, the condition in which “I do not belong to myself,” is not submit to any more of this. For seventeen years my life has been a hell on punishment enough for any crime (“The Chair Not for Women” 6). earth. Now that you find that you cannot put me in prison—oh you know the Her ordeal had made her into an authority in that context and granted jury will set me free!—you want to put me in a lunatic asylum. I tell you [. . .] her the status of one entitled to express her opinion in the public sphere. I am not insane.” Her lawyer tells her to hush, but she responds: “No, I will not She had certainly gone a long way from the “trembling peasant girl,” “dull hush. I have a right to speak and I will speak [. . .] Mr. Ely I am more sane than and apathetic,” who “did not understand anything that went on around her” you. They ought to have a commission to examine you” (“Jerome Stops Girl’s (“Barberi Trial Begins” 14), becoming an individual allowed access to the Trial for Dual Murder” 1). The trial ended on June 2 with her acquittal for the public sphere as an informed and respected participant, a valid individual murder of her aunt and the dismissal of the charges for her uncle’s killing. with a voice in the debate over the death penalty. Giuseppina’s story was dramatized in a play, Giuseppina Terranova ovvero l’onore vendicato, by Riccardo Cordiferro in 1905. otes PROOF 4 PROOF N Antonietta Tolla, from Hackensack, NJ, was sentenced to death on April 27, 1905 for the murder of her husband’s “padrone” who had made repeated 1 Chiara Cignarale, accused of having killed her abusive husband together aggressive sexual advances and who threatened to rape her at gunpoint. Her with her lover, was arrested on October 20, 1886 and later sentenced to first trial was marred by incompetent translation and inadequate representation, death. Many petitions were signed in the Italian community, prominent and Governor Stokes received a petition with 230,000 signatures (“Mrs. Tolla people (including the actress Pearl Eytinge) advocated on her behalf, and Reprieved” 4) organized by the Susan B. Anthony Club of Cincinnati. Her ultimately the Governor commuted her sentence to life in prison. In 1900, she case was then taken up by a female lawyer, Mary Grace Quackenbos, who was pardoned by Governor Roosevelt. Her story inspired the play, Chiara, was active in women’s advocacy (Haskin 4) and who managed to find new La Condannata, by Rocco Metelli, staged by the Circolo Filodrammatico evidence in her favor—notably, Quackenbos produced the gun that the victim Italoamericano (Durante 328). had when he was killed but which had not been produced at the first trial. For 2 On March 2, 1891, Pasqualina Robertiello shot Nicolò Pierro, who “had the first time in history, she managed to get Tolla’s sentence commuted by the ruined her under promise of marriage” (“Her Life at Stake” 3) and was Court of Pardons, not to life imprisonment, but to a much shorter sentence of about to leave the country to go back to Italy leaving her pregnant. The case only seven-and-a-half years, of which she had already served more than two was characterized by massive popular sympathy and, in the end, she was (“Mrs Tolla Escapes Hanging” 6). acquitted on the technical ground of temporary insanity but “the real ground 5 Angelina Napolitano, an Italian immigrant to Canada, was sentenced to death was sympathy” (“Acquittal of the Italian Girl” 6). for killing her abusive husband, Pietro, in his sleep after he had repeatedly 3 Giuseppina Terranova, from Favara, Sicily, was only 16 when, on February tried to force her into prostitution. Six months earlier, he had attacked her 22, 1906, she killed her aunt and uncle in whose care she had been entrusted with a pocket knife, wounding her nine times in the face, neck, shoulder, by her mother. She had been sexually abused by her uncle from the age of chest and arms (“Sentence Commuted” 1). The trial lasted only three hours, 136 Italian Americana Curious Victories 137 and her public defender had been appointed only a day before and presented “Fears Death Chair.” New York World 19 November 1896: 14. Print. no witnesses. The defense argued that Pietro’s abuse had forced a desperate, Ferraro, Thomas J. Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America. New York: pregnant Angelina to kill him, citing the stabbing, but it was ruled inadmissible New York University Press, 2005. Print. by the judge and she was sentenced to death. The case ignited a public debate about domestic violence and the death penalty, and a campaign was launched “Girl Aids in Defense.”Washington Post 18 May 1906: 3. Print. to have her sentence commuted. A deluge of letters and petitions arrived in the Haskin, Frederic J. “Noted Woman Lawyer.” The Pittsburg Gazette Times 13 office of the Federal Minister of Justice, organized by individuals and groups August 1917: 4. Print. from Canada, the US, and even Europe, including The Toronto Suffrage Hawthorne, Julian. “Maria Barberi to Her Twelve Judges.” New York Journal Association and the WCTU (“The Case of Angelina Napolitano” 5). Italian 26 November 1896: 8. Print. Communities in the US and Canada held fund raising events to help Angelina, such as a big benefit concert in San Francisco at the Washington Square “He Invited His Death.” New York World 27 April 1895: 11. Print. Theatre (“A Big Night Tonight” 7). On July 14 her sentence was commuted “Her Life at Stake.” New York Herald 19 May, 1891: 3. Print. to life imprisonment, and she was eventually paroled on December 30, 1922. “It Would Be Murder.” The Recorder 19 July 1895: 6. Print. 6 Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives had been published in 1890. “An Italian Drama.” The Sun 26 August 1899: 7. Print. 7 Even the official case record is entitled “People vs. Barberi.” “Jerome Stops Girl’s Trial for Dual Murder.” New York World 26 May 1906: 8 La donna delinquente, by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferri, had been 1. Print. published two years before, in 1893. “Killed the Man Who Wronged Her.” New York Times 27 April 1895: 6. Print. 9 Author’s translation. “Les Miserables at Mrs. Foster’s Bier.” New York Herald 26 February 1902: 10 Author’s translation. 26. Print. 11 Author’s translation. “Maria Barbera.” L’Araldo Italiano 1 May 1895: 1. Print. 12 Author’s translation.PROOF “Maria Barberi Guilty.”PROOF New York World 16 July 1895: 1. Print. 13 Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate either of these works. “Maria Barberi in Role of Heroine.” New York Journal 31 December 1896: 1-2. Print. Works Cited “Maria Barberi is Mrs. Bruno Now.” New York Journal 4 November 1897: 1. Print. “Acquittal of the Italian Girl.” New York Herald 28 May 1891: 6. Print. “Maria Barberi is Now a Heroine.” Chicago Tribune 31 December 1896: 1. “Barberi Trial Begins.” New York World 17 November 1896: 14. Print. Print. “A Big Night Tonight at Washington Square Theatre.” San Francisco Chronicle “Maria Barberi on the Stand.” New York Herald 12 July 1895: 5. Print. 12 July 1911: 7. Print. “Maria Barberi’s Happy Christmas.” New York Journal 26 December 1896: “The Case of Angelina Napolitano.” The Globe [Toronto] 19 May 1911: 5. 2. Print. Print. “Maria’s Own Sad Story.” New York World 22 November 1896: 12. Print. “The Chair Not for Women.” New York Journal 23 January 1899: 6. Print. “Maudlin Sentiment in Parallel.” New York Times 28 April 1895: 16. Print. “Cosas de America: Maria Barbera Trasformata in Carcere.” Eco d’Italia 19 “Mrs. Tolla Escapes Hanging.” New York Times 10 March 1906: 6. Print. November 1896: 2. Print. “Mrs. Tolla Reprieved: Petitioners by the Thousand Plead for Her.” New York Durante, Francesco. Italoamericana. Milan: Mondadori, 2005. Print. Times 10 January 1906: 4. Print. Editorial. New York Times 20 July 1895: 4. Print. “Plea for Girl Slayer.” Washington Post 19 May 1906: 3. Print. 138 Italian Americana

“Povera Barbera!” L’Araldo Italiano 17 July 1895: 1. Print. Pucci, Idanna. The Trials of Maria Barbella: The True Story of a 19th Century Crime of Passion. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996. Print. “Ran Short of Witnesses.” New York Herald 10 November 1897: 7. Print. “Sentence Commuted.” Boston Globe 15 July 1911: 1. Print. “Summer in the Tombs.” New York Times 26 July 1896: 19. Print. Wong, Aliza S. Race and the Nation in Liberal Italy, 1861-1911: Meridionalism, Empire, and Diaspora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Poetry PROOF PROOF Poetry 141 Introduction from the Poetry Editor

Maria Terrone

When Italian Americana editor Carla Simonini invited me to write this introduction, I quickly agreed. In her editor’s letter, she speaks of our honor in premiering the translation of “Leopardi’s Lament: On an Ancient Funeral Monument” by Eamon Grennan, a celebrated Irish-born poet and PEN-award- winning translator. As poetry editor, I’m thrilled that Eamon has given us the opportunity to share this lyrical masterpiece with our readers. I’m also thrilled for deeply personal reasons. Publishing Eamon’s work is one small way for me to thank him for encouraging me in my own poetry writing and continuing that support for decades. I first met Eamon in fall 1995 at a three-hour master class that he taught at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in Manhattan. I was excited to be admitted to this class of just five students, having long admired his poetry which, it seems to me, combines an unusual attentiveness to the natural world with sensitivity to internal states of mind. As former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has described his work:

“Few poets are as generous as Eamon Grennan in the sheer volume of delight his poems convey, and fewer still are as attentive to the PROOF marvels of PROOFthe earth. To read him is to be led on a walk through the natural world of clover and cricket and, most of all, light, and to face with an open heart the complexity of being human.”

In person, Eamon was a warm, down-to-earth, effective and inspiring teacher. I remain grateful to this day for his kindness in allowing me—an eager, budding poet—to occasionally send him new poems for feedback, despite his busy teaching schedule at Vassar and surely, his own need for time to write and translate. I’ve saved those snail-mailed comments and notes, which I treasure, along with our friendship. Although we might meet only once a year at a pub or restaurant, we’ve kept in touch via email. I’ve been pleased to keep up with Eamon’s activities since retiring from teaching—the ongoing translation work with his partner, the classicist Rachel Kitzinger, his latest volumes of poetry, and also, his successful venture as a director/playwright. With the publication of this Leopardi translation, I’ve also had the great pleasure of learning more about “Eamon as Italophile.” Until now, I hadn’t known that Eamon majored in Italian at University College Dublin—a suggestion of his favorite secondary school teacher. “I chose Italian without having any clue where it would take me, and fell under the spell of Petrarch and Dante, then Leopardi,” he said in a recent email exchange. 142 Italian Americana Poetry 143 I wondered what drew him specifically to Leopardi. “I loved the work, Leopardi’s Lament the mind, the brilliant sad life of Leopardi,” he answered. “How he managed to be such a pure lyrical poet, yet plumbing and plunging into depths of emotions On an Ancient Funeral Monument beyond most. I loved that mixture—elegy and celebration at once.” (Showing a dead girl taking leave of her family) As for “Leopardi’s Lament: On an Ancient Funeral Monument,” Eamon Translated by Eamon Grennan tells me that he has worked a long time on this poem, on and off over the years. “It seems, along with the poem called La Ginestra (“Broom”), which is in my Leopardi translation book, one of the deepest, most unsparing of his poems. Little one, where are you off to? Yet always with the lightness of the lyrical touch he possesses so absolutely. Who calls you away from your loved ones? Are you leaving your father’s house forever— “It’s lovely that it will see the light here.” to go roaming about all on your own? Will you ever cross its threshold again— Thank you, Eamon, for all you’ve done for me; for what must be hundreds and some day comfort those of former students at Vassar, NYU and Columbia; and for the world of literature, who gather around you today in tears? which knows no boundaries. Thank you for giving Italian Americana the privilege of publishing your heartbreakingly beautiful translation in our pages. Dry eyes, quick hands: still you look sad— and from that sober gaze of yours I can’t tell if this journey is pleasure or pain, towards grief or joy. And—sad to say— there’s no way I or the world can be sure if it’s a curse or a blessing from heaven: PROOF whether you’re favoredPROOF or frowned on by the stars. It’s death calls you. Daybreak is the fall of night. You’ll never come back to the nest you’re leaving, losing forever the sight of your loved ones. The Underworld—where you’ll dwell forever— is the end of your journey. Perhaps you’re lucky. . . but anyone who ponders this fate of yours can’t help sighing.

Here’s what I believe: Never to see the light were best. But once born, and just when the body grows beautiful, the face radiant, and in small ways the world starts to take notice; just at that moment when hopes are about to blossom, and long before the truth of things 144 Italian Americana Poetry 145 blasts like lightning Why swaddle it in such gloomy shades those smiles of innocent joy— and show us a harbour more fearsome than any storm-beaten sea? at that very moment, barely formed, to fade— the way a little distant cloud dissolves If death, so, is a given misfortune into shapeless haze— for all of us you abandon to life— innocent as we are, knowing nothing, and so exchange a future of days with no say at all in the matter— for the midnight silence of the grave: surely the one who dies is better off even if a mind can see all this than the one who lives on in some sort of happy light, after the passing of the one he loves. still it must stun with sorrow the most stoical heart. But even if life is (as I firmly believe) a misfortune, death a gift, Mother feared from the moment of birth, who could ever do as he should moaned over by all your animal family. . . Nature, you wonder beyond praise, and desire the death of someone he loves— you who bear and bring up for slaughter. . . and be obliged, so, to drag out a life if early death is a human misery amputated from itself how can you let it light and see the loved one on heads as innocent as these? he’s spent so many years with And if it’s good borne out over the threshold, why make it so unspeakablyPROOF sad, and so say goodbyePROOF with no hope so much more bitter than other griefs of meeting ever again in the world— for those left behind and the one who goes away? becoming a lonesome outcast on earth, searching old haunts for hours on end, This human family of feeling creatures remembering his companion, the friend who’s vanished? is wretched wherever they look, wherever they turn, wherever they run to. How, Nature, how have you the heart And, Nature, it’s thanks to you to wrench friend from friend, brother from brother, that young hopes are blighted by life itself; child from parent, lover from lover— that the tide of time is swollen with sorrow; and, one dead, keep the other living? that death alone shields us from the pain of being: And how could you make us mortal creatures this the single sign you have laid down; this suffer so much: the one left living the one unalterable law for our life’s journey. going on and on loving the dead?

But why, after the weary road we’ve travelled, But I tell you: in all her actions why can’t its end bring some relief? Nature has something else in mind Why must you shroud in black than what is good for us, or bad. that which every living minute we hold in our souls as our certain future— the only cure for all that ails us? Poetry 147

Featured Poet: Grace Cavalieri: “A Child of Two Cultures”

I can’t find any part of my lineage that doesn’t stem from Italy. My father, Angelo, and his family came from Venice and Florence. Before that, Trieste, where the Jewish Cavalieri family owned lumber yards. That’s all we know of them. Grandfather Raphael Cavalieri received a PhD from the University of Pisa and, as an agronomist, invented the first two-cylinder gas engine to harvest the uneven hills of vineyards. Ford took that patent, and my grandfather was helpless to contest it. I see him as a tragic figure, called to America to oversee California’s burgeoning land of grapes. Yet he arrived in this country in 1909 with his oldest son, my father, to learn that whoever had invited him to bring his expertise to the vineyards was nowhere to be found. Phones were idiosyncratic then, and the new wine industry had changing personnel and ragged management. And so, stranded, he never left for the West to realize his dream. He did begin a newspaper in Trenton, New Jersey, but by then was a different man. My father never told us he was born Jewish. When his father, Raphael, married a Catholic, that religious and cultural tradition was abandoned. His PROOF family said KaddishPROOF for their loss. For me, discovering that I was a Jew was a poetry gold mine. I traveled through Italy to trace my grandfather’s footsteps. I stood on a bridge near Pisa that he would have had to cross to go to class. I walked the streets where students lived at the end of the nineteenth century. I visited Padua where he studied in his undergraduate days. He became the center of a myth that I was piecing together. The family of my mother, Annette (Anna) Zoda, came from a village near Palermo, and her mother, Graziela—my namesake—was the strongest woman I’ve ever known. Imagine this Italian matriarch with seven children behind her, not speaking English and yet opening a restaurant in “the men’s part of town” between two bars in downtown Trenton. I think “The Venice” may have been the first of its kind to introduce “tomato pies” to the city. My dear maternal grandfather Philip, once a seminarian in Italy, was now in a kitchen, wearing an apron. And so, we have two people, Angelo, a young banker, and “Nettie,” a shy cashier, meeting in an Italian restaurant in the early part of the twentieth century, who would become my parents. 148 Italian Americana Poetry 149

Tomato Pies, 25 Cents* and recording podcasts of Maryland poets to make their voices available to all the world by simply clicking a link. Tomato pies are what we called them, those days, I’m glad to have this new mission at my advanced age and after losing before pizza came in, my husband a few years ago after our 60 years of marriage. I’m still writing at my grandmother’s restaurant books of poems about that grand adventure. My latest volume, Showboat, in Trenton, New Jersey. revisits 25 years as a Navy wife to a naval aviator—the father of our four My grandfather is rolling meatballs daughters who would become an acclaimed metal sculptor. in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but I’m now gratefully celebrating 42 years on public radio, having saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy produced and hosted about 2,000 episodes to date of “The Poet and The by coming to America. Poem,” recorded at the Library of Congress. I’m also a co-founder of two Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce. still-thriving poetry presses in DC and promote poets’ new work as columnist/ Uncle Joey is always scrubbed clean, reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books. sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after It’s is a great thrill to be featured in the time-honored journal Italian cops delivered him home just hours before. Americana, a staple and the finest example of our culture. The waitresses are helping themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer, playing the numbers with Moon Mullin * “Tomato Pies, 25 Cents” from Sounds Like Something I Would Say (Casa and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942, Menendez Publishing) tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents. With anchovies, large, 50 cents. A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm). How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix, would standPROOF outside all the way down Warren Street, PROOF waiting for this new taste treat, young guys in uniform, lined up and laughing, learning Italian, before being shipped out to fight the last great war.

Although I don’t write in Italian, I’ve worked with Italian translators for many years. My poetry collection, Water on the Sun (Aqua sul Sole), was awarded the Bordighera Prize (2006) and translated by an Italian scholar, Maria Enrico. In 2013, poet Sabine Pascarelli translated my book, What I Would Do for Love: Poems in the Voice of Mary Wollstonecraft (Cosa Farei per Amore). For the last five years, I’ve worked with the American Initiative for Italian Culture in Washington, D.C. This organization, affiliated with the Italian Embassy, has enriched my life and contributed to many significant multilingual poetry events. The major focus, however, is awarding funds for translating fiction and nonfiction from Italian to English and vice versa. In December 2018 I began a new chapter in my life as Maryland’s Poet Laureate, appointed by Governor Larry Hogan. I now have a bigger platform to advance poetry by teaching workshops, helping young poets, 150 Italian Americana Poetry 151

The following three poems are by Featured Poet Grace Cavalieri The End

Oh My Father Kiss the cross I pack my suitcase through the snow on the train ringing the bell opening the door a man puts his shirt on a photograph the door swings in the trees by the road alone in the pasture the priest fixed the altar Why is your hair white and lacquered stiff? chickens there in the yard pet the cow God’s creation the car in the meadow I cannot bend it to kiss. Why? we sat there for hours the music I felt something I never felt before When you died, your hair was black. a hallway sing to me a single cat I have been loved and will never The past is hurling its light at me. have anything else this God of ours hiding behind a pole I walk back and forth My first hope is to fight back, then next wash my face with cold water how we comfort each other I tuck you in not to remember. under blankets the door opens the door closes leaning on the balcony let Anytime soon I’d like to walk my hair fall on my shoulders walking in the forest the dead trees let me hold up the hill with my suitcase to find you. your bones wrap them in white linen all that’s left these gloves and I know there’s only half an hour the suitcase I started with push the dirt down in the hole toward the light before you have to go to work. eating in silence the broken clasp the lost bracelet your last hold on me a habit Maybe I’ll get a ride. How ashamed I am – a grown woman – to put on toe shoes and dance for you still – in these satin ribbons – I want to run toward pain to get to the end of this story.PROOF PROOF But you won’t speak. So we are both cowards then. How can I blame you? How could you know what I needed and what I needed to do. 152 Italian Americana Poetry 153

May Day with toys and sand— For Ken his wife in a pink and white sundress He said they gave him looking up at the sky. a white “Flash” suit— like outer space wear. They said, “put it on and get into your cockpit.”

What peril this was he did not know until they praised his plane that held “his atom bomb.”

A trail of thoughts across his mind— a sweep of stars beyond— his children—their children. his house—their house.

Pale with sadness and hate, he knew PROOFwhat PROOF he would do.

Ditch the plane in water! the deepest part— the bomb would dwell inert and he would raft home from the Turkish seas.

He was a calm man, a survival expert— he figured it out— maybe four months.

His heart was a meteor exploding in his children’s backyard under the apple tree—

It dazzled the swing set, the rowboat filled 154 Italian Americana Poetry 155

‘Tis of Thee Marriage Bed for Luciana, two months old Julia Lisella Dante Di Stefano The marriage bed is a village of strange love There is a malice clearly legible where knowledge grows less sharp, less exact. in the heart of the suburbs, in the net of cul-de-sacs, and off cockeyed side streets. Ghost or spirit-guided, the bodies follow as friends might follow each other’s shadows in the too-dark theater. You cannot skitter away from it, dove. Call it America. Sew it into One feels the other there, one knows the other’s patter of footfall a quilt, this panorama of mourning. on the dirty carpet. Likewise, the bodies

Don’t sew. Unstitch. Rip. Find the whirling soul torque and form their nighttime language, each limb a small animal inside the ephemera of the self. seeking comfort, sustenance. Dart into that illegible movement Somewhat deep in the dream of each of our nights and do not try to translate it. Just dance there’s a small hurt that renders meaning. because there’s a queenly laughter running through the backbone of dusk and it is yours. Caress lingers on the sheets, a light dusting, and the day begins again, un-remembering and un-making And it’s yours, thisPROOF birthright, this bright awareness: PROOF you’ve been born against any old easy allegiance. that which must be felt again each night, the question repeating and the question being answered. 156 Italian Americana Poetry 157

Preemptive Elegy Anniversary Elton Glaser Joey Nicoletti

In the evenings, disappointment brings you your slippers, The midnight sky is a burnt rib eye. Dissatisfaction fills the crystal with a single malt, I will eat it for a snack. And longing lights the fire where the heavy logs decay. I will try not to dwell on what could have been Comfortable now? It could be worse. It has been worse, for my parents today: 50 years Before the invention of Happy Hour and the drive-thru window, of being together The remote that consoled insomnia with all-night news. as wife and husband if not for being different people Now the wind blows sweetly through applausible leaves, whose respective passions And the stone statue in the park stares calmly down into for being alive Waters of the reflecting pool, into the peace of its delusions. were weighed down by the discovery of me Only your little dog, bored with catching balls and sticks, just weeks after Turns away with a tired look, and waits for something impossible their second date To come arcing out of the gray unreliable sky. and busloads of resolve that they would learn and grow together, like the live oaks PROOF outside my kitchenPROOF widow. Alas. Their decision to call it a day was a glass of champagne after countless hours of veins, bulging from their necks during arguments about bills and table manners, or lack thereof after overtime shifts; the grenades of guilt and shame thrown at them by their parents: their loud, insistent calls to the altar. My sadness is a Bengal tiger, stalking me like Hicks, Fredric Forrest’s character in Apocalypse Now, playing on TV, a movie I love almost as much as my spouse or any other family member; my sigh 158 Italian Americana Poetry 159 a Kyrie of beeps Night Shift, Big Steel from the microwave oven, c. Summer 1964 smudged with thumbprints. Jim Scutti

Cranes on rails roar like El trains, smoking strips of steel slide to a molder, the moon peeks through windows.

My feet burn as I rake coal in the furnace. Blount, the foreman, can see me through air holes in the door, ready to pounce if I slacken.

An hour in hell then I shovel steel dust, damp in piles, clogging my nose, soaking my lungs, pinching like ants inside my Jockeys.

Moonlight spills to the floor, edges toward me, a rising tide marking the time— five hours to go, and two more weeks.

I watch old Jeb twirl a hoisting chain PROOF around a bundle ofPROOF pipe with his crane hook as graceful as Chaplin spinning his cane.

He likes to talk retirement. Pallid skin, black teeth, a cigarette between his lips I see him in a casket cuddling a crane hook.

Reverend Rufus, who always works at night to be closer to God, sweeps toward me in circles, dancing, the broom his partner.

He pushes me against a wall. The low shall be high, trust the Lord, he says reeking of whiskey, bloodshot eyes bulging.

The shop steward, Torko, an oak with legs lumbers up, stops and says Hope you’re having fun college boy. 160 Italian Americana Poetry 161

Turning Up Moonstruck Evening Comes to Long Island Sound And I bake bread, bread, bread. And I sweat! Fred Muratori –Ronny Cammareri (Nicholas Cage) Moonstruck, 1987 A self-defense class kicks in ragged unison, Janine Certo their white gis ambered by a waning sun.

I’ve always gone for the younger It’s a mixed group, men and women like long- brother, scruff & a wounded legged birds. Their spindly shadows flail along demeanor, a modest kitchen, the glass of J&B. I want an undressed the sand behind them, ludicrous in this tranquility pasta, the soundtrack of delivery trucks, of hermit crabs and gliding sailboats, of salty a Brooklyn sidewalk, trees pearled & snow falling like gnats swarming. breezes bearing fragments of a reggae beat. Not far They say a full moon from suntanned children gathering shells, a sandbar intensifies insomnia, transforms human into wolf. It can propel the risk surrenders connection with shore. Incoming tide of disease; heal any disease. It might stave off reclaims its possessions: seaweed tossed aside debt; cause death. It can make you pass out; trigger relatives to stop by unannounced. by foiled fishermen, pebbled quartz, the odd, They say never mock a moon or lift upended crab. A family, each with a rod a finger to the moonPROOF & how one seen over PROOF the right shoulder brings good luck; and empty pail in hand, bickers by the water’s one over the left, bad. Let’s bury superstitions edge. Dad’s heard enough of his daughter’s rich as yolk, gather the gray moths of worry, carefully wrap our losses growing boredom. We came, he fumes, to enjoy quiet as the dough rises. ourselves, his fatherly intentions gone awry. The bloody steak doesn’t care what we’ll do. The howling can’t judge what it becomes. Nearly unnoticed, the sun slips out of sight, So turn up La Boheme, lie down with me a ridge of clouds flares gold, then a pinkish white. & throw those last loaves of loneliness into the oven. Then, love, we’ll open Breezes cool. Closing moments of the day one eye to the white sheet of night. wake mosquitoes underneath the quay as shivering bathers retreat inland and buoys ring faint vespers to the wind. 162 Italian Americana Poetry 163

Caddies, 1929 Pyromania Maryann Corbett Connie Post

The photo? It went missing years ago. I carry pieces In it, they lean on golf clubs, swell young men of the fire with me with thin moustaches, à la Errol Flynn, all day decked out for the first tee: knit vests, small bow- ties, baggy knickers, driving caps, argyle I find ashes in my shoes socks to the knee. Can’t you just picture them? small fragments of flame Brash in the sun, outfittedcrème-de-la-crème nestle themselves in my coat pocket to mask their rough, old-country roots? They smile, my father and my uncle, as though they clung the morning rises like a black smoke by their clenched teeth to a pose, a role, a style from which I cannot recover fraying away to dreams. Nothing they wrung from later life—trucker, electrician— I look for the culprit equalled the brilliance of that morning’s fashion. in every crevasse of my clothing To some losses, we never reconcile. but there is no answer

small planes still fly over me PROOF looking for sectionsPROOF of thick brush and patches of smolder

sometimes I think about the flat land the way it was before we arrived how seductive how pristine

I return to moments of dry lightning how it lit up the sky that one autumnal night three decades ago

how the tree cracked open and a slow methodical insanity systematically destroyed everything in its path 164 Italian Americana Poetry 165

La Bailarina a strip of blue sea a buoyant promise, Gabriella Belfiglio and pain that never recedes.

Swirling in front *From The Diary of Frida Kahlo of San Juan market (in slow motion) the bus becomes a shower of limbs, gold fairy dust, iron rods— tangled on wet street.

Blood, doctors, operations, casts, white straps wrap across her breasts,PROOF PROOF silver buckles press into skin, plaster corsets— restrict everything: I had to learn to keep still. I watched death circle my bed.*

Magic wand in her hands—movement returns as paint, stick figures reflect her body, thin lines like her broken spine. In the background of her paintings 166 Italian Americana Poetry 167

Nihil Obstat* December 31 Michelle Reale Simona Carini

My grandmother was named for sorrow. White dimity cloth and a votive candle. She was unafraid of the dead who would gather at her feet or startle Some days there is no horizon, no her when she was drinking her morning coffee. She’d admonish them for edge where the Pacific dips and the sky rises. their departure, then pray to the Sacred Heart to take them away, again. Blue—your eyes, the evening air—a flock Keep them where they belong. They have no place among the living. She of shorebirds running behind a retreating feared only her dreams, how they would tell not only the future, but the wave, raking the wet sand with quick beaks, past, like sly whores with no shoes and dirty feet. The meals she cooked for then backing away from the wave washing her husband contained shortcuts, bitter herbs and resignation. Her rosary, ashore. Again, and again, like breathing. The end well worn, hung on a hook next to her threadbare coat. Her heart turned arrives with our last breath. A long sigh the last in on itself, too tired for the explanations, years of successive novenas, his sound we make. We carry nothing with us, amber beer bottles, and her face staring out at herself day after day from the not even a gulp of air. Will I, on the final chipped mirror in the cold bathroom on the second floor. exhale, remember kindness in your gaze? The shorebirds never rail against the coming *“Nothing hinders” wave for being early, too strong: they accept the aftermath, the food the ebbing water leaves. Drenched in the last light of the year, just wait, PROOF you are not alone.PROOF Fiction & PROOF CreatPROOFive Non-Fiction Ladies Man 171

Ladies Man

Philip Cioffari

I’d never had much luck with the girls in my neighborhood, so on my eighteenth birthday I decided to try elsewhere. To say I was nowhere near what you’d call a ladies man would be an under-statement; I had all the yearnings, but none of the success. With me that summer night was Johnnie Jay, my best friend of my teenage years. Taller than me, dark hair longer and curlier, ever-present sly grin, mischief running rampant in his eyes. He was already a sophomore at Fordham where I would be going in the fall. Where we lived, a middle-class housing project in the Bronx, the girls preferred a more conformist kind of guy: clean-cut, crewcut fraternity types who wore the requisite blue blazers, grey slacks, and buttoned-down shirts to complement their buttoned-down minds. Johnnie Jay and I were on the bohemian fringe. We read the Beats, recited lines verbatim from Eliot, Pound and Hart Crane, let our hair grow over our ears, favored faded and worn-looking blue jeans and black Tee’s, always wore shades outdoors, and the only movies we watched were the foreign ones that played in small art- houses in the Village. PROOF Above all, wePROOF valued experience—with a capital E, as we liked to say. New places, new situations, new people. It was what we lived for, in whatever limited way it came to us. So that evening we drove six miles north to the Ship Ahoy, a bar on the backstreets of New Rochelle—this our miniaturized road trip, a humble version of Kerouac’s wild cross-country ventures but still exotic in its own way, at least to our way of thinking. From what we’d heard around the neighborhood, the girls at the Ship Ahoy— among them the Irish domestics who sat at small tables near the bar waiting to be noticed—would give us what we were looking for, or so we hoped. Right away I saw it was an odd place that attracted all types, young and old, a rough and tumble place—that was the feel of it at least: murky with shadows, the scarred wood of the ancient bar testament to the scarred and damaged lives of the older men who hung out there, smoking Chesterfields and Camels and Lucky Strikes, hoisting their beers to wash away the burn of the Four Roses whiskey they downed, shot after determined shot. The walls, what you could see of them, were adorned with fishnets, ship wheels and other maritime accessories. I sidled up to the bar and ordered a Rheingold—my first legal drink—slapping a dollar down, telling the bartender to keep the change. 172 Italian Americana Ladies Man 173

Standing tall, I lifted the mug to my lips, that first taste of foam and beer breathless and I was thinking you’d have to be dead not to feel good when In accompanied by a sense of accomplishment, similar to the way I felt the the Mood was playing, outdated though it might be. first time my Uncle Frank came to the house and shook my hand instead of Johnnie Jay asked the girls if we could join them but one of them said patting my back or roughing up my hair. loudly and firmly, “We’re expecting our boyfriends any minute now,” so I Meanwhile Johnnie Jay was already at work, his plan focused on led the way promptly back to the bar and the comfort of a second round of building up some confidence with the domestics, before approaching what beers. we thought were the more desirable college girls who hung out in the back Now Johnnie Jay’s strategy was to concentrate exclusively on the room where there was a jukebox and a dance floor with tables on either side. domestics. We’d been turned down so publicly in the back we wouldn’t have Without wasting any time, he asked one of the domestics to dance. She was a chance in hell with the other college girls who’d witnessed our downfall. thin with short, straight hair and a pretty face. His shoulders thrust upward, First rule of the game, he would remind me again and again: you had to he winked at me as he passed the bar, leaning close to say, “God helps those operate from a position of strength. Defeat begat defeat. who etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,” before following her with his uneven walk While I tried to look cool standing at the bar, telling myself I possessed through a wide archway into the back room. the courage to press on, he danced with one domestic after another. Most Though we were only months from the Beatles’ arrival in the States, seemed to be in their early twenties. They wore little or no make-up, plain though we had already been exposed to the likes of Elvis, Buddy Holly and cotton dresses; their hair hung straight to their shoulders or curled in at the Chuck Berry, the music that drifted through the archway was—for some ends below their jaw lines. By contrast, the girls in our neighborhood wore odd reason—mostly from the 40s, big bands like Benny Goodman and the bangs and pony tails and when they went on dates they had their hair curled Dorseys and Glenn Miller, the kind of music my parents liked. or waved and wore a lot of make-up. They would never be caught dead in a Beside me at the bar, an old man asked if I had a light. When I said no, place like this. They had their status-conscious sights set on bigger things. he shook his head and said, “You kids,” as if I was to blame for something. What intrigued me about these Irish girls was that I imagined their When Johnnie Jay returned from the dance floor, he looked flushed lives would turn out so different than mine. Instead of going to college, and excited. “I’m ready.” they cleaned houses or took care of someone else’s kids. Their lives were “For what?”PROOF laid out for them inPROOF what I thought of, at the time, as a particularly dreary “The coeds in back.” He gave me his characteristic sly grin. “I’ll do all example of pre-destination. They would go from one domestic situation to the work. Just follow me.” another until, presumably, they’d become their own domestic in their own He lurched into the back room, with me a few wary steps behind. household. On the other hand, my life would be rich with adventure and No hesitation, though, on his part. He went right for the nearest table of opportunity. College would open doors to worlds I could not yet imagine. I five girls. Cute faces, white blouses, plaid skirts. Definitely older than us, wouldn’t be tied down to the dull routine of family life the way my parents upperclassmen maybe at the College of New Rochelle. He asked the one at seemed to be—my father enduring a job he didn’t like, my mother working the end of the table to dance. She said, “No, thank you, I’m here with my her fingers to the bone to care for my brothers and sisters, to keep the house girlfriends.” in order. The way I imagined these girls had to do. That sent me skidding into defensive mode. I had half-turned back I drank my beer, studying them. From what I could hear they all spoke, toward the bar but Johnnie Jay, undeterred, rallied to the cause. “Well, then, to a greater or lesser degree, with an Irish brogue. And unlike the girls in my how about a group thing?” He pulled her out of her chair, her eyes looking neighborhood, they seemed rarely to turn down an offer to dance. Even one back in panic to her schoolmates who, in sympathy, got up one by one and from the grizzled guys at the bar. They were polite and agreeable and would joined her on the dimly-lit dance floor. dance close without much coaxing. So there we were, dancing with five college girls to In the Mood, Johnnie Jay was beside me now, urging me to make a move. “You taking turns swinging them out and reeling them in, the girls giddy as they know what they say, don’t you? It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.” It was twirled, skirts rising. What Johnnie Jay lacked in finesse, he made up for one of his father’s favorite lines. with enthusiasm, and I of course was in my element, fast-dancing being my So I asked the thin girl with the pretty face to dance. When I approached one claim to fame. When the song ended, the girls were red-cheeked and her she didn’t even say yes. She simply stood up and followed me to the 174 Italian Americana Ladies Man 175 back room where she slipped without hesitation into my arms, dancing close It’s a sad world, I was thinking, but somehow I must have spoken the without any encouragement. words aloud because she said, “Not so much. I’m happy all right. I miss my Every person whose path you cross teaches you something. I’d read mum but I fancy it here in America. Worst of it is how it gets to one’s knees.” that somewhere and I reminded myself of it. When she saw I didn’t understand, she added: “The floors. Scrubbing ‘em.” Her name was Mary and she worked at a large estate that faced onto “Oh.” a golf course. Three other domestics worked there, as well. It was, she said “I fancy it here better than in Ireland. More than a wee bit better.” proudly, considered to be the best house to work for in all of Westchester “That’s good,” I said. But I didn’t understand how this girl thin as air, County. so far from home, on her knees in some strange family’s bathroom could be “Why is that?” happy with her life—what seemed to me such a small life. The song didn’t “Oh,” she said, “it’s grand. Marble staircases, lovely gardens, folks help, either. It was like all the loneliness in the world was locked in the notes coming to and fro.” of the piano, straining to be released. I asked her what she did there. The song ended and she still held me. It seemed she didn’t want to let go. “Tidy up, this and that. Being I’m the youngest, the newest, I do what I considered the possibilities. the others have no mind to. Bathrooms, kitchen. Sometimes they let me be After a moment, though, I disengaged myself gently, said, “It was a nanny to one of the wee ones. I love the wee ones. That’s really what I fancy, pleasure dancing with you, Mary.” being a nanny. It takes time, though, you see. Till they trust you.” She stood there waiting for something. I took her hand, walked her “Yes,” I said, but I couldn’t think of a follow-up question so I moved back to her table and excused myself, taking my position again among the slowly with her in silence, listening to the words of the song, I Don’t Stand a shadows at the bar, watching as she rejoined her girlfriends at the table. Ghost of a Chance with You. I liked the phrase, ghost of a chance. The sound “What’s the matter with you?” Johnnie Jay, suddenly standing beside of it and the implication. The way I felt with most girls I talked to. me, wanted to know. “Ask her to dance again. She digs you, man. You’re on My mind sought distraction in the décor of the place: framed paintings your way.” of sailing ships, fishnets strung across the walls, buoys and anchors hanging Right then, being a ladies man seemed not as exciting as I’d imagined from the ceiling. ItPROOF didn’t make sense, really. There were no sailors here. We it would be. And experience,PROOF with a capital E, appeared more complicated were nowhere near dockside, miles from any marina. than it was in the books I read. Finally I said, “Does all this stuff make you think of the Irish Sea?” I went outside to wait for him, watching through the window as he “What stuff?” wrote down the number of one of his dance partners. At her table, Mary was “The nets and buoys. The anchors.” smiling and joking with her girlfriends as they passed around a pitcher of “Oh, that. I pay it no mind.” beer. The song ended. The piano version of Misty came over the jukebox, painfully soft and tender with yearning. Mary made no attempt to move away, staying close, moving even closer, pressing her head firmly against mine so that I could smell her lavender perfume. Through my shirt, I could feel the muted—fragile—beating of her heart. She was so thin and delicate I thought she might break if I held her too tight or if I moved too quickly. For a moment I felt light-headed, carefree, floating across the floor with a girl in my arms holding me close. I would protect her and she, in turn, would protect me, offering a comfort I hadn’t yet known. But the fantasy was short-lived. I thought of my parents, how the most they could afford was a movie on a Saturday night and even then, more likely than not, my mother was too tired to go. An Epistolary Friendship 177

An Epistolary Friendship: Louise DeSalvo through Her Letters

Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge

Among the literary lights gone dark in 2018 lies Louise DeSalvo, age 76— wife and mother, scholar, feminist, memoirist, teacher, luminary of the Italian-American experience. Improbably, she was also my friend. We met only once over thirteen years ago, and I found out about her death via a mention in Poets & Writers, on October 31, 2018, two months after the fact, but Louise played an outsized role in my life. Our serendipitous friendship was a mystery we both marveled at. Though we had spoken regularly about her battle with cancer—her good days of sunshine, swimming, and food; her rough days of trips to the city for treatments and their side effects—the news of her death hit me with unexpected force. I cried myself to sleep while my husband, Darren, who never had the opportunity to meet Louise, held me. If not for her, he and I might not be together at all. I met Louise in late April 2005 on the sun-baked cobblestones of Panzano in Chianti, a hillside village an hour south of Florence. My presence there was unlikely: my uncle had brought my Pennsylvania farmland family PROOF along with him onPROOF a vacation that we could have never afforded. In photos of the trip I’m doing my country-boy best to approximate Italian fashion: sunglasses, leather ankle boots, and half-zip sweaters that I vainly hoped would whisper Euro-urbane. We wandered the streets like wide-eyed ingenues, taking in vineyards, olive groves and all the bistecca florentina from Dario Cecchini’s infamous butcher shop that we could afford. During siesta we were the only people on the streets until we bumped into Louise and Ernie DeSalvo, two more Americans with a bit too much vigor to acquiesce to the local rest time. Seasoned travelers in Italy, they were standing outside a realtor’s office scoping out prospective properties. Ernie, my uncle and my father fell quickly into conversation about local treasures, essential cuisine, and the Italian phrases that my uncle was working to amass. Louise and I talked about our lives back in the States: I was a junior at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. She was a professor of creative writing at Hunter College in New York. I mentioned that I had recently taken a creative writing workshop with Laura Oliver and had latched onto creative nonfiction. She tore off a piece of paper from something in her purse and jotted her name and the titles of a few recommended books. I took the paper and put it in my wallet. “A lot of people will tell you you’re not a writer if you haven’t produced a novel or collection of short stories. Don’t buy into it,” she warned, 178 Italian Americana An Epistolary Friendship 179 running her fingers through her short gray hair. We wished each other well and I’m finding that the various aspects of my identity don’t mix so wandered off to experience more culture. For the rest of the trip, I basked in well… I turned to your book because I realized that I have lost the feeling of having been transported from a mundane rural life to the world sight of my story. I’ve always had a very strong sense of life as a of the literati that I’d read about and envied for so long. narrative… the story that informs me about who I am, where I’m Our next interaction happened two years later under less idyllic going, and how I get there. But my life has become a confused skies. I had graduated from St. John’s, spent a year teaching in France, and jumble of mismatched parts, like a piece of furniture I struggle returned to Annapolis to chart the next phase of my career. I had also told my to assemble, only to realize that I’m holding the parts for three Evangelical family that I was gay. From that announcement, everything that different furnishings… I believe that words are tools by which we had characterized our family—a joy and closeness founded on our faith— create order out of chaos, meaning out of senselessness, clarity out plummeted into acute and interminable suffering. My parents struggled for air, of confusion. My hope is that, by writing, I will begin to define cycling between anger and denial for months while I reeled amidst their pleas (confine?) the chaos a bit. Words give definition to things and and my burgeoning understanding of who I was. Conservative Christians and bring shape to the amorphous. gays use completely different vocabulary to describe what I was experiencing (Was I gay, or merely suffering from same-gender attraction, an affliction that I enclosed the scrap of paper that she had given to me as a testament to the might be healed with prayer and therapy?); even to try to define my position impression she had left on my life. To my surprise, she wrote back quickly, was to choose loyalties. Stuck in a morass of language, I suspected that writing apologizing for her “delay” with talk of “a health problem.” She expressed her might reveal a path out of my dilemma. gratitude and pride in knowing that her book was helping me in my process. In In the midst of my move back to Annapolis, I came upon the scrap of signing off, she wrote, “I’m sending you back this scrap of paper—as, what? paper Louise DeSalvo had given to me in Panzano. Underneath her name she A continuing memento of that moment in Italy.” I stuck it back in my wallet, a had written “Google > Hunter College > MFA in writing.” So I did. I found her talisman for my ongoing journey. faculty profile and extensive list of publications—books and articles, including a craft book titled Writing as a Way of Healing. Something inarticulate stirred *** within me and I orderedPROOF it. “[W]riting will help you unravel the knots in your The writing projectPROOF that was supposed to save me never made it past twenty- heart,” it promised.1 “[It] permits the construction of a cohesive, elaborate, odd pages. “Through writing,” Louise had said, “we change our relationship to thoughtful personal narrative.2 [It] permits us to discover the wholeness trauma, for we gain confidence in ourselves and in our ability to handle life’s of things.3 If we write about our pain, we heal gradually instead of feeling difficulties.”5 But for all the ink I was spilling, I still felt stuck in the paralysis powerless and confused, and we move to a position of wisdom and power.”4 that I had tried to escape. A few years later, I would discover Louise’s blog, in Wisdom. Cohesion. Power. Wholeness. These were the things I lost when which she described her ongoing battle with cancer, and find that she too had my identities collided. I drank in the book and in August 2007 I sat down at come up against the limits of writing to give her a sense of “mastery” over her my desk and started writing in a new journal: “I want to know and tell the pain: story of my life.” Hoping I now had the crutches to begin the long walk out of my identity paralysis, I divided the project into three sections—Sexuality, [F]or the first time in my writing life, I found that writing about Spirituality, and Family—and set myself an ambitious writing schedule. “Is it something didn’t help at all. That there was nothing I could do fair,” I wrote in agonized script, “to hope that I will know what to do at the end but live through what I did moment by moment by moment. That of this project? That I will be able to answer the questions that plague me?” I had to experience it in all its rawness. That writing about it in As part of my commitment to the project, I decided to come out again my journal didn’t allay the feelings I had, didn’t put them into and wrote to Louise at Hunter, reminding her of our chance meeting in Italy and perspective, didn’t allow me to achieve distance from them—all telling her how her book was helping me. “I don’t identify as a heterosexual the things that I’d always thought that writing could do. This was person,” I told her, still struggling for the right words: an experience I had to feel; the writing I did recorded, to the extent that words could, what I lived through. But I learned, too, that I’m still working out the details of what that means concretely, there are many experiences that can’t be put into words or, rather but as the firstborn pride and joy of my Evangelical family, that there are many experiences that can be written about but that 180 Italian Americana An Epistolary Friendship 181

the writing will only ever be an inadequate simulacrum for what writing course I had designed partly from her inspiration. “All the pieces of happened.6 a fine life” she would call them when she wrote back. “What a wonderful gift you sent me—your letter—and it came during a day when I was ‘melting Now, when I read her words, I recognize Louise’s crisis of faith not as a failing down.’ It helped enormously!” So began our regular communication over the of the truths she had written about and preached in her classroom but as a next six years. She fielded my questions about PhDs and MFAs and offered realization that these things were not enough to save her from the brutality of moral support when my first novel failed to attract an agent. “A literary agent,” life and loss, of pain and death. she commiserated, “it’s like a marriage.” Over the years, Louise blogged about her work and what she called “her “Is marriage as demoralizing as all that?” I replied. condition,” sometimes applying the lessons of one to the other. “If an act of “Marriage, at least mine, is far, far better, of course.” will could achieve miracles,” she wrote a week after one operation, “I’d be Partly on Louise’s advice, I decided against an advanced degree. Darren, fine now. But I’m not. I’m still healing. If an act of will could transform ideas too, was eyeing more school as he transitioned from pharmacy to psychology. into finished works of art, there would be a hell of a lot more art out there than In 2013 we left Maryland for his doctoral program in Massachusetts, and 7 there is now.” She blogged about food, about nature, about her loved ones, I began teaching at Groton School. When the English department chose and what she was reading. She wrote about the “quiet, solitary moments of Louise’s memoir Vertigo as a summer read, we made plans for her to visit and 8 savoring small pleasures that I now remember.” Her blog is a record not of a to speak and meet with classes. I couldn’t wait to introduce her to Darren, to life lived free from cancer, but of a life lived in spite of cancer. my students, to the remarkably stable life that her influence had helped me Today, when I read those twenty pages of my 2007 journal—the one build. I don’t know who was more disappointed when her medication regimen I had written to help me unravel my inner turmoil—I see that my ramblings claimed more of her than she anticipated and she had to cancel her visit. “I’m had not been circular but spiral. They, too, were a record of a life lived not in so very sorry,” she wrote. “I must spend part of every afternoon resting. If I freedom from confusion, but through it. They began in bewilderment, then live carefully, I’m fine. If not, I pay… The good news is that I’m writing. I can swung into anger against Darren for loving me, then back to uncertainty. A few manage an hour in the mornings. And it feels good to be working on a new pages later I railed against my parents for their love. There are pages of prayers project.” shot through with ellipses,PROOF places where I worked to hear a still, small voice We tried to meetPROOF again in person several times over the next few years, through the noise of others’ expectations. especially after Darren and I adopted a baby boy in 2016. However, when we Then the journal goes silent for three years. The last entry, dated June 7, passed through New Jersey for holiday travels, Louise’s treatments frequently 2010, is a set of talking points I drafted for a panel discussion that our church had her in quarantine for fear of infection. Our friendship stayed online but held on sexual orientation two months before I would marry Darren under its it never lost the personal quality that had endeared Louise to me from the auspices. Though I didn’t recognize it at the time, these bullet points were the beginning. She sent our son a stylish jean jacket for his second birthday. I narrative I had been working to articulate. I did not write a book about my life; sent her copies of essays I published in various media. Bouts of weakness I had instead managed to write myself a better life. and neuropathy sometimes delayed her responses, but I admired how she used her strength to capture moments of joy: “I went on a wisteria hunt in *** town yesterday and was well rewarded! It’s been so cool that all the flowering Two years later, I was at another crossroads: having just finished my master’s trees have stayed in bloom for a long time.” She occasionally offered shrewd in English, I was contemplating further studies—a PhD or an MFA—primarily wisdom on parenting: “Two-year-olds are, physically, suicidal, so there’s a lot because, having been a student my entire life, I wasn’t sure what else I could of stopping them, which frustrates them.” do. I vacillated between the analytical and the creative paths for a few months, In 2017, when I told her a few friends and I had started a literary journal not knowing the right questions to ask, before I remembered Louise, who had that had just published its first issue, she wrote back immediately: “What kind begun her career as a scholar of Virginia Woolf before establishing herself as a of work are you publishing? I might have something for you.” The essay she memoirist and creative writing teacher. sent, “Sweets,” is one of the last things Louise published, though of course I wrote to her again, telling her of my marriage to Darren and our snug neither of us (I think) knew it at the time. She wrote, as always, about food, home, of my parents and our eventual reconciliation after their objection to our and about what her current chemo-ravaged relationship to it revealed about wedding, of the school where I had fallen in love with teaching and the creative her losses, loves, and fears. Recounting in third-person a truncated weekend 182 Italian Americana An Epistolary Friendship 183 getaway with her husband, Ernie, that ended at a New Jersey bakery, she wrote: between us, a relationship that was not built on frequent interaction but rather a constant but sporadic criss-crossing of paths. Perhaps because our encounters Right now, they’re pretending that being in Ocean Grove sitting were literary, founded on the books that were Louise’s fulfillment, and, in front of this bakery is something like being on the coast of later, led to mine. Perhaps it was the geographic, cultural, and generational Liguria, sitting at the Primula, the local cafe in Camogli, the one distance between us that made each interaction so intentional. Perhaps such where old women gather to play cards and drink aperitivos every relationships are forged every day in our lives without our immediate notice. afternoon after they do their shopping before heading home to As special as Louise was to me, I know there are others who treasured cook the evening meal. Camogli, a place where they’ve been her far longer and more deeply than I, and whose grief will unfold as slowly many times, but where they’ll never go again, she couldn’t risk and as messily as my own coming out. I wonder if Louise knew what would it, getting sick in Italy, she’s heard the most awful stories… And follow in the wake of her death, how her loss would affect people. There has yes, they both know that sitting outside this cafe at a rusting table always been a selflessness to her writing, an implicit knowledge that good is nothing at all like being in Liguria, but that’s out for the time writing has to serve more than just the author. In her blog posts, her letters, and being, he says, to keep her hopes up, though they both know that her final words, I see a woman coming to terms with the slow termination of the time being means forever, which really means for the rest of a rich, full life, and also offering us all a way to come to terms with our own her life, not his, she says, he could always go there after, and that’s losses. For Louise, the way forward was always in the acts of creation and when he tells her he’ll never go anywhere without her, it would be reclamation. In “Sweets,” she wrote of her pleasure in home renovation TV too hard, and she knows that what he says might not be true, but shows: she’s glad to hear it. So, they play this game, they pretend they’re where they cannot be, and it gives them some small measure of [E]very decrepit house that’s transformed lets her pretend that joy to play this game together, when so much has been taken from something like that could happen to her. She’s had recurring her, from him, from them.9 dreams about people renovating her body, one in which the cute couple from Texas come into her home to perform a full gut on I thought of our meeting thirteen years earlier on the streets of Panzano, of her, and, on demo day, they take out all the diseased parts of her the American couplePROOF browsing Italian real estate and dreaming of retirement PROOF body and throw them into the dumpster in her driveway, and in the land they loved. I saw a woman whose self-possession, style, and they ask her what special features she would like in her new and sophistication are all that my twenty-one-year-old self wanted. If I closed my improved body, and she tells them, nothing special, just something eyes I could imagine the moments Louise wrote about—realizing their travel that functions well, that she’d like to walk without getting dizzy, days were over too soon, saying goodbye prematurely to places they always and if they could do something about the sores on her feet, she’d assumed they would see again. I wondered how much of Louise’s life felt like be grateful, she’d like them to return to a healthy shade of pinko- this: each bunch of wisteria, each lap in the pool, each letter from a friend—all gray, which is what her anthropology professor taught her was unspeakably precious because the only alternative was their lack. the real color of the so-called white race, and they tell her not to My last email to Louise, two months before she died, was the news that worry, to leave it all to them, and when she awakens, they have my second novel had secured an agent. I wrote to thank her for her friendship done more than what she’s asked, and she has nothing at all wrong and support, for teaching me to think of my writing not in terms “of each with her, she’s as good as new, no, she’s better than new, and, they individual work” but instead “as a continuum, with the completion of each tell her, this new improved body will last her a lifetime, she no 10 project viewed as another important step in a lifetime of practice.” I tried to longer has anything to worry about. tell her just how much I attributed the successes in my life—my marriage, my teaching, my writing—to the influence that began with a scrap of paper that *** sits in my bedside table to this day. “Please know,” she replied, “how proud I It’s a cold January afternoon as I reread the last lines in this essay—as cold am of having been a very small part of this wonderful process. I still remember as it gets in our ever-warming world. My little family has left Massachusetts our chance encounter in Tuscany and how moving it was for me… Wasn’t that and returned to Maryland, not far from the house where I first wrote to Louise a moment, us meeting one another! The fates I believe threw us together.” twelve years ago. I’ve been poring over my emails with her and noticed that I sometimes wonder why such a wonderful relationship unfolded 184 Italian Americana my neglected Google profile picture is from that same year—a grainy, off- center, black-and-white shot of my face, the lower portion obscured by my hand as I sit at the desk where I plotted the book I thought would explain me to myself. It looks as if I’m trying not to say something I shouldn’t. It is a photo of a boy trapped in a twenty-three-year-old’s body, stumbling through life the same way my energetic three-year-old son struggles to keep his balance, the same way Louise struggled to keep her own footing in her last days. The light fades so quickly in winter. I realize that in an hour I will go and pick my son up from daycare and the quiet of my afternoon will give way to his whirling dervish chaos. Louise would have treasured all these moments—a soporific winter afternoon for writing, the frenzy of trying to feed andput to bed someone whose boisterous life cannot be contained. She was good at extracting the joy and knowing when to let it go. “I finished a small piece this morning during my early morning writing time,” she wrote in her final email to me. “It felt wonderful.”

Notes 1 DeSalvo, Louise. Writing as a Way of Healing, Beacon Press, 1999. p. 31. 2 Ibid, p. 41 Reviews 3 Ibid, p. 43 4 Ibid, p. 40 PROOF PROOF 5 Ibid, p. 45 6 DeSalvo, Louise. “Dumbstruck.” Writingalife’s Blog, https://writingalife. wordpress.com/2012/06/24/dumbstruck/ 7 DeSalvo, Louise. “Will.” Writingalife’s Blog, https://writingalife.wordpress. com/2011/10/04/will/ 8 DeSalvo, Louise. “Take a 30-Minute Holiday.” Writingalife’s Blog, https:// writingalife.wordpress.com/2016/09/13/take-a-30-minute-holiday/ 9 DeSalvo, Louise. “Sweets.” Oyster River Pages. https://www.oysterriverpages. com/sweets 10 DeSalvo, Louise. The Art of Slow Writing, St. Martin, 2014. p. 73 Reviews 187

Review Essay: A Phenomenology of the American Spirit

The Unreal McCoy by Virginiana Miller. Santeria, 2019.

Review Essay by Simone Marchesi Princeton University

Released in early 2019 on the Santeria label, The Unreal McCoy contains nine original songs, all written and sung in English and all attempting to construct a polycentric and polyphonic explanation of America for Italian audiences. Simone Lenzi, the Livornese singer-songwriter who leads the alternative rock band Virginiana Miller, is not new to this kind of endeavor, having translated into Italian Robert Pinsky’s long poem An Explanation of America (Princeton UP, 1979), which he published with the title Un’America (Le Lettere, 2009).1 In a way, the album continues in the same vein of “translating” America—across genres, this time, rather than across languages—on the Italian cultural scene. As did Pinsky’s long poem, which was built on variedly interconnected sections, The Unreal McCoy attempts to sketch a phenomenology of the American spirit through a distillation of individual figures and images. The resulting mosaic of cultural objects, which are at once marginal and PROOF emblematic, is organizedPROOF by an intellectually principled mimetic pessimism: representing America is ultimately not possible. It is the same healthily skeptical attitude that had guided Pinsky in his approach to an explanation of America forty years ago, when he wrote:

Countries and people, of course,

1 Simone Lenzi’s work as writer encompasses several genres. He is a novelist (La Generazione, Dalai 2012; Dall’esilio, Rizzoli 2018) and an essayist (Sul lungomai di Livorno; Mali minori, both Laterza 2013; Per il verso giusto, Marsilio 2017); he has worked as a script writer (for several films by directors Paolo Virzì and Francesco Bruni) and a journalist (as columnist for both local and national newspapers, such as Il Tirreno and La Repubblica); he has also been active as a translator (we worked together on both the Pinsky translation and a sample of Martial’s epigrams for the journal Semicerchio), and a cantautore (his song “Tutti i santi giorni” was awarded a David di Donatello prize in 2013 as best original song for a film). The band Virginiana Miller, whose name derives from a plant in the botanical garden of Pisa, has been active for more than two decades and has released six albums before The Unreal McCoy. 188 Italian Americana Reviews 189

Cannot be known or told in final terms … The Unreal McCoy But can be, in the comic, halting way 2 Of parents, explained: as Death and Government are. Son, I was cowboy Riding a clotheshorse in the prairie In Lenzi’s case, just as in Pinsky’s, skepticism does not lead to silence, but Do you think I died in vain rather refocuses the exploration from a specific point of view: the end. The To save the fatted calf Unreal McCoy apparently takes Pinsky’s “final terms” quite literally as the Under a dusty rain endpoint of history and narrative. From this logical finality that has somehow To make America great again turned historical, if not metaphysical, spawns the survey of individual and global endings which runs through the album’s tracks. Several songs are Son, I was a commuter concerned with personal deaths—as Motorhomes of America or Old Baller— On the Amtrak to Elizabeth while others project the same sense of finality on a grander scale, dealing And I read the news of yesterday imaginatively with one end of the world as we know it: End of Innocence, And I went down and across Toast the Asteroid and Albuquerque being all cases in point. To crucify my words Yet, not even the end, from which the narratives approach their objects, Once back home to remain silent as a bone provides clarity for the subject of study. A part in a multifaceted whole, each individual song is both complete and cohesive, but the sequencing of the Son, I was a wrestler tracks, all collaborating on explaining “America” as an object, goes hand A face in a pink trunk in hand with a programmatic renunciation of extracting a unifying sense For the booker’s fun from its history and phenomenology. No biographical or historiographical Just the under card of the deck trajectory emerges anywhere in the album: its characters turn into ghosts, One more flat back bump and yet and the moments in America’s historical time that transpire from the lyrics Buried to death remain unconnected.PROOF No superhuman comePROOF back The imbrication of individual, unresolved destinies and collective, dramatic change which pervades the album is at the core of the song The Son, now I’m a ghost Unreal McCoy as well. Locating itself at the center of a field of tensions Reading Cicero on the patio between permanence and change, unity of life and singularity of death, In an old corduroy history and end-of-time, the title track bridges individual and collective I am no one and nothing strains of meditation. Instability and insufficiency are the mark of identity But a wind-up toy of the title role in the song, The Unreal McCoy, who features in the text as But the unreal McCoy linguistic pun turned character. He is both a succession of identities in time I’m the unreal McCoy and the simultaneous undoing of the ultimate idiomatic marker of cultural authenticity the English language assigns to the phrase “The real McCoy.” Organized in four equally-paced and basically isometric stanzas, marked As a self-effacing signifier, Lenzi’s Unreal McCoy unravels in a controlled by the insistent evocation of (and allocution to) a “Son,” the song presents series of characters, arranged in order of decreasing fictionality as well as four successive and revolving identities. The four anonymous personalities according to the progress of historical time. As an unreal American hero, he that culminate in the self-naming of McCoy include three ‘professional’ has a story, mapped upon the history of the country that, as a broken lineage figures, each presented as representative of a specific stage in the progress of intermittent identities, he incarnates. While he may be said to provide an of the nation they collectively personify. They are also all entrusted to an incarnation for the nation’s spirit, however, he does so ultimately as a ghost. aoristic past, a time that has been made to pass completely for each of them. *** A cowboy, a commuter, a wrestler, and finally the prototype of an apparently retired individual, a leisurely reader of ancient texts, seated on a patio and 2 Prologue, You. Lines 28–32. 190 Italian Americana Reviews 191 dressed in an old corduroy. Both his attitude and the fabric he wears incarnate cowboy, in his pseudo-mythical generality, no proposal aiming at reducing the passing of time and herald the approaching of the endgame. his abstract quality could be advanced, there is perhaps a precise, though Signals of finality abound also in the three masks McCoy successively fictional character who fits, at least allusively, the profile of the commuter. It dons. They range from the sorrowful question about individual end, “do is someone who is caught in the same network of places, times, and actions you think I died in vain?” which comes from the clotheshorse-cowboy; pass as the stanza defines it. In Episode 12 of Season 1 of Mad Men, aired on through the dry silence of the commuter, who performs the daily ritual of October 11, 2007, the character of Dick Whitman returns from the Korean ‘crucifying’ his words; and reach ‘The Burial of the Dead’ paraphrased by War, under the assumed identity of Donald Draper, his commanding officer, the wrestler’s admission of existential defeat. To be sure, three momentary fallen in battle, with whom he had exchanged dogtags. In a failed anagnorisis possibilities of returning from death do exist in the text, but they are also scene, Whitman now turned Draper delivers the body of his former self to systematically undercut, in their pretense to reach back, allegedly, to a his family, avoiding any contact with them, in order to go off to live his fullness of life. The cowboy’s violent illusion of MAGA is branded a borrowed life. Though he is recognized by Adam, he speaks no word. Every regressive myth from the start; the return home consummated in solitude later act of commuting, one may surmise, thus unfolds under the aegis of this by the commuter sparks no language, but a desiccated life; the impossible inaugural surrogate self-sacrifice based on silence: a crucifying of one’s own comeback on the ring is denied to the wrestler explicitly, as a superhuman words that coincides with an ultimately unachieved return home. feat. The only instance of persistence in the narrative of disrupted identities The identification of the second mask of McCoy with Whitman- that McCoy details for the benefit of his son is as a ghost. Not so much Draper is, to be sure, only a possibility, but it is possibly a suggestive one, a revenant; rather, the embodiment of a life-in-death paradox—a nihilist since it places the chronology of the episode midway between the age of the consciousness that declares, as candidly as it does bitterly, that he is “no one Great-Depression West and the WWF circus of the late-Eighties activated in and nothing.” the first and third stanza, respectively. Revolving around the wrestler, the The overall sense of blocked history one gathers from the song is third block of verses in the song is even more precise, both temporally and confirmed by a slower reading of the individual stanzas. As hinted above, from the point of view of prosopography, than what preceded it. The “face the three figures that preface McCoy also predate him. Philology and in a pink trunk” is most likely, almost certainly, that of Keith A. Frank Jr. cultural history helpPROOF unravel the thick web of allusions to real and imaginary (1953–1988), whoPROOF wrestled under the eerie ring name of Adrian Adonis. circumstances that frame the episodes and determine the relative degree of The chain of cultural associations and allusions leading to and triggered by fictionality of each instantiation of America that McCoy reviews. the identification of McCoy’s wrestler with the bleached and clownishly The cowboy in the first stanza is certainly the most imaginary, abstract, made up “Adorable Adonis” is dizzying. It reaches back from the WWF and generic mask in the series. While he is the embodiment of possibly the pantomimes aired on local TV stations in Italy thirty years ago to Mario central figure of the American imaginary, the specific set of circumstances of Praz’s introduction to his edition of La terra desolata, the critical text that his life and death, which happen to unfold “to save the fatted calf / under a helped Italian readers realize the hermeneutic advantages of applying to dusty rain,” connect him to a special time and space in American history. The literary studies the basic tenets of comparative cultural mythology; back to Dust Bowl of the Dirty Thirties, the three years of devastating, man-induced T.S. Eliot’s own Waste Land, the ground from which issues “the wicked pack drought which turned parts of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, of cards” at the bottom of which McCoy’s wrestler finds himself, and out and Kansas into an immense, sandstorm-plagued desert. McCoy’s first alter of which also sprouts the tag “buried to death” that appears in the text; and ego, that is, brings us to the triennium 1935-1938, a highly-charged literary back to the extra ordinem annotation, the self-commentary Eliot appended chronotope, having already been chosen as the backdrop of John Steinbeck’s to his poem in 1921, pointing in a miracle of indirection beyond Jessie L. Grapes of Wrath. Weston’s book on the Grail quest to J.G. Frazer’s 1890 study of the seasonal Philology, again, serves to date rather precisely the circumstances and regeneration myths in The Golden Bough. trace the personal profile of the second character, the commuter, starting with All these texts are connected to one another and to Lenzi’s song the context. Records show that the Amtrak service to the railway station of by the shared and interdependent treatment of the archetypal connection Elizabeth, NJ, ceased in 1975. The terminus ante quem for the Amtrak rider, of Attis and Adonis, as the kernel of other, endlessly recurring masks of thus, places his shuttling back and forth on the Northeast Corridor some self-sacrificing deities, from Christ to the Fisherman King, all caught by time in the Sixties and somewhere in and out of New York. While for the 192 Italian Americana Reviews 193 death and all enjoying a superhuman comeback. The anthropological To my knowledge, there is one work from Cicero’s corpus that and imaginary background of Adrian Adonis bleeds over into the final possesses a high degree of intertextual pertinence for The Unreal McCoy. It instantiation of McCoy in the song. He, too, is a blocked character, as his is a text prominently and programmatically written to a son; a text composed predecessors, a failed archetype for whom no redemptive sacrifice has ever as an existential envoy from a liminal space of political marginality and been available. Denied any fullness of existence and reduced to the bare exile; a text containing a theory of human identity as the result of the bones of transactive economics, McCoy has always been moving within a interplay between several personalities—actually, of four distinct masks. waste land, whether the dusty plains of the wild West or the orthogonal maze The convergence of these elements takes place, to my knowledge, only of the unreal metropolis of rampant capitalists, or even the overpoweringly in Cicero’s De officiis. Written in 44 B.C., the last year of Cicero’s life, hedonistic financial ventures controlling the organized mediatic spectacle of dedicated to his son, the Young Marcus Tullius Cicero, containing in the the wrestling ring. final section of Book 1 (par. 107–121), the so-called theory of personalities. One final summarizing note is in order, before moving into the In each individual identity, writes Cicero, come into play four different close reading of the last stanza. Beyond their recurrent status as living and interconnected masks, four personae. There is one’s own natural identity dead, all of McCoy’s identitary instantiations (his doubles) and prodromic as human being, that is, as a rational animal, which is common to all; then personifications (his precursors) have one element in common. They associate there is one’s own individual identity, which distinguishes everybody from themselves with garments. They are, in the most profoundly etymological everybody else. Two more masks are then added by the circumstances of our sense, fabrications of their nation. From the clotheshorse that the dress-up lives: first, a marker of social identity, which depends on the randomness cowboy rides to the old corduroy of the final ghost, passing through the of the status we acquire at birth (rich or poor, aristocratic or plebeian), and, pink trunk—technically, the wrestling singlet—of Adrian Adonis and, if finally, the identity we confer upon ourselves by choosing our trade in life the identification with a military context for the commuter has any merit, (pursuing, for instance, philosophy, oratory, or the law). the uniform worn by Whitman-Draper. Once again, the boundary between By articulating his discourse on individual identity as a succession life and death is tested and found wanting: all characters appear as dressed- of personae, Cicero uncannily anticipates Hegel’s framing of historical up skeletons. Embodying the successive stages of their nation’s spirit, they dialectic as a succession of masks. In the Introduction to the Phenomenology also appear as a dancePROOF of calaveras, an image appearing in Albuquerque of the Spirit, HegelPROOF describes the movement of the Spirit through the later in the album. The song is, thus, accompanying both a Totentanz and successive stages of History towards its own final self-awareness, as a a parade, suspended between the “skeletons in skirts and hats” that Pinsky process of successive incarnations in different historical figures, which are assigned as object of visual desire to the southern-border counterparts of his progressively donned and eventually discarded. The short circuiting of The imagined Americans, and James Ensor’s uncanny and triumphal flânerie of Unreal McCoy between Cicero and Hegel as well as between individual city dwellers at the end of the other European siècle. and collective, also brings us full circle. In Lenzi’s lyrics, the sense of finality and the view from the ending do not lead into a self-realization of *** the Spirit. In the microcosm of The Unreal McCoy, the subject never lives in Having so much to do with death, the song unsurprisingly closes on a the fullness of historical life; the Spirit does not find a subject into which it specter: Son, now I am a ghost. With this release of narrative energy into the may incarnate; language is perennially self-conscious and the only spiritual present, the lyrics reach the point of the character’s self-revelation. From the awareness that may develop hence is that of its ultimate fictionality. start, we are made to feel, McCoy has been unreal, a Geist thinly disguised The explanatory power of each and all the figures in the text is null, as living being, at once an individual, a fictional type, and the mark of a but not because of any inactuality of the approach the song takes. Unlike generation. Now it is the voice of a special kind of citizen that reaches us, not Cicero, defeated by an historical turn toward autocracy and realpolitik he simply of someone who is “reading Cicero on a patio” at the westernmost could and would not comprehend, Lenzi’s McCoy has not been cast out point of a sunset, but someone whose voice has been ventriloquized by of history. Rather, he is in a position of systematic dissatisfaction. No Cicero throughout. Another quick exercise of orienteering through allusive uncomprehending hero, he is the unhappy consciousness of a country he philology may help us get closer to a final identification, not so much of the knows and explains all too well. reader of the last stanza, but rather of the book he reads. 194 Italian Americana Reviews 195

Review Essay: Pop Formalist: Ned Balbo and The Perseids notes that, rescued, form a tune / brand new”—and provides Balbo’s speakers the means to measure human progress and place. In “Live from the Dakota,” 3 Nights of the Perseids by Ned Balbo. Evansville: University of Evansville John Lennon’s sudden death inspires the speaker to assess his younger self: Press, 2018. 164 pp. The whirl of punk and disco Review essay by George Guida winding down had dropped me at the brink New York City College of Technology, CUNY of some new age I’d welcome or resist to no avail, while you, five years retired Full disclosure: Ned Balbo is an Italian-American poet from Long Island and were someone that I’d learned to live without. so am I. He writes poems about popular culture and so do I. His work has Back briefly, twice as old, you were gunned down appeared in two anthologies about popular music in which my work has also before I’d yet forgiven you for leaving. appeared: Clash By Night: Poems Inspired by the Clash’s London Calling And who was I, exactly? (CityLit Press, 2015) and Poet Sounds: Poems Inspired by the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (CityLit Press, 2019), both edited by our mutual friend, Italian- Musical culture not only helps Balbo’s people define and redefine themselves, American poet (from New York) Gerry LaFemina and Gregg Wilhelm. but fires their aspirations. In “Full Circle” Joni Mitchell is the catalyst. Although Balbo and I haven’t gotten the chance to become close friends, we are cultural kin, and I’ve known and liked him and his work for years. Even Joni wasn’t Joni Over those years he has gained a well-deserved national reputation in her youth, just one more pregnant girl as an accomplished formalist, appearing in many of the same journals and struggling to hold and strum her instrument, often mentioned in the same breath as masters like A. E. Stallings, Ernest shut in a room, afraid to call her parents, Hilbert, and Allison Joseph, who, while formalists, share incredible range, and I was me—not her, and not her daughter— intelligence, and catholic sensibilities. Of his five published collections— only a teenage girl lost in music Galileo’s BanquetPROOF (Washington Writers Pub House, 1998); Lives of the like my friends,PROOF the words we sang inscribed Sleepers (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004); The Trials of Edgar Poe on notebooks, three-ring binders, fortune tellers. (Story Line Press, 2010); Upcycling Paumanok (Measure Press, 2016: We rode that carousel, hoping that when rev. Italian Americana, 35 no. 1: 105–107); and his latest, 3 Nights of the the music stopped, we’d step off in a world Perseids; four have won prizes. The prolific poet has yet another prize- where what we felt while carried off by song winning collection, The Clyburn Touch-Me-Nots (Criterion Press), set for was what we’d feel forever: touched, transformed release in December of this year. into the someone else we truly were. Balbo’s earlier volumes established his interest in classical mythology, hagiography, and American cultural history, while highlighting his nimble This confessional tone, a regular feature of Balbo’s free and blank verse use of form and ingenious use of secondary voices to reveal epiphanies. poems, suits his focus on popular music and popular culture. The speakers 3 Nights of the Perseids is filled with epiphanies. In it Balbo roams the of these poems seek transformation through identification with accessible American cultural landscape and sails a sea of forms, extended metaphors, cultural phenomenon in accessible language. But theirs are not the only and free-verse narratives with Odyssean aplomb. In their philosophical voices. whimsy and formal invention, the best of the collection’s poems are sui At 145 pages this quadripartite collection reads like a few books generis vessels for reflection and wisdom set to music. Music, in fact, spines in one. A different epigraph signals each section’s themes. The prefatory this volume: applied theory, genres, songs, and musicians whose flame is poem and the poems of the first section dwell on nature, time, technology, fleeting, but whose presence, like the Perseids, lingers. Many of the poems change, and on poetry’s capacity for comprehending their roles in human linger, too, as loomings of our common fate gleaned in surprising subjects, consciousness and survival. “What else had I learned?” the speaker of “Rare punctuated with glimpses of transcendence. Book and Readers” asks about his college-age self (a number of these poems The continuous re-creation of music perpetuates life—”The scattered 196 Italian Americana Reviews 197 return Balbo’s speakers to their college days): Clash in the voice of her Minister for the Arts. For the Tories of the time, the Clash’s London Calling is “a call / to those forgotten...redundant workers That where the distant future is concerned, on the dole,” a “scream for change the world would not deliver / unless we no language equal to it can exist willed it. And we never would.” Unlike most poems about musicians and nor is there language clear and unadorned their social impact, this dramatic monologue lays bare the relative impotence to show how time recedes into the past. of music to effect change. In fact, of the many elegies and hymns in 3 Nights, just one or two (“My Millay,” for example) veer toward unmitigated He arrives at the predictable but truthful conclusion that “loss becomes homage, and these are the least compelling. But even these include Balbo’s the weight and measure of our days.” The deeper interest of the poem conscientious interrogation of subject. lies in the quest to understand the agents of our loss, a far-reaching quest The elegies, fantasies, ubi sunts, and prayers of the fourth section that yields this collection’s trove of forms, including sonnets, a modified distill the metaphysical concerns of the first three, evoking the mysteries sestina, nonce forms, various stanzaic patterns, and poems built on Internet- of time and space forever altered by technology. “Ex-Libris Lux” posits the inspired conceits. Among the most satisfying of these poems is “Choose process of younger selves becoming history as they haplessly ponder their Your Adventure,” which takes the form of a social media personality quiz, futures. including questions like “Would you rather shop or read?” to which the participant answers, “My currency is words: they buy me time.” Balbo slyly Would we be frail or vital in the future shifts from the language of the quiz to a higher register, both contemplative when, our fashions altered, we’d return and consciously literary, as in the response to the question “Are you an to gawk, surprised by time, technology, athletic person?”: and streaming data nobody can hold? We were the anachronisms, after all... The skeleton beneath my skin we lived as if this world belonged to us emerges from its cage of flesh, and would not change. It would. But less than we. triumphant, PROOFtill the wind returns PROOF to sift the bones from the dust and ash. Human ignorance of the future and of history also preoccupies the speaker of “Amerika for Erika,” who hopes for millennials, “may you not fail history, And in the quiz results: but make it / yours, no matter how it’s spelled, someday.” The speaker of “Night Watch” expresses less hope and more anxiety for a world mediated The Retail Enthusiast through Web-based language and vision. He worries that “We’ve learned to view the whole world through our screens— / how could we live without That Dutchess on the wall is not your last— them?” What most concerns him is You’re a genuine Retail Enthusiast. not some students The poet’s mordant wit shines here, and inflects several music-focused poems on their field trip—how different are we of the second section, such as “Groovy Decay,” whose speaker, reflecting on who share the Rembrandt memin snarky threads an aging Robyn Hitchcock, concludes, “decay is groovy, / wicks burn down, while checking status updates?—but the thought wax melts, a certain skull, / blind socketed, sports shades.” of how the very act of seeing’s changed. In the poems of the third section, Balbo addresses a different sort of decay, the corruption of power. Most of these pieces rain satirical blows He doubts that in our lazy embrace of virtual reality we can ever “love the on their subjects (especially the poems about Donald Trump and other world as much as Rembrandt,” an insight that, especially in context of an politicians), but some transcend the usual modus operandi of political poetry Old Master, recalls Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Art” and its opening line through wisely chosen point-of-view and unflinching insight. “London about the sad and consequential truth of human beings’ capacity for careless Crowds and Tory Crimes” describes Margaret Thatcher’s contempt for the 198 Italian Americana Reviews 199 disregard. Assocamerestero in 1999 to found the association Globus et Locus. As he To better understand our human dilemma, Balbo turns to the natural wrote, “the association’s mission is to help the managerial class face the world, in his Marianne Moore-like exegesis “Sea Star.” In Balbo’s hands the challenges of glocalization by providing them with a new political culture sea star, like the Rembrandt and the rock song, embodies a common fate, and a system of updated values which have adopted glocalism (i.e., those whose secrets we seek for survival and redemption, a quest whose residue phenomena that derive from the impact of globalization with local realities, is artistic form. The contours of the animal kingdom reflect the contours of and vice versa) as the key for interpreting reality” (17–18). the cosmos. He wants to know “Why / would constellations die amid the The significance of hybridization as a result of “glocalization” resides shells”? and, as he asks in “Heirs of Knossos,” “What new genesis awakes?” in promoting a new set of revolutionary values, at the intersection between In “Artificial Age,” a poem that takes Prince as its surface subject, he offers globalization and local communities: i.e., mobility and collaboration versus up an ideal new world in an “Age of Art” to which we should aspire, in isolationism, “pluri-identities” versus “strict citizenships” (20), with all their which “all are blessed, transformed by love & music,” in which Prince cultural and social implications. The indispensable support for this endeavor, returns to life, to sing and play for grateful humanity, who are flashing, like the author further argues, consists of multilingualism and “informational the Perseids, through life, toward infinity and eternity. collaboration” (106) based on the model of the “open source.” Hence in the context of the “new systems of aggregation” (3) based on shared values Let’s Wake Up, Italics!: Manifesto for a Glocal Future by Piero Bassetti. and voluntarily adopted political and functional ties, Bassetti explains, New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2017. 138 pp. the much dreaded “brain drain” provoked by today’s economic crisis in Italy and high youth unemployment becomes a constructive phenomenon. Review by Ioana Raluca Larco It is not perceived as a loss anymore but rather an opportunity for young University of Kentucky professionals and minds to disseminate and exchange Italic values and ideas, consequently serving “humanity before nation for the good of the world” In a world increasingly haunted by extremist tendencies, the present book (xii). As uplifting as this approach might sound, it is also paradoxical, given brings a much-needed positive note by suggesting a different kinship and that the “brain drain” phenomenon is not, for the most part, a voluntary identity paradigm,PROOF beyond political and geographical borders. According migration. Many ItaliansPROOF do not have a choice given the present economic to Piero Bassetti, the Italian community is larger than the territories where and political issues that have reached crisis proportions. Could not Italy use Italian is the official language; it should comprise not only all Italians who to its own benefit the very young Italians that it is forcing out? live outside Italy but also those who might not even have Italian heritage yet Bassetti’s reasoning becomes precise when presenting the benefits of share the same lifestyle, views, and values. The new community of Italics― his theories in the field of business where large multinational companies are the term proposed by Bassetti―“will have to be constructed around binding by now a common presence; a business model deriving from and reflecting factors that overlap with national references, without supplanting them” our nowadays multicultural society. Last but not least, Bassetti’s message (52). Thus, he makes the distinction between Italian and Italic/Italicity, and has a strong political connotation; it is a call to action addressed to all Italics gives preference to the latter as more inclusive and appropriate terms in a in the world to transform Italicity, “this shared way of feeling, a way of world dominated by “transnational interactions” as required by business and relating to the world, of giving meaning to the world,” into an opportunity “to political cooperation. play a new leading role in global history” (3), similar to Anglo-Saxons and The necessity of this distinction became clear to Bassetti starting Hispanics. Even though the concepts discussed here are not necessarily novel in 1993 when he was elected president of the Assocamerestero. In this for us today―they more likely were so at the beginning of Bassetti’s activity position, he was also in charge of making the activity of Italy’s Chambers as the first President of the Lombardy Region (1970–74) and Chairman of of Commerce abroad more efficient. This role helped him realize that Milan’s Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (1982–97)―these “the shared character that permitted the Chambers of Commerce abroad concepts remain nonetheless current today, as the present manifesto delivers to create their own system wasn’t strictly Italianism, but rather a hybrid a powerful civic and humanitarian message to the world. dimension, of which […] Italianism was merely one of the founding factors” (10). The concept of hybridization is at the center of Bassetti’s ideas and theories that he continued to develop even after leaving the presidency of 200 Italian Americana Reviews 201

Facing toward the Dawn: The Italian Anarchists of New London by concludes Lenzi, Galleanism enabled the group, which included a few, Richard Lenzi. Stony Brook: State University of New York Press, 2019. 334 pp. extremely articulate and militant women, “to live fraternally within the shell of the present society” (241). Review by Ferdinando Fasce Based on thorough research that defies the paucity of sources, Lenzi’s University of Genoa book would have benefitted from a broader consideration of the social and economic national environment in which the Fanese enclave lived and An independent scholar with a long-standing interest in the history of labor struggled and of the rich, relevant labor historiography. But even so, it is and radicalism in the United States, especially in Connecticut, Lenzi has a remarkable addition to the literature on the history of Italian-American rescued from oblivion the history of the small, but vibrant movement of radicals. Italian-American anarchists that animated New London’s Fort Trumbull neighborhood for seven decades, from the beginning of the twentieth- At Home in the New World: Essays by Maria Terrone. New York: Bordighera century through the early 1970s. Ironically, this decidedly anti-militarist Press, 2018. 158 pp. enclave coexisted with a highly militarized area, comprising—besides the fort that gave its name to the area—shipyards building warships for the Review by Ilaria Serra U.S. Navy and a system of fortifications stretching along the coast to the Florida Atlantic University Long Island Sound. The tension between the anarchists and the surrounding environment came to the fore with particular intensity during World War I. Let’s start from the cover, with its clues to the book content: an open The same military build-up that brought new orders and jobs to the area was reference to Dorothy’s red shoes and her search for home. The geographic accompanied by the state’s repression of the local radicals, a repression that map under the soles is the new world, North America. Feminine legs wearing intensified in the subsequent heated season of the Red Scare. blue jeans: powerful and exuding activism. Feet well-planted to the ground. While seriously damaging the anarchist group, however, this So is the book’s style: Maria Terrone’s words come from life, family history, repression failed to suppress it. As Lenzi shows, key to the cohesiveness and real people. Moreover, these words dig deep, they get dirty, and descend and resilience of thePROOF small radical community was its ethnic composition. underground, in thisPROOF collection of essays. The Gruppo L’Avvenire—as the anarchists had called themselves in a first The whole book seems to play on the dichotomy of hidden/revealed, phase of their cooperative efforts in the opening decade of the twentieth buried/unearthed. Perhaps it has to do with the double identity of this Italian- century—and its successor, Gruppo I Liberi (formed in 1915) were made American woman from New York. Nothing is clear. Everything is a discovery up of a closely knit set of migrants originating from the Marche region, and and a negotiation. “Let’s face it: immigrant stories are never simple, without especially the coastal town of Fano. loose ends and everything neatly tied up in a red-white-and-blue bow. This Probably, the author suggests in the conclusion, such ethnic origins is a Sicilian American story: there are knots and frays, a ribbon twisting on fitted with the peculiar brand of anarchism with which the Fanesi migrants, itself like a Möbius strip” (90). largely made up of construction workers, embraced in their new land. It So, the first of the five sections is titled “Hide and Seek” and includes was the Galleanist movement, a tiny, sectarian stream of anarchism founded arrange of spaces of confinement, from a cloakroom to a tiny Italian by Luigi Galleani. Born to a middle-class family in the Piedmont region bathroom, from the dark woods to an airless tunnel. The hidden story in of Italy in 1861, Galleani, after a stint as a law student in his native Turin, Terrone’s life is perhaps the story of her immigrant ancestors and their lost immersed himself in the anarchist movement to which he would devote country. In fact, she confesses, “Only a stranger, someone’s grandmother his entire life. Forced to flee Italy by his unceasing agitation, in the early calling to me what must have meant Stay calm from the other side of that twentieth-century he landed in the United States, where he would remain immovable door, could release me from my prison” (17). for the next eighteen years. Plunging into anarchist activity as both agitator The third section, “The Italian Thing,” is the center of the book, and and journalist, he became leader of an absolutely uncompromising and it gives the coordinates of the secret treasure. Terrone goes searching for her anti-authoritarian anarchist current that took the name of anti-organizers or buried roots in Italy. In “Sicily: My Enigma” she gets lost in a labyrinthine Galleanists. While isolating the small Fort Trumbull community from the visit to the “island of my soul,” where a revelation awaits. In “Life Inside rest of the labor movement, including socialists and anarcho-syndicalists, 202 Italian Americana Reviews 203

My Name,” she uncovers the truth about her last name, that it is an insult for roots and for the truth about her family history. Through a quintessentially Southern people, in Italy. But she does not flinch and wears it like a flag, “fist feminine narrative mode, she moves between official history and the obscure clenched, arm raised high” (104). stories of her Sicilian ancestors. History—the Depression, World War II, Terrone dedicates the section, “At Work: Factories and Fifth Avenue” but also the Italian Risorgimento and the early twentieth-century anarchist to memories of old jobs and compassionate portraits of her coworkers. These movement—becomes visible only through the painstakingly reconstructed experiences are not only touching but also sociologically interesting. Most lives of the men, and, even more, the women who contributed in shaping her enjoyable is the second section dedicated to important objects, aptly titled own proudly divided cultural identity. “Obsessions” (a grandfather clock, a Spanish shawl, a cookbook). “Beauty, Starting from her childhood in the Italian-American community of Truth and Gloves” is a discussion of the secret history of gloves, a true late 1920s New Jersey, and ending with her longed-for return journeys to Italian art transported into American manufacturing, a personal obsession Sicily in the 1980s and 1990s, LoCascio captivates the reader by her tone, and a worldly symbol, of “going places.” A cameo is dedicated to the which is deeply personal but at the same time steering clear of the self-pity Italian American, a self-taught glove maker named Daniel Storto. The story that often makes contemporary autobiographical works somewhat irritating “Bobby’s Guns” describes Terrone’s American brother: “The owner of more as they blur the boundaries between the implied reader and the therapist. than 100 guns and a few thousand rounds of ammunition, is a myopic CPA The dramatic passages in the book are powerfully moving, owing to and professor of accounting and business now retired” (42). LoCascio’s elegance and restraint. Yet the dominant note is one of irony. But, above all, the shoes. Terrone defines her career as “a sure-footed The narrator who exhibits a healthy detachment cannot but feel other, executive editor,” starting from her shoes, not just footwear but passports “torn between two worlds” (37) and alien in both; her family perpetually for her realization. Especially the hand-painted blue pumps from Italy hovers between tradition and modernity, between the mysterious world of that helped her walk the balancing act of her youth: “Giving them up felt the generations (in which the narrator often comes into contact with “some like losing part of myself. I am surprised I wrote that last sentence. But ancient code where I didn’t know the rules” (37) and the modern world of on reflection, not really, because shoes are so powerfully associated with her own generation, “busy becoming American” (57)—even the new one of personality” (77). With those shoes, a woman can strike out, hit the ground, her “American grandchildren” (153). and connect with thePROOF world (like aunt Anna, one of the first women employed Unlike the spectacularlyPROOF dysfunctional families to which contemporary outside the house). literature has accustomed us, we are presented with an endearingly close- This book is full of feminine verve, an honest and friendly confession knit group of well-drawn individuals. From the beginning—the title of the in a lively, direct and intelligent style. It is another little Italian-American Preface is “Papa and Mama”—the narrator describes her characters with “an gem in the gold mine of Bordighera Press, an interesting piece of the mosaic intimacy that only Sicilians are capable of when they delve into their own of Italian-American identity. Playing on the hyphen’s meaning of ethnic history” (95), the typically Sicilian unrestrained, heartfelt familiarity which, complexity, we could propose that this book brings us to the margin of the in conversation, is often puzzling even to the natives of other parts of Italy, map of the known world, to the fringes, far removed from the mythical who have strictly defined notions of the limits of small talk and would never Italian origin. But the origin is still powerfully alluring for this grandchild allude to their parents as “Mama” and “Papa” before a stranger. This warm- of immigrants, a woman ever so American, despite the long rolled “r” of her hearted openness is the only feature that might be termed “typical.” The book mighty sounding Italian name. is devoid of stereotypes. Catholicism and anticlericalism, Sicilian traditions, familiar customs are presented in a kaleidoscopic variety of nuances, never Between Two Worlds: Sicily and America by Luisa LoCascio. New York: predictable, never indulging in the picturesque. Legas 2018. 161 pp. The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers, and Life by Richard Russo. Review by Maria Serena Marchesi New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. 205 pp. University of Messina Review by Marc C. Amodio Luisa LoCascio tells the story of a spiritual journey from New Jersey to the Vassar College small village of Cerami, in the Sicilian countryside, on a quest for the author’s 204 Italian Americana Reviews 205

“patch of dirt” he “inherited” and “had to figure out how to be content with.” In an essay on Charles Dickens’s early and critically underappreciated Although the context in which it arises is surprising in ways that I Pickwick Papers, Richard Russo observes that “[a]s with other comic writers, won’t spoil here, discovering at the end of The Destiny Thief that Russo has it’s human frailty and folly that Dickens truly understands and identifies a deep affinity for the work of Bruce Springsteen is not. Born a few months with,” a comment that readers of The Destiny Thief will discover applies apart, both men spent their formative years in roughly similar circumstances, equally well to Russo. A self-described comic writer, Russo reveals in the growing up as they did in households situated firmly within the now largely nine sharply observant, always engaging, and frequently moving non-fiction vanished blue-collar middle class. While both men have moved far beyond essays collected here that he understands all too well the human frailties and their beginnings, they continue to embrace the past, not out of nostalgic follies of his characters. He also, and perhaps more importantly, reveals that longing for a vanished world (far from it for both of them), but rather because he appreciates and has an abiding affection for them, warts and all. They both continue to carry with them and continue to be driven by a keen sense may be fictional, but as many of the biographical threads that run through of what is possible, for as Russo says in the collection’s closing sentence, these essays witness, Russo’s characters are often rooted in and reflective of one that paraphrases Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams,” we have to the people who helped shape him and who contributed to his compelling, believe in possibility or we’ll “never catch that train, the one carrying saints idiosyncratic, and intriguing worldview. and sinners and lost souls, the one headed for the land of hope and literary While students of Russo’s fiction will find much to mine inthe dreams, which is neither here nor there but, rather, in each of us who chase collection’s autobiographical essays— sections of which shed significant it.” light on the complex, and at times fraught relationships he so frequently plumbs in his fiction, including, most memorably that of Sully and his son Staged Narratives / Narrative Stages: Essays on Italian Prose Narrative Peter in Nobody’s Fool—this collection will reward its readers in many and Theatre edited by Enrica Maria Ferrara and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin. other ways. Whether he’s ruminating on his own career in academia (which Florence: Franco Cesati, 2017. 276 pp. he gave up as soon as he could afford to), his journey as a writer (which starts with a short walk across a hallway at the University of Arizona and Review by Maria Galli Stampino begins in earnest inPROOF a basement room next to a noisy washer and dryer), the University of MiamiPROOF craft of writing (one gets a very clear sense of how gifted a writing teacher he was, and remains), the lessons that his maternal grandfather, a “guild- Classifications are helpful, as they allow a systematic approach toour trained glove cutter,” indirectly taught him about the importance of “getting complex world and intricate fields of study. Since the eighteenth century, good” at whatever one chooses to do, or the complexities and challenges of biologists have relied on Carl Linneaus’ binomial nomenclature, which supporting a colleague and close friend before, during, and after her gender categorizes all living things in relation to one another, omitting interaction reassignment surgery. Russo’s companionable and graceful style allows him between and among animal species and neglecting how natives use plants always to seem as if he’s conversing with and not talking at his readers. That for medicinal purposes, just to name two examples. Yet taxonomies are he manages to do this even when he is lecturing, as in the commencement so inculcated in our training that they often constitute blind spots in our speech he gave at Colby College (where he taught and from which one of his thinking. The essay collection under review is a remarkable example of how daughters graduated), is no mean feat. calling classifications into question can yield new insights and open fruitful In the essay that closes the collection, “The Boss in Bulgaria,” Russo research areas. The two analytical taxonomies here considered are intrinsic reveals that after wishing he could create a writerly voice divorced from to literature and culture: genre and language. While ostensibly focusing on his own (as Ken Millar—who Russo greatly admires—did when writing literature, these essays also de-center our thinking on culture, in ways that as Ross Macdonald), he came to realize that he “had little choice but to are meaningful to those who dwell with concernment on the hyphen between return, at least imaginatively, to [his] heart’s home and be who [he] was, who “Italian” and “American.” [he’d] always been and, it appeared, [he] was meant to be.” While he tells Enrica Maria Ferrara and Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin have gathered eleven us that “[a]t the time, [his] inability to invent a new, improved self felt like essays assessing the intersection of prose narrative and theatre in the cultural- nothing so much as defeat,” we should be grateful that he early on accepted linguistic Italian arena. Via their avowed goals of “examin[ing] relationships his writerly voice for what it is and decided to concentrate his efforts on the 206 Italian Americana Reviews 207 between the different but related media of theatre and narrative literature” (9), First, ekphrases belong to a tradition both long and intellectually they explicitly call into question the genre taxonomies that have governed fascinating: to name a few of its exegetists and/or practitioners: Simonides our field since classical antiquity. Additionally, by doing so within Italian of Keos (5th century BC), Plato, Horace, G. E. Lessing, W. J. T. Mitchell, literature they underscore the plurilinguism that marks this tradition. In their J. Hollander. In effect, works of art, particularly visual ones, such as “Introduction” (9–29), Ferrara and Ó Cuilleanáin appropriately single out paintings and sculptures, have inspired poets who have described them, have the fifteenth-centuryLa novella del grasso legnaiuolo (17–18) as presenting meditated on them, have made them speak. And, what is more intriguing, traces of oral delivery, bridging performed and written texts as well as poets have done so not only with actual artistic specimens, but also with so- local language and the established Florentine written koine. As Gianfranco called “notional” ones,3 that is, with those artistic objects that do not exist Contini remarked in 1951, Dante is the foundational writer whose work in reality, but that are made up by the poet as he or she is singing them: e.g., embodies “that Italian tradition of plurilingual expressionistic realism” (15) Homer’s shield of Achilles (Iliad XVIII). in opposition to the monolingual lyric strand that, in his opinion, originates Second, in modern American literature poets from W. H. Auden and with Petrarch. What is not explicit, but follows logically from this approach, Nemerov to Kunitz and Ashbery have been attracted by the ekphrastic mode is that such cross-pollination could apply to other languages and locations— and have explored some of its extraordinary facets. The most original one is, in this light, Italian-American expressions can be investigated along the probably, W. C. Williams who at times did what nobody else ever did. In his lines of Gadda’s pastiche-filled works, examined by Giancarlo Alfano (113– last collection, Pictures from Brueghel (1962), by directing viewers to look 25); or the Luigi Pirandello-Eduardo De Filippo Italian/Sicilian/Neapolitan at successive elements in a Bruegel’s painting, he led them to imaginatively narrative/performance collaboration, explored by Alessandra Marfoglia draw its generative symbol/object—that is, he taught them how to creatively in her essay (195–215). The language levels and idiolects pervading both visual and written narratives concerning the mafia in North America strike this reviewer as ripe for exploration in the direction that these essays chart. The essays run the gamut from Nobel-prize winners (Dario Fo, Pirandello) to popular traditions (cantastorie), from Boccaccio to nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryPROOF writers (Alessandro Manzoni, Achille Campanile, PROOF Giovanni Testori, Vincenzo Consolo), from Sicily to Milan. Ferrara’s own essay “Theatrical Realism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth Century Italian Narrative” (53–72) provides a rigorous theoretical grounding and cogent argument for using the Italian tradition as a rich field of analysis. Far from offering any local-color-inflected points of view, the present essay collection opens an array of possible critical ways forward, if we accept the challenge of not allowing ourselves to be limited by traditional and rigidly interpreted approaches.

Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists by James B. Nicola. Brunswick, Maine: Shanti Arts Publishing, 2018. 182 pp.

Review by Cristina Giorcelli

University of Rome Three Thomas Eakins, The Cello Player, 1896. Oil on Canvas. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Once overcome, the indignation caused in a lover of ekphrases by the disconcerting title (created: out of modesty? out of a sardonic understatement? out of spite for the philistine reader?) turns into an incentive to change it into 3 See John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit. Poems Speaking to Silent Works of its contrary: Out of Every-thing. Let me try and explain why—step by step. Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 208 Italian Americana Reviews 209

4 read and structurally understand that particular painting. cases, these works have become topoi of this kind of literature and, thus, one If many are the visual works that have attracted Nicola’s Muse (his would imagine having been hard—or too audacious—on the part of Nicola book is comprised of 87 ekphrastic poems), several of them are musical to dare tackle them once more, yet, at times, there is something new to ones: from Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (concerned ponder and to reveal in them. For instance, in Michelangelo’s The Creation with the listener’s emotions), to playing a cello (and listening to it): of Adam from the Sistine Chapel the poet sees the “creation” reversed: that is, “the creation of Adam’s” (line 7). Interesting. Even if, perhaps, Adam’s The cello, physically lower position (if compared to God’s), dreamy gaze, and relaxed stroked, caressed: index do not indicate the burst of energy that one expects to see in an act of a warming bath creation (God, in fact, arrives flying in a cloud, surrounded by active angels, perhaps in public: with a determined look, and an imperative index!). In another example, your misdirection, “Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge” (with references both to Joseph Stella’s submerged, painting and, implicitly, to both Hart Crane’s and Walt Whitman’s famous slips, poems on the same subject), using alliterations and assonances, the poet relaxes. succeeds in condensing in a half line—“the turbulent solution” (line 5)—the deep inside, invisibly optimistic meaning this bridge, this work of art, had for these three artists like an attended soul and for this poet as well. invited to expand to noting the virtuosity of a soprano’s voice (matched with an elegantly dressed and comfortably-seated theater audience’s almost tactile feelings), to the mysterious as well as the gustative emotions arisen by a fiddle’s notes: You’ve shownPROOF me the way that Einstein’s square PROOF mc, not just to arrive at e but to show that what we cannot see, what can’t in fact be seen by man, can turn into a quantity that can to the rhythmic movements of dancers, typographically rendered on the page thanks due to spaces. Only musicians—and Nicola is one—can accomplish a similar treat with such competence and originality. Nicola’s imagination has also been excited by many European as well as American paintings, sculptures, and works of architecture: from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Manet’s Water Lilies, from Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, to F. Childe Hassam’s The Breakfast Room, from Frank Gehry’s IAS Building, to the Verrazano and Brooklyn bridges. If, in some

4 See Cristina Giorcelli, “Pictures from Brueghel: Looking Backward, Pointing Forward,” The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams, ed. Christopher MacGowan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Joseph Stella, Brooklyn Bridge, 1939. Oil on Canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art. 2016): 115–129. 210 Italian Americana Reviews 211

fictionalized through a complex process of transmission and reimagining, Where Nicola’s approach is utterly new is, for instance, in the poem the tales collected in this volume span generations and are set in different “Names in Stone,” dedicated to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, in continents to which the protagonists move to find new life opportunities. Such a which the names of the soldiers who died in Vietnam have been engraved. If heterogeneity is counterbalanced by two points of convergence: The centrality a slab is not usually considered a work of art, one hopes, however, that it will of the village of San Ginese, the birthplace of all the migrants featured in be preserved and the names be remembered—therefore, last for ever—as a the volume, and the sense of displacement permanently associated with their work of art is supposed to do. In our digital age, it is more than right that we condition. The idea of living in the interstices, in what Bhabha calls “that place consider what was created in order to commemorate as something that will not between,” is anticipated in the book’s epigraph (“Migrants never arrive at their vanish in space—literally, in air. Especially since those young lives were cut destination”) and obsessively evoked in the tales. off, perhaps, for a “failed or sorry cause,” yet they The very introduction to the collection (“Ugo’s Tale”), written in epistolary style and directly addressed to the reader, pivots around the sense of have had their names saved— non-belonging generated by “leaving behind” familiar places, people, objects their sacrifice, long past; and even stories (1). Drawing on his own experiences abroad, Giovannoni their futures, but oblivion— suggests that being part of a community entails a physicality that is impossible by having been engraved to find elsewhere: “Normally the people you live with share the same memories thereon. and stories. So who can you share yours with, the stories that in the village of your birth are in the skin of the people and the memories that are in the stones?” Although this book’s many essential illustrations are not glossy, they are clear (2). At the same time, the author experiences a strange loss of memory on and their colors are distinct. returning to San Ginese—a loss that sadly confirms his neither/nor identity: “The people in the village remembered him but he couldn’t remember them” The Fireflies of Autumn and Other Tales of San Ginese by Moreno (244). Frustrating and weird, the sense of being poised between two spaces Giovannoni. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2018. 252 pp. without fully belonging to either pertains to the condition of strangerhood of PROOF all those forced to leavePROOF their homeland. “If a man who was born in San Ginese Review by Mariaconcetta Costantini was to return after being away in Australia for many years, he would be like a G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara visitor from abroad, a tourist” (179). In the same way as the “visitor” status becomes an abstract, all-inclusive The twenty-first century has witnessed a growing cultural interest inthe concept, the new national identity acquired by migrants tends to be generalized condition of migrants and other diasporic subjects. Old and new migrations by their native community: “They called anyone in the village who went away have inspired a variety of works focussed on what Benedict Anderson calls an americano, even if they had been to Canada or Argentina […], Venezuela or “imagined communities,” on the experiences of “émigrés and refugees” Australia” (38). The favored destination of many looking for a better life, the (Homi Bhabha) as well as the challenge that “cultural expatriates” (Zygmunt United States symbolizes the other world to which all migrants move in search Bauman) pose to normative understandings of nation, nationhood, identity, of fortune but where they also lose their points of reference: “And they would and belongingness. Widely tackled in cultural studies, these questions also go to America and become lost over there, and when they returned to San emerge in fictional transpositions of stories of migration. In addition to Ginese they would still be lost, as if they could not find the place they had left reimagining the migrants’ lives abroad, these narratives explore the challenges but kept looking for it, anywhere, somewhere, but it was always elsewhere” of homecoming, drawing attention to the identity problems faced by those who (83). Such comments confirm that the book is more than a collection of return to their native lands for short sojourns or permanent residencies. personal and communal memories. What Giovannoni offers to his readers is a A fascinating journey into the condition of émigrés is offered in The thought-provoking description of the sense of displacement felt by all people Fireflies of Autumn and Other Tales of San Ginese. A freelance translator of who embark on a journey without destination. Italian origin who grew up in Australia, Moreno Giovannoni skilfully merges A similar journey is made by the protagonists of the new diasporas, who his own experiences with those of his family members and acquaintances who, choose Italy as their new home. As the author observes, in comparing his own like him, left their native country for other lands. Partly biographical, partly experiences with those made by an African family in San Ginese, the migrant’s 212 Italian Americana Reviews 213 identity is marked by an elusiveness produced by linguistic and cultural “I Heard You Paint Houses”: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing processes of generalization that are hard to overcome: “They are Moroccan, the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, possibly, but then it is impossible to know as although they are referred to 2019. 384 pp. as Marocchini, all migrants from Africa are referred to as Marocchini, which literally means Moroccan” (224). Review by George Birnbaum This passage evidences the centrality of linguistic experiences in migrations. A point of strength of the volume, Giovannoni’s exploration of the Charles Brandt, an experienced trial lawyer and former prosecutor, sets out role of language in cultural mediation benefits from his bilingual condition as to solve the mystery of what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. The legendary boss well as from his professional activities as a translator. Besides adding folkloric of the Teamsters union, Hoffa “disappeared” on July 30, 1975. Remarkably, flavor to the narratives, his use of Italian within the English text unveils the Brandt himself patiently elicited a deathbed confession from Hoffa’s killer, sense of estrangement and engagement felt by migrants in interacting with Frank Sheeran, known to his colleagues in the Mafia as the “Irishman” because their host communities as well as with the homelands to which they often he was one of the few non-Italian Americans in that extended web of crime return. families. Coming this October, Brandt’s story will be a Netflix film by Martin Another strength is the breath-taking reconstruction of Italian culture Scorsese, with Al Pacino in the role of Hoffa and Robert De Niro as Sheeran. and history. By combining memories and tales of San Ginesians of different Frank Sheeran learned to be a professional hitman from his more than generations, Giovannoni provides pictures of local traditions and beliefs, of 400 days in actual combat under George Patton in WWII. Before the U.S. the rhythms of peasant life, the Second World War, and the many changes Army muzzled Patton, that flamboyant general had openly told his subordinates Italy underwent in the course of the twentieth century. Large-scale historical that, no matter what the rules of warfare might say, he intended to take no phenomena, such as fascism and the war, are evoked through the memories of prisoners as his army moved across Europe toward Germany. Sheeran, a big those who suffered their traumatic effects. In a similar way, many tales shed man, was often told that the troops were “moving on” and that he should “see light upon the economic and social problems of a country wavering between to the prisoners.” Sheeran promptly followed that order, usually behind the its rural past and the new challenges of modernization, between the magic of nearest building. This was the education of an unhesitating contract killer who long-established traditionsPROOF and the urge to overcome their strictures. In dealing found a way to continuePROOF his profession after the war in the service of the mob. with gender relations, for example, Giovannoni evokes a patriarchal world Years later, according to Brandt, Sheeran “took out” Hoffa, even though Hoffa dominated by determinism and sensuality, normativity and spaces of violation. had been one of his two mentors, supporters, and best friends in the mob. Sometimes described as seductive creatures (as the red-lipped mother in “The Unfortunately for Hoffa, the “Boss of Bosses,” Russell Bufalino, was a better Imbeciles and the Fig Tree”), other times disembodied by depressive or spiritual friend of Sheeran’s. leanings (as the two protagonists of “The Flour-Eater and the Girl Without a Bufalino had been unable to persuade Hoffa to forbear from trying to Reflection”), the women featured in the volume unveil a tendency to classify return to the leadership of the Teamsters after he was released from prison the feminine into abstract, ‘mythicized’ categories. Deeply ingrained in Italian following his initial racketeering conviction. Bufalino recognized that the rural patriarchy, this tendency became more oppressive in the fascist era, when government’s interest in the mob’s infiltration of the unions, which started the law was used to stigmatize and punish all forms of female transgression. under Bobby Kennedy, could only be heightened if Hoffa re-established his The “adulteress” condemned to social isolation in the eponymous tale unveils fiefdom over the Teamsters, and decided that the uncooperative Hoffa must the gender inequalities of a society that is ready to punish women for a single die. act of lawbreaking while showing more tolerance for their guilty husbands. As Brandt relates in a genuinely riveting narrative, once the order to kill The painful disparities of this reimagined world are counterbalanced by Hoffa was given—and Brandt notes that there was no movie script dialogue the aspects of its rituals and beliefs. Hardly visible in today’s Italy, the traces such as “I want you to pull the trigger,” merely Bufalino’s bland comment that of this lost world are best preserved in the memories of migrants, who left Hoffa had become a problem—Sheeran understood his directive as clearly as their homeland carrying with them a precious set of images, sounds, smells, the knights who murdered Saint Thomas Becket understood Henry II. emotions and stories. Drawing on these memories, Giovannoni offers vivid Accordingly, Sheeran was surreptitiously flown to Detroit, supposedly pictures of a rural culture forgotten by many Italians, while bearing witness to the cultural to convey Hoffa to a purported meeting with Bufalino. Sheeran instead dynamics produced by migrations, both in the past and in our fast-developing age. took Hoffa to a “safe house” where Hoffa had no more than a few seconds 214 Italian Americana Reviews 215 of agonized recognition that his supposed best friend was about to dispatch Casi e citati; case e città; him with a single bullet. Since Sheeran not only “painted houses” (i.e., killed people to order), but “did carpentry” (disposed of the bodies) as well, Hoffa’s Jeu, muru debuli Io muro debole body was never found, probably having been cremated in a Detroit funeral Di petru e taiu, di pietra e creta home. Don’t bother searching in the Meadowlands. Cunsidiratilu consideratelo In addition to Sheeran’s own confession, one of Hoffa’s sons confirmed Si allura caju! se allora cado! to Brandt that Sheeran was one of the few people Hoffa trusted sufficiently to have ridden with in an unprotected car. Case closed. Sia arti maggica, Sia arte magica, If there is one truly tantalizing side note in the book, it is Sheeran’s Sia naturali, sia naturale, revelation that, a few years before the Hoffa affair, he had been involved in an In vui risplendinu in voi risplendono anonymous shipment of weapons which may have wound up in the hands of Biddizzi tali, bellezze tali, Lee Harvey Oswald. I had never given a lot of credence to the many conspiracy theories surrounding John Kennedy’s assassination, but this concrete hint of Chi tutti ’nzemmula che tutte insieme mob involvement which Sheeran gave Charles Brandt has made me reassess Componnu un sciarmu creano un incanto my beliefs. The Mafia was only one of a number of groups and individuals who Capaci a smoviri che può commuovere wanted the Kennedys out of office, but Sheeran’s story of the arms shipment Lu stissu marmu. Lo stesso marmo. has the ring of truth. Readers will judge for themselves. Scorsese’s film will doubtless receive great attention, but don’t deprive yourself of the pleasure of reading this book. (Little dark eyes, your gaze can make houses and cities collapse. Flimsy wall of stone and clay that I am, look and see if I too am falling. Whether your art La Lirica I (Odi, Sonetti e Canzunetti) by Giovanni Meli. Introduzione, be magical or natural, there are such beauties shining in you that they join commento, traduzione e note di Gaetano Cipolla. Cronologia della vita e together in a magic charm that can move marble itself.) bibliografia a cura PROOFdi Salvo Zarcone. Palermo: Nuova Ipsa Editore, 2018. 475 pp. PROOF The third stanza contains one of the very few typos I found, and I have corrected Review by Joseph Russo iddizzi to biddizzi. Haverford College Emeritus Another example of Meli’s poetic gift, in a different meter, is his ode on Sappho’s legendary suicide, which concludes Giovanni Meli (1740–1815) is a little-known name outside the circles of connoisseurs of Sicilian literary culture; and yet he is a major Italian poet, and Chi ti lusinghi cu sta canzunedda, Che ti lusinghi con questa canzonetta, this volume displays the range and intensity of his work. The long introduction Poeta miserabili? poeta miserabile? by Gaetano Cipolla sets Meli in the context of his times and his roots in the Mmatula preghi e incensi la tua bedda: Invano preghi e incensi la tua bella: lyrical traditions not only of Italy but of ancient Greece; and his commentary Amuri è inesorabili! Amore è inesorabile! gives needed information for understanding references within the poems. Cipolla also provides facing translations in Italian, those of Giorgio Santangelo (Unhappy poet, what flattery might you find in this little song? In vain you revised in places to modernize the diction. This first volume of Meli’s lyric pray and glorify your beautiful one: love is relentless.) works includes odes, sonnets, and short songs. To give a sample of the poet’s lyric power, love of rhythm, and delicacy of touch, I give the opening of the It is particularly interesting that Meli sees the Greek poets Sappho, Pindar, and ode on the eyes, L’occh (Gli occhi) Anacreon as poetic ancestors. He takes Sappho as an example of one who went too far in yielding to passion, and he mistakenly believes the ancient legend Ucchiuzzi niuri, Occhiucci neri, that unrequited love drove Sappho to suicide. Cipolla (Introduzione, p. 13) Si taliate se guardate repeats this fiction as if it were true, despite the fact that classical scholarship Faciti cadiri fate crollare long ago demolished this fable. 216 Italian Americana Reviews 217

This edition contains 46 odes, 16 sonnets, and 7 short songs, and a short Labozzetta’s winning turn is her depiction of its characters, who actively review cannot adequately discuss their range and variety of subject matter and tease out notions of identity, religion, gender, and age. This effort is especially poetic form. There are erotic or amatory odes on such subjects as the eyes, evident in the interactions of the Chamber members, whom readers come to the lips, the voice, the breath, the hair, the eyebrows, and the bosom; odes know as distinct personalities, in not-so-subtle dialogues that beg assumptions to abstractions like peace, illusion, and fortune; to poetically evocative plants and biases—a kind of Greek chorus for newer millennial times. Learning that like jasmine and rue; in praise of wine; about God, Bacchus, Anacreon and the names of the selected duo are Ryan and Jason, the committee members Sappho; and unexpected topics like Linnaeus’ sexual system for flowers (!). bicker aloud about the impact of a presumably gay couple as the contest Cipolla’s excellent notes address both small and large points, e.g. that winners. the word for charm, sciarmu, is a direct borrowing from French, and that in Meli’s day it was socially unacceptable for a woman to look directly into a “‘Their first names are both males, so we are just assuming,” Eric man’s eyes, because the power of the direct gaze could be devastating. The says. ‘Actually, we’re thinking trans—he was a flower girl when power of the female gaze is a frequent motif in Italian poetry, and the notes he was little.’ might well have included a reference to Dante’s famous sonnet beginning ‘Oh my God!’ The mechanic bellows . . . . “negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore,/ per che si fa gentil ciò ch’ella mira./ ‘Isn’t that stretching it a bit, Eric?’ the baker asks. Ov’ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira,/ e cui saluta fa tremar lo core,” no doubt ‘I vote we find another couple.’ The mechanic is adamant . . . . a direct influence on Meli. ‘This is supposed to bring business to Brackton, Eric. What the Although Meli is no Dante (or Leopardi), he is a gifted poet with wide hell are you doin’, turnin’ this place into Provincetown?’” (p.19). erudition, true sensibility, and fine technique. An edition like this goes a long way towards making his outstanding achievement accessible. When Ryan arrives for an initial interview with the Chamber committee, joined by her lesbian roommate, Tiffany, the townspeople are relieved to learn A Day in June by Marisa Labozzetta. Toronto and Tonawanda (NY): Guernica that she is indeed a woman, and her roommate, while gay, is not her supposed Editions and Marisa Labozzetta, 2019. 271 pp. fiancé. Ryan knowingly continues her deception, in hopes that Jason will PROOF reappear in her life.PROOF Review by Roxanne Christofano Pilat Throughout the novel, Ryan makes nostalgic references to her upbringing Dominican University with both Catholic and Jewish grandparents. While visiting her eighty-seven- year-old Jewish grandmother in a nursing home, she confides in her outspoken The world of fiction urges readers to suspend their disbelief, but this timely elder, who tells Ryan to forget Jason, stay in the contest, and find another novel by Marisa Labozzetta requires no such effort. The events that take place fiancé. in A Day in June are played out by a cast of well-developed contemporary characters, who engage the reader in a philosophical look at how the difficult “Look, do yourself a favor. Go on the Internet. That’s what all the choices of two individuals come to impact the lives of many others. young girls who work here do. You have a computer. There’s this The story begins on a January day, when paralegal and would-be writer JDate for Jews. It can’t hurt. I used to tell your mother, ‘Would Ryan Toscano enters a contest for a free wedding, offered by the merchants you just try it?’ about dating a Jewish boy, and she would turn her of Brackton, Vermont. Although her fiancé Jason McDermott has decided to nose up as though I were offering her gefilte fish that had been back out of their engagement to join the seminary, Ryan enters the contest in a sitting in the refrigerator from two Passovers ago. She was like broken-hearted fantasy. Although she does not expect to be in the running, her you—always with the gentiles. Always contrary” (p. 45). entry is actually chosen as the winner. The lottery is set up by the Chamber of Commerce’s Eric Boulanger, a Ryan’s contrariness leads her to defer, unsure if Jason will change his photographer who has returned to Brackton to care for his ailing mother, in mind, and whether she wants him to. When he does return, on a leave from an attempt to boost local tourism. If the events of the six months leading up the seminary, a series of plot twists allow other characters to take center stage to the June wedding seem predictable at times, what shines in this story is its before the novel gets back to resolving its overriding question: Will the couple characters, whose banter highlights the novel’s self-reflective undertone. resume their engagement? As if to underscore the urgency of this question, 218 Italian Americana each chapter is dated, and the element of time passing enhances the plot. Ryan needs to let the committee—and the reader—know of her own true intent. But first, she must determine if she can reconcile her relationship with Jason’s dedication to a faith she does not fully understand, and is reluctant to challenge. Labozzetta’s own dedication is directed at allowing her protagonist agency, despite the pressure of outside forces. The author’s attention to this and other issues of our era is provocative, even if the reader may sometimes seek more lingering deliberation of questions raised by the characters’ actions or words. Among her earlier works, including Thieves Never Steal in the Rain and At the Copa, Labozzetta’s descriptive talents are well-recognized for developing memorable characters who speak to the reader with strong voices and intent. She continues that tradition in A Day in June.

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