The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project ERIC TERZUOLO Interviewed by: Mark Tauber Initial interview date: December 14, 2017 Copyright 2019 ADST INTERVIEW Q: Today is December 14, 2017. Eric, where and when were you born? TERZUOLO: I was born in Los Angeles, California, 60-some years ago, and resided primarily in Los Angeles until I was about three years old, when my parents and I moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Q: What brought them to Minneapolis? TERZUOLO: I should note I am the child of immigrants to the United States. I actually remember vaguely when my parents were naturalized. My father was part of the continuing Italian brain drain. My parents emigrated as adults. They were accomplished, educated people. Let’s say I was part of a very privileged immigration, but nonetheless experienced a lot of the same sorts of issues that less fortunate immigrant children do in terms of acculturation and so forth. Q: Well then, before we go further, from where did your parents emigrate? TERZUOLO: From Italy. Q: Do you know anything about the home area they came from? TERZUOLO: Oh, yes. Actually, I know it well, because my parents were the only people from their respective families who left and came to the United States and, unlike a lot of immigrants, retained strong ties to home. I think that, for the first few years, they didn’t get back to Italy at all, but otherwise we would tend to go pretty much every year. I knew the rest of the rather small family on both sides. My father was basically from Turin. Terzuolo is a name from the Asti area, so south of Turin, but it’s all northwestern Italy, the Piemonte region. My mother is from another town in Piemonte, Biella, of wool textile fame. My mother, at 97, is still alive and well and is actually back living in her old hometown, so I get back there frequently. This is not a part of Italy that had a particularly large emigration to the United States. Actually, a lot of Piemontese did emigrate, but they tended to go to South America. There are a lot in Argentina and Sao Paulo in Brazil. They didn’t much go to North America. 1 Q: Interesting. Now what drew them to the U.S.? TERZUOLO: Well, my father was a scientist. As I said, Italy has had a chronic brain drain issue, basically since about 1600, which does not really seem to be abating. My father had a difficult time finding a good professional situation in Italy. He actually worked in Belgium for a while, at the Free University of Brussels, and then got an offer from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). As I understand it, it was what you would probably call a post-doctorate these days. I’m not sure the term existed back then. He married my mom and off they went. Q: What sort of science? TERZUOLO: Neuroscience. He was a neurophysiologist. The term neuroscience wasn’t really used much in those days. Q: Wow! TERZUOLO: So off they went and ended up in Los Angeles, which was in fact a delightful place. They liked it a lot. There were a lot of interesting people. They met Aldous Huxley, who was there at the time. It was really very interesting. My father’s initial intention, as I understood it, was to come to the U.S. for a while, try to do some good work, build up more of a reputation—he still was a young man at this point; I’m not sure he was even quite 30 when he came to the U.S.—and then hopefully go back to Italy. I think this was always his hope, although it proved difficult to implement. Q: So he was doing both some research, but I imagine some teaching? TERZUOLO: He actually wasn’t teaching at that time. It was purely a research gig. Q: Okay. TERZUOLO: It was really very much what you would call post-doc now, which doesn’t as a rule have a teaching component. It’s interesting, though, that he ultimately spent most of his career at the University of Minnesota in the medical school there, where he did teach. He went directly from being a postdoc to being a full professor with an endowed share. He was never an assistant professor. He was never an associate professor. Those were the amazing things that happened in the United States in those days, that sort of post-World War II period. It’s not quite as easy these days. But, yes, it was literally the offer he couldn’t refuse. He had really no idea where Minneapolis was when the university first called him. They spent five years in the U.S. before moving to Minneapolis, four of those years in Los Angeles and one year actually in Washington. My dad had a fellowship at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center) for a year. Q: And he remained in neuroscience the whole time? 2 TERZUOLO: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Q: Now, did your mother work? TERZUOLO: She did not work outside the home. She was very devoted to her role as wife and mother, quite understandable of course for an Italian woman of her generation. It was interesting though, that I think in many ways my mother acculturated more to the United States than my father did. My father was a very intense person. He really devoted himself to his science very, very thoroughly. Between the university ambience, the laboratory ambience and so forth, it was a very particular and in some ways delimited slice of American life. My mom had to deal from the beginning with a wider variety of people. Q: Sure! TERZUOLO: I think over time she got insights into the society that were a little different from those my dad was picking up. Q: Did you speak Italian at home? TERZUOLO: Yes. Italian was my first language, because that was what my parents spoke between the two of them, and I absorbed that. I did learn English basically by osmosis, apparently just by watching the television. There weren’t even a lot of children where we were living. I actually got to speak quite good English before ending up in school, but with a very heavy Italian accent, because my parents, although they spoke English well, were not in a position to correct my accent. Q: Right. TERZUOLO: It was an interesting experience washing up in school. By the time I hit school, we had moved to Minneapolis, which was not a terribly cosmopolitan place in those days. I was sort of the odd duck in the room. I had that kind of outsider experience. Q: Now what about brothers and sisters? TERZUOLO: I am the only child of my parents. I do have a half-brother. He’s quite a bit older than I am. He was also my mother’s son. He’s lived his life in Italy and actually lives pretty close to where my mom is now, so that works out well. He’s keeping a much better eye on her than I can, although she doesn’t need much keeping an eye on, frankly. Q: That’s remarkable. So you’re growing up in Minneapolis. The school that you are going to, or the schools that you’re going to, are regular public schools? Or did your parents enroll you in private? TERZUOLO: I have very few memories regarding the kindergarten I went to. I really don’t know what was going on there. I went to the same school from first grade until I 3 graduated high school. It was a private Episcopal school in Minneapolis, Breck School. It still exists and is still thriving. I was there from first grade, as I said, through graduation, with the exception of what would have been my fifth grade year, when we were in Italy. My dad had gotten a Fulbright at the University of Pisa, so we were there for that year, which was actually a good thing. Like, I think, many immigrant children who are wrestling with English-language issues, when I encountered this sense of difference as a result of speaking English with an accent, I decided I was going to fit in at all costs. I basically stopped speaking Italian. I identified the problem, and I stopped speaking Italian. My parents continued to speak to me in Italian; I would answer them in English. This was probably at some point in first grade. By the time we got to Italy and what would have been fifth grade for me, my active knowledge of Italian had definitely deteriorated. But the situation there was such that I had to bring it back. That was a great long-term benefit to me, because I did bring it back and then I didn’t lose it again. Q: I have heard from Italians that it wasn’t until the 1960s that a kind of a standard, what you might call BBC Italian was spoken throughout Italy as a result of television. There had been a number of dialects that were still quite strong up until then. TERZUOLO: Well, in fact, long before the 1960s there was a concerted effort in Italy to enforce a standard language. This had been, for example, a huge problem during the First World War. I’m a historian by background, so I’ll probably pull in some historical references, but what they found was many of the officers were from the northern parts of the country.