Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

1 Rosalia, a Misery as Ancient as Sicily [Includes Image Plates]

15 1 Rosalia, a Misery as ancient as sicily We who were fortunate enough to know our grandparents well knew them with the directness and fullness of our youthful senses and the wonderful openness of impressionable minds. In contrast to our disciplining and guiding parents, grandparents provided us a gentle and less confrontational encounter with the past. Grandparents themselves were the children of generations whose individual traits and ways have been irretrievably lost to the body of deep time, transformed into archetypical myths of distant origin, epochal migrations to and primitive settlements in primordial lands. Without grandparents’ stories, photographs, and documents, their childhoods are lost to the great gulf of time, and we are ignorant of their family and everyday life. Knowledge of their diets, manners, gestures, habits, thoughts, emotions, sensibilities, and beliefs vanish, and we must reconstruct them. They are the most “familiar strangers” from the past we know, and they prove the right spot to begin our work on the family past. Grandmother Amato has been since I can remember my first way into a different time, mind, and world. My Italian grandmother, she constituted a first contact with a past that no longer existed and a place to which the family once belonged. I knew her home and the table she set. I saw her once dance the tarantella and more than once walk the narrow lanes of family graves. I cuddled close to her at bedtime, took in distinct body smells, and learned a peculiar pattern of breathing. Short and heavy, but filled with energy and grace, she connected me to another form of mortal flesh and keen spirit. When angry and cursing, mourning and moaning in Sicilian, she took me as close to that distant island and place as I could have ever been. Out of Rosalia’s life I fashioned a history, tradition, and self. In calling her forth I enter into a land where past and present are one. Theethnicityorclassweclaimasours,eitherreflexivelyorbyconscious choice, provides us an identity, a past, and an inheritance. It can also distort our writing and rob us of a living past. We must forever take care lest, in our desire to magnify and monumentalize, we trade real persons for abstractions Jacob’s Well 16 and clichés, which empty the family of true individuals and make of it a canister of hollow servants and callow ideologies. Selves and families are not entities frozen in time that can be known and preserved simply as names. My father, who liked grand arias, especially as sung by Caruso and Lanza, was an Italian who couldn’t sing a note. In fact, he was Sicilian, and though Sicilian—a language distinct from Italian—was the only language my father spoke before going to school, he rarely used it, and then only with Grandmother Amato. Our family knew nothing of Italian high culture ; the glories of Rome, the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo, and even the romantic gondolas of Venice did not float in our minds, even though my father took a vague pride in all things Italian. At the same time, we were without any relation to and had not even an iota of knowledge about the Mafia. Our thing—Cosa Nostra, so to speak—was food, jobs, home, a car, and our own family. The family was preoccupied with making it through the Depression, getting home alive from World War II, deciding how long a strike would last. Living on Detroit’s lower east side, we were peasants huddled under the shadows of Chrysler Motors. Our Sicilian world, though not lost entirely in mind and manner, folkways and food ways, was an ocean and a third of a continent away from the mountain towns of Sicily that grandparents Rosalia and Antonino left in their youth in the first decade of the twentieth century. Our surname Amato—“the loved one”—announced and identified us to the outside world as Italians, even though we were Sicilians to the mixed ethnic neighborhood of Germans, Irish, Canadians, and older Americans .1 The two “a’s” and the “o” at the end joined us to relatives with vowelstudded names like Notaro, Bomegna, and DeCarlo and gave us our own heroes and champions like Rocky Marciano, Frank Sinatra, and Guglielmo Marconi, whose development of wireless telegraphy made him special to my father, who worked more than forty years at Western Union. Stereotypes about us as Italians and Sicilians abounded, but my family, like most immigrants to this country, had...