Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans (review)

Like casting a stone into the middle of a lake, Luisa Del Giudice's critical work, Oral History, Oral Culture and Italian Americans, creates circles of awareness that capture the power of Italian oral history to radiate into the fields of music, visual arts, literature, women's history, politics, and social history. Comprised of thirteen essays by leading Italian and Italian American anthropologists, writers, musicologists, folklorists, and oral historians presented at the 2005 Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, the book reveals hidden sources of an unwritten ephemeral culture in need of continued exploration and discovery. By thoughtful division of the book in two major sections, "Oral History" and "Oral Culture," Del Giudice allows ample room for the Italian American multifaceted culture, revealed through oral history, to express itself in a wide range of subject matter. In her essay, "Speaking Memory: Oral History, Oral Culture and Italian America," Del Giudice traces the roots of Italian American culture in the "strati popolari" or the lower social strata of southern Italy and notes that the tradition stemming from the "cultura popolari" continues to influence third- and fourth-generation Italian Americans, even on the subconscious level.

"Given the specific nature of the immigrant provenance," she writes, "folklorists and oral historians begin with the premise that Italian Americans descend largely from peasant oral culture and that this deep ethnographic background resonates with the Italian American experience—even where it is neither acknowledged, known, nor understood"

(4).

Joanna Clapps Herman's essay, "My Homer," explores Italian American values of hospitality, honor, and the sense of obligation to family and community with parallel episodes in Homer's Odyssey. Recalling her early family experiences in Waterbury, Connecticut, Herman discovers the same time-honored traditions of family honor and storytelling still practiced by Italian Americans in the 1950s despite several decades of presence in America. In her journey of self-discovery, Herman unearths and eloquently defines the ancient code of behavior transported to America by southern Italian immigrants at the turn of the century: "What was emphasized was shame not anxiety, honor not accomplishment, hospitality rather than personal ambition, song and storytelling, not writing" (184).

In "Twice-Told Tales: Art and Oral Histories from the Tenement Museum and Ellis Island," B. Amore draws inspiration from stories passed down from her immigrant grandmother who taught the artist to "drink from the fountain of memory" (69). Amore's creation of "Ancestor Scrolls," in the form of hovering bodies wrapped in words representing the "remembered history of that individual" (73) are haunting apparitions, ghostly reminders that unwritten life histories are ultimately forgotten and lost to the passage of time. Ancestor Scrolls are silent testimonies to the collective desire of Italian Americans to be remembered; they visually translate that wish rooted in oral tradition and voiced by an aging Italian American father who tells his son shortly before his death, "If I die and you remember me, then I'm alive. But if I die and you forget me, then I'm dead—so don't forget me" (Anthony V. Riccio, The Italian American Experience in New Haven [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, xx]).

Equally moving is Ernesto Milani's "Il Corriere del Pomeriggio of the Gruppo Lonatese of San Rafael, Marin County, California," the story of American-born children of Italian immigrants of San Rafael whose ancestors emigrated from Lonate Pozzolo in the Lombardy region of Italy in the 1880s. Recognizing that many of their Italian traits and customs had persisted for over a century, elderly members of the Lonatese community formed a group to preserve their cultural legacy. Longing to rediscover their roots led to several trips to Lonate Pozzolo, where they gathered short stories of family histories in San Rafael, saving old photographs, recording oral histories of elderly storytellers, and producing a newsletter. The efforts of the Lonatese of San Rafael to reconnect to their Italian ancestry and create a permanent historical record of their community provide a...