(for my father, Donato Gioseffi, 1905-1982)
In his casket, my immigrant father felt hollow to the touch, laid out in his one good suit, respectable for la famiglia. Family and friends gone at last, I bowed before him my goodbye, then tried to turn him a little to one side. The undertaker hurried to assist, not wanting me to ruin his artwork. My immigrant father had a lame right leg from a fall in the Old Country – Apulia on the Adriatico. A dying Greek–Albanian Italian with a wit, he’d joked: “My right hip hurt me all my life. I don’t want to rest on that pain through eternity!” I took him seriously, though we had no faith in eternity.
“He looks good!” his old friend, Doctor De Felice, said as if it mattered now. It was a modest funeral for a small lame man whose labor was large: Everyone in the room – sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, friends – had been fed by him through the Great Depression.
Too often, I remember that his body felt hollow and I wish I’d never thought he seemed light enough to fly away forever. He’d loved books: Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire. He died laughing, reading Rabelais. He’d dreamed of being a writer, but rarely had time to write, laboring to feed others. He’d been called “guinea gimp” when he shined shoes to work his way through school – though he’d be the first Italian immigrant to win a Phi Beta Kappa from Union College’s Alpha Chapter. Classmates had sung Guinea, Guinea Gimp, Shine my shoe. I got money, but I won’t pay you.
I wanted him to know I was better than the son he’d longed for “to carry on the name.” I wanted him to know I’d put his name on books in the Library of Congress to fulfill his dream.
I remember when as a child, in 1944, I spent days with Grandma Lucia in Newark while he worked in his laboratory. I was just learning to read. “DON’T SPEAK THE ENEMY’S LANGUAGE,” said the poster at the end of a gray alleyway where the raggedy, immigrant guineas of Newark whispered quietly in their dialects on concrete steps, far from blue skies, olive groves, or hyacinths. Bent in a shadow toward the last shafts of sunlight above tenement roofs, Grandpa Galileo sadly sipped homemade wine and hummed, moaning, with his broken mandolin. Children played hide-and-seek in dusty evening streets as red sauce simmered, hour after hour, on coal stoves, the garlic, oil, and crushed tomatoes blended with precious pinches of salt and basilica – a pot that had to last a week of suppers.
The fathers’ hands, with blackened fingernails, were worn rough with iron wrought, bricks laid, ditches dug, glass etched. Wilted women in black cotton dresses waited in twilight, calling their listless children to scrubbed-linoleum kitchens. In cold-water flats with tin tables, stale bread was ladled with sauce, then baked to revive edibility. Clothes soaked in kitchen laundry-tubs, washboards afloat. Strains of radio opera were interrupted by war bulletins. The poster pasted on the fence at the end of the block, streaked with setting sun and rain, still read “DON’T SPEAK THE ENEMY’S LANGUAGE!” But the raggedy immigrant guineas could speak no other, and so they murmured in their rooms in the secret dark, frightened of the camps where people like them were imprisoned in the new land of golden opportunity.* They whispered of Mussolini’s stupidity – stifling the mother tongue, wounding the father’s pride – urging their children to speak English by daylight, telling each other, “We are Americans. God bless America!”
Author's Comment
My father was detained in Ellis Island’s Hospital on Isola delle lacrime (Island of Tears.) after arriving in steerage passage. He was sick for a month with pox and diphtheria contracted in the ship’s crowded hold. His American immigrant life was hard as hell though he’d been told American streets would be paved with gold. He found blood and sweat, and cold in The New Land. He’d crossed the grey Atlantic seasick and vomiting in U.S.S. Liberty’s hold, in which his little sister Rafaella died. Buried at sea, her shrouded body was slid from a board into the rolling Atlantic while his mother Lucia wept her bleeding heart into the storm clouds of that horrible trip. A young boy, he tried to comfort her, but instead, exploring the Liberty, he nearly slid from its deck into the stormy Atlantic, like the Muslim child, a pitiable image in the news, drowned washed up upon a foreign shore. In threadbare clothes, speaking no English, he attended Schenectady’s Public Schools. Depressed and distraught in America, dubbed a guinea, dago, greaseball, shunned by America’s populace and threatened by the police. What taunts he took and what hard labor he endured: delivering newspapers, tending parking lots, carrying coal buckets, shelving library books in Union College where he was the first Italian immigrant to earn both Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Psi. An oldest child of many, a thin boy in ragged knickers, he limped through the 1920s and 30’s up city steps, door to door with loads of night and daily newspapers, each worth a penny of his family’s keep. He wore his heart and soles sore, feeding la famiglia through The Great Depression. My father filled me with pride, and immigrant tenacity. Slave to filial duty, weaver of our dreams, he couldn’t be free to sing. Once full of history, philosophy, poetry, physics, astronomy, his bright, high-flying psyche is now dispersed, set free from his tormented body, but the song he offered, often forlorn, glistened with enough luminescence to carry me onward. I’m the author he wished to be, but could not find time to be in his laboring life, caring for others. He reminds me that all immigrants were once treated like the Muslims and Mexicans of today, and that America was built by the hard labors of slaves and tenacious immigrants.
It was a great, if heartbreaking, experience to read your tribute to your father, Daniela. You brought his suffering and his heroism vividly present to me. You showed how every sacrifice he made contributed to your own success and deep humanity.
I need to explain that though 600,000 Italian Immigrants were declared “enemy aliens” and many thousands displaced or had their property taken from them and their children taken out of public schools, and though many lost their fishing boats or land or homes, only about 2,000 that we can find records for were detained in camps. The records are not exactly clear, but many thousands suffered loss and displacement.
Yes, they build fortunes on immigrant labor while deriding us. The scapegoating of “The Other” is a technique that social and economic elites use to lock in their privilege. That it succeeds can be witnessed in the daily headlines where we see members of the purported “ruling class” trashing foreign speakers, hijab-wearers, etc.
Perhaps these folks would wake up after reading unsparing immigrant family narratives such as yours!
What beautiful and poignant writing this is, Daniela. You have brought me to tears by relating a piece of American history that is almost totally unknown, and you have created an indelible tribute to your father. Wherever he is in “eternity,” he would be so proud of you, as you represent the best of the American dream, not forgetting the suffering that has been a major part of that dream, then and now. Your father’s struggle is now the struggle of a new tide of immigrants.
Thank you, Alicia Ostriker, Since I greatly appreciate your intelligent, heartfelt, fine, and original poetry and writings, this comment means a great deal to me. Many thanks, Daniela
This is the first I have ever heard in my entire life of the Italian camps, similar to the Japanese ones, during World War II. It is a shocking story and needs to be much more widely known.
Few seem to know of the internment of Italian American immigrants, some 600,000 displaced and jailed in detention camps like those for immigrants of today. The interment of Japanese American immigrants is better known. President Bill Clinton finally rendered a official apology, but unlike the Japanese the Italian immigrants were never paid reparations. Una Storia Segreta (The Secret History) by Dr. Lawrence diStasi, professor of UCLA is a book on the subject and his interviews are on YouTube.
Beautifully written, of course, Daniella, and a wonderful tribute to a remarkable man. How easily some people forget where they came from, the struggles their own parents and grandparents faced.
Thank you. I only just realized this had been published. I thank you for your comment. Yes, how easily some forget the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants & slave labor America is made of.