Novel: Vita
by Melania Mazzucco"Rembember to remember"
“The story of a family without a history is its legend. A legend is enriched from generation to generation with details, names, episodes. The legend, passed on during the distracted indifference of childhood, is then rediscovered too late, when no one is left to respond to the simplest, most necessary and nagging eternal questions: Who are you? Where do you come from? Of what destiny are you the final link? That is what happened to me. Be it by chance or destiny, I was the last one. No one was born after me—and with me the chain breaks, the name will be lost.”
This paragraph comes in the closing pages of Melania Mazzucco’s remarkable novel, Vita, winner of the prestigious 2003 Strega Prize in Italy and translated into twenty languages.
Mazzucco is Italian and was born in Rome in 1966. She earned degrees in both Italian literature and film from La Sapienza University and has written for radio, television, and theater.
Notice that though Mazzucco’s novel was written in Italian and that she is an Italian national, I described Vita as an Italian American novel. The reason is that this novel is set in both America and Italy. But more than that, this novel, even beyond the details of its immigrant plot and story, demonstrates what I must conclude is the everlasting relationship that North America and Italy now share.
The novel speaks directly to the many questions that Italian Americans have asked themselves over the last 150 years: Who are we? Are we white? What is the meaning of our heritage? What is our connection to Italy in the generations beyond our immigrant forebears?
What Mazzucco tells us in her novel, though it was not necessarily her intention, is that no matter the number of generations to come, Italy and America will always be inextricably tied by both history and destiny. As Vita demonstrates, America is as inextricably a part of Italian history as Italy is now a part of the American past, and one that continues to inform and influence America’s future.
What is even more important, contemporary Italian society must in some way, as well, reconcile itself to America, especially and above all to those of us who call ourselves Italian Americans, the descendents of those millions of peasants, largely from the South of Italy, who were forced for political and economic reasons to emigrate to America to survive.
Italian history played the major role in the economic and political forces that drove our peasant forebears to these shores in search of a better life. As Mazzucco’s father told her, it is incumbent upon Italian Americans, I would say it is a responsibility of all of us, that we must “remember to remember.”
But this remembering should not come out of any solipsistic, sentimental need for some teary-eyed romanticized version of the past. It must now evolve out of a realistic assessment of our personal histories, American history, and Italian history, and how all three are intertwined: how those histories continue to shape our personal, national, and cultural identity.
In a New York Times article Mazzucco wrote that history “is a dark room, [with] inaccessible memories buried in shame, falsehood and the shadow of oblivion.” That is precisely why now in the twenty-first century, as that original immigrant generation has all but passed from our midst, it is more important than ever to reclaim that history from the potential oblivion that threatens to engulf it, through history, poetry, fiction, and personal memoir.
Mazzucco’s novel is an imaginative combination of both fiction and memoir. Fictional chapters are followed by first person narration as she explains both the history of her family, as she knows it, and the archival research that she did in America, including the Ellis Island archives, municipal archives in the west and east, and baptismal records in Italy.
Her novel is about Diamante Mazzucco, her grandfather who arrived in New York in 1903 at the age of twelve years old with another nine-year-old girl named Vita, the title of the novel. Both manage to survive third class steerage while crossing the Atlantic without an adult chaperone.
They were supposed to have been met by a relative when they landed at Ellis Island. Instead, they wander away from the gate and enter into the chaotic immigrant world of New York’s Lower East Side, what would soon become known as Little Italy. Mazzucco knows little about her grandfather’s struggle to survive and even less about the mysterious Vita. There is no mention of her in any records. She remains the stuff of legend in Mazzucco’s past.
What follows in the fictional sections of Mazzucco’s novel is a story of unrequited love and separation that spans the lives of both Diamante and the mysterious Vita.
Mazzucco’s story encompasses both characters’ struggle to survive, from their lodging in lice-infested boarding houses, to the inhumane conditions Diamante endures while working on the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the Midwest. Intertwined in the narrative are the stories of Caruso, the Black Hand, and even Charlie Chaplin, the first in popular culture to sympathize with the plight of the dispossessed in his silent film entitled, The Immigrant.
What Mazzucco describes, inadvertently, in the course of her fictional and historical sections, is the manner in which the history and destiny of Italy and America are intertwined. To escape the insufferable historical poverty that Southern Italians endured in their native villages, even after the unification of Italy in 1870, both Diamante and Vita are forced to endure little more than slavery and brutally inhuman conditions as dispossessed immigrants in the land where they sought liberation.
As a twelve-year-old Diamante works at a variety of jobs, including the brutalizing work on building the transcontinental rail lines into the Midwest, where he finds himself living in squalid conditions and virtually enslaved by the railroad company far from civilization. To escape, as a boy of fourteen, he had to walk and ride in open box cars for two thousand miles.
The details here are less important than what Diamante’s experiences represent for the millions of Italian immigrants that came to these shores. In a fictional part of the novel, Mazzucco reconstructs the devastation of an historical mine disaster that disfigures one of her fictional characters.
Mazzucco then tells her readers that historically the record shows that “Thirty-six men died in the explosion. The most catastrophic mining disaster since the days of Pittsburgh and Marianna, which left 139 dead in November 1908. Or Cherry in 1909, when 200 died. They never found all the bodies: when the walls cave in, they were buried somewhere in the darkness of the earth.”
Scholars have yet to record and bring to light the extent of the number of Italian and other immigrants who died in mine disasters and other industrial accidents throughout the U.S. before World War II.
This January I had dinner again as I do each year in Florence with Prof. Alessandro Trojani of the University of Florence. He has done extensive research on Italians in the West and recently produced a CD on Italians in Utah, in cooperation with the University of Utah, the Utah Historical Society, and the Italian Center of the West. He discovered only a few years ago that in 1916 in Dawson, New Mexico, 116 miners died in an explosion, and in 1923 over 220 were killed. Many of the bodies were never recovered. The majority of the dead were Italian immigrants.
When he discovered the graveyard and reported it to Italy, not even the Italian government knew of either the existences of the mine disasters of the graveyard, now a desolate, weed-infested cemetery next to the ghost town of Dawson.
Midway in her novel, Mazzucco launches into what I can only describe as a brilliant prose poem, as she recounts the names, dates, and industrial deaths of Italian immigrants throughout America during these years.
She discovers a file in the Denver, Colorado, consulates office archives that lists the deaths and insurance reparations of 378 Italian immigrants: Lorenzo Lucci, eighteen, water boy like Diamante, dead 1909--his father paid two hundred dollars; Zeffiro Mugnani’s widow obtained nothing for his accidental death; “nothing for Giuseppe Addabbo’s heirs in Sheriday, Wyoming in 1906, or for Giuseppe Bacino’s family after his death in Helena, Montana, in 1908.”
Mazzucco goes on and on with the list of names of Italian immigrants killed in the process of building America’s colossal industrial and commercial infrastructure. How many Italians have been buried in American?
I could add to that list my grandfather, Salvatore Di Filippo, who died of black lung disease in Helper, Utah. His untimely death left my grandmother, Rosa, his wife, without resources and with four daughters, ages six months to twelve years, to feed and rear alone.
After reaching California, Rosa and her daughters, my mother included, became itinerant cannery workers to survive, traveling the circuit each summer from Fresno north to Hollister, Gilroy, San Jose, and Madera.
I could also add my great grandfather’s name, Rosa’s father, Domenico Vatalaro, killed in an explosion while excavating a reservoir in Moon Island, Massachusetts.
Where are their graves? Who tends to them now? There was little left of Domenico to bury after the explosion that killed him and left his first born, Raphaelo, Rosa’s brother, alone to cross the continent to California after losing his father to find relatives, solace, and work in the fields surrounding Fresno, California.The details of Mazzucco’s novel I will leave for the reader: that long, tortuous story of immigration and migration, from steerage to laying tracks, living in boarding houses, working in mining camps, and returning to Italy. There is success, too, in her story. But we must always ask, at what price?
Vita is a book that suggests to us all that connection between America and Italy and suggests to Italian Americans especially the need to unearth our history before the silence of history hides who we are and why we have become what we are in North America.
This is a novel that goes to the heart and head at the same time, that stirs memory and emotion and a commitment to “Remember to Remember.”
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