ABSTRACT
One Sunday morning at the time when I was planning the Future Teachers Autobiography Club, a question on the front page of the Book Review section of the New York Times caught my attention: “Where,” asked writer Gay Talese (1993), “are the Italian-American novelists?” Like Talese, my ethnic heritage is southern Italian, and my great grandparents came to the United States during the late 19th century, when immigration from eastern and southern Europe was at its peak (Steinberg, 1989). Yet it never occurred to me to wonder why so few of my forebears wrote and published narratives in America. In his essay, Talese wondered why relatively few Italian Americans view their lives as resources for literature. His explanation turned in part on the experience of those Italians from the south, who immigrated to the United States in greatest number. They traditionally valued privacy and did not tell all to strangers. This was a fact of their social and political life, formed in the multiple and repeated conquests of their region and their subsequent economic exploitation by more powerful northern neighbors. Of his ancestors and their American-born offspring Talese wrote,
Not to protect the privacy of your family from the potential exploitation of your prose would have been considered unpardonable within our ethnic group, which was overwhelmingly of southern Italian origin and which was still influenced, even a generation or two after our parents’ or grandparents’ arrival in America, by that Mediterranean region’s ancient exhortations regarding prudence, family honor and the safeguarding of secrets. A region that for 2,000 years had been conquered and reconquered by despots of every imaginable variety and vice is a region with an implicit
history of caution and with a people united in the fear of being found out. (Talese, 1993, p. 23)
I was intrigued by this explanation. It resonated with my upbringing in a second generation Italian American household where it was rare to discuss (much less write about) one’s problems or strong emotions outside the embrace of family. I can recall my mother hastily closing the kitchen windows when the dinner table talk among my parents and grandparents turned from casual banter to more serious subjectspeople’s health or marital problems, for instance, or the complex interethnic politics of our church and community. But as a child it did not occur to me that this behavior was anything but universal. And to suggest, as Talese did in his essay, that it might have had something to do with cultural history surely did not occur to my family and me. Finally, that this cultural history and its attendant beliefs and practices might help to shape the work of immigrant offspring was a new idea. Until now I had given this aspect of my socialization very little thought although, as a budding researcher, I had studied and written about the dinner table talk of other people’s Italian American families (Shultz, Florio, & Erickson, 1982). Pondering my family’s private volubility and public guardedness, I began to speculate that growing up in such a setting might account for my research preferences. I enjoy the give and take of conversation but prefer the somewhat distanced role of “participant observer.” I am far more comfortable writing about other people and their stories than I am writing about my own. This, it appears, is a condition I share with other Italian Americans.
