r wisd

· delleSinister Wisdom 41
Summer /Fall 1990
Publisher: Elana Dykewomon
Guest Editors: Janet Capone and Denise Leto

Support staff for the special issue: Anna Hilbe, Christine Saulnier, Darci
Cataldo, elizabeth fides, Jean Frances, JoAnn Barton, Leslie Buck, Marisa
Francesca Leto, Mary DeLorenzo Pelc, Raelyn Gallina, Rosemary Zappulla,
Stacy Raye.
Typists and proofreaders: Darci Cataldo, elizabeth fides, Luna Moon, Mary
DeLorenzo Pelc
Italian & English proofreading: Raelyn Gallina
Office help, correspondence, ads and accounting: Caryatis Cardea, Casey
Fisher, Cindy Cooper, Dolphin Waletzky, SJ Kahn, Susan Levinkind
Thanks to Bobby Rothschild and Rebecca Kutlin of Tamed Technology
Distribution and mailing: Cindy Cooper, Dolphin Waletzky, Jasmine Marah,
Julie Mason, Marlane Cook, Susanjill Kah n, Susan Levinkind, Valerie Stoehr
Reader for the Womyn's Braille Press: Marisa Francesca Leto
Cover art: Top photo: an immigrant Neopolitan woman and her daughter,photographer unknown . Bottom photo: Aro Veno, photographed by Diana
Souza. Back cover photo: Family photo contributed by Mary and Carol
Andolina, photographer unknown.
Cover mechanical: Barbara Selfridge
Cover design: Denise Leto and Janet Capone

SINISTER WISDOM, founded 1976
Former editors and publishers: Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desrnoines)
and Catherine Nicholson (1976-81)
Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981 -83)
Michaele Uccella (1983-84)
Melanic Kaye/Kantrowitz (1983-87)
Copyright © 1990 Sinister Wisdom . All rights reserved to individual artists and authors.

ISSN: 0196-1853

Sinister Wisdom' PO Box 3252 • Berkeley CA 94703 • US

A Journal for the Lesbian Imaginationin the Arts and Politics
3
8
10
13
19

Janet Capone and Denise Leto • Notes for a Magazine
Maria Mazziotti Gillan • Public School No. 18: Paterson,
New Jersey (poem)
elizabeth fides • La Mia Polenta (narrative)
Denise Leto • We Do the Best I Can: A Series of Portraits(poem)
Frances Tramontana Patchett • Francesca Ranieri
Tramontana 1887-1963 (narrative)

§§§
22
23
32
34
38
41

Mary Russo Demetrick • Madeline (poem)
Kathy Freeperson • The DeCristo Girls (narrative)
Maria Mazziotti Gillan • Connections (poem)
Rachel Guido deVries • The Accordion (fiction)
Rachel Guido deVries • Litany on the Equinox (poem)
Rosanna Sorella • Turning Away From Secrets and Shame(narrative)

§§§
45
47
54
55
58
66
67

Stacie Samson • Mixed Blood (poem)
Janet Capone • Italy (fiction)
Mary Russo Demetrick • Legacy (narrative)
Jean Rietschel • Rose (narrative)
Laurie Mattioli • The Legacy (narrative)
Kathy Freeperson • Munda (poem)
Diana Gravenites • Shadow Sister (poem)

§§§
71
72
75
79
82
90
94

Dodici Azpadu • Omerta (poem)
Denise Leto • Passion, Danger, Freedom (poem)
Patrizia Tavormina • Living as a Sicilian Dyke (narrative)
Mary DeLorenzo Pelc • Review of The Dream Book
Angie Angela and Demetria Iazzetto • Commari: Excerptof a Dialogue (discussion)
Celine-Marie Pascale • Photographs of Home (narrative)
Mary Anne Bella Mirabella • Connections (narrative)

101
105
111
114
116
118
120
121
122
129
133
136
142

Joan Capra • The Italian Jewish Connection, or, The
History of America (essay)
Mary Saracino • On Being Italian-American: an
Introspection (narrative)
Tasha Belfiore • I Capelli Moltissimi (narrative)
Chris Cuomo • The Wax Problem (poem)
Darci Cataldo • Two Kinds of People in The World(narrative)
Maree Dzian Ecrevan • To Grandmother's Bed (poem)
Aro Veno • Baccala (poem)
elizabeth fides • Salsa di Pomodoro (recipe)
Janet Capone • In Answer to Their Questions (poem)
Contributors' Notes
Books Received
Announcements and Classified Ads
Upcoming Issues & Deadlines
§§§

ART
7

Anna Cusenza, Stacy Raye • Photographs of B.A.SJ.L.
(Bay Area Sicilian/Italian Lesbians)
12 Vincenza Petrilli • Untitled, from the series "Whengirls become women" (photograph)
21 Anna Cusenza • Mamma Cu i Favi (photograph)
30 Vincenza Petrilli • Untitled, from the series "Whengirls become women" (photograph)
31 Photographs of four contributors
33 Contributed by Mary and Carol Andolina • Woman
with her Daughters, photographer unknown
40 Karen Porter • La Madre .. . (pen & ink)
57 Francesca Forte • A Tribute to Grandma Antoinetta,
Padua, Italy 1978 (photograph)
71 Dodici Azpadu holding her doll "Palermo" (photograph)
89 Contributed by Mary and Carol Andolina • Photo
Collage, photographers unknown
93 Sheri Tornatore • Untitled (mixed media collage)
115 elizabeth fides • Nuda (pen & ink)
119 Margaret Tedesco • "Everlasting, Amen" (xerox collage)
128 Anna Cusenza • Self Portrait (oil-based spray paint on
paper)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Notes for a Magazine
11 Viaggio Delle Donne:
Italian-American Women Reach Shore
Looking back, it feels like no surprise that the California earthquake of'89 happened while Denise Leto and I were on the phone
in Oakland discussing Sinister Wisdom's Italian-American issue.
It was a profound shift, the earth taking care of herself, readjusting, and in the process readjusting the priorities and values ofus humans living on top of her. During those intense 15 seconds,
I remember standing under my doorway yelling my head off,
realizing with fear and excitement that I was witnessing something in motion that was much more powerful than myself. With
the publication of this issue, a profound shift has also taken place
for me, and I believe, for Italian/Sicilian-descended women ingeneral. With this new collection of works, the geography changes- for us, as a group, and within our women's and lesbiancommuni ties. As the ti tIe sugges ts we have arrived. We move from
relative obscurity as ethnic American women, to greater visibility, always an exciting and frightening thing.
It's Italian to acknowledge and show respect to one's forebears, those who have preceded us and somehow made our lives
more possible. It would be impossible to name them all in a few
lines, but it's in this spirit that I want to recognize and appreciate
Helen Barolini's The Dream Book, an anthology of writings by
Italian-American women, published in 1985. Through her inspiring and direly needed effort, a precedent was set. A silence wasbroken for the first time, the literary silence enshrouding us for
decades as Italian-American women in this country. Barolini' s
contribution was a heroic affirmation, and did much to begin toestablish us as ethnic American women with a unique andauthentic body of writings long deserving of recognition inNorth
American literature.
Now, with this Sinister Wisdom issue, another silence is broken, not only for Italian/Sicilian-descended women, but for
Italian/Sicilian-descended lesbians, which this collection primarily focuses on. In this sense, this anthology is the first of its
kind to exist. Now, the lesbians can hear each other's voices too,3~~

read each other's words, and get a clearer image of ourselves in
the process.
Why a focus on lesbians? As lesbian women, we often have a
different and sometimes more difficult relationship to our birthfamilies. Many of us have had to leave our families of origin inorder to come out. This leave-taking is never without pain andloss of some sort. What has this meant for us? What impact has it
had on our understanding of our culture and ethnicity? Did welose track of our Italianness along the way? If so, it's clear to me,paesane mie, that we need each other all the more! We cannot
reclaim our culture in isolation! And, in so doing, I think we arefinding that it's possible to be Italian/Sicilian-identified andlesbian at the same time. What a concept! What a relief!
In a similar spirit, I also welcome the work we've included by
the non-lesbian women writers and artists of Italian/Sicilian descent, who bring their special richness and Italian-rootedness tothis issue. We need you as well, paesane - your voices and yourclarity. Finally, I want to acknowledge that we're also blessedwith one contribution from a writer of Sicilian-Canadian descent,
who provides us with her particular and unique vantage point.
In closing, I want to say that I'm left still hungry. (Oh forshame, to go around not feeling thoroughly and completely fed!
How un-Italian!) I want more. We need more. Certainly we needmore books. But, an Italian cannot survive on books alone, as
wonderful and enriching as they are. We need more communityand family. (That's another thing that earthquakes really clarify!)
We need conferences, workshops, support groups, writing groups,
and lots and lots of pasta dinners together. We need more Italian/
Sicilian-descended women in our daily lives. Only in these ways
can we renew and reclaim that sense of family so central to ourculture.
It's my belief that with this issue, we are on a threshold, we arestanding in a doorway, witnessing something large and powerful
in motion. I hope that as you read these pages you are howling
your head off: with excitement, with wonder, with a sense ofvalidation and celebration, and no doubt at least a little fear.

- Janet Capone
4

FORA YEAR AND A HALF, Janet and I have been pounding thepavement. Calling people, corresponding, researching, making
connections, and breaking open the vaults in our own minds andhearts in order to find what had been hidden away, silenced,
oppressed. We found a meaning that transcended our own
individual family experience; we found a voice within ourselves
deeply resonant of our ancestors; we found validation throughthe exploration of our hers tory, Sicilian, Italian and ItalianAmerican; we found that our own pain and joy in being ItalianAmerican lesbians was echoed by the many women with whom
we came in contact. Finding this gave us the strength to keep thevision burning even through our own resistance and fear. Networking they call it. Or more often than not, working without anet. Creating it as we went along. Cultural acrobats walking thetightrope of our ethnicity, our voice, our dream. Improvising,trusting - trusting that what we were doing mattered. That apiece of our experience could be revealed and received. That
there was a context, however new and fragile. That if we fell, there
would be some place to land.
Now we are here and what has been brewing in my own pot
for years finally has a home. All the memories, all the isolated bits
and pieces becoming connected; finally resting in a rich, diverse,thematic cultural mosaic.
In 1989 my Grandma died. My work took on a sense ofurgency and sadness. I had to call on the strength of the Sicilianand Italian-American women poets, artists and writers who came
before, who have paved the way. I wanted to claim my ethnicity
and my love of women even more proudly and boldly. But theconflict felt great, and the cost high. Who am I to be doing this, I
thought? To immerse myself, to take this risk? I am someone whowants to raise the voices of the immigrants, of Italian-American
dykes - to embrace them and then set them free with the full
timbre and space they deserve. I am someone who believes oursurvival depends on our ability to reassemble"to reclaim, and toremember. I am someone who believes that lesbians continually
break new ground, not to bury differences, but to bring them tolife in all their diversity, controversy, and wonder.
Why an Italian-American women's issue? To give us the opportunity to speak, to reach out to one another, to connect, to raise5

consciousness about the issues Italian- and Sicilian-American
lesbians face. To have fun, to have a feast, to celebrate who we are.
To begin to preserve our voice, not yet entirely lost or silenced.
And this is but one jewel of the journey. My greatest hope is that
others will pick it up, gather more momentum until an artistic
and literary context for Italian- and Sicilian-American-Iesbians is
no longer a leap of faith but a concrete multi-faceted reality.
Each word, each image in this issue is an act of courage. Eachcontributor gave yet another perspective, another beautiful truth
to savor. Molto grazie to Sinister Wisdom for taking the risk withus, for providing this space for us to flourish. What a gift it has
been to work on this issue. What an exhilarating, grueling,transforming journey. Each step took faith. Faith that our Sicilianand Italian-American sisters would have the strength and visionto speak, to create, to respond and faith that our non-Italian sisters
would have the openness and willingness to listen. And thisspecial issue is for us all.
If Sinister Wisdom is a country - and I believe it is - thenwelcome to this particular place on the map. The building of acontext is delicate and the magnitude of the task breathtaking.
For the first time a place like this exists for Italian- and SicilianAmerican lesbians and women to gather, to reminisce, to recognize, to share, to spark each other. This is a beginning. One more
step in "il viaggio delle donne."- Denise LetoWe'd like to say molto grazie to our incredible staff and the women andorganizations without whom this issue would not have been possible:
Carol Andolina, Mary Andolina, Cinzia Biagiotti, Siobhan Briley, Antoinette Ca pone, Anna Cusenza, Jud y Freespirit, Nancy Gagnon, Jud y Grahn, Mary
Gemini, Susanjill Kahn, Julie Lavezzo, Ann Leto-Villa, Martha Leto, Susan
Levinkind, Michelle Marchioli, Mary Morales, Lori Newman, Val Ramirez,
Ixchel Rosal, Elena Rossi, Linda Scaparotti, Pam Scola, Valerie Stoehr, Margaret
Tedesco, Cristina Valleau, Jennifer Wilson, Angela Za wadski.
B.A.S.I.L., Bay Times, Feminist Bookstore News, lstituto Italiano di Cultura,
Mama Bears, Old Wives Tales and, of course, Sinister Wisdom and the wholecollective. We give special thanks to Elana Dykewomon for her on-goingsupport and technical expertise.
We want to thank all the women who sent us their manuscripts and art
w ork. You have enriched our understanding, our appreciation and our ability toarticulate our ethnicity and culture. Gra zie ...

6Top photo: B.A.S.I.L (Bay Area Sicilian/Italian Lesbians) march in the
Lesbian Gay Pride Parade for the first time, June 1989, San Francisco. L
to R: Guest editors Janet Capone and Denise Leto, and Carrie Gagliardi,
Lori Donna, Carla Trettin, Rosemary Zappulla, Mary DeLorenzo Pelc.
Bottom photo: a few B.A.S.I.L. members. L to R: Rosemary Zappulla,
Marisa Francesca Leto, Denise Leto, Deana Morello, Janet Capone.

7Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Public School No. 18: Paterson, New Jersey
Miss Wilson's eyes, opaqueas blue glass, fix on me:"We must speak English.
We're in America now."
I want to say, "I am American,"but the evidence is stacked against me.
My mother scrubs my scalp raw, wraps
my shining hair in white rags
to make it curl; Miss Wilson
drags me to the window, checks my hairfor lice. My face wants to hide.
At home, my words smooth in my mouth
I chatter and am proud. In school,
I am silent; I grope for the right English
words, fear the Italian word will sprout
from my mouth like a rose.
I fear the progression of teachers
in their sprigged dresses,
their Anglo-Saxon faces .
Without words, they tell me
to be ashamed.
lam.
I deny that booted country
even from myself,
want to be still
and untouchable
as these women
who teach me to hate myself.

Previously printed in Winter Light, 1985

8

Years later, in a whiteKansas City house,
the psychology professor tells me
I remind him of the Mafia leader
on the cover of Time magazine.
My anger spits
venomous from my mouth:
I am proud of my mother,dressed all in black,proud of my father
with his broken tongue,
proud of the laughterand noise of our house.
Remember me, ladies,
the silent one?
I have found my voice
and my rage will blow
your house down.

9elizabeth fides

La Mia Polenta
Lately, feelings have been bubbling up, like the fat, thick bubbles
in a slow cooking polenta, puffing to the top with purpose, force,
intention. Feelings about my Italian self, about my lesbianism,
about how the two mix, blend, separate, mix again.
I am first of all an Italian, 100%. My grandparents came from
Italy, the northern regions - squat, strong, heavy-boned peasants. As a child, I would struggle to interpret their words, understanding little of what they said. I was being "protected" fromtheir rich culture by a generation of parents who believed it best
to assimilate, to americanize, to WASP it up. I resented that for
years, until I realized that my mother and father were only trying
to keep me from the pain that they had suffered as a result of being
Italian in a community that did not tolerate differences.
Yet, I was not encouraged to deny who I truly was on a very
deep level. Cuddled up in my Nonna Mariannina's feather bed,
I would listen to her stories of a beautiful country far across theocean. It was a place that she told me she missed terribly, one that
I must go to, one that she would never see again.
I was raised with a deep respect for my grandparents, my
Nonni. They had suffered the loss of their homes, their culture
and their families to better the lives of their children. Only one
grandmother remains alive today, and although age has faded
her memory and she rarely leaves the small stone house that my
Nonno built for her, she remains a constant source of spiritualinspiration and courage for me. I see myself in her eyes and in her
hands.
The feelings continue to rise up, softly, the polenta cooks, thefeelings heat. Anger pushes at me. Daily I witness the ridiculous
stereotypes of Italians: Italians do nothing but cook pasta; Italians
speak slowly, unable to form complete sentences in English;
Italians are all "mafia," and have no morals; Italians are stupid,
inferior, to be consulted only for the purpose of cooking or killing.
I find myself turning away from the patriarchal culture, turning
towards the lesbians, hoping it will be different.
10And often it is, within the lesbian community I have been able
to find some comfort and pride. I have been able to develop
family, the very core of what being Italian has meant to me. Withlesbians I have been able to celebrate my Italian self, cooking
gnocchi and risotto, cooking to my heart's content, cooking morethan enough, gathering my friends to eat. With lesbians I celebrate my Italian self, the importance and depth of family, commitment to home, to safety, to loyalty amongst friends.
And as the pot cools, the polenta sticks together, hardens, myfeelings congeal, they are ready, done. I reflect on my relationshipwith my blood family. My mother and grandmothers have ingrained in me a tenacious will to survive. They have encouraged
me to take risks and they have never shunned me when I haveappeared too Dykey. (In 1979 my Nanna told me that she had no
idea as to why I would want to shave my head, but that it wasokay with her nonetheless.) My family has accepted me as alesbian, has welcomed my lover and me into their homes, andalthough it is not discussed openly often, my mother has said that
she will always love me and will struggle to both accept andrespect the choices I have made in my life including that of being
a lesbian.
I stand back and wonder how it all blends together; my loveof womyn, my love of home, my need for family, my respect for
culture, tradition, and my lesbianism. I find myself often drawn
to Jewish womyn - our common threads of culture, ritual,family and food bind us together. Yet I see also that I deny partsof my Italian self in doing so. Somehow I have felt it politicallycorrect to celebrate the holidays associated with the Jewish culture, but have chosen to ignore those associated with my Italianculture. Without buying into the patriarchal garbage alignedwith the roman catholic church, I have only just begun to "reclaim" the rituals which I so joyously shared with my family as achild. I am remembering through these rituals much of what theheart of being Italian has meant to me. Making holiday cookies,
prepared only once a year - the Biscotti and Crustoli - the smellof anise baking. Ravioli rolled out on sheets of wax paper, enoughto cover the kitchen floor. Aunts, Nonne, sisters, Mom, all assigned a task, laughing as we cover ourselves with white baking
flour, powdering our hair. This was not about nativity scenes or11

gifts. This was about closeness, familiarity, and tradition.
Still, I often feel misunderstood. In the lesbian community thestereotypes often thrive. I find myself hiding, keeping secrets
about my cultural identity, afraid someone will make a comment
about a "hot" Italian or the mafia. I am afraid that if I point out anoffensive remark, I will seem petty or too sensitive. I find myself
wondering if non-Italian womyn are as commited to informing
themselves about my cultural traditions as I have been to findingout about theirs. I even question my subtle resistance to attending
monthly meetings of Italian and Sicilian Lesbians, perhaps I haveinternalized too much. Perhaps now is the time to begin embracing all of who I am, Italian Dyke.
I bite into the rich yellow softness of the polenta, savor thesmooth texture, the fine taste of romano cheese cooked with thecornmeal. I realize parts of me are just surfacing, pieces of thispuzzle are just finding their place. My pride wells up in me as I
write. I make a quiet vow to become more of who my Nonnaalready is - strong, Italian, determined not to be oppressed,
proud .

Untitled, from the series "When girls become women"
Vincenza Petrilli
12Denise Leto

We Do the Best I Can: A Series of Portraits
I. Maria Lafa tta

It

is 1969
every weekend the family
visits Aunt Maria
her dog Leo barks
as we approach
we coo at him but he ignores us
he only responds to Sicilian
Aunt Maria yells a command
he backs off obediently
we are in Little Italyon Columbia street in San Diegopeople sit on their porches
basil grows in pots & trays
kids play in the street
hot peppers fry in olive oil
the smell unfurls in our hair
Aunt Maria gives us
melted hershey bars
I go to my favorite place to eat mine
her garden in the backyard
she has herbs growing and peppers
and zucchini and prickly pears
that she picks with her bare hands
peels & gives out to the kids
they are bright pink & orange
I think all children eat this cactus fruit
have spaghetti & meatballs
and great Aunts with rough hands
Aunt Maria used to talkwhile working in the garden
her wide mouth twirling
the occasional english word around like spit
13

her small thick hands
moving quickly through her stories
she moved them not to ornament
but because she had toto turn the earth into foodto pass on what she knew
Women from all over the neighborhood
would come over to her houseand speak rapidly in a language I couldn't understandmy sisters and I would mimic the sounds
and laugh together
not understanding then that what we heard
was the sound of our culture
slipping away with her generation
now we take Italian classes
the accent coming easily like memories
but the language itself comes only with difficulty
as in the understanding of the memories
Maria Lafatta,
when I was little I thought you ran the world
for 60 years you refused to speak english
while my parents refused to teach me Italianand I lived in the middle
stuck in the crack between two worlds
today the porches in Little Italy fall like dust
perky office buildings take their place
I would give anything to go backfind you there sitting on the porch
rocking back and forth
I must have come to you as such a little american thena stranger balancing on the abyss of assimilation
now I invoke your spirit
speak to you in endangered tones
ancient incantations
now I am filled with the part of you that lives in me
and like a flame.
my eyes burn with the vision of you
brave as a blessing.
14II. Mary Leta
Grandma Leta
immigrated
fled, escaped
but did not travel
she did not take a trip
she left everything
she stepped off the ship
not a boaton legs bentwith confinement and grief
not joy
was herded
not escorted
to the side
they put a sign
not a bunch of flowers
in her hand
W.O.P.
in big letterswithout papers
Grandma stared
straight ahead
yes & shut-up
were her only
english words for years
she visited us
in California from back east
made hot pepper sandwiches
that sent us scalding
to the drinking fountainthen home from school
mouths round & open with heatMorn knew from our faces what had happened
the clash between the immigrant
and the second generation Italian-American
was about to begin
we hid under the couch15

knowing that these matriarchs could throw
power into words with staggering aim
though we never knew who won
next day Grandma
would make peanut butter & jelly sandwiches
gripping the knife with a fiercenessthat belied the task
she would pull the sliced bread apartwith distaste
Bread, this?
she would stand over itmaking it looksmall & contemptible,
who won?
Years later
my sister and I visited hertravelled
to Indiana
stepped into her apartment
legs bent
to hug & kiss her
she told us a storyof the evil eye& how it almost killed her
saved only by a spirit
in the form of a woman in black
who knocked on her door
in the middle of the night
and in whispered words
gave her a remedy to ward off malocchio
and then swiftly disappeared
we listened
heard more than her voice
felt the room grow smaller& I remembered her journey,
her loss, her legacy, her faith
her power took holdrooted there16we held it
like a warning
like a jewel
to be worn constantly.
III. Teresa Colone
I don't know you
but I keep your picture with me
in it you are standing
with high laced black boots on
holding a cane and wearing a hat
you look stern & radiantit is an old picture
they say I look like you
relatives weep upon seeing me
struck by the resemblancethey grab my cheeks
hold me close speak your nameover & over again in my ear
I don't know you
great grandmotherI cannot even find out much about you
the family wrapped in a shroud of omerta
but I live knowing
at least thisevery time I stare at the picture
looking into your face
the silence is broken
and I remember
where I come from.
IV. Fanny Sacco
Aunt Fanny
had no fingernails
she worked full timeat the cannery
and at home17

in her spare time
she took care of six kids
the house
the gardens
the animals
the bills
the neighborhood
the laundry
the sewing
the food
her apron was always
splattered with sauce
when I was little
I thought it looked like a map
each stain a different country
I remember when they used to laughat her "broken english"
but it was the Italianthat was left unwhole
to be understoodin the way
her eyes foughtin the way
she walked
filling up space
as if it were nothing
in the way
she sat at the end of the daywith the women in the family
folding her hands
on her lap
as if resting sacred tools
on a shelf
making it whole again
she'd sigh and say,"ahh, we do da best I can,"18Frances Tramontana PatchettFrancesa Ranieri Tramontana, 1887-1963
My name sake, my maternal grandmother, was born in Gallico
Marina, Reggio Calabria, Italy on December 23, 1887. She died in
Brooklyn, New York on September 7, 1963. She married mygrandfather, Antonio, when she was seventeen. He had alreadybeen to the United States. He returned to Italy to marry mygrandmother. They came here together and settled in Brooklyn.
Grandma bore five children, one son and four daughters. My
grandparents, in my mind, did not perfectly fit the immigrantmold. Grandpa was very lucky to get a fine job on the docks. He
estimated the cost for ship repairs and worked successfully in asupervisory capacity until he retired due to heart problems.
Their first and only son, Dominic, became a medical doctor.
The daughters, Antoinette, Frances, Stella and Laura were allhigh school graduates. Although encouraged to go on to college,none of them did. As for the 13 grandchildren, grandma saw
education as equally important for males and females . No profession was too good for us . However, for the granddaughters,
beyond education she envisioned marriage. We were taught that
ultimate happiness would be in marriage.
When I think about grandma and I often do, there are moments frozen in time which come back in memory. I know that
she was not a well woman. She had diabetes. She had to giveherself insulin injections everyday. It was complications from thediabetes that eventually caused her death. Every week she visited
her son's office for her checkups. More often than not she camehome in tears and would stop in our apartment to share her hurtwith my mom, Antoinette. My uncle would become angry with
her if she did not follow her diet. He could be very unkind. Yet he
was her "SON" and his unacceptable behavior was tolerated.
Freeing him from the responsibility of doctoring to the family
was never addressed as an option. Such a choice might havespared all of us a great deal of pain.
It would be impossible to write about grandma without
remembering her in the kitchen cooking. She cooked three hot19

meals a day for her and my grandfather. Always a table cloth on
the kitchen table. Always serving my grandfather first, evenpouring the glass of wine for him before she sat down to her own
meal. She was a wonderful cook! One of her specialities washomemade, from scratch, sausage. Grandma would hand mix all
the ingredients and stuff the casings into uniform links. One day
when I was alone she called me. I went up the stairs toward herapartment and there she sat on the steps waiting for me with aplate on her lap filled with the freshly made sausage. The holidays were a time for feasting. The legendary tales are all true. On
Christmas Eve, with the help of her daughters, she would preparea table laden with lobster, shrimp, baked clams, octopus andcalamari. If we were with her on New Year's Eve, after dinner,close to midnight, grandma would hand us the pots and pans tobang out the windows at the stroke of twelve. In her broken
English she would lead us in a chorus of "Happa New Year!"
Grandma, we are told, was a financial wiz. She and my
grandfather managed several properties. During the Depression
she defied my grandfather and bought yet another apartment
house. She ran a candy store as a way to raise the mortgage
monies. They did not incur any losses during those very lean
years. Today, three of her daughters live in separate apartmentsin those same dwellings.
Grandma missed Italy, and her descriptions of it made itsound like paradise. For all the stories and sweet memories, shenever did go back horne to see her family. Letters would bring
grandma the news from her home. She grieved the death of herparents from thousands of miles away. Her loved ones werealways close to her heart. Grandma collected the out grown andno longer wanted clothes of both her children and grandchildren.
They became part of the packages she sent to her family in Italy.
I would watch her work at the kitchen table. She would neatly
fold the clothes into the white cloth bundles. She would handstitch the seams of the bundles with strong white thread and thentie them tightly with sturdy string. Someone would take thebundles to the post office for her. Whatever her family needed
they received . Included were coats, dresses, suits, shoes, wedding dresses and, it is our suspicion, that among the treasures
were gifts she received from us but never wore.
20

Grandma was a seamstress, too . My mom recently gave melinen sheets, pillow cases and towels which grandma made byhand. Perhaps she found the time to create these heirlooms while
she listened to the opera on Saturday afternoons. She loved theopera and every Saturday at 2pm she would tune into the live
broadcasts from NY Metropolitan Opera House. She not only
listened - she knew the arias by heart and she sang every word.
It was generally understood that those hours on Saturday were
hers. Grandma was rarely interrupted when we heard the opera
on the radio.
Grandma was a woman of faith, but she was not religious.
The Catholic rituals were important to her, but I never had theimpression that she paid much attention to the priests. In fact, mymom told me that when Grandma had a tubular pregnancy, she
had an abortion. And since grandma and grandpa limited theirfamily to five children born in a fourteen year time span, myassumption is that they practiced some form of birth control.
Sometimes my daughter Sarah asks me about my grandmother. At those times I feel very sad. My grandma died when I
was in college. She would have loved my children. Sarah andgrandma would have been a sight to behold. I know that asclearly as the memories I cherish.

Mamma Cu i Favi
Anna Cusenza
21Mary Russo Demetrick

Madeline
She makes Pasqua
Easter bread with wholebrown speckled
eggs almost translucent
braided into doughShe slaps dough downon the chipped ceramic topof that wooden tableserpents spiralaround each of its carved legs
sun filters in through winterspare grape vines
Her tiny hands conduct
an opera over doughin her kitchen yeast
and basilico
and frying onions
She prepares spring foodbuys finnochio
dips its feathery leaves
into holy water
blesses the children
at her feet
Her eggs bake set
in a mass of twisted doughthat pulls apartunbraids in steamy swirls
as if unwinding
a long knot

22

Kathy Freeperson

The DeCristo Girls(This is an abridged version of a chapter from The Biography Of
Ramona DeCristo, a young adult novel in progress.)
One day the phone rang and Gramma answered it. I knew she
was talking to Mommy. She always called her ''Bambina Mia"and referred to my dad as "Antonio."
The four of us were home with the chicken pox playing
checkers, except Pauline, who kept drooling on the game board.
Samantha was getting mad when she could not beat Elena andme. I hated games, but we were tired of TV. We wanted to help
Gramma make some pizza frita, put sugar on it and have Italiancoffee.
Instead, the phone interrupted us. Gramma was talking, andafter a few minutes, handed it to me. I said hello into the receiver.
"Hello Ramona." It was Mom at the hospital. She sounded so
far away. I almost cried for missing her and worrying. 'Well, yourfather had his operation.""Yes Mom," I said. I didn't know what else to say.
"And he will be OK. So, tell your sisters, and be good until I
get there. Dad will have to stay in the hospital for a few more
weeks."
I let out my breath and said quickly "Did they cut out his
throat Mom?" She sounded like she was starting to cry. The
phone was snapping and crackling because she was far away I
guess. "How will he talk?" I asked her.
"He'll have to learn to talk all over again," she said.
All afternoon without talking to anyone, I looked in the
Pictorial Guide for Modern Medicine, a huge book on Mom's
shelf. I couldn't find anything about cancer or getting your throat
cut out. Guess Mom was right about it being a new thing.
About eleven o'clock the next morning, we heard someone
coming up the stairs. Gramma, Elena, and Pauline and I went to
see who. I pressed my nose against the cold glass window,
mushed my face into it and crossed my eyes to scare away any
robbers, but there was my mom coming up the stairs.
23

"Hi, Mom!" I hugged and kissed her. She looked smaller thanwhen she left and a lot more tired. She hugged all three of us, said
hello to Gramma in Italian, and asked where Samantha was.
Gramma told her in Italian that Samantha had gone to school.
They talked to each other some more. I knew enough about
Italian to know they were worried about money. Mom asked me
about the woman from Welfare.
"She hasn't come yet," I said. Mom looked very sad. A week
before she and Dad left for the hospital, a woman in a suit hadcome to our place, looked around, and asked all these questions
about us and if we were hungry. Dad had been out looking foranother job because he got laid off again from his construction
job even though he was sick and kept losing his voice. Mom had
told us the lady came to see if we were lying about needing help.
Mom was mad at her and kind of talked to her through her teeth.
I asked Mom why she didn't just tell her off and Mom said we had
to swallow our pride or starve.
"Why does she have to come again Mom?" I asked her now.
"Can't she believe us the first time?""Well dear, the Welfare people think some people lie to gettheir food."
I looked in the cupboard at the cans of pork we had and the
dry milk and powdered eggs we had waited in a long line at thefire station to get. "You mean some people really want this foodwhen they can buy real food?" Mom laughed. I was happy I could
make her laugh in this time of worry. She worried about money
so much sometimes she would sit there holding up her head withher hand and be off somewhere drinking her coffee very slowly.
She didn't know how we would make it. All of us ate one meal a
day and some things from Gramma's garden.
Gramma said the depression was much worse than this. She
called it "La fame," or "the hunger," in Italian. When you mentioned being broke to Gramma she would tell you how it was forher, with thirteen children during the depression. She liked to tell
us stories of Grandpa trying to get work, not being able to speak
English, and making a lot of trouble in the factory. She told us
about the time he swore at his boss and almost beat him up when
the guy wouldn't pay him very much. Gramma said she mixed upflour and water to make lots of things. She said because of La
24

fame, the boys, her sons, never got any education. They went out
and worked when they were twelve or fourteen at whatever jobs
they could get. Some of them even worked scrounging aroundwith Sammy Bisciglio, the dirty old junk man.
"What makes a depression, Gramma?" I would ask her.
"The government," she'd always say, in Italian. I believed
Gramma knew just about everything even though she couldn't
write or read or speak English too well. When you hugged
Gramma, she smelled of hair gel and felt big, round, and warm.
She said "Embah!" a lot which was like when Jack Benny, thecomedian on TV,looked at the camera with his arms folded andsaid "Well!" I loved Gramma a lot because she listened to mystories and would never let anyone hurt me. She said if anyone
was mean to me, she would get her axe out of the back kitchen andget them. I believed her. I'd seen her kill the chickens we used to
eat in tomato sauce for Sunday dinner before we went broke.
On Saturday afternoon we heard a knock at the door. The lady
from the Welfare Department was standing there. I thought it
might be the paperboy. She had shown me a little card throughthe glass window of the door. I opened it and let her in. Mom
always tells me to see who it is before I open the door to anyone.
The woman was carrying a big black box with a suitcase
handle on it. She thumped it down on the table. She wore a big
double gold ring and smelled of some perfume mixed withoutdoor fall wind. She looked at me for a long time and I felt likeI needed to tell a sin in Confession, when I hadn't done a thing.
She puckered her face and said "Is your mother Jennifer DeCristo
here?" She acted as if I was hiding my mother from her.
"Yes ma'am. Do you want her?" I started for the bedroom,
where Mom was still asleep. She usually never slept late, buttoday all of us girls were playing quietly, letting her rest from hertrip and worrying about Daddy and money and bills. I went to
Mom's room to get her.
"Mrs. DeCristo," said the Welfare lady, "I'm here for a home
visit, as you remember. I'm Mrs. Lysinski from the Welfare
Departmen t.""Yes, what is it?" Mom snarled a little as she came into theroom. But then she added "Well, go ahead, look around. Help
yourself," trying to sound nice. But I know Mom didn't want this25

lady looking inside everything and upsetting everybody. Mrs.
Lysinski didn't care. She snooped in everything as if we were
hiding somebody in the place. She looked in all the rooms, thecupboards, all the drawers, including the one in our roll-top desk
where Pauline had hid an Easter egg. It still smelled bad. The
closet in the bedroom was stuffed so full she couldn't really see
the back.
When she finished looking at everything she asked us if wewere hungry. Then she packed up her papers and told Mom wewould hear in two weeks about receiving aid . I think she meantmoney to pay rent and bills. As soon as she left, Mom started tocry a little and then stopped and started cursing the government
from the president to the governor to the mayor. I guess they had
sent Mrs. Lysinski, but I hoped she never came back to our houseagain.
Mom said "If it wasn't for you kids, I'd tell that woman rightwhere to put her welfare and surplus food!" I hated Mrs. Lysinski
for making Mom feel so bad.
"STAND IN LINE!" the man was yelling at us. "STAND IN
LINE!" The line was long and there were a lot of black people in
it in front of us. We hardly ever saw black people except when wevisited my aunt and uncle who lived in Liberty Garden Apartments on the other side of town. Everyone in the family was
always cracking jokes about black people. I never laughed atthem because I felt bad about the jokes. Everybody always says
I'm too serious, but I don't like calling people names just 'cause
they're different from you. Anyway, all the people in line looked
bad. Not like on T.V., where everyone wears nice clothes, is white,and smiling as they chew gum. In this line, lots of kids were
crying. Their moms tried to keep them quiet. I wondered if they
were hungry like me. Even though I was always being called fat,my stomach felt like it was stuck to the back wall of me. It was
growling so loud I felt the whole place could hear it.
The man giving out food scowled as if he smelled somethingbad. "Have your cards ready to stamp. Have your cards out." Hekept saying things like: "I don't know why they bring all theirdamn kids. If they could only have as much money as they havekids." He looked at all of us and for some reason, even though in26

church they tell you to love everybody, I hated that man then. I
wanted to kick him. It made me feel bad to be alive when helooked at us that way.
Way at the front of the line, a woman was leaving with a big
box of food. Her two sons and husband were helping her. As soon
as she got to the front door of the warehouse, the man yelled forher to stop. "Mrs. Williams, Claretha Williams, stop right there!"Three of the men handing out food ran as the woman tried toleave. "Get her! Get her!" they yelled, and as her children andhusband ran with the big box, the three men grabbed her by theskirt. She stood there terrified and shaking. Then she started toyell at them. They yelled back at her. Finally they let her go.
Later on, I heard the men talking. "Yeah, Jake, her card wasstamped real light and the bitch took off. What if she gets two
supplies of food this month?"''What I can't figure out," said the other man, who had real
white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, "is why don't they getthemselves a damn job and stop living off welfare." I wondered
if these creepy men were somehow connected to Mrs. Lysinski.
They didn't think anyone was honest either.
When we got to the front of the line, they were a little nicer tous than they were to the black people, but they still looked at us
a little funny, like we shouldn't be there. I wondered if it was theirfood they were giving away. The containers they gave us werewhite or silver with big black letters that said you couldn't sellthem. I remember thinking that life was grey with black lettersstamped on it when your family was broke: grey with a big black
heavy hurtful government stamp.
The canned meat was very greasy. As Mom fried it in the big
black cast iron skillet, its smell filled our apartment. We set thetable and got read y for a meal. Pauline was trying to get the empty
can out of the trash bag and we had to stop her. She was learning
to talk more, and saying sentences like "Pauline hungry Mama."
Elena was pretending she was a queen or getting married. She
had pinned a pillow case on her head with bobby pins and carrieda prayer book in her hands. At least she kept us cheered up. Me,
I was in an angry mood. I didn't like to wait when I was hungry,
especially when T.V. showed such good things to eat and we
could smell the meals cooking from the neighbors' apartments.
27

Mom explained that this box of food was our food for thewhole month, unless we found some money from somewhere.
She said she and Dad hadn't made any money in two months
because Dad was so sick.
Soon we ate the greasy pork very quickly. It made us burp.
Afterward, we played hospital and everyone had the same problem. Elena was the doctor.
Later, Mom called a family meeting. As was our habit, we all
sat around the big formica kitchen table. With its metal edges, it
felt cold and smooth when you sat there on one of the stuffedchairs covered with plastic.
"Girls," Mom began, "your father will be home from thehospital next week." Four pairs of chubby hands clapped together and every one of us squealed with glee. "Now I want you
girls to be really nice to Daddy, as I know you will be. He's beenin the hospital and has been very sick, but at least he's alive.""Mom," I said, "explain to the girls about his throat." I didn't
want to have to tell them myself because I was so afraid I would
get sick when I saw it.
"Your father had his voice box removed." We all looked ather. All I could think of was Pauline's toy Jack-in-the-box popping up silent.
"Oh no!" Samantha clamped her hands over her mouth andstarted to cry.
"How will he talk, Mommy? Doesn't your throat let you
talk?" Elena asked. She sang Fa So La Ti Do, like Uncle Jim hadtaught us. Then she mouthed the same scales with no soundcoming out. Normally we would have laughed, but not tonight.
"Well, he'll be writing things down for the first few weeks or
so but he will learn to talk again a different way.""Will he talk like a baby again?" I asked.
"No, dear.""Will he have blood all over him like Jesus?" asked Samantha.
She looked worried.
"No, he won't have blood on him. Just make sure we all help
Daddy as best we can because he feels bad and misses his throat.
If you help him, he'll know you love him. I have to go to the bank
now and ask the man for a loan so we can stay alive while Daddy
gets well. His operation costs a fortune. We'll have to pay back the28hospital and doctors for the rest of our lives, but at least yourfather is alive."
We finished our meeting as usual with complaints we wanted
settled. Elena complained that Pauline was pounding on thebathroom door as a joke to make her get out before she was dry
from her bath. The floor always got all wet. We worked out therest of our complaints together under the strong, peaceful guidance of Mom. We were still worried about Daddy, but the weekly
meeting made us feel better. I was worried most of all. I wanted
Dad to feel O.K., but what if I got sick when I saw him? I'd neverbeen around someone with no throat.
Finally next week arrived. We were all in the house when weheard Dad coming up the stairs. "He's here! He's here! Get thethings ready." Pauline got out the picture all of us drew in crayon
on a paper bag for Daddy. It showed us all saying hello to him. In
addition, I would present my gift to him. I had taken an empty
surplus food can and decorated it with some old Christmas
wrapping paper. Daddy could keep his pencils and pens in it. He
would need them to write notes to us. Elena had made some milkfor him from our surplus powdered milk. The surplus milk was
nasty stuff but an act of love since you had to beat it and beat it foran hour or more and make it real cold before you could stand thetaste of it. Gramma was making sauce, spaghetti dinner andhomemade Italian bread for all of us. Daddy had only eaten
hospital food for so long. Morn and Gramma stood with us
around the door. We were all excited that he was coming horne.
He opened the door. I held my breath. Morn ran to him andthey hugged each other hard, something we never had seen them
do before. Next, he scooped Pauline up in his arms. He looked thesame, except his face was a little slack. He was wearing a little
skirt around his neck. It reminded me of a tiny curtain, like on an
auditorium stage. Morn called this his bib. The end of it was
tucked into his shirt. Smiling at me, he sat on his haunches andshowed us his throat. I was nervous I would be sick, but it reallywasn't so bad. It was just a round hole right in the middle of hisneck above his chest. It was dark in there but it didn't look tooscary.
Dad took our presents, kissed us all on the cheek, and wrote
me a note which read : "Ramona, since you read the best, I can talk29

to you." His writing was scribbly, so I took my time and read eachword to all of us . I was happy Mom had taught me to read andprint before I went to school.
Dad wrote: "I'll have to write you notes for a while but I am
going to learn to talk again very soon. See if I don't get back towork and get well real quick so I can get you all the things you
need."
I stared at Daddy for a moment. I didn't know if you lost yourvoice if you could still hear all right. "Welcome Home Dad!" Iyelled . Everyone jumped, including Dad. The girls started to
giggle. I took a quick look at Dad to see if that had embarrassed
him. He was smiling at me. He jotted down: "I'm not deaf." I readit out loud quickly and we all laughed. Pauline was laughing
because all of us were laughing, for the first time since Daddy had
to go away. We all felt better, and went downstairs to eat Gramma' s
spaghetti dinner. Things would be all right after all.

Untitled, from the series " When girls become women"
Vincenza Petrilli
30

Photographs of four contributors

Top: Mary Russo Demetrick and Maria Mazziotti Gillan(photo by Laura Boss)
Bottom: Patrizia Tavormina (photo by Diane Heffernan)
and Chris Cuomo (photo by Jo Lo Curto)

31

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Connections
Some days, when the world
seems to be chasing mewith an axe and I'm driving along,on the way home from work,or to the post office or some otherordinary place, I find myself
pulling into my mother's driveway
almost as though the car
decided, incredibly, to drive
toward there instead of headingfor home where the clothes wait
to be washed and the dinner cooked
and my poems wait to be placed
in clean white envelopes
and sent out to editors.
Anyway there I am, without
intending to be, knocking
on my mother's door andshe is there. She welcomes me,
smiling and criticizing
glad to see meeven though she tells me
my hair does not look rightand why don't I wear some make up
and if she doesn't tell me,
who will? She cleans off
the already clean white tablein the basement kitchen
where she does all her cooking(the first floor kitchen
is never used, and looks
showroom new) and takes out a cup
and pours me an espresso

32

without even asking and looksin the refrigerator to see if there is anythingelse that I want. She asks
about each item, warms upsome pasta and fasoli or some lentils and rice,and sits down to talk. I marvel
at how small she is when she sits down,
her hands delicate,with tiny bones, and her body compact.
Looking at her face, I realize,
suddenly, that she could die,that if she were not here
for me, I would have no one
to go to for sus tenance,as I come to her, looking
for the food that satisfies
all hunger, knowing that no matter what,
she is there for me, and that I needto have her there, as though
the world were a quaking bog
and she, the only solid place
on which to stand.

Woman with her Daughters, photographer unknown
Contributed by Mary and Carol Andolina
33Rachel Guido deVries

The Accordion
The day I came home to discover that Mama had hocked my gold
and white accordion was the same day I had decided, probably
in a fit of confused sexuality, to practice for hours every day, until
maybe I could get on Ed Sullivan or Arthur Godfrey, some new
way to get rich and get out of the house on Trenton Avenue, awayfrom my father's yelling in the night about money or work or me.
I had hated the accordion, hated the man who gave me lessons in a little cubicle at Robbie Music downtown Paterson. Mostof the time, Pop dropped me off while he went and hung out with
Uncle Marty Longo at the gas station, or sometimes he went
down to the Buffalo Bar and Grill and talked with Rocco Bazzi
about the numbers . Sometimes I took the bus and more often than
not got vaguely sick from the smell of the fumes. I wanted to beat the Paterson Public Library, where the smell of the old andmusty books was exciting to me, like the smell of a parade, andwhere the librarians were mostly women who talked in soft
tones, and had thoughtful-looking glasses, and whose hands,
when they brushed mine as I checked out my books felt soft, thekind of hands that used cold creme, or hand creme, which were
magical words to me, never having used it, nor had my mother.
Both of us had hands that were red, rough, and wrinkly-looking,the hands of peasants working the fields in Sicily instead of
packing meat at the A & P which is what my mother did, or reading books or playing the accordion, which is what I did. I was
twelve when my mother hocked the accordion with its sparkly
gold buttons and the one, the c-button, with its smooth, pearly,
sexual indentation was what I missed most about it being gone.
I remember that it was early spring, and as I walked the ten blocks
home from school I could hear birds singing and I smelled theearth, awakening like I was. There was a boy named Rico withblazing eyes, and another, Mario Octavio who I had met at the
Italian Social Club the Friday before. The following Sunday mymother made me take the accordion to my cousin Sammy's
birthday party so I could play happy birthday while all the other34

cousins sang. "Happy Birthday" and "Drink to Me Only With
Thine Eyes" were the only two songs I ever really learned to play.
So as I walked home thinking about Rico, Mario, and that little
indented button on my accordion, I guess I made the decision to
put all my sexual feeling into making music, and walked into thehouse, my pants damp with arousal beneath the blue plaid skirtof St. Victory's School uniform. I could feel the wetness as I went
to the closet to get the accordion.
Mama looked at me funny the second I got in the house - I
must have seemed so directed in my actions, walking in andheading straight for the closet. Usually I got something to eat, anorange or a peach, and talked to Marna till it was time for
American Bandstand. We always watched it together, and when
it was over, Marna would get up and start fixing supper. But thisday I strode in full of purpose, and probably a little too passionate about the accordion, and Marna's face took on a fearful kindof look, sort of like a bird or a small animal being threatened.
"Where's my accordion, Marna?" The closet where I kept it
had a big clean spot in the shape of the accordion case on the floor.
"You haven't touched it in weeks," Marna said, avoiding myeyes.
"I know, but I'll be better from now on. Where is it?" I looked
up at Mama; she fidgeted with her pale blue house dress, ran her
short rough fingers through her black hair. She looked at me, hereyes nervous, and kind of sad too.
"It's gone, Maria.""What do you mean, 'gone,' gone where? Did you loan it to
Cousin Mickey?""I hocked it."
"What does that mean, Marna?""It means I took it to a little store downtown to get somemoney to pay for your glasses.""My accordion? Can we get it back?""Probably not. Don't tell your father."Like I would. I had learned long ago there were certain things
you didn't tell Pop; most things, in fact because he had one of two
reactions: scorn or rage. The night before I had heard them having
one of their whispered fights in the kitchen in the middle of thenight. I had heard the word glasses so I knew it was about me: the35week before I had an argument with Pop; he ended it with abackhand across my face, breaking my glasses. For the last few
days I wore them taped across the bridge, but yesterday, Sister
John Frances, the school nurse, called Mama about them. I hated
her because once in fourth grade she asked everybody what they
had for breakfast. I told her it depended on what we had forsupper the night before, a dish of macaroni, or maybe cabbage
and noodles; sometimes we had apple pie if we were lucky, anda lot of time we had minute rice with butter and milk. The last two
were my favorites, and Sister John had come right to our houseand talked to Mama about our "eating habits." I remember
Mama's face as she listened to Sister John; it looked sad andashamed, the way it did today, when I asked her about theaccordion.
In school today, Sister Frances asked me how my new glasses
were. "Fine," I had answered, proud that she saw them, new anduntaped. Now, thinking about Sister, I wanted to punch her
stomach, the soft part hidden under the brown habit.
I cried a little, thinking about the round little button, and thesparkly gold keys, and especially for Mama having to hock one
thing for another, and they both had to do with me. I could picture
Mama, by herself, lugging the huge, heavy accordion on the bus,
walking into the store to get money for .it, and coming back home,lighter but sadder somehow. I went outside in the small backyard
where a few years earlier I tried to convince myself I had areligious call by seeing if I could fly off the sloped, tar-papered
walls of the shed. I looked at it now and laughed: it was only threefeet off the ground . I was glad that even as a little kid I hadn't
wanted to risk even such a short distance for any convent, anysacrifice that had to do with nuns like Sister John Frances.
Now I went off further back in the yard, where the tomatos
were staked, and sat for a second there, smelling them, before I
got down on my hands and knees, still in my uniform,looking forsomething, some small, familiar indentation in the ground. I
made one, a small pocket of earth near the tomatoes and basilico
and scraped till I had it just the way I wanted it. I ran my middle
finger over and over the small spot, chanting a kind of litany,promising I'd get the accordion back for Mama, and for me, andI swore I would someday get even with Sister John Frances. After36

about fifteen minutes, I stood up and felt holy, like a little breezeof cleanliness had come up out of the little circle of earth I had
made, where my outrage was buried now, and where I could getback to it whenever I wanted to. I picked a handful ofbasilico andput it in my pocket, and on my way back inside I held my hands
cupped under my nose, smelling the garden, the fresh Italianherb, the life I wanted.
I went back inside. It was Thursday, and we were having
fusilli for supper. Mama's sauce smelled good, familiar, like hersmile after someone hurt my feelings by accident. From myuniform pocket I took the handful of basilico I'd picked in thegarden for Mama to add to the sauce. I pushed my new glasses up
on my sweat shiny nose, and took two meatballs from the big pot,
put them in one dish, got two forks from the silverware drawer,
and then me and Mama went and watched them dance on
American Bandstand, far away from accordions or hock shops,
and where people like Sister John Frances could never go. But it
was where me and Mama went every day after I came home fromschool, knowing the dancing and the music belonged to us andnobody could shame either of us as we sat eating meatballs, side
by side on the old mohair couch, giving up nothing but objects
like accordions or glasses, and holding always the scent of eachother, like the little garden, between us, cupped in our hands andsacred.

37

Rachel Guido deVries

Litany on the Equinox
The Earth is my mothershe maketh me in her image
I shall always want
her voice wind thru trees
in fall rush of waves
at midnight or dawn
the earth dark as the lover
I dream of on the eveof the equinox big breasted
woman, mountains rosy tipped
as sunrise above the hills
and streams of my body
The earth is my mothershe maketh me in her image
I shall always want
her storms raging
her volcanos' roilingthe eyes of her hurricanes
her tornadoes' warnings
her center deeper
than any canyon
or black hole shows
The earth is my mother
She maketh me in her image
I shall always want
her stars, her moons, her suns,
her galaxies, her universe
I shall be a star floating
thru heaven ready to burst
new light
The earth is my mother
Previously published in la bella figura, issue 3, fall 1988

38

She maketh me in her image
I shall always want
her gorges for my own
her waterfalls, her whirlpools,
her underground caves, her sea caves
where the light is blueand she waits in a shapeof anemone or gnome
where she speaks
in many tongues
I want as my own
The earth is my motherI am made in her image
bones like trees, flesh
like clay, blood like rivers,
sex like the oceaneyes that burn in the centerof wanting to be
The earthis my motherI am made in her image
and I
shall
alwayswant

39

La Madre Mi Ha Benedetta Colla Pelle Olivastra
Karen Marie Porter
40

Rosanna Sorella

Turning Away from Secrets & Shame
Then
Hands held firmly in each others', two young women walkleisurely up the street. Heading toward us, they exchange smiles
and confidences which seem to mirror the warmth and clarity ofthe bright spring day.
"Che vergagna," my mother says to me. 'What shame."'''E vera," I respond quietly. "It's true."
We have these conversations, often, my mother and I. She thinks
she has an eye for spotting "those lesbians" and is always quick to
proclaim their shame. But her eyes are " non trappa bene," not very
good, because she can't see that her only daughter is one of those
women too.
Explanation
Before learning to speak English, my mother spoke Italian.
Consequently, she remains a bit uncomfortable negotiating between the two languages. When it comes to expressing horror,
however, she reverts back to her native tongue. I follow suit
because I need my mother's language to hide my otherness. You
see, I've never been able to admit it to myself, in Italian or English.
Background
In my mind, it began seven years ago. In my heart, though, adate is hard to pin down. We were best friends. We nurtured eachother, held each other, and listened to each other. I heard about
her past relationships with men; she listened compassionately tostories of my difficult family life.
One night she turned to me and said that she didn't want to befriends anymore. I was confused until she announced that she
wanted to be lovers, that we could not get any closer or love any
deeper without changing our relationship. I was no longer confused but, to my current shame, I was horrified. I had spent
several successful years running away from my sexuality; suddenly I had to face it.
From my earliest childhood, I was lectured to about sex. Sex
was good, but only under one condition. My mother had learned
41through her religion and immigrant parents that sex had only one
valid arena: the marriage bed. When your ethnic heritage is
Italian you may also inherit Catholicism; for me, the two intertwined and told me to forget about sex until the proper time.
"Avoid occasions or near occasions of sin," my mother would
say. Since I was a faithful child, I grew up dutifully avoiding
dating, masturbating, experimenting. If I behaved long enough,God would reward me with a man. This man would love me,marry me, and stay with me forever. Sounds pathetic, you're
probably thinking, but I believed what I was told and didn't
question.
By the time the issue became real for me, I was in love withand loving a woman. My horror turned to clever rationalization
as I decided, well, here is the person I love, I can't possibly marryher, so I couldn't possibly wait to have a sexual relationship with
her after marriage, so therefore it's okay.
Commitment
We became lovers.
Understatement
It has not been easy.
Reality
My lover and I have made some mistakes. We both internalized romantic heterosexual norms, namely: (1) love conquers all;and (2) you're not a complete, good person unless a man loves
you and commits that love to you forever. In order to side-stepsuch norms, we tried to love in a vacuum. Fearing we would
receive condemnation instead of validation from family andfriends, we told neither. But I think we may have pretended asmuch for their benefit as for ours. We, too, were homophobic.
I pretended that being in this relationship was a kind of
temporary state. If I had to categorize myself, then I must be
bisexual. After all, I liked men. However, I continued to dishonor
the fact that I had never been sexually involved with a man andthat my chief desire to be with one resulted from a need for social
approval.
My lover and I weren' t getting such approval from friends orfamily, so I sought sole legitimization of self through her. But she
was suffering too under the weight of pretense, pressure, and thethreat of non-acceptance. Instead of facing our own fears about42

living a lesbian life, we cultivated denial. It seemed so natural to
be lovers; it seemed so necessary to deny it.
Home
Back home, family members were getting married with theusual frequency and fan-fare. I would go to wedding after wedding, either unescorted or with a fake date, and hear the relatives
question, "You're such a nice girl; why don't you find a nice
Italian boy and settle down?" My mother would rescue me bysaying that I was too involved with my career right now. At thesame time, she would shove me on the dance floor to catch thecoveted bouquet. I would oblige and jump for it if it came myway; it seemed just another one of those things that single Italianwomen learned to do. We learned to cook, to shop, to take pride in
our appearance, to be emotional, to yell, to cry, and most of all tolove - ultimately - to love a man and cater to his needs while wesacrifice our own. I always thought this list only had to do with
my Italian heritage; I'm discovering that first it has everything to
do with patriarchal oppression.
Telling
After five years, my lover and I began to resent each other.
Neither one of us was happy in the relationship. I decided that if
we told other people about our secret, we wouldn't be so hard oneach other, nor so claustrophobically dependent.
I decided to tell my best friend from college. It was a summernight in 1988, and we had gone to the beach. I made her guess
about my lover because I was too afraid to say the truth outloud,especially in public. She said she wasn't surprised and knowing
about it only made her understand and love me more.
I was angry. I had expected rejection. If it was this easy to tellsomeone, why did we keep it a secret for so long? Well, it must not
be so easy; in the interim two years, I've only told three more
people. My lover recently told two.

Now
My lover doesn't want to be with me anymore. She has slept
with someone else, a man, and no longer feels the same about me.
After almost seven years, she has gone off to start another relationship, and I am left alone. I'm writing to you now because I
don't know what to do. I am mad at my lover. She told me she had
43to leave because she would only continue to sabotage the relationship. She was afraid to let it make her happy; she was afraid
she would want to stay with me forever, and staying would mean
having to tell everyone.
I'm also mad at myself. I feel inadequate. I hear voices; heterosexism and homophobia shout I should never have loved andbeen in love with a woman. Patriarchy professes I will never bevalued as much as a man, and no woman will ever want to staywith me.
And now, now that I feel my whole world crumbling, mylover gone, I want to turn my back to family, to a stable cultural
identity for support. I've discovered that in response to ourdominant, denying culture, the culture that doesn't want women
to love or live in peace, I have denied my own peace, my own love.
I gave up my Catholicism, shed my Italian sense of self, distanced
myself from my family because I couldn't deal with my own"vergogna" - shame about my lesbianism.
Now, with my lover gone, I have no support, except perhaps
from you, if you're still reading this. I just need to figure out how
to accept myself and not to pretend anymore. As Dove Gambill
and Rachel Guido de Vries say, I need to "rediscover the heart" of
who I amI. For the lesbian heart is not static; like the mind, it
develops over time, through experience. Rediscovery, for me,necessitates a dedication to appreciating myself and my beginnings. I need to forge a language and a life that allows for change
and growth and self-acceptance. I need to find a safe place to saythat I am an Italian-American lesbian; that I have loved a woman
and she me with all our hearts; that I want to love again, only thistime more honestly.
It will be a long road to travel but maybe you can help. Accept
the pain of my lesbianism as I come out to you; read my words insisterhood and not in condemnation. For now when I feel mostlonely, I need you to care that I do not remain alone. I need to say- no more will I feel ashamed, in any language
1. Gambill, Sue Dove & Rachel Guido deVries. "Rediscovering the Heart." Sin-

ister Wisdom 24 (1983): 41-55.
2. Portions of this work were first written for a seminar on Feminist theory
taught by Adrienne Rich at Stanford University. I am grateful to her for validating autobiographical writing in an academic setting.

44

Stacie Samson

Mixed Blood
My blood is not that pure.
I am the child of two peoples whotalked with their hands
who spoke loud in public, who madescenes, who asked that we Eat Eat again
and again till we were fit to bursting
My blood is not pure. It
has been poisoned by betrayals:
My grandmother (my father's mother) fleeing
her Russian Jewish parents
for the arms of an Italian man;that Italian, my grandfather, betraying
her, fathering a child with another woman.
My Russian mother
who an uncle crudely called"Italian by injection"cooking bowl after bowl of pasta
until we - my father and three children,
should have become completely Italian
by ingestion.
My blood is not that pure: I am a mongrel,an Italian and a Russian,
who bays at the moon,
who laments the deathsof my people from Nazi ovens andRussian guns, who knows little of whatdrove my father's father's people here:
the Italians, the ones who arrived sooner,
the ones who laughed louder,the ones who drank freer and cursed andkissed with more passion.

45

the child of two peoples
who would hate the lesbian I am,
and call me a betrayer of my people
because I won't reproduce the Jews or the Italians,
because my blood flows freely
into the mouths of women
A woman of mixed blood
who suffers the silenceof my gay people, who saddens at how we're
cast aside from all countries;
who weeps at how I have cast aside
all my nations,
to be the lesbian, the amazon, the stranger
A woman - a Jew - a Russian - an Italian
who talks loud when I'm with family,
and softer with these lesbians who
seem distant from the ways of my people
a woman who makes scenes
in the silence of darkness
who kisses sooner
and with more sorrow
whose face shines with the black eyesof the South of Italy, framedby the dark circles of the Russian ghetto
who screams
who loves the forest
who bays at the moon46

Janet Capone

Italy(An excerpt from a novel in progress)
Angela Cannellini sped down Telegraph Avenue at 90 miles
per hour, Mario Lanza's baritone trailing from her car window.
He was screaming Torna Surriento. It was spring time in Sorrentoand his lover was leaving him. She turned toward Berkeley, herhome, the solid tones of his voice clearing her way, making
everything in their path Italian. The transition was definitely inprogress. Italian things jumped out at her from every corner.
Today she counted 55 pizzerias, 43 delis, and more than 60
ristorantes. Up from the day before by 25%. Either she was on her
way to Italy, or Italy was on its way to her. The green white andred jumped at her from every magazine cover, storefront, orbumper sticker. At first she resisted believing it. But, how could
anyone refuse that much indisputable evidence?
Her entire world was changing. What happened? Before, she
had been bogged down in her job and in her life. She was too selfabsorbed to have any lovers. One by one they all left, exasperated.
She felt stuck in a pothole on the road to nowhere, her soul's
engine sputtering on bad gas. She was a snivelling, snifflingshadow of a girl, a shrunken soul, penniless, pathetic fraction,
ethnically unspecified freak fragmented and in so much pain.
She, like Langston Hughes, wondered what happens to a dreamdeferred. It keels over like a dead bird, or waits to be squashedlike a turd. "Italy!" she would cry, turning in her insomniac
stupors night after night in her bed, but to no avail. She craved
that dark, rocky soil her ancestors tread, the sweet, red tomatoes
their children were fed. She tasted it in her mouth, felt it in her
blood, held it, captured in her head . But she was stuck, half-dead,a drooling dog chained to a miserable existence, floundering andalone in un-Italian Berkeley, a flopping fish hung from aNew Age
New Wave hook. She was stuck.
Angela Cannellini had no money to speak of, no paid vacation .from life. Third generation melting pot survivor, granddaughter of illiterate peasants, she was a pawn in the big game ofAmerican capitalism, chopped like zucchini in the gnashingmachine, crammed in like a sardine with the other grandkids of47

immigrants, Italy bleeding out of them with every passing year.
She was sheer pulp, skinless and boiled alive in the melting pot till
she almost forgot who she was. A week before payday at theATM, the screen flashed "insufficient funds" and dissolved backto blank stinginess, a faceless, mechanized proxy, the perfect
American-made civil servant: functional, but without identity.
"Disgusting thing!" she spat, pounding the plastic casing. "I'llsmash your face to smithereens!" That face was the only thingthat stood between her and Italy, that miserly machine with theblank face, hoarding money. If it wasn't for that face, she'd be on
her way to Italy, sipping wine in a first class window seat. Standing there sweating, one day it occurred to her. What they werereally after were her atoms, her bodily molecules, her Italian chromosomes. She borrowed them a long time ago. Now, she was indefault. Italy was summoning her genes. America was freezing
her assets. She was neither Italian enough, nor American enough.
Besides that, or because of that, she was broke. Angela Cannellini
was in a crack. It was her atoms bouncing, along with her checks,
and it was only a matter of time before they nabbed her.
At her job, she endured. She dressed white-skinned mannicans for success in Macys, grinding her teeth. Red, white, or navy
brassieres, silk shirts and jackets. Every day she folded underwear on countertops. Around her, the shoppers seethed in nervous herds. She barely made eye contact. Consumers annoyed her,
their penny-pinching attitudes, their middle class appetite forfrivolous junk festered in her guts. She squirmed with jealousy
and rage week after week as she rung up thousands of their dollars. Their hoity toity hotsy totsy poopsie woopsie taste made her
puke. She spoke to no one. She only had conversations withherself, in her mind. There she came to her best conclusions. For
example, it was a lie, what they taught her in school. All lies! Sheremembered a visit to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor atage 10. She saw the ferry, a boat different from the ones her grandparents came on. She saw herself, and two lines of 4th grade
children holding hands behind their teacher, climbing the steps
inside the Gateway to Liberty and Hope. "Give me your poor,
tired, huddled masses yearning to be free ... " said the inscription.
"I'll bash their illiterate brains in," Angela, now 32, revised thepoem. "Give me your huddled masses, vulnerable in their poverty, cut off from family, forgotten and left for dead by the48

government of their mother country. I'll re-constitute their lives
like Minute Made Orange Juice. In two generations time, theiroffspring will be cultural voids, unable to integrate their thoughts,
feelings and behavior, amnesiacs straddling two worlds. Food?"
said the statue, shrugging. (Angela suspected she was really aman in drag, not female at all.) "Let them eat Big Macs, of course."
Angela snarled. "Damn those bastards, lying to children!"
Eaten with envy, week after week, ringing up other people's
thousands, Angela had only herself to talk with, in her mind. It
was there that she came to her best and her worst conclusions. She
worried at times about her health. "When will I be so at peace withlife and with people, I'll accept everything that's said and donewith calmness?" When you're dead! a voice inside her snickered.
When you step on a plane for Italy! said another, more optimistic
one. To be true, Mother Italy was her one and only interest in life,
her obsessive desire, her alcoholic's bottle. She idolized it beyond
all reasonable proportion, fantasized her homecoming, a long
lost hero, survivor of the melting pot, welcomed by short, dark
women shaped like meatballs with beefy arms and dark mustaches. Oh the feasts of pasta, bread, and wine!
Ringing up purchases for the multitudes day in, day out, inthe throes of one of her Italian fantasies, Angela stood stonefaced
at the cash register one day as a middle aged man in an Oakland
A's cap put his purchases down to pay. He reached into his pocket
and pulled out a bulging wallet. Vaguely, she sifted through his
items and rung them up: one lace, see-through women's nightie
and three pairs of bikini underwear. A voice inside her scowled"Sexist frivolities!" He leered at her, peeled off three easy 50's andpaid. When he walked away, Angela eyed the wad of cash hestuffed back in his pocket. She was thinking again about Italy.
At night she went to psychic classes. Slowly she was recovering her psychic and spiritual abilities. In particular, she wasstrengthening her skills at transmutation, the art of changing one
form into another. She knew she came from a long line of Southern Italian peasant witches and had only to recover her lost skills.
Weekends she visited her acupuncturist herbologist rolfer.
Ten months of treatments, and she was still sick and tired. She
had given up on Western medicine, but she didn't quite trust
other approaches, yet another crack she felt stuck in. At first theysaid her problems were PMS. Her blood cycle shook her inside49

out, hit her with bouts of pointless laughter or sudden tears. Thenthey thought it was CPS, chronic fatigue syndrome. Life was a job
she was chronically exhausted with. They considered IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Her bowels were not among her moreuser friendly organs. Recently, they settled on PSS, profoundsensitivity syndrome. It seemed like, ever since she was little,
she'd had no peace of mind. Every little thing anybody ever saidannoyed her beyond belief. They said this was a symptom ofadvanced PSS. "I can't find a thing wrong with you!" doctors
would always say (which annoyed her). "You're fit as a fiddle."
PMS, CFS, IBS, PSS, Angela knew there was something wrong,something deeply wrong.
Recently, she was prescribed some herbal pills to strengthen
her immune system. She took 12 a day. They seemed to be working. She had to develop a strong barrier to the assaults happening
to her on every level, the terrorist attacks, the velvet-gloved
threats, the invitations seducing her to sell out her culture andbecome another Big Mac-eating American, functional, but without identity, without culture or history, soul-murdered clone
punching a time clock, depositing money into the Bank of America. Well she wasn't banking on America. Third generation melting pot survivor, granddaughter of illiterate peasants, she wasbut a pee-on in the big game of American capitalism, chopped
like zucchini in the gnashing machine, crammed in like a sardine
with the other grandkids of immigrants, Italy bleeding out, Italysqueezing out of them with every passing year. She was a bloody
pulp, skinless and boiled alive in the melting pot till she almost
forgot - but hell no, she didn't! Not all the way. She wasn't
banking on America. She gulped 12 pills a day to strengthen her
immune system, Chinese pills to make her more Italian.
At night, after a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, she closed
her bedroom door. She lit candles and burned incense. She opened
her curtains and let the full light of the moon shine into her room.
There she invoked the goddess Diana. "Beautiful Diana! Give me
one glorious wish!" she crooned, "that I may someday walkthrough the South of Italy, home of my dear departed N eopolitan
foremothers!" At midnight her roommates could still hear her
rhythmic chants.
She studied the map of Italy laid across her altar, and the 3whole basil leaves arranged side by side, representing 3,000 dol-50

lars, representing green. She studied the huge bulbs of garlic
piled high, the skin on the cloves representing white, representing what grows in bulbous abundance. She studied the bowl ofwine, representing red, representing her grape-stomping Neopolitan ancestors. Green white and red . She studied the dead,laidout in tattered photographs. She studied her silver, glinting knife,
representing freedom, representing her slicing through the websof her assimilated condition. She studied the map of Italy, theboot. Italy the boot. She wore her boots when she chanted, blacksuede zippered things she got in a second hand store. She wore
her boots when she chanted, stomping her feet, stomping thegrapes, intoning in her clearest voice:
Blessed be the candle, blessed be the flame
Blessed be all women, who call on Italy's name
Stomping in the darkness she intoned:
Diana! Italia!
Diana! Italia!
Diana! Italia!
Then the next day came and she was back at Macys folding
underwear. Every day that passed her chromosomes howled
louder and she prayed for patience.
One day, when her genes screamed particularly loudly, theman who bought the underwear came back. It seemed like, thelouder her genes raged, the more often he shopped at Macys. Hisname was Harry. She saw it on his credit card. He put his purchases down on the counter, the see-through lace nighties andbikini underwear. He wore the same Oakland A's cap. He pulled
out the same wad of cash and paid. Always there were 50' s on top.
Were those his smallest bills? She rung up his items and bagged
them, eyeing the wad of dough he stuffed back into his pocket.
Who is this guy? she wondered. Where does he get his moulah?
She remembered a National Enquirer article on Jim Bakker, thePTL t.v. evangelist. He had a vast wardrobe of clothes, owningover 250 suits. When asked where he got all his wealth, he replied.
"Stupid people keep sending me money." What was Harry's
story? All that cash. There were possibly thousands of dollars in
his chunk of bills, just begging to be spent on something moresignificant than underwear. Or so Angela reasoned, everythingof course being measured against her one and only yardstick,passage back to Italy, her ancestral land, where she would be51

welcomed by feasts of pasta, bread, and wine, feasts prepared byshort, round women dressed in black. Short, round women withthick arms and dark mustaches who would feed her, nourish thatdying spark of Naples back to a roaring flame. "Che cosa e, cara
mia?" they would say, holding her limp in their arms, a female
Pieta. They would look at her with their dark brown eyes, knowing exactly what she needed. "Sta ammalata? Poverina! Non
mangia abbastanza!" So she would eat, Italy filling her up, filling
her out. Italy slow ly seeping back into her vacuoles, those cellularcavities squeezed and flattened for so many years, popped like
toothpaste tubes under a steam roller, squeezed and flattenedand stamped with a pattern particularly American. Choo choo.
Look out for the American Express! Chugga chugga chugga. In
her dreams, she would hear the machine. In her dreams, shewould be mowed down by the machine, a dark gray train of
multiple steel cars flattening her body. Then, she would be chasedby fascists of the American variety. They would stampede, chasing her from all corners. Ollie North fascists marching in lines on
her head. Fascist terrorists coming at her."You're dead, you little
fuck! Grab her! Squeeze the oil outta her, goddarnn little green
olive! You're dead!"So she would eat, stuffing herself, especially after payday. At
home, she would eat green olives and black olives and pepperocini and pickled eggplant. She would eat for her life: artichoke hearts marinated in olive oil. She would fold pink slices ofprosciutto over pale green melon, open her mouth, and swallow.
She would nibble garlic bread, waiting for her pasta to boil. For
years she had stockpiled pasta in her kitchen, jars and jars of it.
She had separate jars for every type: fusilli, the curly spaghetti,
riga toni, the large, ribbed cylinders, farfallette, the small ribbon
bows, ziti, the plain tubular pasta, spaghetti, the stick straightnoodles. There was ditalini, lasagne, mostaccioli, and conchiglie,
the shells. She stockpiled pasta in her kitchen; Italy, captured in ajar. In this way, she fed herself well, keeping the fascists at bay,
reviving her Italianness day by day.
Much to the dread and fury of the fascists, she had long sincehealed herself of some of the more vulgar American rituals. Gone
were the days when she would lust after chicken MacNuggets, a
Big Mac, and fries. Gone were the days when she would sit infront of the t.v., spreading an altar of ethnically unidentifiable,52nutritionally bankrupt food before her in styrofoam vessels, performing nightly rituals to the God of Assimilation. Gone were thedays when she would rot her teeth with Pepsi, blacken her lungs
with Camels, perk up her overperked system with percolated
coffee and sugar. Gone were the days when she prowled shopping malls, spending money like water, consuming everything
advertised on t.v. Because these days of flagrant Americana weregone, the fascists came in droves in her dreams. They threatened
her, clutched at her. "Italy? You want Italy, you little shit macaroni!" they shrieked, throwing cans of Spaghetti 0' s and Chef
Boy-ardee at her head. "Here's your Italy!" they snorted, chasing
her down. She ran for her life as bottles of Ragu splattered in thin
red blotches at her feet.
She'd wake in a state of dread, get up and click on her cassette
player to clear her head . "Mandolini Napoletani" worked thebest for her nightmares. The high-pitched, melodic vibrations of
the strumming mandolins dispelled her terrors and calmed her.
Sometimes nothing but Giulietta Sacco would work, her mournful seranate taking Angela back to 5 years of age, when she would
sit in her grandmother's kitchen on Sunday morning, feet dangling from the chair, her legs too short to reach the floor. She would
sing in Neopolitan to the music her grandmother always played,sing and inhale the tomato sauce bubbling on the stove. The
windows steamed up with her grandmother's busy movements.
Morning became afternoon, and her family would sit down to amuch-anticipated midday meal of pasta, meatballs, braciole andsweet sausage with delicious fennel seeds inside.
It was this memory, one morning after terrifying nightmares
rivetting her to her bed, the memory of herself at age 5 singing in
Neopolitan, a language and dialect she no longer knew how to
speak, let alone sing, that finally pushed her over the edge. After
waking from a particularly gruesome dream, it was this childhood memory, combined with the image of herself today sittingin her language class at age 32, her tongue struggling over "chiche ci," that finally crystallized her resolve. It made her willing topick up the knife. By any means necessary, she swore, thinking of
Malcolm X's uncompromising demand for Afro-American free- ·dom. She was going to Italy, by any means necessary.
America was ruthless, so she would be ruthless. She would
ruthlessly reclaim her rightful Italian heritage.

53

Mary Russo Demetrick

The Legacy
They say the first time the grandmother saw the baby, she spat,on the ground, making loud noises to keep away spirits. The
mother had never seen this custom. She was offended - her baby
daughter spat at; she had waited so long for a child, praying to thepatron saints, making novenas.
The grandmother said the custom was part of a tradition of
the mountains in the old country. A brutal country where life anddeath are edges of the same cliff. There air cuts like flight feathersof circling hawks. Curses as brutal as the wind, direct and brisk,
affect generations.
The mother thought the grandmother's knowledge of folk
tales was eerie. The grandmother's trade was birthing. Born in themountains of this new country, she learned secrets from the oldones, who learned the magic from the foremothers in the oldworld. At each birth she held the baby and whispered into its ear,
"Life is sweet, life is dear, hang on to it like gold./I She said thisunder her breath, so it was often thought to be in a magical andmysterious language.
The mother knew some old world ways, but she never saw
this ritual. She worried about malocchio and learned a prayer toward off spirits. Saying this prayer while sprinkling olive oildrops in water released spirits from a child who cried all night.
Or, if someone praised the child's dark, curly hair, the motherimmediately used the prayer and oil and water. No chance toallow the spirits to affect her baby with loose praise. Spirits arecunning and know how easy it is for mortals to be swayed andseduced, and once an opening exists, they move in causing illness
and unexplained problems.
The grandmother died young with these words on her lips,"Do not forget the old ways./I Her daughter died young, and herdaughter after her. The ways had not been taught to any of them.
The mother remembered the stories and retold them to her children. They are reborn through witches and midwives of the pastand in bloodlines. They visit me in the dark as I sleep.
Previously printed in fa bella figura #3

54

Jean RietschelRose

We sat in the anteroom of the funeral home feeling the silence.

We sat on small hard chairs, speaking small words. The body, encased in soft satin sheets and heavy wood, lay in the next room,a pink dress draping its lifeless limbs, a rosary placed in its frozen
hands. We sat, gathered to mourn the body in ritual now, although my grandmother had truly left us the year before.

Rose, you with the sharp tongue and the heavy accentRose, ruler of your kitchen throne, always making sauce,
frying peppers
Rose, saying "mangia, mangia, have some more" as we sat
before you with laden plates.
Two years before, when Gabriel, her husband died, she had
started to fade. I remember the week of mourning for my grandfather. As we got ready to go to the wake, she asked, "Where's
Pop?" "He's dead." She would start crying, tears running down
her face, through her clenched fists, onto her dress. We dried herface, recombed her hair and took her to the service. Later, thesame night after we had come back from the funeral parlor.
"Where's Pop?" "He's dead." Her tears again would spill out. We
watched, not knowing what to do. The next day, she said,"Where's Pop? I fried him sausage and green peppers for lunch.""He's dead." Each time one of us told her was the first time. She
could not grasp the finality of his death, or perhaps, she could notface her loss. Eventually, we started lying to her, unable to bear
the bad news one more time. 'Where's Pop?" "He's at work
now."

Don't leave, Rose, you can go on without him. I know
you've lain together since you were seventeen
Don't leave, Rose, you fought with him every single day
Don't leave, Rose, you don't even believe in love.
Marriage was your duty. Now your duty ends.
The family tried to cope. My aunt, who lived with her,listened to her ravings with great patience. My mother ferried her55

to doctors and took care of all her business in the world. Other
relatives came to visit, holding her hand and bringing food.
One day she chased my aunt around the house wielding abutcher knife and shouting curses in English. She scared my aunt
badly and shocked us all. The curses startling from her lips, where
had she learned those words?
Grandma Rossetti, you were the card shark cleaning up
e:very time we played pinnocle
Grandma Rossetti, you managed to live with a foot in
two worlds, lapsing into Italian for the gossip
we shouln't hear
Grandma Rossetti, you were the strong one running us all,your mood clock on the kitchen wall set to warn us
when you were angry.
The painful decision was made to put her in a nursing home.
There she went steadily downhill; shedding pounds until she
was as thin as she had been as a girl, fifty years ago in her wedding
dress. She got to the point where she did not recognize anyone,
not even my aunt or mother. She didn't recognize her grandchildren but she had always mixed us up. I can remember so manytimes standing before her waiting, as she fumbled through thelitany of our names until she found the right one. "Carol, Barbara,
Pam, oh Jeanie, bring the bread to the table."In the nursing home, they x-rayed her brain, finding anominous cloud covering half of it. Nothing could be done. She
spent her days lying on a hospital bed, waiting. She seemed deadto me then, but one couldn't mourn while the body yet breathed.
Don't die, old woman, you who loved to brag of theaccomplishments of your grandchildren to others andto badger us in private about our failures to marryand produce great-grandchildren
Don't die, old woman, you stubborn mule who vented yourfrustrations on us
Don't die, old woman, I know you were taught to serve men
but you were ne:ver meant for it.
Now we sat a year later on the hard chairs of the funeralparlor, mourning the death of her body. The antiquated Catholic
ceremonies were observed. We listened to the great aunts say,56

"Doesn't she look good," as if it mattered.
One had to approach the body and kneel before it to say a
prayer. The ones from the old country did pray, believing stillwith a touching faith. We grandchildren, mostly disbelievers,
were awkward, not knowing how much to go along with, howmuch to be ourselves. We sat in the anteroom feeling the silence
move in and spoke little words.
We sat in the silence, remembering her, a difficult woman tolove, a hard woman to accept. We sat in the silence not knowing
how to mourn her, or whether to forgive her. Even the little words
died.
Don't die, old woman, you are uniqueDon't die, Rose, we need to fight with you
Don't die, grandma, we will miss you,
You showed us strength within the limits of the possible.

A Tribute to Grandma Antoinetta, Padua, Italy 1978
Francesca Forte

57

Laurie Mattioli

LegacyFor as long as I can remember, something deep inside of me has
been slowly dying. Flashes of insight, age and countless funerals
have revealed that moribund "something" to be my culture.
Perhaps it is the same for any third generation ethnic group in thiscountry, struggling with or against assimilation as we must do. In
America I am "white" and I know all the privilege that label
carries with it. My blood though is Mediterranean, the blood ofpoor, proud Italian immigrants and whether it's obvious or not,I am Italian. The youngest grandchild of Anthony Mattioli, I am
the last to hold the Mattioli surname and with me the passing of
this name ceases.
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the weight of my own
name. I question how I can continue to breath life into it when myown breath grows more labored with each dying relative. Exhausted by the act of resuscitation, I sit silently at my desk,
holding this pen and counting the dead.
When I was young my culture was more visible to me andmore clearly defined. I lived it then as children do, without thekind of awareness that now haunts me. I learned as much fromthe kids on the street who were not Italian as I did from my family.
Somehow being Italian made me different. Daily, my friend Joey
told me that I was a greasy dago. Shaking one lone finger at me,
my ma would rumble, "Don't bring that filth in my house," eachtime I asked her what such phrases meant. Joey also said we wereWops and spaghetti benders. In Junior High School I encountered Ron Fisher, a squinty eyed beak nosed little kid whose only
words to me each time we met in the hallway were "Hey Mattioli,
how'd your day go, dago?" Most often my ma would just makethe sign of the cross and whisper, "Gesu Cristo Mio," when she
couldn't listen to any more street slang. She'd heard it all manytimes over and never wanted to talk about any of it, not the street
talk, not the Mafia, the black hand, La Cos a Nostra. Not any of it.
Everything was kept hidden, unspoken. All burdens carried insilence. The oath of omerta, the oath of silence was always in58

effect at our house, especially when anyone who was not Italiancame around. My rna stood most fiercely on this oath whenever
the subject of pa's work was raised. That was truly none of mybusiness and to this day I know very little about his 38 years as apolice officer in the same town.
Though the details of his work remain a mystery, I vividly
recall him in uniform. Majestic in navy blue shirt, light blue
trousers, decorated with leather and gold, he always appeared
larger than life to me. The clash of Old Spice after shave and Dutch
Master's cigar smoke is forever imprinted on my olfactory
memory. And underneath all the regalia, the handcuffs, badges
bars to denote rank, patches, pens, flashlight, nightstick, bullets,
pistol and holster, a heart as wide as the sky. My sister's children
called him Captain grandpa.
My pa was the sort of man who never missed a day of workin his life, happy and healthy most of the time. He grew tomatoes
and pepperoncini in the garden, made salad with the dandelions
in the backyard and worked off his anger by going down into thebasement and pounding nails into a 2x4. I quickly learned not toask, "what's pa building downstairs?" but rather "what's pa so
mad about?" Frequently he was mad about the promotions given
to others less qualified than he simply because names like Halland Peters fit more neatly on a name badge than names like
Gagliardi, Montemurro or Potenziani.
The same hands that pounded nails in anger could be as softas pillows when cupped to hold my face in them. My memory ofthese hands is always of their strength and gentleness, for withthe exception of one half-hearted whack on the ass, with me flying
past him at full speed, he never used them against me.
My knowlege of our family history is sketchy at best. The only
grandparent I actually knew was my father's father, Tony, and hedied when I was a child. The others all died young from somedreadful thing or another. Tony however, lived well into hiseighties, probably because he was too stubborn to get sick anddie. He rode a balloon tire, "girl's" bike with a basket andhandbell everywhere he needed to go. I remember the ringing ofthat bell as he approached our house, signaling us to prepare toreceive the family patriarch. I prepared by hiding, for his broken
English intimidated me and he seemed so very old. I regret that59

I never really knew him.
Tony left northern Italy at the age of 18 to settle in Chicago.
There he married and had his only son, my father, Dominic.
Rumor has it that he fled Chicago in the early 1920's to avoid
paying "protection" money to the local Mafioso. Addendums tothat rumor also say his refusal to pay was not for reasons of honorand justice, but because he was cheap. I make the sign of the crossmyself as I write this just in case I am eventually reunited with any
dead paternal relative.
My rna's family was from Calabria, southern Italy, the poorest and most climatically difficult area in which to live. Her
mother and fa ther, Angela and Joseph Bilotti came to this country
to flee the abject poverty of the south but Angela died at the ageof 42 during the 1918 influenza epidemic, leaving 4 children
without a mother. When Joseph returned to Italy to find anotherbride, all of the children were abandoned to different homes. My
mother Josephine was 8 years old when she saw her own motherdie and her family disintegrate in less than 6 months.
Josephine, and her three sisters, Minnie, Emma and Mary
were a micro-study in the struggle of southern Italian immigrant
women in this country. Minnie and Emma were born in Calabria
and arrived here as children. The early influence of the old world
shaped their lives unalterably. Aunt Minnie's house frightened
me with its heaviness. The rooms were filled with massive pieces
of wooden furniture, all stained too darkly. Heavy tables weredraped in cloth, rugs old and lifeless. The house never seemed toget any sunlight, but how could it through the shroud likedraperies? Everywhere I looked there appeared a statue of thevirgin Mary, a cross of wood, plastic, silver or palm leaf, holy
pictures and rosary beads. Never though, would I find a speck ofdust in Aunt Minnie's house. It was always sterilized with thesweat of work done on hands and knees.
Minnie had carried the weight of poverty and despair fromher home in Italy to her home in America and although timechanged many things it never changed her. A short round woman
with black eyes and hair, she carried this poverty in her body as
well. In her own home she looked perfectly appropriate. Thickblack shoes, stockings with heavy seams running up the back,
black dress and sweater all blended characteristically with the60ambiance of her home. She wore no makeup - ever! It was outof-doors in the sunlight that I could see the greater picture, thesilent pain.
Aunt Emma was shorter and less round than Minnie, but indress and home decor, they were twins. At the age of 14, shemarried and remained unquestionably so to the same little man
until his death more than 50 years later. She too radiated the
hypoxic effects of her Calabrian birth, an impoverishment of thespirit which she dragged about like a large wooden cross. Both
Minnie and Emma kept their lives private, kept their culture aliveby blocking out the world around them. They did not care to mix
or blend, nor did they care for the language or the customs of thiscountry. They had their own. The neighborhood was Italian, themerchants and priests Italian. They kept their money in cash, in
old socks or in the smallest of change purses tucked neatly into
their apron pockets. They made stuffed ravioli on holidays,
danced the tarantella on occasion, cried when Father Tagliavia
died and prayed for early entrance into the kingdom of heaven.
This life was purgatory to them.
In contrast to Minnie and Emma, the two youngest Bilotti
girls, Josephine and Mary wanted what America had promised
them. Born here, they were tempted to believe the "huddled
masses" propaganda. The reality they encountered though, wasno less harsh than the one they escaped in Calabria. Back there
only one set of rules applied. Here they would wrestle with two
languages, one spoken in the home, the other, the dominantlanguage spoken everywhere else. They would struggle with themeeting of two cultures and in the ensuing conflict they would
always be defeated. Victory was not possible for they could neveralign with either side. They were the mediators between two
opposing forces that would never co-exist, not as long as the sole
purpose of one opponent was to crush the life out of the other. The
outcome was pre-determined in this cultural dual to the death.
What Josephine and Mary did not know was that their work
was nothing more than an exercise in planned obsolescence. They
were raised to do as they were told and in America they were told
to lie themselves down with the monster called assimilation. But
would they have chosen this bed if they had known it meant they
were to be eaten alive, leaving no trace of their existence, except61perhaps for a folktale here, a recipe there? Would they have spent
their lives cleaning the house, washing the clothes, cooking themeals, bearing the children, licking the wounds, wiping the ass ofthe beast that would swallow them whole? Would they haveraised their children to be American first if they had known itmeant we could no longer be Italian at all; raised us in semiignorance of our heritage, discouraged us from learning our own
language, cooked us our traditional foods only on federally approved holidays, ensuring that our culture would die with them?
Perhaps the greatest irony lies in their conviction that sacrificing
themselves would guarantee a better life for their children.
As a child, I could feel the confusion and conflict in the worlds
around me. It was disturbing to step from our house, with all of
my ma's attempts at modernization to the homes of any of thewomen and men from the old country. Literally, it was two
different realities and I could not reconcile the differences in mymind. These realities intersected frequently though at weddings,
baptisms, first holy communions and of course at funerals. I
always resisted attending these functions, wanting only to be left
at home with Howdy Doody, someone whose language I understood and whose cowboy appearance I could emulate.
I preferred Salerno butter cookies to Aunt Mary's canoli andOscar Mayer wieners to Aunt Emma's sweet Italian sausage
bombers. My greatest sin was my distaste for garlic. "Hey Domenico! Whatsa matta for you kid? She no eata the food ." Comments by the elders spoken in broken English were always meant
to poke at the grandchildren, since we had developed quite anantagonistic relationship between us. To us, they represented
everything old and rigid. To them, we represented everything
modern and confusing. Yet despite this friction and on someunconscious level, we recognized that something greater was atstake here. If they knew what it actually was, they never spoke
about it to their children or grandchildren, and in that silence they
sealed the fate of generations to come.
While I tried with every ounce of my youthful ingenuity tokeep away from most of these generational imbroglios, I was
drawn wholeheartedly to picnics, for I knew that no outdoor
gathering would be complete without the traditional game ofbocce. Although I have witnessed some stiff competitive egos in62

action, bocce is more a folk ballet than a game. It is a traditionaJ
sport similar to lawn bowling. Two teams, each with four small
wooden balls stand at one end of a long stretch of grass. An evensmaller wooden ball, the pallina, is thrown out to the other end of
the field. The object of the game, then, is for each team to throw
more of its balls closer to the pallina than the other team. Since thegame itself is so simple, the challenge lies in developing one's
own unique style of throwing. Beautifully choreographed dances
make this game a work of art. One could not simply roll the ballthrough the grass and expect to gain any respect, even if your ballended up kissing the pallina. You had to dance! Perhaps the mostimpressive form I recall was developed by my Uncle Gratz. He
needed quite a bit of space for his approach which involved arunning, hopping type maneuver. At the same time he would loft
the ball high into the air, land on one foot and one bended knee
and never lose the ash on his cigar. The ball would land, ker-plop,
somewhere down field and never roll an inch. This, he took pridein saying, was due to some precise wrist twisting motion he had
secretly developed.
No matter how heated the game or how close the score, if I
stood at the sidelines long enough my pa would eventually holda ball out to me and say, "This looks like your shot." Holding theball with both hands and trying to make my pa proud of me, I took
on the men. It never mattered where the ball landed, only that I
was the only girl to try. Through the cheers and laughter I would
hear,"Hey Dominic, she's getting better than you." My pa always
cupped his hand to my face and smiled, each of us enjoying the
moment fully.
Nothing was more fascinating at these gatherings though,than the clash of cultures, the three generational contrast. The oldcountry, represented by the last living immigrants of our clan,
brought tradition, pride and history to the picnic. They brought
the gnocchi and the Chianti. They wore the baggy trousers, white
shirts and suspenders, carried the starched white handkerchiefs.
The second generation, the first children to be born in America
brought confusion, the bleeding wounds of the battle with assimilation, the burden of carrying first the young and now thevery old on their shoulders. They brought the crock pots of bakedbeans, the jello salads with floated fruit cocktail. They wore the63polyester pants, the dacron shirts the lipstick and hairspray. And
the third generation, the grandchildren brought the tools necessary to complete the annihilation. They brought indifference,
disrespect, shame and ignorance. Picnic after picnic, it was apparent that sharing the same bloodline was not nearly enough to save
us from what was happening, even though it was our blood inwhich the warning was written.
Not surprisingly, it was because of the funerals that the
puzzle pieces finally fit together. I grew up on funerals. They
were as much a part of my daily life as frosted flakes. Over dinner
my ma would say, liMy cousin Johnny died yesterday, so we will
be going to the funeral home tomorrow night." 'Who?" I'dalways ask wondering how I could slip the peas off my plate andinto my pocket without being seen. It seemed that a favorite
pastime of the Bilotti sisters was sitting at the kitchen table
naming the dead, some sort of paying of tribute, honoring ofcontribution, or perhaps merely acknowledging past existence.
To me they remain faceless names, a means by which I marked thepassing of my time. Aunt Meena died when I was six. Cousin Rita
died when I made my first holy communion. Uncle Lou diedwhen I moved out of the house.
It wasn't until the death of my own parents that I began topersonalize the loss and grief which was so pervasive in my life.
I was 21 when my mother died, an event for which I was in no way
prepared, even though I knew for months that it would happen.
The trauma of her death was heightened by the grueling funeralritual that we were forced to endure. Now in retrospect andgratitude, the precise details of her funeral escape me. My father
died only four years after my mother and in my memory theirwakes ooze into each other. Both were three day marathons,seemingly endless lines of viewers reciting the rosary, muttering
to each other in Italian. Both elicit memories of rows of old womenin dark clothing, black lace veils hiding their eyes, black handkerchiefs muffling their cries and catching their tears. Some sat stone
faced, hands folded in silent prayer while others wailed shamelessly. Occasionally several of the women would rush to assist a
fainter in the third row.
Because of my father's visibility as a police officer, everyone
in town came to the funeral. I wanted to scream at everyone to go64home and leave us alone. At one point the entire uniformed police
force filed in; solemn, restrained, to show their respect. One by
one they shook my hand, expressed their sorrow, some mechanically, others with genuine feeling, then silently filed back out
again. "That's all?" I screamed inside. "Thirty eight years of mypa's life with you jerks and all you can say is that you're sorry!"
The rage helped to divert my attention from the pain that wasboring its way through my chest and momentarily allowed me tofeel something other than anguish. It was fortunate that mymother died first for I know she could not have endured myfather's funeral.
It was just after these two funerals that I began to see theconnection between the individ ual deaths and the dying of a wayof life. With the passage of enough time it became possible for me
to recall my parents with broader awareness, paying more attention to the context of our lives together and less to the feelings ofpersonal abandonment. Yet even after the frank pain had subsided and I had befriended the permanent, subtle pain, I continued to feel a gnawing inside of me that did not arise from the lossof a parent. It was the dawning recognition of a loss much greaterthan any I had ever known and the writing of this piece is only one
unsteady step in the process of learning to walk with my grief.
Mourning, I have come to understand, has a life of its own.
Now, as my mother's daughter, I too join in the ceremonious
naming of the dead, insuring that no one ever forgets those whohave given up so much more than their own lives. As my father's
daughter, I sit quietly at my desk and cup my hands to my own
face, seeking and finding a familiar comfort that remains verymuch alive in me.

65Kathy Freeperson

M unda The Italian Witch
Rome, New YorkShe was old as dried hot peppers
strung in the hallway
we watched her through high grasson our eleven year old bellies
trying not to breathe or laughfearing her witch's powers dark
secret musty like old widows' black
dresses stored in moth balls
in mahagony cedar chests.
Fear and respect like old brick streets
for a woman who brought the newborn Italian babies
peppercorns in gold to pin
to diapers like tiny protections
from the evil eye, or malocchio.
Munda's thick glasses
like the bottoms of beer mugs
scanned the herb garden in her dark backyard
strident voice rattling off and on
in Italian and a touch of English
using eyes and wrists, fingers
for emphasis
while our bellies on the cool grassfull of pasta from some "Welfare dish"Gramma made, were pillows on the earth
we watched the Italian witch on First
Street through grape vines
grown from grafted pieces brought overon the boat from Naples, Sicily and parts
South, rule her family manless66Diane Gravenites

Shadow Sister
She is my friend.
The dark woman,
whose family came from Sicily,is the sister I never had.
While the music plays,
she dances seductively, provocatively before me,waving her slinky, snaky arms through the air
with absolutely no sense of shame.
She is Kali, Shiva, Medusa.
I stare at her, the snake, with my wide, brown bird eyes.
I am frozen with fascination and fear.
"It's sex," she says ...
"I act out that which is denied ... "My mind meets her shameless sexual energy
with familiar judgment.
Generations of Northern Italian immigrants cringe in horroras I gaze upon my shadowthat disowned part of myself:
the dark side,
the earth,
the snake,the female,the unbound female.
The voices of my Northern Italian ancestors
take over my head and call her silent names:"bad woman" ... "peasant" ... "pagan" ... "cheap" ... "tramp"... "Southern Italian."
She is not wholesome and clean.
She comes from the South, the hot country,
where people are uncultured, sweaty and lazy,67

where food is too spicy and greasy,
where gangsters give us all a bad name here in America.
"You are not supposed to have a pussy!" she says.
"Don't talk like that," I reply.
"Don't dance like that," I think.
"It's not right," I judge.
For I am a good, obsessive compulsive, Italian girlraised on the shores - the North shores - of Long Island,
escaped from the debutante cotillions of New York,to settle in the North of California.
My people take pride in being subtle and refined.
We do not bring Mafia to America;
we bring culture: Verdi, Puccini, Michelangelo ...
fine cuisine delicately flavored with basil,
porcini mushrooms and sweet butter.
We speak only the "purest" Italian.
Let me be clear about this:
We do not eat oregano.
We do not dance the tarantella.
We do not sing "0 solo mio."
We do not play mandolins.
We do not have cats in our houses.
We have pedigree dogs.
We trust them more,probably because we can control them.
From my earliest years I was taughtthat the land south of Rome was reserved for barbarians,
and that unbridled lust came from that "dark, hot, greasy land.""Do not touch yourself down there!" they told me.
Oh, how my family triumphed
when this third generation Italian girlgained entry to the Junior League of New York.
We had finally been accepted by Anglo society!
In my corset, strapless gown, high heels and long, white gloves
I proved to all what I had been told since a child:68We are not Italians,
We are Americans.
We are not hotblooded and swarthy,
We are white.
Over six-course sumptuous meals, my parents
would remind me that
our ancestors came to America from Northern Italian mountains,
to become the owners of successful family businessesof which their daughters,
now married to stockbrokers and attorneys,
are the major stockholders.
They are proud that their daughters do not work,and they show them off in all their refined eleganceas evidence of their successin America.
We are not Italians,
We are Americans.
And on this day when my beloved Sicilian sister
danced before me,veils lifted from my eyes,
and I saw in a profound way,that I was used to prove,and that I have used my whole life provingthat I am a brown-eyed, white, Anglo American that this was my family destiny from before birth.
To think that I, a feminist,
theoretically a lover of women,
do not respect the female,the unbound female!
I was systematically trained to fear
the earth, my genitals, and my body ...
I am a third generation daughterof Northern Italian immigrants
who came to America
and made good... and made good girls... with no bodies.

69

And all these years I have been wanting to know something.
What has kept me so lonely and isolated?
Answer: No deep personal contact.
For contact is timeless and sensual,
sometimes it is even sexual.
It requires a body.
We cannot feel each other in any way
if we don't have bodies.
But still those voices of fear rage in my head:
Godforbid we might really feel each other,our bodies, our pussies, and our love.
Godforbid we might go out of control,
break some rules ...
disgrace ourselves, our mothers and fathers,
and genera tions of Northern Italians
intent on proving that they are not
Southern Italians
with bodies.
Godforbid!
Godforbid!

70

Dodici Azpadu

OmertaSun dried & wind bitter
Sicily of my mind's eye
impoverished by mayhem 2000 years& three continentsof liberator / conquerorsof historical contributions(to call colonizing brutality
by its civilized name)now subject to North American
paternalism where internationallies make screaming silence
the rule of racial survival
Sicily the changelingyou are no secret on my lips.

Dodici Azpadu holding
her doll "Palermo"

71Denise Leto

Passion, Danger, FreedomtiT.
1. hey are on the whole a simple-minded race, primitive intheir emotions and passions ... easily lead by their feelings.// l
I. Passion
next to abstraction
we must appear
too real
or worse,
caricatures
displayed against
the bordersof red, white & blue
rationalismwith our insides
all strewn about
it is nothing
but murder& brutality to the spirit
can kill for generations& who wouldn't cry
who wouldn't cry loudly
for this cultural massacrea sea of people
threatening the orderof things neatly put
in their place
plastic over the sofa
antiseptic foodmanicured lawns
certain ways of being"I pledge allegiance to the ... //in such a place as this
it is dangerous
to feelin such a place as thisfeeling is all we have left,
next to abstraction
passion is the first resistance.

thin authoritative knives
reaching into
our gutspulling up
the pieces
to say look
look how simple they are72

What does it sound like when shit hits the wall? WOP!"2
II. Danger

Shit
is not my relative
not even a distant cousin
in fact no one I know
sounds quite like that& the real danger
is in one of our voices
calling out to anotherbecause what isn't funny
can change the way
we speakto each otherforever.

"Southern Italians are considered biologically inferior beings...semi-barbarians or complete barbarians by natural destiny."3
III. Freedom

Is it because
we are too hairy
too dark
do we smellof rough cheeseand old caves
dowe ignore
your institutions
sweat at all
the wrong moments
howl in the
middle of the nightat the divinity
everywhere in everythingor is it because
we eat heavily
and love it
is it because we have different
accents
mustaches, hips
or is it because we dig
forever digging the dirt
scratching out our life
among the worms
in the soil
are we so barbaricthat your renaissanceborrowed our images

73

because where you see worms
I see sacredrituals working
underneath it all
slowly, steadily
spinning, digging, dancing
unearthing the layers;
where you see worms
I see prayer in motion
slithering, spiraling, toppling

painted them freely
to claim our beauty
for your own
then buried our real bodies
letting them rot in the sun
a poor, hungry, roughbackward region
a thorn in the sideof such civilized tastes
an uncouth opera
at the bottom of the bootthere is dirt
under my fingernails,
Destiny,
as I lift this life
out from under
your civilization putting a garden
in its placeis hard work.

or is it because
successful exploitation
depends on this
this view of us
of our culture
ourhertory
ou r lives

1. Johnson, L. Colleen. 1985. "Growing Up and Growing Old in Italian-American Families." Rutgers University Press, 27.
2. Frequently heard anti-Italian joke.
3. Gramsci, Antonio as quoted by Birnbaum, Chiavola Lucia. 1986. "liberazionedella donna: feminism in Italy." Wesleyan University Press, xvii.

74

Patrizia Tavormina

Living As A Sicilian Dyke
Carrying around Cheryl Clarke's book of poetry, and flashingits vibrant pink cover is always good for a laugh as people focus
on the bold black title Living As A Lesbian, and then me. My long,dark hair and feminine gestures don't fit their stereotype of alesbian. I'm not a closet dyke. I'm a first generation Canadiandyke of Sicilian origin. In Montreal, with a conservative Italiancommunity stranded in a time warp between 1950's Italy and1990 Canada, lesbian life stands little chance.
When Italian immigrants first arrived in Montreal, not speaking a word of French or English and struggling to build a better
life, they depended on one another for survival. Having createdan almost self-sufficient enclave over the years, most of the Italians here today live in the northeast end, or central north end of
the city. Because all neighbourhood services are Italian-run,ltalian immigrants have practically sealed themselves off frommodern day influences. While this insularity is an important way
that Italians have resisted assimilation, one result of it has beenthat the feminist and lesbian movement completely bypassed this
Italian community, and they have held on to the sexist, andheterosexist values their parents taught them back in rural Italy
during the '50s. First generation Italian-Canadian lesbians andwomen grow up against such a backdrop, a life system akin to theearly 1900's when women were lawfully not considered persons,and when lesbians were not considered.
In almost all aspects, growing up female in the Italian community means strong adherence to the dictates of compulsory
heterosexuality. Subservience, femininity, passivity, and dependence are highly valued. Basically the female role assumes marriage to Italian men, jobs as secretaries or hairdressers, and ofcourse housewifery and mothering. Because women and lesbians are kept under lock and key, they usually fulfill their parents'
archaic expectations. As a child, I watched my uncle beat my 12
year old cousin because she dared to run and play with us. I wasspared a beating because I had not reached puberty yet. For

75

Italians, puberty marks the final stages of a girl's training inheterosexual womanhood. Instead of playing, my cousin could
only occasionally sit on the balcony. At 16 her parents arranged
her marriage, passing on the lock and key to her husband.
As teenagers, Italian girls are not only forbidden to play sports(a masculine endeavor), we can rarely sleep over at a girlfriend's
place, attend dances or hang out after class, the underlying reasons being that nice girls (marriageable girls) do not stray fromthe home. Simply sleeping over at a friend's means acting independently from the family. Such initiative on the part of a female,an obvious claim to male privileges, must in every way be discouraged. We are taught to walk, talk, eat and think like heterosexual women. Throughout high school, my Italian girlfriends
lied innovatively and incessantly to gain some freedom. I personally fought my mother tooth and nail for permission to playbasketball, and assuredly had my father been around, my fatewould have been that of my cousin's.
If the Italian community exists with such traditional values,
and rigidly defined sex roles, where in such a penis-ruling culture
can dykes possibly survive? The only other Italian lesbian I know
is emotionally disturbed at 22 years of age; undoubtedly due to a
lifetime of physical and psychological imprisonment. An AngloSaxon acquaintance once expressed how, reading her students'
journals, she was overwhelmed at the outpouring of distressfrom Italian females as they described their compulsory daily
routines of housework and womanly duties, as well as their frustration at the double standard played out between them and theirbrothers or husbands. However few the rights of contemporary
lesbians are today, the young Italian-Canadian lesbian undergoes tremendous stress in trying to reconcile her repressive living
conditions with the basic human rights enjoyed by her peers.
The only solution for many Italian lesbians, as with mostother lesbians, is to leave home. However, in the Italian culture,leaving home is the ultimate sin. A female who leaves her parents
home prior to marriage is considered unchaste, a harlot, and dishonours her family. Whereas most lesbians experience ostracization by coming out to their family, an Italian dyke is treated assuch by simply moving out.
An Italian lesbian seeking independence loses her cultural76

identity if her family ostracizes her. She cannot strengthen her
identity as an Italian and a lesbian with other Italian-Canadianlesbians because so few of us survive our sexist and heterosexist
upbringing to dykehood. Many Italian-Canadian lesbians marryor remain married to men, become spinsters, or live closeted
lesbian lives. This feeling of cultural isolation is compounded forme as a Sicilian, because I speak a dialect very distinct from standard Italian. Even if I met Italian dykes, I would uncomfortably
stutter and struggle to speak an Italian unfamiliar to me. Thisbarrier is exacerbated by the fact that "Siciliano," viewed in Italy
as a dirty dialect, is also a dying one. The chances of meeting
Sicilian-speaking dykes decrease as more and more Sicilians now
speak only standard Italian.
Since I've yet to share my experiences with other first generation Italian or Sicilian dykes, I'm not sure what powers we cangenerate from uniting, nor what customs we could reclaim. Certainly, I miss the strong female-bonding characteristic of Italians.
It's so natural for me to waltz with my mother, sister, aunts, or towalk arm in arm with female cousins. Such expression of affection, and dancing between females is taboo in many other cultures. But, because Italians segregate the sexes, close female bonding inevitably develops. In addition, Italians have a wonderfulappreciation of food. North Americans are too thin-conscious toappreciate the joys of eating, but Italians have the same attitude
towards food that they have towards bodies: the more, the merrier. In a think-slim society, it's refreshing to see both food andvoluptuous females still highly adored amongst many Italians.
On the other hand, this quest to reclaim Italian culture canprove problematic in that catholicism, a religion full of racist,classist, sexist and heterosexist aspects, is imbedded in my identity as an Italian. Unable to see where my Italian culture begins
and catholicism ends, I sometimes almost deny my Italian heritage. Living as a Sicilian dyke means I'm constantly at odds witha culture that I desire and inherit, while at the same time, feel
repulsed by.
Nevertheless, recently I've transformed a few Sicilian customs to be in keeping with my lesbian culture. When my mothercooks "springi" (sweet rice balls) in October to celebrate San
Martino, I celebrate National Coming Out Day on the 11th, and77

when we cook "cubata" (honey-coated almonds) at Christmas, Icelebrate Solstice. Such food traditions carry deep importance.
My aunts and mother have lived such harsh lives as immigrant
women that having food on the table represented survival, thestrength to carryon through another day. As a lesbian in a heterosexist world, I relate strongly to this determination to survive.
I have difficulty describing what it means to be born the nonimmigrant daughter of an immigrant mother. Obviously, I live
privileges my mother will never live, such as acquiring an education past grade 5 or having career choices beyond that of a backbreaking, underpaid sewing machine operator. The institutionalized racism that confines immigrant women to the cheap female
labor needs of capitalism has assured me, a white, educated, nonimmigrant, easier access towards a middle class lifestyle. Alongwith my more privileged position comes a guilt and anger at
knowing that that Sicilian woman who stepped off the boat at 20
could easily have been me. This feeling of guilt re-occurs every
time I look into my mother's eyes and witness the hardships she
has lived. In my fight for lesbian rights, I continuously attempt tosummon within myself the strength and relentless stamina of that
immigrant amazon who, barely capable of uttering one word ofher new country's tongue, courageously threw out an abusive
husband and worked 18 hour days legally and illegally to raise 5
children. When I speak to you as a Sicilian dyke, I bring all of thiswith me: the pain, anger, and defeats, but also the struggles,
culture, hers tory, love and survival.
I'd like to think that the Italian community in Montreal isgradually changing as second and third generation Italian-Canadians grow distant from the sexist and heterosexist aspects of
their Italian roots. Certainly, my family, although first generation
Canadian, has rejected most conservative Italian prejudices. Thenagain, we exceptionally (and thankfully) were raised without the
grand patriarch, but instead with a strong female head of thefamily. Perhaps, in searching to unite Italian or Sicilian dykes, I
seek to affirm my own existence: the recognition that others know
where I've come from, what I may have had to give up, and how
hard I've had to fight as a Sicilian, to be lesbian.

78

Mary DeLorenzo Pelc

Review of The Dream Book:an Anthology of Writings by
Italian American Women CSchocken Books, 1985)
be Dream Book, edited and with an introduction by Helen Barolini, creates a painting of rich colors, textures and moods thatpicked me up and swept me along forgotten memories and feelings, and through the pain of my own ancestors. It's an emotional
journey, the dream of the daughters and granddaughters.
In her introduction, Barolini says the oppression of ItalianAmericans is a direct cause for the "literary silence" among Italian-American women. The immigrants to this country werelargely people who weren't "valued or wanted" in their own
land. Their visions of escaping oppression to have a better life
here were met with the same devaluation and oppression. She
explains: "When your frame of reference is a deep distrust of
education because it is an attribute of the very classes who have
exploited you ....then you do not encourage a reverence for books
among your children. You teach them the practical arts not theimaginative ones."
A deep adherence to the old ways of the Italian family is also
an important reason for this literary silence. As Barolini says,"Italian women who came to this country did so as part of afamily, as daughter, wife, sister, or 'on consignment' ... but always
in the context of a family situation . ... For an uneducated Italian
woman could not exist economically or socially outside thefamily institution which defined her life and gave it its wholemeaning. She came almost as an indentured servant, bonded toher traditional role." She had no choice but to remain totallydependent on men. Women who did manage to hold onto somelevel of social or economic independence were considered deviant, evil, outsiders from the community who were looked uponwith suspicion as "prime casters of the evil eye." This did not
foster for them an atmosphere conducive to pursuing creative79

interests or self-expression. It's the age-old story of women kept
uneducated, dependent, frightened and subservient, who haveno glimmer of, no chance for, personal freedom or self-identification.
Family was the most important Italian institution, and thewomen's role as center of the family was crucial. The responsibility to keep the family together was placed totally on her and she
was most often the one denied a chance for an education.
"In America, schools were not always regarded as the road toa better future; more often they were seen as a threat to the family
because they stressed assimilation .... Reading was ridiculed as
too private ... free time should be spent with the family group ...
Here as in Italy, the top goal was survival of the family as the chiefbulwark against an alien nation." The woman was to remain"permanently accessible and permanently unchanging." She
could not be an individual with her own dreams and needs; thiswould undermine the family structure.
It's easy to see with these rigid roles and economic and social
restraints why Italian-American women have a hard time exploring creative expression and why our literary silence was so pervasive. We are part of a huge oppressive machine built on racism,
illiteracy, suspicion and a rigid patriarchal social structure.
Our silence is broken with this anthology and it's broken withthe musical names of the women that appear in it: Maniscalco,
Carmellino, lezzoni, Benasutti, Scalapino, Segale, DiSanto,
Valentino, etc.; the names of Italian-American daughters andgranddaughters celebrating who they are through the written
word.
Divided into memoirs, non-fiction, fiction, drama and poetry,
The Dream Book is a diverse collection of our experiences, mixed,
blended, simmered, and served up like my nonna's most famousin the whole world spaghetti sauce.
The memoirs are a moving testimonial to the strength andresilience of Italian women, such as Rosa Cassettari, whose The
Life of an Italian Immigrant chronicles the joys and hardships ofliving in Chicago around the turn of the century. Her style is somatter-of-fact and passionate that I felt propelled back to mychildhood, sitting around the kitchen table with my aunts as they
told stories of their youth. The fiction was my favorite section.
80

Many of the stories are written about or from a child's point ofview. One of the best was Zio, by Alma Vanek, the story of ayoung girl's experiences around the death of a close family
friend . Lynette Iezzoni's Window Seat, is a haunting story about
a mother's "transformation" from neighborhood Betty Crocker
to dissatisfied and disconnected wife and mother as seen throughthe eyes of her daughter. The fiction section is the largest part ofthe book, with stories that are well-crafted and enjoyable.
The poetry was also quite good . Poems by Kathy Freeperson,
Ann Bart, and Grace DiSanto were particularly moving andtimely for me. Having recently lost my nonna, Grace DiSanto's"Last Supper" really hit home. It's written in memory of her
grandparents. She reminisces about good meals and good times
with them, and how as children we never think about those welove being absent from our lives. She laments the loss of innocence. "I ache to genuflect, kiss their hands, but then I realize thatsupper, the bread and wine of childhood, was long ago consumed." Again, as with the other sections of this anthology, muchof the poetry reflects the rituals and traditions of growing up
Italian, reflections complete with pain and joy.
The Italian tradition of "omerta," or cultural silence, was verystrong within my family. It said "What I don't know won't hurtme"; it said, "See nothing, say nothing, hear nothing." It led
others to refer to me as "secretive," "witholding," "distant,""cold." I unwittingly carried on the traditions of my ancestors, as
women before me had done, my mother, her mother and hermother before her. We were betraying each other, allowing ourheritage to be buried alive. This anthology gives me great hopethat "omerta" is disintegrating, that the voices of Italian-American women will be heard, that our experiences will be taken seriously, that we will begin to identify ourselves to ourselves andto others as we write our own dream books, and songs andpoems, and paint our own dream paintings.

81

Angie Angela and Demetria Iazzetto

Commari: Excerpts of a Dialogue
Commare is an Italian term for the godparent of a child. It alsofunctions as a connector to bring outsiders into the family and give themhonorary membership in it. The term also connotes a close family friend.
It is used to bond. In the course of talking with one another about our
Italian heritage we came to feel like commari.
Angie: Talking about this has helped me get in touch with my
Italianness, and we have both gotten in touch with how we grew
up. For me it has been how I experienced oppression because ofbeing Italian and how I identified as "other," and for you,
Demetria, how within your Italian-American community youwere taught to look down on the immigrants, to look down on the"other" because of a strong pressure to assimilate.
Demetria: Growing up, I was taught that I was better because I
was born here. We used derogatory labels against the immigrants
like "greaseballs, and "d.p.'s" (displaced persons). Because wewere already here, we looked down upon those Italians who had
recently arrived. What seems clear about you and me, is that wewere both deeply affected by anti-Italian prejudice, though indifferent ways.
A: But you didn't completely buy into it.
D: No, I found a very safe corner within myself to escape from it.
I certainly didn't get any support socially for not completelyinternalizing it, really. It was hard to keep open and I did notunderstand my family's own prejudices. I was so confused about
why they told me I was better than someone who had lived in adifferent country and spoke a different language.
A: My experience in Belgium was one of oppression. I was the"other." We lived in our community, but we were teased, wewere poked fun at, we were battered and discriminated against.
D: Tha tis w ha t would have happened to you had you lived in mycommunity, too, I'm sorry to admit.
A: If I had lived in your community I would have felt the
prejudice and fear from my own people, the Italians, as well as
82

non-Italians. I am trying to remember the feelings that I had on
the playground the first couple of weeks in America. My namewas changed from Angelina to Angie, within two days. I became
Americanized. I felt like a piece to be exhibited. Kids would cometo look at me like animals at the zoo. The feeling of being "other"became much more ingrained and internalized.
D: When I went into a Catholic convent at age 18, I walked into
a middle class, predominantly Irish setting. I felt really different
then. That was the first time in my life that I ever got "described"
to anyone else as being so Italian. When I talk with other Italians,
I don't feel very Italian because I don't speak the language, nor do
I know the culture or the history well. I feel like an imposter attimes. I feel most Italian when I'm with other Italian-Americans,with the people I grew up with in our Italian Community, andwithin my extended family.
A: I do know the Italian language and the culture and the history,
but I am not proud of being an Italian-American. I have internalized being "different" as being negative.
D: I think I've always been proud of being Italian-American, yet
I have felt outside of mainstream America. Not always because I
was Italian-American. My feeling of being different was moreclass-based. I grew up in a working class environment. To me, it'sclass rather than ethnicity that gave me the clearest awareness of
being "other" and "different." I remember when I was 21 someone gave me a book about my neighborhood called The Social
Order of the Slum by Gerald Suttles. I read it and was appalled that
here was some scholar saying I lived in a "slum" and that I was"culturally deprived." I was working class, but that didn't mean
I was culturally deprived. And then in the convent at 18 I was
surrounded by middle class Irish girls. I felt so different. I felt
closest to the Irish girls who also had working class backgrounds.
A: You talk about being aware of your "otherness" at 18. I wasfive years old when I was jeered at for having my head shaved
and for being Italian. My head was shaved because it was thought
I had lice, which I didn't. I remember going to the convent-school
and trying to convince the nuns that I was old enough and smart
enough to go to kindergarten, because my parents needed me outof the house. The nuns said 'Well, we don't know if she'll be able
to understand us or if she can do the work." That really had an83effect on me. I always felt different. I had that feeling of being
other, of being discriminated against. Only for me it was foreverything - because of my language, my culture and my skincolor. And teachers felt sorry for me, pitied me, yet at the sametime told me I would never "make it."
D: I grew up being the rebel in my family and community and I
liked that. In school my sense of rebellion made me value being
smart. In my community of friends, I valued being different. In
the convent I valued being Italian. When I was teaching I came tovalue my working class background. When I was coming out, thissense of otherness enabled me to express that difference in the
fullness that it is - being a lesbian.
A: I had different goals, different values, different pressures. I
wanted to be a teacher, I wanted to get educated. As a result I
didn't feel like I belonged. I didn't want to have a husband. And
yet I remember at 13 I was pushed to have a husband. So I started
running away from the culture, not wearing the same clothes as
the people in the culture.
D: When I was growing up, my parents never taught us anything
about the culture or how to speak Italian. Instead, they would use
it to communicate what they didn't want us to hear. So I had alimited vocabulary of nouns and some slang terms that my
grandmother would teach us children to use . And after I graduated college I decided to study Italian so I could talk to my Sicilian
grandmother. But, ha, within one or two classes I realized that if
I tried to learn anything in school to talk to my Sicilian grandmother about, she'd slap me. She'd be very insulted because I waslearning to speak the upper class Tuscano dialect, not the peasantclass Sicilian she spoke. So I never got to talk Italian with mymaternal grandmother. There are so many things that get lost or
are unconscious. Even while I was in the convent, I didn't realize
how my being Italian was related to how expressive I was
physically - with my voice and my face and my hands and mybody. And now, I love those parts of me. I think that that
expressiveness in me is part of what makes me excellent as ateacher.
A: Me, too. I am able to teach with my whole body in it, not justmy voice, but my feet, my butt, my hands, my everything, you
know.
84

D: And I remember my friends teasing me that if they put myhands behind my back, I'd be unable to talk. And they were right.
I couldn't have talked. In terms of language, most of the Italians
I lived near spoke with a west side Italian Chicago accent,pronouncing these, them and those as "dese," "dem" and "dose."
I learned quickly in high school when to use that adaptation of a
Sicilian dialect and when I was expected to speak "good" English.
A: The Italians do take the English language and make it theirown. I remember my grandmother talking about the hot house,
for what was, in reality, an out house. I knew it was pidgin
English. Even at 13, the only two words I knew in English were"okay" and "jackass." Our primary language structure is the wa y
we organize our thoughts and our words. If your primary language is Italian and then you take English and try to put it overit, you're going to have to change the shape of it so that it fits
within the structure of the first language. I want to say to theEnglish language and to all these people who have been tellingme how awkward I am, "fuck you." But I live in an English
speaking world and so I'm using English words, with my primary language being Italian - it becomes very convoluted.
D: I wish my family had taught me to speak Italian. When I went
to Naples, I met a Neapolitan woman who asked me, in Italian, if
I understood Italian. And I said yes, a little bit. And so, again in
Italian, she said to me "I don't understand. Your mother is
Sicilian, your father is Neapolitan, so how come you don't speak
Italian?" And I felt so guilty. She was right. I have two parents
who both spoke the language and I didn't get it. So in a sense I feelcheated.
A: For me, all my life I've been running away from being Italian.
And yet not being able to run away because I am Italian. I ran
away from the language, the emotionalism. I wanted to bedifferent from what I am. I think you're more accepting of yourItalianness than I am.
D: While there are some things we have in common - we're both
Italian-American, lesbians, teachers - our experiences growing
up were really different. I grew up with a sense of being an ItalianAmerican, the third generation in my family. I felt connected
here. And one of the things I really like about my Italian heritageis that my sisters and brothers and I were all named in an Italian85

tradition - even though it is very patriarchal. The custom is thatthe first male and female children are named after the husband's
parents, and the second male and female children are named after
the wife's parents. That custom gave me Demetria, my mother'smother's name. "Demetria" turned out to have a lot of meaning
for me. Especially when I felt how much it helped me bond to my
grandmother who was this Sicilian peasant woman. And thenwhen I realized that its origin was the goddess Demeter, I felt somuch more connected to a tradition of strong women.
A: My name, too. I'm the eldest daughter and am named after myfather's mother, Angelina.
I want to talk a little about women's friendship, because I
think that's real important in the Italian culture. I think Italianwomen get much of their needs met by other women, including
physical needs. They sit on each other's laps when they're young.
They walk arm in arm and they hold each other.
D: That was not my experience here. I knew that in Italy it wasokay for two young women to walk down the street, hand in
hand. And I remember when my mother died in 1981, I was notout to my family or my neighborhood, and I was grieving, I was
distraught. And my brothers and sisters could bring their partners to support them in their grief, but I couldn't bring my lover.
And that was really difficult. But, I have a childhood girlfriend.
We grew up in the same neighborhood. She's also Italian-American, and because people knew we were friends, she and I could
walk arm in arm holding hands and hugging each other for acouple of hours through the neighborhood, and nobody thought
twice about it. That reminded me of what it might have been likein Italy.
A: And it is. From the time I was a child until I came to America
at 13, I was predominantly surrounded by women. Even myfather was in the periphery, all men were. I feel special that I comefrom a woman-centered culture, where women receive most of
their needs from other women. In my community it was acceptable, for instance, for my aunts never to marry. In their villages
they are seen as crones. I think one of my Aunts who nevermarried is a lesbian.
D: Lesbian as we define it - sexually and emotionally, primarily
connected with women?
86A: I think sexually if she had the chance. Emotionally, definitely.
But if we just define lesbian emotionally, I think a lot of Italianwomen are emotionally lesbian. But sexually they might not be.
D: I know that my woman-centeredness comes from my family.
My mother was always with her three sisters, we called them the
Big Four. They made the decisions for the family, they planned
the holidays. Every summer my maternal extended family lived
together. There were men there, but they were always on the
periphery. The women were in charge.The women bonded together and the women made the decisions. And I saw that. I feelthat my_whole life is women-centered and it always has been.
A: Right. I think for you that's because you chose not to getmarried and you chose not to accept the female role. But for many
Italian women, even though their lives are centered around
women, because of patriarchal oppression, they can be very
passive. And they take care of men, very much so. So, at somelevels, I accepted that part of the Italian woman's role.
D: I didn't.
A: Yes, but that may be because you were born here. I had somany strikes against me when I came to the States that I felt that
I had to somehow try to conform. I tried so hard to fit in with the
new American society by getting married.
D: The pressure to conform and assimilate must have been overwhelming. And I do feel special that I grew up in a womancentered culture and community -surrounded by women whose
primary emotional and intimate relationships were with women.
Some of them were sexual, but when they were, sadly enough, we
didn't talk about it. Growing up, everybody had a "commare."
My mother called her good friends "commari."
A: Using "commare" is a way of tying it all in and making friends
part of our family, so that there is this intense bond that happens
between the women.
I felt that when I went back to Italy. And I went back to heal,
because I had been taken away, I think, at a critical, developmental time in my life. And so for me to go back, it had to be in sucha way that I would get to know where I came from and be able tosee what it looked like. I went back to my elementary school. I
went back to the town where I was born. I met the midwife who
helped my mother give birth to me. I was able to reconnect and87

in the process start to heal. By going back, I regained my roots.
D: As you talk about it, I think about identity being a merging andidentifying with the earth, becoming rooted in the land.
A: While you were already developed, meaning adult, when youleft.
D: And you were still a child . That's so interesting to me, because
when I think of going back to the Italian community in which I
grew up, I don't really want to. My experience of the community
is an old memory. Though I'm aware of some of the physicalchanges which have occurred through urban renewal, I still havethis idea that the attitudes and values of the community's Italianresidents are unchanged from my childhood years. And I feel that
I've outgrown those or left them a long, long time ago. I feel it's
been a gift that I've had two worlds, so to speak, to grow up in,and I don't want to go back to living in my first one again.
A: My first world was torn away from me and it was something
to be able to go back and say this is really mine, and accept thatpart of me. But I don't want to go back, completely, either. Haveyou ever been to Sicily?
D: No. It would be interesting to go back as a lesbian. There's
probably a lesbian community there, if we could just find ways ofcontacting them. And I'm sure we could.
A: What a homecoming that would be! You know, Demetria,
talking together like this has been a very healing experience forme. It's helped me reconnect with my past and to integrate all
those parts of myself that have felt unconnected until now.
D: Me too, commare. It's so wonderful to find another woman
with whom I can share so many dimensions of who I am and how
I got to this place in my life. I honor the bonds we've realized andthe connections we've made with one another.

This conversation was excerpted from a 23 page dialogue.
88

Photographs contributed by Mary and Carol Andolina
photographers unknown
89

Celine-Marie Pascale

Photographs of Homer"r-r
~ ell 'em you're a goddamned American," he bellowed acrossthe room. I jiggled from one leg to another and continued to plead.
"But where did my grandparents come from?" I whined.
"What does it matter," my mother asked. "You wanna know
where your grandparents came from? Well listen: you're English,
Irish, French, Italian, German, and Scotch ... you're a mutt.""No ... " I persisted, "just my grandparents. I need to know forschool. I hafta tell them.""What the hell difference does it make? If you go back far
enough we're all related to the same person. Everybody," heyelled from the other room.
The blister of tears over my eyes burst. I dropped to the floor
and pounded the carpet.
"Susie's grand paren ts come from Ireland." I screamed. "whereare mine from?" I flung myself face down on the rug and criedfrantically.
"For Christ's sake./I My father collapsed his newspaper.
"Get up off of the floor," my mother hissed, "Quick get up.
You're making your father upset. You don't want the belt. Get
up."
The room swirled. Life was hopeless.
"Get up," she whispered as my father rose, "Come with me
and I'll tell you where they came from.""It's OK. It's OK, she's getting up. Aren't you honey? Yes,
she's going to help me in the garden. Stop that crying. See she's
stopped.""It's a helluva way to spend a goddamned Sunday afternoon.
What are they trying to do to these kids anyway. I was born here.
We're goddamned American and that teacher's trying to teachthem different.""Come on." She gave me a final nudge and I followed her.
In the garden we wandered among the fuzzy green fragranceof tomatoes, past the cucumber patch exploding over yet anothermound to the stalks of corn that my father said would never grow.
90

Here among the stalks that grew beyond my reach but neveryielded an ear of corn, I asked.
"Are we Italian?""NO!" Her voice was desperately truthful. I knew she waslying. 'Who told you that? Your brother, huh? Didn't he?""Yes.""Well, it's not true.""Then why did he say it?""'Cause he's a dumbshit. He don't know everything. I'll tellyou. The reason he got confused is because of this: you're French.""Huh?""Well. Your grandparents .... your FATHER'S parents wereborn over there. But there were a lot of wars. One day it wasFrance; one day it was Italy. So what are you? It was France when
they were born there but then the borders changed. All their lives
the borders changed. So are you French or Italian?"
I was baffled.
"See. It's not easy.""So I guess we could say we' re Italian like ..."
"Don't you EVER say you are Italian! Never. Your father will
kill you. You hear me? Kill you dead."
I splintered a thick leaf from the corn stalk. My parents built
lies like brick walls. I started to cry again.
"Cut that out. You gotta toughen-up girl; this world will wear
you down. So listen. You wanna know, I'm gonna tell you. Stop
that god damned cryin'. My parents are German. My motherspoke a little English; my father spoke broken English. But they
don't talk about being German cause they're American now. My
father got arrested during the war for playing German music.
When you leave a country you leave that behind. So there. Now
you know. Are you happy?""Where are my grandparents?""They're gone.""Are they dead?""No. They aren't dead. They're gone. So now you know you
can tell your teacher.""I'm German and ..." I waited .
"You tell your teacher that you are German, English, Irish,
French and Scotch." .
91

"Mom." I whined.
"OK, then tell her that you are German, English, Irish andFrench. You got four grandparents don't you? She'll understand.
If she don't, tell her to call me."Fifteen years later I pieced together the puzzle. Both myparents were first generation American. I don't recall ever having
met my grandparents . Both sets of grandparents disowned myparents: my mother's family disowned her for marrying an
Italian; my father's family disowned him for marrying a "slumgirl." We were raised to be American. This meant that I learned
the stereotypes about my heritage before I learned anything else.
Every summer, my mother and I washed windows together.
She carried the bucket of vinegar water and a ladder; I lugged therags. We wandered around the house, inside and out every few
weeks. During these times, with a voice of concern, she taught me
brutal stereotypes:"You're gonna be fat. All Italians are fat. Big hips andfat thighs; that's what all Italian women look like.
Not me. I got legs like a race horse. They always said
women are like horses, you can tell their breeding by
their legs. I go t good legs but you, kid, you're gonna
have trouble. I'm tellin' you these things now so you
can watch out."
At age six I worried about my weight and began to diet. This,I thought, must be the curse of Italians; this must be why we say
we are French. I learned to sneak-eat and to never speak of
Italians.
The word "Italian" never passed over my father's lips. Never.
He had other derogatory words about Italians, but he didn't use
them in reference to us. He always swore we were not Italian.
I was an adult before I heard that Italians could not get workin Pittsburgh during my father's childhood. My grandparents
had decided to pass as French in a world that knew only caricatures of cultures. "You wanna be Italian? Go to Italy. Here, we're
American." Everyone struggled to Americanize. Being an American was synonymous with being wealthy and safe. They believedthat everyone made it in America .
They bought a poverty-line legacy with silence, denial, fears
92

no one named, and loss, tremendous loss. I want to look back andfind myself in a family history but cannot. There are no stories, nophotographs. I have inherited gravestones scattered acrossnameless fields . My cultural heritage, though Italian and German, is one of countless new beginnings, not tradition. My
grandparents and parents looked forward to a day when thecolors of their lives would be bleached to match the concrete
office buildings of America.
I dream of going to Italy, of speaking Italian; in the dreams
someone calls my name and I am recognized as a long lost
relative. I am welcomed home. But in reality there is no "unmelting" from the melting pot. I now have more in common with myAmerican counterparts than with Italians or Germans. There canonly be a reclaiming, a struggle to know my Italian culture, andto know the culture of the Italians who tried to Americanize. I
work to piece together fragments of a story so that those whocome after me will inherit more than office buildings, more thantombstones .

Untitled (mixed media collage)
Sheri Tornatore
93

Mary Anne Bella Mirabella

Connections

I wrote this when I first began to think about my place in America
and what it means to be an Italian-American. Since then I havethought a good deal more about this issue, and since then I havereturned to Italy and to the villages that were the birthplaces of
my grandparents.
It was seven years ago that Lenny and I drove along thetreacherously winding curves of the Amalfi Drive to the villageof the same name. I knew there would be no relatives left for me
to meet. I had always heard how Grandma Capasso and herbrothers and sister had left Amalfi. Some to go to the UnitedStates and some to southern parts of Italy where they settled in
Calabria and Sicily. Grandma, only a young woman of fifteen,
had come to the United States.
I had not expected to meet any relatives, but I also did not
expect the beauty of Amalfi. The village, clear and sparklingabove the Mediterranean, climbs up the mountainside. It seems
to cling to the mountain, perhaps protecting itself from the sea
which had at one time been the livelihood of Amalfi. Now thevillage seems to thrive on tourists. Perhaps some of the tourists
are like myself and come to see if there is any connection between
themselves and that exquisite place.
Faced with the serene beauty of Amalfi I could not but
wonder how my family must have felt to leave such a magnificent
haven, to have left a place of such loveliness and peace for theeastern United States. But more importantly I wondered how
they felt leaving their history, their culture, their community.
Grandma Capasso had often talked of Amalfi. Often she
talked of La Chiesa di San' Andrea, St. Andrew's Church, and its
huge stretch of stairs that leads up to the Church doors and a viewof the village and the sea below. The Church plays a very
important role in my family's legends; legends about Great
Grandma and her assignations with the spirits. The story goesPreviously printed in the Gallatin Review 1986-87

94

that Great Grandma went to early mass each morning. One
morning the peasant woman made her way through the narrow,
twisting streets of Amalfi to San' Andrea's. The morning wasquiet and though quite dark, she noticed that a black dog, iI canenero, was walking behind her. The cane nero even followed her tothe church and up the many stairs. As Great Grandma made her
way up, she turned to look at the dog and the stairs below; she andthe dog were completely alone. Shewentup the last few steps andwaited there for the church to open. But when she turned again
the cane nero was no longer there. In the animal's place was a
lovely woman, a woman of radiance and peace, a woman who,
according to Grandma Capasso and any other relative who
knows the story, was the Virgin Mary. This is how I recall hearing
the story from Grandma Capasso, but my Italian relatives addedthat Great Grandma entered the church with the cane nero. In the
church were all the people she had known who had died. When
she turned from this scene, she saw the Virgin in place of the dog.
I went to the Church of San' Andrea. On my way I walked past
walls laden with bougainvillaea, past an open kitchen door witha chicken calmly resting next to a washing machine; I walked under laundry hanging from windows above and through narrow
streets wondering if I was passing some ancestral home. I did not
see the cane nero, but I felt I had somehow touched my past by
being in that beautiful village above the sea and in that churchthat has held such an important place in our family mythology.
After Amalfi we journeyed south to Calabria. We were noteven certain of the name of the town from where my father'sfamily had come - it was either Montalta or Altamonte. Besides
this confused name, we had another fact my father gave us that
he had heard from his father: the town was the highest spot in theregion, it was so high that, although you were in the mountains,
you could see the ocean. Keeping this in mind and after seeing thevillage of Altamonte on a modern and ancient map in the Vatican,
we decided Altamonte was the right place.
My thoughts during the trip to Altamonte were different than
the thoughts I had as I drove along the Amalfi Drive. In Altamonte there was a good chance that we would find relatives. Thisidea was unsettling. After all, what would I say? What would
they say when we showed up? My Grandfather Mirabella had left

95

his home at the end of the last century; he never returned and thefamily no longer communicated with us.
We drove east straight from the sea, into the mountains. We
drove for miles with no village in sight. It got later and later, andafter what seemed like hours we saw a walled mountain village
in the distance; that was Altamonte. We came to two roads and an
old gentleman walking along.
"Which is the best road to Altamonte?" we asked. He paused,stamped his feet to test the surface of the road, and then said
matter-of-factly, "E; ugua/e" - "They are the same." We continued on.
It was another man we met along the way who turned out tobe quite important. His car had broken down and he hailed us as
we rode by. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Altamonte," wereplied . "Good, I'll go with you; my car is not working." We tried
to avoid taking him; hadn't everyone in the North warned us ofwily robbers behind every tree and down every street in theSouth? But before we could say a word he was in the car.
Chattering away in a mixture of Italian and French he asked"Why are you going to Altamonte?" "To see if my relatives still
live there," I replied.
In the town, which was ancient, its church from the twelfth
century and a bit run down, we parked our car. Our passenger
insisted we go to a local bar and have a coffee. The cafe was tiny,
it had just enough room for a small bar and a square table in thecorner where a few old men were playing cards. As we stood atthe bar and sipped our espresso the bartender asked our hitchhiker who we were. "They are looking for their parenti,"relatives - he replied. That was really how the whole thing
happened. Once I said the name Mirabella, which is Mirabelli in
Italy, the bar came alive. The owner knew Mirabelli; they lived on
via Balbia. "I remember Michele," one man said. "He married
Josephine Speranno and moved to the United States," anothersaid. They were talking about my grandparents; my grandmother had also come from Altamonte. Then an amazing thing
occurred. One of the old men shuffled over, took my hand andsaid "Con osee New Rochelle?"-"Do you know New Rochelle?"
Now this is the place where I was born and where most of myrelatives still live. The coincidence of this moment shocked me.
96

As the old gentlemen explained, he had in his earlier years gone
to New Rochelle to find work, but unlike my grandfather, he had
returned to Altamonte. We learned that villagers often chose thesame place in the United States to seek work, in this way theywould have friends and family awaiting them.
Our hitchhiker decided to return our kindness by taking us tovia Balbia and the home of Vincenzo Mirabelli. I had actually
traveled thousands of miles for this moment but now that I was
about to meet these people I had thought about for so long, I was
terrified. Would these relatives be awful? Would my Italian failme? I had not learned Italian at home, but had to study it at school.
My family had lost the language. I was not only about to meet
people I had never seen, but speak to them in a language I had
taught myself.
When the hitchhiker knocked on the door and no one answered, I suggested we leave. "Dorme," he replied. "He's sleeping." It was four 0' clock in the afternoon and most of the village
was sleeping except for a few people, including the old man andwoman, still wearing the traditional wide-legged black velvet
pants and dress of long ago, who came out to see what theknocking was. The green shutters above opened out. A man in his
late sixties with grey hair stuck his head out of the window andlooked down at the three strangers below. "It's your relatives
from the United States!" yelled our hitchhiker. In a few moments
Vincenzo Mirabelli opened the door. He shook our hands andkissed us. He embraced us as if he had always known us. It was
only later sitting at the kitchen table and drinking grappa that welearned that Vincenzo was my father's first cousin; we wereactually related . Although I had mumbled in those first momentsthat I was the granddaughter of Michele Mirabelli, Vincenzo had
no idea who we were. He had just welcomed us in because hethought we were relatives. This was all he needed to know.
During our visit, as we sat chatting over huge bowls of pasta
and drinking wine, we learned more about each other and tried
to fill in what had happened over so many years. In all our time
together (we have been there twice) we were always made to feelat home. I particularly recall one meal with cousins who lived in
the countryside outside of Altamonte. The meal took hours to
prepare and we sat and talked while Rozina and Catarina rolled97individual pastas out on a board they held between them on theirlaps. We were sitting in a summer kitchen away from the houseand everywhere around us was the flowering broom, the fields
and the hills of Calabria.
This kindness, hospitality and instant recognition of ourbond, as if we had never lost touch, was repeated on our trip to
Acireale in Sicily. Here we met the relatives of my mother'smother who had left Amalfi for the south. They settled in Sicilyon the sea south of Taormina very close to the spot where
Odysseus fought the Cyclops. They expected us. A cousin in
California had always kept in touch with this part of the family.
So we had written and they had said, "Come."
When we arrived, the two families were waiting to greet us.
Clotilda had baked miniature cream puffs and we ate and sipped
espresso while they showed us photographs. Some of the pictures were very old; one was of my great grandparents, anotherof my grandmother Rosa dressed as a girl of the Edwardian era,surrounded by her parents, brothers and sister. Soon after thisphotograph was made Rosa left Italy and never returned.
We spent days with our family in Acireale. They showed us
Catania, Aetna, the markets; and they fed us foods we had nevereaten. These connections, these bonds, these are the things that
we have lost in the United States. It did not happen right away.
I remember when Grandma Capasso was alive we had enormous
Christmas dinners with thirty relatives and food, especiallydesserts, for a hundred. I recall that in my childhood I was always
surrounded by relatives. N ow almost all my aunts and uncles are
dead, but even when they were alive the individual families
began to spend holidays alone. Today the extended family only
gets together at weddings and funerals.
Many of my relatives have little interest in Italy, some do noteven know from which province their family originally came.
Although we all grew up in the Italian section of New Rochelle,
only one uncle lives there now. Sociologists will say this is
assimilation, that we have all learned to become part of theAmerican culture. I am not convinced that this is a good conclusion. If immigrants cut themselves off from the land and culture
they have left, they cut themselves off from their history. My
history in the United States begins at the close of the last century.
98But what of all the centuries before, what of all the other people,
what of their accomplishments, struggles, fears, their hatreds andloves? What happens to all this, this life, this heritage?
With the denial of this heritage often comes self-loathing. I
grew up embarrassed to be Italian. When I saw those new Italianimmigrants, I wanted nothing to do with them. They looked sad,miserable and afraid standing there in short woolen jackets
buttoned up tight and their hair cut short. I hated them forlooking sad and miserable. I was better than they were; I was an
American; they were not. What did they know? Nothing. They
could not speak the language; they did not know how to behave;they did not belong. What I did not realize then, was that inrejecting them I was rejecting myself. After all, they were just likemy grandparents fifty years earlier. These new immigrants wereexperiencing what my own ancestors had experienced. Wouldthe newcomers abandon the land of their birth too?
My grandparents tried to hold on to their culture, but myparents' generation could not. They realized that the predominant culture here did not think too highly of Italians or for thatmatter of any group which stood out and was different. So myparents assimilated. They did not speak Italian, dressed as
American as they could, and left the old neighborhood.
I recall one incident of stereotyping that shocked me in myearly years. One of my sister's high school friends thought that
because we were Italian our home should resemble the set for an
Italian comedy. Our mother, short and fat with a bun at the backof her neck, could always be found in the kitchen perpetually
preparing tomato sauce; above her head hung the requiredsausages, garlic and tomatoes. My father, of course, had a shapesimilar to mother, only with a large mustache and made his own
wine. When my sister's friend visited, she was shocked to find my"all-American" looking mom in her "all-American" kitchen.
I have always laughed at the foolishness of this story and I stillrecognize and reject the narrow-mindedness of the stereotype. I
also mourn the loss of those sausages and tomatoes hanging in
the kitchen. I mourn the loss of those touches that said this place
was a bit different from the rest of the world outside. They said
that this place had a special tradition, something to be proud of.
These touches reminded me that being Italian meant that a rich99

culture was behind me, that I could embrace my historical past,
not shun it.
Obviously these are symbols of a previous way of life, but theloss of these symbols signals the loss of a more complex and
precious thing - the loss of the cultural tie. Before my trip to
Calabria I do not think I would have acted like Vincenzo Mirabelli. I would not have opened my door, my arms and my heart,
if a stranger had knocked at my door one afternoon and said,"Hello, I am your cousin from Italy."
I realize that people must, to some extent, adjust to the newcountry to which they have moved. But it seems that some kindof balance is needed, a balance which will allow people to keepsome of their old culture and history while learning about thenew.
I think I have found some of that balance. The family here, theethnic connection may still be fragmented, but we always love to
see one another on those rare occasions. However, I do feel a realconnection to Italy and my family there and that in itself diminishes the sense of being so cut off from the past. Now when I thinkof that "long, stretching generation of Italians," I see my role in it.
But my role is to be played here; I am not in Italy. I can carry withme the memories and thoughts of "the old country" and all thosepeople I never met.
And as far as all that knowledge goes - I do not think it isuseless. That knowledge got me to this typewriter and to themoment of thinking about my past and my ethnicity. I know myrelatives in Italy will be pleased that I have written about this, andmaybe even my relatives here will too.

100

Joan Capra

The Italian Jewish Connection,or, The History of America
My maternal grandmother was the fourth child born to a family of Italian Jews, and their first child born in this country. In 1899
my great-grand parents Fortunata and Abramo Piperno emigrated
here from Livorno, a city on the northwest coast of Italy. As thestory goes, my bisnonna Fortunata was so elated to be here thatshe kissed the ground upon disembarcation. "America" is thename she swore she would give her next child, and so it was, andstill is. My grandmother America Zerga was born on Jan. 8, 1900,
and is a spirited 90 year old today. This year the family threw her
a surprise 90th birthday party, and what an event it was!
But, to back up just a little ... As Sephardic Jews in Italy, mygreat-grandparents (the Piperno family) represented one aspectof 2000 years of Italian Jewry. This history originated in the first
century when the Romans returned from Palestine with Jews asslaves ' . Sephardic Jews, however, trace ancestry to medieval
Spain. ("Sefarad" in Hebrew means Spanish.) When in 1492 monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain, many
resettled in Italy and other Mediterranean countries. Indeed, theword "ghetto" is Italian, referring to the restricted neighborhoodin Venice where these immigrants were required to live.
Culturally, Sephardic Jews differ in many ways from Ashkenazic Jews, who trace their ancestry to central or eastern Europe.
Language (the Ladino vernacular vs. Yiddish), food, customs andreligious practices vary greatly between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. In this country most Jews are Ashkenazic, so that theirculture is the dominant influence on American Jewish life. Thisdistinction is important to remember when following the story of
the Piperno family in America.
My great-grandparents Fortunata and Abramo settled in an
Italian neighborhood in New York City. They raised five children, all of whom were ultimately given "American" names.
Hence Vasco, Giulio, Egle, America and Quinto (the 5th!) became
Harry, Alfred, Mary, America and Bill. Partially because other
Italian Jews were scarce, the eldest three grew to marry Ashkena101

zic Jews: Harry and Alfred to Russians and Egle to a Hungarian.
An obstacle arose, however, when Egle's Ashkenazic mother-inlaw refused to believe an Italian could also be Jewish. Consequently it was required that Egle submit to the traditional processof "converting" to Judaism for the marriage to proceed.
This brings us to America. At 13, her first boyfriend, Charlie
Frascati, was Catholic. At that time she worked in a garment
factory, where she eventually fell in love with the elevator operator. This was George Zerga, another Italian Catholic. This tendency in their daughter was definitely a problem for Fortunata
and Abramo. After 5 years of courtship with George, America
ended the relationship because of parental pressure to marry a
Jew. She submitted to an arranged marriage with an Ashkenazicman, which was soon thereafter annulled due to issues of fraud.
This unfortunate incident led Fortunata and Abramo to succumbto their daughter's original wishes. She was allowed to marry
George Zerga, my grandfather. This conflict of America's youth
was resolved finally to her heart's delight.
What is significant about this radical turn of events and unorthodox shift in protocol is that, whereas religious ties were perhaps weakened by the marriage of George and America, theItalian ethnicity was reinforced. They then raised two daughtersof their own. My mother Luisa and aunt Gloria grew up in an
Italian neighborhood with an Italian Jewish mother and an Italian
Catholic father. Although educated as Jews, perhaps this profound precedent set by their own mother makes it not surprisingthat both girls also grew to marry Italian Catholics.
Luisa married Mansueto Capra, my father. As a child I remember his mother, my nonna Rosa, once said to me in a tone ofapproval: "Your mother is a good mother .... " As young as I was,I knew somehow that the unspoken remainder of this commentwas " ... even though she's a Jew."
The ways in which this history has affected me are multi-faceted. Ethnically I feel strongly Italian identified and much lessAmerican{ized) than my cousins, descended from mixed Ashkenazic and Sephardic parentage. Although not exposed to much
Hebrew, I knew enough Italian to understand a HolocausF story
told to me in Italy by my grandmother's cousin Eglina, who spoke
no English. A very short version is as follows: Mussolini's men
had raided a Piperno family birthday party with orders to arrest
102

eveyone there. Instead, these men were "simpatico" enough totake away only 2 of the14 family members present. In response to
the shock, the family split up and, with the help of Catholic
priests, hid in small mountain towns until the war was over. I
considered it one of the most valuable experiences of my life that
I was able to hear and understand this story.
Living in N ew York City as I do now enables me to absorb the
benefits of strong Jewish and Italian communities. In 1986, theCity University of New York sponsored the conference "Italy and
the Jews," focussing on the role of Jews in 20th century Italy.
Recently the Jewish Museum of New York presented "Gardens
and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy," which illuminated2000 years of the aesthetic synthesis of two rich cultures. Anotherinternational conference occurred in conjunction with this striking exhibit: "The Cultural Legacy of Italian Jewry." The accessibility of such events provides continuing self-education, the valueof which was always highly stressed by both my parents.
Today I am also fortunate to live in the same neighborhood
where my mother and grandmother were raised. It is still an
Italian neighborhood where I hear Italian spoken every day andwhere every day pasta, pane, formaggio and dolci are madefresh! On the ground floor of my apartment building my bisnonno Abramo once ran a used furniture store. In fact I live in thesame apartment where America's first boyfriend lived in 1913. It
gives me great pleasure to know that he would hang out mybedroom window and call to her across the courtyards as shehung out hers from around the corner.
In my experience with American lesbian communities I havefound it necessary to describe my heritage to Italian Catholics andAshkenazic Jews, as well as to others. Indeed this article is aneffort to that end. However in the last several years I have been
fortunate to participate in three separate Italian-American lesbian groups (in San Diego, S. F., and N.Y.C.). The deep strength ofbonds formed amongst friends from these groups fulfills a twofold longing for "family" : Italian and lesbian, amiche lesbiche.
Though others of my lesbian friends are Ashkenazic, I feel lessdrawn to Jewish-identified groups, partially because of general
Ashkenazic ignorance of the Sephardic culture and presence.
Once in the company of Ashkenazic lesbians, a woman jokingly
referred to my "Latin" features with the presumption that I was103not Jewish. On a more personal level, however, my lover is Jewish(Ashkenazic), and this is an important connection for me.
Within my traditional family, it has been fascinating to experience the myriad effects of the Sephardic/ Ashkenazic/Catholic
conglomerate. Once I witnessed my grandmother America andher sister Egle, both in their 80's, arguing over the spaghetti pot.
Egle, who had learned to cook for her Hungarian husband, preferred mushy pasta. America insisted on "al dente. 3" Egle was thebigger and older one. She placed herself solidly between the stove
and my grandmother's advance.
"What are you doing?" my Gram said. "It's done, it's time toturn it off.""What are you doing?" Egle said "It's not done, not yet.""What's wrong with you?" Gram said. "You want it to overcook?""What's wrong with you?" Egle said."You want it to undercook?" They danced around each other, determined to defend
what they knew to be right. As precious moments passed, however, America was quickly losing the fight for al dente.
It has also been exciting to observe my grandmother's increasingly engaged reactions as I worked on this piece. Not one tod well on the past and with a faded 90 year old memory, at first she
was reluctant and mildly exasperated. "What do you want toknow all this for? Are you writing a book?" Later I overheard her
say to my aunt: "Is she getting this publica ted?" Then as she
peeked over my shoulder at my scribblings, she asked, "Is all thisabout me? Are you going to get money for this book? If you getmoney, you have to split it with me." Eventually I found her
attempting to piece together my notes from out of the trash.
"Oooh, these people are going to turn over in their graves!" Whenshe finally decided she might in fact like all this attention, her face
lit up and she came out with "Just like on the TV show: This Is
Your Life, America Zerga!"

1. The History of the Jews of Italy, Cecil Roth, 1946.
2. The Italians and the Holocaust , Susan Zuccotti, 1988
3. The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, Edda Servi Machlin, 1981.
Also see: The Ghetto of Venice, Riccardo Calimani, 1987; Mussolini and theJews, Meir Michaelis, 1978; Storia degli ebrei in Italia by Attilio Milano,

1963.

104

Mary Saracino

On Being Italian-American:
An Introspection

I grew up in a small, working class town in upstate New Yorkduring the fifties and sixties, a second generation Italian-American. Both sets of my grandparents immigrated to the UnitedStates after World War I, and both had raised their children to beloyal American citizens. Their allegiance to their new homeland
was strong. They refused to eulogize the poverty they left behindin their mother country. America promised a better life. Even if it
didn't always deliver riches, it always delivered the hope of
riches, and that was reason enough for them to leave all theyknew, cross an ocean, and embrace a land whose customs andlanguage were strange to them.
To my parents, being Italian was second nature, like being
right-handed, a happenstance of biology. As first generation
Americans, they spoke English, the tongue of their native land.
Italian, the language of the "old country" as they called it, wasonly used to communicate with their fathers and mothers, andthen only until their parents' English improved. My parents
thought like Americans, talked like Americans, dreamed like
Americans. They never taught us kids to speak Italian.
But the town I grew up in had an undeniable Italian influence.
The immigrants settled in waves throughout the early part of thiscentury, until finally, the town was a transplanted "little Italy"
brimming with a hodgepodge of northern, southern and central
Italian men and women.
Storefronts with names like Caruso's, Calarco's, Romeo's andBove & Sons graced the streets of downtown. The "Tastee Freeze"
ice cream stand served spaghetti and meatballs. And the local
A & P grocery sold provolone cheese, genoa salami and fresh, imported parmesan. Dark-haired, olive-skinned Americans were ascommon as garlic, pasta and olive oil.
But while the town was blatantly Italian, in some ways I didn't
know that I was Italian - or more rightly I didn't know that105

everyone else in the entire world wasn't also Italian, because
almost everyone around me was. Likewise, nearly everyone was
Catholic. In fact, I didn't know a non-Catholic person 'until I
moved to Minnesota in 1967. And I only knew a handful of nonItalians, mainly because they happened to live right next door andacross the street from my family.
I was insulated in my ethnicity. I lived my Italian-American
childhood unaware of the cultural and religious diversity thatexisted outside my hometown. We lived a hybrid version ofAmerica, a blend of customs from the old country and traditions
from the new. Wetookwhatfitand discarded what didn't. Names
like Petrosino, Suffradini, Vergamini, Govianni, DeSarro andSaracino were American names to me. I was American. It was mygrandparents who were Italian, not me. I had no name at thatyoung age for assimilation, no language for the way America
sucked clean my ethnic bones leaving them to brittle under theblinding white Anglo-Saxon protestant sun.
As I grew older I was exposed to a wider definition of"American" culture through the media, through school, through themillions of subtle little ways that the message forms into consciousness. This is how I began to feel my difference and define
myself as an Italian-American.
I saw that I wasn't the same as the people on TV, in magazines,
in my school textbooks. I had no sense of ethnic pride. Italians, likeother peoples kept on the outside, were footnotes in the annals of
American history, mentioned briefly in lesson plans about "TheLand of Immigrants," or in Art History class when discussing
Renaissance music and art. What I didn't have, and wasn't taught,
were the tools to connect that those were my people, that was myculture, too. America's "melting pot" homogenized its immigrants.
What I came to know, melting pot theory notwithstanding,
was that the homogenized "stew" had a distinct flavor: WASP.
Someone else was calling the shots about what's okay and what's
not in America - the socially acceptable rules of behavior, thenorms that try to standardize us all. Anglo-Saxon patriarchs werestirring the "melting pot."
I can't remember when I started judging myself throughAnglo eyes, seeing myself the way they saw us. Italians are loud,1[6and emotional. We interrupt at will. We do not fit into "polite"social situations. We laugh when something is funny. We cry orrage when something is sad. We openly display affection, hugging, kissing and carrying on. We don't politely pass the foodaround the dinner table, observing social etiquette. We reach overeach other's plates to grab more meatballs, or sausage, and thenbelch at the table when the meal is over. We have funny superstitions, like praying to a blue-clad Virgin Mother, and a fierce
allegiance to family, which means of course that we're all crooks,
killers, and Mafiosos. We smell like garlic and have too many
kids. We eat funny food, "noodles," non-Italians call them, andwe give them funny little names like, spaghetti, rigatoni, mostaciolli, ziti.
Maybe it was an accident of biology, but I couldn't be like thewhite Anglo-Saxon protestant gatekeepers. If I were lucky, I
might be able to unlearn my "Italian behaviors," dress myself up
and pretend to be like them, but I could never erase the physicalevidence that I was not a WASP fairy princess. It hit me every time
I looked in the mirror.
As a kid, I hated the way I looked. I wanted blue eyes, blondhair and a button nose. My coarse, thick dark hair explodedaround my skinny, pale face. Long brown lashes covered my coolbrown eyes. And my nose never, ever turned up.
I used to lay in bed at night, face pressed sideways into mypillow trying to rearrange my nose, make it flip up at the end likea ski jump, like the movie star noses and the noses of glamorous
women I'd seen on TV and at the movies. When that method
failed, I turned to prayer, beseeching the Blessed Virgin Mother totransform my face into a shining vision of American beauty. I
hated the bump on the bridge of my nose. I would have given
anything to have it "fixed." I hated my small lopsided mouth, myfull lower lip nearly swallowed its thin upper half. Even at the ageof ten, I knew a woman's worth rested in the curve of her nose, thefull pout of her lips, the clear blue of her eyes, the silky golden hueof her hair. To be gorgeous in America was not to look like me. As
far as I knew, no Italian-American ever won the Miss America
pageant.
I grew up valuing light, hating dark. I fell in love with blueeyed, blond-haired movie star idols because that's who the WASP
107

world told me was worthy oflove. Certainly every little American
girl of the fifties and sixties was brainwashed to think she had tolook like those white, blond-haired beauties. But the cost to someis more dear. The gap between physical and cultural reality can be
too wide to bridge.
Ironically, my first movie star idol crush was on Connie
Stevens. She had the prerequisite dainty, upturned features andwhen I read in the fan magazines that she was half Italian, I was atonce elated and confused. I reasoned that her non-Italian genes
must have softened her into beauty. She was a living breathing
oxymoron: two things that didn't fit - Italian blood lines with
Anglo beauty. I forgave her being Italian because of that face,
while simultaneously clinging to the hope that, perhaps, even an
Italian woman could be as gorgeous as Julie Andrews, Katherine
Hepburn, or Julie Christie.
I wasn't the only one in my family who'd bought the WASP
version of beauty. Although my Italian-American father had
married my Italian-American mother, my four older brothers
never missed the opportunity to tell me that Italian women were
ugly. They got fat and grew mustaches when they got older, and
who wanted to kiss a fat, mustached woman anyway. They
vowed never to marry one. With the odds of defining ourselves as
desirable stacked against us, my two sisters and I accepted the"fact" that no self respecting Italian man would ever marry us.
Things like that mattered to me, then. Until I came out as a lesbianat seventeen.
But while the self-hating messages were ever-present, allaround me were images of strong Italian women. My grandmothers, my mother, my aunts, making ravioli in the kitchen,laughing
as they rolled the dough over floured boards. The intense darkeyes, the flash of white teeth through full lips, the strong hands
gestured in the air to make a point, or express a feeling. These
women with their brown hair, their olive skin, their long bumpy
noses taught me how to roll the dough, make the red sauce, bakethe bread. Some were fat, some were thin, some even had mustaches. But they all taught me about survival in an Anglo-centric
world. And that was true beauty. Maybe my brothers were wrong.
We moved to Minnesota when I was thirteen and I came face
to face with ethnic prejudice in my day-to-day life. I felt my
10:'3

Italianness on another whole level. In Minnesota, my physicaldifferences were very conspicuous. My brown-haired soul had
been dropped, without a parachute, into the middle of enemy
territory. More blond hair and blues eyes per capita than any
other state in the union, except maybe California. It was a nightmare. I thought all the Italians in America had been exiled from
Minnesota, kept out by some gubernatorial decree. It was a flukethat they ever let my family over the border.
Everywhere I went, everyone I met was either a Johnson,
Hagen, Swenson, Erickson, or Olson. Not an Italian nose in thebunch. It wasn't just that I was different, it was that my difference
mattered so much. To me and to them. The cruel, careless jokes
about my "hawk" nose by the Swedish-American boy in myeighth grade, suburban junior high science class. The blue eyesthat peered from every face in the halls between classes; the fairhair and fair complexions. Having to pronounce and spell myname over and over because they couldn't wrap their unfamiliar
tongues around all those vowels. I felt like a teenaged mutant
Southern European, a freak of nature, banished to live among
evolution's perfected race.
I felt so exposed in Junior High that I asked my mother to killme and put me out of my misery. Somehow being different gavethem the right to see into my mind and grab a chunk of my soul.
They could own me, these Scandinavians. They owned the wholeplace. I was too loud for their parties, too emotional for theirsilence. Too ugly compared to their picture perfect faces . They
made the rules, taught the classes, selected the prom queen,
defined reality. And it wasn't my version.
It wasn't until I got to high school that I finally met another
Italian student. She introduced me to St. Paul's Italian neighborhoods and a world, quite similar to the one I'd grown up in,
opened to me. The store fronts, the beautiful musical names, thedark hair and eyes. I looked in the mirror and, this time, smiled at
my own coffee-colored irises. This is what I am, I found myself
saying, like an amnesiac claiming her identity. This is good, true,
right, me.
I spent a lot of time, during high school, at Carbone's grocery
store and Cossetta's Deli excavating my cultural ruins. I bought,
cooked and ate real Italian food - not mushy Creamette noodles,
109

but robust garlic, fresh oregano, homemade, warm Italian bread.
Real Italian pasta, real Italian sausage, pungent black olives that
reminded me of Sunday dinners at my grandmother's house in
upstate New York. During high school, I slowly began to reteachmyself tha t, even in exile, I had a voice, a language my soul needed
to articulate.
Coming out as a lesbian was the final stretch of my journey
home. That I was able to name that part of myself in the midst ofwhat felt to me like Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian "headquarters" is still a puzzle to me. Getting to that essential core takes animmense amount of determination, a willingness to cherish yourself in the face of heterosexist, ethnocentric hatred, and say you
are more important than some arbitrary rule about the way
human beings should be. Maybe everything in my past had
prepared me after all. I fell in love with my high school best friend,a German-N orwegian American Lutheran girl, who was as opposite me as could possibly be. Sandy blond hair and, yes, blue eyes.
But, I learned to acknowledge my own beauty, while accepting
hers. In honoring her, I honored myself.
It took a trip to North Dakota and fifteen years of waiting tofind another Italian lesbian. She was a friend of a woman I was
dating. We met in a packed, smoky bar in Fargo. I easily picked
her out of the fair-haired crowd. When we saw each other, welaughed. The thick, dark hair, the brown eyes, the long nose. I
hugged her like a sister, like a reunion. We spoke fluent Italianlesbian. I didn't have to translate. I could, at last, speak my own
dialect. Without explanation. Without excuses.
Somewhere in the passage from childhood to adulthood I
learned the value of self-definition and the folly of the "one typefits all" WASP beauty. Being dark-haired and Italian-nosed isn'ta death sentence. I have come to value, even in Minnesota, the giftof being Italian. The pride of ethnicity is a statement of diversity.
Perhaps the American standard bearers assumed that, we on theoutside, would never embrace the power of our difference, or
realize the truth of our own beauty. To "come out" as a feminist,
as a lesbian, as an Italian-American, I had to peel back the thicklayers of cultural lies. What remains at the core is just me, reconciled from the inside out.

110Tasha Belfiore

I Capelli Moltissimi

My fathers father was Sicilian. And I am a woman with a lotof hair. Actually, I do not have more hair than many women. It's
just that I don't bleach it, pluck it, or otherwise remove or disguiseit, and it happens to be dark. I think people forget that we comelike this, soft and furry, embellished with lines and swirls of hairand fuzz and bristle.
My own relationship with my hair is a constantly evolving
process. Just when I forget, myself, that I am a hairy woman,someone reminds me. And it is more often than not someone whoshould best be able to relate to their own glorious fuzz who getsup in arms, often in subtle ways, about my own.
When my leg hairs, my armpit hairs, and my facial hairsbegan to show up, dark and bold, it was my father who told me
I looked like a gorilla. Of course he was also the one who said, in
response to my repeated borrowing of his clothes, loose-fitting
jackets, sweaters, shirts, wacky '70s ties, that he thought I shouldstop wearing "men's" clothes, because if I wore "women's"
clothes, he could be more sure how I would turn out. I supposethat went for body hair too. The unspoken word then, of course,
was lesbian. Somehow wearing clothes that he associated withwhat a woman should look like would ensure that I would not be
a lesbian. By the same token, I suppose, removing my body hair,as though it were not a natural, inherently female thing, would
equally ensure my heterosexuality. Well, perhaps he was right,
because I neither removed my body hair, nor stopped wearing"men's" clothes, and 10 and behold, I am a lesbian.
Not that it was always as easy as it is now. When I was in highschool, I did a lot of theater. Once, while during a rehearsal, I wasalone on the stage with the entire cast in the audience watching,and my little blond brother came skipping down the aisle, pausedin front of the interrupted rehearsal and called up to me "gee,Tash, I wish I had a mustache like yours." Strangely, I was both
embarrassed and proud to have my mustache pointed out. I got
so that I commented on my mustache, or whatever body hair wasillobvious at the time, to make other people confront it, admit its
existence. Because my leg hair could not be seen from the audience, I used to joke that I should put mascara on it to bring it out,
as we all did to our eyelashes.
While other girls plucked at and tortured their tender eyelid
skin, I argued with my mother, who brandished tweezers whenever she got me alone in a small room. And once, years later, I met
my father at a subway stop to go for supper. He smiled and put
his arm around me, then started squinting at my face. He brushed
the little hairs between my eyebrows with his finger, and said"you know, you really should get rid of that hair between youreyebrows." I greeted him cheerfully back by saying "you know
dad, you should really get rid of the hairs between your eyebrows." He laughed, and said "no really." "No really," I said.
But the biggest invasion happened in Italy. I went to visit
some relatives I barely knew and hadn't seen in many years. I
spoke almost no Italian, and for nearly a week, found myself inthe middle of huge extended family arguments over whose house
I should stay at, which cousin I should go out with, or where mynext meal would come from. These discussions were punctuatedwith aunts and uncles grabbing my cheeks or pulling my hair andexclaiming over how "bella" I was, and with plates of foodshoved in front of me to tide me over. One afternoon, Aunt
Carmella and a cousin grabbed my shoulders, turned me toward
them, and smeared something on my upper lip, all the whilesmiling and chattering. To my efforts at questioning what they
were doing, they shushed me and explained about women things
to the other relatives in the room. Some time later, they took myhand and led me into the bathroom where they painfully wiped
off the cream, leaving a puckered, raw, pink and very bald space
where my mustache had been. Uncles and cousins continued tosmile and grab my cheeks and exclaim over how "bella" I was.
But I was traumatized. Upon my return to France, my closest
friend took one look at me and stared and stared, saying thatsomething had changed but she couldn't figure out what. FinallyI told her, and she cried. It was a part of me, seared off.
My hair has been short for several years. At least one out of
every two white men who don't know me greets me as "sir." Now
I live in the south, and my hair is longer, on one side of my head,112

I still get called sir, this time by both men and women, but only ifthey are looking me in the face, or from the short side of my head.
I respond by calling the men "rna' am," or with a smile and a long
look, right in the eye. Southern graciousness doesn't know what
to do with mistaken gender, not to mention direct eye contact.
It was only a few years ago that my chin hairs began to comein. They are black and curly, and not too numerous. But for two
years in a row, my sister, much blonder' than I, has taken it uponherself to comment, seemingly without judgment, "gee, Tash, I
never noticed you had so much hair under your chin." Well,
clearly, she had.
I love the lines my eyebrows and mustache create on my face,horizontal breaks in the vertical lines of my narrow jaw, longstraight nose,straight dark hair. Like smiles, resting, waiting for
my mouth to follow suit. I love the feeling of the soft curls of one
leg's hair against the other leg. I cannot imagine brushing against
the stubble of mine or another woman's shaven body. A 4-yearold, blond, blue eyed boy, with a blond, blue eyed mother,reached up to my face recently, and touched my cheek with his
fingertips, staring at my mustache, and said, inquisitively andsoftly, "you are so brown." I am not very brown, but he is not used
to seeing shadow and darkness from hair on the faces of women.
It was loving and tender, and made me very happy. My stepsister, when very young, chose games to play with me in which
one of us thought of a part of the body and the other asked
questions until she guessed which part. She repeatedly chosemustache, armpit hair, leg hair or eyebrows, focusing very intently on my uncovered and unashamed body.

1J3

Chris Cuomo

The Wax Problem
The first time I think I used wax
The wax came in a pink box labeled
ZIP
Fast Easy Effective
I melted the hard puke green substancein a little double boiler until it was liquid
And I let the green stuff cool a bit
And when it began to thicken
I scooped some of it up
with the enclosed popsicle stickprovided just for that purpose
So I painted the hairs above my mouthwith the burning substance
It cooled hard and fast
Easy Effective
My face in the mirror
had a hard green mustacheand resembled a child
whose runny nose had gotten
way out of hand
When the wax had cooled completely
Eyes tearing
Forehead straining
I grasped at the edge of the lumpand tried to tear it away from my face
ZIP ZIPThis was not easy
Effective Fast
The brain cannot tell the hand
PULL THE HAIR FROM THE FLESH
While the lip tells the brain
THIS PAIN MUST STOP NOW

n4

Without ample meditation on
and dedication to
the given act
Of course
I could only pull that wax off
bit by bit
So I stood in front of the mirror
with half of a green wax snot mustache
and a piece of hairy wax
hanging from my burned lip
ZIP ZIP ZIP
Prayingthat I would not get caught

"- "

J
Nuda
elizabeth fides
115

Darci Cataldo

Two Kinds of People in the World
When my grandmother died a few years ago, I dreamed shewould come back taller and richer, flippant and flamboyant. She
would wear big earrings and fancy stockings. Her life had been
everything opposite of fancy or flippant.
Like all her sisters, her name was Mary. Mary Josephine.
Seventeen to twenty-two sisters and brothers depending on who
told the story. She had nine kids of her own. My dad was one of
the youngest. She and my grandfather were from the same small
mountain town east of Naples. My grandfather immigrated alone
as a teenager. They were married in rural New York.
My grandmother was a small woman. She slept on the floor
a lot - those nights my grandfather had no use for her. She
plowed the land they homesteaded without a horse. She tended
a flower garden in her yard. Her house was old, big, and not clean.
She cooked as if obsessed: noodles all over the house and chairs,
and the smell of sauce, yet most of her life she wasn't allowed toeat at the table with the men.
My grandmother was old, tired, and angry long before I wasborn. Poverty, racism and sexism had snatched away any softness from her. I remember her as a coarse woman who walked
heavily, without grace. Not a movement wasted on style. Every
second of life was toward survival; nothing was left over.
My grandmother saw only two kinds of people - Italian andnon-Italian. What then did she think of me? Half Anglo, half
Italian, a young girl who was thin and tall, but who looked backat her with her own brown eyes.
I see things a lot like my grandmother would. I see Italianpeople and non-Italian people. I always notice. I always know.
My early ideas about being Italian were drawn mostly from her- strong, loyal, powerful, yet tragic and isolated. Later I began tosee being Italian as somewhat hidden, secret. No one ever talked
about it. At times, my dad would take my brothers and me to an
Italian-American Club picnic. There he'd be very animated andcomfortable, laughing, speaking Italian, eating, playing bocce
116ball and miniature golf. When we went home, it was like leaving
one world to enter another. Being Italian became hidden andunspoken.
Away from other Italians, my dad has always seemed humiliated by his history. When I was about seven, I asked him to teachme Italian. He replied very angrily that it was not something I
needed to know. I believe now that my dad was trying to shelterme from the shame and poverty he associates with being unable
to speak English. I think he was relieved that his kids were tall,thin, and fair, like his wife, yet I have also felt his disappointment
at my not being Italian enough. And, I have often felt like anoutsider, like the other people, the non-Italians.
The feeling of what being Italian means to me has beenbroadening. This change started many years ago. At sixteen I fellin love with a beautiful young Italian woman who had that senseof humor that is particularly Italian (non-Italians sure don't haveit!) . She accepted my half-Italianness with open arms. I found ahome with her that I didn't have before, a place to be all of me.
With her came a different image of being Italian-American. It's
not just about silence, isolation, or what I eat on Sundays. It's
about the passions I feel, the way I hold my hands, the way I lookat the world, and the way the world sees me. It's about voicing myheart and spirit. Today I feel so much more of who I am, although
I still struggle with not feeling enough of one or the other. I don't
speak Italian, can't cook to save my life, and look half Italian, not
Italian. Yet when I sit in a room with Italians, hear an Italian name,or see an Italian feature or gesture, I feel home. I feel a wholenessabout me.
Inside me, I carry my grandmother. I hold her in the way I
move or glance at the world. I remember the power of her
presence. She worked like a servant and was treated like a farmanimal. Yet when she walked into a room, something changed.
She possessed something powerful. Perhaps it was from the Old
World. Whatever it was, it sustained her. I wonder if it willsustain me. I have her eyes. They look back at me from the mirror.
In the world, I, like her, notice and remember people as Italian or
non-Italian. And I am both.

117

Maree Dzian Ecrevan

To Grandmother's Bed
remember the times you silently led
me to grandmother's bed
to grandmother's bed
grandma, little old grey-haired woman
with her anger, heritalian accented anger.
most of the time i didn't like her'cause she picked on us girls
and idolized you"Your brother's the man of the house."
Jackie, Jackie, wonderful Jackie.
i could have admired her qualities.
she would knit and crochet for hours
turning out beautiful afghans, sweaters
and lace.
i could have admired those colorful afghans
had i not the memory of the woolen squares
scratchy beneath your weight on me
on her bed when she went to visit our aunt
who lived in Brooklyn.
you thief
you stole my childhood, my precious adolescence,
my attitudes, my undeveloped beauty.
you thief
you robbed me of my grandma,that i must link the memoriesof the mother of my motherto your unholy deeds.
i speak to her directly now.
i know that she is with me now.
you hold no place of honor.
you have no more power over me.
118

j
~~ I

\' (r

"Everlasting, Amen"~argaretTedesco

119

.J

j

Aro Veno

BaccalaI remember what had been soaking
in a big pot in the bathtub for several days
before it was made into three or four
different dishes to eat on Christmas Eve.
My father would get it at the fish store
a week ahead of time. It looked so weird
because it was salted and dried.
Out would come the biggest pot we had.
Take it to the bathroom and fill it up in the tub.
In would go the dried up pieces of flesh tosoften and stink for the next 5 or 6 days.
We'd keep the door closed but there was
no avoiding going in there.
Everyone would complain loudly
about how bad it smelled
except for my grandmother. She loved it.
It made her laugh to hear the rest of us.
I can see her sitting in the kitchen laughing
her toothless grin, her belly bouncing up and down
under her crossed arms.
What a relief when Christmas Eve finally came.
The smelly stuff was transformed
into a delicious meal.
My favorite was the deep-fried patties
so crisp and greasy.
Then there was the saladwith flaked fish, lemon, parsley, garlic and oil.
And from the oven would come the tomato version
with pignoli nuts and raisins
which went over spaghetti.
We'd all agree it was worth the agony.
What a tradition. We loved it.
We called it Baccala.
120

elizabeth fides

Salsa di Pomodoro

4 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, peeled and thinly sliced
1 carrot, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
3 or 4 fresh parsley sprigs, coarsely chopped
3 or 4 basil leaves, coarsely chopped
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
4 tablespoons tomato paste
1 cup vegetable broth1 large can peeled tomatoes
freshly ground pepper and salt to taste
Heat the oil and butter in a big saucepan. When they begin tosizzle, add onions and saute for about 5 minutes. Then add theherbs and vegetables. Saute a few more minutes.
Dissolve the tomato paste in the vegetable broth, add to onion
mixture and cook for 10 minutes. Stir frequently to prevent thesauce from sticking to the pan.
Add the peeled tomatoes and blend well with the rest of the
mixture. Cook 45 minutes on low heat. Put the whole mixture
through a food mill or sieve. If the sauce seems too runny after
being sieved, return it to the heat and simmer until thick. Serves
6. Brava! Mangiamo!

121

Janet Capone

In Answer to Their Questions
at the lesbian feminist writers' meeting,the ones spoken with only an eyebrow, a look:"Not that you don't deserve the space, but what
would you write about being Italian-American?"In answer to his questionin line at the bank"Capone? Are you from Chicago?"
In answer to their undisguised guffaw at the Gay Pride March"Bay Area Sicilian & Italian-American Lesbians!
That's pushing it, isn't it?"
In answer to the guy reading my flier over my shoulder
at Copymat:"Now that's a specialized group!" (as if WASP
ruling class male is not)"Yes," I said, going for the stereotype, "we specialize inmachine guns."
In answer to the queries, guffaws, blank stares,
nonchalant hateful slips, historically incorrect power trips,
but mostly for myself and my commare lesbiche
per la maggior parte per noi
Italianis where I'm understood,
loved, and included,
where aglio e olio
is Neopolitan
for soul food.
Italian means my living habits
are not quirks,
but ceremonies filled with tradition
mostly invisible
to your non-Italian eye.
122My skin coloris olive, not white
and the hair spreading down my arms and legs and over
the top of my lip
is a dense garden cultivated for centuries
by Neopolitan peasantsbending, digging, dropping their sweat
into the soil like seeds,
passing down their genes
subsisting, resisting their own extinction
down there nel mezzogiorno,
the land of the forgotten,
so low and indestructible,
they clung like cockroaches to life.
My skin is olive, like theirs,
and the dark hair, spreading down my arms and legs and over
the top of my lip
grows thicker and thicker
the more black pepper I shakeover my spaghetti.
Italianmeans the boat
from the boot-shaped country
The immigrants teeming like lentil beans
in New York Harbor
Exhausted and sick, crammed in thickbelow the decks
to make a three week passage
over icy water.
They watched their dead heaved overboard by authorities
who altered passenger lists,
removing Italian lives like lint
from old clothing.
Italianmeant whole families herded in line
for a doctor's exam,la tua nonna singled out
as defective, sent back,Italian, in fact123

were the syllables and vowels
of our long and tuberous family names
lopped off on Ellis Island,
our bloodlines stopped
like zucchini chopped in a Cusinart,
the original American Express.
Because Italian meanta country divided,
the Northerner's boot in Sicily'S ass
the Neopolitan shit ona country torn, and halfliving in miserable squalor
taxed to the point of starvationby the affluent North.
Italianmeant my Neopolitan grandparents
losing family one by one
to starvation and disease
finally forced to leave
one by one, eldest sonsfirst in line for the boattaking them to a land of plenty
whose streets are lined with silver and gold
Italianmeant my grandfathers Dominic and Donato,
supporting their wives and children
by sweeping the streets of New York,the custodians, but never the beneficiariesof that wealth.
Because Italian meant
you do what you must to survive
You keep your mouth shut
Celebrate what you got
and thank God you're alive
It meant one generation later
five kids draped on couch and chairs
TV blares, Sinatra sings while the phone ringsand my mother finally flings her hands in the air
invoking the Goddess "Madonna!
Give me one hour of peace. One hour!"
Italian -American
meant our neighborhood
laid out like a village in Naples:
Ambrosio, Iovino, Capone, Barone, Nardone, Cerbone,
Luisi, Marconi, Mastrianni, Bonavitacola,the" Americans"living side by sidewith "those guinea straight off the boat."
Italianmeant Sunday morning sausage and meatballs
foaming in oil,a pot of pasta water set to boil
and the hollow tapof a wooden spoon
or Mrs. Nardone chasing us with the broom
her tomato plants flattenedby mean-mouthed kids
who mimicked her broken English
with "up-your-ass" gesturesthat crossed an 'ocean
to roost on our hands,
olive-skinned American kids
who didn't knowwhat the hell we were saying
or to whom.
Italian meant the old men
playing bocce ballin Hartley Park,Mr. Bonavitacola roasting peppers
in his backyard,
and every nose in the neighborhood
inhaling the aroma.
Italian
was the horn honk

125

of Ambrosio's red convertible
parading up and down the street
on Saturday afternoon
his comings and goings announcedwith a musical tootthat never would suit his more Americanized
Italian neighbors.
Italianwere the yellow patties of polenta
frying in a pan,a pot full of escarole greensor Ma spreading the lentil beanson the kitchen table,
talking to me
after I'm home from schoolsorting the good from the bad,the good from the bad,at the kitchen table.
Or my sister Lisa
pouring salt into a flat saucer on the table
and telling us: "Here's the white people,"pouring pepper over them, "And here's the black people,"pouring olive oil over them, "And here come the Italians!"
and us squealing with laughteras the oil bubbles slither and slide
over the salt and pepper,
retaining their distinct
and voluptuous identity.
But Italian also means
those dagos, garlic breath bastards, stupid wops
My guinea nose and greasy skinGinzos straight off the boat
Slick-haired, like vermin, they bring disease
Italian means the entire Mafia
looking over my shoulder
whenever I cash a check"Capone? She's from Chicago!"126

and their laughter
because they associate my Italianness
first and foremost with a killer
and hardened criminal.
But, second generation American-Italianalso means I do what I must to survive,means I won't keep my mouth shut,
won't shrink to fit
someone else's definition of our lives
Italian-Americanmeans my living habits
are cultural ceremonies, not quirks
My skin is olive
And the hair spreading down my arms and legs and over
the top of my lip
grows thicker and thicker
the more I resist,the more I insist
on possessing
entirely who I am.

127

Self Portrait
Anna Cusenza128

- - - - - ' - - - - - - - - - Contributors' Notes
Angie Angela is an Italian-American lesbian, born in Italy, of Neapolitan and Sicilian heritage. Her parents emigrated to Belgium when she
was five, and to America when she was 13. Angie has an M.A. in Social
Science with a concentration in Women's Studies.
Dodid Azpadu has published two novels. Saturday Night in the Prime ofLife is about Sicilian-Americans, and no one shoots anyone. The samecannot be said for her novel Goat Song. Her mother's people were fromthe Kalso, an Arab ghetto in Palermo. Her father's people were from
Genoa. She has been active in women of color groups in Iowa City, San
Francisco, and Albuquerque, where she now lives.
Tasha Belfiore - I am from Washington D.C., where I have been
involved in many kinds of lesbian & feminist politics. Currently I am agraduate student in zoology, living in the south, getting used to theslower place, & the available time & energy to write & take pictures.
Janet Capone was raised in N.Y. Her grandparents came from villages
near Naples around 1900. It took her longer to come out as aN eopolitanAmerican than it did for any of her other identities: lesbian separatist,
feminist, revolutionary, community activist, poet, and fiction writer.
She has writing in: Lesbian Ethics, Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, and la bella
figura, and is at work on her first novel.
Joan Capra is a professional violinist who loves living in New York City.
o ard Ca tald 0 is a second genera tion N eopoli tan-American. She lives in
Oakland and works doing research in immunology.
Chris Cuomo: These days I'm working on my PhD in philosophy,
teaching environmental ethics, and moving my body around as much as
possible. I am a lesbian separatist living in a Midwestern town where all
the food in the grocery store is wrapped in plastic.
Anna Cusenza is a first generation Sicilian-American lesbian visual
artist and poet living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared nationallyand internationally.
Mary Russo Demetrick - my works have been published in Plainswoman, la bella figura, forthcoming in Voices in Italian Americana, andelsewhere. I look to my Italian heritage for inspiration and strength.
Rachel Guido deVries, poet and novelist, co-founded and directs The
Community Writers' Project in Syracuse. Her novel Tender Warriors was
published in 1986; fiction editor of Ikon, her work has appeared in Yellow
Silk, Voices in Italian Americana, Ikon, Conditions, and Sinister Wisdom .

129

Maree Dzian Ecrevan: I am a 47 year old fat Italian dyke. At 36, I
acknowledged my childhood victimization for the first time. At 47, I am
closer than ever to a guiltless resolve and a measurable peace. lowe thisto the support I've gleaned from my sisters, who courageously tell thetruth, when and if they can.
elizabeth fides - i live happily in oakland, ca. with my partner. i am an
artist, vegetarian, gardener and i teach deaf children. in tutti i miei lavori
rni piace mol to usare Ie mani, e credo profondamente nelle donne e nella
sopravvivenza della nostra pianeta bellissima.
Francesca Forte (Fran Roccaforte, "Francesca") - born 1956, 2nd generation ex-Brooklynite Neapolitan/Sicilian with MUCH COLOR. Bay
area photographer-artist healer, videographer /poet N.Y (S.V.A.) art
schooled, CA (Laney) video ed, exhibited widely & published too. Loves
to dance, create masterpieces on film & honeymoon in Venezia.
Kathy Freeperson was born Kathy Telesco in Rome, N.Y., 1947. After
receiving formal education in schools and colleges, escaping the ironmills from her working class Italian-American family, she struggles towrite and live with as much dignity as possible. After being ray-gunned
for years she is now bushed. She lives with her two four-legged bestfriends in Gainesville, Fla., and dreams of funding for her writing as wellas activism.
Diane Gravenites is an Italian-American woman living in Sonoma
County, Ca. In her profession as a psychotherapist, she helps people findand love their lost bodies. In doing so, her woundedness is healed, andshe creates some intimacy along the way.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan books include Winter Light (Chantry Press,
1985), Luce D'lnverno (Bi-lingual) and The Weather of Old Seasons. She is
the editor of Footwork: The Paterson Literary Review. She lives with her
husband Dennis in Hawthorne, New Jersey.
Demetria Iazzetto is a 3rd generation Italian-American lesbian. Her
mother's family came from Sicily and her father's parents came from
Naples. She grew up in a working-class, Catholic, Italian-American
community on Chicago's near west side. She has a Ph.D. in Women'sStudies.
Denise Leto - I am a half Sicilian, half Southern Italian-American poetand performer. One day, while letting my imagination run away withme, I found myself on a most astounding journey of which this issue isbut a dazzling beginning. Credo nelle nostre voci. Benedette sono Ie
donne di coraggio.

Laurie Mattioli lives in the Bay Area. Recently, she stopped checking thebox marked "white" on ethnic data questions and started creating a box
marked "Italian-American." She is kept busy trying to memorize thenames of all the different styles of pasta. However, Rigatoni and Rigaletti still confuse the hell out of her.
Mary Anne Bella Mirabella is an associate professor of Humanities in
the Gallatin division of New York Uni versity. She lives in New York City
with her husband & two children.
Celine-Marie Pascale is author of two books, numerous poems, shortstories and essays. She writes with feline patience while earning a living
as a textbook production service. She is bisexual.
Frances Tramontana Patchett is a community education specialist for
Fairfax Public Schools. Fran facilitates reading seminars & presents
workshops on "Women & Understudied Groups in the Curriculum."
She lives in Burke, VA with her husband Jay & their two children.
Mary DeLorenzo Pelc: I am a half Italian, half Gypsy, butch lesbian,musician, playwright, a cultural archaeologist of sorts, digging andsifting through years of silence and assimilation to excavate and keep
alive the passions, emotions and dreams of my people.
Vincenza Petrilli photographs memories from her Southern ItalianAmerican girlhood. She and Bill live in S.P. and often dream of moving
to Cleveland. Together they balance work, art and being parents to
Damico.
Karen Marie Porter - Sicilian-American womon-Ioving-Ieo-feministwitch. I'm currently writing/ illustrating a children'S book of poetry &learning to tattoo. This is my first published piece. Anyone need an
ambitious, unjaded illustrator? Write P.O. Box 5545, Atlanta GA 30307.
Molto Grazie, cara Nonna & Nonno.
Jean Rietshel- I live in the Pacific Northwest and earn my living as an
attorney. I grew up in New York amidst a large extended ItalianAmerican fami! y . My piece is largely factual al though 1'm sure any of myrelatives would tell it differently.
Stacie Samson is a writer, storyteller and ex-tenant activist, trying to
make sense of reality in Cambridge, MA. She can often be found seatedpensively at a cafe, notebook in hand. After many months of covering
lesbian events for a local gay paper, she has sworn off women's music
concerts. Her favorite place in the world is the city of Montreal.
Mary Saracino is a full-blooded, second generation Italian-American.
She grew up in the Finger Lakes region of western New York State andcurrently lives, with her partner, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A freelance131marketing/ advertising writer, she also writes fiction and is currently
working on her first novel.
Rosanna Sorella was born and raised in the Bay Area. She hopes one day
to finish a Ph.D. in something, welcomes suggestions as to just what. In
the meantime, she earns her living by teaching college English.
Diana Souza is a graphic interpreter of visions & dreams who has
illustrated & designed many books on feminist & spiritual subjects.
Diana is also a photographer. The photo shown here was taken in Ithaca,
New York.
Patrizia Tavormina: I am a 23 year old radical Sicilian-Canadian dyke,
and fight for lesbian rights wherever I go. For the past year and a half,
I have worked with a lesbian group to eradicate heterosexism in academia, and to implement a Lesbian Studies programme at my university.
I am also active in recording Lesbian Herstory in Quebec. I have neverpublished anything before this.
Margaret Tedesco has been doing performance work for fifteen years.
She also does some visual art. She moved to San Francisco 11/2 years
ago. Her background is Calabrese/Barese.
Sheri Tornatore is an Italian-American Lesbian Artist living in Austin,
Texas. She is the co-founder and co-director of Acme Art Cooperative
Gallery. She is a multi-media artist whose last project was a mural in
Austin.
Aro Veno - I am a 2nd generation Italian/American Lesbian who
writes music, does carpentry, pottery, embroidery, crochet, massage
and gardening. I love the world in its natural state. More than anything,
I wantto live self-sufficiently and to see the end of the monetary system.

132

----~-------- Books Received
My Jewish Face & Other Stories chronicles the coming of age and coming
out of a daughter of the Jewish Left and former Sinister Wisdom editor
Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz. 1990, $9.95, an Aunt Lute Foundation book,Spinsters/ Aunt Lute Press, PO Box 410687, S.F., CA 94141 .
Speaking for Ourselves - Short Stories by Jewish Lesbians (inc. many Sinister
Wisdom contributors), edited by Irene Zahava. 1990, $8.95, The Crossing
Press, PO Box 1048, Freedom, CA 95019.
Finding The Lesbians - Personal Accounts From Around The World - 29
dykes tell tales of quest and discovery, with an intro. by Alix Dobkin,edited by Julia Penelope and Sarah Valentine. 1990, $10.95, Crossing.

All Women Are Healers -A Comprehensive Guide to Natural Healing,includes stones & crystals, Reiki, Chinese healing, acupressure, reflexology, pendulums, herbs, homeopathy, flower remedies and more withspecific instructions, by Diane Stein. 1990, $12.95, Crossing.
Crime Against Nature - brilliant lesbian poetry from the viewpoint of alesbian mother of sons by Minnie Bruce Pratt, 1989 Lamont Poetry
Selection. 1990, $8.95, Firebrand, 141 The Commons, Ithaca, NY 14850.
Movement in Black - Pat Parker's signature volume of poetry, originallypublished in 1978, in a new edition with foreword by Audre Lorde. 1990,$8.95, Firebrand.
New, Improved! Dykes To Watch Out For - the fantastic and funny cartoons of Alison Bechdel. 1990, $7.95, Firebrand.

Jewish Women's Call for Peace - A Handbook for Jewish Women on the Israeli/
Palestinian Conflict is a handbook for understanding and organizing,edited by Rita Falbel, Irena Klepfisz, and Donna Nevel with a preface byGrace Paley. 1990, $4.95, Firebrand.
exile in the promised land is the memoir of 14 years in Israel as a feminist
leader, elected member of Knesset, mili tant peace activist and lesbian by
Marcia Freedman, 1990, $8.95, Firebrand.
Simple Songs, stories set in a variety of Native American/white childhood and adult lesbian contexts by Vickie Sears. 1990, $8.95, Firebrand.
Because of India - New and Selected Poems by wonderful, funny andincisive lesbian poetSunitiNamjoshi. 1989,$8.95, Onlywomen Press,38
Mt. Pleasant, London WC1X OAP England.
Stranger Than Fish, lesbian feminist short stories by J.E. Hardy. 1989,$8.95, Onlywomen Press.
Crazy - a novel in which a lesbian librarian and writer gets locked up
and finds the road to self reclamation by Carolyn Weathers. 1989, $8.95,
Clothespin Fever Press, 5529 N . Figueroa, LA, CA 90042.
133Lesbian Lists numbers us from actressess and scholars to those who diedyoung - a great bathroom book by Dell Richards. 1990, $8.95, Alyson
Publications, 40 Plympton St., Boston, MA 02118.
A Week Like Any Other - Novellas & Stories of women's li ves in the Soviet
Union by Natalya Baranskaya, trans. from Russian by Pieta Monks.
1990, $9.95, The Seal Press, PO Box 13, Seattle, WA 98111.
The Haunted House a first novel abou the repercussions of growing up in
an alcoholic family by Rebecca Brown. 1990, $8.95, The Seal Press.
Murder by the Book is lesbian Helen Black's first mystery caper, by Pat
Walsh. 1990, $8.95, Naiad Press, PO Box 10543. Tallahassee, FL 32302.
Berrigan is a reprint of Vicki P. (Gingerlox) McConnell's first lesbiannovel, set at college in the '70s. 1990 (1978), $8.95, Naiad.
Lesbians in Germany: 1890's-1920's - fiction, poetry, essays and historical commentary, edited by Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson. 1990
(orig. pub. in 1980), $8.95, Naiad.
Lifestyles, wherein a dyke and straight woman, fall in love at a resort anddeal with each other's lives, by Jack Calhoun. 1990, $8.95, Naiad.
The Chesapeake Project, a first mystery / suspense/ romance lesbian novel
set among the crabbers by Phyllis Horn. 1990, $8.95, Naiad.
Montana Feathers, a lesbian Western of the late 1800s by Yellowthroat
author Penny Hayes, 1990, $8.95, Naiad.
Death Down Under, #3 of the Detective Inspector Carol Ashton mystery
series takes place in Australia, by Claire McNab. 1990, $8.95, Naiad.
(EX)TENSIONS - Re-Figuring Feminist Criticism explores the politicalnature of identity through analyzing women's literature. 1990, $10.95,
Univ. of Ill. Press, 54 East Gregory Drive, Champaign, IL 61820.
My Life A Loaded Gun - Dickinson, Plath, Rich & Female Creativity, literary
thought by Paula Bennet. 1990, $12.95, Univ. of Ill. Press.
Love and Politics: Radical Feminist and Lesbian Theories, survey & discussion of radical thought in the 2nd wave by Carol Anne Douglas, an editorof Off Our Backs. 1990, $12, Ism Press, PO Box 12447, S.F., CA 94112.
Sarah's Daughters Sing - A Sampler of Poems by Jewish Women is a richcollection - something wonderful for everyone, ed. by Henny Wenkart.
1990, $11.95, KTAV Publishing House, 900 Jefferson St., Box 6249,
Hoboken, NJ 07030-7205.
The Spectral Mother - Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis - new theory
on Freud by Madelon Sprengnether. 1990, Cornell University Press, 124Roberts Place, Ithaca, NY 14850.
The Green Dream is Olga Cabral's 7th book of poetry, with art by Grambs
Miller. 1990, $5, Contact II, Box 451 Bowling Green NY, NY 10004.
134

Inessential Woman -Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought - anargument against white, middle-class bias in theory by Elizabeth V.
Spelman. 1990, $11.95, Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108.
The Global Ecology Handbook - What You Can Do About the Environmental
Crisis, instructions by Global Tomorrow Coalition. 1990,$16.95, Beacon.
Beyond Oppression - Feminist Theory and Political Strategy, which includes a call for women to be 50% of all governing officials as a constitutional amendment, by M.E. Hawkesworth. 1990, $22.95 (cloth), Continuum, 370 Lexington Ave., NY, NY 10017.
Gertrude Stein, a biography in the Literature and Life: American Writers
series, by Bettina L. Knapp. 1990, $18.95 (cloth), Continuum Press.
Recollecting Our Lives - Women's Experience of Childhood Sexual Abuse, 25interviews with survivors and mothers of survivors by the Women's
Research Centre. 1989, $14.95 (Canadian), Press Gang Publishers, 603
Powell Street, Vancouver, B.C. V6A 1H2.
Silverleat's Choice: An Anthology of Lesbian Humor includes short stories,
essays, poems and cartoons, edited by Ann E. Larson and Carole A. Carr.
1990, $8.95, Silverleaf Press, PO Box 70189, Seattle, WA 98107.

The Courage to Heal Workbook For Women and Men Survivors of Child Sexual
Abuse - a companion to The Courage to Heal, by one of its' co-authors,
Laura Davis. 1990,$18.95, Harper & Row, 10 E. 53rd St.,NY,NY 10022.
The following books are from Gynergy Press, Box 132, Charlottetown,
Prince Edward Island, CIA 7K2 Canada, distributers of Ragweed, Jezebel and L'Essentielle, editrices books. Hard to find in the U.S. - write fora catalog of these engaging, thoughtful and thoughtfully made books.
Under Tongue / Sous La Langue is a beautiful, lesbic prose/poem letterpress chapbook by Nicole Brossard, trans. by Susanne de LorbiniereHarwood, 1987, L'Essentielle, editrices.
Flesh and Paper, dialogues and collaboration in verse by the poets, friends
and lovers Suniti Namjoshi and Gillian Hanscombe, 1986, Jezebel.
The Fat Woman Measures Up - poems about the body, by Christine
Donald, 1986, Ragweed Press.
The Breaking Up Poems, Christine Donald's second book of lesbian
poems, 1988, Gynergy Books.
unnatural acts, poems by Marg Yeo which remind her "that they, and i,
owe everything we are to other women," 1987, Gynergy Books.
Double Negative - poems, dialogue, prose/poems written on/ as a journey by Daphne Marlatt & Betsy Warland, 1988, Gynergy Books.
By Word Of Mouth -lesbians write the erotic, a collection of prose andpoetry, edited by Lee Fleming, 1989, Gynergy Books.

135

Announcements and Classified Ads,_ _ _ _ __PUBLICATIONS/ PERIODICALSOUT/INSIDE, A Women's Newsjournal Focusing on Lesbian Prisoners.
Barbara Ruth, ed. $6/yr, $1.50 sample (+501t postage). PO Box 2821,
Oakland, CA 94609.
HIKANE: THE CAPABLE WOMaN - disabled wimmin's newsletterfor lesbians and our wimmin friends. Available in print or cassette. $4
sample, $14 indiv. subscription, $24 inst., sliding scale available, free towimmin in prison. Hikane, PO Box C-9, Hillsdale, NY 12529.
BRIDGES: A Journal for Jewish feminists and our friends has published its
premier issue. Editors include: Ruth Atkin, Elly Bulkin, Rita Falbel,
Clare Kinberg, Ruth Kraut, Adrienne Rich and Laurie White. $7.50 anissue, $15 year sub. (2 issues). PO Box 18437, Seattle, WA 98118.
LESBIAN ETHICS - Special issues on CLASS (deadline: Aug. 15) andOUR MOTHERS (deadline Dec. 31/90). Send querieis and original, descriptive work that links these issues with life in dyke communities to:
PO Box 4723, Albuquerque, NM 87196.
TRIVIA - A Journal of Ideas, seeks all radical, creative feminist thought
in all forms (except poetry) for double-issue on BREAKING FORMS.
Query or submit to PO Box 606, N. Amherst, MA 01059 by Aug. 15.
HURRICANE ALICE's fall 1990 issue will be on "Families, Old & New."
Submit any form, up to 3,000 words, deadline: Aug. 15 to: Hurricane
Alice, 207 Lind Hall 207 Church Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55404.
WORDS OF OUR OWN (W.OD,) anew lesbian quarterly from the bible
belt, emphasizing fiction, is seeking submissions and subscribers. $13.50
for 4 issues, $4.50 single. WOO, PO Box 52721, Knoxville, TN 37950.
CALLS FOR SUBMISSION
WHAT IS LESBIAN COMMUNITY? New Canadian Anthology ofLesbian Short Stories seeks work describing turning points in our lesbian identities/ communities. Submit or query w /SASE: Lee Fleming,
gynergy books, Box 2023, Charlottetown, PEl, Canada, CIA 7N7.
CATHOLIC GIRLS - all forms for an anthology reflecting diversity ofculture, ethnicity, age on the experience of Catholic girlhood. Submissions w / SASE: Patrice Vecchione/ Amber Coverdale Sumrall, PO Box
61, Capitola, CA 95010. Deadline: Nov. I, 1990.
SEVERED TIES: LESBIANS LOSING FAMILY, LOSING FRIENDSanthology oflosses incurred by coming out. Send submissions or queries
to Lynne D'Orsay, PO Box 332, Portsmouth, NH 03801.

136

TO BE OR NOT TO BE BUTCH/FEMME - all forms and artwork for alesbian anthology to be published by new gay and lesbian publishinghouse. Send submissions or queries to Multiple Dimensions, attn: Caryn
Goldberg, 1604 Vista Del Mar Ave., Hollywood, CA 90028.
CATS (AND THEIR DYKES) anthology deadline has been extended to
October 1. All forms from analysis to love stories, artwork and photos.
HerBooks, PO Box 7467, Santa Cruz, CA.
LESBIAN VISUAL ART AND ARTISTS - ideas, articles, work forreview (slides or xeroxes) sought by Tee Corinne for a series of lecturesand possible book. Send SASE with submission or for more info to POB
278, Wolf Creek, OR 97497-0278.
CANADIAN WOMEN AND AIDS seeks all forms of work by HIVpositive women and women with AIDS and any women involved withthem, in English or French. Send to Jacquie Manthorne, ed. Les Editions
Communiqu'Elles, 3585 St-Urbain, Montreal, Quebec, H2X 2N6; fax:
514-842-1067. Deadline: September I, 1990.
WORD OF MOUTH: SHORT-STORIES BY WOMEN VOL. II, max.
length 500 words, send no more than six stories with SASE to Irene
Zahava, 307 W. State St., Ithaca, NY 14850. Deadline: August 30, 1990.
CONFERENCES
NATIONAL LESBIAN CONFERENCE, spring 1991 in Atlanta, Georgia. Local organizing and national meetings are happening around the
U.S. now. For more info, write: PO Box 3057, Albany, NY 12203.
THE THIRD ANNUAL LESBIAN SEP ARATIST CONFERENCE AND
GATHERING will be held in southeastern Wisconsin, August 30 throughSeptember 2, 1990. Play, talk, argue, spark new friendships, renew oldconnections, and have fun for a change! Sliding scale registration fee:$85-150. For more information, contact: Burning Bush, PO Box 3056,
Madison, WI 53704-0065, USA.
THE 5TH ANNUAL WOMYN & WITCHCRAFT: DEVELOPINGDIANIC WICCA CONFERENCE, Aug. 30-Sept. 2, 1990 in Wisconsin.
Wheelchair access. For reg., or more info, write: DDW5 Conf., c/o RCG,
Box 6021, Madison, WI 53716.
GENERAL
EARTH LIGHT VISUAL PRODUCTIONS - specializing in video andphotography. Write or call for ra tes and special projects. Francesca Forte,
PO Box 1151, Oakland, CA 94611, 415-531-2309.
IF YOU WRITE CONGRESS, write to protest cuts and restrictions to the
National Endowment for the Arts. Stop U.S. facism at home!

137

TRIPS

MT. MAMA PACKING & RIDING CO. - Horse pack trips in beautiful
mtns. of northern New Mexico. Rustic bed & breakfast. Harpy, PO Box
698, Tesuque, NM 87545, (505) 986-1924.
SUPPORT

THE LESBIAN HERSTORY ARCHIVES NEEDS A BUILDING! For 16
years the Archives has been housed in aNYC apartment and must move.
Wouldn't it help you sleep at night to know there's a lesbian building
where our work is cherished? Can we raise $1,000,000? If every lesbian
who reads SW got 10 friends to send $10 we'd raise over $300,000. Let's
do it! Send donations to: LHEF, PO Box 1258, NYC, NY 10116.
WOMEN IN ISRAEL SPEAK: RELIGION, ACTION AND POLITICS
will be a book of interviews, photos, poetry compiled by Batya Weinbaum. Contributions needed to finish. Send checks payable to: New
Israel Fund, 111 W. 40th St., NY, NY 10018, marked Women in Israel
Speak Project, donor advised Isha L'Isha, or send SASE for more info.
"WHEN WAR IS TOLD THROUGH THE MOUTHS OF WOMEN, it isa different kind of war story." National Emmy Award-winning Tina
DiFeliciantonio & producer Jane Wagner are fundraising for their feature length documentary film: Una Donna, about an Italian immigrant
woman raped by Allied soldiers in Italy, 1944. For more info: Naked Eye
Productions, 347 Dolores St., suite 111, S.F., CA.94110, (415) 558-9558.
RESOURCESITALIAN-AMERICAN WOMEN'S WRITER'S NETWORK: If you'reinterested in joining a newly formed network ofItalian-American women
writers, please send name, address, phone, type of writing you do,whether or not you've been published and where. It's time for our voices
to be heard! E. N ole, 39 Glenorchy Road, New Rochelle, New York 10804.
NATIONAL WOMEN'S STUDIES ASSOC. SCHOLARSHIPS for 1991
include awards for book-length ms., graduate interdisciplinary and
Women's Studies work, graduate work in Jewish Women's Studies,
Lesbian Studies, the Pat Parker Poetry Award, and a fellowship to avisiting Chinese scholar for research on women. Deadlines in Feb., 1991.
For more info: NWSA, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20842-1325.

AD RATES: Classified: 35 \t a word, $5 minimum. Display: $150 page,$751/2,$601/3, $40 1/4, 2x2$30. 10% discount for 30rmoreinsertions.
Write for deadlines or any special needs.
1.38

COMMON LIVES/LESBIAN LIVES

Stories, journals, graphics, essays, humor, poetry,autobiography, and more .. .
The experiences and ideas of common Lesbians.
We print the work of Lesbians who have been
kept invisible and silent.
Single issue: $4.00
One Year: $12.00

S-Oj-O'U 'RN'ER
7Jii- J1/rmz£?t4- %uum-

POLITICS • CULTURE • OPINION
1050 Commonweolth Avenue. #305.
Bost on . MA 022 15 617-66 1-3567
S17/yeor (1 2 issues)

S2/somple copy

yoLi COULD BE READING . ..

The Women's Review of Books
Published every month since
October 1983.
A forum for the widest range offeminist thinking and writing on
every topic.
A source of Information andInformed opinion that more andmore readers are coming to findIndispensable.

Recent revIews by Patricia Bell'Scott,Jessie Bernard, E.M. Broner, Z.
Budapest, Blanche Wiesen Cook,
Marilyn Frye, Vivian Gornick, Carolyn
Heilbrun, Jane Marcus, Valerie Miner,
Julia Penelope, Hortense Spillers andmany more .

TO subscribe:
Send 514 (Indlvldualsl or 525(Institutions) to: Dept. EX,

The Women's Review of Books,
Wellesley College center for Researchon Women, Wellesley, MA 02181-8255.
(Outside the US: Please add 518
airmail, 55 surface mall; Canadian
subscribers only add 53.!
Please make all payments In US
dollars, by check or money order, to

The Women's Review of Books.
Allow 6-8 weeks for all subscription
transactions.
Free sample copy available on
request.

COMMON LIVES
P.O. Box 1553
IOWA CITY, IA 52244

off our backs
the best in feminist journalism
LI'SIJIdl.NS"oob is international in scope and focuses on diverse
topics dealing with poor women, working classwomen, minority women, prison, custody, andabortion. It's never been simple· minded. It's what I
think of as fe minism..... Marilyn Frye()NL~

LI: jUlAN

news from every continent .. working women's
issues, health, reproductive rights , Black
women's issues, lesbian rights
thorough reports of women's conferencesbook reviews, commentaries, leners, more

I NIU~ NAn 'ONA\L'4\(('.1

Don't miss out!
~,.\''-(..'','t!."lLl'l 'IU lS

otfoll'backs:
outraged and ou1rageous since 1970

I ll. .)().~I S

subscription ratss:' , 'S" NVS

Contributing: $20
Individual: $17.NIUl V.I'WS

Institutional: $30

Canada, Mexico: U.S. $ 18
Overseas airmail: U.S. $25, UK £16
Free to women prisoners

Subscribe now--send check to:
I .• I.S •• I J.4 ). Ile ))\( B. · 1()U~H) l l UI' N. LANeS ..

off our backs
2423 18th Street NW
Washington, DC 20009, U.S.A.
Name ___________________________

I'Ni;Ldl.NU. ()L'" 1H ·Z .

Address ________________________
City, Postcode'------------------ - -A femin ist journalof critical analysis andinnovative research .
RFRlDRF is on the cuttingedge of Canadian andinternational scho larship.

If your check is not on a U.S. , UK, or C. bank, make it out
for the U.S.$ equivalent, plus $5 for cashing the check.

i 1M ~~

Strifei~~~~~

RFR/ORFRESOURCES FOR FEMINIST RESEARCH~

h~3~~m~Four issues each year:$25/Canada$40/Foreign
RFR/DRF, 252 Bloor 8t. W.
Toronto, Ontario , M58 1V6StrifeStrifeh;bt~m~Strife~StrifeilM~

The ra dical feminist magazine
Issue 18 Spring 1990

• Meot, murder a nd metophor• l esbian feminism In Eosl Germany• Interview with Clore Shorl MP• Helen lilly: a lesblon tUe• O f eggs and men: The
Embryology Bill
• CharlaHe Bunch: panties with

passionSubs lot one year (3 Issues):
8rllaln & N. Ireland ~ ................ £7.50.... £20
Supporting Sub .......
Unwaged Sub .. __ ...................... _... £6£20
Instltutlons: Inlond
Overseas ........... __ ..... _._._ ... £30
Europe/ Irish Republic.........

•• H ••• _sur/oce moll worldwide . £9.50
Alrmoll: Middle Eosl ...............__ £ 12
Alrico,N&SAmerlco .........._ £13
FO/ Eosl & Australia ._.... _.. _" £ 1':. fl fn rm idllblt' [t'mi" isfIIItlga z;IJI' - 1/0 1 fo r li' t'fn; II, ./r el1r1rll." The GU:lrdian

Trouble and Strife, c/o Women's Centre,
34 Exchange Street, Norwich, UK. NI/2 lAX

QUARTERLY PUBLICATIONFEATURES WOMEN ARTISTS
New and established women anisis
describe their art. their lives. a nd th eir
philoso phi es in Gal/erie; Women 's Art,
NA visual reas t. Thc-

commentary ... is as direct andmoving. as s ubtle a nd as lyrical.
as the photos." -Till' IU)/II(//MI~'~Ethics'lIIIII'lIIIII'lIIIIIl esb/an

A forumforethicalissuesamong
lesbians.

Envisioning theWorld We Were All
Meant to Live In.
• ESSAYS• READERS FORUMS• REVIEWS/COMMENTARY

Now in her fourth year.
3 Issues for $14; out of U.S. $16 surface . $24 air.
Institutions add $4. Sample $6.
Out of U.S. subscribers: Please try to pay wtth a check written on a bank with a U.S. branch. Thonxt:~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AddressCity. Slate. Zip
Name
Country

LE PUBLICATIONS. PO BOX 4723. Albuquerque. NM 87196

Feminist
IssuesMary Jo Lakeland andSusan Ellis Wolf, editors
Devoted to leminlsl social and palilicalanalysis,w~ h e!Tl)haslsonan

inlemallonal elCchange 01 Ideas.
Explores cenlral leminiSI questions In
ways relevant to Ihe daily Ilves 01
women everywhere.

Recent 8r1/c les Include:
Detention In South Africa: A WOrMn'1
Expl rlinci
DianllE. H. Russell

From Nunl to Surrogltl Mothlrl:
Evolution of the Forml 01 ApproprllUonof Women
Danie"e Jutellu and Nit:;QIfI Laurin

Stavi Clrls, Temptr",", Ind COmradas:
Image. of Women In thl Tu rkl.h No ve l
DlnizKandiyoti

Where Does I Blick T"nage Mother
Turn?
Elaine8S/IKaplllll

Published Semiannuilly
Subscrlptlonrlt ..;Indlvlduatl:SI5,yr;S2812yrs.
InsUtutlon.:S25,yr; S41I2yrs.
DomlltIcU"t-ct.. lmlllllddS6,yr.
Foreign lu rlllCti maU add S6,yr.
Foreig n alrrMll addSl2Jojr.

SPIRITED LESBIANS
Lesbian Desire As Social Action
by Nett HartSPIRITED LESBIANS begins In aheart 01 self· love for ourselves as
Lesbians and spirals through theen tire world creating socialchange as an effect o f that love.

$9,95 post paid 160

Notes on the T h e m e s - - - - - - - - - - - #42 is an open issue - we have many varied and wonderful
dykey writings lined up! Due out in early December.
#43/44 will be our 15th anniversary retrospective issue. We'regoing to particularly focus on publishing work from the earlyout-of-print Sinister Wisdoms. If you have any favorites fromissues 1-20,let us know and we'll try to include them. Due out in
May/June, 1991.
#45 Lesbians & Class is the next issue to which you cancontribute. We want to focus on lies about money - in our editorial group we acknowledged that we had all lied about money,
though how and why varied dramatically by class. Where do thelies come from? How do we deal with our shame? Our anger? Our
bitterness? Are there communities where dykes are actively redistributing resources? After twenty years of personal discussion
around class in the lesbian and women's movements, have wefound any ways to really change the class set-ups we're born into?
We urge middle-class and wealthy lesbians to remember that anembarresment of riches is not the same as the shame of poverty.
This issue will particularly address the concerns of working classand poor lesbians and will be primarily composed of their work.
Lesbian Ethics will be putting out an issue on class as well (see Announcements) - we hope it appears before our deadline so wehave the opportunity to continue discussions started there, as
well as present new perspectives. Deadline: June I, 1991.

See inside back cover for details on how to send us your work.

142sinister wisdom
Current & Back Issues(partial list of contents)#40/Special Focus on Friendship. Essays, fiction, editorial discussion transcript.
• de la Pena, Hardy, Svirsky, Gray, Stinson, Dambroff, Mi Ok Bruining, Hauptman •#39/Special Focus on Disability. Testimony in all forms by disabled womyn.
• Freespirit, Winnow, Sorella, Edgington, Rome, Lauby, Folayan, Koolish, Cardea •#38/Emphasis on Lesbian Relationships. Fiction and poetry.
• Jewell, Clarke, Anzaldua, Gage, Schaffer, Spisak, Taraba, Devora, Louise, Knight •#37/ Emphasis on Lesbian Theory. With work on consumerism, spirituality,
political theory, children, racism, anti-Semitism, lesbians in pris·on.
• Lee, Tallen, Evans, Pratt, Robson, Quinlan, Livia, Hardy, Gray, Green, Justicz •#36/Special Focus on Surviving Psychiatric Assault/Creating Emotional Well
Being in our Communities. Includes testimony, prose, poetry and essays on
getting locked up, getting out, community, therapy and therapism .
• Hope, Aal, Caicedo, thundercloud, Robson, Sien, Moran, Ward, NiHera, Willcox •#35/Special Focus on Passing. Includes work on / by Black, Jewish, Native
American, Latina, Italian, White, disabled, working class, butch, fern lesbians .
• Jewell, Frye, Pratt, Rosales, Bogus, Ruth, Gage, Barrington, Davis, JEB, Romano •#34/Special Focus on Lesbian Visions, Fantasy, SciFi. Includes work on Separatism, Disability, Building and Transformation.
• Katz, Ortiz Taylor, Hoagland, Allegra, Livia, Louise, Rios, Danaan, Marah •#33 / Special Focus on Wisdom. Lesbians of Color, Non-violence, War Stories,
Incest, Leaving a Will, Assimilation, Fat Poems, Coming to Terms .
• Anzaldua, Ruth, Rich, Chrystos, Kaye/ Kantrowitz, Hardy, Gilmore, Brody, Rakusin •#32 / Special Focus on Illness, Death, Mourning, Healing, the Disappeared,
Hunting Season, Dealing with Suicide, Cancer, New Ritual Observances .
• Maia, Allegra, Sears, McDonald, Waters, Hansell, Rosenblum, Butler, Stinson •#3l/Special Focus on Sex and Fiction, Coming out in the South, Found Goddesses, Waiting, Bobe Mayse, Sex and Socialist Feminism.
• Smukler, Blackwomon, Romano, Davenport, Dykewomon, McNaron •#28/Special Focus on Women & Work; Body Image, Size & Eating, Aging,
Comedy about Outlaw Lesbian Communi~ies, Courage, PC / PI, Letter on #26.
• Clarke, Heather, Klepfisz, Sturgis, Gould, Boucher, Gomez, Sardella, Moran •#27/Special Focus on Girlhood, Sexuality and Violence, Office Wor.k, Navy
Dykes, White Trash, Women of Color I Women in Israel/Women in Lebanon .
• Adnan, Felman, Grahn, Schalet, Bogus, HaMa'avak Touch, Quintanales, Anzaldua •#26 / Special Issue: To Go To Berbir by Jill Drew, a book-length journal written
by an American nurse working in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion.
#25 I Butch / Fem in the 50's, Native American Roots of White Feminism, Haitian,
Palestinian, Puerto Rican Struggles, Jewish Radical Identity, Welfare Life .
• Allen, Cotrell, Root, Stecenko, Love, Paz, Smukler, Hall, Lipstadt, Brant •#2l/Separatism Revisited, Jewish Survival & Defiance, Black Lesbian Writing,
Photos of Dykes in Drag, Suicide, Bars, Letters about Anti-Semitism.
• Klepfisz, Arobateau, Segrest, Simpson, Tornes, Addison, justice, Foley, Crawford •Sinister Wisdom #1-19 & 24 are out of print. Photocopies can be provided-$5 forthe first, $1 for each add. article in the same order. Allow one month for delivery.

.llnl.lTER
WI.lDOm

Since 1976. ..

"One of the most popular and widely read
lesbian periodicals in existence"

Joy Parks, Women 's Review of Books

essaysgraphics
reviews
plays
sex
humor
revolution
visiondiversity
survival
defiance" . . .comes from and speaks to the heartof the feminist movement ."-Susan Griffin , Utne Reader

Please send:
CURRENT ISSUE, SINISTER WISDOM 641
I want to subscribe to SW, beginning with 6_ __ _ copies@$5.00 = _ __(see rates below) = _ __Back issues (please circle): 621 ($3.50), 625 ($4.25), 626, 627, 628, 631 & 632 (4.75 ea.),633, 634, 635, 636, 637, 638, 639 & 640 ($5 ea.)
Thtal for back issues: = _ __Postage & Handling: $1.25 for first back issue, 50¢ each add.
NAME _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ___ADDRESS _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ZIP _ __I am adding a donation to support free & hardship subscriptions:
Please send SW to my friend, beginning with issue 641
NAME _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ADDRESS _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ZIP _ __Sign gift card: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __Total Enclosed: = _ __SUBSCRIPTION RATES
1 year = 4 issues
Individuals: 1 year, $17; 2 years, $30
Out or U.S. : $22 (U.S. $)Hardship: $6·10
Institutions: 1 year, $30
Sustaining: $50·200
Free on request to to women in prisons and mental institutions- bu lk discounts available-

SINISTER WISDOM PO BOX3252 BERKELEY, CA 94703 USA
Available on tape from the Womyn's Braille Press, PO Box 8475, Minneapolis, MN55408

What to do with
.MANUSCRIPTS, MONEY, SUBSCRIPTIONS,
ADS, BACK ISSUES & BOOK ORDERS
MANUSCRIPTS, SUBSCRIPTIONS, BACK ISSUE ORDERS, &CHANGES OF ADDRESS
ShouidALL be sent to: Sinister Wisdom, POB 3252, Berkeley, CA 94703.
Submission Guidelines
All written work should be mailed flat (not folded) and SUBMITTED IN
DUPLICATE. Submissions may be in any style or form, or combinationof forms. Five poems or two stories maximum submission per issue. We
may return longer submissions.We prefer you type (or send your workon Macintosh discs with 2 printouts) . Legible handwritten work accepted, tapes accepted from print-impaired womyn. All submissions
must be on white paper, with the author's name on each page. SASE
MUST BE ENCLOSED. Selection may take up to nine months. If you wantacknowledgement of receipt, enclose a separate, stamped postcard.
GRAPHIC ARTISTS should send B&W photos, stats, or other duplicatesof their work. Let us know if we can keep artwork on file for future use.
We are particularly interested in work that reflects the diversity of ourexperiences: as lesbians of color, ethnic lesbians, Third World, Jewish,
old, young, working class, poor, disabled, fat. We will not print anythingthat is oppressi ve or demeaning to lesbians or women, or which perpetuates negative stereotypes. We do intend to keep an open and critical
dialogue on all the issues that affect our work, joy and survival. See p.142
for details on upcoming issues. The themes are intended as guidelines,
not as rigid catagories. If you have work that doesn't fit an upcoming
theme, but belongs in Sinister Wisdom, don'thesitate to submit it.

BOOK ORDERS: SINISTER WISDOM BOOKS IS NO LONGER IN
BUSINESS.
• All orders for The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology, edited by
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz, should be sent to Beacon
Press,25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108. This is a new, expanded editionof Dina, retailing for $12.95.
• All orders for A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American
Indian Women, edited by Beth Brant, should be sent to Firebrand Books,
141 The Commons, Ithaca, NY 14850.
• All orders for Keeper of Accounts by Irena Klepfisz should be sent to theauthor at 155 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11201.