A MELUS Interview: Helen Barolini

Helen Barolini, the author of numerous stories, essays, translations, and poems which have been published in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Saturday Review, and The Yale Review, is the recipient of many awards, among them the 1987 Susan Koppelman Award of the American Culture Association for The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women. Her novel Umbertina, a saga of four generations of Italian-American women, carefully explores some of the tensions of women caught between two cultures and between traditionalism and feminism. The primary interview was conducted by Dorothee von Huene Greenberg in the author's home in Ossining, N. Y., on April 8, 1988. It is supplemented by material from an interview with Kay Bonetti in December 1982. Interviewer: How did you happen to become interested in your grandmother who seems to be the focus of the first part of Umbertina? Barolini: It really began when my mother was cleaning the house and came upon the tin heart that my grandmother had brought as a young woman from Calabria. In my diary entry on February 25,1965, I say, My parents were here, and Mother brought Grandma's knitting needle over: a crude piece of tin shaped like a heart with a hammered-on border design and a piece of black yarn through it to tie around the waist. I can imagine the goat girls herding their flocks on the rocks of Calabria wearing such a holder to keep the needles steady as they knit and watch the herd. And now for the first time I am touched by these rude, poor, unintelligible forefathers. Theirs was an epic in American life, and it should be written, for they who lived it kept no diaries. But we descendents can write and tell, and it's time now before the last of them die out. I am sure their story is unique, and now that Mario Puzo's book [The Fortunate Pilgrim] has raised their theme, why not other books? The blacks, the Jews, the Irish all have their spokesmen, why not the Italians? So there you have the quote. It goes way back, a good many years before the book actually came out and a good many before it was actually written. But the seeds were set. Interviewer: So your interest in your grandmother was really triggered by that tin heart. Barolini: Yes! In fact, that's why the heart plays such a part in it and is on the cover. It is quite a good duplication of the original. And the theme runs throughout. Very consciously I use certain motifs in it. The heart is one, which to me stands for the unforeseen; and the rosemary stands for the strong woman of the house, and the rooting stands for tradition. Interviewer: So it was really your interest in your grandmother that sparked your interest in your ethnic heritage? Barolini: It seems to have been, because I know that she was always a mysterious figure, and I felt if I could figure her out, maybe I could figure out something about myself. What I wanted to know about myself is what all women wanted to know about themselves at that particular time. It was the feminist movement of 1963 that said, "now is the time to explore," but you know a lot of women carry these questions and never vocalize. Then the opening came with the '60s, and it was the blacks who released all of the turbulence. Interviewer: Where were you when you started reading Betty Friedan? Barolini: I was here in the States. My husband was a correspondent for an Italian paper, and I was here, and it certainly galvanized me. It did many women, because we each thought of ourselves as being so isolated that each of us had some kind of vague discomfort which we couldn't articulate, and then suddenly Betty Friedan put it together. She spoke for an awful lot of us, and then, very soon after, comes Mario Puzo's book, and then comes my mother bearing this symbol. …