Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

  We heard a school bell and then a flood of children’s voices. We’d have to circle the tanks, since there was no sidewalk on the other side of the busy street.

  “They’re guarding the school.” Heavy ammunition harnesses were slung across the soldiers’ green uniforms. The men held matte-surfaced, desert-colored machine guns twice as large around as my daughter’s skinny legs.

  “Why?” We headed into a military zone. I’d been around soldiers and guns, in Nicaragua in the early 1980s. My daughter had never seen a gun, and we’d not yet suffered through the monstrousness of 9-11. Striking a balance between honesty and not scaring her stiff, I said, “There are some people in Israel—Jews and Palestinians—who have continued to fight over the same land for thousands of years. They both want to control it. They even fight in places outside of their country.” In October 1982, in a call for revolution within the Arab world, the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) attacked a synagogue in Rome.

  “The soldiers are here because before you were born a Palestinian terrorist group tossed grenades and fired guns into a synagogue and killed a two-year-old boy.”

  We walked a few steps. “It doesn’t seem right, does it?”

  She shook her head in agreement.

  “The Italians were horrified. They wanted the Jewish people in Rome to feel safe and to know that the Italian government understood their concerns. So the military made a pledge to the Jewish community to guard this school day and night.”

  “Why did they kill the boy?” Her eyes darted from side to side.

  “For a lot of reasons, but mostly because the terrorists didn’t like Jews.”

  “Daddy’s Jewish.”

  We slowed down between tanks to peer into the schoolyard where the children played quite happily. “They’re your age.”

  Immediately, a soldier brandishing his machine gun pointed the barrel at my face. “Avanti. Subito. Keep moving.” His helmet shadowed his forehead. He was shorter than I am. Nonetheless, my feet froze to the sidewalk. My mouth went dry. The paralyzing fright was like what I had felt when neighborhood kids used to jump out from behind hedges on summer nights just to scare the bejesus out of passersby. Worse, I couldn’t turn my head to see Ruby. I couldn’t speak; yet, in that short moment, an entire horrid scene from the De Sica movie Two Women reeled through my mind: a World War II widow, played by Sophia Loren, and her daughter, Rosetta, are attacked and raped in a church outside Rome by a band of Moroccan soldiers.

  A second carabiniere, out of kindness or duty, nudged my shoulder, breaking the trance. His touch should have been more terrifying than the threat of being shot, but it ended the surreal moment, bringing blood back to my limbs. I scooped up my daughter. She seemed to weigh no more than a sack of semolina flour.

  I put her down ten yards beyond the third tank.

  “You okay?” Her brow puckered. Her irises shrank and with savage grace she smoothed the front of her pink dress. I patted the top of her head.

  “We won’t stop there again,” I said.

  Ruby, a child of few words, put on her straight face—I knew the look from when she competed in gymnastics—a firm resolve to proceed despite challenge.

  We began walking. “Would they have shot us?”

  “No. Like good Italians, they take care of children. The soldiers aren’t allowed to let anyone stop. That’s their job.”

  I could smell the river and the acrid exhaust of automobiles. The encounter had shaken my sense of safety, and I didn’t want to communicate that to Ruby. Still, I knew how much more sophisticated Italian children’s awareness of politics had to be compared to my daughter’s. Yes, taking her to Europe, exposing her to more than American ways and people, was a deliberate educational move on my part, but standing in front of a loaded gun wasn’t part of the plan. We walked under an archway. I elaborated on the ongoing tension between the Jews and Palestinians, intellectually lessening our encounter with the soldiers. As usual, Ruby wasn’t saying much. “Have you studied Israel in school?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Hitler?”

  “Yes.” She answered in a quick clip to let me know not to tell her more, but I did.

  “Well, he had a friend Mussolini, an Italian. Italy was on the same side as Hitler during the War. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  Mussolini’s damaging 1938 racist laws barred Jews from public schools and universities, barred Jews from marrying non-Jews, and prohibited Jews from taking vacations.

  A handful of scooters ripped by on the left.

  “I really don’t want to be Jewish.” She stared down the street, as though, if she really wanted, she could run after the scooters and catch them.

  Ahead, a traffic jam incited drivers to sound their horns. While we waited on an island on viale Trastevere for the #116 bus, Ruby leaned against me and wrapped her arms around my waist. “I want to be Italian, like you.”

  One way I had embedded my Italianness into her being was through her mouth: feeding her white beans, crusty bread sprinkled with salt and olive oil, anisette biscotti, prosciutto, and Christmas Eve baccalà. Food and an unthwartable sense of loyalty, which could at times be as much a prison as an asset, penetrated my core, occupying the eternal spiral of my being, which was Italian.

  I looked down at my daughter and then straight ahead into the traffic. Totally enjoying himself, a middle-aged man dressed in an expensive suit drove by on his scooter. In one hand he held a cell phone and was carrying on a conversation, and in the other hand a cigarette. Beagles balanced on the scooter’s sideboards, tucking their spotted shoulders under the driver’s calves. So, she’d rather be like the man on the scooter than the kids in the Hebrew School, like her mother rather than her father.

  Though I was pleased by her choice, I could not dismiss the fact that she was half-Jewish, and, as the poet Adrienne Rich pointed out, “from the beginning split at the root.” I had not connected the two cultures because I didn’t know how to be Jewish. My husband, who does not practice Judaism, does consider himself to be a cultural Jew. Though he is often mistaken for being Italian, he asserts, “If they came looking again to round up the Jews, they’d take me.”

  Prior to World War II, immigrants to the United States, such as my grandparents and my husband’s grandparents, lived in Italian, Irish, Polish, and Jewish enclaves. In our case, near Pittsburgh and in the Bronx. Children of the immigrants rarely intermarried; their children, however, who include my husband and me, grew up in suburban settings and then went to college where we were thrown together with people who came from families with similar economic lifestyles.

  In 1986, when my husband and I married, the Jewish side felt more concern. Our marriage threatened to contribute to the shrinking Jewish population in the United States. In 1970, a National Jewish Population Survey discovered that in the previous five years, 30 percent of new Jewish marriages were to non-Jews. By 1990, that figure was more than 50 percent. Moreover, according to a later study, 28 percent of children of intermarriage were raised as Jews, and only 15 percent of that group ultimately married Jews themselves. In other words, the Jewish grandparents felt the children were already lost to them—as ethnic replacements—before they were born. At the time, embracing my sweet husband and new family, I was oblivious to the dynamic our offspring would let loose into the larger community.

  The Italian side celebrated the marriage. My father thanked Matthew, my husband, for taking me off his hands. “Someone else can worry about her.” My mother prayed my husband would convert, and probably still does. As a Christian, my mother thinks Matthew only has to take one more step: “He already knows the Old Testament: he just needs to add on the New Testament.”

  When my daughter was born, my Italian aunt had said to me, “Oh, how lucky, she’ll have the best of two worlds.” The best of two worlds never happened: my husband did not bring Judaism into the home. In Jewish households the women pass on the traditions. I was hardly prepared to take on a culture I
knew little about while I was struggling to pass on my own ethnic identity, which had no generational guidelines.

  I don’t blame my husband for not teaching her more about his culture. Perhaps my daughter is less confused, perhaps her root is less split. By saying she wants to be Italian, she is choosing what is more familiar and safe. Would I want my daughter to walk around Boston, New York, London, or Rome wearing an ITALIA T-shirt or an ISRAEL T-shirt?

  Choosing an identity is always a verbal act, whether it’s a T-shirt that identifies its wearer or a statement, such as Ruby’s “I want to be Italian.” For my daughter and other children three times removed from their immigrant ancestors, ethnicity is voluntary and satisfies the American urges for both community and individuality. Ruby can be different from her friends because, for example, she puts an Italian twist on her holiday celebration. At the same time, just by saying she’s Italian, she’s become a member of a larger community that shares the same ancestry.

  In the first week of a new semester, the students in my Ethnic Literature class at Boston University name their ethnic identities. Of twenty students at least 60 percent of them identify with one ethnic group in their multiethnic backgrounds. A student with the last name Camp says he is Italian; a tiny blonde says she is Korean, because she has one Korean grandmother; a fellow with the surname Pisaturo identifies himself as Polish.

  In mixed marriages, Italian is often chosen by parents to simplify ancestry on questionnaires and surveys. In the 2000 census, the number of Americans claiming Italian ancestry increased over previous years. A 1990 survey by Harvard sociologist Mary Waters asked participants: “If you could be a member of any ethnic group you wanted, which one would you choose?” Italian was the most common answer. The reason might be more than good food, sensuality, and appreciation for beauty. Additionally, we can consider that Italy is a fiction: a country of provinces, dialects, and regions, and historically, because of its location, an incorporator of invaders, empires, and bloodlines.

  Interesting, too, is the increase in Italian language studies. From 1998 to 2002, enrollment in Italian language courses in both high schools and universities grew in America by 30 percent, faster than the enrollment rates for Spanish. French and German language studies actually decreased.

  Memory and similarity create a group identity. Because memory is strongly tied to childhood, whatever ethnic culture dominates the family when the child is young is the culture that the child is most likely to identify with as an adult. So families like mine, who develop food preferences for pasta and risotto over macaroni and cheese and Uncle Ben’s, and who are members of Italian American organizations, and who teach or encourage their children to speak Italian, raise children who choose to identify themselves as Italian Americans. For Ruby the origins of her Italianness come from what I have passed on to her, her travels in Italy, her Italian family, and media images—some good, some not so good. Here’s an irony: for members of her generation, the genuineness of the ethnicity they choose becomes more obscure and questionable because of its mixed origins; however, because it is voluntary, the act of choosing sustains the identity. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume said it this way: “That which ceases to exist cannot be the same as that which afterwards begins to exist.” If my daughter’s grandson chooses to be Jewish, his ethnic identity will not embody the Jewish memories of my mother-in-law and her ancestors.

  We’re chameleons, able to change our way of being in order to survive or to fit in. There are optional add-ons to subjective ethnic identity. During Chanukah, my daughter is happy to be Jewish. Because of how it sounds, when teachers, friends, or gymnastic trainers hear her Russian Jewish last name—Bagedonow: (BAG-a-dawn-oh)—they think it’s Italian. Similarly, for the third-generation Americans in my Literature class who have multiple identity pools to draw from, how they choose to characterize their ancestry depends on time, place, and whether they’ve been influenced by me, their instructor, or the cute girl sitting next to them.

  I admit I’ve influenced my child: I would rather her Italian ancestry stand guard, as the Italian carabinieri stand guard over the Hebrew School. Her Jewishness is her vulnerability, both personally and internationally.

  When she was an infant, just about every day after I finished my workday, I turned on Verdi’s La Traviata or Puccini’s Tosca, lowered the lights, and massaged her strong, tiny body with warm olive oil, defining each soft toe, smoothing not only my energy but also Italy’s nectar into her skin, priming her muscles for pleasure. Her father returned home before seven. While I washed her in the kitchen sink, he played the guitar and sang. He didn’t sing Jewish songs but folk tunes, rock ’n’ roll, and the theme from Pippi Longstocking. In an obvious way Matthew has been less concerned about Ruby’s being Jewish than I am about her being Italian.

  So why didn’t I marry an Italian man? I think, in the end, DNA makes the choice. The human race wants to survive and multiethnic children like Ruby have an array of biological resources.

  Later that day in Rome, after Ruby and I had gone about the business of being guests and tourists in Rome’s Centro Storico, we returned to Trastevere, but not directly to our flat, nor did we pass the tanks in front of the Hebrew School. We got off the #116 bus farther down the road, at via Glorioso, and slowly walked up a steep hill, stopping to rest under blocks of shade, until we reached via Dandolo. That June the grass, browned early because of lack of rain, clung close to the earth. We followed a gravel path to a playground near the Villa Sciarra, a spot we often visited when in Rome. Statues and fountains surrounded the swing set, slide, and sandboxes. Water spewed from frogs’ mouths into a tiny low water fountain, from the nipples of a row of bare-breasted women into a small pool, and from a small to a larger tier into a large basin flanked by a circle of creatures half-female, half-crouching-animal. A ten-foot tall statue of a naked man chasing a naked woman stood guard over the sliding board. No American playground could hold a candle to the sensuality of Italian ones.

  Ruby amused herself on the edge of a sandbox, sifting and rearranging piles, while I sat watching, taking out a sketchbook and colored pencils. Where I grew up, in Western Pennsylvania, the park along the Allegheny where my sister and I often played proudly displayed a row of heavy cannons, dating from the Civil War to World War II. The cannons pointed over the water to the hill on the other side of the river. After we tired of the swings, we’d climb to the end of the cannon barrels to watch the river.

  I collected a cup of water from a fountain to wet my paper before drawing. Two cute, chubby Italian girls, both younger than Ruby, followed me back to the bench to watch me draw. After a few minutes, when she saw potential playmates, Ruby joined us.

  Using my best Italian, I asked the girls their names and ages. They looked at each other.

  “Sono straniere. They’re foreigners,” one said to the other, lifting her shoulders in a perfect Italian gesture. Non italiane. Not Italians.

  “They say we’re not Italian,” I translated for my daughter.

  The girls laughed. “You speak really funny.” The blonde one put her arm on my lap and leaned close to my drawing of the naked woman.

  “Ma, dove ha imparato l’italiano? Where did you learn Italian?” she asked, and then, “Where are you from?”

  “Boston,” I said.

  “Americane,” she shouted.

  A bevy of mothers and nannies looked our way. That afternoon, neither Ruby nor I was Italian.

  My daughter, who is now seventeen, continues to say she is Italian whenever anyone asks about her ethnicity. She studies Italian language and culture in school. Speaking the language is the only real way to maintain a connection to an ethnic identity. She has grown to look Italian, in a Botticelli sort of way, and dresses well—which means coordinating everything on her body as carefully as Italian words are coordinated in a sentence. On random Italian American days, she wears gold jewelry or sports a red ITALIAN GIRL T-shirt. Her boyfriend, who is half-Anglo, says he is Palestinian.
Together they are quite an exotic pair, even in their multiethnic and racially diverse Cambridge high school where “white” people are a minority,

  I often think about the Italian soldier pushing me away from the Hebrew School in Rome. During the War, Jews fared less badly under the Italians than anywhere else in German-occupied Europe. Although not every Italian helped the Jews, and though deportations and shootings did happen, no ingrained anti-Semitism existed or continues to exist, as unfortunately it does in France and Germany. Perhaps the origins of Italian-Jewish compatibility began in the Middle Ages when both Jews and Italians in Italian city-states provided banking services to the rest of Western Europe. For these reasons, Jewish Italian marriages seem less charged than, for example, Jewish German marriages. I also wonder what ethnic identities the children of Rome’s Hebrew School chose: simply Italian, or Jewish, or Russian Jew, Polish Jew, Iraqi Jew, or Italian Jew? In the United States, as recently as 20 years ago, Jews considered marriage between distinct subgroups an out-marriage, a crossing of ethnic lines.

  Along with the foodways that my grandmother passed on to me, the language, and travel to Rome and Italy to understand more about the intricacies of the culture, I want to pass on the age-old tradition of hospitality to my daughter. In Italian, the word ospite means both the host and the guest, which is a clear indication of the selflessness of caring for one another, no matter what side of the door he is on.

  What I don’t want her to catch wind of is the idea that sons are much more valuable than daughters and the consequent mindless privileges that go along with being a boy. I don’t intend to diminish the sensuality of the feminine element. The loyalty, which I have called both an asset and a prison, stems from the son–daughter complex and has clouded clear calls for me, too often in my life, on issues of work and love. At the same time, the loyalty has kept me in a marriage that keeps getting better.

  The Anglo American writer Iris Origo, Marchesa of Val d’Orcia, who lived most of her life in Italy, noted, “The Italians live in the continuous present.” Maybe this is why people choose to be Italian. What better way to start a day than as a new day, while at the same time claiming membership in an ancient culture that, rather than controlling and organizing, perseveres and adapts to the chaos of life?