Still, how would it feel to be home again? I could walk the streets of Opi that I knew so well, hear once again the familiar accents of my own name, watch fog lift over our valley, smell the pines under a star-sprayed sky and visit Zia’s grave. Assunta would be glad to see me; I could meet my half sister Luisa and bring her presents from America. But who else would truly greet me? The mayor’s wife had died and her daughter gone to live with cousins. Perhaps others from our village were already in America. For the cost of second-class passage home I could send Luisa to school in Pescasseroli with a coat and leather shoes like any city girl.
If I went to Opi now, the cut and cloth of my dress, the twist of my hair, even my way of walking might set me apart. Everyone would be polite, for I had once been one of them. But still the men would watch me askance, and even women would keep a wary eye on “L’Americana,” who could not know Opi’s new tapestry of births, marriages, deaths, joys and sorrows, and who might even play the grand signora with them. In the church piazza where we gathered in long summer evenings, those who once knew every movement of my day would ask how long I would stay in Opi, and any answer I could give—a week, a month, a season—would only betray what I had become, a stranger passing through their lives.
And yet if I did not go to Opi, as surely it was useless to go, how could I endure the inevitable telegram announcing my father’s death? I buried my face in my hands.
“Come with me, Irma,” said Niko. “Let’s walk a little.” So we went, as we often did at twilight, to a rocky ledge looking over San Francisco Bay and sat close together watching blue melt to violet above the darkening waves, that brief cut of water before the land that rolled east to the great ocean. We would never return to Kos or to Opi, for they held no more place for us, and yet they were home, woven deep in our flesh.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people for the creation of this book. Barbara Dewey, dean of the University of Tennessee Library, granted me the post of Writer in Residence, providing time, research materials and writing space. Robert Stewart published “Threads on the Mountain,” the short story that became the novel’s first chapter in New Letters. Giuseppe Trautteur’s warm response to that tale set in a region he knows so intimately afforded the confidence to continue. As the novel grew, I shared chapters with members of the Knoxville Writers Guild fiction group and constantly profited from the perceptions of Carole Borges, Jackson Culpepper, Bob Cumming, Maria de la Orden, Julie Gautreau, David Joyner, Cathy Kodra, Bonny Millard, Alan Sims and Don Williams. Andrew Rasenen’s unerring editor’s eye caught issues large and small, presenting each critique with graceful precision as well as helping with the accuracy of the San Francisco scenes. Shannon Burke, writer and friend, gave calming perspective on the publishing process, and Roz Andrews provided expert copyediting for no more recompense than a pasta dinner.
Any work of historical fiction has a manic thirst for information. Naturally, this book draws on a wide range of print and digital sources. A few people were invaluable. First, Karen Schoenewaldt for her historian’s view of the immigration process, research suggestions, careful readings for historical accuracy and at every stage being a marvelous sister. Karmen Crowther of the University of Tennessee Library guided me to a horde of data on nineteenth-century wages and prices in the United States and Italy. The Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health and Safe Haven Center provided insight on the trauma of sexual assault. Dr. Paul Barrette offered background on the Alsace region. For gracious unfolding of Greek culture and Web site magic, I thank JoAnn and Yiannis Pantanizopoulos.
Agent Courtney Miller-Callihan of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates was simply perfect in every ramification of that role. I owe much of the final shaping of the novel to her sympathetic, knowing eye. Editor Amanda Bergeron and the entire staff at HarperCollins steered the project with enthusiasm, deft skill and buoyant energy.
The History Behind the Story
Creating Irma
The inspiration for When We Were Strangers began with the realization that I am an exceptionally lazy cross-country skier. When we lived near Naples, Italy (1990–2000), dear friends, Ezio and Anamaria Catanzariti, invited us to come skiing with them in Abruzzo. We would rent a house in the tiny mountain town of Opi, which the Catanzaritis were sure we’d love for its magnificent vistas, the courtesy of the people, and quiet, mountain-hugging streets, a welcome change from the constant clang of Naples. I had concerns about the skiing element, but the rest sounded wonderful. We reached Opi at night, shrouded in somber darkness. The landlord unlocked a tiny, spotless house, lit the wood stove, assured us that anything we could possibly need was in Opi stores (all owned by people directly or intricately related to him), admonished us to keep the wood bin filled, wished us good night and disappeared into the silent street.
In the clear winter morning, the slightly larger valley town of Pescasseroli still lazed in shadows. Only a few kilometers below, it seemed another world from our airy perch. In the next few hours, I made the melancholy discovery that cross-country skiing in Abruzzo involved exhausting climbs and what for me were terrifying descents. That afternoon, while Ezio, Anamaria, and my husband, Maurizio, planned yet more adventurous routes, I made the generous offer to go back to Opi, get more firewood and do the shopping for our dinner.
Thus began a satisfying routine. After a few desultory hours on the slopes, I returned alone to Opi, making the rounds of baker, vegetable and fruit dealer, cheese seller, wine store, butcher and other diminutive shops which, in fact, had all we needed of non-foodstuffs. Everyone was helpful, even kind, but polite inquiries about where I was from and what I did there seemed to invite no lengthy response: Naples was as far away and insignificant as America—or Pescasseroli. This place, this tiny clutch of houses on the ramping spine of Abruzzo, was all that really needed to be known.
I sat in the dim, very cold church, wrote a little in the sunny, equally cold piazza, and walked the few hundred meters to the sudden edge of inhabitation, where footpaths and sheep trails began. A small child could circle Opi without tiring. Like most mountain regions of Italy, Opi has suffered a steady depopulation since the end of the nineteenth century: poverty, cold, and the utter lack of opportunity for young people were too much to bear. Looking more closely at the narrow stone houses, I began to notice keystones with dates in the 1890s. What spark of wealth made its way up this mountain to spur a building boom? Ah, of course, money from American relatives. What was their story? How many ever saw the houses their money had built? What had these emigrants felt, walking down the steep, rutted path from Opi to Pescasseroli and on to an America?
In the next days, my musing slowly coalesced on a single imagined figure: a young woman, neither pretty nor wealthy. Street-level windows in Opi invariably featured starched white cotton half curtains in cutwork or lace. Was she a needleworker? Yes, precisely so. I named her Irma after an older woman from Abruzzo I knew. My Irma would have been as intricately bound to every Opi family as our landlord, and yet I always imagined her alone on the piazza, standing against the sunset at the edge of town, hurrying back from the bakery on a frosty morning, warm bread held close to the chest, or disappearing into one of the smaller stone houses whose door was rough planks nailed to a wooden Z. Surely Irma loved Opi, knowing no other world. Like our landlord she must have assumed that it held whatever a person could want. Then I imagined her walking down the main street in Opi with every branching path blocked, leaving only a narrow road down the mountain. At that time I had no idea what, precisely, blocked each option for staying, but I knew that she left and left alone, and I believed this uneducated, inexperienced young woman with a slim packet of worldly skills did somehow endure her leaving.
Once back in Naples, other writing projects drew me from Opi and Irma but I kept my notes. For years she was quietly there, wrapped in a cape at the edge of Opi, silhouetted against a blue-purple sky. Finally I began to do research on needlework, emigration and conditions in Abruzzo in the
1880s. But for a fundamental quality of Irma—her being a stranger in America—I used my own experience of a decade lived in Italy. I was happily married, had a job I liked and was fluent enough in Italian to be earning some money from translating. My neighbor swore she felt closer to me than to her own sister. Yet I overheard her speaking of me as “L’Americana” as if I had no name. Once when she was lamenting some particularly onerous housekeeping chore, I said I didn’t do that. “Oh Pamela,” she scoffed, “what you do doesn’t count. You’re not from here. You might as well be an extraterrestrial.” So there I was, her sister, and yet, fundamentally E.T., a stranger, no matter how long I stayed.
Apart from the millions forced from home unwillingly by economic, natural, or man-made disasters, many of us pass some of our lives as strangers. To go to college, to change jobs, to move, even to change life circumstances, can put us in a new world in which no past skills are relevant. We feel labeled and unknown. Ironically, as in the immigrant communities that Irma knew, the company of other strangers is not altogether a solace. Nostalgia for our home, our food, our people can separate us from others with other longings. Yet, as Irma discovers, there is much to be learned from being strangers together.
When I went back to creating Irma’s journey in earnest, first as a short story that ends as she leaves Opi, and then as a novel, I felt an astonishing closeness to her, a sureness of how she would feel, what choices she might make and what options she would refuse. Not that the writing was easy or quick or that I didn’t endlessly revise, but there was always Irma, leading me on with her quick, light walk, leaving Opi and then pressing west after a constantly shifting dream until she finally attains a new home and new company of cherished strangers in the California hills.
—Pamela Schoenewaldt
ON WRITING WHEN WE WERE STRANGERS
Q: When We Were Strangers explores Irma’s journey from Italy to America—from girl to woman—and on a wider scale examines the human condition and the common threads that unite us all. How did you keep all these elements in play?
I knew from the first that Irma would begin in fairly self-absorbed innocence, become traumatized in Chicago and that out of that trauma, that very dark place, she would find a guide back to the light, to a resurrection of the self that would be more other-directed. I had lived in San Francisco before moving to Italy and liked the idea of Irma’s voyage ending there, but also the westward journey worked for me. While writing the early chapters I chanced to see an oil by Corot in the Brooklyn Museum: Young Woman of Albano. It was painted about ten years before Irma leaves Opi. The woman’s downward gaze, her self-possession, and the curve of her hand on her bodice spoke to me of Irma. I bought a postcard of the painting and kept it propped above my computer, imagining a scar on her face, just out of view. I also had a postcard of trunks piled up at Ellis Island. These two images—Irma and her baggage—marked for me the specificity of her character, and it does seem to be true that specificity, if deeply felt, can be a path to expressing our commonality.
In the same way, I think that a metaphor like “the journey” can be pointless and flat if the particular quality of a journey is not articulated. As noted elsewhere, I spent a good deal of time researching and imagining Irma’s physical world—and the details of that world that would imprint themselves on her. I also worked hard to create real characters around her, people with journeys and stories of their own. That practice prepared the way for one of the most difficult scenes, when Irma confronts the humanity of Jake. It would be so much easier for her to objectify and abuse him as he has objectified and abused her. That meant, of course, that he can’t be just “the rapist,” but has to be someone with a past, with things he likes and dislikes and people who have other experiences of him. So Irma’s encounters with the human condition have to be grounded in her experience of others as human, not Italian, Greek, Irish, American, etc., but people on a journey, as she is, as we are.
Q: You’ve said you became very close to Irma as you wrote her story. Did this make describing some of the more difficult or traumatic aspects harder to put on the page?
Yes, for sure, and I don’t see any way around that pain of identification. You have to imagine a scene very graphically to write about it, press your face into it and feel what the characters would feel. Perhaps there are other ways to write but I don’t know them. To pick a milder example, I’m fairly claustrophobic, so describing life in the hold of the Servia was uncomfortable; the storm at sea was worse. Irma’s trauma in the ruins of the Chicago fire was so hard to write that I had to do it many times, each time forcing myself back to that house, observing more, listening more closely, using more senses. I even felt guilty for “letting” Irma go there, for not warning her. A character can feel like your child whom you want to protect, not only from the outside world but also from any weakness in herself. But fiction writing is not about being a hyper-protective parent, and members of my writing group warned me more than once against creating a chronicle of Saint Irma. She did things she wasn’t proud of—like stealing from the Missus—and I had to let that happen, just as the rape had to happen. It was part of who she was, the situation she was in, her complex of choices and the journey that was hers to take.
Q: You don’t shy away from exploring difficult issues. Irma’s decision to have an abortion was a major event in her journey and could draw criticism from some readers. What would this choice have meant in the context of her time—particularly for someone with her religious upbringing?
Irma’s decision is difficult and she struggles unsuccessfully to find an alternative. Clearly the church did not condone her choice, but in the nineteenth century, abortion wasn’t the public policy issue it is today. The frequency of abortions varied through the century, but generally, control of fertility was a woman’s concern. Perhaps Victorian reticence added to the silence. In Irma’s time, abortionists were rarely prosecuted except in cases of willful harm. In many ways these weren’t “the good old days.” Without effective contraceptives, it wasn’t uncommon for a sexually active woman at any social level to have multiple abortions in her childbearing years, as well as resorting to home treatments ranging from useless and bizarre to deadly. State-funded welfare systems were decades away and many orphanages warehoused children for “adoption” into servitude. Childbirth was so dangerous that termination of unplanned pregnancies often seemed preferable to risking death and leaving one’s children motherless. Dangerous concoctions, like Dr. Bronson’s Infallible Cure, were sold openly in magazines to “restore regularity” or “remove obstructions.” Readers interested in this subject may want to read Janet Brodie’s excellent study, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America. However, this is all sociological background. Like the decision to leave Opi, Irma does not make her choice lightly or without pain. As a writer, all I could do was to present as clearly as possible her situation and the wholeness of her person and hope that readers see Irma’s course as consistent with who and where she is.
Q: Considerable research went into the careful detailing of everything from Irma’s passage to medical knowledge of the time period. How did you approach this task?
I was fortunate to have begun my research when I was Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee Libraries. My sister holds a doctorate in immigration history and she led me to classic works like Philip Taylor’s The Distant Magnet: European Emigration to the United States. I read a good deal in English and Italian on the economic situation in Southern Italy at that time. The Special Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics produced in the 1880s gives a wealth of information on costs of consumer goods and wages (as well as recondite data, like the contribution of human hair to the GNP of various European countries and a U.S. importer’s evaluation of the “moral fiber” of Venetian glassblowers. I couldn’t work in this last factoid, but readers will be relieved to know that their fiber was excellent.). For background on ranges of reaction to sexual abuse I interviewed professionals in a rape
crisis center and a women’s clinic. Having lived in southern Italy for ten years helped, of course. I visited Opi several times, lived in a small town with some of Opi’s insularity, and studied Italian at a school near Piazza Montesanto in Naples, where Irma was so overwhelmed by the exuberant chaos of that city.
Q: When We Were Strangers grew out of a short story. Can you describe that initial project and what made you return to it?
I published a short story in New Letters called “Threads on the Mountain,” which is the basis of this novel’s first chapter and ends with Irma leaving Opi. I always liked the story and after a difficult and unsatisfying experience with another fiction project, I began wondering what happened to Irma after she left Opi. The arc of the novel, her journey across America and metamorphosis from needleworker to medical worker, came to me in one piece and a few years ago I started to research and then write. The short story genre demands a very quick establishment of place and character, which was helpful when I began the novel, since Irma’s character was so clearly in my mind: her strengths, her standards, her fears and native wit. Zia Carmela had a larger role in the short story and since we would be leaving her behind in the novel, I had to reduce that role, which was hard, since I had grown very fond of her. I suppose that’s one of the costs of writing a journey-based novel like When We Were Strangers: there were so many characters that I grew fond of and curious about. Yet, like Irma, I had to leave them behind. Assunta, Attilio, Teresa, the Serbian girls, Lula, even the Missus, Jacob and his sisters—what happened to all of them?
Q: Some authors say they end up taking direction from their characters rather than the reverse. As you were writing did any characters or plot lines take on a life of their own?
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