IN THE GARDEN OF PAPA SANTUZZU

Since we’re going to Italy, I am taking the occasion to write about one of my favorite “Italian Immigration Novels”.  This one– IN THE GARDEN OF PAPA SANTUZZU — is more specifically a Sicily to American novel. My daughter will be enjoying Sicily during her spring break. I’ll be drinking wine in Roma and Bari.

“Cu nesci arrinesci” (He who leaves succeeds)

Tony Ardizzone’s novel, In the Garcden of Papa Santuzzu, is an abundant collection of magical stories and magnificent language woven together to create a extraordinary loving novel about not only Sicilian Americans but also the heartbreak and hope of common people who leave a home to begin again somewhere else.  In Ardizzone’s case the people are poor Sicilian farm laborers who endure backbreaking work in the rocky fields of oppressive baruni.  The place they migrate to is La Merica.  The story begins as the character’s father, Papa Santuzzu and his wife Adriana, push their sons and daughters, one by one, to the land of opportunity and promise.

Rosa Dolci, Gaetanu, Luigi, Assunta, Salvatore, Rosaria and Livicedda Girgenti, Teresa Pantaluna, Ciccina Agneddina, and Carla and Gerlando Cavadduzzo all bribe their way out of the poverty of their island–one disguises herself as a man; another gains the help of enchanted eels

Old World Daughter, New World Mother

preview FROM Spring 2009 Italian Americana, cultural and historical journal.  Do not reproduce any part of this review without permission of the author and publisher.

Old World Daughter, New World Mother is a provocative meditation on feminism: a symphony of intellectual, historical, economic, political, social, emotional, and personal aspects playing their part in a final creation that holds together not only the story of Maria Laurino, but also other ambitious second generation immigrant women–perhaps Italian Americans in particular, but certainly not limited to that ethnic group.

Laurino, author of the best selling book, Were You Always an Italian,

My Mother Knows Patricia Walden 9/22/08

Ruth Palamidessi

Mom, I, and my daughter have a family plan with AT&T.  I talk to  both of them everyday.  Daughter lives across the river in Boston; mom is way down south in Florida. I don’t know why she lives so far away, but it was always her dream to live where she could sit in the sun on a beach everyday and never shovel snow.  Well, she got it!

We’ve not been living near each other for thirty years or more; In the States I moved around from Pittsburgh to Baltimore to Maine to NYC to Boston. Mom made a direct line from Pittsburgh to Florida, Venice to be exact, one of the cities rated best place to retire by AARP. Before having the family cell phone plan, we rarely spoke more than three times a month.

Now my mother knows what I do everyday and me her. She volunteers at a place called The Cattery. “A really nice resell store,” she says. ”You can’t believe the things that come in! Real treasures.”  So far she’s sent me a “il bisone” buffalo leather agenda book, which is gorgeous, a set of steak knives ( I don’t eat meat), a cancer prevention macrobiotic cookbook, and a Coach leather briefcase that weighs a ton when empty. The profits from The Cattery go to cat shelters for homeless cats and kittens, cat adoption agencies, and animal cruelty prevention organizations.  My mother never had a cat.  One of the women she works with at The Cattery keeps a dozen in her house.

Patricia Walden