THE LANGUAGE OF THE HALF-FOREIGNERS

With a few, rare exceptions, Italians who migrated to North America never learned English all that well. Many, especially women, didn’t learn it at all. The majority stopped at five hundred mangled words, with English roots and Italian endings, to be used in a life that was restricted to work, saving and raising children. The best study conducted on the topic is an essay by Alberto Menarini.[1]

The situation was greatly different for their children, with a series of unexpected and dire consequences. The children went to school, played in the streets, went to the movies, practice sports and, in so doing, learned English. The new language put them on the same level as their peers and the rest of the population but separated them from their parents. Even the old folks who had managed to learn English could only pronounce it with a strong accent that embarrassed their own children and was ridiculed by native speakers. This phenomenon is not discussed in the official statistics; nor is it present in diplomatic reports and it is never mentioned during colonial banquets. Generally, the phenomenon was barely noticed even in the memoires of the few second-generation Italians who wrote those stories after they had gone on to great success and brilliant careers in other fields. A few instances appear in autobiographies and novels written in English by the second generation. I was able to secure one of these autobiographies, full of interesting biographical and family information, from a student of mine, Olga Peragallo.[2]

One of the best American writers of Italian origin was John Fante, whose autobiography, Dago Red, was translated into Italian. First of all, we must pay attention to the fact that the title includes one of the most common slurs used by Americans to demean Italians: Dago. This is a word that provoked many fist fights and occasionally pushed enraged Italians to draw knives from their pockets.

 

I am nervous when I bring friends to my house; the place looks so Italian. Here hangs a picture of Victor Emmanuel,[3] and over there is one of the cathedral of Milan, and next to it is one of St. Peter’s, and on the buffet stands a wine pitcher of medieval design; it’s forever brimming, forever red and brilliant with wine. These things are heirloom belonging to my father, and no matter who may come to our house, he likes to stand under them and brag.

So I begin to shout to him. I tell him to cut out to be a Wop and be an American once in a while. Immediately he gets his razor strop and whales hell out of me, clouting me from room to room and finally out the back door. I go into the woodshed and pull down my pants and stretch my neck to examine the blue slices across my romp. A Wop, that’s what my father is! Nowhere is there an American father who beats his son this way. Well, he is not going to get away with it; someday I’ll get even with him.

I begin to think that my grandmother is hopelessly a Wop. She is a small, stocky peasant who walks with her wrists criss-crossed over her belly, a simple old lady fond of boys. She comes to the room and tries to talk to my friends. She speaks English with a bad accent, her vowels rolling out like hoops. When, in her simple way, she confronts a friend of mine and says, her old eyes smiling: “You lika go the Seester scola?” my heart roars. Mannaggia! I’m disgraced; now they all know that I am Italian.

My grandmother has taught me to speak her native tongue. By seven, I know it pretty well, and I always address her in it. But when friends are with me, when I am twelve and thirteen, I pretend ignorance of what she says, and smirk stiffly; my friends daren’t know that I can speak any language but English. Sometimes this infuriates her. She bristles, the loose skin at her throat knits hard, and she blasphemes with a mighty blasphemy. (169-170)

One of the first books written in English by an Italian immigrant that came to the attention of American critics was Son of Italy, by Pascal D’Angelo. The book, which includes prose and poetry, is the extraordinary narration of the hardships he faced as a foreign worker in America and his passionate effort to achieve poetical expression. When it first came out it was welcome with great enthusiasm and it is, to this very day, a fundamental book for understanding the history of immigration. Here is what it says about the difficulties of learning English:

None of us, including myself, ever thought of a movement to broaden our knowledge of the English language. We soon learned a few words about the job, which was the preliminary creed; then came bread, shirt, gloves (no kid gloves), milk. And that is all. We formed our own little world —one of many in this country. And the other people around us who spoke in strange languages might have been phantoms for all the influence that they had upon us or for all we cared about them. (68)

 

And here it is, the creation of a “little world,” a world separated from that of the others, as if they were ghosts. And here are also the first token words, without emotion or value, indispensible in the concrete world.

Francesco Ventresca[4] was a teacher. When he first arrived to these shores he was a pick-and-shovel worker and, in an extraordinary case of strong will, decided to start going to school at 21 years of age. He became so absorbed in studying that he eventually became chairperson of a foreign language department in a [non-specified] college. In his memoirs he wrote:

From that moment on I started living with my fellow countrymen with my body only, but not with my heart and mind. While they were chatting, playing cards and cursing, I was busy reading out loud my English lessons and looking up word definitions in the dictionary. My companions would look at me strange and finally one of them said: “Cecco,[5] if you go on like this you are going to go crazy.” The prophecy didn’t scare me. And I kept reading, reading and reading.

This separation from his Italian companions in “heart” and “mind” is noteworthy in that it is related directly to the notion of education. The hostility for and rejection of education is so strong that, to them, studying is the equivalent of madness. From their point of view, the necessity to adopt the new language is responsible for the shrinking of their native tongue and for the impoverishment of their emotional world. Often it also pushed them to renegade their very names and to adopt English ones. At times this was the result of the immigrants’ wish to become completely American and no longer be considered wops or dagoes; foreigners targeted by the antipathy of landlords; policemen; and civil servants. Some times it was the Americans’ difficulty in pronouncing their foreign names that suggested the change, informally at first, then officially. Changing names was very easy, requiring only the approval of a judge. In many cases the new last name was the English translation of the Italian family name, thus Papa became Pope; Verdi became Green; and Ferraro was translated with Smith. In other occasions the change was a pejorative, as was the story I read in

the memoirs of Constantine Panunzio.[6]

 

The first important incident in that American house was the change of name. George Annis, my landlord, who—as I discover later was almost illiterate—could not pronounce my Italian name. He thus suggested that I changed it. At first I was stunned and I thought how my parents[7] [sic] would have reacted, since they gave me that name on purpose, to perpetuate my grandfather’s. But I wanted to become as similar as possible to an American and it seemed there was no other way. I let George change my name into a genuine American name. This is not an uncommon experience for many immigrants to America. Even today, some change it out of expediency; others take the initiative to be American at least in their name. But in most cases the change is forced by the landlord. In some cases the changes are funny. The name I was given by George was over the top as far American origins are concerned. It was American in its nature and it smelled of Americanism. For a period of three months I was called Mr. Beefsteak. When I found out about the real meaning of the word I rebelled. I didn’t want to be known as a cut of meat. Then George changed my name again into Frank Nardi, and Frank Nardi I was until I went to school and could return to my original name.[8] In the meantime with my relatives I felt the humiliation of having changed my name. I sent them a bunch of envelopes already addressed to Frank Nardi, telling them they should use them to send me their letters. I later found out that many other immigrants had done the same thing to hide the fact that they had changed their names.

Even in the larger picture painted by The Grand Gennaro by Garibaldi Lapolla—the story of the rise and fall of an Italian family—the problem of the split

 between the two languages appears:

 

The older son of the “great” Gennaro learned English incredibly fast and was proud of it. When mother spoke to him in Italian he would always answer in English. “Why in English, Roberto?” his father would ask. “Do you want to forget your sweet language?” His younger brothers were following his example. Then Gennaro decided to follow in the steps of signor Monterano and bought an English grammar and started studying with his wife. But his accent made his children laugh despite the fact that his cadence was harmonious and full of sibilants.

Joe [sic] Pagano,[9] author of a series of sketches and vignettes titled The Paesanos,[10] in a short story describes a gathering of Italian Americans on the occasion of a baptism. Hanging on a tavern’s walls are the portraits of Roosevelt[11] and Mussolini: the first with tired eyes behind spectacles, the other with a black beret and a belligerent jaw. Also on the walls are the American and Italian flags, crossed like scissors. It’s a rainy day, the tavern is filling up and soon the large room is crowded, with people gathered in small groups:

(…) some sitting and some standing, chatting and laughing and bantering in Italian American lingo –Yah, I sez him…. Woudn’ tcha like ta know—and other similar expressions.

The stories narrated in English by Italian American authors bring to light the pain, the poverty, the humiliations, the betrayals, the miscommunication and the confusion that are usually kept hidden during the official speeches, the banquets and social events that attract politicians, Chambers of Commerce functionaries, lawyers, travel agents, fraudulent bankers and other new rich. Those stories are really moving. And at the center is always the linguistic tragedy, the tragedy of impossible expressivity, the demolition of words and, therefore, thought. This tragedy devastated the Italian American psyche in two different ways. The first was the impoverishment of the lexicon. The immigrant cafone[12] picked up only the most mechanical and functional aspects of the linguistic mixture made of jobba [job] and pezze [pieces, dollars]. The other phenomenon was the schizophrenia, the split in the immigrant’s soul between Italian and American identities, often represented by the conflict between two generations: fathers and mothers against their grandparents on one side; and against children, grandchildren and their friends on the other.

There were obviously several exceptions. For instance, people who ended up in the countryside were luckier than those who stayed in the cities. Those who went to California found better conditions than on the Atlantic coast; people with even minimal education resisted better than the illiterate. However, the general picture remains the same. The language and the lingo of Italian Americans reveal the crisis of the spirit and the customs.