Family Heritage
In recognition of Italian American Heritage Month, I wanted to pay tribute to one of my great-grandmothers, Carmela Rosciano Menafra, who was born in 1876, emigrated to the United States in 1890, married in 1893, had ten pregnancies, bore nine children, saw seven live to adulthood, and died from what appears to have been an illness related to appendicitis. Hers is a classic immigrant story, her struggles in many ways no different than those of a multitude of immigrants from Italy and other countries around the world. A classic tale, but also unique, Carmela’s heartaches and pleasures, challenges and blessings, making up her own individual history worthy of recognition and celebration.
If only I knew more about her. I got interested in our family’s past relatively late in life, when struck by an idea for a historical fiction novel inspired by my two grandmothers. The decision to undertake the novel happened long after both were dead, so I couldn’t go to the original sources for information. But thanks to the diligent efforts of an older cousin who has a passion for genealogy and a great-aunt who lived to be over 100, the family stories weren’t entirely lost.
Growing up I heard a lot about my grandfather Thomas and his four brothers and very little about his sisters and mother. Maybe because Thomas died when I was only two, and we spent less time with that side of the family. But I’ve always attributed the focus on the Minnefor men to the patriarchal aspect of Italian American culture, in which the women so often defer to the men, at least in public. The research for my novel certainly reinforced my lived experience as an Italian American. A woman may be considered the center of the family, but the man is the dominant voice, the head of the household.
Perhaps in reaction to that custom, my interest now is in the lives of my female ancestors. Not just the stereotyped versions of little grey-haired women in black dresses standing at a stove cooking, although in photos I’ve seen of Carmela, she did in fact become a little grey-haired woman in a black dress. With seven children and a husband doing manual labor as a garbage man, she also had to do a lot of cooking (e.g., homemade ravioli in batches of one hundred!). But behind the often-cartoonish version of the Italian family matriarch lies so much more: bravery and ambition and quite a lot of strength.
Carmela was only fourteen years old when she came to America with her older sister Maria. According to family lore, they were forced to emigrate when her father abandoned her mother with four daughters to care for. The money for the trip was provided by her mother’s sister, who was already living here and who arranged jobs for Carmela and Maria at a rag factory. After forty days in the rank, frightening conditions of steerage, they arrived from Naples on Christmas Eve cold and alone, unable to speak the language.
Three years later, after Carmela had repaid the cost of her trip, her aunt arranged for her to marry Antonio Menafra, a widower eight years her senior who came from the same hometown. Carmela had little interest. She and Antonio had never spoken, and during their “courtship,” exhaustion from the long horse and buggy ride to Carmela’s aunt and uncle’s house left Antonio sleeping by the fire. Not surprisingly, a seventeen-year-old girl had no desire to wed a virtual stranger, a man who seemed old and tired. Not that Carmela’s feelings mattered. Her aunt gave her an ultimatum: marry Antonio or I’ll send you back home.
Getting pregnant almost immediately, Carmela lost her first baby, a daughter, in a miscarriage at eight months. Nevertheless, four children quickly followed: Marianna, Vincenzo, Biagio, and Carmine. But Vincenzo, 6 years old, and Biagio, 4, died of kidney problems in June and August of 1902. Despite her devastation over their loss (family stories suggest her aunt had to force her to eat), Carmela went on to have five more children, including two sons she again named Vincenzo and Biagio.
No matter what tragedies she suffered, Carmela seemed to have a spirit that couldn’t be squelched. She ran the household with a firm, sometimes physical style of discipline that wouldn’t be acceptable today. She snuck cigarettes at a time when women didn’t typically smoke. She danced the tarantella, alone if she had to. She wore spiked shoe covers to hike through snow and ice with her sister to attend performances at an Italian theater. And unlike a lot of her peers—who brought their suspicion and dislike of teachers and other “elites” with them from the class-bound, abusive social and economic system at home—Carmela pushed her children to become educated. Unable to read or write, she said that she didn’t want any of them to be a “dummy” like her. Her views seem chauvinistic by today’s standards (she refused to allow her daughter to go to college). But many if not most of her children finished high school and the first of her sons to survive childhood became a doctor, one of a small number of Italian American professionals at that time. Such a small number, in fact, that my great uncle was the reason the entire family changed their name to the more American sounding “Minnefor” around 1926. He’d been advised by one of his physician mentors that given the continuing bias against Italians, the name “Menafra” could be a deterrent for prospective patients.
That wasn’t the only name they’d changed. At some point (or in some settings?) the family had adopted Americanized first names as well: Carmine went by Charles, Vincenzo by James, Adea by Dora, Rocco by Robert. Biagio became my grandfather Thomas. Again, a classic immigrant story.
In what I like to think was a meaningful milestone for Carmela in her journey to become a prosperous American, she and Antonio donated a stained-glass window of Saint Michael, their hometown’s patron saint, to their new church, St. Rocco’s in Newark, now a landmarked building. A visual emblem of both how far they’d come and their love for what they’d left behind. Carmela never returned home, and she never saw her mother again. She couldn’t even write to her without help. Forced to leave by circumstances outside her control, she suffered unfathomable losses and still managed to find some joy in life. So, don’t be fooled by the media’s two-dimensional caricature of the old Italian nonna. In my family and no doubt many others, the figure at the stove may have been small, but her backbone was steel and served as the foundation upon which future generations were built.