The Story Behind When the World was Young
Pop's Singer sewing machine
One summer afternoon I was driving by a pizza place, a tiny take-out joint, the sight of which reminded me of the Italian social clubs that were once common throughout Chicago, and I imagined a young man with a dark vest and starched white shirt striding out of this club gripping a bottle of some sort, the owner’s son perhaps, and I knew I wanted to spend time in this place from the past. Though that scene never appeared in the novel, the quietude of that image stayed with me and drove me during the writing of this book.I kept wondering, Why the stride, why the confidence? Who or what was waiting for this young man at home? I wasn’t sure, but a few certainties began to emerge: this was a Sunday stride, the day when a pot of red sauce and a bowl of fresh pasta brought the family together for a few hours, and to arrive home early meant he could pull a slice of warm bread from the newly baked loaf and dip it into the sauce and luxuriate in the aroma of meatballs frying in a pan until his old world mother ordered him out of the kitchen. Outside, in the backyard, there were plum tomatoes and bell peppers, of course, and an extended family of loud neighbors who seemed busy at doing nothing. But beyond that the greater neighborhood pulsed with its own stark needs and promises and threatened to disrupt the sanctity of these Sunday dinners.
Inhabiting such settings with particular people—and after a while they seem like people to me rather than just characters—is infinitely more challenging. While I can genuinely claim that the characters in this book are imaginary, I can’t deny the many parallels with my own life. My father immigrated to America when he was thirty-seven, a fact that never fails to astonish me. Six months later, after establishing himself, which meant he leased an apartment and found a job as a tailor in a factory in downtown Chicago, he sent for the rest of his family, a wife, a five-year-old son, and me, their eleven-month-old, who often wonders what my life would have been like had I stayed in Italy. I wonder about the physical, of course, running down dusty village roads; picking cherries in front of our stone farmhouse; taking in the mist-shrouded Apennines each morning; visiting my grandfather, a man I met only twice, though he lived an entire century. But mainly I wonder about language, how English has shaped my very thoughts, while my father could never hope to make this tongue his own.
While I feel fortunate, even redeemed, to have grown up hearing two tongues, I also feel loss. My siblings and I knew a crude Napolitano well enough to ask for another helping of cake or to explain we were going three houses down to play, but we could never fully express how we felt about anything. And because of their limitations, coming to English so late in their lives, my parents couldn’t share their stories with us. Our conversations then were limited to simple household matters. As a result, I craved stories and turned to comic books, began collecting them. Every Thursday I cashed in the pop bottles I’d scrounged from around the neighborhood for the newest World’s Finest and Superman and Batman. Eventually I discovered other kinds of writing, and between schoolyard softball games and pitching pennies along sidewalk squares, spent hours on my front stoop lost in the tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and Poe and many others I can’t even recall.
When I began writing my own short stories, which seemed to nourish me as much as my mother’s bread, they were largely autobiographical. After finishing When the World Was Young I thought I had finally broken free from my past and created a wholly imagined world, and in some respects I had. But mostly, I’m still the boy reading on the stoop, wondering, coming to grips with the familiar cycle of loss and redemption, this time through the Peccatori family breathing and working in Chicago in 1957, old friends to me now. How is it possible, I often wonder, to feel nostalgia for characters and places that don’t exist and for a time in which I never lived?
Inhabiting such settings with particular people—and after a while they seem like people to me rather than just characters—is infinitely more challenging. While I can genuinely claim that the characters in this book are imaginary, I can’t deny the many parallels with my own life. My father immigrated to America when he was thirty-seven, a fact that never fails to astonish me. Six months later, after establishing himself, which meant he leased an apartment and found a job as a tailor in a factory in downtown Chicago, he sent for the rest of his family, a wife, a five-year-old son, and me, their eleven-month-old, who often wonders what my life would have been like had I stayed in Italy. I wonder about the physical, of course, running down dusty village roads; picking cherries in front of our stone farmhouse; taking in the mist-shrouded Apennines each morning; visiting my grandfather, a man I met only twice, though he lived an entire century. But mainly I wonder about language, how English has shaped my very thoughts, while my father could never hope to make this tongue his own.
While I feel fortunate, even redeemed, to have grown up hearing two tongues, I also feel loss. My siblings and I knew a crude Napolitano well enough to ask for another helping of cake or to explain we were going three houses down to play, but we could never fully express how we felt about anything. And because of their limitations, coming to English so late in their lives, my parents couldn’t share their stories with us. Our conversations then were limited to simple household matters. As a result, I craved stories and turned to comic books, began collecting them. Every Thursday I cashed in the pop bottles I’d scrounged from around the neighborhood for the newest World’s Finest and Superman and Batman. Eventually I discovered other kinds of writing, and between schoolyard softball games and pitching pennies along sidewalk squares, spent hours on my front stoop lost in the tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and Poe and many others I can’t even recall.
When I began writing my own short stories, which seemed to nourish me as much as my mother’s bread, they were largely autobiographical. After finishing When the World Was Young I thought I had finally broken free from my past and created a wholly imagined world, and in some respects I had. But mostly, I’m still the boy reading on the stoop, wondering, coming to grips with the familiar cycle of loss and redemption, this time through the Peccatori family breathing and working in Chicago in 1957, old friends to me now. How is it possible, I often wonder, to feel nostalgia for characters and places that don’t exist and for a time in which I never lived?
The Story Behind If You Eat, You Never Die
1958
When he was 37, my father came to America. He had a job at a suit factory waiting for him, arranged by his cousin, Solly. But he didn’t know a word of English. He’d rarely been outside his small village in Italy, other than to bicycle a few miles to the neighboring towns. He had to leave behind his wife and two sons and wasn’t sure how long before he could send for them. Six months later, after enduring weeks on a boat and days on a train, we joined him. Although I was only a year old when we arrived, these journeys had already begun to define me.
In Italy, my mother and father completed six grades in school, but they were about to embark on a different kind of education in America. My father was content, I think, to work his eight hour shift and come home to his family. But my mother wanted more. She wanted to know people; to learn this new language so that the clerks at the grocery store wouldn’t cheat her; to dress her children like Americans so that they wouldn’t be ridiculed; to send them to the Catholic school down the street, where they could come home for lunch each day. To achieve this, she worked the night shift at the machine factory a few blocks away. For many years, my father and mother saw each other only on weekends, although I’m fairly certain she woke up early each morning to prepare his breakfast and then his lunch, a salami sandwich with lettuce leaf on homemade bread, always the same sandwich for over 30 years.
While these short stories about the Comingo family are fiction, they do remain true to many of my family’s struggles. In some cases, the parallels are direct. For instance, in one story, the boy’s coach comes to the house to talk to Mama. In fact, I did have a wrestling coach who came to our house to explain to my mother why I had to lose weight. I didn’t realize at the time that by joining the wrestling team, I was waging a classic conflict between a mother whose holy mission in life was to feed her children in abundance and a boy who needed to begin to find his place in the world. What worse sport could an Italian boy join? So yes, sometimes we can find art in our pasts, but still the fictional story is not true to the facts. As all writers of fiction do, I changed the details to fit the art. If you try to remain true to actual fact, you create, as Mario Vargas Llosa calls it, failed fiction. For example, the dialogue in the wrestling story is entirely imagined, as is the outcome. The coach and the mother are no longer my coach and my mother. But I’ll stop there before it begins to sound as if I protest too much.
In most cases, the parallels between the stories and my life are indirect and merely reflect my family’s or any immigrant’s struggles. How do first generation parents talk to their children, given the language barriers that arise? How can these parents remain close to their original culture yet fit in with their adopted one? How does the myth of the American dream continue to haunt the immigrant family? How can any one of us feel like we fit in? I don’t think many fiction writers consciously think about such questions so explicitly, until afterward, as I’m doing now, mainly because this kind of examination tends to stem the creative flow, and also because the posing of such questions makes us (me?) feel a little pretentious.
I think it’s enough to enjoy the stories, to believe during the few minutes you’re reading them that the characters are real and that the conflicts are compelling. You don’t need to wonder if my mother ever used to say to us, as Mama does in the stories, “If you eat, you never die,” because my mother didn’t. She was more serious. It was my father who used to tell us that, seeking a laugh every time.
In Italy, my mother and father completed six grades in school, but they were about to embark on a different kind of education in America. My father was content, I think, to work his eight hour shift and come home to his family. But my mother wanted more. She wanted to know people; to learn this new language so that the clerks at the grocery store wouldn’t cheat her; to dress her children like Americans so that they wouldn’t be ridiculed; to send them to the Catholic school down the street, where they could come home for lunch each day. To achieve this, she worked the night shift at the machine factory a few blocks away. For many years, my father and mother saw each other only on weekends, although I’m fairly certain she woke up early each morning to prepare his breakfast and then his lunch, a salami sandwich with lettuce leaf on homemade bread, always the same sandwich for over 30 years.
While these short stories about the Comingo family are fiction, they do remain true to many of my family’s struggles. In some cases, the parallels are direct. For instance, in one story, the boy’s coach comes to the house to talk to Mama. In fact, I did have a wrestling coach who came to our house to explain to my mother why I had to lose weight. I didn’t realize at the time that by joining the wrestling team, I was waging a classic conflict between a mother whose holy mission in life was to feed her children in abundance and a boy who needed to begin to find his place in the world. What worse sport could an Italian boy join? So yes, sometimes we can find art in our pasts, but still the fictional story is not true to the facts. As all writers of fiction do, I changed the details to fit the art. If you try to remain true to actual fact, you create, as Mario Vargas Llosa calls it, failed fiction. For example, the dialogue in the wrestling story is entirely imagined, as is the outcome. The coach and the mother are no longer my coach and my mother. But I’ll stop there before it begins to sound as if I protest too much.
In most cases, the parallels between the stories and my life are indirect and merely reflect my family’s or any immigrant’s struggles. How do first generation parents talk to their children, given the language barriers that arise? How can these parents remain close to their original culture yet fit in with their adopted one? How does the myth of the American dream continue to haunt the immigrant family? How can any one of us feel like we fit in? I don’t think many fiction writers consciously think about such questions so explicitly, until afterward, as I’m doing now, mainly because this kind of examination tends to stem the creative flow, and also because the posing of such questions makes us (me?) feel a little pretentious.
I think it’s enough to enjoy the stories, to believe during the few minutes you’re reading them that the characters are real and that the conflicts are compelling. You don’t need to wonder if my mother ever used to say to us, as Mama does in the stories, “If you eat, you never die,” because my mother didn’t. She was more serious. It was my father who used to tell us that, seeking a laugh every time.