Guest Post: Author of Painted Hands - Jennifer Zobair

When I talk about how I came to write a book about two successful, professional Muslim women in Boston, I often say that it started with a drug test in Michigan. I’d just left my law firm job for an in-house position at a robotics corporation and, as many companies do, they required a drug test as part of the hiring process. I reported to the appropriate hospital for the test, with my big, blond hair and tailored black suit, and proceeded to answer the perfunctory questions—name, address, date of birth— from the twenty-something male registrar. When he got to religion, I said Islam.

 Without missing a beat, he replied, “I wasn’t expecting that.”

 Despite research showing that Muslim women in America are highly educated and high-income earners, the stereotype of the oppressed and foreign woman persists. This “otherizing” is what allowed that young man to be so surprised to learn I was a Muslim. And it’s what informs too many narratives about Muslim women in this country.

 My novel is about the kinds of Muslim women I know—smart, opinionated, warm, confident. Because I married into a Pakistani American family, many of the Muslim women I know happen to be South Asian like my two main characters, Amra and Zainab. In many ways, the book is about their experience as second generation Indian and Pakistani Americans and the ways they navigate their bicultural identities. For example, they don high-end western clothes as they scale the corporate ladder, but can still rock a gharara or a sari at South Asian weddings and parties. Zainab, who is a brash, beautiful campaign strategist, even wears a red lehenga to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, causing Amra to ask if her attire isn’t “too ethnic.” Part of this might be because Amra is a lawyer at a prestigious law firm, and law firm culture is notoriously conservative. But politics is, too, and Zainab’s sartorial choice probably has more to do with her confidence: In this as in all matters, Zainab is radically and unflinchingly committed to being herself—a very American and very South Asian feminist.

 The novel explores Indian and Pakistani culture, to be sure—there are descriptions of food and clothes and wedding traditions like how brides typically wear red and have their hands “painted” with henna before the ceremony. But for immigrants of any generation or background who happen to be Muslim, there are points of departure from other immigrant stories in a post-9/11 world, and I’ve tried to capture that in this novel. What does it mean to be a Muslim in America, or a woman—even a feminist, as my characters and the author certainly are—in Islam? Who is a “real American” and who gets to decide? And how do you maintain your dignity when so many people stand ready to vilify you on the one hand, or pity you on the other, based on your religious affiliation?

 Of course, Painted Hands also explores issues many non-Muslim women can relate to as well. My characters balance high-powered careers and the desire for a family. They are attracted to compelling and complicated men. They confront the glass ceiling, the pressures of the western beauty myth, and the fissures even close friendships face when people change. At the heart of the story, then, is that whatever our roots, whatever generation of “immigrant” we happen to be, our struggles and triumphs are strikingly similar. There are differences, of course, and I hope Painted Hands illuminates a bit about what it’s like to be Muslim woman in America. But I hope it also shows that universal truth the brilliant Maya Angelou spoke of in her poem “Human Family”:

 I note the obvious differences 

between each sort and type 

but we are more alike, my friends 

than we are unalike

Thank you to Jennifer Zobair for this excellent post about the characters in her novel, their immigrant stories and the universality of that experience.  Her first novel is Painted Hands (my review).

Guest Post: Author of The Partner Track, Helen Wan

A writing instructor of mine once assigned our fiction class this terrific exercise: “When you get stuck, put aside whatever you’re working on and try writing about your elementary school cafeteria. What did it look like, smell like, sound like? Where did you sit? And who with? Did you ever sit alone? And how did that make you feel? What about what you ate? Were you a lunch-bringer or a lunch-buyer? Were you self-conscious about what you were having for lunch?”

This, I think, is an incredibly helpful prompt to give to a roomful of aspiring fiction writers. What better microcosm than a school cafeteria to draw out so many long-forgotten memories, deeply rooted cultural traditions, raw insecurities and honest emotions? It gave me the opening to my debut novel, THE PARTNER TRACK, the story of a second-generation Chinese American woman about to become the first minority female partner at a prestigious white-shoe law firm, and how family and cultural context and “outsider” status affect her journey up the corporate ladder.


At the start of the novel, Ingrid Yung, my protagonist, has perfected the art of “passing” – that is, downplaying attributes of having been raised by first-generation Chinese immigrants – in order to seamlessly blend into the fabric of her white-shoe law firm. Secretly, though, like many other men and women with any sort of “outsider” status, Ingrid sometimes feels she must be a less “authentic” self in the workplace in order to be successful.

Although she is now a polished, seasoned M&A lawyer on the cusp of partnership at a top global law firm, Ingrid sits in the corporate cafeteria and reflects on being a shy kid awkwardly unwrapping the shrimp toast and scallion pancakes her Chinese-American mother would pack in her lunchbox, and how the other girls at the table would wrinkle up their noses and ask, “What’s that?” – their own tidy baloney-and-cheese sandwiches raised halfway to their mouths.

 A lot of people have asked me how much of my novel is autobiographical. Well, like Ingrid, I’m the child of first-generation Chinese immigrants, my grandparents fled China during the Communist Revolution and found refuge in Taiwan, my parents later immigrated to the United States, where I was born and raised, and my first job after graduating law school was in fact at a large corporate law firm.

When I began work on this book over a decade ago, I was dead set against writing a particular kind of so-called “ethnic novel” (a phrase that I find of questionable utility anyway. What were John Updike and John Cheever doing if not writing at least partly about their “ethnicity”?). It seemed to me there were a fair number of “immigrant stories” being published about Asian Americans, but they always seemed to follow an increasingly familiar formula: a flock of old-world relatives, a wedding banquet with large and detailed descriptions of the food, a soul-searching trip back to some “ancestral village” in Asia, at least one arranged marriage. By the way, note that I am not denigrating novels that include any of these elements; I myself enjoy many of them; I am simply saying that my goal was to write something that felt altogether different. I wanted to explore the question: What happens to these children of immigrants once they’ve actually arrived at the top (or at least have gotten very, very close)? What happens to these hyphenated Americans, these Minority Darlings, when they are finally within striking distance of The American Dream, the one their immigrant parents have been hoping to see them achieve all their lives?

 It is this aspect of the immigrant experience that I am most interested in: the cultural weight that any second generation carries around with them. When you’re the child of Chinese immigrants, especially ones who abandoned everything that was comfortable and familiar and had to start over from scratch twice (once to flee China, and once to immigrate from Taiwan to the States), when that is part of your family’s origin story, if you will, I think it really influences the personal choices that you make in life. And that is at the heart of THE PARTNER TRACK.

 Ingrid constantly has to ask herself the question, how important is it to achieve something, just because she is one of the very few who can? Because she can, does it follow that she must?

By the way, a number of friends who happen to be as white and male as they come, have told me they were surprised how well they could relate to Ingrid, and that this means that it doesn’t take immigrant or outsider status at all to appreciate the themes of this book – that is, the pressure we all sometimes feel to conform because we want so desperately to fit in. Again, I’m drawn back to the setting of the school cafeteria. To me, those childhood memories of the desire and necessity to fit in are so powerful, so ingrained, and so informative of later adult lives and choices, that they are incredibly useful to writers of fiction.

 Helen Wan is the author of the debut novel THE PARTNER TRACK, about a young Chinese-American woman’s experience in corporate America, just released by St. Martin’s Press. She is also Associate General Counsel at the Time Inc. division of Time Warner. Helen’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. Her author website is www.helenwan.com.

Sunday Salon: June 2, 2013

This has been quite a week - I was fortunate enough to attend Book Expo America (BEA) which was here in NYC from Wed through Sat. It was a great week of books, authors, bloggers and readers.  Did I mention books?

I LOVE totes and BEA delivered!

I need to creatively stash these throughout the apartment

 I need to go through all this and sort out how I will best feature it all on the blog (if you have suggestions on how you would like to hear about these books, please leave them in the comments). I want to bring these books to you because I am excited about them and also want to make sure I feature them relative to when they publish since I don't read quickly enough to read all this in time! 


Here are some highlights of my week:

 - great book blogger events thrown by Harper Collins, Atria and Penguin which included blogger friends Kathy, Diane, Gayle, Nicole, Candace, Alison, Jenn, Elizabeth and Julie

 - meeting amazing authors including Joshilyn Jackson, Joseph Kanon, Sue Grafton, Kimberly McCreight, Amy Hill Hearth, Koethi Zan (check out her bio on the website - I think it is so well written!), Elizabeth Gilbert and Wally Lamb

 - having breakfast with other bloggers at the home of author Adriana Trigiani (!!) - this was such a lovely morning. Her home is beautiful and she was such a gracious host to us all. She is also invited authors John Searles, Bruce Feiler and Susan Fales-Hill. It was great to meet and talk books, etc with them too!

- cocktails with author Dorothea Benton Frank where we chatted about her road to becoming an author, the city of Charleston, and her latest novel The Last Original Wife. I also discovered a great little place in the city - The Tipsy Parson - they had a wonderful menu of drinks and eats (even though the pepper jelly on the biscuits almost choked poor Dottie - it was so spicy!)

Ok - off to settle in with a book - hope you all have a great week!

Guest Post: Author of Bella Fortuna - Rosanna Chiofalo

Rosanna Chiofalo is the author of Bella Fortuna (my review) which tells the story of Valentina Deluca, the daughter of Italian immigrants who ultimately travels to Italy to change her fortune when life deals her a blow. Like Valentina, the author is the daughter of Italian immigrants. Rosanna graciously agreed to guest post on my blog about her own mother's immigrant experience in conjunction with my Immigrant Stories Challenge. 

 As a child growing up, my siblings and I were constantly reminded of my mother’s emigration from Sicily to the United States. For she still longed to live in her native homeland and be surrounded by her large, tight-knit family. Her depression and yearning for Sicily, hung like a dark cloud over my family and me, and as a result, my siblings and I grew resentful of this foreign place that had occupied my mother’s attention and stolen her happiness.

Though my siblings and I were also proud to be of Italian heritage and loved many of the customs my mother brought with her from Sicily—the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve, Easter bread, her impeccable seamstress skills which enabled her to sew whatever clothes we desired—we often spoke derisively of Italy when we were among ourselves. It wasn’t until I went to Sicily for the first time and spent the entire summer there, that I started to understand more of my mother’s sadness over leaving her country.

Sicily (Credit)

The island of Sicily is a paradise with temperate weather, verdant soil, majestic panoramas that include mountains and pristine beaches, volcanic islands that are just a ferry ride away, amazing architecture of its many churches and cathedrals, ancient Greek ruins, and a host of culinary treasures. As our airplane approached the island, the aerial view left me awe-struck and brought tears to my eyes. Finally, I had caught a glimpse of what my mother had left behind. She had traded the beauty of Sicily for a life that would be filled with struggles, especially the first few years after she and my father emigrated to the U.S. and resided on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in a rat-infested tenement. Money was scarce as my father worked whatever odd jobs he could find, and my mother often skipped meals so she could feed my older brothers. She had traded mild winters for ones where the temperatures dipped close to or below the freezing mark, and snow, instead of the grass she walked barefoot through in Sicily, blanketed the streets. Everything in America was foreign to her, and she soon realized, immigrants were often treated like second-class citizens.

Despite her trials, eventually my mother did come to embrace her new home. Years later when she visited Sicily, she proudly defended America to her sister when they got into a heated political debate. I remember my aunt saying to my mother, “Why are you so upset that I’m badmouthing America? You’re not from there.” My uncle replied, “She’s now lived in America for more years than she has in Sicily.” My mother acknowledged this fact years later, after my father died, and my siblings and I implored her to return to Sicily so she could live out the rest of her days there. She said, “This is my home now and you’re my family.” Sadly, I couldn’t help wondering why this epiphany had eluded her throughout my childhood, when my brothers and sister and I would have given anything to see our mother smile. But once I became a woman, I grew to understand just how difficult it was for her to adjust to life in America.

 Four years ago, my husband and I relocated to Austin, Texas. While I knew it would be hard being apart from my family whom I was very close to, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. From the moment I said goodbye to my mother before we left New York, I was grief stricken. While Texas is not oceans or continents apart from New York as Italy is, the thought that I couldn’t simply hop in my car and see my mother whenever I wanted to devastated me. Having lost my father to cancer when I was just sixteen-years-old, I was more sensitive to having my loved ones absent from my life. I thought about my mother a lot, and finally, I was able to empathize with her more as well as understand the emotions she had after she lost her family.

Unlike my mother, my own story had a happy ending. My husband and I decided to return to New York after only living in Texas for one year. And my ambivalence over my mother’s homeland faded a long time ago. Now, I am not only proud to tell everyone I meet for the first time that I am a first-generation Italian America, but I also chose to highlight the Italian culture in my debut novel, Bella Fortuna. And if my mother ever voices doubts regarding her decision to emigrate with my father to America, I tell her to read my book’s dedication to remind her she did make the right choice: “I vostri sacrifici non furano vani” or “Your sacrifices were not in vain.” 

  Rosanna Chiofalo is the author of Bella Fortuna, (Kensington Publishing).You can visit her website at: www.RosannaChiofalo.com 


Thank you Rosanna for sharing your and your mother's story with us.  Your debut novel is quite a tribute to the sacrifices made by your Mom and her unique story!  

Immigrant Stories Guest Post: Author Jyotsna Sreenivasan

On Monday, I reviewed And Laughter Fell From the Sky (review here) by author Jyotsna Sreenivasan and wrote about how the main character's struggle to fit into a new country and meet her parent's expectations is very typical of many immigrants and first generation children (although we don't all go to the lengths that she goes to!).  Jyotsna Sreenivasan has graciously written about her own immigrant experience in the guest post below as part of the Immigrant Stories Challenge.  She even makes some immigrant story recommendations so read on!

In my new novel, And Laughter Fell from the Sky, Rasika, one of the main characters, reveals that as a child she cheated, imitated, and pretended in an attempt to fit into American culture.

    When I was a child I don’t remember cheating in order to fit in, but I did try to pretend that I wasn’t “different,” that I didn’t have brown skin and black hair and parents who spoke with an Indian accent. At the age of seven or eight, I was mortified if India was ever mentioned in class, because all the kids would turn around and stare at me.  I was embarrassed when my mother brought potato curry or rice pilaf to a Girl Scout potluck. Whereas my parents were proud and happy when others asked them about India, I hated it when people assumed I was an expert on India, or that I should serve as a cultural ambassador for the country.

    Rasika arrived in the U.S. at the age of eight. I was born in the U.S., but we moved to India when I was five, and came back to the U.S. when I was seven. In India I was “the girl from America,” and in kindergarten I had entertained my class by singing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” By the time we came back to the U.S. I had acquired an Indian accent, yet I didn’t realize that I spoke differently from the American kids. How had I suddenly turned into “the girl from India”? In any case, I very soon began talking like all the other kids. 

    By sixth grade I had become comfortable enough with my identity to read a book that took place in India--The Road to Agra by Aimee Sommerfelt—and do an oral report on it. I felt triumphant, but my teacher just said, “Of course you would be interested in that book.” By seventh grade I sometimes wore embroidered Indian blouses to school. My senior year of high school, I did a long research report on Indian classical music.

    Yet despite my growing comfort with my ethnicity, in college when I began writing poetry and fiction, I did not draw inspiration from my cultural background. In my senior year of college I wrote a short story in which the main character dealt with a boyfriend and conflicts with her mother--problems I faced--yet I didn’t give the character any particular ethnicity. I guess I assumed she was white and Protestant. It didn’t occur to me then to give her a cultural background. She was just supposed to be “normal,” whatever that meant.

    When I read The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston in graduate school, the light suddenly went on for me. I identified with Kingston’s feeling of not being Chinese enough for her parents, nor American enough for her classmates—the feeling of not really fitting in anywhere. I finally realized that many of my cultural insecurities were not just my own problem, but a problem shared with others of the second generation—children of immigrants, and those who immigrated as children.

These insecurities often cut across cultures. While first-generation immigrants retain their foreign accent when speaking English, and have strong ties to the home country, their children often have weak ties to the home country, and acquire the accent of the region in which they live. Julia Alvarez, a second-generation author from the Dominican Republic, titled her first book of fiction How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.

    My first published short story, “The Peacock’s Mirrored Eyes,” appeared in India Currents magazine in 1992.  It dealt with an Indian-American teen who was conflicted about her cultural background. Since then, all my fiction has been about Indians and Indian-Americans.

    Many of my favorite books are written by authors of the second generation. A few months ago I finally started a web site that I’ve been wanting to put together for years. Second Generation Stories: Literature by Children of Immigrants (www.SecondGenStories.com) features books by dozens of second-generation authors, including well-known figures such as Mario Puzo (author of The Godfather), Maxine Hong Kingston, and Julia Alvarez.

Interview and Giveaway: Author Jane Green

Yesterday I reviewed Jane Green's latest (#13) novel Another Piece of My Heart. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to participate in a Q&A with the author and some other bloggers - Jane Green offered some great insights into the novel, her writing and what she enjoys to read. Read on for an excerpt from the interview:


Question: You wrote Andi's chapters in third person, and then you wrote Emily's in first person. And I enjoyed it and I appreciate it, but I wonder as an author how you came about deciding to do it that way.

Answer: Actually, it wasn’t my decision at all. I’d reached a point in the book where I think Emily was just so deeply irritating and Andi was a bit whiny . . . I was a little bit nervous because I didn’t think of myself as somebody who can write teenagers well. The dialogue, everything is different. And I have a lot of friends who write YA. It’s something that I couldn’t even contemplate. I can’t imagine writing anything that a 16 or 17 year old would actually want to read. But, as soon as I started writing from Emily’s point of view, I just felt that I knew her. I absolutely knew who she was and what she was about. And I felt enormous amounts of empathy for her.

Question: Which of your book characters do you think is most similar to you?

Answer: I think there’s probably a little bit of me in all of them. I don’t have any one character where I think, yes, that absolutely is me. But I certainly see myself in so many of them. Different books over the years have captured different parts of my life. Jemima J was about my own struggles with food and body image. In Second Chance, there were aspects of me in Holly definitely. I was married at the time and not terribly happy although not quite realizing it then . . .

Even in this book, in Another Piece of My Heart where it is so divided, I would say there are parts of me in Andi and possibly even more of me in Emily, actually. As soon as I started writing Emily, it felt like I was writing about my teenage self. I didn’t have a stepmother but feelings of just not fitting in, of not being good enough, of being different somehow.

Question: I wonder if you notice a difference in the book community or how readers respond to you specifically between the US and England?

Answer: I do very little touring in England. I haven’t done it for years. I’m doing a very big tour this summer in England. But, that’s really the first one I have done in a long time . . . Book communities are so different everywhere you go, and you never quite know what you’re going to get. One of the things that I love doing more than anything are events at libraries and events at independent bookstores, not that I am not a huge fan of the chains. But, when you go to a really wonderful independent bookstore that’s been there for a long time, they know their clientele, they love books, they’re doing this not because they want to make money but because they just love books. And they love people, and they’re bringing the two together.

Finally, here are some book/author recommendations from Jane Green:

Room by Emma Donoghue

Hooked by Catherine Greenman

This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman

Reading My Father by Alexandra Styron

Slow Love by Dominique Browning

Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jonathan Tropper: “I think he is a wonderful author. And he’s one of the few where I know that I’m going to love pretty much anything and everything he writes” - A woman after my own heart!

You can hear more from Jane Green on her website or her Facebook page or by following her on twitter (@janegreen).  You can also see Jane on the Today Show yesterday talking about Another Piece of My Heart and blended families.

Thanks to St. Martin's Press, I have one copy of Another Piece of My Heart to give away. Please leave a comment with the question you would most like to ask this or any other author. Please also leave a way to contact you. The winner will be selected on Thursday April 19 at noon EST. US only please.  Good Luck!

Immigrant Lives and Stories: The Ever-Present Past by Aine Greaney

Aine Greaney is the author of Dance Lessons: A Novel which tells the story of an American woman who travels to Ireland following her husband's death to learn about her Irish immigrant husband - she learns much more than she ever expected. (Stop by tomorrow for my review) Aine was raised in County Mayo, Ireland and emigrated to the US in 1986.  She currently resides on Boston's North Shore.  Aine has graciously agreed to guest post on my blog about her immigrant experience in conjunction with my Immigrant Stories Challenge.



The Ever-Present Past

Most mornings, I wake up to a strange bedroom. I lie there peering into that gauzy daylight, sleepy and baffled. Where? Where am I? And then, bit by bit, things become familiar. That’s my bedroom chair against the wall. I bought it at a garage sale in upstate New York. And there’s my framed wall mirror. I brought it home from an estate sale in Gloucester, Massachusetts. And that’s my purple bath robe hanging on the back of the door. Two years ago, I unwrapped it from a package beneath our Christmas tree. So this is my bedroom. This is my life. In America.

After 24 years of living here, you would think that I would wake up to instant recognition, an instant sense of where I am. But most mornings, I wake from a dream of Ireland.

It’s not always a happy dream.

On one winter day in 1986, an Aer Lingus plane deposited me and my backpack into the intercoms and voices and smells of JFK Airport, New York. The airport was too hot. The weather outside was frightful. I was terrified. That was 24 years ago. This year, 2011, I have spent as much as my life here as I had back there. So I should be as American as I am Irish.

And I am. I order a tom-ay-to on my salad. I get pissed because I’m angry, not drunk. I have learned to be on time (mostly).

And yet, I wake up a stranger in my own house. I wake up still back there.

Photo Credit: Homeaway

In many of my night dreams, I’m in a small, thatch-roof house at the end of an old, pebbled road in County Mayo. It’s the house that was handed down in my grandmother’s family. It’s listed in the online 1901 Irish census, though the house and the farm predate that. After I was born in a Galway hospital, they brought me home there. I lived there until I was 10 years old.


At three o’clock in the morning, American eastern standard time, I am back there again, standing in that smoky little kitchen, or I’m lying in my childhood sick bed, watching the apple trees make shadows against bedroom window.


Sometimes I’m in a two-level stone house on a village street—the house we moved to when I was ten. I’m in my teenage bedroom, the bed has a pink quilt; there's blue, 1970s-style carpet on the floor. Downstairs, I hear my mother’s and my grandmother’s voices.


Or I’m standing in another bedroom, this one in the Irish midlands. It’s a furnished studio flat at the top of a decrepit house that sits on a main street in a small one-street town. From college in Dublin, I moved there for my first job. In the dream, I can smell my landing neighbor’s burnt toast through the thin apartment walls.


Most days, I commute to work in an office north of Boston. I e-mail colleagues and I have lunch and sit in meetings. On the commute home, I listen to the radio or I make dinner arrangements with my American husband or friends. In my daylight hours, the bedrooms of my past are just a quick blip of color, a drive-by sighting of memory. Even when they assume full color, they exist in a separate wing of the gallery. But at night, here they are again, in full Technicolor.


At night, I sing those other songs. I speak that other tongue, and when I wake up, there is no instant passage from one life to the other.


For immigrants, I believe that this is how it is. From New York to Hong Kong to London, we live our lives within the shadow of the life left behind. As we walk down a city street, that shadow jimmies and bounces and dances alongside us.


This is why I read immigrant writers. Not exclusively. But when I read that first scene, there is an automatic reader-writer connection. This words mirror my own dual-realities, my own splintered existence. Quite simply, the literature of displacement makes me feel less displaced.


As an author, this is why I write so much about history and why my characters’ past is ever-present on the page. Because for immigrants, there’s really no back-story and main story.


The back-story is the story. Every morning.

As part of my Immigrant Stories Challenge, I will feature a post on the last day of each month which focuses on immigrant literature or the immigrant experience.  Thank you Aine for sharing with us your immigrant experience - I think living "our lives in the shadow of the life left behind" beautifully captures the unique pain of being caught between two worlds which is so often experienced by immigrants.  And thank you for sharing your top 5 Immigrant Novels:

Aine Greaney's 5 Favorite Immigrant Books (in no particular order)

 “The Middleman and Other Stories” (Bharati Mukherjee)

 “A Distant Shore” (Caryl Phillips)  

 “The Namesake” (Jhumpa Lahiri)

 “The Road Home” (Rose Tremain)  

“Walking into the Night” (Olaf Olafsson)

Guest Post: Author of When We Were Strangers - Pamela Schoenewaldt

  When We Were Strangers  is a work of historical fiction which chronicles the emigration of Irma Vitale  from Italy to the United States.  Author Pamela Schoenewaldt expertly captures the struggle of immigrants and the experience of being caught between two worlds.  I was so invested in Irma's story! My review will be up shortly but in the meantime check out reviews here and here.  Pamela graciously agreed to guest post on my blog in conjunction with my Immigrant Stories Challenge.  


An Immigrant in Naples

My historical novel of immigration, When We Were Strangers, is set in the 1880s, when Irma Vitale leaves her mountain village in Southern Italy and comes to America. My “research” began in November, 1990, when I left Northern California to live in Naples, Italy with my fiancé, Maurizio, and felt the searing displacement that might have been Irma’s.

I’d been to Italy as a tourist on the customary circuit. Nothing of those sunny easy days prepared me for life in the center of Naples. I had worked in California as a freelance writer with some success. In Naples I could barely frame a sentence. Shopping, the gay experience of so American-in-Italy cinema, was complex. “You bombed this!” one man said accusingly, pointing to a church damaged by the Allies during World War II.

November was cold and rainy; our apartment unheated. We lived in coats. In the old quarters of Naples, roads are paved with basalt; buildings climbing overhead were dark with age, opening to slits of gray sky. No parks, trees or grass. I knew that in a walled medieval city, parks are an unreasonable luxury, yet I ached for California’s green.

“It’s a small apartment,” Maurizio had warned before I came to Naples. No kidding. We had a basso, two rooms on the ground floor of a vicoletto, an alley 10 feet wide, paved in the eternal basalt, in constant shadow. Our front room had one “window,” an opening to the vicoletto about 18 inches square, lined in black marble a foot deep. That would be our refrigerator. We parked Maurizio’s motorcycle inside for safety. Our hand-washed clothes dried with aching slowness here, for they would be stolen if hung outside. Our bedroom had no window. Frequent power failures left it pitch dark. But of all these inconveniences (soon over for we had moved by Spring), the worst was to feel so foreign, awkward and ignorant. After some social gaffe, like shaking hands on a frigid day with gloves on (uncouth) or using a formal rather than informal “you” or vice versa, I wanted to say, “In my country, I know the rules.”

Of course when I began the novel, I did formal research, studying ships, immigration patterns, Ellis Island and its predecessor, Castle Gardens. I read How the Other Half Lives (1890) by Jacob Riis, the classic (deeply racist) description of life in Manhattan’s foul East Side ghettos. I visited the Tenement Project and read Italian classics on life in the South. I used university and public library resources, government documents and online sources.

But to truly create Irma’s passage, I stripped away my immigrant advantages – education and a profession, money in the bank and a fiancé I adored – to imagine myself a young girl in an utterly strange land in which all that I knew and knew how to do was irrelevant. The experience was humbling; it was soul-changing, and it connected me forever to those who have been made strangers, those who ache for our welcome.

Pamela Schoenewaldt lived for ten years in a small town outside Naples, Italy. She visited Opi, where her novel When We Were Strangers opens on cross-country skiing trips and was inspired by its solemn beauty, isolation and the reserved pride of its people. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines in England, France, Italy, and the U.S. Her play “Espresso con mia madre” (Espresso with My Mother) was produced at Teatro Cilea, Naples. Pamela Schoenewaldt taught writing at the University of Maryland, European Division, and at the University of Tennessee. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her husband, Maurizio Conti—a medical physicist, and their dog, Jesse—a philosopher. Visit her at her blog. 

As part of my Immigrant Stories Challenge, I will feature a post on the last day of each month which focuses on immigrant literature or the immigrant experience.  Pamela - thank you so much for sharing a little with us about your immigrant experience and how it influenced the creation of Irma!