Italian Group Therapy... Oxymoron?

At last month's book club, we read Montreal, Italo-Canadian author, Mary Melfi's book, Revisiting Italy: Conversations with my Mother. We were graced with the presence of the author and hosted by one of our book club members in her beautiful home in Montreal Nord on the shores of the St. Lawrence River. 

I know I've written about our book club before, but here's a bit more background. Several years ago, one of my cousins pitched an idea: You know, Rocco... I can still hear Sal's voice; I know when it starts with, You know, Rocco... I'm in for a ride :) 

The idea was a book club for cousins from what we at the time thought would be Niagara and Montreal. It has since blossomed to include Ontario, Canada (Niagara Falls and Kitchener), Montreal, Connecticut, California and Nardodipace, Italy (which is of particular importance because, with the exception of our Noank, Connecticut cousin who married into our fold, all of our forebears came from this small southern Italian mountainous village). We have just recently added my cousin's daughter who is from Perugia, Italy. 

Revisiting Italy was our sixteenth book! We started our Fraternità dei Cugini in November of 2020 on Zoom during the pandemic and have been going strong ever since, with four meetings a year. September 2024 was the first time we met in person. Our cousin from Italy nearly showed up in person as a surprise to the rest of us (and what a surprise it would have been!) but, alas, in the eleventh hour he contracted Covid. 

I know this book club is special for some of the reasons I've just mentioned. But in case I don't know, I'm reminded whenever I talk to friends about it. When visiting a friend from the city I moved from five years ago, for example, we went through all the perfunctory conversation points. 

Him: How are your kids? What are they up to? 

Me. How's work? How are your kids? Where are they now? 

Him: What keeps you busy in retirement?  

Me. Cooking, blogging, writing music, Zoom book club with Italian cousins, volunteering work at church --  

Him: Whoa, circle back to book club; tell me more about that... 

Which I do, and which, without fail, my friends find fascinating. What they're most struck with is that a) we're from all over the world and b) we have an exclusively English-speaking cousin, an exclusively Italian-speaking cousin, with the rest of us on a sliding scale between fluently proficient in both languages or, like myself, good with English but struggling with Italian -- which reminds me! I need to do my fifteen minutes on the language app Duolingo which claims I'll be fully conversational in a few months!

This particular book club meeting was special for a few other reasons. Several member spouses sat in. One cousin who had never attended, attended. And, for me the most striking reason: we all -- for different reasons -- resonated with the topic of the book in the most real and raw way that one rarely experiences in a group. There was laughter, passion, vulnerability and great food and wine -- Italian-themed, of course (thank you, Montreal cousins for making this day happen!).

Specifically, most striking was both how different and, at a meta level, how similar our experiences were regarding being immigrants or children of immigrants. Different because some of us were born in North America, one of us never left Italy, some of us feel totally Italian some of us are, in the words of one of my cousins, "confused." And we all own our personal experience on a sliding scale from:

passionate/almost religiously --------------- trying to figure it out ----------- chill/almost indifferently

In the book, the author asks her mother -- and herself -- who am I? She tells a moving story of suffering a nervous breakdown in her twenties, in part because of grappling with this question. She writes that she felt largely alone because she felt she didn't belong. In her mother's view, however, it was quite simple. They left Italy for the promised land. What's your problem? You think too much. Get me the flour from the cupboard. She also writes of how her Anglo psychiatrist had no capacity to understand and deal with a young woman who didn't know who she was or where home was. Her mother tells her, "You're too Italian to be Canadian and too Canadian to be Italian."

Yesterday we had lunch with good friends in Scotland, Ontario. I think there's some sort of irony here. The couple we met with lived down the street from us in Virgil. John is originally from the Netherlands and moved to Montreal when he was two years old. Aniko is from Hungary and moved to Burlington, Ontario when she was six years old. During our lunch, Aniko asked, "Where's home for you?"

Aniko later wrote to me that, for her, "...specifically Buda (in Budapest) exactly, 66 Soproni Ut [is home]. It is where I spent my childhood - aged 1 to 6, and where I could reliably return and find it recognizable. The home in Burlington is gone; homes/houses in Cochrane and Virgil are also much the same, but for some reason Budapest holds my heart -- perhaps because that is where my “village” of relatives is. In Canada, I have a very small village of relatives."

John told me that, "Montreal was home -- where i grew up, went to school, was a part of the family, had friends. But then Cochrane became home -- it was accepting, had a family there, friends. Then Virgil became home also -- accepting with family, friends. And now Port Dover is home for all the same reasons."

For Doris, my wife, it's Virgil, Ontario because she was raised there, we raised our kids there and they all graduated from elementary school there. It's also where she played a lot of sports and still has two childhood friends -- along with another two from the Niagara region -- with whom she is, to this day, quite close.

 My answer at lunch was, "I don't know, but it doesn't stress me much... I think returning to my parents' birthplace, Nardodipace, Italy, might help me answer that question." 

To which John replied, "Yes, there's something about the soil...." 

I have found belonging in many different places and groups. Geography only seems to gain significance years late. But isn't that always the way of things? Like Joni Mitchell said, "You don't know what you've got 'till it's gone." So now it's, years later, that I realize how important the different places I've lived were and how they've shaped my life. 

Nardodipace, Vibo Valentia, Italy. the birthplace of both my parents, a place I visited when I was five and then again when I was fourteen years old. A place which, as far as meaning goes, remains elusive to me. Although, I must say, spending a few hours four times a year with my beautiful cousins makes it ever so slightly more real.

As I've already mentioned, we have a cousin who still lives there, cousins who remember it well having lived there and then having immigrated to Canada as older children. And then there are several of us who were born in Canada and for whom Nardodipace is part myth, part the soil from which our souls took root and part forever out of reach. A dream of sorts. 

I suppose in the end, the answer to the question Where's home? is all of the above for most of us. Because, like all important things in life, for here and for now we see through a glass darkly. We see shapes and colours but never with perfect clarity. But I do believe that it's as we grapple with the questions worthy of our time alongside others whom we love and trust and share in questioning, that the answers become just a little less shadowy.