Random Miracles: A Memoir

By Edward Martin Cifelli

Happy the Man
Happy he, and happy he alone,
is the man who can call today his own,
the man who, secure within, can say:
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Whether fair or foul or rain or shine,
all my days, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not even Heaven upon the past has power:
What has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Horace
First Century, B.C.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462811625

Edward Martin Cifelli

In addition to Random Miracles, Edward M. Cifelli has written biographies of poets David Humphreys and John Ciardi. He has also edited or compiled books of letters, poems, essays, and bibliography. He has written dozens of articles for magazines and professional journals, and hundreds of movie reviews for a daily newspaper, The New Jersey Herald. For the Signet Classics Editions, he has written introductions or afterwords to the three-volumes of Dante’s Divine Comedy, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline. He has also contributed to the American National Biography, American Writers Before 1800, and The Encyclopedia of New Jersey. He is a regular contributor as well to the St. Petersburg Times. He and his wife Roberta live in Dade City, Florida.

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Copyright © 2009 by Edward Martin Cifelli.

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Contents

To My Grandchildren

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Appendix

Publications

The next thing most like living one’s life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

Benjamin Franklin

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

George Bernard Shaw

Solipsism: Noun. The philosophical theory that the self is the only thing that can be known, the only reality. Also, extreme egocentrism.

On Miracles

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

George Santayana

"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the

common."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.

Pablo Picasso

"Miracles happen every day. Not just in remote country villages or at

holy sites halfway across the globe, but here, in our own lives."

Deepak Chopra

Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.

Saint Augustine

"If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would

change."

Buddha

DEDICATION

Looking forward and backward, this book is for my grandchildren:

Elizabeth Louise Howe, b. April 5, 1996

Julia Rose Stibich, b. June 23, 1999

Madeline Jill Hodgins, b. April 23, 2002

Joseph Edward Stibich, b. June 11, 2003

David Robert Stibich, b. March 3, 2005

Thomas Patrick Stibich, b. March 17, 2008

And in memory of my grandparents:

Martino Nicola (Martin Nicholas) Cifelli, b. November 11, 1876

Maria (Mary) D’Aloia Cifelli, b. October 10, 1884

Michele (Michael) Ruscito, b. March 9, 1872

Giuseppa (Josephine) Valentino Ruscito, b. March 5 (?), 1886

Image 1.jpg

With Bobbi at the Orso 88 restaurant, Piazza Navona, Rome. Summer, 2008.

For the Record

If I am scheduled to die today, I am happy to report that

I have lived the life I intended to—and hoped for—

among the people I have loved. What more could a man want?

And although my sense of humor defined me in life,

I have left behind a body of serious work

for posterity to know me by.

I’ve been doubly blessed.

I hope my tombstone will say that I was

A good husband and father,

A good scholar and writer,

And a good friend and companion.

I know I’ve fallen short,

probably more often than I know, but those,

for the record, are the goals I was working for.

Now… if it’s a really big tombstone,

I’d be obliged if it could also say that once upon a time

I had a heck of a jump shot,

that I could run up to fifteen miles a day,

and that I could sometimes drive a golf ball 250 yards—

now and then straight down the middle.

Good luck and good bye, for now… .

img154.jpg

With Lisa and Laura, Christmas 2005

To My Grandchildren

Dear Lizard Lips, JR, Mad Jill, J Rock, D Train, and T Rex:

FORGIVE A GRANDFATHER’S sentimental pleasure at using these childhood nicknames, but they are, after all, how I think of you, little ones who bounce in and out of my life, just long enough for hugs and kisses and for me to pinch your cheeks. And then, in the wink of an eye, you’re gone. This book, a single ongoing letter from me to you, will give us a little more time together.

Of course, I will not be writing to you as the children you are now, but as the educated and thoughtful adults you will soon become, people whom I, quite naturally, will never know. In that sense, you are loved little ones and grown-up strangers at the same time, and I find that when I think of you as adults-in-the-making, I can more easily share with you the stories I have to tell, describe to you some of the people who have come in and out of my life, trace out for you a few of the professional and personal moments that have shaped me, and, finally, explain to you a few of the ideas that have claimed my attention.

You and I are, of course, intimately connected by ties of love and strands of DNA, so my original purpose in writing this memoir was to help you understand who you are by letting you know a little more of who I am. That is still at the core of this book. However, as the book slowly took shape, I discovered some added benefits that had not occurred to me when I began it. So, for example, it isn’t uncommon for people to say that life is messy and disorganized, too full-to-the-hilt with day-to-day busyness for most of us to think much about what it all may mean or where we may be headed. What I have learned, happily and unexpectedly, is that from the back end of my life I can indeed see patterns that were in it, arcs that connected people and events—even purpose that held it all together. I have learned that life may seem chaotic as you live it, but with the distance of the right number of years, a lot of it gets clarified into a satisfying and calming orderliness. This is something like digging for oil, finding it, and then noticing a diamond mine at the same site.

There were still other unanticipated benefits. Writing this book has put me in touch with the boy and the young man I used to be, and I have rejoiced at meeting him again, wishing I could warn him here and there of troubles lurking in his future, or wishing I could whisper to him now and then that he should slow down and enjoy more completely a few of the moments that flew by all too quickly. Also, this book has led me back to the friends I have cherished and the family members I have loved, almost all of them now either dead or gone. It was good to meet up with them all once again in these pages, even though I was often moved to tears of love and affection—and often of painful loss as well. Finally, I have enjoyed (in a sense) reliving some of the lessons I had to learn, including the intellectual and moral ones associated with a lifetime of inquiry and weakness. There has been some reckoning and forgiveness in this process, and I welcomed that as well.

All these hidden benefits, arising as they have from so much self-examination, probably should have been expected, but as inevitable as they seem now, they more or less crept up on me as I moved the narrative forward, bit by bit, year by year. And now that the work is completed, I have discovered something else that I hadn’t anticipated: the book seems to me like a quiet but firm assertion that I was here, that I took my place on the planet for a few years. More than that, I find myself hoping that I may have left my imprint (or footprint or voiceprint) in a variety of forms—like you all, for example, and like the few words I have strung together along the way. This doesn’t go very far in the direction of immortality, but it does take a small step in that direction, which pleases me to think about because at such moments I can’t help feeling a little better about the process of aging and the inevitability of dying.

So my purposes in writing this book may have shifted and expanded somewhat in the telling, but it has played out in a good way I hope, broadening the focus rather than narrowing it, and making the book better I think, more satisfying certainly, than it otherwise might have been.

* * *

These pages are personal and self-reflective, of course, as honest and complete as I could make them, which means that much of my psychological profile is no doubt on display. Make of that what you will. For the record, I will say only that I have not deliberately set out to explore what might be called the inner me, the one with warts and peccadilloes to confess, the one who has a dark side to keep at bay. Like every man, I’ve behaved badly here and there, said and done some things I’m not proud of, and been plagued by a few character traits I wish I didn’t have. I could have written a memoir about these and other messy failings, but I’ve chosen not to, because that is just the sort of autobiographical self-dramatization that has always seemed to me unpardonably self-centered, emotionally self-absorbed, and hopelessly self-indulgent. I wasn’t interested in writing that sort of book.

These pages are, instead, a reexamination of my personal and professional lives, a rethinking of the goals I have worked toward, and a review of my successes and failures. And what stands out in the end is the mountain of good fortune I’ve enjoyed—like loving a good and beautiful woman who chose me to share her life with; like raising two intelligent, funny, and engaging children who gave me much more than I was able to give them back; like teaching young people who came to mean more to me than I ever imagined they would; like becoming a professor who contributed a few thoughts to the ongoing scholarly dialogue; and like learning how to write newspaper and magazine columns for readers who have, now and then, enjoyed my work. What a series of blessings.

Which is not to say I haven’t suffered now and then through stretches of time when I have felt unlucky and undervalued in my professional life. I’ll tell you a little about those periods and say a little about my frustrations too, but you should know that far and away what I feel about my career as a scholar is that I maximized the modest talents I was born with. Clearly I’m no genius, but I tried always to squeeze out every last drop of the talent I did have, and then combine it with an extra measure of determination, with the result being that I’ve been able to make a few small but real contributions to the field of American literary studies. That’s the part I like best, the part that means so much to me. And, if possible, I am even happier that I became a better teacher of writing and literature by working my way through my professional experience as a researcher and writer. My classroom students received the benefit of my work, just as the untold number of students do who know me (still, after ten years of retirement) only through the books and articles I have written. Another set of blessings.

Of course, to eke out my few contributions to American literary scholarship, I had to become nearly obsessive in my approach to work, but I’ve come to believe that that is the key to success, at least for me. In this regard, Oscar Wilde once quipped on the inadequacy of moderation, the famous but overly simple ancient Greek formula for living the good life. Moderation, Wilde said (gleefully I think) is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. I liked Wilde’s maxim so much that I had it printed on an eight by twelve-inch sign that has hung in my office for thirty-five years. It suits me, and it describes my regular approach to most things, not just scholarship. One of my NYU professors, Carl Prince, reminded me of another truism: Never take yourself seriously, he said, but always take your work seriously. Being excessive about my work, serious in that sense, has helped me to improve my aim and given me access to professional achievements I thought when I began my career, would be well beyond me. Happily, I discovered they were not.

These adages don’t take the place of more appropriate motivators, whatever they might be, but they have served me well as daily reminders of what I wanted to do and who I wanted to become. My hope for you, my grandchildren, is that you may stumble on something that will improve your own aim, and perhaps even find something that will help you measure your lives by.

With love to all of you, and to your children—and theirs,

Your Grandfather, Daddy Eddie

Preface

Boundaries

FOR DECADES I’VE thought about writing some sort of book to introduce myself, in a manner of speaking, to your mothers, my own sweet daughters, Lisa Louise and Laura Ann, but probably because they both know me pretty well, I have been able to fend off the impulse. In recent years, however, this long-put-off exercise has raised its ugly head once again, this time as something more properly addressed to you, my grandchildren: Elizabeth Louise, Julia Rose, Madeline Jill, and (after thirty-six years of girls) young Joseph Edward, David Robert, and Thomas Patrick. I cannot escape the conviction that at some point in the far-off future you, like most other people, will want to know a little more than what you can remember (and what your parents can help you with) about your roots—and I am in a good position to supply one part of that story for you.

This desire to know one’s roots is of course a universal human curiosity, and one that usually sets in later in life, perhaps between the ages of forty and sixty (somewhere between 2036 and 2068 for you six), with forty being the symbolic middle age that reminds us all that we are merely one link in a chain that connects the past with the future. So in one sense, then, this book will help you to link up with one part of your past. However, while I do have you in mind primarily, I also have in mind your children, and theirs. When my imagination gets the best of me, I can squint down an infinite chain of descendants, a long list of barely perceptible far-off great-grandchildren, who will come along long after I am gone and who will manage to grow up and have even more children. At such distances, the whole business seems humorous, with me positioned as one of those biblical patriarchs responsible for hundreds of generations, one after the other, each one begetting again and again. But of course I am no biblical king, no prophet. Instead, I am just the opposite: I look backward and piece history together—that, at least, is what I have done throughout my professional career. And so now, for your sakes, and for those of your children, and so on down the line, I am preserving a few pages of your own ancient history.

* * *

There are limits, however, to what this book will be, and the first one saddens me a little. I have been a literary historian and biographer for most of the past half century, a fact I mention here because it seems to urge me toward a more comprehensive study than I want to write or feel I can reasonably complete. For example, this book will not discuss your grandmother’s distinguished family tree. The lovely Roberta Louise Brunson, whom you call Baci (pronounced BAH-chee), the Italian word for kisses, if you didn’t know that already, traces her roots back on her mother’s father’s side to England in the seventeenth century, when a minister named Abraham Pierson immigrated to New Haven Colony in 1639. In 1666, he was also the minister in charge of a ship full of disaffected Puritans who sailed the short distance down the Atlantic coastline from New Haven, Connecticut, to Newark, New Jersey. This was the last serious effort among New Englanders to establish a religious commonwealth in the New World. His son of the same name later became the first rector, what would now be called president, of Yale University in 1702. In fact, all through Baci’s family history, on both sides, you will find prominent and wealthy figures with names like McDowell, Davis, Brewer, and Brunson in places like Hot Springs, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Asbury Park, even Havana, Cuba.

The Bloomfield branch of Baci’s family, on her mother’s side, the Davises, were not only socially prominent and wealthy but philanthropic too, donating to the city the land that is to this day Bloomfield’s downtown public square, and also the land on which the Classical School for Boys would be built, which would later become the Bloomfield College and Seminary. This part of Baci’s story was reported in the Newark Star-Ledger on October 2, 1994, and there are additional newspaper clippings on the Davises and Bloomfield’s history stored away in boxes somewhere in our house. We hope, of course, that these papers will be preserved by your mothers and by you down through the years. They are part of your heritage.

Baci’s grandmother, Helen Davis (McDowell) Pierson, was raised in the famous Davis house in Bloomfield, which had been built about 1670 and which would later become a stop on the Underground Railroad, that network of safe houses where runaway slaves from the South found temporary shelter from the bounty hunters who were tracking them down. Before that, during the Revolution, women and children were kept safe in these same cellar rooms that opened into a tunnel that extended to the foot of Orange Mountain, according to a scrap of information that was saved by your great-grandmother Edith Brunson. The tunnel’s exit was uncovered by surprised construction workers during the 1950s, according to Judy Gluck of Stevens, Pennsylvania, a McDowell descendant who was putting together parts of the family history. Baci and I were once shown through the house, including the dark cellar rooms where slaves were hidden away and protected.

Memories of the Davis house were preserved by Helen McDowell’s sister, Edith McDowell Beeken (named Bloomfield’s 1948 Outstanding Citizen), in a 1938 self-published book, My Treasure House, two copies of which are still in our possession, one inscribed by the author to her niece, Baci’s mother, Edith, who had been named after her aunt, the author. There are two sections of the book, one devoted to the Davises and the other to the McDowells. In the Davis section, we learn that the first of the Bloomfield Davises in the seventeenth century was Stephen Davis, who had found his way there from Milford, Connecticut, in the mid-1660s. Milford was one of the towns that acted as what might be called a sending district to the conservative Puritan churches in nearby New Haven Colony, which at about the same time was sending Abraham Pierson down to Newark. I don’t know if there are any surviving passenger lists from those migrations (I suspect there are), but it seems possible that at least two key members of that historic trip to Newark came from Baci’s family, which is directly descended from both the Pierson and Davis families. They may even have sailed on the same ship.

However, as curious and fascinated as I am professionally and personally about Baci’s entire lineage, that story is not what I feel capable of writing at this point in my life. My regret over this is eased somewhat by the knowledge that Baci’s family history is well-established in official records and published papers and that it simply awaits an interested descendant, maybe one of you, to undertake a proper genealogical study—and perhaps even a narrative history—of your grandmother’s family tree, your own family tree after all.[1]

* * *

What follows in these pages will instead be about my part in your bloodline. First, I’ll tell you what I have been able to learn about my grandparents and parents, an interesting but frustratingly fragmented tale that is, nonetheless, surprisingly more detailed than I thought it might be. After that I’ll try to tell you who I have been and am now, a journey that is at least to some extent one of self-discovery. That self-discovery has not always been pleasant to encounter, so whenever I was stalled by misgivings, I tried to focus on how much I wish my father and grandfather, and theirs before them, had left me a written record of who they were. I tried to keep in mind that someday you too will be curious about me and the times I lived in and will be grateful to have these pages to read. And so I have pressed on, and I hope you may even become inspired to leave a written record of your own lives for future generations we will all have been partly responsible for bringing into the world.

And so, with these preliminary thoughts completed, I’ll begin this journey by reducing to a manageable size what I have been able to learn of your ancestors who left loving families and risked an Atlantic crossing in uncomfortable and crowded steerage quarters in order to flee the poverty of small towns in southern Italy. These were men and women who found the courage to create a new life for themselves and their descendants, including all of you, in America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Although they were common people, their stories, like the stories of so many immigrants, are heroic.

* * *

A brief word about the updated and revised edition. Almost at once when I began reading the first edition, I noticed a few typographical errors that needed correcting. Then paragraphs here and there needed a little attention. Then came a few more memories that I wanted to include, a few more clarifications, a handful of corrections, and a fair number of stylistic changes. Lastly, I wanted to add more pictures to the text. The changes, corrections, and additions were made on nearly every page of the first edition, and are, I think, at least when tallied up and evaluated, both extensive and significant. The story itself remains, of course, as it originally appeared.

Chapter One

Digging in the Garden

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Helen Keller

1. The Cifellis

Image 2.jpg

Martino Cifelli, left, and his brother John in Cifelli’s Bar, Harrison, NJ, about 1905

January 1, 2011

Dear Elizabeth, Julia, Maddy, Joe, Dave, and Tom,

THE CIFELLI PART of your Italian American heritage reaches back to February 11, 1876, when Martino Nicola Cifelli, my grandfather, was born in Castelpetroso, a small town in central Italy, some eighty miles southeast of Rome and fifty miles due north of Naples. It is located in the province of Isernia in the region of Molise, and lies about twenty miles from Campobasso, the capital of Molise. In 1876 there were more than three thousand people living in Castelpetroso, twice as many as live there today. My parents, like yours Joseph Edward, gave me my grandfather’s first name as my middle name, and so I have always been a little extra curious about him, the more so I suppose because he died eleven years before I was born.

According to his passport, which was signed on April 26, 1898, Martino Cifelli was a contadino (peasant) with brown hair and eyes, a regular chin, and a thin beard—red according to surviving family stories. He also had some sort of distinguishing birthmark on his neck according to his certificate of naturalization, which was dated November 16, 1920. We learn there also that he was five feet four. (My father was two inches shorter than that, I an inch taller.) Ellis Island records show that he arrived there on June 1, 1898, after shipping over on the Kaiser Wilhelm II. According to a website dedicated to the descendants of Castelpetroso, my grandfather’s destination was an unidentified friend’s house at 68 River Street in Newark, New Jersey.

The Castelpetroso website has a wealth of statistical information about the number of Cifellis who came to the United States and to Newark in particular, but very little of it sheds any light on my grandfather. There are, for example, one hundred and eighty-eight individual entries for people with the name of Cifelli coming into the United States during the thirty-one years between 1893 and 1924, although the actual number is smaller because some are listed more than once as they returned to Italy and then came back again to America. Of that total, one hundred and three were going to Newark, and twenty-three reported that they were going to see relatives at three addresses in the same neighborhood, 64, 67, and 68 River Street. The information on Martino is vague, just that he was headed to see a friend at 68 River Street, but other Cifelli immigrants put down that they were going to the same address to see Giuseppe Cifelli, Pasquale Cifelli, Andrea Cifelli, or Antonio Cifelli. The data suggests that all three addresses may have been linked, as perhaps in the notorious and shameful tenement buildings of that era, where an untold number of families were subjected to overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions. It seems likely, however, that some of them went off on their own very shortly after they checked in at the addresses given, as my grandfather seems to have done.

* * *

One colorized studio photograph of Martino Cifelli from about 1906, I think, shows a thin young man, about thirty years old, nattily dressed in a white shirt and blue-striped tie, gray jacket and vest, and a gray, striped pair of trousers. He was posed seated in a fancy wicker chair with a cigar between the first two fingers of his right hand, his left elbow resting on the arm of the chair, and his left hand raised to the side of his head, index finger pointing to his temple. He had full lips, a wispy brown moustache, bright, dark eyes, wavy brownish-red hair, and a serene expression. He looks more like a poet than a working man.

Martino’s marriage certificate in 1905 records that his occupation was Laborer, a catch-all term used to describe most immigrant men who did not belong to a particular trade and who would do whatever work came their way. His surviving World War I draft registration card, which recently became available on myancestry.com, shows that on September 12, 1918, he worked as a machinist’s [helper?] for the Submarine Boat Corporation, which built cargo vessels at Port Newark from 1917 to 1920. The draft card shows that in 1918 he was living at 282 Academy Street in Newark, but no doubt his work at the shipyards earned him enough money to buy a house because by 1920 he was living at 83 Bruce Street, the Cifelli family home I recall from when I was a little boy. The house was valued at four thousand dollars a decade later, according to the 1930 census.

What else Martino did for a living, before and after his time at the Submarine Boat Corporation, we don’t know. I’m fairly sure he worked as a bartender in the family-owned restaurant and tavern in Harrison, which may well have been where he earned most of his living most of the time. The chances are good, however, that he was also a freelance laborer for some part of his work life in the Newark area; perhaps, given his home town in Italy, he worked as a stonemason—or a stonemason’s helper. My sense is that he had to scrap around to earn a living, and that he somehow did well enough to keep six children together and to buy a small house to raise them in. It could not have been easy for him, and I admire his fortitude and courage. Martino Cifelli may never have made a name for himself or made a mark on his time and place, but by all accounts he was a hard worker, a devoted husband, a caring father, and a decent man—someone we can be proud of.

* * *

A few additional details about Martino have survived in sketchy notes left behind by Anthony Cifelli, Uncle Tony, my father’s oldest brother and the undisputed patriarch of our branch of the Cifelli clan during my lifetime. He tells us, for example, that in 1898, when Martino arrived in the United States, he joined an extended Cifelli family network in the Newark, Harrison, and Kearny areas, a detail that is verified by the Castelpetroso website. Unfortunately, Uncle Tony doesn’t give very many names or suggest how many in our immediate clan there may have been—brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins. If he had left a little more information, I might have been able to run a few checks on Cifelli immigrants to see who might be directly related to us, although I confess my curiosity fades a little at this distance.

Judging from the number of worldwide Cifellis today, the international Cifelli clan has proven to be prolific. According to The World Book of Cifellis, prepared by a vanity genealogical service for my second cousin Dan from Harrison, there were 429 Cifelli households scattered between North America, Australia, and Europe back in 1992, some 1,275 individual Cifellis in all. The 2000 census reported 1,092 occurrences of the name in the United States. If Dan and his genealogical service can be trusted, by the way, every one of those Cifellis traces his family back to Castelpetroso, which even today has nearly two hundred Cifellis living there, including some who hosted the 2004 and 2006 reunions of the Descendants of Castelpetroso.

How any of these Cifellis might be related to us is anybody’s guess. I myself have met many Cifellis from the Newark and Harrison and Kearny areas who must, I think, be related to us, and yet I cannot trace any of them back to common ancestors. I’m certain the reason is because, as we have seen, there are so many Cifelli immigrants in the Newark area, and right now my contemporaries and I are all third- and fourth-generation Italian Americans, which means that no one from the surviving families has known enough about our common backgrounds to say just who came from just where or just when, with the result being that people who are quite obviously related can no longer figure out exactly how.

The most important other Cifelli that Uncle Tony mentions in his notes is Martino’s brother John, whom I remember slightly from my childhood as Uncle John, the legendary restaurateur and prohibition-era saloon keeper who sired the entire Harrison branch of the family. A generation earlier, a Nicola Cifelli had settled in Kearny and started that branch of the family, and still another Cifelli settled Down Neck, which is located east of Penn Station in Newark and is also called the Ironbound District. Martino also had a sister Josephine (Cifelli) Vacca, called by my father simply as The Aunt. She was Zia Peppina in Italian, which when spoken sounded something like zip-pepeen, whom I also knew slightly because she lived around the corner from my father’s boyhood home.

All I can recall of Zia Peppina’s small corner of my childhood is a fenced yard, many chickens, a pair of gnarled old people I for some reason recoiled from, and the unhappy fact, I learned much later, that their son John had died somewhere in Italy as part of the American armed forces during World War II. Her surviving son Rocco was about my father’s age, and they played a big part in each other’s early lives. My cousin Marie (Cifelli) Van Riper, two years older than I, lived nearer Zia Peppina and remembers her as a sweet lady who occasionally made waffles and ice cream for the children. I was surprised to learn from Uncle Tony’s notes that Martino also had a sister Adoloratta (Cifelli) Iadarolo—as well as I can make out from his handwriting—who died in about 1935 of cancer. I had never before heard of her.

That, however, is all I have been able to learn about Martino Cifelli, the man whose name I carry—except for the fact that he filled out his own draft registration card in 1918 and signed his certificate of naturalization in 1920 in a firm, well-formed hand, which tells us he was literate, although no information has survived about his education.

* * *

Image 4.jpg

Martino Cifelli, about 1928

Image 3.jpg

Maria (D’Aloia) Cifelli, about 1945

The girl who would become Martino’s bride was Maria Antonia D’Aloia, who was born October 10, 1884. Her father’s name, according to their church-issued marriage certificate in Italian and the English marriage certificate issued by the city of Newark, was Arcangelo, and her mother’s maiden name was Maria Colacchio. (I have been told that other relatives in the Newark area went by names that have always been familiar to me, although I knew none of them: Duva, Vacca, Tamburri, Lombardo, and Notte, to name but five who still represent, with Cifelli, more than half of the most popular surnames in Castelpetroso today.) Maria D’Aloia was born in Italy, possibly in Castelpetroso, but as she did not marry Martino until September 17, 1905, at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Newark, when she was twenty-one, it is also possible she was from some other town in Italy and perhaps met her husband-to-be, eight years older than she, in Newark. Nothing of a personal nature remains about Maria Antonia D’Aloia as a young woman (there are some photographs of her as a grandmother)—not her height, complexion, or hair color. One surviving document calling for her signature contains an X (her mark it says), so she, we know, was illiterate. I was eight when she died so I have a few not very well-formed memories of her as a smiling, sweet-smelling, overweight lady in an apron. I knew she cared about me in a way that made me feel welcome and safe—and well fed.

Maria Antonia gave Martino six children, with my father being born on June 21, 1914, the day of the summer solstice, the single day of the year with the most daylight and least darkness, which is as good an explanation as any other for his sunny disposition. Maria’s other children, the ones who formed the core of my family landscape, were named Antonio (Tony), who was born in 1906; Michele (Mike), 1907; Francesco (Frank), 1910; Angela Maria (Mary), 1912; and Carmela (Connie), 1917. Martino was a strict father according to stories, especially with the girls, who weren’t even allowed to sit on the front porch on summer evenings, lest neighborhood boys stop by to talk. But he was also strict with the boys; the headstrong and hot-tempered Mike—just like his father, people said—often scrambled under the bed to escape the strap.

One last piece of stray information has survived about the Cifelli family: in 1909 Martino and Maria took their young sons Anthony and Michael back to Italy. It is impossible to say exactly why they went, but they remained there for a year and then returned to Newark on April 12, 1910, aboard the Ancona, which had sailed from Naples. Perhaps they had returned to Italy to see ailing relatives. Perhaps there was lingering family business that needed tending to. Or perhaps it was merely a pleasure trip. Whatever the reason, once they arrived in the Newark-Harrison area again in 1910, they stayed for the rest of their lives.

2. The Ruscitos

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Michael Ruscito in Newark, about 1935

My mother’s family has a more colorful story than the Cifellis do, but their records too are scattered, suspect, and sometimes erroneous, so much of what I know about the early Ruscitos has had to be surmised from the shaky and conflicting evidence that has managed to survive. For example, one type of evidence is the fond retelling, by elderly aunts and rapidly aging cousins, of the Ruscito clan stories—a spicy collection of anecdotes, vignettes, and isolated memories. But like the famous telephone game, a story begins in one person’s memory, then is passed to another person who tells it in a slightly different version to a third person, and so on, until there is no telling any more what the real story was, way back in the beginning, when it may have had some kernel of truth to it.

Another problem has to do with errors and contradictions in the official records. The first one is the Ellis Island website, which shows that my grandfather, Michael Ruscito, arrived from Orsara, Italy, in the province of Foggia and the region of Puglia, on a ship called the Ems on May 4, 1899. The town is misspelled Orsaro, and the date, as far as I can tell from family stories, is two or three years before he could have arrived—unless, of course, the stories are in error. His year of birth is another problem. Ellis Island has him at age twenty-seven on his arrival in 1899, putting his year of birth 1872, but according to his certificate of naturalization signed in Easton, Pennsylvania, on September 28, 1914, he was thirty-two years old that year, which would make his year of birth 1882. Adding to the confusion is his funeral card from November 15, 1939, which gives his birth date as March 9, 1873.

The family story which puts doubt on the date of Michael’s first arrival in the United States has to do with his first marriage, if there was one. According to my cousin, the Rev. Dr. Allen Ruscito, Michael had married sometime in the early 1890s in Italy and lost his wife and two of his three children to an unnamed epidemic—which incidentally argues for an 1872 date of birth because he would in that case have had time for a marriage, three children, and an epidemic by 1899, when he was twenty-seven and about to start out again in life, this time in another country. The story continues, according to Cousin Allen, when Michael left his surviving son Arcangelo Alessandro (Allen’s father and my uncle), who was born in 1901 according to his birth certificate, in the care of a brother in Orsara, and then made his first Atlantic crossing.

According to a second official record, the List of Alien Passengers for the Commission of Immigration, which I found at myancestry.com in 2008, Michael did indeed arrive on May 4, 1899, on the Ems, ending up first in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was going to see a brother Paolo, whom I had never before heard of. Then, if I have the sequence correct, he headed to the coal-mining town of Butler, Pennsylvania, about a hundred miles away near the Ohio border, where he took up his trade as a barber. The problem, of course, is that if Michael got to Ellis Island in 1899, he would have arrived two years before the birth of his son whom he had, according to the story, left behind in Orsara. Clearly, the chronology doesn’t work.

Still another New York passenger list shows that Michael arrived from Italy a second time on June 11, 1903, age thirty-one, on board the Roma. According to that record, he was then married and on his way once again to Cleveland. Furthermore, it says he had been to America before, from 1899 to 1902. The fact that three official records have Michael Ruscito arriving from Italy for the first time in 1899 would seem to settle the question. It seems, further, that he went back to Italy in 1902, staying only until June 1903, when he returned with a new wife (my grandmother) to Cleveland (and perhaps Butler). There is no mention of a son in these records, but it seems likely that when he returned with a wife in 1903, he also had Arcangelo Alessandro with him, although I can’t see how he could possibly have been Michael’s actual son—if this makeshift chronology is correct. Either the boy was born in the late 1890s and left in the care of Michael’s brother, in time for Michael to arrive at Ellis Island in 1899, or the boy was born, as his birth certificate testifies, in 1901, in which case he could not have been Michael’s son at all because Michael was in the United States at that time. A third possibility is that the boy’s birth certificate is wrong, although it is hard to see how 1897 (or so) could get mangled into 1901, but it remains a possibility. One further complication is that when the boy Al became a man, he bore a striking resemblance to Michael.

Finally, as though one more confusing detail is needed, there is a third passenger list for May 20, 1924, for a Michele Ruscito. There are no family stories suggesting that my grandfather returned to Italy for some reason in 1924, which leads me to think this might be a different man, especially because the man who arrived in 1924 was born in 1880, not 1872. But the remarkable aspect of this part of the story is that the 1924 Michele Ruscito was headed to 343 Locust Street—in Butler, Pennsylvania. It is hard to believe this Michele Ruscito is the same man as my grandfather, but it is equally hard to believe he is not.[2]

Whatever the truth behind this mystery, Michael Ruscito did come to America, did return to Italy, and did come back again permanently with his new wife and Arcangelo Alessandro in 1903. He went to Butler on his first arrival and may have returned there for a while after his second, before moving across the state to Philadelphia. We do know that when Michael’s fifth child was born (Palma, known as Pauline, March 21, 1907), his second child with his new wife, my grandmother, they were living at 710 Alter Street in Philadelphia, that according to Pauline’s birth certificate. Their first child together had been a boy, Michael junior, according to a family story, who was born in Philadelphia and died in his tenth month. Shortly after Pauline’s birth in 1907, my grandfather, his young wife, plus Al, and baby Pauline moved to 16 West Third Street in South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where all the rest of their children would be born.

Michael’s return to Italy in 1902 came after an incident of some sort had occurred in Butler. As the story has been handed down to Allen Ruscito, Michael was beaten up and slashed across the face by thugs one evening on his way home after closing the barbershop. Among Michael’s friends and customers at the shop were several who wanted to find the attackers and take their revenge. Michael himself, perhaps too timid or frightened to sanction such vengeful goings on, left town instead and did not stop running until he’d reached the safety of Orsara.

If there is any truth to the story and if the event happened between 1899 and 1902, roughly when Michael is reported to have been living in Butler, it may explain why he headed back to Italy at that particular point in time; it might also explain why, after he took a new wife, he would set up a new home for her and young Al in Philadelphia instead of Butler. For although the passenger list says Michael was headed to Cleveland in 1903, there are no records I have come across or family stories either that put him and his new family in Butler at that time.

All the conflicting anecdotes and suspect family recollections, plus the official records that are filled with errors and contradictions, all make the story of Michael Ruscito’s early days and his Atlantic crossings an out-of-focus tale of adventure, love, and single-minded determination. I wish, of course, that there were more hard facts to build his story on, but then again it may be because Michael’s story is so misted in uncertainty that it swells with the true music and melodrama of high opera. I do know that I like very much the broken pieces of his story that I’ve been able to assemble—and happily, it gets even better.

* * *

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Giuseppa (Valentino) Ruscito, about 1965

The girl Michael went back to Italy to meet and marry was the convent-educated Maria Giuseppa Valentino, only in her late teens at the time, but already a widow. I like to imagine Michael in Butler, Pennsylvania, receiving a letter from a friend or relative telling him about this mysterious and beautiful young woman back home whom he should meet. In my mind’s eye, I see Michael Ruscito in his late twenties, oddly misplaced in western Pennsylvania, probably with a young man’s hard-to-govern passions, and with a young son in the care of relatives back home—I see Michael reading a letter offering to introduce him to Giuseppa Valentino, a girl so beautiful that she had only a couple of years earlier posed for a statue of the Virgin Mary (or of Saint Lucy, depending on who tells the story). How could he not have been interested? Perhaps the letter arrived after he’d been beaten up and slashed and after he had decided to move out of Butler rather than be part of the revenge plot that was being hatched among his friends at the barbershop. Maybe it was he himself who had taken his revenge and needed to lie low for a while. Maybe with his broken English and his immigrant ways, he was having a hard time in Butler meeting young women whose fathers would allow them to date him. And maybe he had already learned what he had gone to Butler to find out, namely that he could indeed earn a living and support a family in America.

All this romantic speculation is tempting, of course, but in the end we know only that Michael did return to Italy, that he did indeed marry the beautiful Giuseppa, and that he returned to America with her and Arcangelo Alessandro. For her part, family legend has determined Giuseppa to have been a tragic heroine, the soprano in a Verdi opera perhaps, but one with a happy ending—at least we hope it was. As the libretto has been handed down, Giuseppa, perhaps fifteen, had fallen in love with and married a handsome young man of her village, only to lose him to a mysterious and fatal illness that overtook him on their wedding night or shortly thereafter. Devastated and lost, she was sent to the convent. When thirty-one-year-old Michael Ruscito returned to Orsara, the eighteen-year-old, hot-blooded Giuseppa was facing the miserable prospect of a cloistered life—and so the stage was set for a marriage. To put a romantic construction on it, they were two tragic souls who were destined for each other; more realistically, Giuseppa simply needed a husband as badly as Michael needed a wife.

Robbing the story completely of its romantic overtones, the union may have been completely arranged, with no courting or wooing at all, which is precisely how Nancy Ruscito remembered the story in 2006. Nancy, wife of Lenny, my grandmother’s youngest child, lived on the second floor at 144 Fairmount Avenue in Newark, when the Ruscitos lived on the first. She and Lenny fell in love, much to my grandmother’s dismay. Maybe Giuseppa merely thought Nancy wasn’t good enough for her baby boy, a common enough complaint among Italian mothers about to lose their sons. But Nancy had a laundry list of what Giuseppa might have considered character flaws: she was an outspoken, beautiful girl who cursed, smoked openly, and loved to gossip. None of Giuseppa’s own daughters dared to smoke in front of her, which made Nancy a nervy, impolite, and impudent girl as well. Nancy recalls, however, that she and Grandma Ruscito overcame their original wariness of each other and became fast friends, especially because Nancy could speak a kind of pigeon Italian that pleased the older lady, even though her own Italian was perfect Florentine, according to Nancy, which she had supposedly perfected at the convent school in Orsara. They shared secrets in hushed Italian.

Aunt Nancy reports that Grandma Ruscito confessed to her that she had run away from the convent and from her family to marry a boy she had fallen in love with in Orsara. When her family finally caught up with her, Giuseppa, still a minor, was forced to submit to an annulment and an arranged marriage to one Michele Ruscito, fourteen years older than she and with a son from a previous marriage, and then she was sent off to America, a respectable married woman whose reckless past would not be an embarrassment to her family back in Orsara. That, of course, has its own operatic and romantic plot line—love, death, arranged marriage, and exile—a story that might have appealed to Puccini. Unfortunately, this version of the story also implies a sort of cool relationship between Giuseppa and Michele that only gradually (though there is no surviving testimony about this one way or the other) grew into love.

Regardless of how the back story was written, however, the bottom line is that Philadelphia must have loomed for Michele and Giuseppa as a great adventure—an opportunity to start a new life in a new country after each had suffered great sadness in the old. They would build a rich and fulfilling life together, but their lives in Italy and the intimate details of their relationship and the kind of love they eventually shared are not likely ever to be any better known than they are now.

* * *

I never knew the members of Michael Ruscito’s family who also immigrated to America, but his daughter Martha Jule once told me there was a brother somewhere and a sister, whom Jule had visited once in Glendale, California, sometime in the 1950s. The brother is no doubt the Paolo whom Michael went to see in Cleveland when he first arrived in 1899. I am curious, of course, about that group of relatives I know nothing about, but again, at this distance it hardly seems possible any additional information will surface about any of them—and even if I had a telephone number, I’m not sure what good it would do, the principals being so long gone. More to the point, I suppose, my curiosity does not extend quite that far.

As to Giuseppa Valentino’s family, some of them immigrated to the United States as well. Nothing is known of her parents, but she had three sisters and a brother who settled in Canaseraga, New York, an upstate town of about six hundred people today, located midway between Binghamton and Buffalo. All Giuseppa’s children knew their Canaseraga uncle and aunts well, and her grandchildren probably all have a few memories of them and the town they all lived in. I recall one or two long car rides to visit them when I was a boy. They had a general store and raised chickens in the backyard, and I remember once going back there with Aunt Anna, the oldest of the Canaseraga clan, who proceeded to kill one of the chickens while I looked on in disbelief and horror. I’ve never forgotten the scene, or the fact that I couldn’t eat that night when the bird reappeared, roasted and arranged on a platter.

3. Patsy

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Patsy Cifelli, downtown Newark, about 1932

My father, like most first-generation children of immigrants, was saddled with an old-world name, Pasquale Giorgio, but he was called Patsy through his first twenty-five years or so. When he was born in 1914, my father became the fifth child in the family, with Connie, the sixth and last, arriving three years later. The family was living on Cleveland Avenue in Harrison in 1914. As soon as Martino and Maria returned from their year-long trip back to Castelpetroso in 1909, their young family grew. Frank and Mary were born in 1910 and 1912, and shortly after my father’s birth in 1914, the family moved to larger quarters on Hamilton Street in Harrison. From there they moved to Academy Street in Newark, where they lived from 1916 to 1919, at which point Martino was able to buy an older house with an outside bathroom at 83 Bruce Street in Newark. This is the Cifelli family home that I recall, where my grandmother and Uncle Frank and Aunt Mary lived on the second floor, and Uncle Mike and his family of five lived on the first until the mid-1950s.

The Cifelli household on Bruce Street was filled with the liveliness of young people, who ranged in age from three to fourteen in 1920, thirteen to twenty-four in 1930, and twenty-three to thirty-four in 1940. They were all fully grown by the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Martino worked to support the family and was successful enough as a breadwinner to buy the house on Bruce Street, while Maria watched over her husband and six children, kept a neat house, fed and otherwise cared for the brood, and generally provided the warm heart that balanced her husband’s strict discipline. For pure pleasure (and to keep in touch with the earth that I imagine her to have worked back home in Italy) my grandmother kept a flower garden in back of the house that I remember walking through, hand-in-hand with her, when I was a boy. She was, according to stories, adept at digging for roots.

To the best of my knowledge, all the Cifelli children went to elementary school, but Tony, the oldest, was the only one to make it into Newark’s Central High School, although he stayed only one year, 1921-22. Patsy Cifelli graduated from Newton Street Grammar School on May 31, 1929, which in a sense establishes his whereabouts and activities until then. I have a black and white photograph of his graduation class, officially taken by the Morrison Studio on Ferry Street in Newark; it is mounted on a sturdy board of some sort and remains even today, some eighty years after it was taken, in remarkably good condition. Patsy was the class treasurer that year, and he carefully recorded the names of all thirty of his fellow students on the back of the picture—twenty-four with names like Filomena Del Monico, Tessie Spalletta, Charles Campisi and Tony Caporosa, and six others with names like Dora Levinson, Tom Bender, and Leo Goldman. The school principal and the English teacher stood for the picture with their students at the main entrance of the school. The boys all wore white shirts and neckties—and very serious countenances.

Patsy, never more than about five-two, seems about the same height as most of the boys in the picture. He was a good-looking boy, narrowly built with a thin face and dark eyes that looked with interest into the camera. He had long, dark, wavy hair with a part on the left. He and the boy next to him, Werner Gorenzel (the president of the class who squinted at the camera through large, wire-rimmed glasses) had their arms slung around each other’s shoulder. One or two other boys had their hands on the shoulder of the boy next to them, but only Patsy and Werner showed this sort of casual intimacy—they were best friends and officers in the class, and they wanted the official class picture to capture their friendship. It turned out to be a touching demonstration of open-hearted warmth—and in its openness it matches the impression I always had of my father when I was a youngster growing up in his house. He was a person who liked human contact, the warmth of a touch—a characteristic he passed along to me.

The girls of Newton Grammar School were generally a more smiling group than the boys. They, of course, were all dressed up too, either in light-colored dresses or white blouses with dark skirts; the girls sitting in the front row held a large banner on their laps that said NEWTON. On the back of the picture, my father recorded: I entered Newton Feb. 2, 1928 with Nick Gigantino and Victor Lederman. The cursive handwriting is bold and attractive, suggesting a boy who was comfortable as a student, although arithmetic came out arithmatic and geography turned into geogaraphy. He listed four teachers on the back of the photo too, with the name of Miss Marie Frisina, the geogaraphy teacher, getting a double underline. He followed that with Memorandums: The fun on graduation night. The fun in Miss Frisina’s class.

It is hard to imagine that this bright eighth grader, a boy who was his class treasurer and interested enough in his graduation to preserve all the names of his classmates plus a few teachers and who wrote enthusiastically of his fun on graduation night and the fun in geogaraphy class, that this boy might become a drop-out from school—but that is what happened. Family finances may have been part of it, or perhaps his father’s health—and no doubt it was more common then than now for fourteen-year-olds to head off to the job market.

But what sort of jobs could he have had? There are no family records, but opportunities for a minimally educated Italian American boy in 1929, and then during the Great Depression of the 1930s, had to be slender. For some of the time, he probably, like other family members, worked for Uncle John at the restaurant / speakeasy in Harrison, the entire family being thus on the bootleg side of Prohibition, the wrong side of the law. There were always slightly raised eyebrows, lowered voices, sly smiles, and thinly veiled hints that various Cifellis, including my father, may have gotten into trouble with the law at one time or another in the 1930s, although no details have survived.

Realistically, of course, as the Cifelli family was never part of the boom years of the 1920s, never experienced, that is, the F. Scott Fitzgerald version of dreamy upscale Flappers in Jazz Age fur coats,