Scribbling

The last few weeks have been rather memorable as an international audience witnessed the tale of two brothers unfold online. I had discovered a cache of letters written to my grandfather by his brother during the 1930’s and 40’s. My grandfather emigrated to America in 1906, his brother was a boy of twelve and neither would ever see each other again. In fact, my grandfather never saw, talked to, or embraced any one in his immediate family again once he departed on that bittersweet day in 1906 when he left his home in Belmonte Mezzagno in Sicily to sail for the great unknown that lay ahead of him in this country.

While I have had the opportunity to study several languages in high school and college, Italian was not one of them; Latin, French, German, and Classical Greek might have been of some help to me were they anything more than recollections from a long departed youth. At my age it is no longer a point of honor to suffer silently or not to acknowledge my limitations. My language skills were lackluster at best; and, hunting definitions from a 40 year old paperback Italian-English dictionary might have been character building but it did little to derive the meaning of these letters in my possession. I was less frustrated by the tedious nature of my approach than I was by the occasional breakthrough I’d make to understand a sentence or just an isolated phrase in a particular passage. I was looking through a glass darkly and I knew that any lack of clarity in the matter would not be a result of foolish pride or lack of effort on my part; however, I didn’t know that there existed a number of surprising, caring, unselfish, gracious, and talented people at Gente di Mare who would quite literally bear me up on their shoulders throughout this journey. The efforts of those people, indeed, all of those who dropped by to share in the story, seemed to take on the character and feel of a homecoming for which preparations were being made to celebrate a prodigal return.

Not only did these dozen or so letters contain half of the conversation between the brothers, what had survived for more than a half a century was buried in vernacular, dialect, an elusive style of cursive as foreign to my eyes as the language in which it was written. In a strange wordless odyssey my grandfather loomed as inquisitor, confidant, messenger, a loved and loving brother upon whom was visited oblations and anguish, as his brother’s lament painted the garish desolation of Sicily’s landscape and the hardship, hunger, and despair that threatened his daily existence. Throughout the sadness, these tortured souls, never surrender. The pain of one brother was the pain of the other; an ocean, a war never severed the bond made fast with their blood. There were times during my childhood that I thought I caught glimpses of the longing in my grandfather’s eyes as if he had resigned himself to an inexplicable injury about which he could never speak; in the end it was his brother’s voice who spoke for him.

The story doesn’t end with the angst of two brothers lost to each other, denied the simple pleasure of a fraternal embrace. Stories are threads in the fabric of history, our history, each one of us. Somewhere there is a loose thread, which has unraveled from apiece of cloth, insignificant by itself it is a piece, a mere fandango of a construction, part of a finer, more precious garment. Fascinated by the spectacle of the raiment he was helping to restore, one of the translators at Gente, quite unexpectedly, shifted from interpreting meaning to searching for meaning. After all, the letters had been preserved on one side of the ocean by descendants of one brother, surely there must be descendants on the other side of the ocean of the other brother. Phone calls were made, imploring strangers to suspend their disbelief, to entertain the possibility that family, like these letters had survived the odds of conflict and separation. And they had! And so might those letters written by my grandfather.

Tags: Family, genealogy, letters, Sicily