Family History

I am looking into the past.

With the help of a powerful convex lens I pore over old family photographs of my grandfather Vincenzo and my grandmother Rosa in the old Brooklyn apartment house they bought in 1920, with money scraped together from my grandfather’s various laboring jobs and my grandmother’s thrift and economy. That was the house I grew up in.

According to census records, grandfather Vincenzo worked as a ‘fur-puller’. I had to look that up: as near I can make out, it involved ‘pulling’ or skinning the fur off of rabbits so that the skins could be used to line coats and jackets. It doesn’t sound like very pleasant or lucrative work, but he supplemented this income selling plaster animal figurines he turned out at his basement work bench, and a second job as a bank night watchman. As a child I remember playing with a set of ‘police’ clubs I was told belonged to him. I bragged to friends my grandfather had been a policeman. In any event, my grandparents raised eight children and bought two houses, so I’d say Vincenzo wasn’t the worse provider who ever lived.

Sorry to say I never knew them; My grandfather died of tuberculosis in the early 1930s, and my grandmother’s heart gave out just as her sons and daughter were coming home safely from war in 1945.

In one of the photographs the family stands around the kitchen table which has been festively set with the best dishes. I easily make out the faces of Aunt Jennie, Aunt Madeline and Aunt Carmella. When I knew them they were already thick and matronly, but here they are three slender girls with bright, merry eyes, eager to get started on the path of life. My mother should have been standing with them but for some reason was out of camera range that day.

This morning’s mail brings a photocopy of the passenger manifest for the Anchor Line of steam packet ships arriving in NYC on June 21st, 1882, carrying to America my grandmother, Rosa Pagano. She was one year old. Seeing her name penned in a florid hand by a harried immigration officer on a fading but still legible document, Rosa seems somehow more alive to me than ever. My father used to brag that he was her favorite son-in-law. He would go down to the basement and chop wood for her stove, then shovel coal into the furnace. In return he sat at her kitchen table and she poured him glasses of red wine and fed him meatballs fresh from her frying pan and drenched in homemade tomato sauce. My father told me that the hallway was always filled with my grandmother’s cooking, an aroma richer than the lushest garden, fragrant with tomatoes and garlic and olives and spices from distant provinces. And right now I only wish I could bite into one of those meatballs, but Grandma Rosa is gone and no one knows how to make them anymore.