Review of Helen Barolini’s A CIRCULAR JOURNEY (Fordham Univ. Press)

Barolini’s parents, the children of Italian immigrants, were not engaged in this struggle. Rather, as newcomers, their desire was to become accepted as Americans. They looked forward, not back, and were willing to shed any connections to their Italian roots in their quest. Barolini’s father, Antonio Mollica, the eldest child of Sicilian immigrants became a self-made man of Syracuse, New York by the time he was 27. Though Syracuse made him proud because of its connection to the ancient city of Siracusa in Sicily, it wasn’t his first choice. His dream was golden California where he would set up a wholesale produce business. Fate intervened when on his mother’s deathbed, she called on her favorite son, rather than her husband, to take charge of the family after she died. Her son became so successful that when he married, he gave his Utica bride, Angela, a honeymoon in Europe, which included a trip to her family’s village in Castagna. After traveling to Paris and Rome, stopping in the wilds of Calabria left them both stunned and dazed, and they fled after one night. That flight marked the terms of their American identities. Old country ways were backward and to be scorned. Being Italian was something to get past on the way to becoming an American.

Spurred by her love of books, Latin and the classics, Helen Mollica dreamed of exploring the Mediterranean world and especially the land of her family’s birth. Her journey was to open the closed doors of the past and this clashed with their dreams of assimilation. They believed her trips to Europe threatened their stature in Syracuse. Barolini’s father became a member of the Syracuse Golf and Country Club that had previously restricted blacks, Italians and Asians. For him, this acceptance proved that he had made it; he had become an American. Adding further to their disapproval and disappointment, on one of her trips to Italy, Helen meets Antonio Barolini, an older Venetian poet, who becomes her soul mate and marries him.

Helen returns to those towns her parents fled. Haunted by the memory of her maternal grandmother, Nicolleta, the little old lady who huddled in her mother’s old Utica kitchen, Barolini goes back to the village of Castagna where her grandmother had tended goats in the oak forests of Calabria. Though she never was able to communicate with her, once she learned Italian, Barolini wishes she could go back in time to speak to her. She states, “Grandma Nicolleta, the silent old woman in black who managed to tell me volumes.” Touched by her memory, she becomes the heroine of her novel, Umbertina.

In adopting American ways and the modernity of the twentieth century, Helen Barolini’s parents lost the old world family ties and unity of their parents. Her mother at 90 attends her granddaughter’s wedding and laments that there is no one represented by the Italian side of the family. She says, “the place swarmed with the Irish takeover” and “it’s as if my whole part of the family didn’t exist.” Her only hope to keep those memories alive are the conversations and stories she will tell her grandchildren.

As a grown woman returning to Syracuse, Barolini learns for the first time of her ties with the writer, Henry James. She learns that James Street, where she grew up, was named after his grandfather, William James, who emigrated from Ireland in 1789. James Street was described by Henry James as being “one of the most handsomest streets in America, the 5th Avenue of Syracuse.” Barolini muses on James’ expatriate life and conflicted loyalty and sees the similarities to her own. He wrote that “It’s a complex fate being an American.” Barolini remarked that “It seems to me now that those fine New England gentlemen didn’t know the half of it—the Italian half of being an American.”

These essays span a period of thirty years and end with Barolini’s daughters all grown up, two living in America and one living in Italy. Her circular journey is now sealed. Their lives are intertwined with the two worlds of Italy and America and always will be. In her writings, Barolini sought “to create a heroine born and raised in the United States of Italian descent who would meet Italy head on as pivotal player in her search for an identity that is not the demeaning one she shunned in America.” What is best and most passionate about this memoir is following Barolini on her journey of self discovery as she becomes that woman.