An Interview with Joe Giordano
Q: Birds of Passage has as its setting both New York and the area around Naples, specifically a small village Capodimonte. We know New York is close to your heart, but why Capodimonte? What made you choose this village as the Italian setting? What can you tell us about Capodimonte?
A: My father came from Capodimonte. There are numerous references to my family throughout Birds of Passage, but they’re recognizable only to insiders. The novel is not about my family, but I’m old enough to have known Italians born in the nineteenth-century, and in the book I tried to capture how they thought and acted.
Capodimonte is famous for a spectacular museum, home of the Farnese Collection, and for porcelain. I’ve been to Naples a number of times and stay in contact with the Italian side of my family through Facebook. Of course, the Capodimonte of my father’s time was quite different.
Q: Leonardo Robustelli and Carlo Mazzi are the two protagonists in Birds of Passage. Leonardo is poor and Carlo is rich and yet America holds promise of a new and better life for both of them. You write sympathetically about both Leonardo and Carlo; far different from the current literary and political trend of class warfare. Explain your view of the two main characters. Did class distinction end for most Italians when they arrived in Ellis Island?
A: Leonardo Robustelli represents the more typical southern Italian immigrant of the time, leaving the impoverished Mezzogiorno for work in the United States. Carlo Mazzi is an aristocrat and forced to leave. Carlo’s father is padrone to Leonardo’s tenant farmer father in Italy. The client-patron relationship was critical for an Italian of that era.
Victor Emmanuel was Italy’s king and, in 1905, some Italians living in the U.S. still “genuflected” to aristocracy. In Birds of Passage, I tried to capture that feeling through the actions of Azzura’s mother, Isabella Medina.
Early Italian immigrants faced a difficult ocean trip and harsh working and living conditions in the United States. So, why did they decide to stay? There were economic incentives, sure. But I also believe that Italian men and women found a sense of social freedom in the U.S. not available to them in the mainly agricultural locales they came from in Italy.
Q: Several scenes in Birds of Passage recount how Italians were discriminated against in New York. Based on your in-depth research, explain how pervasive was discrimination and ethnocentrism against Italians at the turn of the century.
A: Well, to quote Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives, an 1890 exposé on the deplorable conditions of tenement life, Italians were the lowest of the new immigrants and “dirtier than the Negro.” Italian immigrant labors were given the worst jobs, and while they were instrumental in building New York’s subways and skyscrapers, were often used like human steam shovels.
Operating from the 1890s, the Immigration Restriction League in Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco argued that southern and eastern Europeans were racially inferior and threatened the American way of life. The Senate and House combined Dillingham Commission agreed and in 1911 recommended reducing southern and eastern European immigration. United States immigration laws were tightened after World War I, and Italians who had made multiple trips back and forth from Italy had to decide if they wanted to stay in the U.S. and bring their families.
Q: Organized crime is intrinsic in the story. Two groups have an important presence: the Camorra and the Black Hand. For those not familiar with organized crime, please tell us about the two crime groups and how they differed from each other, based on your research.
A: In 1905, there were numerous Jewish, Italian, and other gangs in New York. The Camorra were clan based, Neapolitan gangs. Years later, they were extinguished by Sicilian gangs. Ignazio Terranova, the character in Birds of Passage, more closely resembles the Sicilian hoodlums of the time than Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
Prohibition, and the lucrative trade in bootlegged liquor that provided the income for organized crime to flourish was still a decade and a half away. Successful Italians were susceptible to extortion and kidnapping, the specialty of the Black Hand. Many Black Hand thugs were Italian criminals put on boats to the U.S. by Italian authorities. In New York, they quickly picked up their former illegal trade. In 1908, Joseph Petrosino was appointed lieutenant, leader of the Italian Squad in the New York Police Department, specifically to go after Black Handers. In 1909, Petrosino was assassinated in Palermo.
Q: As the son of an Italian immigrant, writing Birds of Passage must have meant a lot to you. What inspired you to write the book and how did the book change you?
A: All my grandparents and my father were immigrants from Naples. They entered the United States during the Progressive Era. I was curious about the period and took a graduate course at UT Austin. My term paper focused on Italians who were called “birds of passage” because they were the first immigrants making multiple round trips, returning to their home country. During the semester, I wrote a short story, “The Sour Smell of Pain” about an Italian immigrant’s experience. Afterwards, I decided to write the Birds of Passage novel.
The process of writing put me back in touch with my roots. My parents and grandparents have been gone for years. My wife and I have traveled extensively and lived in many places, so some of the memories and feelings about growing up began to fade. The book helped me crystalize my heritage. The famed poet, Jorge Luis Borges asked, “What will the world lose when I die?” When my generation passes, the first-hand connection to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Italian immigrants will be lost, their culture, their thinking, their experiences. Birds of Passage was an attempt to maintain that sacred flame.
Q: What books do you have planned in the future? Do you plan to revisit the immigrant saga?
A: Harvard Square Editions published my literary thriller, Appointment with ISIL, about an Italian-American from New York who runs afoul of the Russian mob. I hope you won’t be able to put it down. I’m working on my third novel with the working title Drone Strike. I continue to write short stories; over one-hundred have been published. Perhaps, one day, I’ll write a sequel to Birds of Passage.
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