Helen Barolini, a novelist, essayist and poet who explored the challenges of assimilation, in addition to the hard-won victories of feminist emancipation skilled by Italian American girls, died on March 29 at her dwelling in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. She was 97.
Her dying was confirmed by her daughter Teodolinda Barolini.
A local of Syracuse, N.Y., whose grandparents immigrated from southern Italy within the late nineteenth century, Ms. Barolini introduced their journey, and people of many others, to life in “Umbertina,” her celebrated 1979 historic novel tracing 4 generations of girls in a single Italian American household as they arrive to phrases with their origins and identification in a brand new land, and with an ever-changing social panorama.
“It’s the Madonna of Italian American literature in that it exhibits the transition from the Italian immigrant to American citizen like no different ebook of its style,” Fred Gardaphé, then the director of Italian American research at SUNY Stony Brook on Lengthy Island and now a professor on the Metropolis College of New York, was quoted as saying in an article in The New York Occasions in 1999, when the ebook was reissued.
All through Ms. Barolini’s profession, her work was animated by the idea that Italian American girls have been underrepresented, not solely as topics in American literature but in addition as authors, and that as a bunch they confronted what she referred to as a “double erasure, each as Italians and as girls,” Teodolinda Barolini mentioned in a cellphone interview.
Dedicated all through her life to selling Italian poetry and literature, she all the time sought to broaden the depictions of her individuals in standard tradition past “Sopranos”-style stereotypes, whereas giving voice to these beforehand unheard.
Such beliefs impressed her influential 1985 compilation of quick fiction, memoirs and poems, “The Dream E-book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Girls.”
“I believe Italian American literature belongs, apparently sufficient, not a lot in immigrant literature however within the form of literature that offers with the outsider,” she mentioned in a 1993 interview revealed in Melus, a journal dedicated to multiethnic literature. “Jews have executed this, and Blacks have executed this; they usually have very pronounced figures — very attention-grabbing figures that they’ve created of the remoted particular person in an alien society.”
“The Blacks, the Jews, the Irish all have their spokesmen,” she added. “Why not the Italians?”
Helen Frances Mollica was born on Nov. 18, 1925, the eldest of three kids of Anthony Mollica, the son of Sicilian immigrants and a self-made man who constructed a thriving fruit importation and distribution enterprise, and Angela (Cardamone) Mollica, the daughter of immigrants from Calabria.
A gifted scholar all through her youth, Ms. Barolini graduated with honors from Syracuse College in 1947, and afterward traveled to Italy to review its tradition, historical past and literature. The subsequent yr, she met her future husband, the esteemed Italian novelist and poet Antonio Barolini, in Florence.
The couple married in 1950, had three daughters, and spent a decade bouncing between Italy and the USA, the place Ms. Barolini earned a grasp’s diploma in library science from Columbia College. She additionally labored as a translator of Italian literature, together with her husband’s quick tales, which have been revealed in English in The New Yorker.
In these early years, “I noticed my husband because the extra necessary author,” she advised Melus. “It was after I started to get extra in contact with myself that I mentioned, ‘Wait a minute, I wish to write. I don’t wish to simply be the service of another person’s voice.’”
With a grant from the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts, Ms. Barolini started work on “Umbertina.” The seed of the concept got here on a 1965 journey to Calabria, the place she found a heart-shaped tin stitching package like these utilized by rural Italian girls in her grandmother’s day.
Taking the time and setting as a place to begin, she meticulously researched the historic circumstances of every period portrayed within the ebook, and infused the narrative with a feminist sensibility owing to Betty Friedan, the creator of the landmark 1963 ebook “The Female Mystique,” and others. Whereas outwardly a story of diaspora, “I nonetheless suppose that ‘Umbertina’ is extra a feminist assertion,” Ms. Barolini later mentioned.
Along with her daughter Teodolinda, Ms. Barolini is survived by two different daughters, Nicoletta and Susanna Barolini; a brother, Anthony Mollica Jr.; and 5 grandchildren.
In later books like “Chiaroscuro: Essays on Identification” and “Their Different Facet: Six American Girls and the Lure of Italy,” Ms. Barolini returned to the topics and themes that propelled “Umbertina.”
“Theirs was an epic in American life, and it must be written,” she mentioned within the Melus interview, referring to immigrant girls like her forebears, “for they who lived it saved no diaries. However we descendants can write and inform, and it’s time now earlier than the final of them die out.”
Supply: NY Times