In exactly ten days, I will turn 70. Perhaps that's why I have become so preoccupied thinking about my great grandfather, Pasquale Orzo, my grandmother's father. Pasquale died when he was 70, in 1940, 12 years before I was born in November of 1952.
What draws me to my great grandfather are the circumstances of his birth. Pasquale Orzo was born in a tiny town in the southern province of Cosenza, Italy, on November 3, 1870.
He was illegitimate. My great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano was an unwed mother. To be born illegitimate at that time and place in history was very dangerous. A researcher at Brown University has studied illegitimacy in Italy in the late 19th century and he estimates that 93 percent of infants born at that time in Cosenza perished in horrible foundling homes where babies died of malnutrition and disease.
Miraculously, my great grandfather managed to survive. One hundred years after he was born, in 1970, I entered Brown University as a freshman. What a privilege it was to go to that extremely popular college. I knew that when I went there but I really had no appreciation for just what a miracle it was that my family had, in 100 years, risen from the depths of poverty to the privileged world of an Ivy League school. Until a couple of years ago, I wasn't the least bit interested in my ancestor Pasquale Orzo (or any of my other Italian ancestors for that matter.) It all seemed like ancient history to me. What was the point of digging into the past? Who cared about all those old yellowed photos hanging in my grandparents' hallways, photos of dead people I would never know? But this all changed about two years ago, during the pandemic. I had the sense I was frozen inside. I spent weeks and weeks -- that turned into months -- trying to find a way out of that feeling. I started to study Italian, and then I started writing in Italian, and lo and behold, stories about my ancestors -- on both sides of my family -- started pouring out of me. So too did stories about my upbringing as a second generation Italian American girl. There were stories about the shame I felt growing up. Shame about my heritage. Shame about my body. As I wrote about the shame, I wanted to understand where it came from. And then, the Covid vaccines finally arrived and people started travelling again and my husband and I went abroad and visited Italy. One day, sitting on a hillside overlooking lush vineyards and row after row of pale green olive trees, I was overcome with the feeling -- it was a physical sensation -- that I had to tell the story of my great grandfather. I felt like I needed to know how he grew up, and how ashamed he must have felt as "the macaroni boy." The name Orzo -- a type of pasta -- was given to my great grandfather by the municipal officials of Paola.
In my great grandfather's case, I believe he was intentionally given a name that was silly and humiliating. The name ensured that Pasquale would be laughed at by villagers -- all of whom knew his shameful birth history.
Pasquale's birth situation was the source of great shame in my father's family for decades. My grandmother, Albina, and her five sisters never spoke openly about their father being illegitimate. It wasn't until my grandmother's generation had passed that the family finally started piecing together Pasquale's history. Thank heaven for my first cousin, Donna Ricci (her father and mine were brothers.) The familiy genealogist, Donna has spent years assembling information about the Orzo clan from birth, death, marriage and census records. In 2012, she and her husband visited Pasquale's birthplace, Paola, only to be told that she wasn't allowed to see his birth record. And incredibly, the women working in the municipal office laughed at Donna, as if here was a descendant of a man who was considered the butt of jokes. Dear Great Grandpa, how horrible was it for you growing up in Paola? Were you humiliated every day in school when you had to say your last name? Did the municipal officials give you that name as a way of branding you as illegitimate?
I am trying hard to imagine what it was like for you growing up in a foster family -- without your mother -- because in those days newborns were taken away from their mothers at birth. Because of the strict laws of the Catholic church, an unmarried woman who became pregant was not allowed to keep her child. A researcher at Brown University named David Kerzer -- who has studied this barbaric practise -- found that hundreds of thousands of babies were taken from their mothers during the 19th century in Italy. Many many of those babies perished. In Cozenza, the province of Southern Italy where my great grandfather was born, a whopping 93 percent of babies taken from their mothers died!!!! How tragic, how senseless!
It's an absolute miracle that you survived Great Grandpa! Your abundant descendants -- six children, and dozens and dozens of grandchildren, great grandchildren, great great grandchildren and now great great great grandchildren -- owe you so much, and so too do we owe your mother Filomena Scrivano -- about whom virtually nothing is known.
But honestly, Great Grandpa, I know so so little about you!!! And less about your mother.
And so, I am going to have to go deep into my heart and mind and try to imagine your life, and your mother's,
Did your mother ever tell you who your father was? And if you knew, why didn't you tell your daughters, including my grandmother, Albina Orzo Ricci? Grandma was absolutely humiliated by the fact that you were illegitimate. It wasn't until she and her sisters passed that the family started to ask questions, and get answers.
But of course, there really weren't many answers. Which is why I face a world of possibilities: I can tell a myriad of tales explaining who you were, and where you came from! It's exhilerating, in one way, and terrifying and overwhelming in another!!!!
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