What a Small Small World it Is! Also, a Print Version of My Novel is Coming Soon

My neighbor Lana Israel is leaving Massachusetts, moving back to Rhode Island to live near family, so a few friends and I took her out to lunch today.

She asked if I was working on a novel, so I told her about my new book, Finding Filomena, which tells the story of my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano, who way back in 1870 in southern Italy, had a baby — my great grandfather — out of wedlock (oh what an awful word.) The shame that resulted lived on for a long long time.

One thing led to another at lunch, and suddenly Lana said, “I know David Kertzer.” I was flabbergasted. What are the odds that she would know the historian at Brown University who wrote a definitive book: Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control. It’s an amazing book that explores the horrific facts surrounding my great great grandmother’s situation as an unwed mother. Lana’s family attends the same synagogue in Providence, Rhode Island, that Kertzer does. Lana’s husband, Richard J. Israel, served as Attorney General of Rhode Island from 1971 to 1975. He passed away in 2022.

A little-known fact — and one that Kertzer writes about in great detail — is that for centuries in Italy (and in all other Catholic countries in Europe) illegitimate babies were routinely taken away from their mothers and housed in “ospizios,” foundling homes where the poor infants usually perished because hired wet nurses readily transmitted disease from one baby to another. David Kertzer’s compelling historical account of this situation gave me a much-needed perspective on my great great grandmother’s scary dilemma back in the 19th century.

According to Kertzer, “even in the first years of the twentieth century…only 62 percent of Italy’s foundlings lived to their first birthday.”

Something else Kertzer reveals: women were policed! That is, unmarried women who got pregnant were often turned into authorities by priests, doctors, midwifes or even neighbors. Women were imprisoned in order to prevent them from seeking abortions.

In other words, women in Italy in the old days faced a predicament not entirely unlike that of too many women today. According to Sacrificed for Honor, published in 1993, hundreds of thousands of babies died throughout Europe because of this monstrous practice by the Catholic Church (which apparently started in Italy and was most extreme there.)

In 1870, in the southern region of Calabria, Italy, where my great great grandmother delivered her son (who was given the rather silly name of Pasquale Orzo), Kertzer reports that a horrifying 93 percent of the illegitimate babies died, making it an absolute “miraculo” that my great grandfather survived.

It was in part because I wanted to explain how this miracle came to pass that I decided to write Finding Filomena, the novel about my great great grandmother.

Until now, I haven’t publicly thanked Dr. Kertzer for his extraordinary book. He has written numerous other fine books, too, including several histories of the Vatican and the Popes. Kertzer still teaches at Brown University, where he is Paul Dupee Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies. I was a student in the 1970s; I graduated from Brown a few years after Kertzer did.

Meanwhile, my novel is earning praise even from some non-family members, which comes as a welcome surprise to me.

And now, it looks like there will be a print version of the book, and that makes me very excited. If you’re interested in a copy of the print edition, please email me at claudiajricci@gmail.com.