Umbertina

Helen Barolini

UMBERTINA

A NOVEL BY

HELEN BAROLINI

Afterword by Edvige Giunta

Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition, 1999

No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Lines from the song “Eleanor Rigby” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copyright © 1966 Northern Songs Limited. All rights for the USA, Mexico, and the Philippines are controlled by Maclen Music, Inc., c/o ATV Corp. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The poem “An Old Atheist Pauses by the Sea” by Thomas Kinsella. Reprinted from Poems and Translations, by Thomas Kinsella (New York: Atheneum, 1961), 62.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barolini, Helen.

Umbertina: a novel / by Helen Barolini : afterword by Edvige Giunta.

—1st Feminist Press ed.

p. cm.

1. Italian Americans—New York (State)—Fiction. I. Title

PS3552.A725U39 1999

813'.54—dc21 98-44374

eISBN 978-155861-727-8

The Feminist Press is grateful to Janet Brown, William L. Hedges, Joanne Markell, Caroline Urvater, Genevieve Vaughan, and Patricia Wentworth and Mark Fagan for their generosity in supporting this publication.

It is a wonderful thing to see this reissue of Umbertina twenty years after its first appearance. That this story of three women lives again is due to three women: Edvige Giunta, its advocate, Jean Casella, its editor, and Florence Howe, its publisher.

I am happy to see this story of three generations of women journeying to self-knowledge offered to a new generation of readers. Through the image of immigrants reaching a new land to start new lives, the metaphor of all women’s journey to be reborn to themselves is retold.

In the spirit of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, more than twenty years ago I set out to write an American story that would add a distinct nuance to the national literature through a voice not much heard—one that had the reverberations of an Italian American voice but was, and is, meant for all people.

Helen Barolini

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York

September 1998

In memory of Nicoletta and Stefana,

the immigrants . . .

and for my mother, the storyteller.

With great gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts, whose grant made possible the writing of this book, and to the Writers Community in New York, where parts of the work in progress were read.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Cover Page

2. Title Page

3. Copyright Page

4. Author’s Note

5. Dedication

6. Contents

7. Prologue

8. Part One: Umbertina 1860 - 1940