WHO WAS SHE, REALLY?
Elisabetta had many voices, names, and selves. Who was she, really? Born 12 years after Italian unification. U’jévezeroglie in her native dialect of Jelsi, a small village located 12 kilometers from Campobasso, the capital of the region known today as Molise, Italy’s second-smallest region after Val d’Aosta. Una jelsese in Italian. Part of over four million Italians who emigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1924. Likely a member of the half who left between 1900 and 1910. Wife to Donato, who returned to Italy to marry her. Elisabetta’s legs emigrated towards the certainty that her descendants would speak English. Her grandchildren would grow up American with Italian flavors, perhaps sensing how her arms, hands, and legs also embodied Jelsi. She prayed daily in New York in her living room’s bay window, rubbing her rosary beads, fingering and pushing through decades. “She tried to teach me to say the Rosary in Italian,” her oldest granddaughter, a great-grandmother herself at 86, remembered. Did my great-grandmother feel her language slipping away as she slipped each bead forward, hearing her granddaughter push forward the sounds of English only? What is not lost is that Elisabetta had an inner life, and spent time listening to it. Who was she, really? Seven stories serve as footholds in getting to know her better.
Story #1: The Personal Self
Elisabetta. Luisa spelled the Italian way. Louisa spelled the English way. Bette. Lizza. Liza. Lisa. Elisa. Her names are myriad, multiple, and mysterious. I am one of her many great-granddaughters who also has at least seven misspelled names, mispronounced by lips gone
horribly askew. Kerstin. Kristin. Christine. Christiane. Chrystelle. Houston. Pearson. And (yes,
once, incredibly) Thursday.
Did she have a favorite name? Why did her names change so often? Answers are lost to
time and memory. Who was she really? What is not lost is that her birthplace also has seven names.
Story #2: The Geographical Self
Elisabetta’s birthplace of Jelsi is believed to be derived from Tibiczan, a word of
Bulgarian origin. Tibiczan was later translated into various names, including Gibbiza, Gittia,
“Terra Gyptie,” Gilizzata, Gelsi, and up to the penultimate name given during the Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies, that of Ielsi. Jelsi is thought to have been built between the 6 th and 7 th centuries AD during the Longobardia Minor when Bulgarian tribes probably settled there. Elisabetta may have been a descendant of gypsies. Elisabetta emigrated with her husband to Philadelphia and then to upstate New York. They settled in Watervliet, a Dutch-named town along the Hudson River. Watervliet was home to the first Meneely bell foundry established in 1826. In Agnone, Molise, one hour and 15 minutes by car from Jelsi, the Marinelli Bell Foundry is Italy’s oldest family-owned bell foundry. Bells are symbols of beginnings and endings. Like Elisabetta’s.
Story #3: The Linguistic Self
Elisabetta’s natal region of Molise has its own ending and beginning. Part of the region
known as Abruzzi until 1963, Molise became a hashtag #Molisnt, or Molise isn’t. This reflects a
joke – Il Molise non esiste – “Molise doesn’t exist.” From its beginning as an ending in Abruzzi,
Molise’s 1174 square mile area and very existence came with a new name and a negation.
Elisabetta’s favorite granddaughter remembers a grandmother who could speak fluent
English. There were three bedrooms in total, one for Elisabetta and one for each of her
daughters. Elisabetta’s granddaughter chose to snuggle up to her grandmother when staying
overnight. Elisabetta called her granddaughter “my big warmer” and tried to teach her to say the
Hail Mary in Italian.
Who was she really?
What might have been the language of her heart?
Story #4: The Spiritual Self
Elisabetta prayed the rosary daily, with her Bible in her lap, fingers on rosary beads, and
eyes overlooking her yard and street. Her husband’s family had a special devotion to St. Joseph,
but Elisabetta came from a place that honored St. Anne, Joseph’s mother-in-law and Jesus’
maternal grandmother. In Jelsi’s annual wheat festival that occurs every July 26, gifts of sculpted wheat are offered in gratitude in a procession accompanied by accordions, carts called traglie drawn by oxen, families in folkloric costumes or the clothes of contadini, tractors pulling floats called carri, and the statue of St. Anna whose braids resemble the wheat sculptures. The feast of St. Anna is celebrated today by Jelsesi and their descendants throughout the diaspora: in Montreal, which is jokingly referred to as Jelsi’s largest city outside of Jelsi; and by the St. Ann’s Club of Norwalk, Connecticut, and in Argentina. St. Anne is thanked for sparing most of Jelsi’s people from death on July 26, 1805, when an earthquake measuring 6.6 in magnitude destroyed towns throughout what today is Molise, Campania, and the Kingdom of Naples. The greatest damage occurred in the towns between Isernia and Campobasso, and an estimated 5,573 deaths resulted from the earthquake and two of its aftershocks. Of Jelsi’s population of 207, 27 died; none were injured. The sequence of aftershocks on the Bojano fault system continued until the following June. Two centuries after the earthquake, scientists are still “integrating” this seismic event’s energy. That puts into perspective the question that I, Elisabetta’s great-granddaughter, got asked in Jelsi: “Why, signora? Why do you all come here one hundred years later, just to know their stories? Why, when they left so long ago? I answered, “When you put it in numerical terms, it was a long time ago. When you consider that their children were my grandparents, it wasn’t that long ago at all.”
Elisabetta’s oldest granddaughter, Ann Marie, will be so named after being born on July
27 th . But Ann Marie will learn of la festa di Sant’Anna when I write about it in English for an
Italian American magazine. And that is part of why I write about it. Who was she, really?
Story #5: The Emotional Self
Taking away a language removes a person’s culture and community. Elisabetta spoke Italian to her bilingual children, who did not speak Italian to their children. In one generation, Italian dissipated. Elisabetta would not know all of her grandchildren’s English-speaking children, who in turn would not know Italian unless they chose to study it. Did she ever miss Jelsi, and its sunlight, and wheat fields, and oak trees, even under the grape arbor in her garden with its many fruits and vegetables? How did her spirit reconcile the endless gray winters in Watervliet with the sunshine of Molise? What did she feel the night before the doctor amputated her left leg below the knee, a casualty of diabetes? Did she talk with the dis-eased part of her body, turning over the limb to God, accepting a wooden prosthetic for the rest of her days, with her life spared?
How did she feel afterwards, when her daughter cooked for her, strictly, making her
mother only one sweet thing a month?
Story #6: The Physical Self
Elisabetta lost her left leg below the knee to diabetes when she was 63 years old. In 2021, the metaphysical world declares the left side of the body as the feminine side – where the heart
is. Was Elisabetta still deeply rooted in Italy, the mother country, with literally a foot in both
worlds?
What sweetness Elisabetta may have been missing will go forever unspoken.
I do hear her counsel, at night, however, when my hand is threatened by a rare
neurological complication, which later goes into remission. When I break my humerus bone, my
heart begins to speak of desires I had not known were there.
I reach out for my great-grandmother’s hands. Is it imagination that feels like a loving
hand clasping my fingers that burn and throb after a traumatic fall, while another cups my heart?
Two months later, the complication goes into complete remission. Unlike Elisabetta, I get to
keep both limbs. Who is she, really?
Story #7: The Relational Self
Daughter to Raffaele and Maria of Jelsi. Wife to Donato. Sister to three siblings who
also emigrated to America. Mother of ten children with both Italian and American names.
Grandmother to thirteen grandchildren. Great-grandmother to even more great-grandchildren.
I know of her through her grandchildren’s memories. One says, “Grandma advised the men from the phone company where to plant the telephone pole in her yard. And the men were listening to her.” Another remembers, “Grandma used whatever body parts needed to make her point.
When I spilled a bottle of nail polish on my favorite dress, my mother was furious and wanted to
swat me. Grandma wheeled herself in front of my mother, saying, ‘You’ll have to go through me
first. She didn’t mean to do it.’”
This is how I learn that Elisabetta got men to listen and her own daughter to suspend
swatting a broom. Elisabetta made this happen as an immigrant woman, with one leg, and in a wheelchair. That’s all I need to know about the power of her voice. I am one of Elisabetta’s many great-granddaughters. I tell her story because I am also her voice. Unlike her, I get to keep both limbs, as long as I speak from the heart.
Who am I, really?
I am the first woman in our family since Elisabetta’s daughter to walk through Jelsi, see wheat sculptures, and feel an instant connection to my great-grandmother and her gifts to me of
intuition and perception.
Her story is not mine, yet telling this story empowers me. It softens my heart, and
grounds me in my rooted womanline. She (or who I imagine her to be) is there whispering to me, reminding me to listen to my heart. To slow down and drop in. To make time to listen, and reflect. And lift my voice. I learn Italian and practice it as a way of honoring her, and restoring what got lost.
I visit Jelsi and Molise as a way of understanding the great migration.
Each time I fall asleep in Italy, I grow more rooted in its earth. Its grains now weave themselves in sculptural surfeit. Molise’s solar windmills look like novice nuns whose white habits spin in welcome. I am the great-granddaughter of a woman who left this land to cross the sea to live on another ground where I was born. I have returned to her point of departure. No one can tell me any longer what I am not.
The Campanelle river winds alongside Jelsi. A ribbon stretched along fertile earth, where wheat and wine still grow, its water’s permanence streams on, softening mountain shoulders. The
wheat is sculpted with gratitude. Elisabetta lost a paese, a country, and a way of relating she
continued in upstate New York. She lost her physical mobility.
Through these stories, I find her. She is my reminder to seek life’s sweetness, and to listen to the stories my own limbs speak from roots in several places.
Together, we hold the spaces in one heart.
Bio:
Kirsten Keppel is a 2017 Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum semifinalist for her
documentary Ringraziamenti: The Saint Joseph’s Day Table Tradition. She is a member and past videographer of the Abruzzo and Molise Heritage Society of Washington, DC, and has been a regular contributor to Ambassador magazine of the National Italian American Foundation since 2015. Her poetry has appeared in Mediterranean Odyssey, The Chesapeake Reader, and Lombardi Voices. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Paterson Literary Review. A descendant of Molisani great-grandparents, Kirsten lives in Washington, DC and teaches French at Georgetown Preparatory School in North Bethesda, Maryland.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 