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Italian Story
Italian story
Thursday,
November 04, 2004
By Elizabeth S. Ludas
of The Montclair Times
 When
Ruth Kunstadter began to do research into her mother’s family — the Magistro
family, originally of Montclair, but before that, from Cerami, in Sicily —
there wasn’t much material here in town. Kunstadter said she found more
information in the Mormon Family History Library than in the Montclair
Public Library.
But Kunstadter, the child of a “matzo-pizza marriage”
who grew up Jewish and moved to Montclair as an adult, knew that the
neighborhood of her mother’s childhood had been a vibrant part of
Montclair’s history, and thought there ought to be a museum, or at least a
Pine Street Historical Society.
“This was such a thriving community,” she told The
Times. “There were tons of bakeries, butchers… If you look at old phone
books, the old ones that go by street addresses, you can look at the last
names. Pine Street, Baldwin Street, Glenridge Avenue, they were all Italian
through the 1920s and ’30s.”
But the Italian-Americans of Montclair will not fade
away, unchronicled.
Two years ago, when the U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development provided grant money to document the history of the area
affected by the Montclair Connection, the Community Outreach Partnership
Center at MSU initiated the Community Heritage Documentation Project.
Kunstadter was named to its advisory committee.
There she met Marisa Trubiano, assistant professor of
Italian at Montclair State University, and Montclair native Donato
DiGeronimo, who shared her interest in Montclair’s Italian-Americans. The
three have been instrumental in The Italians of Montclair Oral History
Project, which will hold its first public exhibition beginning this
Saturday, Nov. 6, at noon, at the Crane House Museum, home of the Montclair
Historical Society.
DiGeronimo can catalog a large portion of the
Italian-American community in Montclair by charting his own family. His
grandmother and her twin sister, Rose and Mary Sandora, born in 1894,
married two DiGeronimo brothers, Donato and Vincenzo. Rose and Donato bore
12 children, Mary and Vincenzo 15, and many of their children’s families
have stayed in Montclair and neighboring towns.
DiGeronimo grew up fascinated with family history, and
beyond that, with the Italian-American experience in general.
“I have 800 relatives, and not one speaks Italian,”
DiGeronimo said, laughing. “Why is that, what caused that?”
His interest in the Italians of Montclair, the wealth of
information available to him from his own family, and his own reading on the
subject gained a new focus with the oral history project.
“My interest is that we’re losing it,” DiGeronimo said.
“If we don’t capture it now, we’ll lose that whole generation who can talk
about it.”
Trubiano, who grew up in Central New Jersey, said there
has been a resurgence of interest in the Italian experience and language in
both academia and society in general, and that Montclair — “a place where
people feel they can express their ethnic experience” — is a suitable
setting for the Italian story to be told.
With the help of students in Trubiano’s Italian studies
classes, the project organizers began to interview the Italians of Montclair
and assemble a photographic archive. They held “scanning parties” at the
Montclair Public Library to which residents could bring family photos for
copying without having to part with them.
The interviews, which are ongoing, now number more than
60, and the collected conversations give a picture of Montclair’s Italian
community over several decades.
The majority of Montclair’s Italians came from three
towns in one area of Italy — Aquilonia, Lacedonia, and Calitri, all in the
province of Avellino — and the Sicilian town of Cerami. They lived much as
they did in Italy, in close communities, though as Kunstadter points out, it
was important to the Ceramesi not to be lumped in with the others: they
considered themselves Sicilians, not Italians.
The exhibit at the Historical Society was curated in
collaboration with Laura Caparotti, actor, director, journalist, and
curator, and features photographs, personal artifacts, and quotations from
the oral interviews. Trubiano and DiGeronimo also credited Bill Fischer,
information specialist at the Montclair Public Library, and Alicia
Schatteman, executive director of the Historical Society, for their interest
in and support of the project.
Trubiano said two more exhibits were planned, a show at
Our Lady of Mount Carmel parish set to coincide with the feast of St.
Sebastian next August, and a show at the Montclair Public Library in late
2005. Kunstadter said the organizers hope to eventually produce a
publication, as well as an interactive Web site.
“We don’t want it to be lost. It’s such a great part of
Montclair’s history,” she said. “People don’t know, and those who do are
getting older. We want it to be available for everyone.”
The Oral History Project exhibit will
be at the Crane House Museum, 110 Orange Road, through Dec. 28 and may be
viewed during regular museum hours, Fridays and Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m.,
and Sundays from 2 to 5 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults, $2 for ages 11 to
17, and free for children 10 and under. For information, call the Historical
Society at (973) 744-1796.
Members of Montclair’s
Italian-American community wishing to be interviewed for the Oral History
Project or those wishing to help conduct interviews may call Trubiano at
(973) 655-7950 or e-mail her at
trubianom@mail.montclair.edu.
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