The year 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather. I remember one incident from my childhood that related to this event with utter vividness. Sometime in the late 1970s, both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II had been edited together to create an ersatz mini-series shown on network television, a sort of Italian American version of “Roots.”On that very day, Grandpa, my mother's father and an Italian immigrant, opened the week's television guide to a page that featured a very large photo of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone holding a cat. “A dago, like me,” my grandfather said, smiling. At nine years of age, I had never seen the film nor had the slightest idea who Don Corleone might be, or who Marlon Brando was for that matter. I did know the word dago pretty well. Every Italian American does. It comes to you with your mother's milk, or at least in her marinara sauce.Standing there beside my grandfather, looking at Marlon Brando and a cat, I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.For one reason or another, for many years I never saw “The Godfather” or any of its sequels. But the film was part of my life. I literally grew up eating food from a neighborhood restaurant named Sonny's. The establishment actually had a picture of James Caan on the wall, in character, in case the reference was somehow too subtle for customers. When I finally did see the films, I experienced the distinct sense of having eaten an unripe persimmon; it felt like an astringent shriveling of my tongue. And my teeth were on edge. What good can you take from an epic that depicts your people as gangsters?Albeit, “The Godfather” series is, without a doubt, excellent filmmaking, and the films have become part of American culture and society. Just about every American who wishes to be culturally literate has watched them. Its phrases have crept into our vocabulary: “to sleep with the fishes” or “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” and “to make them an offer they couldn't refuse.” The images have penetrated our culture, too. For instance, a man waking up to find a horse's head in his bed has been in an episode of “The Simpsons.” To top that all off, I heard it appears that even the remaining few members of La Cosa Nostra have appropriated phrases and tropes from the films. In March 2019, while walking down the aisle at Costco, a strange shiver came over me when I saw the exact image of Don Corleone that my grandfather had shown me as a child. It was on the cover of a commemorative edition of Life magazine.The special edition was dedicated to the impact of “The Godfather” films and the novel on American culture. I shook my head and thought: My grandfather had spent his entire life trying to become an American, but the only major image of his people he had ever been offered by America's filmmakers was that of a murderous criminal with a perverse code of honor.Not only for me, but also for others in the Italian American community, “The Godfather” and its sequels seemed to have elicited a range of responses from pride to shame. For a long time, I possessed mixed feelings about being Italian. Nothing in my life pushed me to want to think of myself as anything other than an American, with a capital “A.” I had not one, but two Italian families. My own father as well as my mother's father were Italian immigrants. My mother and maternal grandmother were American born, but both of my grandmother's parents (my great-grandparents) were Italian immigrants. I certainly lived in an Italian American world, and it wasn't anything I was particularly proud of. Somehow, in my very early adolescence, I felt distant from my relatives on all sides.While my brother and I were growing up, my father never taught us a word of Italian, but more on that later. All his siblings and their spouses (my aunts and uncles), however, spoke only Italian to each other. Indeed, I might note that my father's branch of my family spoke what a linguist might categorize as “not proper Italian.” They spoke Neapolitan, a dialect that is, in reality, a different language. Proper or not, I would sit at the table during many holidays listening to people talk for hours without recognizing a word. I felt as if I were an outsider in my own family. I had no idea what the adults said at these family gatherings. However, I do remember small plates of mostaccioli with red sauce, blocks of Parmesan cheese, and glasses filled with sour wine and little tazzine of bitter espresso.On my mother's side of the family, only my grandfather—a quiet, kindly and sympathetic man—had actually been born in Italy. All of the rest of them were Italian Americans.A horrible athlete and victim of an intensely over-protective mother, in my teens I budded into a young “intellectual,” because books and the public library were my only outlet outside the household. But at family functions on my mother's side of my family, I found myself surrounded by older men and women to whom it was difficult to relate but for different reasons than the language barrier I ran up against in my father's family gatherings. I had no memories of what my mother's family considered “the good old days,” and they didn't value the experience and pride of a child moving from the kiddie table to the grown-up table. I might also mention I noticed differences between Italian and Italian American culture. The cuisine in particular was subtly different: my father's family didn't serve “Italian beef” (a staple in Chicago dining), for example. I don't remember any espresso at my maternal grandmother's house, and all the men there drank a lot of Old Milwaukee beer, a beverage I never saw at my father's family's events.I was too young to drink with the men in my mother's family, and I didn't talk very much with them either. They all loved Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, singers who seemed to me as though they were from a different age, a different world even. Listening to them sing alienated me in a way that did not build up any ethnic pride in my heart.During my teen years, I developed a visceral dislike of cultural activities like Saint Joseph tables, a sort of free-will donation dinner put on by churches and other Italian American associations. In this, I was perhaps no different than a great many teenagers who rebelled against their upbringing. And in a way, the structure of my family showed me how assimilation worked first-hand: My father was born in Italy, as was my maternal grandfather and great-grandparents. I could easily see how my cousins, who were first-, second-, and third-generation Americans, had assimilated—some to the degree that they bought their spaghetti sauce premade in a jar. The ceaseless undercurrent message was: Become American. Be American. Stay American.Along with “The Godfather,” television was of no help in its most stereotypical depictions of Italian American men, such as the stupid lothario Vinny Barbarino character in “Welcome Back, Kotter.”Shortly after “The Sopranos” aired in 1999, I noticed that the most well-known Italian American suddenly became Tony Soprano. But did we need another portrayal of Italians as vicious gangsters, or at best, anti-heroes?I loved “The Sopranos,” and I hated “The Sopranos.” No doubt it was an excellent television program—well-written, well-directed, and well-acted—that depicted Italian American life at eye-level, for all its strengths and weaknesses. It even got the different types of pastries right. And the show must have been the only work of art to have accurately depicted both life in the Mafia and life in psychotherapy. The finale episode, the show cut-to-black ending, was the best ending: it perfectly conveyed my ambivalence and my inability to define a coherent opinion about the characters and about them and me being Italian American.I wondered: Was it possible for an Italian American man to be seen as a thoughtful, articulate, intellectual person? How could I bridge the gap between where my family came from and who I wanted to be? Who could I be?These questions continued to push me away from publicly and personally claiming an Italian American identity. As an undergraduate, I studied in Mexico City. One day I met two young women, twin Italian Americans, who were traveling. We talked about being Italian, and I made it pretty clear that I would never marry an Italian American woman. “I have two Italian families, who needs a third?” The look on their faces blended sadness and pity for my self-loathing. At the time, I had been examining the less flattering side of the equation in my Italian American family, its rigid adherence to tradition and old ways, the bitter personal grievances that evolved into decades of estrangements over trivial things, and the stubborn egotism and pride that did not seek forgiveness. I had seen it all too close and for too long.I might add that I eventually realized I could not really escape my ethnicity no matter how hard I tried. I had eaten more than my fair share of pasta fazool. My older relatives had eaten dandelion greens, poverty food. It all tasted good, but no one spoke outside the family about what we ate because at the time many people had never seen or tasted an artichoke, a persimmon, or a chestnut. I followed suit and kept quiet. The foodways of Italy remained in my life, informing my ethnicity.My family did not give up their rural heritage easily. My Great-Uncle Tony on my mother's side and my Uncle Felix on my father's side were both expert gardeners. They coaxed a cornucopia of vegetables from their small backyards: zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, and even figs. I went to Uncle Felix's home each October to bury their fig tree for the winter. Fighting to maintain a Mediterranean plant in a cold environment sticks in my mind as a metaphor for maintaining traditional foodways in the face of a grinding industrial system of food production, a way of eating dominated by machines that produced canned pasta the way it produced socks and radios. After college, I taught English as a Second Language to adults at a junior college and fell madly in love with that profession. I loved working with immigrants and their communities. Time and again I found myself working in the Hispanic community. My family history was one of immigration, so I understood the challenges facing the immigrants who sat in front of me every day. After six years at the junior college, I returned to graduate school and eventually settled down at a suburban high school to run a small program to help immigrant students to learn English. I saw my father, grandfather, and great-grandparents in the faces of my students who were from Bosnia or Oaxaca or Gdansk. I identified with them, understanding the argument for immigration in my flesh even though I hadn't embraced my Italian culture. I was the child of immigrants, and I intended to live my value system with my actions. For 20 years, I worked with or taught immigrants in some capacity.My Italian American self-loathing, however, continued until the death of my father. As Freud said, the death of a man's father is the single most powerful psychological crisis in his life. I was struggling with a cancer diagnosis when he died, and this condition along with his death prompted me to learn more about my father. It was an effort to capture what I had just lost, I guess, or perhaps what I feared losing myself.Slowly, a portrait emerged. My father, Domenico Sasso, was born in 1935 in a small town outside Naples, Italy, into what was horrific poverty. His family was essentially the southern Italian version of American sharecroppers. Their house had no glass windows or running water, and electricity consisted of a wire to a light bulb. (And this was the upgraded house my brother had seen on a visit to Italy in the early 1970s, by the way.)Talk about childhood trauma. One day, during the Second World War, a friend of my father's set off a hand grenade that he had found, and the explosion peppered my father with shrapnel. Soon after that, my father's mother, Angelina, died, probably from diabetes according to the symptoms my relatives said my father had described. She died quickly because poor Italians didn't have access to insulin in those days. My father was 15 years old. I knew he had spent very few years in school—he never said exactly how many—before he went to work in the family fields.Slowly, the information I gathered gave me a picture of the landscape in which my father had grown up. In addition, my knowledge about the challenges and difficulties of life in the Mezzogiorno grew. I came to understand my father better and better in his absence. He was a man who had known chronic unemployment, and therefore he worked every hour sent his way. He had known hunger and want, and he did not take food or clothing for granted. He was suspicious of a great many things and was fiercely independent. Both his strengths and his weaknesses stemmed from a childhood that had emerged from an apocalyptic, war-torn, and impoverished nation.I found out that while he was growing up, my father worked a variety of jobs in Italy, including a stint as a glassmaker. He immigrated to America in 1962, married my mother, and began working as a manual laborer while he learned English. In the mid-1960s, my parents bought a “carpenter's dream” house in unincorporated Leyden Township. My father did all the work to complete the upstairs, and, working with famiglia, he lifted the house and added a basement. (I, his son, don't understand how a sink works.) Eventually he became a tool-and-die maker and worked many a night shift at manufacturing facilities.Neither my brother nor I learned to speak, read, or write Italian. This was because my father, who was a very smart man, learned English at night school, and my mother was a native speaker of English. (I often thought of him when I taught adults English at night.) My father quickly became highly proficient at English and never needed his children or friends to translate for him; he often was the person others called when they needed help. He had no patience for Americans who spent hours watching professional sports when they could have been improving themselves. In fact, my father possessed a relentless intellectual curiosity and read a lot. We found hundreds of books in his condo after he died, including Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Safe to say, this was a book one would not normally find in American homes, much less in the home of an immigrant with very few years of formal education.My father also had utter contempt for excessive drinking and drunkenness. I could put all the alcohol I saw him drink during his lifetime into a gallon milk jug and still have room for some milk. That, too, was a great lesson I learned from him.He was a hard man to fully understand and, even then, was something of a mystery. He certainly had his demons, including an often-blinding furious temper and the ability to carry a grudge for decades. I have not yet uncovered the exact circumstances that compelled him to leave Italy. Comparatively, as I looked at his friends and family who came from the same time and place, I realized none of them had succeeded as well in America as my father had. Could they all have come from such harrowing, poverty-stricken beginnings?Eventually diabetes got my father. He refused the insulin, the same medicine his mother had been unable to attain, and he descended into senility. One day his heart stopped. Few native-born Americans have seen the inner workings of an immigrant family. If you are a child of an immigrant, there's a dynamic that you can grasp. You understand what it means to be from someplace else and have part of your life always there. You understand what it means to have an “old country.” You have relatives you don't see often, relatives you can't see often, relatives you meet once and never see again. You know what it means to have part of your life informed so thoroughly by a set of values that are completely opaque and foreign to others and to live by traditions from a different time and place that are incongruous to those around you. The child of an immigrant holds in their heart a nostalgia for something they never knew and never were—to speak a different language (or not to speak it), to be a different person in different places, to crave things others do not.Children of immigrants hear their family members say “that is how Americans do things, but this isn't going to be our way,” then they wonder what makes anyone an American or something else. Some people are born Americans. Some people become Americans. Others find themselves on a journey of becoming American.I have traveled along the road of becoming an American. Regina Barreca, author of Don't Tell Mama: The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing (2002), pointed out a tricky side of being a child, or grandchild, of Italian immigrants: “Italian-Americans live (and have always lived) a life not inherited, but invented, aware of their own process of transformation from citizens of another country to residents of a new land, however long ago the journey was made” (p. xix). The truth about “the journey”—both mine and perhaps the journeys of many other Italian Americans—became apparent when I looked at my mother's side of the family. My mother and grandmother had both been born in Chicago and both grew up in the traditional Italian American enclave, the Taylor Street neighborhood. In the mid-sixties, The University of Illinois at Chicago demolished the neighborhood and turned the real estate into the University of Illinois at Chicago's first real campus in the city. For me, life came full circle when I attended graduate school there in 2000–2002. My mother and grandmother had lived two blocks from Jane Addams’ Hull House, the museum that I passed most mornings as I walked to class.Similar in origin to my father's family, my grandmother's parents (my great-grandparents) both emigrated from Italy's Naples region in the early twentieth century. My grandmother, Lena Renella, was born in Chicago. She grew up and married my grandfather, Domenico Panico, who was an immigrant from a small town near Naples. The two moved into a house near my great-grandparents’ home. In the mid-fifties, taking advantage of the post–World War II economic boom, they all moved out of the city in the sixties, following the “Italian highway,” which was a corridor between Grand Avenue and Lake Street running from the west side of the city into its near-western suburbs. They eventually ended up in an Italian American neighborhood in Chicagoland: unincorporated Leyden Township, where my grandfather built two modest houses so that they could live next door to my great-grandparents.My maternal great-grandmother died when I was an infant; my maternal great-grandfather died when I was a very young boy. But I knew my maternal grandfather, my mother's father who had shown me the picture of Don Corleone holding the cat. I was quite close to him. He was the diametric opposite of my father in every way.My chatty father had been outgoing and engaged with all sorts of people. My grandfather was a quiet, subdued man. My father could be given to immense bursts of rage and fury, but my grandfather almost never raised his voice in all the years I knew him. In fact, my grandfather was so mild and reserved, his nickname was literally (and facetiously) “Shut Up, Domenico.” Despite and because of his reserved nature, he became a solid, positive example of the Italian immigrant who did hard physical labor every day of his life until he retired. My mother recalled being a young girl and standing behind her father, my grandfather, when he sat down after coming home from work and tracing the lines of his muscular biceps with her finger. “He was bigger than Popeye,” she remembered.He was an emblem of a contadino from Italy, eating raw onions like apples, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, and slipping his dog, Jake, a treat under the table. He liked to drink wine, too, which he made from the grapes in his backyard grape arbor. I spent many afternoons in my childhood in the grape arbor with him, picking the bitter grapes and spitting them out.My grandfather was kind, loving, and relentlessly generous to me during the many hours we spent together. He wasn't a “Godfather,” a Tony Soprano or a dumb, violent thug like Tony “Lip” Vallelonga in The Green Book. He passed on a few maximums to me, such as “Do good and you can forget it. Do bad and you will be forced to remember it.” He lived a simple life of a simple man; he lived the good life of a good man. I still think of him with love and warmth. Looking back, he and my father are exemplary Italian American men.My grandfather never returned to Italy for a visit after immigrating to America. I have thought about my father and my grandfather's lives and the challenges they overcame, and I began to reassess my own notions about ethnicity.Remembering these things forced a change in my thinking: I came to see my life in a greater context. I learned, for example, that Italian American men were among the largest ethnic groups to serve in the United States military during the Second World War, and yet Italian Americans on the Pacific Coast were placed in enemy internment camps, as were the Japanese Americans. Every educated American knows the story of the Japanese internment; almost none know about the Italian American internment. How many other stories were there that I should have known but did not?In fact, I have grasped that I have a great deal more to learn—about being Italian and being Italian American. A new road has opened up in front of me, and it goes in two directions. In one direction, my ancestors beckon me, and I feel driven not just to learn their stories but also to somehow render their experiences anew to future generations. Something tells me that my people's past deserves a future. Now, I want desperately to tell their stories, good and bad, bright and dark, for I have finally come to understand that they are, most definitely, my people.