Anton the bachelor

Posted on March 17, 2012 by

My fact-finding trip was over. I’d certainly learned a lot about my mother’s family, including my once-deleted grandfather, but failed to find a photograph of him. Somewhere there exists one, taken by E. Jellusich or a Triestine photographer, perhaps in a pile waiting to be sorted by a museum archivist. Or there is one of him as a young man at his sister’s wedding, in a collection of family photos with one of her descendants. Surely photographs were taken at his first wedding, to Paulina Letís.

Think of the possibilities. The wedding; the births; the christenings; the holidays; all occasions for a photo to be snapped and mailed to close friends and family or to be framed. Allied bombs over Trieste took down my grandmother’s house with all the mementos that it held. But photos must have lain at the bottom of a drawer or decorating walls at the sister’s farm in Žminj or in photography studio files in Opatija. Who knows, really, if they remain. Without one, I haven’t got the literal main piece to the puzzle let alone a figurative one.

When we returned home from Opatija and Trieste, I had in my possession, from the Trieste Archivio di Stato, copies of military records for three men named Anton Jurich from Žminj. I managed to find a German professor at the University of British Columbia to translate them for me. But it wasn’t easy: despite the extremely learned mind of this professor, he explained that the documents were written in an old script and in HauptDeutsh, which is not used today.

Two of the copies he discarded right away; they related to men of different ages and physical descriptions than my grandfather. The third rang true: blond, gray-eyed, tall, speaker of Italian and Croatian; 1871 birth date. He enlisted in 1893, when he was 22 years of age, and as Europe’s leaders were laying the foundation for World War I through various alliances and provocations.

Why had he left Žminj? Was it because of a quarrel with his sister and her family? He’d left a modest living on the farm after all. Had there been trouble? Was he simply restless?

Anton had lots of opportunities for seeing combat. The Austro-Hungarian empire was constantly fighting nationalists. Shifting alliances among world powers meant endless conflicts within the Empire as hopes rose among nationalists for change (which would not begin until after WWI).

According to the official Army document, he was a Kannonier. He manned the heavy guns. A few promotions are recorded, but he stayed with the cannons. In 1905, he was pensioned, after 12 years of service. But there is no reference to whether he served in Croatia, Italy, Bosnia or Serbia, or any other details. Perhaps that pension evaporated once the Empire dissolved, resulting in Anton’s destitute state in his final years.

From the Italian city hall records, I know that he was called back in 1905 and released in 1907. He was 37 years old by then, and not a candidate for the front. But when WWI broke out in 1914, he was called up by the Austrian military again, and served in some capacity for a few years.

One other path remained in the search for information and a photograph: Paulina’s family.

Posted in Austrio-Hungarian Empire, Opatija, Trieste, Žminj | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Shame

Posted on March 4, 2012 by

Marion in St. Paul de Vence

Among the questions raised by this family research, most of which I cannot ever hope to answer, is the one about the reason for my mother’s silence on her childhood and youth. She lived through momentous times and tragic events. Throughout them all, she and her family and friends — and there must have been friends — must have experienced a daily life of school, play, boys; stormy days and long summer nights; favorite dishes and dresses; universally known joys and disappointments of the stages of life.

Did she simply think no one was interested? And if that’s what she thought, how could that be? My life has been steady and safe, and I still am involuntarily prompted to tell my daughter vignettes about the shoes with two straps that I wore as a child in Rio, and how happy they made me; how high I liked to sail on the swing facing the sea; and of the heat that made me cry. My mother would issue tiny details piecemeal, rarely, when inspired by a return trip to Paris or Trieste.

It’s just too odd to me. Now I know a little more about her life, but I still don’t understand what powerful force silenced her. Perhaps it was shame.

Her father cast a pall of shame over her family. Despite their blamelessness, the family was cast out of a certain society as their fortune evaporated. From the proud owner of property in the Empire’s most glamorous winter resort, her father became a homeless pauper. You’d think my mother’s family would be proud of having survived him. Perhaps at some level they were, but perhaps not fervently enough to eradicate the societal dishonor.

My Aunt Livia responded by creating a younger, more attractive version of herself.”Io sono bella!” I can still hear her say. “Don’t tell my sons that I’m the second born,” she once instructed my Aunt Graziella. “I’ve told them I’m the youngest.” In fact, there’s a theory positing that narcissism is a subconscious compensation for feelings of social embarrassment.

My impression is that my mother just wanted to forget it all. In her wildest dreams she probably did not imagine meeting one of those well-off Americans, who drove a fancy Chevrolet down the streets of post-war Paris and could afford fancy restaurants and the horse races, but did not drink, smoke, gamble or chase skirts. They married in 1951, the year of the profoundly romantic “An American in Paris,” a time when American culture was ascendant.

With Bill, she’d leave Europe for strange lands in Latin America, Africa and the U.S. What a way to wipe the slate clean.

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Maria Çetin

Posted on February 18, 2012 by

Unlike my grandfather, my grandmother Nonna Maria cared deeply for her family. My mother was her first born and namesake, and, according to what my cousins told me, her favorite. When my grandmother was dying, she would call out “Mariuccia,” and look for her.

My mother returned the affection. She didn’t speak very often about her mother, but we heard more about her than anyone else. I can still see the image of my mother at her writing desk preparing long letters to her.

During the time we lived in Rome, Nonna Maria visited us, and we’d see her in Trieste. My mother spoke often about the hot Rome summer that she escaped by taking me and my older sister, a baby and a toddler, to San Candido in the Dolomites. Nonna Maria came to stay for weeks, with Aunt Graziella and her two girls. Apparently it was a wonderful time. I’ll bet it was. The wounds of war were as healed as they could be. They were together. The sisters had married good men and they had beautiful children who had all the prospects in the world.

Nonna Maria with me in San Candido, Italy

Nonna Maria was a great home cook. We would all get super excited when she’d prepare gnocchi di semolino in brodo. When she got older, she’d cook just as well, but would forget to salt anything and everyone would sit glumly at table, tsk tsking at the results.

When Nonna Maria died in Trieste in 1981 at 84 years, my mother, who was living in Bethesda, Maryland, broke down in wracked sobs, for the first time in my experience.

Tucked into the stories of Nonna Maria’s devotion to her children, were vignettes of her severity too. She was responsible for my mother’s perfect posture, but also her lack of confidence. “Perhaps if my mother hadn’t been so critical,” she wondered one day, “I would have done more.”

Until I started this research I really did not know much about Nonna Maria, not even her maiden name. One of my cousins speculates that the name has Turkish origins, and that Nonna Maria’s father was a Montenegrin with Turkish roots. That would explain the black hair I’d heard about growing up, which Aunt Graziella had inherited. There is a town of Cetin in Montenegro and Çetin is a common enough name in Turkey.

The same cousin, the nun, did her own research in Trieste. She found that Nonna Maria’s father, Franziskus, was “cancelliere del Tribunale” according to official records. Was he a “Chancellor” of the court?

Maybe so. But what the Trieste City Hall records told me was that at the time of her marriage to Anton Jurich, Maria Çetin was a “prestaservizi in una casa privata.” That sounds like domestic servant to me, even if the term does not seem to have any contemporary equivalence. She was “on loan” which means she wasn’t born to service in the semi-feudal way one sees in “Downton Abbey.” But it’s hard to see how a Chancellor’s daughter would be put out to work in any way let alone domestic service.

And then, I found this photograph at my other cousin’s home.

Nonna Maria, young and single

Here Maria Çetin is young, unmarried. She stands modestly against a fabulous chair, immaculately dressed, posing for the picture. The floor is plain, without the customary parquet. This was not the parlor or main room of a grand house. A coarse big block of wood is set along a post. Outdoor light seems to suffuse a second room through an open door in the background. And what is that we see? Is it laundry hanging to dry in the sun?

What is Maria Çetin doing in the work room of a house? Is it her house? Then why wouldn’t she be upstairs?

And why is picture being taken anyway? Because of its setting, it seems covert, surreptitiously done. Does it have something to do with the flowers she is holding? Was the photographer Anton Jurich?

Flowers also figure in a professional photo from around this time. Perhaps this was an engagement photo. She looks thrilled, doesn’t she? If she only knew.

Posted in ancestry, Mariuccia, Trieste | Tagged | 5 Comments

Nino

Posted on February 8, 2012 by

My maternal uncle, Antonio "Nino" Giorgi

My mother refused to talk about her father because she hated him. She did not talk about her brother because she loved him.

I knew so little of my long-deceased Uncle that when my mother lay dying and called out to “Nino” I did not know who she was talking about. My Aunt Graziella later explained.

He died young, a victim of one of those unspeakable acts of violence with which we associate war and the history of Europe.

According to my mother, Nino was not at all a soldier. He loved art and music. He couldn’t wait for the war to stop. But under Mussolini, he was conscripted into the Fascist army.

There were no photos of Nino in our house. On a visit to Trieste when I was 19, I saw one at Aunt Graziella’s. He was tall and dark, resembling the Montenegrin side of his mother and not at all the blond Slav of his father. That was probably a point in his favor in the Giorgi house once the erstwhile paterfamilias was gone. On my 2011 trip to Trieste, I found a few others in a stash of old photographs at the home of my youngest cousin, one of Graziella’s two daughters.

Mariuccia, Nino in Fascist uniform, and possibly Livia, at Mentone, now Menton, France

Mentone on the Mediterranean in what is today Menton on the French Riviera was not a bad place to be stationed. There are photos of my mother and her sister Livia visiting him there, perhaps during their days with the Rivista di Macario. There are views of the sea, of palm trees, of the beach.

Nino and an unknown friend, in Mentone, now Menton

His luck was about to run out.

In the chaos after Italy left the Axis in 1943, Nino wound his way back home, as did many other Italian men, to hide out for the rest of the war. But the occupying Germans put every man of military age into Nazi uniform and shipped the men to German-occupied Europe as forced labor. (The only concentration camp on Italian soil, at La Risiera San Sabba, marks the Nazi era in Trieste.) The last official account of Nino, that I have seen, is from the Trieste city hall record stating that on October 20, 1944 the Nazi SS abducted Nino. He was 24.

His family never saw him again.

The city hall record corresponds to the little my mother did tell me about him: that the Nazis posted Nino to a depot of some sort in Austria, from where he would surreptitiously and under penalty of death ship care packages to his hungry family.

After the Nazi contingent surrendered to the New Zealanders in Trieste in May, 1945, Nino must have made a run for it out of Austria to repeat the fraught journey back to Trieste, god only knows whether on foot or horse or combination of conveyances. He seems to have gotten there, but at the worst possible time.

Because once the German occupation of Trieste was over, Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans, the “Titini,” immediately replaced them. The “40 Days of Trieste” that ensued saw any man who had worn a Fascist or Nazi uniform, among others, abducted and executed. Vengeful Slavs, oppressed under the Fascists, were eager to turn in their Italian neighbors who they accused of crimes. The Titini took hundreds, perhaps thousands, to the mile-deep crevasses in the Carso and dumped them, sometimes alive, down the holes called “Foibe.”

(The Allies, Italians and Yugoslavs covered up this incident for reasons to do with geopolitics. For decades the only people who talked about it were the eye witnesses and the families of the victims, mostly amongst themselves as no one else would listen. This history is now being brought back from the land of forgetting. Italian schools teach it and a monument stands at the site of the massacres. Nevertheless, the facts of the incident are still disputed.)

In 1952, my US diplomat father asked for an investigation into Nino’s disappearance from the Commander in Allied-occupied Trieste (the war was over but Trieste was still a hot zone along with all of Eastern Europe as the Cold War loomed). My oldest cousin, the nun, was eight years old at the time, but she remembers her parents visiting the Commander’s office to learn that Nino’s bones lay at the bottom of the foibe. Aunt Graziella never told her mother.

The last time I asked my mother about her brother, as part of the same story about Nino working in the depot she blurted out her own horrifying account of his death. It went like this: one day in Rome, where she and my Aunt Livia were living, she went to the kiosk to buy a newspaper. A Communist rag ran a screaming headline: “This is what we do to deserters.” The photograph was of a Tito Partisan holding the head of another man. The severed head, she was sure, was of her brother. She and Livia examined the photograph, assumed Nino had fallen into Partisan hands and tried to escape, and resolved never to tell their mother.

The only thing holding the two stories together was the perpetrator: a Tito Partisan. Can either story really be certified? I tend to believe the Commander’s account. My father obtained it to clear up the mystery of Nino’s fate, to honor my mother. Was her version somehow more acceptable?

While her sisters would occasionally cross the border into Yugoslavia to see the villa where the two older girls had been born, my mother forever refused to enter the land of “barbarians.” She never forgave the Yugoslavs.

To be on her deathbed and intoning his name, but to have never given us a share of her memory of him, is incomprehensible to me. He must have meant so much to her family. As a young man, Nino was the only male in a household of powerless and vulnerable females. There was no trace of the violence and volatility of their father in Nino. He sang, he played piano, he enjoyed life. He was innocent. He was so devoted to his family that he took risks to help them, and to return to them. When he died, a measure of happiness was gone forever.

Nino in Mentone, now Menton

Posted in Trieste, Tito, Rivista de Macario, La Risiera di San Sabba, Foibe, 40 Days of Trieste | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Marion, married

Posted on January 28, 2012 by

My mother met my father in Paris. He was assigned to the Embassy. His American friend had met my mother on train, and she had asked about a visa to the U.S. A lunch invitation followed. When the day for the lunch arrived, the friend had to be out of town and asked my father to meet her.

About a year later they were married in Rome.

Marion on her wedding day in Rome

When I was an adult, I asked her why she had married my father. What had attracted her? She answered that when she was growing up she would ask God in her prayers to please, please, never send her a man like her father: a man with a wild streak, a drinker, gambler and philanderer. My father was responsible, sober and stable. He would be a devoted family man. Which he was. The opposite of Anton Jurich.

That’s why she chose him.

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Mariuccia as a Young Woman

Posted on January 22, 2012 by

Marion "Mariuccia" Giorgi (by a mysterious photographer)

The geography of Trieste was forever imprinted on my mother’s spirit. The fierce Bora winds making winter an annual exercise in survival; the delicious indulgence of sea and sand on bare skin in the oppressive summer; the heady herbal scent of the Carso in autumn; the hypnotic blue of the Adriatic shimmering in the spring sun. She always missed these elements. Well, maybe not the Bora. But she acknowledged its iconic power.

Bora blowing in Trieste

She loved Trieste like anyone does their home town. Somehow the facts of geopolitical turmoil and the squalor of war didn’t detract from what she always remembered as a place of singular grandeur, allure and beauty. And apparently, of family that rose again, almost literally from the ashes, to measure up to it again.

What was Mariuccia’s life like in those years leading up to 1941 and her departure for the Rivista di Macario? I knew nothing, until the woman in the Trieste City Hall read to me from the card containing information on her father.

He had abandoned the family, it seems in fits and starts, between 1923 and 1925, failing at the marriage after fewer than 8 years and leaving his family impoverished. According to the City Hall record, he went to live outside of Trieste, in a Casa Populare, or shelter, working as a gardener in Barcola on the Gulf of Trieste. He was 53 years old. It had all unraveled for the final time.

The Casa Popolare, at via Pondares 5, would be converted to a military hospital during WW II. It is quite possible that her father would have therefore been evicted and made homeless before dying in 1941, a “barbone” as my cousin’s husband had speculated.

Mariuccia was eight years old when her father began his flight out of the family nest. Two years later she was photographed, fashionably dressed, for her Confirmation and probably Holy Communion (a date marked in the Abbazia/Opatija birth registry). Dressmakers were employed in those times, as prêt-à-porter was an idea only being hatched, and in that regard perhaps the Confirmation outfit is simple, almost plain, befitting reduced circumstances.

Mariuccia Jurich, June, 1927, for her Confirmation and possibly First Holy Communion

Perhaps her mother’s family, including four sets of aunts and uncles, helped support the Jurichs. It is even possible, I suppose, that there was money from the Jurich family in Žminj. In any case, by the end of WWII, my grandmother’s parents and three of four older siblings and their children had died in the 1944 Allied bombings, and she was working as a cleaner in the Generali insurance building in downtown Trieste. Mariuccia and Livia were “commesse”, or sales girls, at a shoe store. (My other cousin told me that after the bombing destroyed their own home, the family went to live in a rental apartment above the dressmaker’s.)

Hearing these details for the first time, I recalled how ashamed my mother had been when my older sister and I, true Americans taking charge of our destinies by pursuing our economic independence, got jobs while in high school. She raised her voice in protest. She begged my father’s intervention. Italian girls, and women, simply didn’t work unless they needed to do so. Women’s work was associated with a fall from grace.

Another memory: hearing about my aunt Livia’s wedding, in Rome, to a well-to-do publisher, Paulo. Livia instructed her mother not to attend, because she was embarrassed about her. Livia was prone to lies that embellished her origins and past, and there was no place at her wedding for a mother who had been a cleaner. Her mother went anyway, and sat in the back of the church, weeping.

During my childhood, my family traveled and lived in different countries. By dint of a strong US dollar and the “developing” category of country my father was assigned to, we lived well, with drivers and servants. It struck me even then that the other expat families lorded it over their servants much more than mine. One time, a maid asked my mother if her husband, still in the countryside, could live with her in our maid’s quarters while he looked for a job in the city. My mother consented, even though her friends told her not to complicate things. Perhaps she saw them as people as hard on their luck as her family had been, and that she was available to bestow some grace on them.

Do we all edit the stories we tell about ourselves to our children? Is it even possible to reveal everything? Do the stories told and those withheld amount to an ultimately more significant meta-story?

It is my consolation to know despite there being many things painful enough to try to eradicate from her story, my mother eventually reclaimed  her bulwark against defeat: elegance.  It was rooted in Trieste, and its accidental, short but irreversibly important placement at the heart of a powerful empire.

On our last night in Trieste, as we walked on our way towards the hotel and sleep, through the Piazza Unità, past the magnificent Austrian buildings that had captured my mother’s imagination forever, it is as though I catch the scent of her perfume, and then a glimpse of her rare beauty in the slim, slender-ankled women of a certain age whom we brush past.

Piazza Unità, October, 2011

Posted in Marion, Mariuccia, Rivista de Macario, stories, Trieste, Žminj | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Mariuccia travels, dances and meets Vittorio De Sica

Posted on December 26, 2011 by

During the day we spent with my cousin in Trieste, before entering Croatia, we had sifted through her thin collection of old family photographs. I had noted a series of them dated 1941 depicting my mother Mariuccia, my aunt Graziella, and another young woman, taken in different places all over Italy: Rome, Assisi, Palermo and some unidentifiable places.

Graziella to the left, Mariuccia to the right, unknown woman in the center, Rome, 1941

What were they doing traveling to those places in the midst of war?

Mariuccia in Assisi, presumably in 1941

“Oh, that must have been the year they were dancing,” my cousin explained.

Wait a minute.

Dancing?

“Ma, non lo sapevi?” she said. Didn’t you know about that? When I shook my head, she and her husband broke into knowing laughter.

In the 1920s through 1950s in Italy, a form of variety revue was very popular, called the Teatro di Rivista. The Rivista, known as “revue” elsewhere, was descended from a long line of Italian theater styles mixing broad comedy, theatrical vignettes, musical performances and dancing. Contrasted with the sad and ugly life of war time, the rivistas must have offered people nights of glittering fun, lively entertainment and the distracting sight of pretty young dancers.

For at least one year, the three sisters traveled Italy with one of the most successful of the revues, the Rivista di Macario, as members of the dancing retinue.

Erminio Macario

The pictures show the girls happy as they played tourists on their days off, even if their ill-fitting cheap suits must have galled. My mother had probably not traveled far from Trieste until then. What a sight Rome must have been in all its monumental glory.

Let’s be clear: the Rivista was not burlesque. This was not tawdriness. These were highly respected shows, as a high quality cabaret might be.

In fact, the rivista was a stepping-stone to stardom in Italian theater and film for many players. Among the entertainment figures who began their careers in Rivistas, there was Vittorio De Sica, who used some of the Rivista di Macario stagings as backdrops for scenes in at least one early film. Later on, De Sica would enter the film history pantheon with his “The Bicycle Thief” and other Neo-Realist classics.

There is a glam headshot of my mother that must have come from this period, when she and Livia were probably trying to leverage contacts from the Rivista towards more lucrative acting careers.

Mariuccia during her life in Rome, year unknown

The women must have been elated at their luck. Here they were: employed, fed and housed during wartime, and having a good time to boot. But let there be no doubt, they took these jobs as a matter of survival, and to give their hard-pressed mother in Trieste a financial break. Because no mother would have sent her daughters to work in a musical revue, even a respected one, unless the alternative had been much worse. Which is why my mother and Livia never admitted to having had a theatrical career.

Mariuccia and Livia were born in the Villa Gioconda, after all, in a society where servants brought finger bowls between meals and where men of a certain class cossetted their women. To be forced out into the world to dance was, well, a little shameful.

And to be forced out into the world to clean other people’s homes and offices, well, that was really embarrassing. That’s what their mother had had to resort to, as my cousin reported. Compared to that, the Rivista was more than a respectable livelihood. It was their escape from a similar fate.

Graziella, on the other hand, had been born after the Villa days, and identified less with that period. She ended up having the time of her life with the Rivista, and could not help telling stories about her happy dancing days to her daughters. Including one where Vittorio de Sica had an eye for my mother, pursuing her after hours.

Graziella in her dancing days, aged 15 or 16

My mother knew I loved film, and Italian film in particular, and neo-Realist film especially, a genre that De Sica practically invented. We talked about the films together. And yet she never told me that I was one degree removed from an acquaintance with him. Ah, the stories that are lost!

Which brings me to a mysterious set of photos of my mother that I first came across in my teens. They are obviously taken by a skilled photographer, not a run of the mill amateur. They are cinematic in style and tone, and are the only flirty and sexy photos of her I have ever seen. A few remain in my possession. Many others have disappeard.

Mariuccia, unknown year and photographer

When I first sorted through them, I said to my mother, “Wow, Dad was really in love with you when he took these photos.” There was a moment’s silence. I looked up to see an expression on her face that seemed to say, “If you only knew.” Then she replied, “Your father did not take them.”

Mariuccia, unknown year and photographer

Posted in Marion, Mariuccia, Rivista de Macario, stories, Vittorio De Sica | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments