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That Ginger, Anna

That Ginger, Anna

Tag Archives: bronx

Happy (kinda-sorta) New Year!

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in Personal and Fun

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

adventure, apartment, blog, bronx, hardship, harlem, job, job hunting, judaism, life, moving, New York City, NYC, renting, riverdale, roomshare, society, twenty something, unemployed, Work

So, I didn’t write a post for the new year since I was out of town, but I’m going to do it NOW!

I am back in New York after 6 weeks away and I am facing what seems like an insurmountable task: I have to build a new life. From scratch.

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I always struggle to find things to write about on this blog because I often feel like my life isn’t really exciting or I’m too embarrassed to write about my real opinions and struggles, but I came to a realization recently and the truth is, I have a lot to write about-I just need to gather the courage and be honest. So here’s the latest episode in the life of moi!

I’m sure you’re wondering why I have to build a new life for myself. I’ve told my three closest friends and my mom, but that’s about it. The bottom line is, I did not abide by old adage, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” I put all my eggs and the chickens that hatched them in the same basket and that basket was Riverdale, Bronx, NY. I worked there, I lived there, I loved there, and I spent all my time there for 2 years.

I moved to NYC in 2014 and found an apartment I could afford by myself in the Bronx. It wasn’t rent stabilized and it went up like 5 percent a year. The lease on my apartment on the Grand Concourse was up at the end of August 2016 and I decided not to renew it because they upped my rent to $1300 a month (I know, I know. All you NYCers are going “Whattt the hell? That’s peanuts!”). I know now that I made a terrible mistake, but alas, I have also realized I am apparently not great at making responsible life choices. I was not making enough money to pay that amount of rent living alone and stay on top of my student loan payments, plus the commute to work before I had my car was an hour and a half-so I chose to stay on top of my loan payments and move out.

SN: It was also in Mount Hope which was not necessarily a safe environment for my single self to be staying. I never had any problems but I (and my parents) felt like it was a ticking time bomb before something was bound to occur and it was also not great that I didn’t feel safe to leave my apartment after dark.

img_1721Before moving, I looked for an apartment for over a month, consulted two real estate agents, put up flyers-basically anything you can imagine. Long story short, there were no other apartments anywhere for less than $1300 a month (except in Far Rockaway or New Jersey) and despite the flyers and asking around I was unable to find a roommate during the month. I made a friend last March (the professor who is teaching me Hebrew and Judaica and who I went to Israel with) and we had been casually dating for 6 months. We didn’t really label anything and while the relationship was serious, it was multifaceted and was not just romantic, but also largely academic in nature. He knew about my search and asked me to move in with him. It was a 3 minute WALK to work and the apartment was in a nice building in a safe, clean, and quiet environment. Things were going great, I continued working, I was learning Hebrew and studying Judaism (in hopes of expanding my past scholarship of the subject incase I got into a PhD program), and as far as I knew things were cool. In September we planned a trip to Israel together for December and I gave my boss my notice. I had planned to quit my job because the client I was taking care of had deteriorated and her condition became very difficult for me to handle. Plus, I had a new M.A. and I really wanted to find a career utilizing my existing talents. Little did I know, this wasn’t a permanent or even semi-permanent living arrangement. There is a significant age difference between us and a religious difference, so it turns out that when people in the community found out about the nature of our relationship and about my religious affiliation things did not go over well. Since I am not part of the social/religious scene in the community, I was unaware that things had gone awry until I was informed that I needed to move.

A few days before my last day at work and a week or so before my trip to Israel, some extremely complicated circumstances arose and my friend was told directly that living with me was not right or proper or pious or normal or good due to the aforementioned age and religious differences. Members of the community insulted my character and questioned my motives and life choices (all this without my knowledge). Several people got involved and long story short, they made it impossible for me to continue living there-against the wishes of both my friend and I. It was an insanely unfortunate and heartbreaking turn of events for yours truly and taught me an extremely hard lesson. I quit my job under the impression I would have a place to stay after the trip while I looked for a career. But as fate would have it, within a 3 day period, I was a soon to be 28 year old, going into a new year as a single, childless, homeless, jobless woman with a ticket to Israel, a few college degrees, and not much else.

Needless to say, this reality hit me like a ton of bricks, so after a two-day sobbing fit, I had to put my big girl pants on and get to fixing (while packing for a month-long trip).

In between more crying (again, at this point, still believing I had been dumped out of the blue), I got a second storage room and moved all my clothes, kitchen appliances, bedding, and hygiene stuff in (I moved all my furniture and stuff into storage when I left my apartment). I met with a friend and put out ads on half a dozen apps looking for rentals/roomshares and I started saving job listings.

SN #1: I was unaware of the behind-the-scenes circumstances that led to me being kicked out of where I was living until I got to Israel and investigated and uncovered what happened on my own. From the start, my friend had taken the blame and said he had just changed his mind about our relationship (which made me extremely upset and confused me greatly since things had been going so well), but then when I found out the truth on my own, he explained the entire two month long saga that led up to the atomic-bomb level explosion that occurred right before the trip. I am not really at liberty to give specific details (yet again, people stay steady creepin’ my social networks, haha) but his clarification of the events did help me understand the situation-specifically the socio-economic intricacies of the Jewish community-and after a few days of walking around Tel Aviv together, things were resolved between us. However, despite the clarity and resolution, my situation remained the same, obviously.

SN #2: Also, funny (funny as in mind-shatteringly depressing) freaking story. Back in October (maybe early November, I honestly can’t remember) I took the test for entry into the State Department for the second time. See, you can take and pass the test numerous times before you are invited for an interview. I passed the test in 2010 but wasn’t invited for an interview, so I decided to take the test again. I passed it and was waiting for the results when all this happened. Well, I’m sure you can guess by now, I found out about a week before my return from Israel that I passed the test for a second time but wasn’t invited for an interview. On top of everything else, this kind of sent me over the edge emotionally. My two dream careers at this point (now that I know National Geographic photographer and Oscar winning actress are out of reach) are being a professor (at a private university) or joining the State Department. I can’t seem to get into a PhD program and I can’t seem to get into the State Department. So, not only am I working to build a new life, I also have to find a new dream. And that’s just heartbreaking, y’all!

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I found a room rental with a friend of a friend from NYU a few days before I left for my trip (🙏🏻🙌🏻🙏🏻 PTL) and used my last pay check to pay through February. I went home to Texas after my trip to Israel and had another sobbing fest with my mom and my best friends and some tequila which also helped a lot. Then I started applying for jobs. I’ve applied for over 35 jobs so far and plan to keep applying until I find something. While I apply for jobs, my next order of business is to sell and/or donate as many of the things I have in storage as possible. I spent last week cleaning out my second storage room and donated/threw away 6+ bags of clothes, numerous pairs of shoes, an entire kitchen, and an entire office. I need to sell my bed, couch, and dining room table and chairs next. When I got to Israel, I found another more permanent living situation with some new roommates in Washington Heights and will be moving there tomorrow. I’ve signed a lease for 3 months just in case I don’t find a job or it’s secretly a crack-den. Once I find a job, I can start looking for a more permanent living situation and thennn this whole ordeal will be fixed.

I’m so angry and disappointed. I’m disappointed that I decided to trust and depend on someone and in the end both of our lives were turned upside down by external circumstances. It was instantly made clear to me that no matter one’s age or net worth or religion or social network or character, none of us is in control of ANYTHING. It is terrifying. I am very quick to identify my mistakes in situations and let me tell youuu, I have made a ton of shitty mistakes in my life, but I felt like I was making well-meaning and seemingly responsible choices, yet here I am. While I am angry and disappointed, I am equally exhausted. One after the other, from the time I was 17-so, over a decade now-I have loved boys and men that were either incapable of loving me the way I loved them or simply did not want to love me back (I broke a couple of hearts and dated a  few pathological liars too, so it’s been a bundle of fun, of course). I am exhausted. I trusted my gut and did something I thought was good and right and it caused my life to implode. I loved another person unconditionally and have been punished for it. I’m sad that my character and life have been judged and changed by people I don’t know and who don’t know me, solely because of my age and religion. My education didn’t matter, my character didn’t matter, my morals didn’t matter, my personality didn’t matter, my looks didn’t matter, my work ethic didn’t matter, my reputation didn’t matter, the fact that I took care of a woman in the community for two years didn’t matter, the fact I embraced a religion, language and culture that were not my own didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except what a group of people thought about me. What was going to be a fun month abroad followed by an intensive career search to kick off my adult life in a passionate new direction has now turned into a frantic search for a job while living out of a suitcase and renting a bed in a boarding house.

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On top of all this, my parents are going through their own challenges with illnesses, career changes, and family obligations (my grandmother in Alabama was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s), so this time around I have to pick myself up and figure all this out on my own. I’m an only child so it’s only natural that I learn to cope with stuff and figure out this life independently of everyone, but I do wish it would have happened a little more gradually this go-around.

Despite the whirlwind of events and emotions, I do feel liberated in a sense. I went through one of these life/emotion/consciousness-shifting events in late 2011/12 and it led me here to New York, so who’s to say where this will catapult me next. Other than the looming anvil that is student loan payments, I am fortunate to have savings and wonderful credit, so as long as I can find a job in a reasonable length of time, everything will be fine.

SN: I started reading the Bible recently. Partly for scholarship and partly to atone or shake off whatever kind of bad juju one of y’all has put on me. If you’re interested check out this site. My friend is an expert of the Bible so it’s been cool to be able to ask questions and get real answers without feeling like a heretic. (The last time I read the Bible at length was in 7th grade at an evangelical private school and asking questions/challenging the teacher’s interpretation/not accepting it as literal was highlyyy frowned upon). It presents the Bible in like 10 formats and also includes commentary, translations, and other versions. I didn’t realize Beersheba was such a big part of the Bible so it makes it even cooler that I was there!

So, my 2017 started off in a heavenly location, with phenomenal people (as I said-this situation was restricted completely to Riverdale-everyone in Israel accepted me with zero judgement and was extremely nice), while I was in complete turmoil internally because I do not know what I’m going to do with my life. I’ll be renting a room and living out of a suitcase for the foreseeable future. If I can’t find a job in the next 12 weeks, I’ll be doing the U-Haul thing while towing my car from NYC to Dallas, which would be a literal nightmare.

I have faith things are going to work out though!

I did make some resolutions while I was on my trip (follow me on li.st):

1. Sell/donate my belongings.

2. Take concrete steps toward starting a career.

3. Minimize/Simplify.

4. Think more carefully before speaking.

5. Start a creative/artistic project (hopefully YouTube if I can ever make time to edit).

6. Put more effort into cultivating friendships.

7. Love someone.

8. Dedicate more time to my mental, physical, and spiritual health.

9. Work at being more patient.

10. Curb the intensity of my emotional reactions.

Check back in because I will be posting updates on my furniture-selling-job-hunting-freezing-my-ass-off-in-New York-in-February-room-renting-crazy life!

Talk to y’all later!

P.S. Need a roommate in NYC? Email me at thatgingeranna@gmail.com

P.S.S. Need an employee? Hire me.

P.S.S.S.  Want a gift from me? Become a patron.

Find me on all the platforms @thatgingeranna

 

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Day 1: Interrogations, Tefillin, and Strip Clubs

07 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in Personal and Fun, Travel

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

adventure, blogging, bronx, educational travel, female travel, ginger, history, international, international relations, israel, jewish, judaism, middle east, New York City, political science, redhead, religion, study, tel aviv, thatgingeranna, thatgingerISR, Travel, traveler, twenty something, world history, writing, ישראל, תל אביב

יום א

Hey, guys. I’m here in Tel Aviv ready to see stuff and things.

As I wrote earlier today, I’m on a month long stay in Israel!

So, getting here was the MOST hilarious experience I’ve ever had on a trip. The airline I used had a passport control line before you could even check in for your flight.

Apparently, a twenty-something female traveling to a country for the first time with an older man sets off some kind of prostitute-terrorist red flags in their little system because they went hard in the paint.

First, my friend and I went up to a kiosk when it was our turn in line. A young man asked for my passport and asked a couple of questions about why I’m going to Israel (standard stuff). Then he asked my friend why we were together. He said hold on and went and got some older guy. He came and asked me the same questions and then went and got a lady and told her in Hebrew to take me across the terminal to another kiosk.

Now, I’ve seen enough movies and episodes of Locked up Abroad to know if they separate you from people you’re traveling with, it’s about to get cray.

This last interrogator was some intense woman who kept asking me if I let anyone put a bomb in my bag and that innocent gifts can be bombs too.

I now know they then asked my friend where I worked, how I paid for my ticket, if he’d ever met my parents, if I was Jewish, what the nature of our relationship is, etc.

The first guy asked me was if I was a member of a synagogue or church and I said a church so the lady asked me 37 questions about that: When’s the last time I went, did I pay to be a member, what church, where is it located, what religion is it, would anyone know me there. Then they asked my friend where, when, why, and how we met. Then his interrogator and mine kept walking away from their kiosks and comparing our answers.

I have a new passport because my old one expired and they couldn’t understand that. I had to explain everywhere I went with the old passport, the dates and duration of my trips, with whom I travelled and why.

This included day-trips to Turkey and Morocco so I had to give the lowdown on that. Then she asked me all about my job and school and the nature/duration/reason for mine and my friend’s relationship and my financial situation.  They asked each of us more personal questions that made it clear they thought I was either an international call-girl or a terrorist or both and compared their answers again.

Then the lady escorted me to the check in desk and told me we would be intercepted after TSA security.

They followed us all the way to the gate. They intercepted us before we got in line to board as I was exiting the bathroom. They took our carryons into a separate room, made us wait until final boarding was called, and searched each of them by hand (all after the TSA search).

Then, they pulled me into a room alone with three more security specialists and scanned my body, clothes, and stuff. Then they escorted both of us past the line to board and onto the plane.

They did this to two other people on the flight too…I won’t comment on what we did and didn’t have in common.

The plane was a 747-400 that had two stories! I’ve always seen those on TV and in movies but never IRL, so that was neat!

Now, the plane ride was also super interesting. I’d say 90 percent of the travelers were Orthodox Jewish. Now, before I moved to NYC, I thought there were three groups of Jews: Orthodox Jews with the hats and curls, Jews who wore yarmulkes, and secular Jews that just belonged to the culture. Now that I’m not ignorant of the denominations, I know there are dozens of sects and cultural groups. Long story short, I am fascinated and completely naive of Orthodox Judaism so flying with a huge group was interesting. There were a couple of groups of new immigrants and American Christians too.

The food was delicious and all Kosher, of course. Twice during the flight all the orthodox men got up and went through their prayer rituals with their Tallit and Tefillin (shawls and phylacteries).

I was amazed they were allowed to get up and pack and unpack all of their supplies and get in groups and walk around and stand near the exit doors and everything, but my friend said the staff gave up trying to enforce the rules long, long ago.

**Even though it was confusing and embarrassing (like my gingerness doesn’t make me stick out enough), I’m genuinely glad the airline/security and immigration officials take everything so seriously. I’m not being sarcastic or anything like that. It was a hilarious and enlightening experience that I will never forget.**

The flight went by surprisingly fast (as it always does going, but seldom returning) and we didn’t have any issues once we got here. My friend’s nephew picked us up and drove us to the hotel.

I got a few hours of sleep but woke up at 2 AM and haven’t been able to go back to bed.

Side note: It also turns out there are strip clubs here and the window in my room gives me a fullllll, elevated view of the entrance/exit of a huge one called Pussycat. There will be much filming and picture taking of these drunk fools stumbling in and out of here.

Tomorrow my friend has to take care of some business downtown and then I think I’ll go to the grocery store and who knows what else. The hotel is right on the marina so hopefully some beachin’ will take place at some point.

I’m going to attempt to get a couple of hours sleep in the meantime. Catch y’all mañana!

Don’t forget to add me on all the things @thatgingeranna

Waiting for the security specialists to clear my carryons!

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Thank You

24 Thursday Nov 2016

Tags

autumn, bronx, bx, fall, New York City, NYC, thanksgiving

Thank you for following my blog! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. While I will continue to post my historical blogs over the next few months, I have a new series starting on December 6th, so come back and check it out! Have a wonderful day and feel free to ask questions or request content! 

-Anna

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Posted by That Ginger, Anna | Filed under Personal and Fun

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Un Duplice Omicidio: Murder, Politics, and Immigration in the Bronx

12 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in history

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Tags

american history, bronx, fascism, fascismo, history, immigration, italian american, italian history, italiano, labor history, little italy, manhattan, New York City, NYC, political history, political identity, politics, social history, storia

Early one Monday morning, less than half a mile from his apartment, a 38-year-old Army veteran named Joseph is stabbed to death in the Bronx. A 22-year-old man, identified as Nicholas, comes to his rescue and is stabbed 8 times in the back. They were both part of a group which had been invited by the American Legion to march in the annual Memorial Day parade downtown. All of this takes place within yards of one of the oldest hospitals in New York City, yet they both perish. Their deaths make it into the New York Times and a world-renowned attorney agrees to defend their accused murderers. He succeeds and no one is ever imprisoned for their deaths. Their funerals draw 10,000 mourners and newspapers as far as Texas and Kentucky publish their obituaries…

So, Anna, here we go again with those weeks-long gaps in writing. Why you’re absolutely right, but I have a good excuse this time: I was researching for this next piece. Now, this one is not going to be an opinion piece and there is going to be no resolution at the end, but if you are interested in history, then I think this might grab your attention. Also, it does have a tangential connection to Donald Trump (just hold your horses-it isn’t commentary on current politics…that’s for another time) and there will be lots of pictures and a few mysteries! Now, let’s get down to it.

Back in the Spring of 2015 I took a required class at NYU and the final assignment was a primary source research paper. Well, if you’ll remember, even my first M.A. thesis was based mostly on secondary sources. So, I had very little experience working with primary sources, outside of some transcription I did for a professor one year. For this paper, I went to two research libraries and a courthouse archive here in the Bronx. The result was a 20+ page primary source research paper about two murders in the Bronx and Italian political history in New York City. A few posts ago I mentioned that I “spider-webbed” a lot of my work in graduate school so that I could expand upon the same topic and do more research on one subject. That semester it was Fascism. I was also enrolled in a Nazi Germany/Fascist Italy dual-taught course. Instead of working on two separate things I wrote this seminar paper for one course and a historiography over a similar topic for the Fascism+Nazism class. I am terrible at writing historiographies so that one didn’t turn out great, but my seminar paper was much better. I got a B on the paper and I was really upset about it, but a few months later a click-bait article from BoingBoing about Donald Trump’s dad being arrested as part of a KKK brawl came across my Facebook timeline.boing-boing I didn’t plan to click, but then I saw the funeral announcement for the two men who were murdered! I clicked and realized their deaths had been a much bigger deal than I initially thought and I also picked up on some inconsistencies from my paper.

I’m not going to summarize 20 pages of writing in this blog, I just want to talk about the two guys who were murdered. If you want to know more about the Italian diaspora just read this. I was researching Fascism in the Italian-American communities in NYC and how Italian’s organized their Fascist groups abroad. In Italian Fascist Activities in North America by Gaetano Salvemini, he mentions the case of two men who were murdered in the Bronx in 1927. Clarence freakin’ Darrow defended the men accused of their murders pro bono and got them off (here is his correspondence from the trial). Despite this, the murders were only discussed in a page or two and the discrepancies regarding the accused and the victims were never addressed. I have been researching for a year and a half now, on and off, and I have yet to find another book or historian who has delved into this case. I obviously can’t travel to Italy and I can’t go back in time to know what really happened, but I will present you with the evidence I’ve found. I have used ancestry.com, the Bronx Country Courthouse, familysearch.org, and a few archival websites in Italy.

Here is the profile I’ve put together of the two victims:

Michele Ambrosoli was born on 9 September 1906 in Rionero in Volture, Potenza, Italy.birth-record His father was a farmer named Giovanni Ambrosoli. He was born at #13 Via Processione. In my research, I found a Via Ambrosoli in Melfi, nearby. When you search the street on Google it’s called Via Michele Ambrosoli, but Google maps only lists it as Via Ambrosoli. I know the Fascist government renamed many streets in Italy, so it would be interesting to know if they named this street after this Michele Ambrosoli, when, and who took Michele off of Google maps and why.

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Also, Via Processione no longer exists in Rionero, but I know it existed before because other people traced their relatives to the same street on some genealogy blogs. I have searched and searched for an old map of Rionero with no success, but I will keep trying. Michele immigrated to the United States in July 1920 aboard the S.S.Patria. He was 14, traveled alone, gave no destination, and no relatives back in Italy. He was held by immigration at Ellis Island for 2 days and ultimately released on 2 August around 3:45 PM. Michele Ship.jpgI haven’t been able to track him any further until 7 years later when he is killed on the corner of 183rd and 3rd in the Bronx around 8 AM. He is then misidentified in every newspaper that reports on his death. The court records also misidentify him and the accused are tried for the death of Michele. The Fascists hold a funeral for him in the Bronx and 10,000 people attend. A new Fascist club was created in his honor in Brooklyn under the name Michele Ambrosoli.

While this information may seem trivial, we need to talk about naming and name changes. Initially, Michele Ambrosoli was identified by the New York Times as Nicola Amoroso, then Nicholas Amoruzo, Nicola, Amorosso, then Nicholas Amoruzo D’Ambrosoli. The Ambrosoli was only mentioned in one of the last stories about their funeral in Naples. His death certificate is listed on Ancestry under Michael Ramibrose. I have yet to figure out how or why he was identified as Nichola(s) Amoroso. A new Fascio was commemorated in his honor in Brooklyn and it was called Fascio Michele Ambrosoli, so the Italian community knew his real name. He was also listed as a Fascist martyr as both Michele Ambrosoli and Michele D’Ambrosoli. I am currently trying to get ahold of a funeral announcement from Mt. Carmel Church, but all evidence points to the fact that he was not going by an alias. I believe he lived in Brooklyn and was only visiting the Bronx, but I have no evidence so far. I don’t know where he worked, where he lived, if he ever traveled back to Italy, nothing. The list of Fascist martyrs says that he died trying to help a comrade who had been attacked by “subversives” and I can only assume that was the first victim that day: Giuseppe Carisi.

Now, for the other guy. I’ve had a LOT of success finding information about him. Similarly, his name is listed in various forms: His birth name is Giuseppe Carisi but he signed his name and is listed as George Carisi, Joseph Carisie, Joseph Carrisi, Joseph Carisy, etc.

Giuseppe Carisi was born on 10 February 1889 in Reggio Calabria, Italy. Pietro Carisi was his father. An unnumbered house on Via Santa Caterina is listed and Vittoria Mesiano is also listed on his birth certificate.

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I have been able to track him to a home at 124-126 Thompson street in Manhattan in 1910. He was boarding with a Carmelo (twenty years his senior) and Philomena Mesiano, who I can only assume were relatives of Vittoria from back in Calabria. Carlo was making watches in his home and Giuseppe said he was an operator at a coat shop.

652In 1913, Giuseppe moved to the Bronx and according to the 1920 census Carmelo and Giuseppe were living 500 feet from one another at 502 and 552 East 187th Street. Carlo now owned a jewelry store and Giuseppe was a tailor at a factory. Giuseppe was now living with his younger brother Pietro. As of 1918, he was working at Eclipse Cloth(es) Company on 328 Church Street (which now appears to be a Post Office). In 1890 this factory had 22 employees and is listed as specializing in foodstuffs, leather, and general merchandise. During World War I, Joseph (he was signing this name now) was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Fort Hancock, Georgia for six months.

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He became a naturalized citizen there. Upon his return from the Army, he applied for a passport in 1919 and traveled back and forth to Italy at least two times in the early 20s. It appears he intended to bring his family back to the United States.

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While his brother appears to have been here with him in 1920, his assets were probated in 1928 and all of his family is listed as resident aliens in Staiti, Calabria-including his brother Pietro Jr. I am unsure as of yet if he was able to bring his family back from Italy. Tragically, his father died just 18 days after he was killed. Giuseppe had over $2000 in assets which appear to have been given to his family, although it appears the legal proceedings took over a year to complete.

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One of the most interesting things to note is that Carmelo Mesiano moved from 124-126 Thomson street to 502 East 187th street sometime between 1910 and 1920. I do not know when or if any of these men became full-fledged Fascists, nor what that process entailed, but he was living next door to 506 East 187th street which was the headquarters for Fascists in this area and the location of the Fascio Mario Sozini. fascist-meeting-houseThis Fascio is featured in Carlo Tresca’s memoirs as an especially active Fascio and most of the accounts I read said that the men gathered there that morning before leaving to go to the parade. Perhaps Pietro joined the Fascists first, maybe Carmelo invited Giuseppe to join for economic or social reasons. Maybe Giuseppe wasn’t Fascist at all and just hung out with his friend and neighbors regularly. People shifting their identities is nothing new, so it is important that we realize these shifts in the political and national identity of immigrants have existed for centuries.

The two men were murdered here (the train station has since been demolished)

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google-maps-183rd-and-3rd

One reason history is so fascinating to me is because we are often able to pin down the exact time and date certain things happened, but other than the occasional diary it is impossible to know how people felt. I will never know how a World War I veteran that died with a $2000 estate in 1927 became a Fascist. I will never know why a 14-year-old boy traveled to a new continent alone, became a Fascist, was murdered while trying to aide Giuseppe, was misidentified by the national media, and doesn’t show up in any extant records. But one thing is for sure, two men who were able to gain the attention of national and international media and drew 10,000 people to the Bronx for their funerals are worth talking a look at.

I think this case is incredibly relevant to current political discourse. Veterans, immigration, Fascism, identity, diaspora, allegiance, and the importance of documentation are all as important today as they were on Memorial Day 1927.

So, this is where I leave it for now. I will probably continue to research this for years to come and hopefully one day I will be able to visit Southern Italy armed with these records. I don’t know what I can do with all this stuff since I’m not in academia anymore, but I’d love to make a vlog of the significant locations, write a biography, or even a historical novel.

**I am in the process of ordering the two men’s death certificates (they are sequentially numbered which really helped with making sure I was researching the right guys) and will update this when/if I find out anything new!

Until next time, y’all!

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Part 1: Why the Jews and Perché Venezia?

07 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in School and Work

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

academics, bronx, fate, God, grad school, graduate school, historian, history, history student, jewish, jewish history, jews, judaica, judaism, MA, NYU, religion, sephardim, six degrees, student, texas, Thesis, UNT, venezia, venice, writing

So, as usual, I didn’t get to follow the schedule I’d planned for starting this new series because life and that paper chaseee. But here we are now. Ok, this first post will mostly be a background about why this Catholic, Army-brat from Georgia became interested in Judaica studies (didn’t even know that was a thing until 2011) and how a seminar paper from 2012 became a thesis chapter in 2013 and has impacted my life more than I could have ever fathomed. This initial post is more about me than about Jews in Venice (if that’s all you’re here for, just wait for part two-there will be no personal stuff in that one), but I will link to my original paper and the L.A. Times article about the same topic from last year. Part 2 will be an updated summary of my paper/thesis chapter with some new material and commentary.


I am going to start by saying I knew NOTHING about Judaism. Zero. Zilch. Nada. I knew Hitler killed millions of “the Jews” in the Holocaust, that Jews didn’t believe in Jesus, and that they didn’t eat pork, but that was the extent of it. I know about Christianity because that’s the religion my parents are and therefore how I was raised (mom’s Baptist non-denominational and my dad is a non-practicing Catholic). I know about Islam because I had several Muslim friends (see also: hung out with an Imam’s son in the back of his coffee shop after school for a few weeks my Junior year) in Tulsa and I became more curious about that religion when my dad was deployed to Iraq. I’ve learned about Christianity in Sunday School since I was 3 years old and I learned about Islam through independent study, friends, and a couple of university classes. But guess what? In all my travels and all the moves, I had not ever met a Jewish person-to my knowledge.

Circa 2006 or 2007, I went to Alabama with my mom and we had lunch with her uncle. He knew I was interested in history and gave me a jump drive with our family tree on it. He was an amateur genealogist and had traced my mother’s, father’s, mother’s family tree. I never looked at the jump drive, but he passed away in the Summer of 2011 and I thought I’d better check it out. I opened up the document and to my surprise, he traced the family back to the 15th century in Bassano del Grappa, Italy! After some Googling, I saw that research had been done by other people who thought the family were exiled Jews from Spain or Portugal. I obviously thought it was cool, but didn’t really dig any further. When I started graduate school in 2011, I took a class about Venetian History and learned about the ghettos and a little bit about the Jewish population there. A new student arrived the following Fall and we became friends-it turned out she was Jewish. It just so happens that I signed up for a History of the Reformation class with her and the professor was Jewish too (hold on to your shorts, this will get trippy in a little bit). We had to come up with a paper topic and since I always tried to piggy-back my research paper’s off one another, I thought I would expand upon research I’d already done about Jews in Venice.

**Grad School pro-tip: I highly suggest finding a broad topic you like before you start graduate school and using that to guide all of your seminar papers. It turns out my broad topics were Italian Politics and Judaism. I went to two universities and took 25+ classes and was able to spider-web my papers and expand upon a few core topics each semester. (Obviously, I took unrelated courses like Carribbean History and Russian Cinema for which I wasn’t able to research anything related to these topics, but you get what I mean.) If I ever got nervous about using my own prior work, I’d just cite myself and link to my paper on Google Docs, but as far as I know there is no academic dishonesty in this approach and it will cut down your workload tremendously because you’ll be familiar with a group of sources and have already researched a topic that you can just expand or reframe in your next class.**

As a result, I wrote a seminar paper entitled: Jewish Life in Early Modern Venice: Migration, Segregation, and the Economic Necessity of Jews in Venice. I worked really hard on this paper and was proud of it. (SN: This paper contains the least amount of passive voice I could possibly use-so if you have issues reading things written in passive voice you best skidaddle on out of here now…also, this was my first real seminar paper, so excuse the errors and also realize I am NOT AN EXPERT of Judaica-sorry in advance). After some issues with my thesis committee and topic, in 2013, I decided to build upon this paper and some research I’d done about Venice in another course. This paper became a chapter in my thesis (I wrote more about it during my trip to Italy in 2014) and I got into the Ph.D. program at UNT shortly afterward. I left UNT, I had this chunck of research/writing, and a tangential connection to some family history. So, that’s the end of it, right? Nope.

In 2014, I went to Italy and got to visit all the places I’d talked about in my thesis. From the place the first Venetian settlers came from, to the town where my family came from, all the way to the Jewish ghetto itself! Later that year when I got to New York, I quickly found a job in Riverdale, an affluent-and largely Jewish-suburb in the Bronx. I began working for a family as a companion to a lady with Alzheimer’s. I soon found out that her daughter-in-law was from Fort Worth, Texas. The following year, upon meeting her in-laws, I asked them if they knew the Jewish professor who was on my thesis committee (not just because he was Jewish-I’m not that redneck-but because I knew he was an active member of the Jewish community in North Texas) and helped guide my research. It turns out my new bosses’ in-laws were very well aquainted with that professor I took the class with way back in 2012. Then, early this year, I logged into Facebook and had several notifications. 3 or 4 friends that knew about my seminar paper and thesis had linked me to the L.A. Times artilce about the history of Jews in Venice! I found out shortly afterward that I wasn’t accepted into a Ph.D. program, so I really thought that was the end of all this history stuff, but it turns out I wasn’t quiteee done.

As part of my job, I go to a Jewish Senior Center multiple times a week and earlier this year I met a member of the senior center who is an Afghani-Sephardic Jew from Israel. We became close friends, and in the past 6 months my research about Judaism has increased ten-fold (peep my IG if you’d like to see my interactions with the Jewish community in the Bronx). While I’ve branched out beyond Venice, I am still finding new sources which connect to my thesis!

So, a family tree given to me in Alabama in 2007 and viewed in 2011, led to a seminar paper in Denton, Texas in 2012, and a thesis chapter in 2013. An application to a Ph.D. program using this chapter as a writing sample brought me to New York City in 2014, where I found a job with a connection to two Jewish families in Fort Worth, Texas and the Bronx, New York. This new job led me to a Jewish Senior Center and a new friend from Israel, who just so happens to be an expert in the field of Judaica. Here I am, 4 years after writing that first paper and just last week I found yet another connection between Venice and “the Jews”…

*Next up: Let’s talk about the modern day divides within Judaism and the history of Jews in Venice/their importance to the Venetian economy!

*Probably next weekend…

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