By Nino Ricci (page 1 of 4)

While my own entry into Canada was by that most traumatic of emigrations, birth, my parents, who arrived here a few years ahead of me, in 1954, apparently had a much easier time of it, cruising into HalifaxÕs pier 21 aboard the well-appointed passenger liner Saturnia. To hear them tell it they had the time of their lives on the crossing, dining and dancing and living it up, giving the lie to those images we were all raised on of the poor immigrant masses stumbling out of the darkened holds of rat-infested, cholera-infected death ships. By the 1950s, it seems, the days of lightless steerage berths and of fatal island quarantines had passed, and for about three hundred dollars-roughly what you could save in a year-any two-bit peasant or labourer could book a fairly comfortable passage to the New World.

For my parents, that passage had its origins in my fatherÕs year of army service, when, stationed in northern Italy far from the mountains of his native Molise, he gazed for the first time on the beautiful flat green fields of the Po Valley. The sight made him wonder why he and his family had been wasting their time on the few craggy acres of hillside they scrabbled a living from back home; it seems it had never occurred to him before then that elsewhere things might be different. Not long afterwards the chance arose to come to Canada, and he was quick to take it. The flat fields that greeted his arrival here, however, were a far cry from those of the Po: wind-swept and snow-covered and bleak, they seemed the last outreaches of the habitable world. Coming from Italy, where even the doghouses had walls of foot-thick stone, he and my mother were made somewhat concerned by the rickety wooden shacks that seemed to form the primary residences here, and by the tiny, even more rickety ones out back-though one whiff of them would have quickly explained their function-that they feared might be the workersÕ quarters.

As it happened, my parentsÕ first home in Canada, in the small farming town of Leamington, Ontario, was not so far removed from those rickety outhouses: set off the barn of a farmer who had sponsored them for their first year of work here, it was essentially a refurbished chicken coop. A couple of my brothers were born there, and afterwards my parents remembered the place fondly enough; and indeed an uncle of mine, Uncle Luigi, subsequently took it over, and stayed on for the next thirty years working at the local Heinz factory and living the bachelor life before finally returning to Italy to the wife and son heÕd left behind there. We used to visit him sometimes Sunday mornings after mass and he always seemed so settled and self-sufficient and in his element in that elfin habitation, with his army-sized cot and his stoop-shouldered Kelvinator fridge and the little shot glasses heÕd bring out for a glass of Tia Maria or anisette. It was a kind of shock to me as I grew older to learn that he had this completely other life across the sea that he would be returning to, and that everything here, his blackened espresso pot, his tiny sloped-ceilinged rooms, was merely provisional, a way station. I had not quite understood then this dual-sidedness of immigration, how there was always an absent reference point that the present stood against, and that could make the presentÕs nuts-and-bolts everydayness and permanence suddenly appear the merest shadow.

By the time I was born-the fifth of seven children, though one, a girl, had died as an infant back in Italy-my parents had purchased a small farm and our household had burgeoned to include a set of grandparents and my fatherÕs two unmarried sisters. In some important respects, the world I arrived into was not so different from the one my parents had left behind: the language we spoke was the dialect my parents had brought with them; the festivals we celebrated were the local ones of their hometowns; the people we saw were my parentsÕ siblings and cousins and neighbours from back home. My motherÕs hometown of Villa Canale, which had a population of about a thousand just after the war, eventually, in a kind of mitosis, lost some half of these to Leamington; and so it might have been true to claim that those who left ended up no less at home than those who stayed behind. Indeed I often heard it said that fellow villagers got along much better in Canada than they ever had in their hometowns, where theyÕd had centuries of feuds and old land disputes and the like to divide them, and where everyone had been careful not to let their neighbours know their business. In Canada, on the other hand, at planting time, every paesan and third cousin from back home would show up in your field to help you out. Some of my best memories from my early childhood are of those days in the fields, the jugs of Kool Aid IÕd lug around to people while they worked and the mid-morning breaks weÕd take with coffee and biscuits and slabs of cheese and salted pork passed around on the tip of someoneÕs jack-knife.