By Nicole Arcieri
Helen Barolini, an acclaimed translator, novelist, poet, and winner of several literature awards, served for decades as a captivating voice for Italian American women. She passed away on March 29, 2023 at the age of 97.
Barolini was born on November 18, 1925, in Syracuse, NY to Italian American parents. The eldest of three, Helen went on to attend Syracuse University and Columbia University. Although her grandparents were Italian immigrants, Barolini spoke no Italian until she hired a tutor at Syracuse to teach her the language.
courtesy of vqronline.org.
She spent her life writing non-fiction, historical fiction and poetry. Arguably, her most notable novel, Umbertina, published in 1979, highlighted – through a feminist lens – the experiences of several generations of Italian American women, and the cultural and personal identity challenges they faced living in the United States. According to an article in The New York Times published in the spring of 1999, Fred Gardaphe, director of Italian American Studies at SUNY Stony Brook, is quoted as saying, “[Umbertina] is the Madonna of Italian American literature….” Gardaphe included Barolini’s novel in his teachings at the university for over a decade.
In 2008, Barolini was awarded the Premio Acerbi Italian literary prize in the “Voyage Between Italy and America” category for her work and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for Umbertina. She won a handful of other awards for her work on this novel, which clearly demonstrates how deeply her writing impacted the Italian American community and readers on a larger scale.
She was also recognized by the mayor of Castagna, a small village in Italy where Umbertina, the protagonist, is from. The mayor honored Barolini as an honorary citizen of the village. Barolini is noted as saying that Umbertina was her biggest literary accomplishment, paving the way for her to write more engaging and thoughtful content.
According to an article in The Rivertowns Enterprise from winter 2008, Barolini was not exposed to her Italian heritage growing up. Her parents were American and did not speak Italian in their home, nor did they introduce her to the rich cultural Italian background from which her family came. In the same New York Times article, Barolini explained this disconnect by saying, “Like most second-generation Americans, my parents wanted to assimilate at all costs in their zeal to advance themselves – and set themselves apart from those Italians who were…just off the boat.”
Arguably, the only tie Barolini had to her heritage was through her grandmother, Cardamone. However, her grandmother didn’t speak English, so the life that Cardamone lived and the culture she grew up with as an immigrant remained elusive and foreign to Barolini as a child. Her grandmother passed away when she was 12 years old. Barolini’s interactions with her grandmother, however limited due to the language barrier, were a driving force in Barolini’s journey to discover more about her heritage through her writing.
In writing Umbertina, Barolini took inspiration from interviews she had conducted with Italian American women of Dobbs Ferry. She found a connection among the experiences of Italian Americans on a wide scale. She discovered that many of them were in search of a new life from the one they had in Italy, or from the one their parents had before coming to the U.S.
Barolini lived in Italy and Westchester during various periods of her life. She and her Italian-born husband, Antonio raised their first child in Croton-on-Hudson. They ended up having three daughters together. After her husband passed away from a heart attack in 1974, Barolini moved to Dobbs Ferry and worked as a librarian. She also lived in Ossining, before eventually living out the rest of her life in Hastings.
According to an article in The New York Times chronicling Barolini’s life, she aimed to dismantle stereotypes about Italians. That being said, she likely would have expressed disdain for the “mob wife” fashion trend that circulated on TikTok in October 2024, given that her mission was to avoid writing about Italian Americans in a stereotypical way.
Barolini presented Hudson River Haiku, a piece that weaves a narrative about the scenery outside the residence of her Hastings home, at a Historical Society event in October 2009. It describes the Palisades cascading over the Hudson River, the Tappan Zee towering above the cool, calm waters, and the sailboats that bobbed along their journey through the river in a specter-like fashion.
Here is an excerpt from her haiku, which was published in a “chapbook” (a pamphlet-like publication) by Slapering Hol Press of Sleepy Hollow:
Grey shadows on black,
Twilight descends on river –
One more December.
Ice on the Hudson.
Frigid winds toss up white gulls,
Sun brushes the sky.
Watch the moving tide –
Small waves pitch swiftly upstream,
River runs two ways.
Wall of opaque fog
And nothing visible out there –
A whole world walled in.
In this piece, Barolini eloquently encapsulates the serenity and creativity she derived from residing so close to the river. In an article from The Rivertowns Enterprise published in the summer of 2001, on the subject of finding a new home in Hastings, Barolini is quoted as saying, “This is where I want to be. I don’t feel like moving anymore, and I like to be near the river and New York. This is it.”
Barolini settled in a place that further drove and inspired her literary creativity. She experienced a strong sense of community in Hastings and Westchester as a whole, and was a member of the Literature Club of Hastings and a trustee of the Hastings Historical Society. She is greatly valued by all who knew her and is said by many at the Society to have been a “character.”
Perhaps the nature of Barolini’s personality was nurtured and explored through her writing. Or perhaps this relationship between her personal being and her literature was more symbiotic, each one enriching the other in a profound way. In the 1999 New York Times article, Barolini describes the character of Umbertina as “a perpetual wonderer.” Parallels can be drawn from Umbertina and Barolini as individuals. This description not only sums up the attributes of the protagonist of her acclaimed novel, but also offers insight into the character of Helen Barolini as well.
Nicole Arcieri is an intern at the Hastings Historical Society. She graduated from CUNY Hunter College with a BA in Media Studies and Anthropology.
