In previous Reports, I have featured articles about "Killer Smile" by Lisa Scottoline,
(May 13, May 30, June 14) a thriller that is framed around the Violation of Italian American Civil Rights, during WWII in the US.

As faithful readers already know, 600,000+ Italian Americans were required to Register as "Enemy Aliens", 50,000 of them were curfewed and 10,000 were forcibly relocated away from the coastlines, or interned in 41 camps.Comparatively 300,000 German Americans, and 10,000+ Japanese Americans were affected.

We also know that the Italian American chapter was "Una Storia Segreta", that was finally brought to light by the efforts of Larry DiStasi, his traveling Exhibit and book, that resulted in Legislation, and a Presidential apology (but no recompense) based also on the efforts of Tony LaPiana and John Calvelli.

It was "A Secret Story" because the US Government files were kept Secret, and all attempts to make them public were "stonewalled", and the "victims" were not talking because they were so ashamed that the country that they had "adopted" looked so down upon them to treat them this way.

FDR in being told of hardships caused by the various restrictions, showing his disdain said: "I don't care so much about the Italians.They are a lot of opera singers."

I'm angered by a US President speaking so dismissively about Italian Americans.  But, I've heard in my time a lot of terms of disparagement about Italians, and this attempt seems like a compliment, even if FDR hated opera :)

It however showed a crassness if he knew about 90+ year old terminally ill bed ridden man being forced to evacuate (where is the common sense or humanity in that?). There were far too many Deaths from Heart Attacks and Suicides by Italian Americans who felt ruined or shamed or both.

The restrictions, evacuations, and internments had a tremendous deleterious psychological and economic effect on the Victims and their families of that generation.BUT it also affected future generations as Scottoline states: "Now I know why my first name is Lisa, and why my family didn't want me to study Italian in school," she said. "It's because they were afraid to be Italian, and they didn't want me to be Italian. Or too Italian. Or Italian outside of the house."

On an entirely different note, and one that puzzles me, Scottoline sits back and grins. "Of course, the kicker is that my books are published in Italy," she said. "But over there my name is Lisa Scott, because my Italian publisher says that Italians prefer to read books by Americans."  (Silvio, tell me it isn't so. Please tell me that Italians are not coming down to the American cultural level :)

On a final curious note. The review is written by Bill Tonelli who frequently castigates Italian American "activists" as "whiners" and "professional victims". hmmm.

A dying father summons his daughter, a lawyer, to reveal a terrible secret: before she was born, her immigrant grandparents were declared enemy aliens by the federal government. F.B.I. agents raided their home and confiscated items that could be used to signal invading troops.

What does the daughter do now?

It sounds like the start of a legal thriller, except it happened in real life — to an author of best-selling legal thrillers, Lisa Scottoline, who incorporated the incident in her latest book, "Killer Smile" (HarperCollins). The encounter with her father took place in the summer of 2002, in his suburban Philadelphia home. "It was humid and hot outside," said Ms. Scottoline, 49, "but he was chilled and completely bald from chemo. We ate provolone hoagies, our favorite — sweet peppers for me, hot for him — which I had brought for lunch."

He handed her three aged-looking documents, she said, recalling the events of that day. One was the deed to the family plot. "You might be needing this," he told her. The others, though, were the real shocker.

"This is what's left from your grandparents," he said. Enclosed in tattered pink cardboard covers were enemy alien registration papers, issued by the federal government in February 1942 to Giuseppe and Maria Scottoline, natives of Ascoli Piceno in east-central Italy but residents of a West Philadelphia row house for the previous 29 years and nine months. The documents included thumbprints and grim-faced headshots.

She was stunned, Ms. Scottoline said, until her father explained a little-known footnote to the history of World War II: nearly 700,000 Italians living in the United States were required to register as enemy aliens, and 10,000 were forcibly relocated away from the coastlines, put under curfew or interned in camps. She knew, of course, about the more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese resident aliens in California who had been imprisoned without due process during the war. At University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she graduated cum laude, she had studied the United States Supreme Court's Korematsu decision that ruled favorably on the roundups. But she was unaware that Italians and Germans had received similar treatment.

As her father told it, one night two F.B.I. agents came to the Scottoline home and searched it for weapons, contraband or anything that could be used to communicate with enemy warships. They confiscated a flashlight and a radio — not a shortwave, just the standard model. Her grandparents didn't speak much English and so couldn't follow exactly what was going on. During the search, "They just sat there in their bedclothes on the sofa in the living room," she recalled him telling her, "and I can still picture that sofa." At the time, her father, an only son, was serving in the United States Army Air Force in Italy.

Once she heard the tale, Ms. Scottoline (pronounced Scot-to-LEE-neh) remembered, "I asked him two questions. The first was why they had kept it such a secret, and he said it was because they were ashamed. What they got from the experience was that if you are Italian, American men in suits will come to your house in the middle of the night and take small appliances, and they won't tell you why."

Her second question was why, then, had they bothered to keep the documents after the war ended. "And he said it was because they were afraid not to — in case the men ever came back."

At that moment she said to herself, "This is my next book."

It turned out to be the book after that, but the incident inspired the backdrop of "Killer Smile," published this summer. As do most of her 10 books, this one centers on an all-female, mostly Italian-American law firm. Her protagonist, Mary DiNunzio, a South Philadelphia native (like Ms. Scottoline), solves a murder by unraveling the mystery of an Italian immigrant's death in an internment camp.

Ms. Scottoline, twice divorced, lives near the Main Line with horses, dogs, cats and, until now, her teenage daughter, who is leaving for college. For five years she was a trial lawyer with a top Philadelphia law firm. In 1986 she quit law to write full time. Each book has sold better than its predecessor, and she is in the top rank of HarperCollins's commercial fiction brand names.

That summer day in 2002, she left her father's house and began her search, scouring Web sites devoted to the internments and reading books on the subject. Most of what she found had been in existence less than a decade. That it was known at all was mainly due to the work of Rose Scherini and Lawrence DiStasi, California academics and authors.

What started as a modest exhibition at an Italian-American museum in San Francisco in 1994 snowballed into a landmark book edited by Mr. DiStasi ("Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian-American Evacuation and Internment During World War II," published by Heyday Books) and a campaign to teach the story and gain official acknowledgement of what had taken place. (As a result of the effort, on Nov. 8, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the Wartime Violation of Italian-American Civil Liberties Act.)

In December 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive orders permitting restrictions on anyone living in this country who was born in Japan, Germany or Italy. The greatest effect was in California because Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, was a gung-ho enforcer of Roosevelt's edicts. Treatment of the Japanese was by far the harshest, but hundreds of Italians and Germans were also arrested.

Ms. Scottoline filed a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests with the National Archives, seeking documents on Italians who had been held at the 41 camps dotting the country. She learned that one internment camp, in Missoula, Mont., still stood and housed a small museum commemorating the period. She spent a week there, talking with locals who remembered the era. "The Italians were beloved" in Montana, she discovered. "In the museum they have the programs from musical performances the Italian internees would put on. It was so stereotypical — all the people in Missoula told me the Italians were so happy-go-lucky. Of course, they were also slave labor, so they were happy-go-lucky slaves."

This relatively benign view of the Italian internees was apparently shared even by President Roosevelt. Discussing how severely to restrict enemy aliens, Attorney General Francis Biddle quoted President Roosevelt as saying: "I don't care so much about the Italians. They are a lot of opera singers."

Once Ms. Scottoline got the files, she scoured them for details to create a character for her book. Favored Italian internees had been permitted to work unguarded in the sugar beet fields, she found. When it was time to invent a character who would die there, she mused, "In the beet fields there would be hoes. Ropes. Trees." Thus was created Amadeo Brandolini, an immigrant living in Philadelphia who was interned at Fort Missoula and found dead, hanging from a tree.

In an afterword she explained the genesis of its subplot and showed her grandparents' enemy alien papers. As a result, the book is enjoying an afterlife with readers who attend her in-store appearances or e-mail her through her Web site (scottoline.com). Some fans, she says, bring their own family members' registration papers, explaining that until they read the book, they, too, were mystified by the documents.

To Ms. Scottoline, the contemporary relevance of the book's backdrop seems obvious. "Imagine if tomorrow the federal government decided to order every Iraqi-born person living in America to register, and then we took them out of their houses, confiscated their property and detained them in camps, all without trials because they haven't actually been charged with a crime," she said. "Can you lock up a whole group of people because they scare you?"

Uncovering her grandparents' secret also revealed the roots of what she had always perceived as a vague uneasiness among her elders about their ethnic background.

"Now I know why my first name is Lisa, and why my family didn't want me to study Italian in school," she said. "It's because they were afraid to be Italian, and they didn't want me to be Italian. Or too Italian. Or Italian outside of the house."

She sits back and grins. "Of course, the kicker is that my books are published in Italy," she said. "But over there my name is Lisa Scott, because my Italian publisher says that Italians prefer to read books by Americans."

The New York Times > Books > Thriller Draws on Oppression of Italians in Wartime U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/02/
books/02THRI.html