The Legacy of the Second World War in the Memory of Italian Americans

23rd Jun 202527th Jun 2025Close Encounters in War Journal Leave a comment

Memo-AmIt Oral History Project

The Memo-AmIt project, realised by Dr Gianluca Cinelli and Dr Patrizia Piredda as a part of the MemoGen Project with the support of the Ragusa Foundation (New York), is collecting video interviews with Italian Americans born between 1965 and 1985, to understand how the legacy of the conflict has influenced the identity and self-perception of the Italian American community, how it has imprinted the narrative of the war within families and smaller communities, and how it has contributed to reshaping the perception of Italy in post-war America.

Italian American soldiers played a fundamental role in transforming the image of Italians in the United States. In addition, many Italian Americans could reconnect with their ancestral origins by fighting in Italy. Finally, the direct involvement of the second-generation Americans in the Vietnam War influenced the connection between the third generation and the Second World War.

People born approximately between 1965 and 1985 who identify as Italian Americans and want to participate as interviewees can visit the website of the Memo-AmIt project and get in touch with Dr Gianluca Cinelli (giancin77@yahoo.it) for further information.

The corpus of video interviews will constitute a relevant source for understanding Italian-American relations from 1945 to the present day. The interviews will explore themes such as the importance of grandparents’ legacy for personal development and moral education, immigration, integration, multiculturalism, ethical values, the role of education in the development of critical thinking, the damaging effects of propaganda and fake news, the perception of Italy and the legacy of other American wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan) and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Finally, the concepts of freedom and democracy as bridges between the past and present are explored.

Today, in the face of the international crisis that the Western world is experiencing, oral history focused on the topicality of the Second World War and its legacy can provide valuable insights to understand and re-evaluate the point of view of Italian Americans, their self-perception and the meaning of Italy in their cultural imagination. Recording video interviews will allow us to investigate a target group that scholars have not considered in previous oral history projects regarding the legacy of the Second World War. Memo-AmIt, therefore, represents an important step in the exploration of the cultural ties between Americans and Italians in relation to one of the major historical events of the twentieth century, which shaped the relations between the two countries and their cultures for decades.

“Shared in Shards”: Fragments from the War in Ukraine.

18th Jun 2025Close Encounters in War Journal Leave a comment

Review of Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City, Diary of an Invasion

By Sarah Montin

“Are they there yet?” is the question haunting Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut collection in English which chronicles the period just before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Exiled in the US since the 1990’s, author of two poetry collections in Ukrainian and the celebrated co-translator of Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska, Oksana Maksymchuk returned to her hometown of Lviv just before Russia launched its “special operation” on 24^th February 2022. Poised for war, Maksymchuk’s poetic Diary of an Invasion is frozen in the expectation of violence, hushed in the anxiogenic stillness of “things to come/waiting to be unwrapped” (When a Missile Finds a Home).

“Snow is a strange white word” wrote British war poet Isaac Rosenberg as he learned of Great Britain’s entrance in the war in August 1914 and witnessed the winter of the world closing in: “Ice and frost and snow / From earth to sky / This summer land does know / No man knows why” (On Receiving the First News of the War).

More than a hundred years later, the cover of Still City, featuring snow-laden roofs against a white sky and a drone-like bird frozen mid-air suggests in the same manner the looming Homeric “white ruin” of war under the false serenity of snow. It also materializes the force lines that shape the collection (and perhaps war poetry in general) – namely the symbolic and formal dialectic between stillness and movement, expansion and concentration, abstraction and figuration…

Continue reading the review here

The Legacy of the Vietnam War in a Poem: “Market Day” by Karly Randolph Pitman

6th Jun 2025Close Encounters in War Journal 1 Comment

When I visit my parents in the Cleveland suburbs, my 81-year-old father and I go to the West Side Market. The market is a Cleveland landmark, and has served produce, meats, bakery items, and prepared foods in an old, beautiful brick building for over a hundred years.

My dad goes to the market every week to pick up his beef, a loaf of wheat bread, and a treat or two – shrimp dip, gyro sandwiches, or apple strudel. He wears his “Vietnam Vet” baseball hat and people come up to thank him for his service – a strong contrast to his experience coming home from the war in 1970.

I’d long wanted to honor my dad and his war experience by writing a poem about our market trips. Then a few years ago, I worked with a therapist who asked me a surprising question – “Did you know you carry your dad’s fear from the war in your nervous system?” That left me weeping in the truth of it, and in relief. And it left me wondering what I could do to help ease our pain…

Read the full story and Market Day poem here

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, poet, presenter, and mental health facilitator who helps people nurture a more compassionate relationship with their struggles. She creates books, courses, presentations and trainings to bring insight to our human vulnerabilities, especially food suffering like overeating. In addition to her healing work, Karly is a published poet, writes a reader supported poetry newsletter, O Nobly Born, offers writing and mindfulness workshops to nurture self-awareness and self-compassion, and works with teens as a teacher and tutor. She lives in Austin, Texas with her family where she takes her sweet dog on leisurely bike rides and creates as much as possible with her hands. In all she remains in awe of the human heart.