A GLIMPSE AT AN INTERVIEW

Most of the new immigrants I've spoken with did not want to be video or audio taped. I take lots of notes and then type them up soon afterwards. Here are some miscellaneous highlights from one interview with a Ukrainian couple. The interview took place in early April at their home. The woman did most of the talking, and, unless otherwise noted, the opinions are hers.

Passages in quotation marks have been transcribed from my handwritten notes of the conversation and translated from the Italian.

"We are in need of nothing. We have everything we need, but still, something is missing"

"We have many Italian acquaintances and friends, but not real friends that you hang out with/socialize with, have over for parties, celebrations, etc. Everyone has their families and their own ways of doing things. If Italians come here, and I serve them some Russian salad, they say, oh yuck, mayonnaise. Then I feel bad that they haven't eaten and it ruins the party. It's not a party if people don't eat your food and they [Italians] don't have an open enough minds. We are more open. The only person we are friends with who isn't like that is an older gentleman, in his 60s, who is single. He lived in Holland for 40 years, and he understands, he says, he was like us. He eats and tries everything too, and he comes to our celebrations and parties, since he has no family. Otherwise, we just socialize with other Ukrainians or sometimes Poles or Russians.

On the topic of life in the Ukraine versus life here:

"Yes, things have improved there [in the Ukraine], but life is still expensive and difficult. The cost of living is lower but so are the salaries and there's nothing to buy and nothing to buy it with. You buy a banana (she picks up a banana from the bowl of fruit in front of her) for your child and you watch how they weigh it and make sure they don't rip you off. You cut the banana up and you feed it carefully to your child, and that's it. That's it for fruit. The same for meat. Here we can have meat every day and fresh fruit. It's amazing, it's not fair what we can have here."

"My mother, as you know, was sick (she had previously told me her mother, who came to Italy for a visit a few years ago, ended up staying for a year, because she became ill. And she didn't pay anything for her hospital bills.). She now needs help. I can't go there and help her, but I can afford to pay two women to take turns taking care of her. I buy her all her medicines and send them to her."

"It's not right. It's not my fault that the situation is like this. It's the fault of the politicians [she's referring in part to the post-communist era in the former USSR, she had been critiquing earlier], and us, the general public don't have anything to do with it. It's the fault of the economic situation. It's always the fault of economics."

She goes on, emotionally talking about the fact that she has to be in Italy in order to have a comfortable, middle-class existence.

"I have everything here, a house a car, my license. I got my license here, I would never even thought to get it back home, because when would I ever have a car? Now we have two. My daughter has everything she wants, just like teenagers here. She has a 1000 euro fancy computer, she has to have that. Life goes forward. That's progress. I'm not like one of those old people who say, 'I lived perfectly well without anything, so my daughter doesn't need anything either.' No, why shouldn't my daughter have things? She needs them to succeed, it's right that I can give her these things. But it's not right that I have to be here in order to do it."

The conversation moves in many directions. We talk a long time about the lack of jobs in this part of Italy and the antagonism they say sometimes exists between immigrants and Italians-especially young Italians, they say, who don't have a steady job. At a certain point, the husband, who has, by and large remained quiet and only nodded approvingly or not at what his wife has been saying, brings up the immigrant situation in the U.S. Pointing to their television he mentions the immigrant rallies and discussions of stronger border controls in the U.S. that he sees on the news, and he asks me, "Isn't this the same as what happens there?" His wife chimes in, before I can respond, addressing me rather than her husband: "it's [the situation in Italy is] the same as America, those poor people who pick your fruit and are treated so badly. Why should they be sent to jail? It's not right. I see that on the news and I feel pity, I sympathize, because that could be us too."