When you are the child of an immigrant, you grow up with stories of the other country. No matter how proud you are of your own homeland, there is always the other. It is in your food, it is the way you feel when you hear the language too often forgotten, it is in your traditions, it is in the faces of your cousins, it is in your heart.

Each day I read the reports from Italy and cry. I remember hearing stories of my father’s reaction to the bombing of Cassino. Now I understand. He would read the newspaper and listen to the radio, worried about his aunts who raised him living in the small town nearby. Those elderly women are long gone now. Yet each day, as the numbers rise, I think of them again.