The aim of this book is to illustrate and analyse the experience in Canada of a group of Italian emigrants so far neglected and ‘forgotten’ by historical research: the Julian-Dalmatians. The reason for their longstanding lack of visibility is that these Italians arrived in Canada after the Second World War from territories no longer belonging to Italy but to Yugoslavia. As pointed out by the editor Konrad Eisenbichler in his introduction, it is ironic and dramatic that they left their home towns willing to remain Italians but, nevertheless, the immigration officials of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) ‘listed them not as immigrants from Italy but as refugees from Yugoslavia’ (p. 3).
The choice to focus on the writers and artists of this neglected community is motivated by the attempt to present a multidisciplinary narrative of their experience of exile and loss of homeland, rather than refer only to historical research. This choice recalls the programme of an important conference held in Rome in 1987, with the participation of scholars, artists and film-makers from various countries, which led to the publication in 1989 of the first multidisciplinary history of Italians in Canada – Arrangiarsi: the Italian Immigration Experience in Canada, edited by Robert Perin and Franc Sturino. This report marked one of the most important steps in the study of Italian immigration in Canada, after the seminal studies of Robert Harney.
Forgotten Italians is a collection of twelve essays, introduced by Eisenbichler, who outlines the background of the territory of the Julian-Dalmatians, and the reasons for their departure after the various treaties that established the new border after the Second World War. Part of the diaspora settled in Canada and Eisenbichler writes about their way of life and their efforts to retain their Italian identity and language through dedicated newspapers and radio broadcasting, poetry, novels and art.
The Dalmatian territory had been ruled by the Venetian Republic from the Middle Ages to 1797, when it fell to Napoleon; then with the Treaty of Vienna of 1815 it became part of the Hapsburg Empire. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Istria and parts of Dalmatia, with the town of Zara, were assigned in 1919 to Italy, but the entire territory was lost to Yugoslavia after defeat in the Second World War. The violence against the Slavic population that had characterised the Italian rule, was now turned back against the Italians, forcing most of them to leave. Immediately after the war, between 250,000 and 350,000 refugees fled to Italy, Australia, South America and the United States. The arrival in Canada of about 71,000 Italians in 1946–1948, followed by another 102,000 between 1949 and 1950, was sponsored by the IRO.
Some of the chapters are devoted to the most renowned spokesmen of this group of Italian immigrants, who played an important role in the building of a collective identity and in the preservation of a shared memory of their ancestral language and culture, which were different from those of other immigrants from the peninsula. The complex history of the Dalmatian territory had fostered in its inhabitants a cosmopolitan character and a multilingual tradition which fitted easily into the multicultural approach adopted by Canada in the second half of the twentieth century. Two protagonists have deserved particular attention: the journalist and writer Angelo Grohovaz, depicted by Gianna Mazzieri Sanković, Paul Baxa and Robert Buranello, and the literature scholar and distinguished professor Diego Bastianutti, whose broad professional and artistic itinerary is analysed by Henry Veggian and Corinna Gerbaz Giuliano. The experience of the latter reveals the psychological conflicts raised by displacement and exile: the first attempt to forget his origin in order to be considered truly American caused him painful alienation, forcing him to move from the United States to Canada, change his life, find a new partner, embrace a new academic career and accept his Italian and Istrian heritage.
Four chapters are devoted to the experience of women. Women were the backbone of the strong, unremitting efforts to build a new community through Julian-Dalmatian associations, but they also worked to retain ties with the society left behind in Europe and its heritage, such as culinary traditions. Meanwhile, women with cosmopolitan attitudes are depicted in the life and work of the writer Rosanna Turcinovich Giuricin, who survived the Nazi deportation camps, and of the artist Silvia Pecota, whose art and lifestyle ‘are heavily influenced and shaped by this cultural, linguistic and historical heritage’, as recalled by Paolo Frascà (p. 277). An analysis by Ida Vodarich Marinzoli of the novel Island of the Nightingales by Caterina Edwards, also provides an insight into one of the multiple identities of the protagonist, a young Canadian-born girl, who in the 1970s discovers her double identity during a visit to her family's ancestral village.
The multidisciplinary approach of this collection of papers allows a wider understanding of the complexity of these Italian immigrants’ experience of Canada, providing a better knowledge of one itinerary of the Julian-Dalmatian diaspora largely neglected by historical studies. The book also reveals the limited familiarity of Canadian scholars with historical research in and about Italy; the most frequently quoted sources are a book by Arrigo Petacco published in 2005, and some articles by Pamela Ballinger, but not her most important book, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Most of the relevant and innovative studies published on the subject in the last 20 years by important authors such as Raoul Pupo, Roberto Spazzali, Gloria Nemec and Enrico Miletto are not mentioned; the result is a narrower-than-expected historical approach.
