THE FINNISHNESS OF MY AMERICANNESS

AN ESSAY BY JANE PIIRTO

PUBLISHED IN 2000 in Connecting Souls: Finnish American and Canadian Writers. Available from Toronto, ON, Canada: Aspasia Publishers.

Last Christmas Eve, at a feast at my son-in-law’s parents’ apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, his father took me to task for calling them Italians in an essay I wrote a few years ago. “We are not Italians,” he said. “We are Americans.”

“Not even Italian Americans?” I asked, as I pierced the shrimp and squid and seafood and ate the cheese ravioli, a traditional ritual in this family, that no meat is to be eaten until after Midnight Mass.

“No,” he said with some anger and indignation in his voice. “We are Americans. My parents and grandparents came from Italy, and they became Americans. They never looked back. There is nothing Italian about us,” he said loudly.

I raised my voice too, though I usually speak softly in his presence, deferring to his dominance as I think he wants me to. My son-in-law later told my daughter that I didn’t show “respect” for his father in his own house, and that if I wanted to argue with his father, I should have done it in his, my son-in-law’s house, and not in his father’s house.

Were those expectations for my behavior not Italian-American? Were not the foods we were eating and the rituals we were observing Italian-American? My son-in-law refuses to watch The Sopranos, about an Italian-American mafia family in New Jersey. “I don’t watch those kinds of shows,” he says. He won’t tell me why not, but I presume it has to do with negative stereotyping of Italian-Americans as Mafioso. The exchange prompted me to begin to think about the Finnishness of my own Americanness.

Was my Christmas Eve outburst, my uppity behavior, part of the Finnishness of my Americanness? The matriarchal family, I have been told, is quite commonly a residue of our ancestors in our lived lives. How our parents and grandparents conducted their family discourses influences the conduct of each of our family discourses. I begin to think the girls I grew up with who shared my Finnish heritage, whose grandparents all emigrated in the early 1900s, just as all four of mine did.

Strong mothers, silent fathers. Our mothers took on the mantle of 1950s ideal womanhood, though, and most of them did not do the strong stuff our grandmothers did—keep boardinghouses [as in this photo of my paternal grandparents’ house in Ishpeming, Michigan ] for young men from Finland who came to seek their fortune in the mines; keep a few cows; have a milk business; work in a co-op store; cook, clean, and scrub while ruling their sons and daughters with shame and guilt as weapons. As my mind casts back over all the Finnish American families I knew, the gender of parental dominance was not something that could be generalized, for among my girlfriends and boy friends, the families seemed to have differently dominant parents.

There was the scared, silent Finnish American mother who wouldn’t let her son play on the bluff, who always called for him if he strayed more than a hundred yards from her view; we called him, sadly, a sissy. There was the loud, boisterous Finnish-American miner father who always knew the latest joke, who could sing bawdy songs in three languages, English, Finnish, and French-Canadian, and who encouraged us kids to swear in Finnish. “Satana!” We followed him as if he were a pied piper.

There was the social-climbing Finnish American mother whose daughters always had the latest fashion, and who didn’t like them to keep company with kids who were probably not going to go to college.

There were my own parents, my shy artist mother and my shy welder father who bought me all the latest softball equipment, who brought me “steelies” from the shop so I could play (and lose all my) marbles with the boys. There was the in-the-house family behavior where he would say, “Where’s the sugar, Pearl?” when it was closer to him than to her, and she would get up from her place at the table, go to the counter, and take him the sugar to go with his daily 4 o’clock after-work coffee.

Is the Finnishness in my Americanness my nostalgia for saunas, fruit and pea soup, home-made coffee bread? My mother, in her 80s, bakes and sends us cardamom, rye, and potato breads for our birthdays and holidays. Yet she also bakes pasties and saffron bread, and we hunger for those as much as for the more traditional Scandinavian fare. Our Cousin Jack (nickname for Welsh) childhood companions probably throw a little cardamom into their coffee bread, also. And the sauna? Doesn’t everyone who is anyone have a sauna nowadays? What matters the ritual that develops? It’s part of a family’s ethos to develop its own rituals and to change the rituals that they have been given, to make them their own. No— neither food nor baths makes me Finnish-American rather than American-Finnish.

In teaching about the Piaget stages of childhood development, I often tell my undergraduates a story based on my Finnish-Americanness. I tell them we are going to study the terms schema, assimilation, and equilibration, and say, “In my family we take a bath together. Now, ask me questions.”

The students ask, “Is it a jacuzzi?”

“No,” I say.

“Is it a shower?”

“No,” I say. They recoil in shuddering disgust. How could an upstanding middle-aged professor like me take a bath with her daughter, and even with her son when he was a young boy?

By the time we are finished with the lesson they have absorbed into their schema of “bath,” through the processes of “assimilation” and the reaching of “equilibration,” the term and custom of “sauna,” as practiced by my family.

Is this how I am Finnish-American?

My daughter, when she attended college where I teach, said her friends, after that lesson, came up to her and said,

“Do you really take a bath with your mother?” And she smiled and said, “Yes, I do. What’s wrong with that? We wash each other’s backs and tell stories.”

Is it in the mixing of northern Michigan, Upper Peninsula, roots with Finnish background? We grew up, many of us, with our Finnish names and our aunts who belonged to the Kaleva Club, and our grandparents who put out the good tablecloth for the Finnish Church’s papi who came to minister to them when they emigrated.

We were in a large ethnic group, not alone, and we heard tales and grew up in towns with public saunas. We were encouraged to marry and date Finnish boys because if you marry a Catholic they make you change your religion, girls. So, girls, even if those Italian boys like the Finnish girls “stick with your own kind/cling to your own kind” as they sang in West Side Story, or your children will be half-breeds. I was actually told this by my aunt when I fell in love with a boy who wasn’t of Finnish background.

Is it in the Finnish songs we sang in the Suomi College choir, songs I can still sing but whose words I don’t understand—Oi Muistatko Viela Sen Virren. Is it in the sentiment for the land, its forests, iron hills, its blue lakes and deep snows, its difference and its wilderness? Or in the Finnish community dances my sister’s friend attended but which we never did, disdaining them?

Is the Finnishness of my Americanness in my deep interest in Finnish mythology?

It is a fact that people ski in my dreams.

As a person who is fascinated with the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious, and as a student of mythology weaned on the Greeks, I don’t dream of sunny temples of marble and deep blue “wine dark” seas. I sometimes have what I call “archetypal” dreams. One of my dreams a few years ago featured a shack in the woods with a light shining on the snow. As I skied up, the man leaning on the shack told me his name was “Pentti.” I didn’t know anyone named Pentti. A few weeks later, at an education conference, I met a Finnish professor named Pentti. I have kept him as a friend, and we lunch and discuss Finland when we meet at other conferences. He appeared in my skiing dream before he appeared in my life.

I would be surprised if a deep consciousness of snow, Finnish names, and skiing pervades the archetypal dreams of people whose ancestors lived on more sunny shores. Is the Finnishness of my Americanness my resonance with themes of the woods, of cool lakes, of northern vistas? Is it my deep satisfaction now, as I am writing this, looking out my window at the new-fallen snow of January, and my deep dissatisfaction with our warm, snow-less December?

I just got a letter from a woman who was given my book, A Location in the Upper Peninsula, by her daughter. She tells me about growing up in Ishpeming, and in the location I write about in the book. She writes from Sun City in California: “I haven’t been in the U.P. at wintertime since 1941. Even Ohio was too cold for me. I love the sunshine, year around. . . . I always dreamed of living in a place like this while growing up in the U.P.” She doesn’t have dreams where shadowy, mythologically-oriented people ski, obviously. Yet she is as Finnish-American as I am.

Is the Finnishness about that heavy $85.00 book, A Sibelius Companion, I bought in the bookstore at the University of Georgia last week?

Did I buy it because I want to understand why my heart strings soar as the octaves sing in the 3rd movement of his 5^th symphony?

Why do I have to keep turning up the volume on my stereo when that movement comes on? Why does that music touch something deep in me? I put the Saraste-Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra version into the CD Rom of my computer as I write this. I listen. The strings are quivering; the brass is striding; the tympanies underscore, the tempo slows, my heart races.

I grab the computer speakers and put one to each ear, as I cannot turn the volume loud enough. As a musician friend of mine says, “I want to crawl into the speakers to where the music is.” Sibelius, when inspired to write the 5^th, said, in his diary of 1914, “God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the fifth symphony.” (p. 233, Ekman biography).

Finland declared a national holiday for Sibelius’ fiftieth birthday, in 1915, when his 5^th symphony premiered. He continued to revise it, and another “final version” was performed in 1916, and then the Russian revolution spilled over into Helsinki, leading to massacres, bombardments, shootings of officers, the imprisonment of his brother, and self-imposed exile at Järvenpää. He worked on it more, revising and revising.

We who listen, see what is to come as World War I begins and ends. I sob at the prescience and the beauty and the incipient terror. Then the resolution and the question in the anticipation of those last four chords calms me and makes me fear at the same time.

But then Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring does that to me, as does the violin of Anna Sophie-Mutter, the voice of Kiri Te Kanawa, the piccolo runs in “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the congregation singing “The Lord’s Prayer” as we do for a month or two each spring, before Lent. My graduate students when I taught in Finland a few years ago gave me as a parting gift, a CD of cellos playing Led Zeppelin, and my head bobs and my feet tap, too, when I listen to this fine fierce music. Music is part of me and always has been, and I sing, play, and listen as part of my training and background of 8 years of piano and many years of choir work.

Perhaps I am Finnish-American because of my Lutheranism. I felt deep relief in the white church in Helsinki when the Suomi College choir sang for the Lutheran World Federation, in 1963, and I confessed my sins (of being pregnant without being married yet — a situation in which my maternal great-grandmother found herself, only she never married, and my grandmother probably emigrated because of the shame.

Oddly, I was born on December 19, the same day as this maternal great-grandmother, Anna Kärna, of Vimpeli). I then took Holy Communion from the then-president of the American Lutheran Suomi Synod, from the hands of my friend’s father, Dr. Raymond Wargelin. I felt forgiven, and do, every time I participate in the Lutheran liturgy.

After many years in my young adulthood not going to church, I came home to the liturgy after personal troubles. But I felt the same at Catholic Mass, in the Cathedral de Notre Dame in Paris a few years ago, with a Latin liturgy and a French priest. And I prefer the church I go to now, in Ohio, of German origins, to my own Bethel Lutheran Church in Ishpeming, of Finnish origins, because of the music and the social activism of my present church, one of the most socially active in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

Perhaps I am Finnish because of my socialist leanings. From a distance of continents and years, I read of the romantic sacrifice of the thousands of workers uniting against the Duchy rulers. I take second-hand nationalistic pride in the fact that the poor and the elderly are taken care of in this highly-taxed nation that still managed to pay its war debt. I absorb eagerly the details and translations that tell of how they fought off Stalin’s troops for an impossible three months in 1939, recalling those brown-and-white photographs of the war in that picture book in Finnish that adorned the lamp table in my childhood home. I remember my pride when I lived in New York City, in reading Caro’s book about Robert Moses, that

the Finnish immigrants to the U.S. built the first co-op apartments in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. The co-op apartment is now a New York City institution. I drove past those first apartments, knowing their history and letting it resonate with mine.

Perhaps my Finnishness is in my love of clear glass and clean design, in how I have a collection of Iitala glass and gave Alvar Aalto vases to my sisters and children for Christmas one year. Perhaps it lies in the icicle candlesticks that adorn my dining room table, and of which my friends always say, “Where did you get those, Jane? They are so beautiful.” Perhaps it was in the Marimekko wall hangings I stretched and placed on my house walls in the 1970s, and in the curvy-lined brown and white long dress I wear in many photographs from those days, bought at the Marimekko shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Perhaps it is in the $6.00 Marimekko wall hanging my half-Finnish daughter found at the Salvation Army store, which now adorns the wall in her townhouse.

Perhaps my Finnishness is in my intellect, in my greedy reading of several translations of the Kalevala, and my attempts to attach Kalevala Runo lines to my own poems not composed consciously as echoing the Kalevala, but perhaps unconsciously composed that way; of my subscribing to a journal called Books in Finland; of my sitting on panels of Finnish-American women at two international conferences to discuss education and creative writing; of my fondness for Finnish colleagues who study and visit at universities here; and of my collaboration with them in my own scholarly work; or perhaps it is in my reading and study of Finnish history (translated into English). I refused, when I was given a chance as a freshman at the only Finnish-American heritage college on the continent, to formally study Finnish, and I have regretted it ever since.

I had coffee with a professor of journalism while I was in Finland. We went to a sweet shop and took our pick from the delectable pastries. When I commented on Finnish baking, he sadly shook his head and said, “English is such an impoverished language compared to Finnish. In Finnish I have just the word to describe what you are saying, but English doesn’t contain such a word.”

Can a person even be Finnish without the language, is a question I wonder about.

Since the Finns defined themselves by language, and became a nation by language, can we be Finnish with our mother tongue being not Finnish, but English?

What influence does language structure have on the development of one’s ways of thinking and being?

The Finnish mother tongue is spoken by people in a nation of only five million people, on a land mass the size of Minnesota, and because of the accident of my grandparents’ immigration during hard times in the early twentieth-century, my mother tongue is English, rapidly becoming the language of choice throughout the world of commerce and culture. Part of my becoming American was becoming a native speaker, acquiring the American idiom, and not learning Finnish. My coffee partner was not a native speaker of English and

I doubt that the English language is less rich than the Finnish language.

His comment illustrates how important language is to development of consciousness and being.

Perhaps my Finnishness is in my creativity. A Finnish scholar told me that poets in Finland come from Kuopio, where my maternal grandfather was born and raised. But not every Finnish American with roots in Kuopio writes poetry, so that is not a logical argument. And most of my ancestors came from the west, Vasa.

Someone told me my name means something very creative, and when I look it up on the world wide web, I see a lot of references to overhead projectors and such. It means “a creative line, as in drawing,” someone told me.

But my mother is the visual artist, and her maiden name was Eskilinen. Her father was from Kuopio.

Perhaps my Finnishness is in my reputation as a Finnophile. Recently, when an article appeared in the New York Times Magazine about the pervasive presence of Finns in the classical music world, I received copies in the mail from two faraway friends who had read it. “Dear Jane: Thought you would enjoy this. Love, Sara,” wrote my Jewish-American girlfriend from New York. “Dear cousin,” said my first-cousin from Boston, who send me a xeroxed copy. “I thought of you when I read this.” I regularly receive such clippings from friends who know me and my Finnish interests.

Perhaps the Finnishness of my Americanness is only in my body. “The map of Finland is written across your face,” someone told me when I worked in New York City in a mostly Jewish-populated school for bright children. I see a photograph of my stout paternal grandmother with her hands on her hips in exactly the angle in which they reside on my hips in a picture of me taken in front of Egyptian pyramids. My own stoutness seems unbeatable by diet, exercise, or will. I remember her gulping quarts of strawberry pop and think of that when I lug in twelve-packs of diet raspberry soda. The family female diabetes seems to have skipped me so far, but has come to rest in my younger sister’s body. The family alcoholism in males of both sides is a warning to all of us.

Perhaps it is in my blood. I read that Finns are genetically similar to other Europeans and to central Russians. I look at one of my own descendants, my granddaughter. The light eyes of our family have been genetically overcome by the dark brown eyes of my son-in-law’s family. Her “blood” is one-half Italian European, one-fourth Finnish European, one-eighth Austro-Prussian, one-sixteenth French, one-sixteenth German. Her small nose, her brown hair are her mother’s. The small nose, from me. The brown hair, from my ex-husband. Many other features from whom? where? She is a mutt, a European American. Not a Finnish American, not an Italian American.

Her Finnish genes have mixed with her other European genes, and she is an American.

The old ties I feel to the land of my grandparents’ birth were loosened in my children and may be all but severed in my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

How many generations does it take to loosen these ties? In 1997, my sisters, cousin, mother and I were invited to a Finnish outdoor opera in Vimpeli, about a folk hero of Finland, Jakob Ilkka, who with his men, fought off Swedish soldiers seeking to billet themselves in the area. Then we visited our Piirto family home, and on the grounds we found a monument with the saying, Nvijamiehille 1597 (“For the Clubbers”). It turns out that the battle took place next to where our family lived, and we are supposedly related to this hero, according to an aunt we met, our father’s first cousin, who looked just like our Aunt Lynn.

We felt the forlorn yet proud tug of blood from four centuries ago, and, if a generation is twenty years long—20 generations removed.

What do the genetic researchers say about blood from 20 generations influencing descendants from rebel leadership during times of Swedish dominance that lived through the ages and were substantial enough to compel a modern opera?

As I chronicle all the ways I show my Finnishness in my Americanness, I realize that perhaps all, together, make up concrete details that contribute to a concept of soul. How am I a Finnish American? Let me count the ways. And when I go back next Christmas Eve, to my family’s Italian-American feast of seafood, I will show my son-in-law’s father this essay, and perhaps we can talk, peacefully, with mutual respect, beaming lovingly at our mutual descendant, American to American.

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