Main Piece: How about the evil eye? Do you know that? It’s a good one. It’s very popular in the South of Italy. In places like Bari where our family is from. Anyway, the idea is that just by giving someone a bad look, you can make them have bad luck. It’s like giving someone the stink eye or side eye but much, much worse because you give them actual bad luck. And it sticks on you. You can’t get rid of the bad luck on your own. It doesn’t fade off. You have to actually get it taken off. And so you have to do everything you can to protect yourself from it. One thing you can do is to wear red underwear. Then people can try and give you the evil eye but it won’t work. There are also lots of charms you can wear to protect yourself like a little horn or make hand signs like the horn hand sign or this one where you stick your thumb in between your middle and index. We never took it that seriously but the old timers would warn you not to brag or to talk about when you had exams coming up in case someone gave you the evil eye. The next time we go to Bari we’ll get your grandfather to point it out. It’s everywhere.

Background Information: Dianne Burnett is my mom. Her dad is originally from Bari, Italy, and she grew up in New York City.

Context of the Performance: The story was performed in the kitchen of my mom’s house.

My Thoughts on the Piece: The whole idea of the evil eye seems really bizarre to me and I think it’s hilarious that red underwear are supposed to offer you magical protection. That’s so great. Afterwards, I went and did some research on The Evil Eye and was amazed that it is not only in Southern Italy but all over the Mediterranean and into the Middle East. Of course, there are many such superstitions all over the world but it is fascinating how seriously people seem to take the evil eye.

Main Story: Okay. And what about La Befana? It’s kind of like an Italian Santa Claus. Basically on the sixth of January…anyway…so the three wise men come looking for Baby Jesus and they knock on this old lady’s house. They’re dressed in these very rich robes. And she says she doesn’t know where Baby Jesus is or who he is. They ask her if she wants to come help them. She says she’s too busy and has too much housework. Then she realizes that she’s made a mistake and so she heads out looking for the wise men but can’t find them. So she stops every kid hoping that they are Baby Jesus and gives them so candy. So now in Italy on January 6th, La Befana flies around on her broomstick and gives candy to the good kids and coal to the bad ones. Kids are supposed to leave out some food and drink for her and she sweeps the floor before she leaves. It’s a lot like Santa Claus–she even comes down the chimney–but, unlike Santa, La Befana cleans up after herself.

Background Information: Dianne Burnett is my mom. Her dad is originally from Bari, Italy, and she grew up in New York City.

Context of the Performance: The story was performed in the kitchen of my mom’s house.

My Thoughts on the Piece: It’s really interesting to see the basic elements of the Santa story but different and in an Italian context. The idea of a person who gives children presents in conjunction with a holiday seems pretty common across cultures and it’s interesting to see the subtle variations between them. I really liked this story. I like Santa a lot but I also think La Befana is really fun and I’d never heard this story before. It was very cool to connect with a piece of my Italian heritage I didn’t know about before.

Main Piece: During World War II, food was pretty scarce for the Dutch. People sort of vaguely know this because they talk about the Dutch having to eat tulip bulbs during the war but that’s about the extent of it. In particular, the winter of 1944 was really bad. The Allies had tried to liberate the Dutch and end the war in 1944 with a military campaign known as Operation Market Garden. The plan was for the Allies to capture all the major bridges between where they were and Germany. If they could secure that line of bridges, then they could punch right through into Germany itself and end the war right then and there. They succeeded in capturing all those bridges except for the last one. It was in a town called Arnhem which is on the Rhine. The Brits and the Poles secured the bridge in Arnhem but help failed to arrive in time. They were left stranded and the bridge was lost. There was a great movie made called “A Bridge Too Far.” I once told my headmaster in high school that my grandparents were from Arnhem and he burst into tears and said “it really was a bridge too far.” If Operation Market Garden had succeeded, the war might have ended in 1944. It didn’t. My grandfather was from Arnhem and like every other person there he had been force evacuated.

The winter of 1944 was known as the Hongerwinter in Dutch because everyone starved and a lot of people died. Trapped behind German lines, they had no access to Allied food supplies and the Germans were rediverting food supplies to their own people. So, people were desperate for any food they could get. This is the story of how my grandfather got some for him and his family. At the time, everything non-essential to the NAZI war effort had been shut down including the zoo. At some point, the zoo got hit by a shell and a giraffe was injured. There were no vets around and so they called in my grandfather who was a human medical doctor. Now, there was nothing that could be done for the giraffe and so my grandfather got a friend to grab a baby pram and they took out the mattress. Then they hacked off the very best pieces of giraffe meat in order to exactly mirror the space taken up by the mattress so that they would not raise suspicion when they went through the German checkpoints. The result was tens of kilos of high quality red meat in the middle of the most desperate part of the war. At the time, he didn’t tell anyone the source of the meat. After the war though, it became one of his favorite stories and now my whole family tells it.

Background Information: This piece was performed by Hunter Maats who learned it from his father. He likes it because it is a piece of family folklore that reminds him of values of resourcefulness and grit.

Context of the Performance: The story was performed in person in the kitchen of my dad’s house.

My Thoughts on the Piece: I really like this piece. I’ve heard a lot of stories about people doing incredible things to survive in World War II from my own grandparents and also through history classes, museum visits and films. I always find these stories really inspiring because they remind me that humans are incredibly resourceful and can find ways to succeed in any environment.

So, as a child…as a little girl…I remember I’m sitting in my grandmother’s dark kitchen…she never turn on the light. It was dark in the room and she said “Why do you need the light?” “Grandma, it’s dark.” “If it’s too dark for you, you need to go to go to sleep.” So, every night, grandma was living in this little village and at this time every night if you wanted to know what’s happening in the village you stay at home and people from different parts of the village were going from house to house to house to tell what happened in their yard or in the family or whatever happened people were going from house to house telling each other story. And then the person would go to the next house and tell the story. And the funny part was that usually the story you heard the next morning was completely different because the person who told the story the last time would come to you and say “No. That’s not what we said.” So we always had a different story about every single that happened. If someone said my cow was a little wounded. The next morning a neighbor was coming and saying “I heard your cow just died.” But during World War II, my grandma and my grandpa they lived through the World War II and they were from Ukraine. It was and they were telling us often the story of how they walked from Ukraine to Poland and why they walked and how many miles. It took them virtually seven months to walk with two children from Ukraine to the part of Poland they end up…they took a house because it was empty and how the NAZIs will still trying to push them away and how few of the family members died on the road. They didn’t survive. Some of them because they were sick. Some of them because they were killed by the NAZIs and my family was Jewish. And so that was a big story. The fact that they survived some of these members had to do purely with the luck because they were able to survive through the hiding and people sometimes hidden houses or I don’t know or underground and all of these stories they are vivid. I don’t remember specific story but I remember that it took a tremendous amount of strength, a tremendous amount of wisdom. The type of the character that right now we don’t have to exercise on a daily basis. Only if we want to be successful but not to survive. And I learned that now we live in a completely different place. A much more beautiful place where we don’t have to exercise these parts of the character where we have them to survive but only to make our lives and other people’s lives better. That sometimes comes to me if I only knew how to express this to other people that procrastination is an artificial concept. I don’t believe in it. It doesn’t exist. Laziness. I don’t believe. No one is lazy. We just don’t have a motivation. So so many of things we go and I know that you’ve done a lot on your journey and that just because you have a strong motive behind why you need to go certain things why you needed to go certain things through this just because you needed to. So sometimes I wish for all of us to need to be in a place where we need to exercise this, these precious parts of character that aren’t awakened anymore. So hearing these stories from my grandparents really reminds me.

Background Information: Gosia is Polish. She’s the wife of Glen Steele, my stepdad’s wife.

Context of the Performance: The story was performed in Glen’s house.

My Thoughts on the Piece: I think it is fascinating that Gosia doesn’t remember a specific story of her grandparents’ persecution but it’s clear that she has a very strong feeling of what happened. That more than the facts of any specific incident are what her grandmother transmitted to her. This story to me just demonstrates how easily values can be lost. Gosia has a sense of this value that her grandparents felt and that she feels but she doesn’t quite know how to express or communicate to the world. There are so many feelings like that and then enough generations pass and they are lost and have to be rediscovered.

Main Story: There was a saying. It is hard to translate in Polish. It is “takich dwóch jak nas trzech to nie ma ani jednego.” What does it mean? To translate that. It’s such a special thing you say it to someone you really, really like to make this relationship really strong connection so special. What translates is you say, “There is no three people in the world as the two of us not even one.” There is not even one couple like the three of us. There is not even three people. Not even one example. So in English. You cannot translate. Make sense. But the way you say it in Polish makes sense. Makes it extremely special that you say the three people. Not even three people can make a group so special that just the two of us is not even one like this.

Background Information: Gosia is Polish. She’s the fiancee of Glen Steele.

Context of the Performance: The story was performed in Glen’s house.

My Thoughts on the Piece: Clearly, this saying was difficult to translate but once I got it I thought it was really cool. You often hear people say that things don’t always translate but this was a really good example. It’s clear that there’s a play on the idea of three, two and one but I bet that there’s a whole sense that comes through in Polish that doesn’t come through in English. Experiences like this make me want to learn more foreign languages.