Gaudio: Translating fish tales

to feed her family. My father remembers hiding in barns, in farmhouses and under haystacks.

So when Paul asked whether they celebrated the Feast of Seven Fishes in Italy, she looked at him, incredulous, and answered in dialect. (My English translation doesn’t do justice to her poetry.) “Seven fishes? What seven fishes?! When times were good, we had maybe one fish. And for that one fish, we were grateful to God.” If you asked her more about it, she would just say, in a high voice (again, my translation): “Ooooh! You don’t know what things I’ve seen,” and then raise her hand up in the air with an Italian hand expression that I always interpreted as “enough of this talk.”

I remember giving Auntie Sis a hard time one year for not having seven fishes (I counted six), and she pinched me and whispered to “sta zito” (keep quiet!) and laughed.

Wikipedia says that the idea of eating fish on the night before Christmas is a Roman Catholic tradition of avoiding meat on the eve of a feast day, or holy day. Apparently that got codified in America, where people had a greater abundance of, well, everything, into seven fishes. (Seven sacraments? Seven hills of Rome? Who really cares?)

I’ve been luckier than I deserve for all of my life. Like most of the people I know, I have never had the hardship of trying to feed a family during a war, of hiding from marauding soldiers of an occupying army or an oppressive regime. I have never known poverty. I have always been surrounded by people I love and who love me. I think about what it would be like to live in Iran or in Eastern Ukraine or Mali or Haiti or Yemen. Or even what it would be like to be poor and alone in New London.

My Grandma is gone now. But at Auntie Sis’s house this year, I will think of her on her birthday and remember what she said: “We had maybe one fish, and for that one fish, we gave thanks to God.” Happy holidays.