...Growing up, I could feel the language of my parents wither and die like autumn leaves. They had immigrated to the United States from Calabria in the late 1950s and continued to speak the dialect of their poor southern Italian region, but it was a tongue frozen in time by exile and filled with words that no longer existed in their homeland.

After a decade in America, my father decided to buy a fancy car. The Italian for a car is “una macchina,” and the Calabrian equivalent is “’na macchina.” But in the car-crazy suburbs of postwar America, an immigrant such as my father was bound to defer to his host nation. He went to the Chevy dealership and asked for “’nu carru.” The Calabrian “’nu” sounds like new, and “carro” means cart. But the dealership knew what he meant, and sold my father a maroon 1967 Chevy Impala. He bought it the year that I, his first American child, was born.

My father’s dialect flourished only in fits of anger: “mala nuova ti vo’ venire” (“may a new harm befall you”), when you annoyed him; “ti vo’ pigliare ’na shcuppettata” (“may you be shot”) and “ti vo’ brusciare l’erba” (“may the ground beneath you combust”) when you really got under his skin. It’s difficult to translate these makeshift phrases. Better just to imagine them uttered by a man who could pick up a small backyard shed....