March Program
CELEBRATES ST. JOSEPH’S TABLE TRADITION
By Nancy DeSanti, 1st Vice President, Programs
Our second program of the year on March 24, 2019, celebrated the St. Joseph’s Table tradition and featured the film made by AMHS member Kirsten Keppel. Her half-hour film, which was screened by the National Italian American Foundation last March, tells the story of the Tavola di San Giuseppe tradition as passed down through generations of Italian Americans.
About 45 people attended the luncheon program, held at Alfio’s La Trattoria in Bethesda, Maryland. Kirsten told the story of how she came to make the film after she visited the Cleveland Park Library in Washington to start her research focusing on the Baltimore area. There, she found a book that had the e-mail address for someone at St. Leo’s Church in Baltimore’s Little Italy. So she went to Baltimore and found that the original Italian immigrants were passing down this beautiful tradition to the future generations.
Kirsten was able to interview some of the key people behind this annual celebration. Kirsten invited some of the film’s participants and people who helped her make the film. They included Karen Kiesner, whose family has celebrated the tradition for the past 100 years; Paul Paolicelli, the well-known author of “Under the Southern Sun” who was interviewed in the film; Damon Lombard, who grew up in New Orleans with the St. Joseph’s Table tradition; and Antonio Villaronga, the film’s editor who is also responsible for the music (he found the wonderful accordion music and taught himself to play the mandolin).
Kirsten’s film, entitled “Ringraziamenti: The St. Joseph’s Table Tradition,” was a semi-finalist of the 2017 Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum and was first shown at the NIAF Gala.
Kirsten is the great-granddaughter of Molisani immigrants to New York. Her great-grandmother came from Jelsi, and her great-grandfather came from Riccia in the province of Campobasso. Her great-grandfather’s youngest sister married in Philadelphia, and later returned with her husband to L’Aquila, where Kirsten’s many cousins live today, thus giving her ties to both Abruzzo and Molise. Although Kirsten’s grandfather and his siblings were bilingual in English and Italian, Kirsten grew up learning French.
She currently works as a French language instructor for a contractor, Yorktown Systems Group, Inc., on location at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department. Kirsten also studied Italian in college and at the Casa Italiana Language School. Kirsten’s film, entitled “Ringraziamenti: The St. Joseph’s Table Tradition,” was a semi-finalist of the 2017 Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum and was first shown at the NIAF Gala. In her talk, she explained how St. Joseph’s Table represents an ancient tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, as legend has it, to a time when there was an especially severe drought in Sicily. No rain fell for a long time, so no crops would grow and famine was widespread.
The people prayed to God for rain, and they also prayed to St. Joseph to intercede with God on their behalf, promising that if God caused it to rain, they would have a special feast in honor of St. Joseph. Miraculously, the rains came and the crops were planted. With the harvest, the people prepared a feast of foods from those crops, and this became known as La Tavola di San Giuseppe. Families prepared huge buffets and invited the less fortunate people of the village, especially the homeless and sick. Kirsten explained how nowadays the tradition is still practiced in Sicily and worldwide, especially in Italian-American communities of Sicilian descent. The St. Joseph’s Table tradition was brought to America in the late 19th and early 20th century by Sicilian immigrants into Louisiana, Texas, California, Colorado and New York. ❚