Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
From the moment she stepped on U.S. soil at age 5, Giulia Feiza Voirol despised the name Roseanne, given to her by her adoptive mother.
It was only recently that the now 71-year-old decided to once again go by her Italian birth name, Giulia.
Feiza Voirol lives in La Grange, in suburban Chicago, with her husband of nine years, James Voirol. She has a daughter from her first marriage, along with two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
She grew up with her adoptive family in Cicero, also in suburban Chicago, and has been on a decades-long quest to find her birth family, always longing to know her origins. Last year, she finally did, although not in the way she had hoped.
“I found out my birth mother died in 2005,” she says. “I got a picture of her gravestone, and it has a picture of her. She looks really sad. She has a lot of wear and tear on her face. I do see myself in her.”
Now, Feiza Voirol wants to find her twin brother and older sister, and hopes to travel to Italy sometime soon.
She was born on May 30, 1953, in Vasto, in the province of Chieti, in the Abruzzo region.
From what she has been able to ascertain, she and her twin were given up for adoption the day after they were born, although they don’t appear to have been placed in the same orphanage.
She has no recollection of her life in Italy. Her first memory is stepping off the plane at Midway Airport on July 18, 1958, and meeting her mother, who immediately told her that her new name was Roseanne. “I was bitter about that,” she recalls.
Her adoptive parents, Simon and Evelyn Feiza, lived in Cicero. Her adoptive father was Lithuanian and her adoptive mother was Italian. The couple already had adopted two boys, one older and one younger than Giulia.
Growing up, Feiza Voirol was especially attached to her maternal grandmother, Emilia Venditti, who had emigrated from Italy to marry a man from her native town.
“When I came, I had malnutrition. I was very skinny. My grandmother gave me raw eggs and wine to try to build me up,” she recalls. “I loved my mom and dad, but nothing like my grandmother. She had a grocery store for 65 years and I met a lot of people through her, and she taught me a lot of morals and values.”
Feiza Voirol attended a Catholic school in Cicero and graduated from Morton East High School. She first worked at the catalog company Aldens, then took a job as a waitress and eventually moved her way up to managing restaurants, bakeries and other stores. She most recently worked in private home caregiving until she injured her hip a year ago.
Feiza Voirol only found out she had a twin brother when she was pregnant with her daughter and her mother finally told her. After she gave birth, Feiza Voirol decided to take action and start searching for her birth family.
Over the last four decades, she has tried numerous avenues, she says.
She approached Catholic Charities, but was told all documents were sealed. She enlisted the help of a detective friend in New York, as well as Fra Noi’s former Italian editor, Marissa Percuoco, who made inquiries. She also hired an attorney in Italy to look into the matter.
Most importantly, she connected with John Pierre Campitelli, a fellow U.S. adoptee whose story of reuniting with his Italian birth mother after a years-long search made the TV news program “60 Minutes.” Last year, Campitelli was able to obtain the photo of Feiza Voirol’s mother’s gravestone. “He is my angel,” she says.
Through the different channels, Feiza Voirol pieced together some of her story.
According to a baptism record, she was born Giulia Raducci and her mother’s name was Donata Vitalina Di Nardo.
A hospital record listed Donata’s spouse as Pasquale Zilli. However, Zilli’s name — for unknown reasons— was crossed out by hand, so it’s unclear whether Zilli was Feiza Voirol’s father, and if her mother was married or a widow when she gave birth. It also appears Feiza Voirol’s brother, whose name is unknown, might have been raised by a priest.
A key aspect for Feiza Voirol is finding out whether her mother knowingly gave her and her siblings up for adoption, because between the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of children born out of wedlock were sent from Italy to the United States on orphan visas, sometimes under questionable circumstance.
A 60 Minutes CBS News story about Maria Laurino’s book “The Price of Children: Stolen Lives in a Land Without Choice” describes that time period.
“At the end of World War II, Italy was a shattered country. Hundreds of thousands of children were abandoned in institutions run by the Catholic Church. Alarmed by the growing number of children, the Vatican decided to send children to America for adoption and the promise of a better life,” the story says.
“The Church arranged the visas, helped by a 1950 U.S. law that broadened the definition of orphan to include a child with one living parent, but a parent who couldn’t provide care,” the story says. “The linchpin of the program was a consent form that birth mothers were supposed to sign that severed all rights to the child. But Laurino said often doctors or lawyers signed the consent form without telling the mothers. Others were deliberately misled.”
Finding out about the orphan visa program changed her long-held feelings about her birth mother, Feiza Voirol says.
“I question if I am a product of that too,” says Feiza Voirol. “For many years, I hated (my birth mother) because I thought she didn’t want us. But then, after hearing about ‘The Price of Children’ and the things that could have happened, how do I know why she had to give me up? The hatred of her was unjustified. I actually love her now.”
Feiza Voirol recently obtained a passport and dreams of visiting her mother’s grave in the cemetery in San Salvo, in the province of Chieti. Most of all, she fervently wishes to find her siblings.
“I am 71. I am not promised today, tomorrow or even tonight,” she says. “I want to find them.”
