On ‘Finding Your Roots,’ Joy Behar Gets Choked Up Over Mother’s Immigration Story: ‘I Could Start Crying’

On Tuesday’s edition of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr., the theme was Italian heritage week as both The View star Joy Behar and The Sopranos alum Michael Imperioli journeyed back to their common roots in the Old Country to find out about their families’ long-forgotten origins.

While Imperioli discovered that his ancestors included a man who arrived with just $12 and became a rule-breaker in the era of Prohibition, Behar discovered some more devastating facts about her forebears. 

First, she learned that her grandfather, Vincento Carbone, arrived in the United States as a 23-year-old man from Sant’Eufemia, Italy, and, soon after, lost his wife to kidney disease shortly after she gave birth to Behar’s grandmother. (Behar said she didn’t find out until she was 17 that the woman she called Grandma wasn’t her biological relative.) Then, she learned that her mother spent the better part of her childhood growing up back in Italy in an impoverished town before coming back to America.

“She’d make up stories that were so pathetic. She said, ‘My father wanted me to learn the piano, and we would bring fruit to the piano teacher,'” Behar remembered in response to that news. “It made you think like, ‘Oh my God, they had nothing.'”

After spending 13 years in the small Italian town, she and her family returned to the U.S., and Behar thought that must have been deeply difficult for her.

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“I think it must have been traumatic. First of all, I’m sure she didn’t speak any English — when I was a child she spoke perfect English … so she comes to this country, she has no education, they still have no money. The only thing she knows how to do was sew. She was an incredible seamstress,” Behar explained. “I could start crying now from this. That makes me sad, that my poor mother at 14 is thrown into a factory already. She had no chance.”

Behar then said that she is grateful for the sacrifice and feels like she’s “standing on the shoulders of” her grandfather and mother as a result of their struggle.

Things got even more upsetting, in a way, when Gates then took her even further back into the archives to the small town where both sides of her family apparently originated and which also had a very perilous history: As it turns out, Behar’s fourth great-grandfather was killed in the 1743 earthquakes that destroyed hundreds of towns in Calabria and killed thousands of people. 

“It’s really hard to envision all of this, to think about all of this. This will haunt me,” she said in response to the news stories presented to her.

On the other hand, she was touched by the survival story of her third great-grandfather, who overcame the death of his parent and the loss of his town to continue the family tree that brought her into being, praising hers as “hearty stock.”

Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr., Tuesdays, 8/7c, PBS