I am mainly interested in British literature because my family is a bunch of thieves.

Some of Britain’s most literary subjects lived in its Diaspora; many of them aren’t ethnically British. As someone who often feels conflict between American pride and immigrant bloodlines, I can relate. My family has been an ocean away from home for more than a century and a half.

My great-great-grandfather, Carlo, fled Italy around 1850. Just as he was getting used to the revolutions that would eventually lead to Italian independence, he had to pack up the entire Torrosco family and leave Castellana Grotte, a picturesque village near Bari on the eastern shore of the Italian region Apulia. Castellana Grotte became known for two things— magnificent caves and thievery. The Torrosco family produced much of the latter. Two steps ahead of an arrest warrant (such documents didn’t exist then, but my uncles like to modernize the story for narrative purposes), the Torrosco family left under cover of night, fearing imprisonment and possibly death for its crimes. They went by boat to Marseille, France and immediately attempted to assimilate. Unable to completely read the language, but since it looked enough like our dialect (most likely because the French Savoy house ruled much of Southern Italy), he gave us a new family name off a street sign. He had been standing on Rue de Thiers, a street that stands to this day.

Unbeknownst to Carlo, the surname Thiers was fairly popular. In fact, it would be the name of a French president 30 years later. It is not known whether that president, Marie-Joseph-Louis Adolphe Thiers, traced his ancestry to my bloodline or the original French one. He was known to be a Catholic. At the time, most of France was Huguenot. After his role in the brutal squashing of the Paris Commune, the populace turned on him. Previously, he had been a popular leader, the first president of the Third Republic. At his death in 1877, he was an outcast and he sullied the already negative view of Catholicism.

The Thiers (nee` Torroscos) took this as a cue and left for America. While steaming to Ellis Island, the family resolved to abandon Catholicism to avoid religious persecution in the New World. Again, they wanted to assimilate, so they adopted Judaism as their faith. Not the brightest bunch, my ancestors. After the family arrived in America, Charles Thiers, the grandson of Carlo Torrosco, would instruct his five sons to marry Jewish women and his three daughters were to wed Jewish men.

Upon arrival at Ellis Island, a foolish custom’s officer assumed Thiers was pluralized to represent the entire family. He lopped off the “s” and turned the lyrical Thiers (pronounced Thee-ay) into Thier, a vulgar sounding name (pronounced Thear) that is now changed into a possessive pronoun by auto-spellcheck on Microsoft Word.

The family dispersed throughout the United States, but settled mainly on the East Coast, as they had in France and Italy before. Now the family is evenly divided between Catholics and Jews, but I am related to everyone in America who has the name Thier.

But there’s more than what’s in a name. I denied myself a chance to learn British literature as an undergraduate so this course naturally jumped off the Web site when I perused the catalogue. I had been an English major at NYU, but late in my sophomore year, I grew monumentally and inexplicably fed up with literary analysis in large survey courses. I couldn’t deal with impersonality of ripping apart works from a far with precious little time for intimate discussion. So I withdrew from British Literature II (1850-present), switched my concentration to journalism and never looked back. Now, for the last four years, I’ve been a sportswriter for Newsday. But I’ve grown dissatisfied with the hollow nature of my career, which merely chronicles the comings and goings of a privileged class, but produces nothing of real value. I want to teach English and believe this class will help me acquire the knowledge I abdicated by dropping British Literature.