La Bell' America: From La Rivoluzione to the Great Depression: An Italian Immigrant Family Remembered

Five generations of Italian immigrants carry on a love affair with America in this sprawling, exuberant memoir. Graziano's narrative, padded with reams of invented dialogue, stretches back to his 19th-century ancestors in the Italian village of Maida, a semifeudal society whose rigid class hierarchy and hopeless poverty are reinforced by a church-inculcated fatalism. (The author's anticlericalism is pronounced.) But for those with gumption, America beckons: a harsh but dynamic place where opportunities abound despite anti-Italian bigotry. The story gradually refocuses on Graziano's lush reminiscences of his Depression-era boyhood in Nyack, N.Y., where his family weathered hard times thanks to clan solidarity and his father's Herculean work ethic. The author includes iconic vignettes of steerage and arrival, lengthy digressions on Italian history and sociological exegeses of the ways in which immigrants adapted Italy's peasant culture to America, along with novelistic domestic scenes—family dinners, street vendors, wash-day rituals—that are almost Proustian in their detail. The book is a bit schmaltzy and sometimes feels like an overstuffed photo album full of rose-colored stories about half-remembered cousins, but its evocations of family life make it a rich study of the immigrant adventure. Photos. (Dec.)