Journeys of the Heart: Three Sisters—Three Nuns

Historical musicologist Bonino (The Doheny Mansion) packs a plethora of facts and photographs into this overstuffed history of three generations of the Gerber family. Herbert Gerber, an American of Swiss heritage who inherited a fortune from his family’s cheese company, and Jenny Bozzano, an Italian with ambitions in education, met and married in Mexico during the 1910s as Herbert sought to expand his business and Jenny explored starting a school. Bonino begins with a bounty of biographical information on numerous accomplished relatives (particularly Herbert’s cheese monger father) before relating the Gerbers’ experiences in Mexico during the tumultuous period leading up to and following WWI. The Gerbers developed close relationships with painter Diego Rivera and Jesuit priest Miguel Pro, who was executed in 1927 as part of President Plutarco Elías Calles’s persecution of Catholicism. The narrative culminates with accounts of the Herbert and Jenny’s three daughters, who abandoned their family’s high cultural milieu and wealth to join Sisters of St. Joseph (to the anguish of both parents). In an attempt to stop Calles’s persecution of Catholics, they publicly lobbied the pope to intervene, an act that launched them to national fame. Though haphazardly organized material impedes the book’s narrative flow, this beguiling family history is intriguing on its own and also offers a unique exploration of the cultural climate of Europe and Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. (BookLife)