L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2018 www.italoamericano.org 12 L'Italo-Americano I l Dio di New York is an interesting work, not only because of its content but also because of its form. It is what can be termed a docu-novel. It is a fictional nar- rative, but it is based on the autobiography of Italian immi- grant Pascal D'Angelo's famous autobiography, Son of Italy, published in 1924. D'Angelo's was not the first Italian immigrant autobiography published in the twentieth centu- ry. Before it appeared, Constan- tine Panunzio published Soul of an Immigrant (1921), an equally important autobiography in what it tells us about the immigrant experience before 1945. Panun- zio is of s pecial interes t to Southern Californians because, after emigrating from Italy and settling in the East where he was educated, he finished his career at UCLA as a renowned profes- sor of sociology. But these two invaluable autobiographies are of a different order: Panunzio assimilated rapidly into Ameri- can life. He was educated and became a distinguished professor and published scholar. The uned- ucated D'Angelo struggled dur- ing his brief life in America as a pick-and-shovel worker, before he enjoyed a short-lived fame as a poet and autobiographer, at least among New York's literati. He died an untimely death in 1932. Luigi Fontanella is professor of Italian at State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a widely published poet who has won nearly twenty prestigious prizes in Italy and the U.S. for his poetry and translations. Edu- cated both at the University of Rome and at Harvard where he received his Ph.D., he is also an accomplished novelist and liter- ary critic. In 1999 Fontanella became interested in Son of Italy and translated D'Angelo's autobiog- raphy into Italian. In Il Dio di New York Fontanella returns to D'Angelo's narrative and retells in an imaginative form D'Ange- lo's life. At the same time, all along the narrative Fontanella, through Giorgio's voice, fills in useful historical information per- tinent to D'Angelo's life, in both Italy and New York, which are not a part of his original autobi- ography. But there is more to Fontanella's version. Il Dio is narrated in the voice of a fiction- al Italian American, Giorgio Vanno. He is living in contem- porary New York, where while growing up, he had heard stories about D'Angelo. In the imagi- nary narrative that frames D'An- gelo's story, Giorgio's fictional grandfather had been friends with the protagonist, with whom he had immigrated to N ew York. Fontanella's narrative begins with a Prologo, set in 1921 in the New York Public Library where Pascal spent so many days learn- ing English and reading English poets such as Keats and Shelley. Giorgio describes the bustling, industrial city that he imagines must have greeted Pascal when he arrived in America in the early years of the twentieth cen- tury. The next section of the novel jumps to 2010, nearly one hun- dred years later, in Introdacqua. After visiting his ancestral home, Giorgio goes on his journey of discovery to find information also about Pascal, taking the reader on a journey back in time to D'Angelo's roots in the small village of Introdaqua, which was also his grandfather's village. Giorgio finds his grandparents' home before he turns his atten- tion to D'Angelo's life. He tracks down others who knew D'Angelo and who are able to give him information on his early life before leaving for America. Adding historical depth to his narrative, Giorgio gives a brief history of the steam ship that D'Angelo and his grandfather took to America. It is a curious and interesting interlude in the narrative. Everyone who has gone to the Ellis Island web site and successfully found his or her relatives' record, also discovered not just the name but also a pho- tograph of the steamship that brought them to America. To see that image, as I have, is to see a concrete piece of immigrant his- tory that represents the fear and the courage, the poverty and the hope, that these large passenger ships represent in immigrant his- tory. Immigrants spent nearly a month below decks, crammed into dormitory-like living and sleeping quarters, with little ven- tilation and no privacy. With nearly a month in the confined spaces of third-class passage, illnesses quickly became conta- gious and spread among the immigrant passengers. Children were confined and had little time to play on the deck. Young unmarried and married women traveling to meet their husbands, some of whom they had never even met before, were preyed upon by lascivious men. But as Giorgio narrates, pas- sage over the sea was not even half the battle. In addition to traveling with Giorgio's grandfa- ther, D'Angelo came with his father. Upon arrival, they worked in gangs, hired and directed by a padrone. They worked day labor throughout the Northeast, wherever there was work for unskilled laborers. They lived in tents and in rail- road box cars. One day, D'Angelo's father, feeling hopeless and homesick, tells his son that he is quitting and returning to Introdaqua. D'Angelo refuses to give up, to fail in his endeavor to succeed in America. He stays on alone, con- tinuing his pick and shovel labor. But one day Pascal also sees the pointlessness of what he is doing. Of all goals for an immi- grant to set for himself, he decides to learn English and become a writer. At a time when nearly all immigrants in America were struggling just to survive, he decides that he does not want to be a mere economic success. Rather he chooses to strive for something that is much higher: a place in American high culture. He frequents the New York Pub- lic Library reading room, reads poetry, and laboriously looks up all English words he does not know. In time he begins writing and sending out his poems, only to have them rejected. Not discour- aged and only more determined, he submits poems to a poetry contest at the Nation magazine and follows his submission with an impassioned letter to the edi- tors. His poems are accepted. His poems are suddenly accept- ed by numerous other New York literary magazines. The renowned Columbia University professor and literary critic of the era, Carl Van Doren, pro- motes his work. Pascal becomes a local phenomenon. To capital- ize further on his celebrity, D'Angelo writes his autobiogra- phy. But it only goes through a single edition and never makes a lasting imprint on the American literary canon. In the retelling of this poignant narrative Fontanella, through his fictional Giorgio, links history with contemporary Italian American life. Immigrant history comes alive in Giorgio's atavistic curiosity about D'An- gelo and his grandparents' lives in Abruzzo. Though Giorgio may well be motivated by senti- mentality, he unearths a treasure trove of historical facts about Italian immigration. These his- torical facts balance Fontanella's narrative, between its imagina- tive retelling of D'Angelo's life and history, between Giorgio's personal motivation and immi- gration history. (Ken Scam- bray's most recent book is Queen Calafia's Paradise: Cali- fornia and the Italian American Novel). LIFE PEOPLE MOVIES MUSIC BOOKS KENNETH SCAMBRAY Il Dio di New York by Luigi Fontanella

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