Elizabeth Street, Laurie Fabiano

Elizabeth Street, Laurie Fabiano

How do you categorize this book – is it historical fiction, historical memoir or fiction enriched history?  The author has taken her own history, the story of her Italian immigrant family that traveled to the New World from Scilla, Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century and fleshed it out with historical research on the people, place, and times.  Then she married the facts of research with the stories of family that were painfully extracted over a long time of listening and probing and added some fictional details that give the individuals and events more three dimensional form.

It is well written and flows so well that I was a hundred pages in quicker than I expected and totally waiting for the next chance to sit down and read.  What this does is not just represent her family, but the struggle of all immigrants in a nation that pretends to have open arms, that is built by immigrants who first resented the native population and then represented the newest people to follow their path.

We have to see this in the craziness that is the U.S.  The African Americans that are still so resented by many white populations were brought here by the ancestors of many of those who are filled with bias and if we remember back to reconstruction, many wanted to ship them back to Africa.  The Chinese were brought in to finish the transcontinental Railroads that were the pride of the 19^th century, then they were resented.  In the past economic boom we brought Hispanics in to do what the dominant groups did not want to do, but when the economy tanked, as it is wont to do, the nation went to building a wall.

But the issues of bias is not just along clear color lines.  The Irish were imported because we needed workers and then the Micks were denigrated.  The Italians flowed in to meet the labor shortages of building New York and they became the Dagos.  The repetition of the story is repulsive, but does not seem to be ended – think about the U.S. allies in Vietnam – the Hmong.

This book follows the Italians.  One family seeking to get better and their connection with the Old Country – a country that was in the South of Italy, a country that had just formed and did not even feel like the home country until they were forced to accept the single status in response to the pressures they encountered as they became lumped together.

Within the crowded streets and tenements of Elizabeth street there was massive poverty, death among the workers who were expendable assets to the larger companies, births, celebrations and terror and all of these were visited upon the family that is profiled in this “true” story.

I find myself fascinated with the fact that the people were victimized by the capitalists who owned the city and by the criminals who flowed across the seas with them.  Italy allowed criminals in numbers almost as great as immigrants to cross the borders – a purging that they might have liked in Italy, but one that created a parasitic existence in New York where the powerful Black Hand became the organized crime of the city.  And the people did not trust the police even though Joseph Petrosino was an amazing person - a policeman who organized the Italian squad and fought a battle to clear the streets and make people safe.  He was assassinated and the result was a confirmation that the police force would become untrustworthy and in fact people learned not to trust anyone not in their family. 

And as we read and think about what happens we see that power likes power.  The money likes the muscle and the money that flows from the muscle and ultimately the strongest of the criminals because part of society while the tenement families rally together and in this book face a bombing, a kidnapping, and threats that no one should have to have in their personal story.