Memoirs of immigration to the United States are to be found across the internet and frequently amongst Amazon’s listings. It is perhaps no surprise that someone who has wrenched themselves from home and family to relocate halfway around the world would want to commit their story to paper. When an Irishman or woman made the decision to emigrate, the rest of the family would hold an ‘American wake’ for them, in the knowledge that they would never be seen again. Many of these stories spring from pre-war and post-war hardship, from the need to escape food shortages, unemployment and a very real risk to health and wellbeing.
If many of us in Europe dig around in our family backgrounds, we will encounter someone who has emigrated, whether to the US, Canada, Australia or Latin America. Likewise, if Americans from both hemispheres wish to trace their roots, they will encounter a plethora of ancestors, often with complex and difficult lives who sacrificed a great deal to establish themselves elsewhere. It would be naïve to expect a new start in a new world to sever the past from the future. We can all travel to escape our environment or be forced to emigrate to escape our circumstances, but the one thing we can’t escape is ourselves, what lies within. Marco Rafalà, a first-generation Sicilian American, has taken these themes and written a poignant novel where tragic consequences unravel against a backdrop spanning generations and continents.
Rafalà has a real ear for dialogue and speech patterns, narrating the story from the main characters’ perspectives – starting with David, the son of Salvatore Marconi, who, for reasons that unfold as the tale progresses, changed his surname from Vassallo. David is rooted in his Italo-American community in Connecticut, where the daily routines are punctuated by meals laden with Sicilian nostalgia, trips to a bar owned by a family friend and attendance at various church events. By contrast, we are also pitched into David’s adolescent world of camaraderie, sexual awakening and conflict avoidance, where the scenarios played out are more reminiscent of The Breakfast Club than anything written by Giovanni Verga. Such youthful ‘brat pack’ angst, however, clashes headlong with old world woes when David finds himself at the mercy of the school bully whose reasons for making him the victim of his attentions lie, not with David’s academic acumen or because of his indie-kid friend, but with a shared familial past that still haunts both their fathers.
Secrets are at the heart of Rafalà’s book, secrets so gnawingly corrosive that they have the power to destroy, to extinguish an interior mental landscape and to end a life. The most heart-rending deaths in a war are always those that occur as peace seems imminent, as the last shells drop over the trenches, as the final soldier returns to barracks. In the Sicily of 1943, amidst Allied invasion and German retreat, an end to imminent threat seems in sight. The town of Melilli, once blessed by the mysterious appearance of a statue of San Sebastian, now appears to be blessed again as the Axis troops retreat and the populace experiences the joy of liberation. The joy will be short-lived for David’s father, Salvatore, who sees his two brothers blown to pieces when innocently playing with an unexploded shell. The rest of the town is giving thanks to their patron saint, as the course of Salvatore’s life is altered forever.
Rafalà adeptly changes narrator in order to explain the nature of the secret burden that Salvatore carried to America, a burden that will have a devastating effect on David. Does the sin of the immigrant father have to be the sin of the first-generation son? It is a story as old as the movement of people and the bellicose nature of humanity, but it is told with a refreshing compassion and poise, allowing the characters to voice their own challenging destinies in a captivating and penetrating manner. History is so present in Rafalà’s narrative that it forms a corporeal rather than metaphysical weight, something we see in Salvatore’s bearing and demeanour. It is only when working with the earth, tilling the soil, that we feel his load has been temporarily lifted. The complexity of humanity has been replaced by the simplicity of nature, a simplicity shared by Sicily and Connecticut.
We read of war and emigration, we see it on television and think of it abstractly, in terms of pain and division, but Rafalà has made it personal and imbued it with a deep sense of place and personality. We want David to find his feet and his own life, we wish Salvatore could find consolation and Nella, his sister, could salve her soul. The disturbing rattle of skeletons in the cupboard and the spectral outline of redemption are the ever-present ghosts in Rafalà’s finely honed pages.
Andrew Edwards
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