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A review by sinuhe
Mount Allegro: A Memoir of Italian American Life by Jerre Mangione
5.0
A fantastic memoir of growing up in a Sicilian community in Rochester in the 1920s. This hits close to home for me as I'm Italian/Sicilian on my father's side; my great-aunt married into this community (or, well, what was left of it; by that time it had dispersed).
It leaves me somewhat depressed, as this world (like the worlds in all older memoirs) is totally disappeared, but so close to us generationally. Mangione was able to go back to his parents' hometowns in the 1930s and meet their friends and relations, and see firsthand why they left. Today my Italian relatives are likely third cousins at best and would probably have no stories to share of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. I have no stories of them passed down in the family - as a third-gen child, my father couldn't even communicate with his grandmother.
It does leave me curious as to the experience of girls on the writer's generation. Minimally educated, expected to marry close to home, and held to a strict standard of propriety, they would have had a very different life. I can't imagine a Gerlanda going to Sicily in the 1930s to gather material and write.
It leaves me somewhat depressed, as this world (like the worlds in all older memoirs) is totally disappeared, but so close to us generationally. Mangione was able to go back to his parents' hometowns in the 1930s and meet their friends and relations, and see firsthand why they left. Today my Italian relatives are likely third cousins at best and would probably have no stories to share of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. I have no stories of them passed down in the family - as a third-gen child, my father couldn't even communicate with his grandmother.
It does leave me curious as to the experience of girls on the writer's generation. Minimally educated, expected to marry close to home, and held to a strict standard of propriety, they would have had a very different life. I can't imagine a Gerlanda going to Sicily in the 1930s to gather material and write.