Unto the Sons

Unto the Sons – Gay Talese.

The author of the bestselling Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Honor Thy Father, and The Kingdom and the Power now gives us his most important and compelling work: the epic of the millions who emigrated from Italy to America beginning at the turn of the century, told full-scale for the first time.

The immigrant saga is brought close to us through the lives of the author’s forebears, particularly his Italian-born father, Joseph, a tailor and assimilated American who during World War II existed as an ‘emotional double-agent’- swayed by his devotion to his brothers fighting in the Fascist army while at the same time aiding the Allied cause as a volunteer shore patrolman within the beachfront community of his adopted home in Ocean City, New Jersey. Joseph’s tempered loyalty, felt as well by many fellow immigrants during Italy’s unfriendly years with the Allies, brought him into conflict with his American-born son, who saw himself as an ‘alien’ under his father’s roof, an ‘outsider’ on the flag-waving Protestant island of Ocean City – ‘olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town’.

The son would in time become the chronicler not only of his father’s fate but also of the impoverished patriarchal world of Southern Italy that had dispatched multitudes of immigrants to the New World – settlers named La Guardia, Sinatra, DiMaggio, Cuomo, Ferraro, and Iacocca, and the ancestors of the rock singer known as Madonna. The author’s own wandering grandfather Gaetano was one of a boatload of workers arriving in the 1880s to embark upon half-lives in a Pennsylvania factory town – returning periodically to their Italian homeland and to their wives [the fabled ‘white widows’], who had been left behind with the children and the elderly village patriarchs who preferred the Old World to the New. The author’s great-grandfather Domenico was one such patriarch, rigidly rooted to his feudal estate in a region immersed in the mysticism of the Church and haunted by persisting echoes of Roman glory and the subsequent waves of foreign invaders that ranged from the Arabs to the Napoleonic French and ultimately to the GIs and Anglos under the Mediterranean’s supreme commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Interweaving historic fact with the lore he has gathered from family tales, interviews, letters, and diaries, Gay Talese has juxtaposed his family’s adventures with the dominant events and disasters that have affected their lives. Encompassing three generations and two World Wars, Unto the Sons combines the breadth of history with the intimate dreams of family. It speaks, in its own piercing way, to the heart of the American experience.