{"product_id":"unto-the-sonsisbn-9780812976070","title":"Unto the Sons","description":"\"An Italian ROOTS.\" \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—The Washington Post Book World\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.\u003cb\u003eGay Talese \u003c\/b\u003ewas a reporter for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e from 1956 to 1965. Since then he has written for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHarper's Magazine, \u003c\/i\u003eand other national publications. He is the author of 13 books. He lives with his wife, Nan, in New York City.1.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     The beach in winter was dank and desolate, and the island dampened by the  frigid spray of the ocean waves pounding relentlessly against the  beachfront bulkheads, and the seaweed-covered beams beneath the white  houses on the dunes creaked as quietly as the crabs crawling nearby.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The boardwalk that in summer was a festive promenade of suntanned couples  and children’s balloons, of carousel tunes and colored lights spinning at  night from the Ferris wheel, was occupied in winter by hundreds of sea  gulls perched on the iron railings facing into the wind. When not resting  they strutted outside the locked doors of vacated shops, or circled high  in the sky, holding clams in their beaks that they soon dropped upon the  boardwalk with a splattering cluck. Then they zoomed down and pounced on  the exposed meat, pecking and pulling until there was nothing left but the  jagged, salty white chips of empty shells.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By midwinter the shell-strewn promenade was a vast cemetery of clams, and  from a distance the long elevated flat deck of the boardwalk resembled a  stranded aircraft carrier being attacked by dive-bombers—and oddly  juxtaposed in the fog behind the dunes loomed the rusting remains of a  once sleek four-masted vessel that during a gale in the winter of 1901 had  run aground on this small island in southern New Jersey called Ocean City.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The steel-hulled ship, flying a British flag and flaunting  hundred-fifty-foot masts, had been sailing north along the New Jersey  coast toward New York City, where it was scheduled to deliver one million  dollars’ worth of Christmas cargo it had picked up five months before in  Kobe, Japan. But during the middle of the night, while a number of crewmen  drank rum and beer in a premature toast to the long journey’s end, a  fierce storm rose and destroyed the ship’s sails, snapped its masts, and  drove it into a sandbar within one hundred yards of the Ocean City  boardwalk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Awakened by the distress signals that flared in the night, the alarmed  residents of Ocean City—a conservative community founded in 1879 by  Methodist ministers and other Prohibitionists who wished to establish an  island of abstinence and propriety—hastened to help the sailors, who were  soon discovered to be battered but unharmed and smelling of sweat, salt  water, and liquor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After the entire thirty-three-man crew had been escorted to shore, they  were sheltered and fed for days under the auspices of the town’s   teetotaling elders and ministers’ wives; and while the sailors expressed  gratitude for such hospitality they privately cursed their fate in being  shipwrecked on an island so sedate and sober. But soon they were relocated  by British nautical authorities, and the salvageable cargo was barged to  New York to be sold at reduced prices. And the town returned to the tedium  of winter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The big ship, however, remained forever lodged in the soft white  sand—unmovable, slowly sinking, a sight that served Ocean City’s pious  guardians as a daily reminder of the grim consequences of intemperate  guidance. But as I grew up in the late 1930s, more than three decades  after the shipwreck—when the visible remnants at low tide consisted only  of the barnacle-bitten ridge of the upper deck, the corroded brown rudder  post and tiller, and a single lopsided mast—I viewed the vessel as a  symbol of adventure and risk; and during my boyhood wanderings along the  beach I became enchanted with exotic fantasies of nights in foreign ports,  of braving the waves and wind with wayward men, and of escaping the rigid  confines of this island on which I was born but never believed I belonged.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I saw myself always as an alien, an outsider, a drifter who, like the  shipwrecked sailors, had arrived by accident. I felt different from my  young friends in almost every way, different in the cut of my clothes, the  food in my lunch box, the music I heard at home on the record player, the  ideas and inner thoughts I revealed on those rare occasions when I was  open and honest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town, and I felt unrelated even to  my parents, especially my father, who was indeed a foreigner—an unusual  man in dress and manner, to whom I bore no physical resemblance and with  whom I could never identify. Trim and elegant, with wavy dark hair and a  small rust-colored moustache, he spoke English with an accent and received  letters bearing strange-looking stamps.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    These letters sometimes contained snapshots of soldiers wearing uniforms  with insignia and epaulets unlike any I had seen on the recruit-  ment posters displayed throughout the island. They were my uncles and  cousins, my father explained to me quietly one day early in World War II,  when I was ten; they were fighting in the Italian army, and—it was  unnecessary for him to add—their enemy included the government of the  United States.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I became increasingly sensitive to this fact when I sat through the  newsreels each week at the local cinema; next to my unknowing classmates,  I watched with private horror the destruction by Allied bombers of  mountain villages and towns in southern Italy to which I was ancestrally  linked through a historically ill-timed relationship with my Italian  father. At any moment I half expected to see up on the screen, gazing down  at me from a dust-covered United States Army truck filled with disheveled  Italian prisoners being guarded at gunpoint, a sad face that I could  identify from one of my father’s snapshots.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My father, on the other hand, seemed to share none of my confused sense of  patriotism during the war years. He joined a citizens’ committee of shore  patrolmen who kept watch along the waterfront at night, standing with  binoculars on the boardwalk under the stanchioned lights that on the ocean  side were painted black as a precaution against discovery by enemy  submarines.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He made headlines in the local newspaper after a popular speech to the  Rotary Club in which he reaffirmed his loyalty to the Allied cause,  declaring that were he not too old for the draft (he was thirty-nine) he  would proudly join the American troops at the front, in a uniform  devotedly cut and stitched with his own hands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Trained as an apprentice tailor in his native village, and later an  assistant cutter in a prominent shop in Paris that employed an older  Italian cousin, my father arrived in Ocean City circuitously and  impulsively at the age of eighteen in 1922 with very little money, an  extensive wardrobe, and the outward appearance of a man who knew exactly  where he was going, when in fact nothing was further from the truth. He  knew no one in town, barely knew the language, and yet, with a  self-assurance that has always mystified me, he adjusted to this unusual  island as readily as he could cut cloth to fit any size and shape.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Having noticed a “For Sale” sign in the window of a tailor shop in the  center of town, my father approached the asthmatic owner, who was  desperate to leave the island for the drier climate of Arizona. After a  brief negotiation, my father acquired the business and thus began a  lengthy, spirited campaign to bring the rakish fashion of the Continental  boulevardier to the comparatively continent men of the south Jersey shore.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But after decorating his windows with lantern-jawed mannequins holding  cigarettes and wearing Borsalino hats, and draping his counters with bolts  of fine imported fabrics—and displaying on his walls such presumably  persuasive regalia as his French master tailor’s diploma bordered by  cherubim and a Greek goddess—my father made so few sales during his first  year that he was finally forced to introduce into his shop a somewhat  undignified gimmick called the Suit Club.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At the cost of one dollar per week, Suit Club members would print their  names and addresses on small white cards and, after placing the cards in  unmarked envelopes, would deposit them into a large opaque vase placed  prominently atop a velvet-covered table next to a fashion photograph of a  dapper man and woman posing with a greyhound on the greensward of an  ornate country manor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Each Friday evening just prior to closing time, my father would invite one  of the assembled Suit Club members to close his eyes and pick from the  vase a single envelope, which would reveal the name of the fortunate  winner of a free suit, to be made from fabric selected by that individual;  after two fittings, it would be ready for wearing within a week.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Since as many as three or four hundred people were soon paying a dollar  each week to partake in this raffle, my father was earning on each free  suit a profit perhaps three times the average cost of a custom-made suit  in those days—to say nothing of the additional money he earned when he  enticed a male winner into purchasing an extra pair of matching trousers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But my father’s bonanza was abruptly terminated one day in 1928, when an  anonymous complaint sent to City Hall, possibly by a rival tailor, charged  that the Suit Club was a form of gambling clearly outlawed under the town  charter; thus ended for all time my father’s full-time commitment to the  reputable but precarious life of an artist with a needle and thread. My  father did not climb down from an impoverished mountain in southern Italy  and forsake the glorious lights of Paris and sail thousands of miles to  the more opportunistic shores of America to end up as a poor tailor in  Ocean City, New Jersey.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So he diversified. Advertising himself as a ladies’ furrier who could  alter or remodel old coats as well as provide resplendent new ones (which  he obtained on consignment from a Russian Jewish immigrant who resided in  nearby Atlantic City), my father expanded his store to accommodate a  refrigerated fur storage vault and extended the rear of the building to  include a dry-cleaning plant overseen by a black Baptist deacon who during  Prohibition operated a small side business in bootlegging. Later, in the  1930s, my father added a ladies’ dress boutique, having as partner and  wife a well-tailored woman who once worked as a buyer in a large  department store in Brooklyn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He met her while attending an Italian wedding in that borough in December  1927. She was a bridesmaid, a graceful and slender woman of twenty with  dark eyes and fair complexion and a style my father immediately recognized  as both feminine and prepossessing. After a few dances at the reception  under the scrutiny of her parents, and the frowns of the   saxophone player in the band with whom she had recently gone out on   a discreet double date, my father decided to delay his departure from  Brooklyn for a day or two so that he might ingratiate himself with her.  This he did with such panache that they were engaged within a year, and  married six months later, after buying a small white house near the Ocean  City beach, where, in the winter of 1932, I was born and awoke each  morning to the smell of espresso and the roaring sound of the waves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My first recollection of my mother was of a fashionable, solitary figure  on the breezy boardwalk pushing a baby carriage with one hand while with  the other stabilizing on her head a modish feathered hat at an unwavering  angle against the will of the wind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As I grew older I learned that she cared greatly about exactness in   appearance, preciseness in fit, straightness in seams; and, except when  positioned on a pedestal in the store as my father measured her for a new  suit, she seemed to prefer standing at a distance from other people,  conversing with customers over a counter, communicating with her friends  via telephone rather than in person. On those infrequent occasions when  her relatives from Brooklyn would visit us in Ocean City, I noticed how  quickly she backed away from their touch after offering her cheek for a  kiss of greeting. Once, during my preschool days as I accompanied her on  an errand, I tried to hold on to her, to put my hand inside the pocket of  her coat not only for the warmth but for a closer feeling with her  presence. But when I tried this I felt her hand, gently but firmly, remove  my own.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was as if she were incapable of intimate contact with anyone but my  father, whom she plainly adored to the exclusion of everyone else; and the  impression persisted throughout my youth that I was a kind of orphan   in the custody of a compatible couple whose way of life was strange and  baffling.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One night at the dinner table when I casually picked up a loaf of Italian  bread and placed it upside down in the basket, my father became furious  and, without further explanation, turned the loaf right side up and  demanded that I never repeat what I had done. Whenever we attended the  cinema as a family we left before the end, possibly because of my parents’  inability or unwillingness to relate to the film’s content, be it drama or  comedy. And although my parents spent their entire married life living  along the sea, I never saw them go sailing, fishing, or swimming, and  rarely did they even venture onto the beach itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In my mother’s case I suspect her avoidance of the beach was due to her  desire to prevent the sun from scorching and darkening her fair skin. But  I believe my father’s aversion to the sea was based on something deeper,  more complex, somehow related to his boyhood in southern Italy. I suggest  this because I often heard him refer to his region’s coastline as  foreboding and malarial, a place of piracy and invasion; and as an avid  reader of Greek mythology—his birthplace is not far from the renowned rock  of Scylla, where the Homeric sea monster devoured sailors who had escaped  the whirlpool of Charybdis—my father was prone to attaching chimerical  significance to certain bizarre or inexplicable events that occurred  during his youth along the streams and lakes below his village.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I remember overhearing, when I was eleven or twelve, my father complaining  to my mother that he had just experienced a sleepless night during which  he had been disturbed by beachfront sounds resembling howling wolves,  distant but distinct, and reminiscent of a frightful night back in 1914  when his entire village had been stirred by such sounds; when the  villagers awoke they discovered that the azure water of their lake had  turned a murky red.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was a mournful precursor of things to come, my father explained to my  mother: his own father would soon die unexpectedly of an undiagnosed  ailment, and a bloody world war would destroy the lives of so many of his  young countrymen, including his older brother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I, too, had sometimes heard in Ocean City at night what sounded like  wolves echoing above the sand dunes; but I knew they were really stray  dogs, part of the large population of underfed pets and watchdogs  abandoned each fall by summer merchants and vacationers during the peak  years of the Depression, when the local animal shelter was inadequately  staffed or closed entirely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Even in summertime the dogs roamed freely on the boardwalk during the  Depression, mingling with the reduced number of tourists who strolled  casually up and down the promenade, passing the restaurants of mostly  unoccupied tables, the soundless bandstand outside the music pavilion, and  the carousel’s riderless wooden horses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother loathed the sight and smell of these dogs; and as if her  disapproval provoked their spiteful nature, they followed her everywhere.  Moments after she had emerged from the house to escort me to school before  her mile walk along deserted streets to join my father at the store, the  dogs would appear from behind fences and high-weeded yards and trail her  by several paces in a quiet trot, softly whimpering and whining, or  growling or panting with their tongues extended.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    While there were a few pointers and terriers, spaniels and beagles, they  were mostly mongrels of every breed and color, and all of them seemed  unintimidated by my mother, even after she abruptly turned and glared at  them and tried to drive them away with a sweeping gesture of her right arm  in the air. They never attacked her or advanced close enough to nip at her  high heels; it was mainly a game of territorial imperative that they  played each morning with her. By the winter of 1940, the dogs had  definitely won.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    At this time my mother was caring for her second and final child, a  daughter four years my junior; and I think that the daily responsibility  of rearing two children, assisting in the store, and being followed, even  when we children accompanied her, by the ragged retinue of dogs—a few of  which often paused to copulate in the street as my sister and I watched in  startled wonderment—drove my mother to ask my father to sell our house on  the isolated north end of the island and move us into the more populated  center of town.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This he unhesitatingly did, although in the depressed real estate market  of that time he was forced to sell at an unfavorable price. But he also  benefitted from these conditions by obtaining at a bargain on the main  street of Ocean City a large brick building that had been the offices of a  weekly newspaper lately absorbed in a merger. The spacious first floor of  the building, with its high ceiling and balcony, its thick walls and deep  interior, its annex and parking lot, provided more than enough room for my  father’s various enterprises—his dress shop and dry-cleaning service, his  fur storage vaults and tailoring trade.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    More important to my mother, however, was the empty floor of the building,  an open area as large as a dance hall that would be converted into an  apartment offering her both a convenient closeness to my father and the  option of distance from everyone else when she so desired. Since she also  decorated this space in accord with her dictum that living quarters should  be designed less to be lived in than to be looked at and admired, my  sister and I soon found ourselves residing in an abode that was  essentially an extended showroom. It was aglow with crystal chandeliers  and sculpted candles in silver holders, and it had several bronze  claw-footed marble-topped coffee tables surrounded by velvet sofas and  chairs that bespoke comfort and taste but nonetheless conveyed the message  that should we children ever take the liberty of reclining on their  cushions and pillows, we should, upon rising, be certain we did not leave  them rumpled or scattered or even at angles asymmetrical to the armrests.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Not only did my father not object to this fastidiously decorative  ambience, he accentuated it by installing in the apartment several large  mirrors that doubled the impression of almost everything in view, and also  concealed in the rear of the apartment the existence of three ersatz  bedrooms that for some reason my parents preferred not to acknowledge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Each bed was separately enclosed within an L-shaped ten-foot-high  partition that on the inside was backed by shelves and closets and on the  outside was covered entirely with mirrors. Whatever was gained by this  arrangement was lost whenever a visitor bumped into a mirror. And while I  never remember at night being an unwitting monitor of my parents’  intimacy, I do know that otherwise in this domestic hall of mirrors we as  a family hardly ever lost sight of one another.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Most embarrassing to me were those moments when, on entering the apartment  unannounced after school, I saw reflected in a mirror, opposite a small  alcove, the bowed head of my father as he knelt on the red velvet of a  prie-dieu in front of a wall portrait of a bearded, brown-robed medieval  monk. The monk’s face was emaciated, his lips seemed dry, and as he stood  on a rock in sandals balancing a crosier in his right arm, his dark,  somber eyes looked skyward as if seeking heavenly relief from the sins  that surrounded him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ever since my earliest youth I had heard again and again my father’s  astonishing tales about this fifteenth-century southern Italian miracle  worker, Saint Francis of Paola. He had cured the crippled and revived the  dead, he had multiplied food and levitated and with his hands stopped  mountain boulders from rolling down upon villages; and one day in his  hermitage, after an alluring young woman had tempted his celibacy, he had  hastily retreated and leaped into an icy river to extinguish his passion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The denial of pleasure, the rejection of worldly beauty and values,  dominated the entire life of Saint Francis, my father had emphasized,  adding that Francis as a boy had slept on stones in a cave near my  father’s own village, had fasted and prayed and flagellated himself, and  had finally established a credo of punishing piety and devotion that  endures in southern Italy to this day, almost six hundred years after the  birth of the saint.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I myself had seen other portraits of Saint Francis in the Philadelphia  homes of some of my father’s Italian friends whom we occasionally visited  on Sunday afternoons; and while I never openly doubted the veracity of  Francis’s achievements, I never felt comfortable after I had climbed the  many steps of the private staircase leading to the apartment and opened  the living room door to see my father kneeling in prayer before this  almost grotesque oil painting of a holy figure whose aura suggested agony  and despair.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Prayer for me was either a private act witnessed exclusively by God or a  public act carried out by the congregation or by me and my classmates in  parochial school. It was not an act to be on exhibition in a family parlor  in which I, as a nonparticipating observer, felt suddenly like an  interloper, a trapped intruder in spiritual space, an awkward youth who  dared not disturb my father’s meditation by announcing my presence. And  yet I could not unobtrusively retreat from the room, or remain unaffected  or even unafraid as I stood there, stifled against the wall, overhearing  during these war years of the 1940s my father’s whispered words as he  sought from Saint Francis nothing less than a miracle.","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301769335013,"sku":"NP9780812976070","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812976069_2cf03921-03a9-440f-8019-8017299532a3.jpg?v=1730748727","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/unto-the-sonsisbn-9780812976070","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}