Sharing the Story of the Boston Italians

by Stephen Puleo

Stephen Puleo's latest book is The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day. His previous books include Due to Enemy Action: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle 56, and Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, a critically-acclaimed Boston-area bestseller.

As the paperback edition of The Boston Italians is released this month, I wanted to make a few observations about readers' reactions to the book since the hardcover’s debut a year ago. I have received hundreds of e-mails and spoken to nearly two thousand people at presentations throughout the Boston area; the response has been overwhelmingly positive and heartwarming – from Italian-Americans and others – and has fallen into two main categories.

First, there is the resounding opinion that the book was long overdue; that it's simply about time Boston’s second largest ethnic group was the subject of a "non-Mob" book. That the real story – one of Italian immigrants overcoming enormous odds and paving the way for their children and grandchildren to achieve remarkable success – needed to be told.

Making it a Movie

by Martin Moran

I write from the edge of Washington, DC, on a freezing day. I'm here performing a one-man play, The Tricky Part, which was developed from my memoir of the same title. There's an Obama event going on at a Virginia high school some blocks from here. A massive motorcade -- cycles, black sedans, police cars -- is streaming past my apartment window. It is the picture of momentum itself: wheels and steel and flashing lights, the gathering force of change, a traffic nightmare, a future president? The high school they’re headed to, T.C. Williams, was the subject of a feature film some years ago starring Denzel Washington as the coach of the school's football team, the Titans.

I'm watching all this, here at my computer, while struggling to write a script, a film adaptation of my book and play. The autobiographical tale is sensitive and complex and I am finding the task of transforming the material into yet another genre daunting if not impossible. This accounts for all the looking out the window.

Let me lay out the essentials. When I was twelve, a camp counselor molested me. Our illicit sex went on for three years. I grew taller and older while holding the boy inside me hostage because I blamed him for being bad, for doing wrong, for succumbing to desire. I couldn’t help it and it was agonizing. I got even older and started writing about what happened, became obsessed with remembering, with using language to seek meaning in the story. A day would arrive when I stood to face a pasty old man crumpled in his wheelchair, the counselor who'd wronged me when I was a child. The one who ignited my aching sense of complicity. I looked at that man, at his stained pajamas; his puffy cheeks and I felt my heart break. For the fragile human in front of me, but more so for the boy I once was. And somewhere in that breaking was the beginning of forgiveness. Somehow, because I'd spent so much time piecing together the narrative of my own life, I was able to see, to feel, how that boy was blameless and how forgiveness was the gift I must give to myself.

Dare I Ask?

by Laila Halaby

During graduate school, I worked at the library with an African American girl named Carmon. One quiet Saturday morning, she asked if I would mind trimming her hair. Carmon had handfuls of thin braids that she wanted layered in the back so there would be a cascading effect.

We sat outside the library--our fifteen minute break--and I snipped away as instructed.I was curious about the texture of the braids and she explained that in weaving you could choose what kind of hair you wanted, synthetic or human and that human hair was usually Asian. When I wondered aloud why I almost never saw braids on White women, she explained that Black hair was very dry, which was why it was more suited to adding braids to than White hair that tended to get oily.

Over the years, this conversation evolved into a larger look at hair choices made by African American women and what it meant politically and socially to have braids or an afro or dreadlocks or to use a relaxer. I learned a great deal about African American culture during those conversations (because it was never only about hair) and I have always been grateful to Carmon for being so open with me.

During those same years, she asked me a lot of questions about the Middle East, about women, and particularly about Islam. I was happy to offer whatever knowledge I had and was often struck by the overlap in what we each had to say: personal decisions often carried larger social or political reverberations; and you are always an ambassador for your culture. To this day I am thankful for those years of talking we shared and I firmly believe that we widened one another’s horizons with our conversations.

In the intervening years, the last few in particular, I have been approached with all sorts of questions about the Middle East and Islam--some of the very same ones Carmon asked me, though usually presented in a rapid-fire sort of way, without any context or conversation to go along with them. The questions range from the simple (why do women cover their hair?) to the more complex (how can you tell the difference between Sunnis and Shiites?--which sounds like it’s going to be a joke rather than a question) to the personal (how are you raising your children?) to the ignorant (does your husband wear a turban?) to the blatantly racist (how can you show that Islam is not a violent religion?).  I am always happy to offer any understanding I can to offset American “jahiliyya,” or generalized ignorance of other cultures, but more and more I am struck by the assumptions that are made in the asking of these questions, first and foremost that any and all questions are acceptable, and second that Arabs/Muslims are almost solely governed by their ethnicity/religion.

Migrations and Movement: Our Unsettled World

by David Gessner

I think it's funny how often people use place as a metaphor for their state of being.  "I'm not quite there yet." "I'm getting there." "I'm feeling unsettled." Everyone wants to get there and be there but even the most superficial survey of the animal world will tell you that there's no there there. Everyone is moving, everyone is busy going somewhere else; it's a world in movement, a decidedly unsettled world.   

Migration and movement have long been themes of my writing, but never more so than since I moved to the South four years ago. This was an odd decision in some ways, given that Cape Cod had been the main subject of both my writing and life.  Rather than buy a house, my wife and I decided to rent an apartment very close to the beach, the caveat being that it was a "winter rental" and we would be expelled each summer. That was okay with us in one way, since we would be heading back north to rent in Maine or on Cape Cod for the summer, and we have stuck with this arrangement ever since, putting our whole lives in storage in May and taking them back out in late August.