The second chapter of The Madonna of 115th Street presents a very interesting paradox in the life of the southern Italian immigrants to America.  This is the idea that the first generation parents want their children to know Italian culture and their dialect, but many of the parents did not, according to Robert Orsi, romanticize the old country or paese. They told their children about the poverty and all the problems of southern Italy. This is a paradox on multiple levels. The first is that while parents are not glossing over the hardships of life in Italy, they still want their children to connect to the Italian culture. That connection seems unlikely if the children associate their culture with poverty and exploitation.  “They remembered and told their children stories of poverty and explotation of the mezzogiorno (pg. 21).”  The parents would need to actively create that positive association with Italian culture.  The conditions in Italy clearly did not add up to a good quality of life which is why the parents left, but telling the child about suffering would not make him eager to identity with southern Italy. The neighbors who do yearn for Italy would not have enough of an impact on a small child as their parents would.

The next level of this paradox, which Orsi also mentions, is the fact that if the child just simply opens his eyes he would see “exploration, endurance, unemployment, difficulty, and separation (pg. 27).” To the child, what makes America better than Italy? There are very limited opportunities for the immigrants to make a living in Italian Harlem. Desperate, they accept any job they can find, no matter the pay or conditions.  What Orsi does not mention is the effect this has on the second generation, or the child.  Home is clearly not Italy, but this home in northern Manhattan looks equally as bad as the parents made Italy sound. There is nothing the parents, and certainly nothing the child could do to improve the conditions, but now the child is even more confused. My parents left poverty to live in a different poverty across the ocean? The child has no positive connection with either Italy or America.  Which leads to a bigger question: how will the child identify himself when he grows up? Italian-American, American-Italian, just Italian, just American, none of the above?

The last layer of the paradox is another idea that Orsi discusses: “We must be wary of the powerful distortions of memory (pg. 45).” Because Italian Harlem does not exist any more, people sometimes became nostalgic, and romanticized what used to be.  This is the same idea that Foner mentioned in the beginning of chapter 2 when New Yorkers often remembered their communites as close knit ethnic neighborhoods and not for all the hardships they endured. It is this final layer of the paradox that is most interesting.  Regardless of whether some immigrants later romanticized Italian Harlem, there is testimony that men and women came to love the neighborhood. Some never left, while others did but wished to be buried by the neighborhood’s funeral director.  Why is it that Italy was neither the subject of romanticization or eventual love, while northern Manhattan, which had many of the same difficulties, was both? I think it is because of the mind set the immigrants had when they arrived.  Conditions in America were not perfect, but the immigrants came with the idea that they would have to work.  The assumption was that their lot could only get better, which it did.