Unto the Sons
Authors: Gay Talese
Praise for
UNTO
THE
SONS
A
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year
“
Unto the Sons
is a triumph.… Place and and time are summoned directly and sensuously out of the memory of Gay Talese, who begins this story as a first-person narrator, creating a voice, an entirely trustworthy witness. But soon he vanishes gracefully into the telling of the tale, a tale of others.… The story begins as a personal account but ends as a communal one, a shared experience.”
—Chicago Tribune Book World
“Richly human … [Talese] interweaves the history of [his family’s] private lives with the public history of contemporary Italy, the wars and leaders and economic forces that sent so many Italians across the sea to work hard and suffer the indignities of prejudice in a new land.… Talese is able to make this all-important personal story—where he came from—significant for the rest of us as well.”
—
USA Today
“Brilliantly evoked … The book is a sweeping saga tracing the fate of the Taleses and their far-flung family during World War II.… extremely moving.”
—
Vogue
“A dazzling self-examination on a large canvas. Perhaps nobody but Talese, a demon for research and a natural storyteller, could have pulled it off.…
Unto the Sons
is thick with revealing incident and colorful character.”
—
People
“A wonderful and unforgettable book and I think the finest work he’s produced in his remarkable career. Mr. Talese has taken the raw material of his own family’s migration to America and turned it into epic dimensions. He turns the story of his Italian family into one of the most quintessentially American stories ever told.
Unto the Sons
is a love song to the courage of immigrants and the continuing power of the American dream.”
—P
AT
C
ONROY
“Gay Talese has spoken often of his debt to Fitzgerald, Cheever, and other modern masters of fiction; and in this book he makes a grand leap into the form, bringing the characters of his father, himself as a boy, and their ancestors in Italy to vividly dramatic life with novelistic storytelling. It is a compelling use of the form by Talese, who, as he has proven again and again with his books, is a master of the narrative art. With this new work he delves into the souls of his people to tell a universal story we haven’t heard before; and the consequence is a wonderful book.”
—W
ILLIAM
K
ENNEDY
“Masterful … a story that will resonate for parents and children of every nationality.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“A magnificent multigenerational saga …
Unto the Sons
demonstrates every bit of the talent and industry that established and kept Talese a star.… A work of literature, a nonfiction novel, a tone poem from the first paragraph.”
—
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Gay Talese has produced a work that is part fiction, part history, part biography and part autobiography.… [He] has written an entertaining, valuable and insightful book that will appeal to all Americans today of Italian ancestry.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times
“Written with obvious devotion, both to historical accuracy and to the people it speaks of. Ultimately it reminds us of the marvelously real lives behind the increasingly calcified myth of the immigrant experience.”
—
Mirabella
“
Unto the Sons
is as exquisitely tailored as the clothes [Talese’s] ancestors made.… [He] stitched this work of art together day by day by month by year for ten years, making
Unto the Sons
a priceless gift for his family, and for all of us.”
—M
ARIO
C
UOMO
, former governor of New York
2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1992 by Gay Talese
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by
Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1992.
This edition published by arrangement with
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
ISBN 0-8129-7606-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-76541-3
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Author’s Note
Dedication
Bibliography
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
The ambitions of people who never became very rich, who founded no dynasty or long-lasting company, and who lived in the middle and lower ranks of the business world, are difficult to write about, because they are seldom recorded.
But the character of a society is greatly influenced by the form the ambitions of such men take, and by the extent to which they are satisfied or frustrated.
—Theodore Zeldin,
France, 1848–1945: Ambition and Love
1.
T
he 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.