Book Review: Someone by Alice McDermott

I recently joined a local book club through Meetup.com, and the first book I was able to join them for was Someone by Alice McDermott. I didn't read the book because it was historical fiction about Brooklyn; I read it because I've been trying to "officially" join this book club for months now, and this was the book they chose during the month I could make it to a meeting. I was excited to discover, though, that it was the story of a girl growing up in Brooklyn during the interwar period.

That much I got from the description on the back of the book. As I started reading, though, I began to realize that the main character, Marie, was growing up in Carroll Gardens, or South Brooklyn, as it might have been known at the time. She even attended St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, which was where my Madigan and Mulcahy families would have gone to church when they were living at 85 Luqueer Street! I enjoyed this aspect of the book, even though my direct ancestors were no longer living in the neighborhood at the time the story is set. (Marie would have been more or less a contemporary of my grandparents, but my grandfather grew up in Park Slope and my grandmother, whose parents were from South Brooklyn, grew up in Bay Ridge and Flatbush.)

Given the amount of time I spend researching in Brooklyn, I always appreciate a book that gives me a flavor of the borough in general, or the culture of neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens in particular, and Someone did this in excellent fashion. I think anyone who is interested in this era of Brooklyn history would find this an interesting glimpse at the time and the culture, though it's obviously not a history book or a scholarly tome.

The book was, luckily, equally enjoyable as a work of literature. The narrative of the book switches from Marie's childhood to various stages of her adulthood, and while this is not what my linear brain would have preferred, it worked well and wasn't difficult to follow. My book club had some great discussions about the relationship between Marie and her brother Gabe and the dichotomy they represented, but I was also glad that as they grew, the author added some nuance to the depiction of them as polar opposites when they were young. If I had to describe it in a sentence, I'd say that the book is primarily about familial relationships and the way a person - and a family - can grow and change over a lifetime. It's a really good read, and while some of the book club members thought it was hard to get into, I found it impossible to put down from the very beginning. I recommend it highly!

Disclosure: This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links. This means that if you choose to make a purchase from Amazon after clicking one of these links, I will receive a small portion of your purchase price as a commission. I personally make a point of starting my Amazon shopping through the affiliate links of bloggers and friends whenever possible, so that large corporations are not the only beneficiaries of my purchases, and encourage others to do the same, regardless of whether they use my affiliate links or another blogger's.

Book Review: Sacrificed for Honor by David I. Kertzer

After I recently discovered that my great-great-grandmother Anna Pace was probably abandoned as an infant in Italy in the 1860s, fellow genealogist Peter Barbella recommended that I read Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control by David I. Kertzer. With a subtitle like that, what person in my position could say no?

It's times like this that I'm most glad to have joined such an active, welcoming, online genealogical community, both through Geneabloggers and on Google+. It honestly hadn't occurred to me, when I saw the records of a number of abandoned babies in the southern Italian towns that my family came from, that there might have been a monograph written about it. Only other people researching the same topics could have brought it to my attention.

Sacrificed for Honor is a book that's specifically about the widespread practice of infant abandonment in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it contains such a wealth of information about Italian social, religious, cultural, and familial practices that I'd suggest it to anyone with an interest in Italian history or genealogy.

The book focuses primarily on northern Italy, particularly the large cities of Milan and Florence, where most of the research thus far has been done. However, it gives enough history of practices in the south to put my Anna Pace's life in context for me. I'm expanding on this by using the records found on Antenati to create my own index of babies abandoned in Grumo Appula in the 1860s (g-g-grandma was born in 1864) to see if I can figure out the local context for abandonment. For example, the book tells us that in the South, many small towns had a "wheel" at which abandoned babies were left. (This in comparison to the North, where babies from small town were brought to nearby cities and left at their wheels.) However, having looked, so far, at 24 babies abandoned in the course of 18 months, there's no mention of a wheel,  and each of the babies is described as having been discovered "behind the door of her house" by one of the 3 local midwives.

Kertzer provides a ton of national context for the practice of infant abandonment. For example, did you know that unmarried parents in Italy were essentially required to "abandon" their illegitimate children to the huge network of foundling homes and foster parents set up to receive them? (The book even mentions one case of a 6-year-old boy, whose parents were unmarried but living together. When authorities found out that he was illegitimate, they intervened at that late date to remove him from the home and send him to a foster family - from which, of course, he promptly ran away.) Or that the vast majority of infants sent to foundling homes perished within the first 2 years of life, most of them within their first months, due to the difficulty of obtaining wetnurses in the days before safe, nutritious formula? This, despite the fact that the entire system was arranged to protect illegitimate babies from the ever-present dangers of abortion and infanticide.

I can't say that I agree with all of Kertzer's conclusions, particularly where he extrapolates into modern moral and political arenas. I won't spend too much time on my reasons on a blog that doesn't have a political purpose.  Suffice it to say that the book makes clear where his beliefs and mine differ on things like women's rights and the sanctity of all life, at all stages of development. Had abortion been an officially sanctioned, accessible option in 1864 like it is today, there's a very good chance that Anna Pace never would have been born, and neither would her 7 children who survived infancy, among them my great-grandmother; or her 7 children, among them my grandfather; or his 8 children; or his 20 grandchildren (myself among them) or his 4 great-granchildren. You don't know my family, but they're pretty fantastic; I can attest my own life would have been least among these losses.

Putting the personal and the political aside, I can recommend Sacrificed for Honor by David I. Kertzer enthusiastically. In fact, I was thrilled to discover that Kertzer's website includes a long list of other articles he's authored on similar topics, and I've added them to my reading list to gain additional context on the childhood, maturation, and adulthood of foundlings like my great-great-grandmother. I don't have to agree with his politics to know that his scholarship has provided context to the murkiest line in my family. With a brick wall this thick, context might be all I have. Anna's parents are described as ignoti on her marriage certificate, and merely as the autori di suoi giorni on the record that describes her discovery behind the midwife's door. I'm thinking about testing my grandfather's mtDNA on the off chance that a match provides some more information, but that's uncertain and even would benefit from the context provided here. The book, though scholarly, is an easy and engaging read, suitable for anyone with genealogical research interests in Italy, and particularly for those of us with brick walls of this nature, and I recommend it highly.


Disclosure: This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links. This means that if you choose to make a purchase from Amazon after clicking one of these links, I will receive a small portion of your purchase price as a commission. I personally make a point of starting my Amazon shopping through the affiliate links of bloggers and friends whenever possible, so that large corporations are not the only beneficiaries of my purchases, and encourage others to do the same, regardless of whether they use my affiliate links or another blogger's.  

Book Review: Brooklyn! An Illustrated History

When I was at The Genealogy Event last year, I attended a session by Laura G. Prescott on Timelines: Putting Your History into Historical Perspective, and it made me realize that I need to do more background research on my family's history. Luckily, after they immigrated, every line of my family (except 1) settled in Brooklyn, New York, and stayed there. While there's plenty of research still to do in various areas of Ireland, two towns in southern Italy, and Rio de Janiero, Brazil, I've been focusing my reading on Brooklyn, because it kills so many birds with one stone.

I started with Diocese of Immigrants: The Brooklyn Catholic Experience 1853-2003, which was a very interesting read, but I found it too heavy on the modern-day experience to be particularly useful in my research. Once I'd gotten through the first couple chapters, on the founding of the diocese, etc., I felt like I had to keep reading, in case anything good was in there, but wasn't finding it relevant to my work.

The next book I read was Brooklyn! An Illustrated History by Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, and it was fantastic. This book covers so many aspects of Brooklyn's rich and varied history, from its relationship to New York City, to the rise and fall of industry, to entertainment and recreation (Coney Island, anyone?) to a whole chapter on the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The book starts near the beginning*, with the original 5 Dutch towns that made up what is now the Borough of Brooklyn, and includes everything up to the more modern trends that were emerging when it was published in 1996. With nary a mention of hipsters, it's clear that this is not a book about Brooklyn that was published within the last decade! However, I know plenty about hipsters from my own friends, relatives, and personal observations - I don't need a book to tell me about skinny jeans, yoga, and mustaches. Brooklyn! An Illustrated History covers all the other important aspects of the borough. I found it particularly useful that it focused on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as those were the years of my family's primary residence in the area. (My earliest immigrant ancestors arrived circa 1851, and stayed until the mid-1950s.)

Of all the topics that the book touches upon, a few that interested me the most, in terms of situating the facts of my ancestors' lives in historical context, included the New York City draft riots in 1863; the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883; the expansion of the subway system through the early 20th century, the industry centered around the docks in Red Hook through the 19th and much of the 20th centuries; the development and popularity of Coney Island; and the rise and fall of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I particularly appreciated that the chapter on industry gave so much insight into Red Hook and South Brooklyn, where the docks were located, and also where my ancestors were located.

It would probably be an overstatement to say that this book is a tearjerker, but I'm beginning to worry that I've gotten a bit too invested in the lives - and geography - of my ancestors, because it made me cry. Twice.

• I couldn't quite hold back a few tears - on the subway, no less - when I read about the Dodgers' move to LA. This one hit particularly close to home, as I could imagine my Brooklyn-born, baseball-loving grandfather's dismay at the loss, made all the more vivid by the book's archival images of protesting fans.  

• After reading about the vibrant industrial center that Brooklyn once was, and the long and defunct history of brewing beer there, and knowing that my great-great-grandfather Michael Mulcahy was probably serving locally brewed beer at his pub in South Brooklyn, reading that "In a former matzoh factory on North Eleventh Street, the Brooklyn Brewery . . . revives Brooklyn's brewing tradition" made me cry. On the subway, once again. Now, this was not news to me. I've walked past Brooklyn Brewery dozens of times. I've drunk plenty of their beer. And I happen to be well aware that in the decade and a half since this book was published, Brooklyn Brewery has been joined by a number of other brewers making beer in the borough. But apparently I'm a big crybaby anyway.

While I can't guarantee that you'll be as moved as I was - probably a good thing, considering that this is not actually a book that's aiming to play on readers' emotions - I can unreservedly say that Brooklyn! An Illustrated History is a must-read for anyone looking for a good overview of the important parts of Brooklyn's history and development. It also has a very thorough bibliography at the end, offering lots of further avenues for research for those who are looking for a more in-depth examination of any particular topic.

*The earlier Indian inhabitants are treated with an unfortunately cursory description.


Disclosure: This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links. This means that if you choose to make a purchase from Amazon after clicking one of these links, I will receive a small portion of your purchase price as a commission. I personally make a point of starting my Amazon shopping through the affiliate links of bloggers and friends whenever possible, so that large corporations are not the only beneficiaries of my purchases, and encourage others to do the same, regardless of whether they use my affiliate links or another blogger's.

118th Carnival of Genealogy: Reading!

My paternal grandmother, Marilyn Mulcahy, whom I called Nan, died when I was 4, so I unfortunately don't remember her well, and most of what I know about her I know in an intellectual sense, not a relational sense. But there's one way in which I've always felt connected to her, and that was through reading.

My dad used to tell me that I was the only person he knew - other than his mother - who would read the same book more than once. It was clear to me that Nan and I were somehow the only people with knowledge of an incredibly obvious secret: if you can watch your favorite movie more than once, and watch reruns of your favorite tv show, and listen to your favorite song multiple times, why on earth wouldn't you read your favorite book (or 10) every year or so?

Being known for reading could be something of a curse for an elementary school student. A friend of mine spread the rumor that she had found me reading the dictionary, and I was made fun of for it, despite my protests. (It wasn't that I had any theoretical objection to reading the dictionary, it was just that she had never seen me do it - of that I was certain.) I had a tendency to read in places that my classmates didn't consider socially acceptable - like the bus, and the playground, and the lunch line - and places my teachers didn't think were appropriate - like under my desk while they were teaching. I was so known for being a reader that I spent years where my relatives' go-to conversation starter was "So have you read any good books lately?" (Given how often I reread books, this did not often lead to new and interesting conversations, and I struggled with how to respond.)

But being known as a reader could also be a boon, one I wouldn't fully appreciate for several years. Nan's sister, Aunt Betty, showed up at a family party when I was about 10, and gave me some books that my grandmother had read when she was younger. I received Nan's own copies of several books, with her name in them (as well as some scribbles and notes left when the much younger Betty tried to imitate her sister in reading a book she was otherwise uninterested in). I certainly appreciated being the recipient of those books.

Aunt Betty also relayed just how Nan had utilized her reputation as a reader: apparently as a girl she was so quiet, well-mannered, and well-behaved, and so content to sit and read while grown-ups went about their business that her parents would take her along to places that kids wouldn't otherwise have been invited to. I'm told that this worked out well until she was one day caught sitting there "reading" - with the book upside down, taking in the grown-up conversation around her! (This was something I always kept in mind but - unfortunately - never had the opportunity to emulate.)

Book Review: Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky

I stumbled upon Aaron Lansky's Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books at a thrift store; I'd never heard of it before, but the title caught my attention and the blurb on the back sealed it for me. Even though I don't know the first thing about Yiddish (I can spell yarmulke, which is apparently more than most Irish Catholics can say), and even though I have the pretty common bias that leads to my spending my pleasure reading on the histories and stories of people like myself and like my ancestors - the Irish, the Italians, the New Yorkers, the Catholics - as a historian and a bibliophile, I couldn't pass up a book about the rescue of 1,500,000 books.

 I wasn't disappointed. Even as someone who's never so much as seen The Fiddler on the Roof, I found the story of the rescue of Yiddish literature to be touching and profoundly moving. I cried more than once. I learned a lot, too. I picked up the story assuming that Lansky was setting out to save rare, priceless, historic books, and learned that he had much more inclusive standards of what was worthy of saving then I did. He aimed to save all the books - the entirety of Yiddish literature. The story begins with the author, a graduate student, and a rag-tag team of friends and volunteers salvaging books from dumpsters, and ends with the founding of the Yiddish Book Center and the digitization of the entirety of extant Yiddish Literature.

The book is full of funny, touching, stories about Lansky's encounters with the elderly Jewish people who donated the books of their youth, and, more than that, passed on their culture with them. Although I'm sure that the book would be particularly interesting to readers with Jewish heritage, it's a story that would fascinate anyone with an interest in books, culture, literature, or history.

(This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links.)

How would Great-Grandma bake?

There are a couple of genealogy or history related books on my list of things to read while I'm unemployed/a housewife (Annals of the Famine in Ireland; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), but what I've recently started reading instead is Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. It is a fascinating, enlightening, eye-opening book, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you're open to taking a long, hard look at what you eat and where it comes from. Of course, I do think the author probably has his biases, as we all do. I recently watched his movie The Botany of Desire, where he rails against monoculture. He certainly makes good points, but to attribute the Irish Potato Famine strictly to the fact that growing a single variety of potato left the crop more open to disease with not one single mention of a single political, economic, social, or religious factor? Yes it's a movie about biology, but the Potato Famine wasn't a strictly biological tragedy, and can't honestly be presented as one. If he's committed similar omissions elsewhere, though, they haven't been in areas where I'm knowledgable enough to pick up on them. With that in mind, and if you want to know where your food comes from, I'm enjoying The Omnivore's Dilemma so far.

Now, one of the most exciting wedding presents we got was a bread machine, and I'd already started using it to bake bread recreationally. I'd have nice, thick, slices of homemade bread during the day as snacks, or a slice for breakfast, or as a side with dinner. But we were still buying loaves of sliced bread to make sandwiches. It was almost as if we thought of the fresh, homemade bread as some sort of novel new extra, not "real" bread like the stuff in the plastic bag from the shelf in the store. Thanks to this book, I made the somewhat radical decision not to pick up any bread when I went grocery shopping yesterday, despite the fact that we had no store-bought bread at home. (When I told Ben that I would make him a sandwich on homemade bread for lunch today, he responded "I'm going to have to get rid of that book!")

I also have recipes for baking bread the old-fashioned way, in the oven, and I'm thinking of trying out a sourdough starter, too. But what I'd really like to do is bake bread the old-fashioned way. The recipes I find on the internet can't be the same as the recipes my great-grandmothers would have learned a century or more ago. (Is cottage cheese really a standard bread ingredient? Or, more to the point, was cottage historically a standard bread ingredient?) The bread recipe that Grandma Molly learned from Mary Gillan Quinn, or the recipe that Nana learned from Julia Toner Mulvaney? That would be a recipe I'd love to try. The 19th century was no nostalgic era of good nutrition and food purity (see: swill milk) - but I'd still be really interested in baking the bread my great-grandmother baked. (When I add milk, it'll be milk that complies with FDA regulations, after all.)

I used the Fulton History website to search old newspapers for bread recipes. As it turns out, bread recipes did not often appear in late 19th century newspapers. (If everyone knows how to bake bread, why print the recipe? When was the last time your local paper printed a step-by-step guide to sending an e-mail?) They often appeared in mid-20th century papers, but I'm not really interested in bread recipes from the 50s, when everyone was eating Wonderbread, anyway. There were only a couple of recipes I came across that met my criteria, and I may try them all - if I can figure them out!

Elmira NY Morning Telegram, 1898

Geneva NY Gazette, 1879

Interesting - a recipe for potato bread, I guess. Not sure whether I'll try this one. I also can't tell how much flour Miss Davidson added. (Is it really more important to tell us where the flour was milled than to tell us how much of it to use?)

Hudson NY Evening Register, 1886

Syracuse NY Evening Herald, 1895

Can anyone help me with this - what is "sweet milk"? I'd like to try my hand at some of these, but some of the terminology is a little difficult to penetrate.