Strangers and Pilgrims: The Last Italian Migration

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Kirkus Review: Ann Cornelisen (Torregreca, Women of the Shadows) here follows her beloved southern Italian villagers north in their search for work. Armed with addresses of emigrants from Torregreca and accompanied by her village confederate and long-time friend, Chichella, Cornelisen develops her interviews with families now in Germany and northern Italy into an intelligent and compassionate accounting. As some of the nearly 600,000 Italians residing in Germany by 1976, these families were originally seduced north by a booming German economy. Today, with jobs cut back, it's a different story. "He needed the Italians in the Sixties," observes one plant manager. "I guess we'll just have to put up with them in the Seventies." They are just barely put up with. The one Italian-oriented television show features such hot numbers as Arrivederci Roma and a scrawny German master of ceremonies jabbering and spouting "Only a country so gay and sunny and irresponsible as Italy could invent such joyful music." Individual Germans, however, react more strongly: a woman on a bus, sensing in Cornelisen a kindred Anglo-Saxon, warned: "Don't trust those two women. You can't tell what they're planning. Southerners are so very treacherous, you know." As for the Italians themselves, they manage. They find work or collect unemployment, usually enjoying a higher standard of living than they could find in Italy. As Cornelisen remarks, "There is more coffee, Schnaps, beer, and cigarettes than is good for them, more dances, Diskotheks, and cinemas than they have energy for, medical insurance that actually covers them, and a local hospital that actually cures them."" Despite an occasional lapse into nostalgia (""No man wants to die a stranger among strangers. . . . Not still a stranger"), the longer they stay, the more they change--apparently shedding the "amoral familism" of which Ban-field (The Moral Basis of a Backward Society) accuses them. Up north they are exhilarated by the experience of buying something simply because it pleases them, of choosing their friends where they find them; "They no longer had to pretend there was a bond beyond the accident of birth or marriage." Thus, whatever the economic outlook, the appeal remains. Chicella herself sums it up upon her return to Torregreca after the visits and interviews: "ll tell you one thing. If it weren't for losing my pension, I'd go right now, today!" Chichella, says Cornelisen, is a survivor. So, clearly, are the others. An intimate portrait of both a people and a major social problem.

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