THE BLACK MADONNA

A genial debut from Kirkus reviewer Ermelino, a reporter for InStyle, celebrates neighborhood culture, testifies to the power of women in a peasant-based society, and smartly counters the prevailing stereotypes of Italian-Americans from the not-so-mean streets of New York’s Little Italy.

The Italian mommas in Ermelino’s three linked narratives let no men oppress them, but rely on the power of their patroness, the Black Madonna of Viggiano, to solve their earthly dilemmas. Teresa Sabatini, who lives with her young son on Spring Street while her merchant marine husband is fighting the war at sea, endures the constant questions of her nosy neighbors. When her beloved son cripples himself playing Tarzan on the fire escape, Teresa looks to her elusive husband for help and comes up with a double miracle. The second story, set in the ’30s, a decade earlier, explains how Magdalena Caparetti, a young beauty from the old country, manages to snag eligible widower Amadeo Pavese, a successful American merchant visiting his relatives in Italy. With the help of the Virgin’s magic, Amodeo’s aunt and uncle, who rely on his monthly check, combine folklore and foodlore to arrange a suitable match. In the third tale, both Magdalena and Teresa lend their cunning to their haughty neighbor Antoinette Mangiacarne, whose son, Jumbo, once their own sons’ playmate, wants to move away from what passes for his home in the 1960s—he lives with his mother in the same building as his five married sisters and tends bar in the neighborhood in order to settle a bad gambling debt—and marry a Jewish girl from Long Island. The mother-son struggle and the inter-ethnic culture clash result in some fine, and finely climactic, low comedy.

All these momma’s boys undermine popular notions of Italian machismo and suggest unexplored relations between old-country ways and new-world realities: a welcome antidote to “fuhggeddaboudit.”