SICILIAN DREAMS

In this historical novel, a Sicilian immigrant navigates the spheres of workers rights and organized crime in his adopted homeland.

The year is 1907. Santo Regina, already a widower at age 32, is skeptical of the Fasci movement taking hold in his native Sicily, where the peasants are organizing to demand better treatment from the landowners. But he is intrigued by Don Vito Cascio Ferro, a former landowner–turned-agitator with assumed ties to the local Mafia. Vito is not a typical Mafioso, however. He looks like a religious hermit, tall and gaunt with a long gray beard, and he rails against the concept of private property. “I tell you now,” he says to Santo upon their meeting, “within five years most of the men around you will be in L’America, and Sicily will be left to those with the foresight to see its future.” When his own attempt at activism fails, Santo joins the stream of men immigrating to America for work, leaving his young son and teenage daughter behind in the care of his mother. In Louisiana, Santo encounters the same oppressive working conditions that he faced in Sicily—as well as bosses willing to use violence to enforce the status quo. In New Orleans, Santo again meets Vito, who has cut his long beard and evolved away from his earlier politics. “Let’s say I’m in another part of the same business,” he tells Santo as he describes his new activities within America’s growing Sicilian community. As Santo’s daughter, Mariana, back in Sicily gets herself in a compromising position with a local tough, he must decide to what lengths he will assist his countrymen in their attempts to gain financial independence—and just what side of Vito’s law he will stand on.

Panella’s prose is concise and insightful, capturing not only the era in which it is set, but also the contemporary worldviews of his characters. At one point, Santo wonders: “What kept him in Sicily? A house and a shovelful of land? A mother whose life was a path between home and church, and who wouldn’t even hear of L’America? Or was it the image of his father, who walked the streets like a ghost, a bag of bones in a black suit, railing at the ignorance of his fellows.” The author largely avoids the more clichéd depictions of the Mafia in the United States, presenting instead a less formal, more organic outgrowth of the cultural upheavals present in Italy and America during this period. There are times when the story moves a bit slowly, but the book’s relatively short length and streamlined plot help to maintain its momentum. Santo and Vito are both intriguing characters, and Mariana provides a particular window into the precariousness of life back home. At its best moments, the volume calls to mind the work of 20th-century Italian novelists like Cesare Pavese and Leonardo Sciascia, wherein the convictions of a moral man are tested by an invariably amoral environment.

A richly textured tale of the less romantic aspects of the early Italian American experience.