Old Wine, New Bottle

MOUNT ALLEGRO --Jerre Mangione--Houghton MiffIin ($2.50).

Mount Allegro is the modest, unassuming, sensitive record of a young U.S. writer of Sicilian descent. It is no towering peak in U.S. letters, but readers who make the climb can get a clear view of a relatively unexplored part of the native scene-- America's "Little Italys" and the people who live in them.

To the U.S., during the first decade of the 20th Century, came more than 2,000,000 Italians, part of history's greatest population movement.* Rootless and adrift in the New World, they formed "foreign language" enclaves such as the one in Rochester, N.Y., where dark, pun-loving Author Mangione grew up. "Most of my relatives lived in one neighborhood [nicknamed Mount Allegro], not more than five or six blocks from each other. That was about as far apart as they could live without feeling that America was a desolate and lonely place."

Life in Mount Allegro was warm, noisy and often violent and profane. Uncle Nino in a fit of temporary madness tried to kill his brother with a flatiron. Children at too early an age learned the meaning and implications of epithets like strafalaria (genteel translation: loose woman). And often, at night, the sky hung like a smoldering sulphurous ceiling above the optical factory that squatted on the banks of the Genesee River. "Underneath it my relatives sang and played guitars and, if they noticed the sky at all, they were reminded of the lemon groves in Sicily. They were stubborn poets." More deeply glowing than the sky above the factory was the inherited canopy of Catholicism. "Their Catholicism, like their lives, was enveloped in a heavy blanket of fatalism. . . . There might be a great deal of noisy emotionalism among my relatives over a misfortune . . . but eventually it was laid on the doorstep of Destiny. 'E tu -Destino!' That single phrase explained everything."

But one thing even E tu Destino could not explain--the sense of loss that brooded above Mount Allegro, the feeling of being strange and alien in a strangely alien land. At school the second generation were told that if they were born here they were American, but "then one day one of your new teachers looked at you brightly and said you were Italian because your last name was Amoroso and that too was puzzling." You talked it over with your father but he wasn't very helpful. "Your children will be Americani, but you, my son, are half-and-half. . . . What do you learn in school, anyway?"

Author Mangione's search for a more valid identity and sense of place than is implied by "half-and-half" led him to books, to the studies of the sociologists, finally to Sicily itself. "... I began asking myself questions like these: Was it in the chemistry of human life for my relatives to become Anglo-Saxonized--the apparent goal of the melting pot theorists? . . . Was it necessary that they try to change themselves? Didn't America need their wisdom and their warmth, just as they and their children needed America's youth and vigor?"

Mount Allegro gives no dogmatic answer to these questions, but itself is an emphatic, resounding affirmative. As for Fascism, that question was answered by Mangione's father, who listened to the boastings of a Mussolunitic, then snorted: "Eight million bayonets? Misca! Where has he got them? Stuck up his --?"

The Author. Rochester-born Jerre Mangione, 33, looks Sicilian enough to have posed for one of the statues in a Palermo piazza. Now special assistant to the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, his first writing job was ghosting love letters for his Mount Allegro relatives in love with women who could not read Italian. Says he of his early reading: "I got most of it done in the seclusion of bathrooms and under beds because my relatives believed too much reading was bound to drive a person insane." He, working his way through Syracuse University, graduated in 1931, went on to magazine writing, reading for publishers, etc. After the trip to Sicily described in Mount Allegro, he went to Washington as a member of the staff of the WPA Writer's Project, has been on the Government payroll ever since.

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