The hard struggle of the first "Italians of America"

The name Garibaldi Mario Lapolla probably means little to today's Italian readers. Yet, Lapolla - born in Rapolla (Basilicata) in 1888 and emigrated with his family to the United States as a child - was among the first writers to tell the story of the life of the Italian community in America, conveying with extraordinary intensity the social tensions, ambitions and contradictions of East Harlem, the largest Italian neighborhood between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the nucleus of the future Little Italy.

An English teacher in New York City public schools, Lapolla was a multifaceted man: a publicist, a writer of novels and cookbooks, a passionate illustrator and painter, and a political activist. Above all, he was a witness and a keen observer, and he described the world of emigration with a unique perspective: his personal experience and his work as an educator allowed him to grasp both the hopes of the first generation of Italians in America and the challenges of their children, torn between inherited identities and new aspirations. Through his works, Lapolla helped define a literature of emigration rich in contrasts, in which the Italian community confronts the American dream and its shadows.

This is demonstrated by the publication by the publishing house readerforblind for the first time in Italy of the debut novel by the Italian-American writer, Il fuoco e la carne (readerforblind, 2025, pp. 428), published in the United States in 1931. It is a novel that overflows with ambition and passion and that tells, with a lucid gaze and from a privileged position, the soul of Italian Harlem and the often cruel dream of America.

The novel follows two intertwined narrative lines, a love story marked by desire and guilt and a social climb built on determination and compromise , to tell the story of the first Italian immigrants to the United States of America. The protagonist, Agnese, is a woman who refuses a secondary role and who fights to conquer her own space in a society that sees her as a witch and would like her relegated to the margins. After a forbidden relationship with the priest Gelsomino and the ensuing scandal, Agnese leaves Italy with her father, brother, son Giovanni and husband of convenience Michele to seek her fortune in America. While her husband surrenders to unhappiness and indolence, Agnese redeems herself by building a real estate empire in East Harlem, fearlessly facing anyone who tries to hinder her and obtaining social recognition from the Italian community. Meanwhile, Giovanni, son of Agnese and Gelsomino, tries to escape a destiny that his mother would like to have sealed: in the emigrants' neighborhood, between dreams of social advancement and apparently unbreakable ties with his homeland, the young man tries to build a relationship with his natural father and seeks an escape from reality by taking refuge in art, through drawing and painting.

In this scenario and with these protagonists , Lapolla tells of an America made of illusions and disillusions, where money is redemption, the past a looming shadow and the family a battlefield between old rules and new beginnings . The protagonists of the book, in fact, are all Italian immigrants, torn between respect for the customs and traditions of their country of origin and the need to adapt to the new reality, men and women who speak a language mixed between English and dialect that the translator Erika Silvestri has rendered impeccably, preserving the atmosphere of the place and the novel as best as possible.

With a powerful plot, through a never sugarcoated language, Il fuoco nella carne offers a unique portrait of the community of the protagonists of the first great Italian exodus to America, always balanced between the past and the future, between the need to belong and the desire to change.