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Book Reviews

The Hill: a parable of histories

By SANDRA OLIVETTI MARTIN

Gary Ross Mormino, Immigrants on the Hill: Italian-Americans in St. Louis 1882-1982. Urbana,Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1986. 290 pages. $21.95.

Here are five good reasons to read Immigrants on the Hill — Gary Ross Mormino's history of St. Louis' Italian enclave, one good reason not to, and one reason to complain after you've read it.

Reason 1: Children of the Hill will uncover their roots here.

Reason 2: Hill visitors who have read it can look with clairvoyance beyond the prim facade to the intangible forces that built and sustain this "showcase community."

Reason 3: St. Louisians who read it will be able to solve the mystery of why this ordinary blue-collar neighborhood has prospered while grander neighborhoods crumbled.

Reason 4: Italian-Americans who read it will strengthen their sense of identity, for the Hill's patterns of immigration and settlement illuminate the parallel paths millions of Italian villagers followed along their way to becoming Americans. Southern Illinois' many Italian-Americans will find particularly close parallels, since St. Louis' Italian-American residents were their city cousins.

Reason 5: All of us of whatever ancestries — hyphenated, hybridized, distanced from the past as we are — can read Immigrants on the Hill as a parable of the many histories submerged in our American nationality.

But all who read Immigrants on the Hill will have to hold firmly to their thread of purpose to avoid floundering in Gary Ross Mormino's clotted prose. Here nurture rather than nature seems to be the issue. The same scholarly training that Mr. Mormino follows so successfully in tracking today's citizens of the Hill to their grandparents' and great-grandparents' villages in Lombardy and Sicily leads his sentences astray. Trying to be so exact, to compass ideas so abstract, he writes such sentences as: "Self-interest and individual capitalism did not degenerate into an abscess of privatism, resulting in the outmigration of the entrepreneurally successful." Over many such constructions as this, I cast his book aside. But for one or the other of those five good reasons, each time I picked it up again.

Here is the Hill's reward:

Of all the differences that set St. Louis' Dago Hill apart from the city's other ethnic enclaves, one matters most: All the others are memories; Dago Hill has survived. Though visitors can no longer see the hill that gave the neighborhood its name, they can see the community. Swept sidewalks lead through tiny, manicured lawns to tidy brick houses not very different from their neighbors'. At nearly every corner, groceries, restaurants and taverns keep the people of the Hill contented in the neighborhood. Unifying the community — as it would in any Italian village — is the parish church, St. Ambrose's. Most of the people who live here belong here. Descendants of the Hill's Italian settlers, they are a community in spirit as well as in place.

A century's continuity is seldom achieved in America's neighborhoods, which seem to form only to dissolve. A peculiar convergence of forces made things different on the Hill. In Mr. Mormino's words: "The structural realities imposed on the Hill — race, geography and ecology — acted as a precipitant for group-colony behavior."

The meaning behind that phrase is his story. Like other immigrants, Italians caught the fever from one another. Each immigrant was no separate satellite launched into a new world. Instead, where one came, others followed. First the men. the wage-earners, came; then, when enough money had been saved, their families followed. So for many years, the network of the village remained the network of the settlement on the Hill.

To St. Louis' Hill came, first, villagers from an area of Italy's province of Lombardy. In later years, Sicilians also made their homes there. But until after World War II, the two cultures remained largely separate.

All came to the Hill to work. The clay mines that honeycombed the then-outlying region needed willing, undiscriminating hard workers. The Lombards and Sicilian were peasants, not miners, but they would work tirelessly for tiny wages. Where one found work, so did others. Cut off from the rest of the city by distance; by barriers of geography, culture, and race; and by lack of transportation, the growing community became self-sufficient. According to Mr. Mormino, "Immigrants sought identity and security through an elaborately fashioned cloak of kinship ties, community relationships, and job structures."


Camping in boarding houses
in the new settlement, the Italians
worked and saved to bring
their families over, to build a
house and to
ensure themselves and
one another against disaster


Camping in boarding houses in the new settlement, the Italians worked and saved to bring their families over, to build a house and to ensure themselves and one another against disaster. Mutual aid societies were the first institutions these pilgrims founded. Work — not education, religion or entrepreneurship — kept body soul and family together. The Hill grew into a solidly working-class community. According to Joe Palozzolo, one of the many immigrants and their descendants whose oral histories enrich Immigrants of the Hill: "My wife and I worked hard as we love our house. We would never sell it for any amount."

32/June 1987/Illinois Issues


Outside forces made their contributions as well. Prohibition increased the community's economic independence and prosperity. As Mr. Mormino writes: "Moonshine found fertile soil in the labyrinthine cellars, garages, mines, and even churches of the Hill." Three other community-strengthening forces, curiously, were also injected from the outside. Organized religion, education and sports came to Dago Hill from conscientious outsiders. Important as education and the church have been in sustaining the Hill as a community both independent and integrated with the larger society, sports has given the Hill its greatest notoriety. Beginning in the 20s and '30s, when the community was economically stable enough to tolerate organized play, the YMCA introduced sports to the Hill. Athletics "helped transform the raw, undisciplined energies of young Italian-Americans into constructive outlets for societally approved violence," writes Mr. Mormino. Along with its superstars — Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra — the Hill produced championship amateur soccer players and generations of young people practiced in "obedience, subordination, authority, teamwork, violence . . . and an intense sense of patriotism."

Many other facts and forces have converged on the Hill in its century. Most of them are identified, chronicled and interpreted in the 290 pages of Immigrants on the Hill. But one chapter is left out.

The women of the Hill remain shadows in the background. Mr. Mormino did not omit them from his oral history. Women as well as men add an authentic, human voice to his stilted, scholarly style. But Mr. Mormino has neglected women's special, identifiable role in forming the Hill. I regret that omission. Not only does it make Gary Ross Mormino's portrait less rich than the reality, but it also allows readers of Immigrants on the Hill to forget that our grandmothers as well as our grandfathers made America, its communities, and its hodgepodge of hyphenated Americans.

Sandra Olivetti Martin, an Italian-American with roots in southern Illinois and St. Louis, now writes from North Beach. Md. She is working on a biography of her immigrant grandmother.

June 1987/Illinois Issues/33



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