Review by Lynda La Rocca
Immigrant Life – May 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Salone Italiano – The True Story of an Italian Immigrant Family’s Struggles in Southwestern Colorado
by Kay Niemann
Published in 2005
by Western Reflections Publishing Company
ISBN 1-932738-25-8
I don’t know exactly how to explain my reaction to Salone Italiano. The book is described on its back cover as an “… epic novel [that] maintains a sense of realism that will keep readers riveted to its pages.” Far from being “riveted,” however, I was disappointed.
In fairness, my disappointment stems, in part, from anticipation. Like author Kay Niemann, I, too, am of Italian descent. And so I was eager to read Salone Italiano, which tells the story of Niemann’s Italian immigrant family, who came to the United States shortly before my grandfather made his own ocean crossing. While my relatives never ventured farther than America’s East Coast, Niemann’s headed west during the late 19th century, settling in Durango and Silverton (with one branch relocating in the copper-mining area of Calumet, Michigan) and becoming miners and business owners. The letters exchanged between family members living in Italy and the United States — more than 150 in all — form the basis for Salone Italiano.
This book contains wonderful family photographs, many dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with historical photographs of Colorado mining towns and nice illustrations by the author’s sister Carla. (A family tree would also have been helpful to keep all the names and family connections straight.) Its cover photo, which appears again within the text, shows Salone Italiano, the Durango boardinghouse and saloon also called The Mascot, which was owned and operated by Niemann’s grandparents, John and Katie Baudino, and John’s brother Tony.
Salone Italiano recounts such typically Italian customs as basing meals around polenta, a mush made of water and cornmeal or semolina, and naming several grandchildren after the same grandparent. In Niemann’s family, these kids were referred to throughout their lives as Big Phil and Little Phil; in my family, it was — and still is — Big Nick and Little Nick.
I enjoyed trying to decipher phrases and sentences written in the northern Italian Piedmontese dialect spoken by Niemann’s family. Like many dialects, including that of my relatives from southern Italy, this one bears little resemblance to the “proper” Italian found in grammar books.
And my own memories of domestic dramas were stirred by matriarch Angelina Sartore’s ability to find good in the husband her parents had arranged for her to wed, while — in almost the same breath — she curses him, the day she was married, and all men in general.
I WAS IMPRESSED with Niemann’s understanding of frontier-western mining history and her descriptions of underground coal and metal mining. But it’s worth noting that the 1893 repeal of the federal Sherman Silver Purchase Act (or as Niemann calls it, “The Great Silver Panic of 1893”) did a lot more than make silver prices “unstable” (page 110). The repeal actually caused silver prices to plummet, plunging silver-mining towns throughout the West into economic depressions from which many never recovered.
So why my disappointment? Niemann’s story contains all the elements of great literature. There’s triumph, despair, love, hatred, revenge, prejudice, illicit sex, even murder, not to mention bootlegging, prostitution, and prison terms. And so I expected an exciting narrative full of passion and drama. But the characters in Salone Italiano are one-dimensional. I never cared about them because none had personalities drawn fully enough to engage me and show me what made them tick.
And that, I think, is one of the chief dangers of basing a book on a “true” story. Authors who use this method often invent dialogue and extrapolate from sketchy information to create scenarios that don’t necessarily ring true. It takes a great writer to capture and portray the personalities of people who actually lived and therefore, actually had their own unique and quirky personalities.
In this case, the author was fortunate enough to have had real letters written by real people who lived and breathed and sometimes died in pursuit of the American dream. Perhaps they should have been allowed to speak for themselves and tell their stories in their own words, supported by interviews with surviving relatives, historical documents, whatever. That might have made them, and their adventures, more compelling.
ON THE OTHER HAND, when the author writes, “They had expressed themselves the best they could, considering some of them were barely literate,” and, “I decided to use my imagination to bring them to life,” one can’t help but wonder how much material actually came from the letters. And referring to this work as a “novel” (while the author asserts that “this story is true”) just makes matters more confusing. It’s neither novel nor biography nor memoir nor historical account, but rather a mishmash of all.
That said, parts of Salone Italiano will certainly resonate with many Italian-Americans. And I’ll venture to guess that readers from various ethnic backgrounds will relate to this culture that is based upon food, family, and fellowship, upon tradition, respect, hard work, and loyalty, where sons are allowed tremendous freedom while daughters are subject to nearly pathological parental control, and prejudice can boil over with unexpected, and sometimes tragic, consequences.
But hey, that’s family, right?