Di Donato on Immigration, Faith

Di Donato on Immigration, Faith and Labor

The countless individuals and families who arrived in America during the Industrial Revolution would find in the urban tenements, factory floors and slumlike ethnic enclaves an opportunity far more elusive than anticipated. Greeted with a life of hardship and bigotry, new arrivals in America during the early 20th century would find their sense of faith and their religious values challenged by the harsh demand for toil and little to no insulation against the worst of possibilities. So is this demonstrated in the compelling 1939 memoirs by Pietro Di Donata, entitled Christ in Concrete. Dramatizing the experiences of Italian immigrants during the Depression Era, Di Donato paints through a set of moving and devastating stories a life in which religion might either be taken as a luxury or as a last refuge against America's false idealism.

"The Lean loaded his wheelbarrow and spat furiously. 'Sons of two-legged dogs . . . despised of even the Devil himself! Work! Sure! For America beautiful will eat you and spit your bones into the earth's hole! Work!' And with that his wiry frame pitched the barrow violently over the rough floor.'" (Di Donato, 3) it is thus that quite early, and sparing no degree of rhetorical flair, the author introduces the condition of the immigrant in the United States. The idea to which many of us have become accustomed -- that the flowery terms used to describe "America beautiful" are rarely consistent with the experience of those who come in search of it -- is here induced as a major premise in the larger text.

And in the story provided by Chapter 1 of Book I, entitled Geremio, this impression is reinforced by harsh realities such as the labor conditions which the Italian immigrants here portrayed faced on a daily basis. The theme of religious devotion permeates the relationship which the author describes with the job, as though the performance of this labor was part of a covenant entitling his family survival for another day in harsh America. He explicitly states this relationship in Chapter 1, reporting "Blessings to Thee, O Jesus. I have fought winds and cold. Hand to hand I have locked dumb stones in place and the great building rises. I have earned a bit of bread for me and mine.'" (Di Donato, 6) Framing his life thusly, the author seems to view his spiritual faith as a validation that his struggles are justified and that his toil is ultimately rewarded. This becomes an important premise throughout the work, which remarks upon immigrant life as inherently brutal and demanding a total submission to faith as a way to persist.

In Chapter 2 of Book I, this theme begins to take on more complex proportions, as the danger and psychological suffering brought to bear upon the immigrant laborers by their jobs had come to represent its own encompassing being. The degree to which many immigrants must bow to and pray before the "Job" with utter submission is emphasized as Di Donato comments on the psyche of these abused men. Their prostration before the Job had come to replace God for so many immigrants, even constituting something reflective of the mythological characterization of the circles of Hell. The author, once again describing the Lean, tells, "The barrow that he pushed, he did not love. The great God Job, he did not love. He felt a searing bitterness and a fathomless consternation at the queer consciousness that inflicted the ever mounting weight of structures that had to! had to! raise above his shoulders! When, when and where would the last stone be? Never . . ." (Di Donato1, 8)

This last passage reflects a major device for punishment in Dante's Inferno, a classic literary description of the Seven Circles of Hell. The concept of a never-ending task which never gets smaller or larger, and which never proceeds any closer to or further from its goal, is described as a punishment designed for specific offenders. In the Di Donato text, this is the life reserved for immigrant laborers, who in addition to their unending toil, have been consumed by the capitalist, industrial beast that is America. The worship shown to the Job, a figurative effect of the Di Donato text, is nonetheless shown in Chapter 2 to constitute a form of religious heresy perpetrated by the United States and foisted upon its subjects great and small.

The immigrants described by the text are the meekest of these subjects, with some like Geremio struggling to retain faith betwixt he and his family even as the Job permeates his life. They are demonstrated to be thusly at the will of the Job and that which it allowed them or denied them. So is this illustrated in the absolutely horrific set of pages devoted to the collapse of the building in which the men worked. On Good Friday no less, as a warm happiness set about men soon to be on holiday, the splintering structured claimed each in a manner as gruesome and terrifying as one might imagine.