Christ in Concrete

Pietro di Donato, in his semi-autobiographical novel Christ in Concrete, depicts the life, work and community of Italian immigrants in New York City in the 1920s. The protagonist Paul serves as a bridge between and a product of the Italian and American cultures, and undergoes experiences which force him to consider and reconsider all of the major belief systems upon which he has relied in the past. He resists the oppression of workers in the American system of economics, just as he resists the traditional Italian (Catholic) response to troubles in life, which his mother urges upon him. The end of the book finds Paul in the role of a kind of "Christ in concrete" himself, in which he represents the worker who must look to himself and other workers to win justice for themselves.

At the beginning of the book the author immerses the reader in the most horrible aspects of the experiences of the Italian immigrants in New York, with the terrible death on the job of a worker--Paul's father--serving as the context for those horrors. Before the death of Geremio, however, the author quickly establishes the richness of the Italian culture, especially its vitality and its language (Engishized, but no less ethnic in its power and uniqueness). He also demonstrates his ability to capture that culture as well as to succinctly describe the relationship between the workers and their attitude toward their grueling work.

For Geremio, this grueling work ends with an even more grueling death,

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ply the characters with colorful language, but instead infuses what they say with the arguments for justice those characters seek: 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 (3). This passionate cry against injustice and call for justice illuminates the book, although the competing interests of worker activism (especially in the persons of Geremio and Paul) clash with Paul's mother's Catholicism which urges a kind of passive acceptance of one's fate on earth in favor of rewards in the next world. Paul struggles with that choice but in the end di Donato leaves no doubt whatsoever that he has cast his lot in this world with other workers and has rejected the Catholic vision: "We have only one life! One life! . . . On earth, yes-- I want justice here! i want happiness here! I want life here! . . . Now! Now! I want salvation now! For I know oh I know we cannot live forever . . . . Mama, we must go on to a world of our own. We need each other more than ever--before we die crushed

Category: Literature - C