Books in the City: Immigrant Stories Challenge 2011

Showing posts with label Immigrant Stories Challenge 2011. Show all posts

Monday, July 18, 2011

Guest Post: Kate Kerrigan, author of Ellis Island

I am pleased to welcome author Kate Kerrigan to Books in the City. Kate is the author of Ellis Island: A Novel (my review here). She graciously agreed to write this guest post on immigration and what it has meant in her life.

Growing up Irish in London, England in the 1970’s was a cultural identity minefield.
My parents were both school teachers, educated and bookish with Irish republican sensibilities. I remember my sister coming home from school one day and innocently asking my mother; “Mum – are we posh or are we common?”
My mother replied; “If anyone should be rude enough to ask - you can tell them we are ‘Educated Irish.’”

Ballina, Co. Mayo (credit: Belleek Park)

Looking back now, it was equally as snobbish a distinction, but even as a young child I grabbed onto the notion. I was already confused about my true national identity.
Because my parents were teachers we enjoyed two-month holidays in Ireland every year. In my mother’s home-town of Ballina, County Mayo we stayed with our grandmother and hung out with the neighbours’ children. We went to discos’ and ceilidhs – I had my first kiss on the bridge crossing the Rover Moy with a heartbreakingly handsome young man called Eammon Rooney. But still, we were “the English kids” with our hee-haw accents and our strangely fashionable clothes. We hung out with the local kids, but were never quite accepted as local ourselves. My parents and grandparents were Irish born and bred, their brogue was intact – their history, but we, their children, bore the stigma of their having abandoned ship. They left Ireland – not for the glamour and affluence of our friends in America – but for the traitorous advantages on offer from our oppressors, the English.

The 70’s and 80’s was a bad time to be Irish in Britain with republican paramilitary groups – the IRA and terrorist offshoots – blowing up nightclubs and department stores. “If an Irish person who seems to have a lot of cash moves into your area,” signs on the London underground warned, “call this number,” with a hotline to the special police unit set up for people to report on their Irish neighbours. My politically motivated teenage years were spent keeping my mouth shut about my strong opinions on what I saw as the continued occupation of my parents’ homeland by the English. I did not agree on the planting of bombs in London. As a young woman I narrowly missed being inside Harrods of Knightsbridge when it was attacked and the blast blew in the windows of the hairdressing salon where I was working, but at the same time I knew more about the history and ongoing social injustice and politics that were leading this illegal call to arms.

Eventually, I moved to Ireland. Other people went abroad on holidays – we always went ‘home’. As a young adult, I spent all of my vacation time in my mother’s home in Ballina, County Mayo. I always said I moved to Ireland so I could start holidaying abroad!

The truth was far more complicated. I always felt more Irish than English and had always harboured a desire to live in the place my parents left. One of my sisters feels the same and followed me over here with her family, the other sister and our brother (who died, in London two years ago, God Rest His Soul) are Londoners through and through, and mystified by my desire to live here. They see themselves as Londoners, with Irish parents – which, in effect, is what we all were bought up to be. But it was never enough for me. I wanted to be properly Irish – somehow the English angle never computed in my soul.

I have been living in Ireland for twenty years now. I married a Dubliner, and we have two Irish boys with soft, sing-song accents. We live a few miles from my mother’s native Ballina in a fishing village called Killala in a house overlooking the sea. We burn bog-turf and bake soda-bread and have the radio tuned to R.T.E. For all that, I still speak with the North London accent I grew up with and am still, for all my family history in this area – if not a ‘blow-in’ (the name given to foreign residents) at least a “Plastic Paddy”. However, I am generally considered a wholly Irish writer and I won’t bend on that point. My latest offering, Ellis Island, is the first of a trilogy and deals with the question of identity and moral values that I find myself constantly drawn to as a writer.

So for all my efforts to fit in do I feel truly Irish now? The answer is – yes and no and either way it doesn’t matter to me any more. The greatest thing my emigrant identity has given me is enough interest to question and explore the influences of my parent’s background on my life and, in turn, the political and social circumstances that influenced their lives. Had they stayed in Ireland, and I had been born and educated here, perhaps I would not have had the questioning spirit that led me to become a writer? Would I have had the ‘outsiders’ view of the savage beauty of the landscape– the fresh ear for the odd vernacular, the curiosity to ask questions? Maybe. More importantly through living and writing in Ireland as the “pretender” to an Irish identity – I have learned that the personal path of the second generation emigrant carves it’s own peculiar place in a country’s history that is no less important that the people who were born there.

Thank you Kate for sharing your unique experience and perspective. We too always went "home" to Ireland each summer and I still get a little thrill when I visit now and a friend or family member says "You are welcome home". If you like Immigrant Stories, you won't be disappointed by Ellis Island: A Novel!

Monday, July 11, 2011

Immigrant Stories ala Europa Editions

Have you heard of the Europa Challenge? This unique challenge asks participants to commit to reading books from Europa Editions - a publisher of literary fiction. In fact, 2/3 of their titles are works of literature in translation. With this international influence, it is not surprising that many of their titles also include the theme of immigration/emigration. In keeping with my interest in Immigrant Stories , my focus for the Europa Challenge will be their books with an immigrant theme which include:

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio: A small culturally mixed community living an apartment building in the center of Rome is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbors is murdered. An investigation ensues and as each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned, the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. Each character takes his or her turn center-stage, “giving evidence,” recounting his or her story—the dramas of emigration, the daily equivocations of immigration, the fears and misunderstandings of a life spent on society’s margins, abused by mainstream culture’s fears and indifference, preconceptions and insensitivity. What emerges is a touching story that is common to us all, whether we live in Rome or in Los Angeles.

The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris: This exhilarating novel about tradition and modernity, obligation and emancipation, also speaks to what it means to live in a heterogeneous society where cultures and ideologies often clash. With this portrait of a man balanced between two cultures—liberated and successful but nonetheless conditioned by religion, family, and an overbearing mother—Leïla Marouane establishes herself as an original and talented chronicler of modern man’s inhibitions and taboos.

Between Two Seas: With the exuberance of innocence and childlike urgency, the story of Heumann’s fame and Bellusci’s obsession is told through the eyes of Florian—the two men’s grandson, a child of two countries and two cultures that are often at odds, and the unlikely heir to his Italian grandfather’s obsession.

Broken Glass Park :
The heroine of this engrossing and thoroughly contemporary novel is seventeen-year-old Sascha Naimann. Sascha was born in Moscow, but now lives in Berlin with her two younger siblings and, until recently, her mother. She is precocious, independent, street-wise, and, since her stepfather murdered her mother several months ago, an orphan. . . . Germany’s Freundin Magazine called Broken Glass Park “a gripping portrayal of life on the margins of society.” But Sascha’s story does not remain on the margins; it goes straight to the heart of what it means to be young, alive, and conscious in these first decades of the new century.

Bone China: A beautifully crafted story of hope and survival set in Sri Lanka and England that will appeal to all readers of White Teeth and The Inheritance of Loss.

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine: Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray.

Told with sly humor and an anthropologist’s eye for detail, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is the story of three unforgettable women whose destinies are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic. In her new novel, Russian-born Alina Bronsky gives readers a moving portrait of the devious limits of the will to survive.

I like the fact that these books cover emigration to countries other than the US which is a change from many of the other books I have read for the challenge. So, if you are a participant in the Immigrant Stories Challenge, consider Europa Editions for some of your selections and join in the Europa Challenge!

If immigrant stories are not your thing, never fear - there are over 100 books in the Europa catalog covering a variety of topics - I am sure there is one in there for you!

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Immigrant Stories Finds at BEA

I spent one day at BEA this year and as I walked the floor and spoke to publishers I was on the hunt for book recommendations for the Immigrant Stories Challenge. The publishers were great and made some excellent recommendations from their backlist and from their upcoming releases. Here is a sampling:

HarperCollins