Paper Fish by Tina De Rosa

Reviewed by Erica Varlese (CLA 2010)

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Published in 1980, Paper Fish , by Tina De Rosa, was hiding as a literary gem. Extending upon a very short line of ethnic literary tradition, the story was written in gentle, modern prose. It tells the tale of a young Italian-American child, Carmolina BellaCasa - meaning beautiful home - growing up in Chicago 's Italian ghetto. In a nostalgic effort to capture an intangible frontier of Italian-American life, De Rosa, in her fragmented, sensual style, tells the tale of a world where everyday life is an art-form. It's a world in which Carmolina's grandmother is the divine link between the spiritual and the physical, the Old Country and the New. It's world where her beautiful sister, Doria, suffers from an unidentifiable mental illness, eliciting fantastical explanations from the family's matriarch. Following the course of a disjointed, everyday life, Paper Fish maximizes the “other history” of Italian-Americans in the Chicago of the 1940s and 50s – a world where the local fruit vendor was more important than Al Capone.

Subject to prejudice, Carmolina and her family are surrounded by the safety of fellow paesanos in Chicago 's West Side . However, when she hears her parents discussing the possibility of sending Doria to a children's home, Carmolina rejects her home-life in search of a significantly metaphorical new identity, rather than accept the loss of her silent sister, with whom she shares the magical stories of her grandmother. Carmolina's narrative moves outside of her neighborhood, but it pulls the reader into a tumultuous nightmare. It is both childish and full of harsh reality, analogous to the cultural confusion felt by the children of immigrants, and the immigrants themselves, when acclimating to a foreign culture.

Indeed, the crisis of cultural identity is one of the main themes of De Rosa's book and is the benchmark of its significance. Italian-Americans have long defied definition in terms of being an ethnic minority. Those participating in this hybrid culture recognize a significant difference between that of the Northern European immigrants and themselves. Yet, at the same time, Italians are not included in the minority subculture of America . Thus, the absence of Paper Fish (it soon went out of print after being published in1980) during the hey-day of debates on minority literature is deplorable. Explaining and sharing immigrant experiences both adds depth and understanding to American culture as a whole, but also helps the author negotiate between an ancestral culture passed down from generation to generation and the alien American one. For any immigrant tale to be dominated by a specific narrative, – such as the popularity of Mafia tales in representations of Italian Americans - or largely silent, is detrimental to society as well as the new nationals looking to articulate their experiences and to understand their mixed history in its unique glory. De Rosa articulates this chasm between Italian and American culture well in her essay An Italian-American Woman Speaks Out , when she states, “What happens to a person who is raised in this environment full of color, loud music, loud voices, and genuine crying at funerals and then finds herself in a world where the highest emotional charges comes from the falling of the Dow Jones average, or yet another rise in the price of gold?”

The use of religion and language adds an ethereal, almost holy aspect to the book, elevating the lower class struggle to a story of the divine. De Rosa admits in the afterword that when she began writing the story, it was an attempt to fill the void left by the death of her grandmother and father, so that they could live forever. In this world of nostalgia, her sentences paint pictures of emotion, rather than merely describe the settings of the world around her characters. Each word is laced with just the right connotation. In fact, she has stated that while writing the book, she often paused the creative process because the emotions stirred became overwhelming. Thus, Paper Fish is a product of sincere emotion, leaving impressions to be inferred, rather than explicitly stated.

De Rosa's tale of her family becomes a novel that glorifies the smallest aspects of everyday life – from crushing dried peppers in the sun, to washing dishes, to watching women in black shuffle to church each morning. The signature style of the book is the poeticizing of routine and associating it with a traditional, ethereal mixture of Italian folklore and Catholicism that is common in Southern Italy . Coincidentally, it becomes the mode by which Carmolina's crisis of cultural identity is solved. At the very end, after the struggle of returning home has passed, the ill Grandma BellaCasa wants to see her granddaughter in her wedding dress before she dies. In a defiance of tradition and in a large, zealous procession, Grandma BellaCasa is brought before her granddaughter like a goddess, giving the gift of identity and history to the girl.

Paper Fish, significant not only in a cultural sense, but in a spiritually exciting one as well is a rare type of tale that pushes through to the emotional core of the reader, raising questions of identity, beauty and life. The linguistic masterpiece also reminds readers of their own family traditions and what it means to be an ethnic American – and our duty to the preservation of our delicate ancestries.