Cambridge Street

Book excerpt: In the early 1900s, the Mafia controls much of Sicily, the government is corrupt, and taxes are exorbitant. As a result of the terrible conditions and the limits of their crops, Tomas and Katerina Tomaso are forced to send their three grown sons and their grandchildren to live in America. It is a heart-breaking split: grandparents forced to say goodbye to grandchildren knowing they will likely never see them again. Parents and sons splitting from each other. Paolo and Gianna, their two young children and the two younger brothers endure a painful farewell to the people, the farm and the life they love. They arrive in Chicago on Christmas Day at the dawning of the Roaring Twenties. The sprawling, dirty, smelly city is not like anything they could have imagined or dreamed. The family moves into a fourth floor apartment in a run-down tenement building in the Little Italy section of town. The streets are run by mobsters, politicians and crooked cops, not much different from their homeland. The family soon learns that they are now in the lower class. The two-century family history of hard work and honesty in the Old Country does not matter here. They endure prejudice in the workplace, in the lack of social services and in the absence of police protection. Jobs were hard to find, especially for Italians and even worse for Sicilians. Poverty and discrimination humble them all. Life was tough, but they learned to be tougher. Slowly, the family overcomes obstacles and adjusts to their new homeland. TThe children grow and become Americans. The family was finally settled and content when a terrible and unforgiveable act of violence - committed against them by their Italian countrymen - struck the family, hard. Paolo and Gianna's dreams and hopes for their future and for their children hang in the balance as they decide on the course of action that will define them as people and determine their futures. Plots and tensions simmer and boil over in a shocking conclusion early one morning on Cambridge Street.