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446 Shorter Book Reviews Robert Anthony Orsi. The Madonna of I I5th Street: Faith and Communityin Italian Harlem, 1880-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. xxn"i+ 287 pp. Illus. This is a study of the most popular religious festival in Italian Harlem, the annual festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel. According to Professor Orsi, the '' celebration cannot be understood apart from an understanding of the lives of the people who took part in it" (xiii). The gestures, prayers and postures at the annual event reflected ''the inner life of the culture'' of the participants. To develop this concept, Orsi generally divides the book into two sections, the first of which is a backdrop for the second. Orsi describes the development ofltalian Harlem andthe f'esta, and what he calls the "domus-centered" society of the neighbourhood. In the second part, he penetrates the meaning of the devotion to the Madonna of I I5th Street. The devotion began in the Neapolitan town of Palla and was transplanted to New York in 1882. Unfortunately, Professor Orsi does not tell us much about the particular devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. For example, for which kindof petitions did she usually intercede? Where in Italy was she venerated? Why didso many Italian towns venerate her in addition to the town patron saint? Some answers would have helped us understand why the festa became so important in Harlem. The devotion was very quickly internalized by the rest of the Italian community of Harlem, and in 1904 the Madonna was elevated to the status of Marian sanctuary, at that time one of only two such sanctuaries in the United States. Orsi suggests convincingly that Pope Leo XIII intervened in this decision in order to crown his battle against Americanism and to seal ''the presence of a Romancentered Catholicism in the United States.'' It was also a statement against the American hierarchy's hostility to Italian immigrants and their religious practices. At the heart of the devotion and of thefesta was the domus. It was the source of '' meaning and morals'' for Italian Harlem. Orsi develops this concept primarily by using transcripts of interviews of the 1920s and 1930s by Leonard Covello, the Harlem High School principal and Italian community leader. The domus had a clear set of values, beliefs and myths, which touched on everything from the proper relations among family members, or the choice of a marriage partner fora daughter, to the intervention of saints. Because of the public nature of Italian life in Harlem, ''the life of the domus spilled out into the streets.'' The streets werea "theatre of the domus" where the values of the household were also lived. The domus was also the locus of very deep and bitter conflicts, at the centre of which were always women. Because of their special powers within the family, women were at the heart of battles and tensions: with husbands, between sons and with daughters who desired more freedom. Orsi presents not a despairing or tragic Shorter Book Reviews 447 picture of the Italian-American family, but one in which suffering and frustration werevery real. The women therefore brought this agony and pain to the Madonna; during thefesta, the procession, the gestures, the manners of devotion confirmed women's powerful role in the community and also allowed them to "unburden themselves and reveal the complexities of their lives'' before this intercessor (149). The final chapter, entitled "The Theology of the Streets," raises some important questions about Catholic historiography in America. In this chapter, Orsi underlines the depth of the devotion to the Madonna. The identification of the Italian's suffering with that of Christ and the Madonna' 'became the people's way of participating in the central mystery of the Christian faith'' (222). The festa ''confirmed the people's belief that destiny ... was a shared destiny.'' Catholic historiography in the United States has generally shunned as peripheral the devotional practices of immigrant groups, and has centred instead on the "bricks and mortar," or more church-going and political Irish-American Catholics. Orsi, almost in the tradition of Leo XIII, tries to re-assert the centrality of devotional practices and forms of...

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