A Sicilian in East Harlem By Salvatore Mondello

The Schools

Italian East Harlem was a dying community in New York City. It was also the largest Italian American community in the country. It existed after Irish and Jewish East Harlem and before Spanish East Harlem. As a child I was taught by my grandparents to speak dying languages in my dying neighborhood. Out of necessity I would become a cultural transient.

The Sicilian language and Sicilian culture were not considered important enough to be maintained in the United States and Italy in the 1930’s and 1940’s, my childhood years in East Harlem. Fascist Italy and New Deal America could find no place in their societies for the culture of the Sicilians. Ironically, Sicilian culture enjoyed a period of rebirth in the early twentieth century led by a playwright with an international following, Luigi Pirandello. His plays in the Sicilian language were performed in the Teatro Nazionale in Rome, the Teatro Olympia in Palermo, the Teatro Mastrojeni in Messina and elsewhere in Italy before the Fascist period. Often the leading male roles were played by Angelo Musco, an important Italian actor of that era. There were other important Sicilian authors writing in the Sicilian language, including