Some ‘courageous immigrants’ who ate well

The entrance to the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence, traditionally the heartland of southeastern New England’s Italian-American community.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

I was leafing through a copy of Dr. Edward Iannuccilli’s book What Ever Happened to Sunday Dinner? … and Other Stories the other day and enjoyed yet again these memoirs, which I first read some years ago. The tales of growing up in a tight-knit Italo-American family in Rhode Island are sometimes very funny, occasionally sad and filled with finely constructed  dialogue,  strong narrative drive and an understanding of the social history that everyone in the book (and most everyone else in those decades) was living through. They show how immigrant traditions  were diluted and sometimes even evaporated  in an always churning America. But this charming book is for everybody who has followed life in the mid-20th Century. It certainly brought back a lot of memories to me and many friends and relatives.

I liked his dedication, to his wife, Diane, and “To the courageous immigrants who made it possible.’’ Of course the old cliché is that we’re “a nation of immigrants’’ – true, including the Siberian-Americans we call Native Americans or Indians.