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Christ in Concrete (Centennial Edition)

Pietro Di Donato,

Studs Terkel (Preface),

Fred L. Gardaphé (Introduction)

3.70 · Rating details · 793 ratings · 78 reviews

An uncompromising yet beautiful portrait of the life of Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920s, Christ in Concrete is the story of a twelve-year-old boy who must support his family after his father's untimely death. ...more

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Mass Market Paperback, 256 pages

Published July 1st 1993 by Signet (first published 1937)

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Feb 01, 2009 Evan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2009-reads, labor, favorites, yearning, ny-ny, my-faves, evans-alternative-100, __in-my-collection, capitalist-piggy-swine

Wow. I mean, wow! First, di Donato's powers as a writer humble me. This book is touted as a social justice novel, but it's not quite the screed that Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was at times; di Donato's book is a cry to the heavens, it plumbs the mysteries and pleads with heart and soul the essential question: "Why?"

There are passages in this book that I've never seen equaled in terms of poignancy about the human condition, about loss and grief, and the belief and hope that our lost ones acco Wow. I mean, wow! First, di Donato's powers as a writer humble me. This book is touted as a social justice novel, but it's not quite the screed that Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was at times; di Donato's book is a cry to the heavens, it plumbs the mysteries and pleads with heart and soul the essential question: "Why?"

There are passages in this book that I've never seen equaled in terms of poignancy about the human condition, about loss and grief, and the belief and hope that our lost ones accompany us and watch over us. Sinclair's book---one of my all-time favorites---begins brilliantly with an Old Country wedding, and that seemingly natural way of life is contrasted with the ostensibly richer hopes of the New World, which becomes an unremitting stinking hellhole of merciless misery and injustice. Jurgis Rudkis works harder, but things only worsen. There's a glimmer of hope, but not much. In Sinclair's book, the immigrants are Lithuanians toiling in the rank hell of the Chicago packinghouses. In di Donato's, the hopefuls hail from Italy, plying their skills in the precarious, dangerous environs of New York City's building construction sites. In di Donato's book, the American city yields its tragedy early on; a tragedy that haunts everyone for the rest of the book. And yet, in the second to the last chapter, we have an inverse of Sinclair: an Old Country wedding, not in the old country, but in the new. Wine stomping and a night of sumptuous eating and partying inside the tenement block. This wedding chapter, "Fiesta," is an astounding tour de force. What's gloomy in Sinclair is more like yearning in di Donato.

Things become grim in this book, and yet the optimism of these people, these Italian immigrants is always to the fore. Somehow they get by, the family and the extended family are strong. So, for all its darkness, this book is constantly one of positivity. It's hard to quite put a finger on how di Donato pulls this off, yet he does. The author writes in a myriad of styles, always dense and passionate, occasionally experimental but never obscure. This is a book of incredible metaphors and imagery. Harrowing descriptions of death, and dreams, of nostalgia. It's sometimes as florid as its opera-loving characters. Its passions are not contained, yet it never feels sappy or sentimental. It feels genuine. It is heartfelt, deeply so. This book will make you cry. It made me.

There's an excellent 1949 film version, also worthy and for a long time banned for butting up against the forces of McCarthyism.

I veer into hyperbole: One of the greatest books ever written. It must be. ...more

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Sep 12, 2011 K.D. Absolutely rated it really liked it

Shelves: italian, translated, religion

This is a story of a 12-y/o Italian immigrant boy, Paul whose father, Geremio was buried alive one Good Friday when the building he was constructing collapsed and the fresh cement (thus the title) fell on him. The father has just signed a contract to pay, on installment basis, a house for his family and was excitedly telling everyone about it.

This seems to be based on Pietro Di Donato (1911-1992) actual experience as a boy whose family migrated from Italy to the US and whose father died in 1923. This is a story of a 12-y/o Italian immigrant boy, Paul whose father, Geremio was buried alive one Good Friday when the building he was constructing collapsed and the fresh cement (thus the title) fell on him. The father has just signed a contract to pay, on installment basis, a house for his family and was excitedly telling everyone about it.

This seems to be based on Pietro Di Donato (1911-1992) actual experience as a boy whose family migrated from Italy to the US and whose father died in 1923. Donato like Paul in the story, was 12 years old and had to work as a bricklayer making his as the breadwinner in the family. This book was written in 1939 (same year The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck came out) and was hailed as an accurate depiction of Italian immigrants experience trying to survive the harsh environment in the lower side of Manhattan during the Great Depression era.

Due to its rich religious imagery and the characters directly talking to God, reading this book is a good way to spend your Holy Week. It makes you as the question why do people suffer if there is indeed God. Why do God let His children suffer even if they truly believe in Him? For example, even job (yes, your job that gives you your salary) is referred by his people her as Job (first letter is capitalized) and I thought that Di Donato was referring to the prophet who lost his fortune and his whole family and had boils all over his body as God's way to test his faith. So, is this the way Di Donato suggests as the answer to that difficult question of why good people suffer despite having God in our midst? That He is testing us?

The plot could be predictable. The twist in the end is nothing spectacular but Paul's mother, Annunaziata's faith is something that I admire. Hers is a torch that guide her family that despite having lost her husband she was steadfast in her belief that they would survive and losing faith on God would not help. That despite all life's tests everything will turn out "fiesta." Oh, read that part, it's magic. Nicely written and it left that positivism that you experience from the first page of the book until that part. This book has a roller coaster effect on me but in the end, it will leave you hope.

A beautiful book. ...more

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Aug 11, 2007 Jonny rated it it was amazing

Why don't more people know about this book? An immigrant and second generation Italian-American tale written in 1939, also very much about class and exploitation--so much so that the movie version of it was banned in the US. ...more

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Oct 23, 2020 Muftarovam rated it really liked it

When i first saw this book at the bookshelves in the store, i imediattelly picked it up. I read "Christ in Concrete" on the cover and saw the buildings and i knew i had to read it. The title was provoking and the author was Italian, i knew i found something worth reading. My expectations were that this book was about the times of The Depression, but my guess was kind of wrong. It is about the times leading to the depression. Di Donato's writing is heavy, passionate and dramatic, as one would exp ...more

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Jul 19, 2008 Jacques Pierre rated it it was amazing

I know I'm getting redundant, but this is another favorite urban narrative with a focus on the struggles of the italian immigrant community in New York in the early 20th century. ...more

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Sep 04, 2011 Janis rated it it was amazing

Beautiful, absolutely beautiful story. Beautiful style. It was like reading poetry.

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Mar 09, 2015 James Van rated it it was amazing

I have not read a more devastating first chapter. I'll never look at an old building again without thinking of what the true human cost was of building America's great cities. ...more

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Mar 11, 2012 Stephen rated it really liked it

"Christ in Concrete" is both paean and prayer to the old immigrant Italian industrial worker.

Like the laborers it depicts, "Concrete" lurches towards moments of joy without ever breaking through the unrelenting misery that is very much author Pietro di Donato's message.

This is working class literature of the 1930s where the great unwashed are brought into finer relief, their desperate situations the fodder for heart-wrenching plot.

In vogue during its Depression heyday, this kind of literature ...more

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May 17, 2019 Alan rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20c, favorites

Published in the same year as The Grapes Of Wrath, Pietro Di Donato's first novel is in that same neglected vein of American working class literature: explicitly socialistic novels about the lives of the poor, the lives of the downtrodden. In this case, the story is largely autobiographical: the book is about Italian immigrant construction workers in New York. In the opening chapter, proud father of eight Geremio is crushed to death when a building collapses, forcing his eldest son, 12 year old ...more

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Mar 08, 2007 Natalie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It's astounding how under the radar this book is considering how mind-blowingly good it is. The first chapter includes the best description of a building under construction collapsing and crushing people that I've ever read. And it's really beautifully written. ...more

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Dec 29, 2017 Celina rated it it was amazing

Brutal, visceral, sensual. This book is thick with atmosphere and heavy with the pressure of Italian-american life just before the depression. Love the linguistic attentions and gritty realness. It is so lush with detail yet careful not to be so hyperbolic that it is not believable.

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May 31, 2018 Deborah De rated it really liked it

Beautiful,magical, almost lyrical at types, story of an Italian-American family in NYC during the Depression. Really funny pasta-eating scene. Lots of suffering, poverty, family struggle, etc. Lots of "cursing," but would be great to have them in Italian! ...more

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May 24, 2011 Elizabeth La Lettrice rated it it was amazing

Shelves: italian-writers, historical-fiction

Another essential for Italian American readers, studies, research, etc. Absolutely fantastic.

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Dec 11, 2018 Ralph F rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2018

A forgotten classic. DiDonato really captures the soul of the Italian immigrant and gives a realistic view of tenement life. A truly worthy read!

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Apr 10, 2019 A Solis rated it really liked it

Difficult to read and follow at times, but once you get the whole picture the story will have you wondering about life in general.

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Sep 03, 2017 Bill FromPA rated it really liked it

Shelves: 1930s

Christ in Concrete presents the often harrowing story of an Italian immigrant family in New York City in the 1920s. 12 year old Paul is forced into construction work to support his mother and 7 younger siblings after the death of his father Geremio in the collapse of a shoddily constructed building. The book alternates passages of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness – the narrative often becomes expressionistically inarticulate in scenes where the characters experience extreme stress - with
Christ in Concrete presents the often harrowing story of an Italian immigrant family in New York City in the 1920s. 12 year old Paul is forced into construction work to support his mother and 7 younger siblings after the death of his father Geremio in the collapse of a shoddily constructed building. The book alternates passages of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness – the narrative often becomes expressionistically inarticulate in scenes where the characters experience extreme stress - with semi-objective third person point of view passages. The more straightforward descriptive passages are among the best in the book: the sounds of the lower East Side by day and night, a visit to a tenement medium, and the novel’s big set piece, a wedding celebration among Italian-American construction workers and their wives. Di Donato writes dialogue in a kind of Italianized English meant to indicate when the characters are speaking in their native tongue:

For pleasure, do not laugh. … The boy is man-child of master mason and born in the mortar tub. I beg you, this is not moment for comedy: the little one is son of Italian and paesano who left his blood under Job.

That last word, “Job”, almost always capitalized and without a preceding article, is the way in which work and employment is referred to by the characters both in speech and thought throughout the book, unconsciously worshipped and feared as a kind of Moloch, a rival God to their orthodox Catholic pantheon.

The novel presents its criticisms of society – the greedy and bigoted bosses, the indifferent bureaucracy, the ineffective and self-seeking Catholic clergy – by showing, not telling, no direct attacks against these institutions are made, either by the author or characters. The only hints of larger economic and historic movements come from Paul’s conversations with his friend Louis, a Russian Jew his own age, an atheist scholar who reads Thorstein Veblen, and recounts the successive cruelty of the Tsarist and Bolshevist regimes. The last section of the novel takes place in the early years of the Great Depression, but even this society shattering event is overshadowed by the personal relationships of the characters and the crisis of faith Paul undergoes, symbolically presented over several pages in a dream vision which serves as the novel’s climax and which, like most such efforts, I found heavy-handed and unsatisfying.

The first chapter describes Geremio’s last days of life and ends with his death on Good Friday, which, especially given the book’s title, struck me as overly heavy-handed symbolism. I found in the introduction that this chapter was published first, as a separate story titled “Christ in Concrete”, also that the Good Friday death was based on the death of di Donato’s own father. The chapter is not quite integrated into what follows: the metaphor of Geremio as the “Christ in Concrete” doesn’t sustain itself and the Paul described here doesn’t join seamlessly to the character that carries most of the novel’s subsequent narrative – for instance, we hear nothing more of the crystal radio set built by Paul of which his father thinks with great pride. ...more

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Jan 09, 2020 ☆Tweety ~ purplebass ☆ rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2020, university, multi-pov, read-in-english, american-literature

Such a heartbreaking book about Italian immigrants in America during the first thirty years of 1900'.

The story, which reminded me I Malavoglia by Verga, was very tragic and haunting. Even though there is a tragedy after another, there are happy moments as well. This is life: a mix of happiness and pain. I'm Italian and I could feel the sorrow of the Italo-Americans who moved to the "new world" to look for a better life for themselves but were disillusioned by the American Dream. Despite being a Such a heartbreaking book about Italian immigrants in America during the first thirty years of 1900'.

The story, which reminded me I Malavoglia by Verga, was very tragic and haunting. Even though there is a tragedy after another, there are happy moments as well. This is life: a mix of happiness and pain. I'm Italian and I could feel the sorrow of the Italo-Americans who moved to the "new world" to look for a better life for themselves but were disillusioned by the American Dream. Despite being almost 100 year old, this story is still actual because many people today still wish for a better life and move to another country to pursue it. I admire them, but I am realist and think that I wouldn't be that courageous to do that and leave my country.

The book is divided into five parts: Geremio, Job, Tenement, Fiesta, Annunziata.

In the first part the main focus is Geremio, who is a foreman and works on a construction site that doesn't seem to respect the Law and at some point, the building he and the other Italian workers were building, collapses, leaving Geremio in concrete. He is paralyzed so he can't free himself and save his life. This event is tragic for his big family and their neighbors in the tenement because it happens on Good Friday and because Geremio was a respected man and worker who worked hard to sustain his people.

It isn't a coincidence that Geremio dies on Good Friday. He and his wife Annunziata are fervid Catholics and for them this day means the day Jesus was crucified and died. Geremio was crucified by his own "padrone" because Mister Murdin, his boss, never respected security norms and probably used low-cost materials for the construction. But of course he doesn't care - after all, it's "Eytalians" who died in the collapse, and they weren't even officially American citizens to begin with, so who cares?

Mister Murdin reasons like many sovereign-minded people today. The immigrant, despite moved from another country to live in my country, will never be seen as my equal. The immigrant is included in the group of citizens but he is also outside of the group. He is included just when you need him. In this case, Geremio's boss preyed on his and his "paesanos" hunger and will to live a better life, but he was exploiting them. They were like slaves and they probably knew it, but what could they do?

As Paul, Geremio's oldest son makes us see in the following parts, Job is needed. Job is what a man must do in order to go on, otherwise, he will starve and he will die. When Geremio dies, Paul tasks himself with protecting his family and he becomes his mother and his brother and sister's "father". This happens in the second part, JOB, which is not only named like that because of the job in general as "work", but also because Job in the Bible was a man who had to trust God even though his faith risked to be shaken because of what happened in his life. Paul too, like Job, holds his faith in Catholic church and trusts his mama Annunziata that God will help them, Jesus hasn't sacrificed for nothing. Geremio hasn't died for nothing. But once the boom period for the constructions of buildings in New York city ends after the infamous Black Friday of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression, Paul's faith starts to waver.

When his godfather Vincenz Nazone dies on the job in a similar manner to Geremio, Paul has lost his father not once, but twice. Where was God? Why didn't he help Nazone from falling?

Paul, who bears the name of yet another important apostle of Jesus who spread his religious message, feels cheated and betrayed towards the end. We only have one life, and "not even the Death can free us, for we are... Christ in concrete..." ...more

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Jan 13, 2018 Mike rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-owned

(The following review also appears on my blog: https://trumpfiction.wordpress.com/20...)

1939 saw the release of two celebrated works about the experiences of downtrodden American migrants to California during the Depression: John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and William Saroyan’s drama The Time of Your Life. Both would go on to win Pulitzer Prizes in their respective genres and enter the canon as classic American works of the proletariat in the Depression-era. Both would be mythologize (The following review also appears on my blog: https://trumpfiction.wordpress.com/20...)

1939 saw the release of two celebrated works about the experiences of downtrodden American migrants to California during the Depression: John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and William Saroyan’s drama The Time of Your Life. Both would go on to win Pulitzer Prizes in their respective genres and enter the canon as classic American works of the proletariat in the Depression-era. Both would be mythologized in Hollywood films -- the former starring Henry Fonda and the latter James Cagney. Equally celebrated in that year was a work of fiction that also would be turned into a film ten years later, Give Us This Day, directed by the blacklisted Edward Dmytryk. The novel's author didn’t win any awards or achieve the canonical status of Steinbeck or Saroyan, despite his novel’s passionate prose, timely narrative, and (as almost eighty years of time has confirmed) timeless themes.

The novel was Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, which focuses on the struggles of urban immigrants back east who risked their lives for starvation wages in the 1920s to help build the sprawling cities that drove an American economic boom that would come crashing down in 1929. Like The Grapes of Wrath and The Time of Your Life, Christ in Concrete is a critique of the mythical American Dream -- an idea that fuels the capitalist exploitation of immigrants, migrants, ethnic minorities, and the working poor for the prosperity and comfort of the the upper classes, thereby excluding from advancement the very American citizens who drive the economic engine. It is a novel in which the stark, bitter reality of the American promise becomes clear to the Italian immigrants who toil as bricklayers: their labor, their bodies, and their blood are used to develop a nation whose laws, justice system, and business practices not only preclude them from the profits of their labor, but dehumanize them at every turn -- or simply refuse even to acknowledge their existence.

The novel opens with the death of a bright and skilled bricklayer named Geremio, the patriarch of a large family of Italian immigrants who assume that their father’s hardwork and honest living will help them soon to achieve the American Dream: a steady job, their own home, financial stability, upward mobility, security for their children, etc. In truth, Geremio and his Italian-American co-workers are treated as expendable tools, whose safety is the last thing of concern to either the construction corporation or the law.

Geremio’s horrific death due to the negligence of uncaring bosses at his construction site is a brutal, visceral wake-up call: these immigrant laborers are not free and equal citizens in the American capitalist system. They are, instead, the Christs in concrete who sacrifice their lives for the pagan god “Job.” All that matters is Job. They live and die for Job. Job is their master.

Commentators often comment on the so-called “personification” of “Job” in the novel. However, it is not so much a personification as a deification. Job is another word for the pagan god of Capitalism (or even more specifically, Corporatism) with the owners functioning as high priests, the foremen as deacons, and the immigrant labor force as the flock, ostensibly “saved” by the holy auspices of Job, but ultimately guided to their demise like lambs to the slaughter. As the sacrificial offerings to the pagan god of the New World, the men are martyrs to a nation whose economic system exploits their sweat, steals their blood, and gives them only the hope of some better life in the future -- the “American Dream” as an eternal promise for their suffering. I would even suggest that the designation “Job” is a textual connection to the Biblical Job. Di Donato’s novel, like the Old Testament book, grapples with the injustice of innocent humans suffering purely on the faith of a silent god. In di Donato’s novel, that silent god is extended to include the pagan god of Capitalism.

Set against this pagan god of the New World is the joyous, pastoral, communal celebrations of the Italian immigrants, as documented in the section titled “Fiesta.” Their Old World pagan rituals are a stark contrast to both the stifling dominance of Job and the impotent emptiness of the Catholic Church, whose presence in the novel is epitomized by the Irish priest who dismisses a dire request for aid from Paul with a slice of “rich-rich cake.” Unable to nourish the spiritual needs of the immigrants or provide charity relief in their times of deep misfortune, the Church is the Old World equivalent of Job: taking from the people in the distant, empty promise of some mythical “better life” in the future. As a result, the working-class must rely on each other -- as workers and as neighbors -- drawing strength from their ancient, pre-Christian pagan rituals of sharing food and song in a sense of communal bonding.

Di Donato’s deeply empathetic portrait of the Italian immigrant laborers is both humanizing and glorifying: like Paul, the reader comes to see these men as martyrs, whose gruesome deaths on the scaffolding of the the new cathedrals of the pagan god Capitalism are preserved in concrete like the saints who adorn the stone parapets of medieval cathedrals -- monuments in stone that were created, not coincidentally, by the guilds of Old World working-class stonemasons, carpenters, and metallurgists who were the forefathers (perhaps even literally) of these Italian immigrants.

It cannot be coincidental that di Donato names his young protagonist Paul. Like St. Paul the Apostle, he witnesses a “crucifixion” and undergoes a spiritual transformation, accepting his role as an apostle of the new labor movement by testifying to the Christs in concrete who have suffered and died so that their families may one day secure a better life in a New World. Paul’s conversion roughly follows the new spiritual awakening described in the Pauline epistles, culminating in Paul's mystic dream-vision -- not in subjugation to the false gods of Job or Church, but in service to the very human sacrifices of his fellow laborers. Paul's dream details his conversion to a new faith in socialism and the labor movement: "He looks about Job. He is in a huge choir loft with scaffolding about the walls. In niches are Saints. They wear overalls and look like paesanos he dimly recalls. They step down and carry hods and push wheelbarrows. But what Saints are they? The little fellow and the curly-headed and the mortarman look like Thomas and Lazarene, and the Snoutnose who once visited the house."

Paul’s allegiance is now with his working-class brethren, whose martyrdom he has witnessed on the scaffolding of Job. Paul’s mother, a devout Catholic, soon makes the heart-rending decision that her faith must be born anew, not in the “plaster man and wooden cross,” but in her fellow man: “Follow him,” she tells her children of this newly transformed Paul. His mother's blessing is a testament to his new faith, which is documented in Christ in Concrete much like St. Paul’s own conversion was recounted in his First Epistle to the Corinthians.

Almost eighty years after its publication, di Donato's autobiographical portrait -- testifying to the sacrificial burden of new immigrants in a nation that purports to welcome them, while simultaneously exploiting their labor and dehumanizing their struggle -- remains, unfortunately, all-too-relevant. The American conceit of being a land of hope and plenty for tempest-tossed refugees is belied by every new generation's attempts to deny immigrants the same opportunities granted their ancestors. As we have learned from the fiction of so many great American writers who emigrated to the United States in the twentieth century -- Yezierska, Cahan, Saroyan, Rølvaag, and di Donato, among them -- the success of immigrants is won in the face of overwhelming challenges and hardships. For them, the promise of the American Dream exists at the expense of their struggle, rather than as a safe harbor from it. Their triumph is an overcoming of adversity built into a system that actively denies them its loftiest ideals. ...more

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Aug 05, 2017 Brian Ferguson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century-classic, library, political-and-social-issues

“Christ in Concrete” is a remarkable little find. Written nearly eighty years ago, but with nary an out-of-date-reference or any contrivance or corniness, it reads with dynamism and literate flight that would not seem out of place in the present day. All rings with authenticity of direct cultural and lifeblood experience. The story is of socio-economic, class and cultural struggle. It doesn’t take much to guess that this account originates from Donato’s own experiences as worker and family memb “Christ in Concrete” is a remarkable little find. Written nearly eighty years ago, but with nary an out-of-date-reference or any contrivance or corniness, it reads with dynamism and literate flight that would not seem out of place in the present day. All rings with authenticity of direct cultural and lifeblood experience. The story is of socio-economic, class and cultural struggle. It doesn’t take much to guess that this account originates from Donato’s own experiences as worker and family member. The brutality of labour struggle though America’s depression years is portrayed, I believe, without an iota of propagandistic or didactic posturing. I get the definite sense the descriptions are based on actual events as experienced, if not close accounts. And terrible and relentless are the conditions the people must endure indeed! At the outset of the novel the father of a large family and many of his co-workers are buried in the rubble of a sub-standard structure. The well-being of a score of children is immediately threatened as there is no social safety net. All the social institutions, government, business and religion come under fire, but refuse responsibility. Injury and loss continue throughout the book, but it is not merely a rote list of misfortunes.

This novel is actually very and proudly lyrical throughout. There is joy and pride in the face of irreparable tragedy. The wellspring of this is the working-class Italian cultural origins of the author and his family. The minutiae of passion both amongst the men, women and children is as detailed as the descriptions of the technique of the artisanry. I liked and identified with it on so many levels. I even find that that the writing has interesting characteristics, almost avant-garde. Description seems to float upon the page demanding that the reader fill in detail from their imagination with a humanistic commonality (where otherwise, because of cultural distinctiveness, the brain would pause to conjecture). It causes a disjunction where one is reading what must be foreign colloquialism with familiarity. The flow changes abruptly sometimes to poetic and sensory technique, but there is no dawdling in the narrative. Nothing is included that isn’t essential.

The inevitable comparisons would be to socially-conscious writers of the time, such as Lillian Hellman or John Steinbeck, but there is little bending, posturing or allegorical ornamentation to make a point. Donato does not have to reach very far to draw on his inspirational resources and though there is emotional passion it is never affected. Intensely passionate, scathing, yet loving. I wonder how Donato managed to find the time to pull this off. Being a manual labourer for years myself I know how much extreme labour taxes one’s ability to do much else in one’s life. Truly the work of a literary genius, pretty much unheralded anymore. I want to find out more about this guy, but I’ve the feeling that this would be his masterpiece. If it isn’t the only one, even if it is, this guy, in my opinion, is one of the greatest novelists unjustly forgotten. ...more

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Jan 12, 2019 Germanicusii rated it it was amazing

Shelves: rebirth-modernity, fiction

The United States a land of immigrants can also be called a land of refugees with the understanding that neither Native Americans nor enslaved Africans were strictly speaking refugees. The first refugees are euphemistically called pilgrims. In fact, they were refugees fleeing English and European religious, economic, and political oppression. Then came the great wave of European and Asian refugees or refuse. They suffered the double indignity of homeland oppression and the nativist cruelties of ...more

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Mar 09, 2016 Jim Puskas rated it it was amazing

Shelves: human-achievement, human-relations, family-relationships, our-world

A powerful work, portraying in agonizingly reality the experience of recent immigrants, in this case Italians in America as they struggle to find their way, scratch out a living, sweat, suffer and die in the merciless construction industry of the 1920s. In his introduction, Studs Terkel compares it with Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath", and aptly so. A boy of twelve, after the death of his father in a construction accident, sees no alternative but to quit school and seek employment as a bricklayer ...more

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Jan 21, 2018 Jan1243 rated it it was amazing

Here is a book about what it was like to be an immigrant, in this case Italian, in the early 20th century. No whiners here. I found myself asking, Is it really worth leaving your home to endure such hardship and longing for a “better” life when what you had may have actually been the better thing? The writing is exceptional, experimental, and di Donato manages to capture the pathos, the culture, and the heartache of the immigrant experience—where family and community were all you had—and it was ...more

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May 16, 2019 Frank Giaramida rated it it was amazing

One of the most underrated books I’ve ever read. Gripping and sad story and it’s a shame it doesn’t get enough attention.

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Feb 14, 2021 Joe Kraus rated it really liked it

Shelves: multi-ethnic

I’ve read this one four or five times before, but not for years. I’m coming back to it as I teach it to start a section of multi-ethnic American literature, and I am struck by it in contradictory ways.

To begin with, I find this has a much sentimental power as I remember. I am bit of a sap, but not exactly a sodden-handkerchief kind of guy. Still, each time I read about young Paul, I get weepy. Geremio dies. Luigi chops off his leg. And it falls to Paul, 12-year-old and sensitive Paul, to carry t I’ve read this one four or five times before, but not for years. I’m coming back to it as I teach it to start a section of multi-ethnic American literature, and I am struck by it in contradictory ways.

To begin with, I find this has a much sentimental power as I remember. I am bit of a sap, but not exactly a sodden-handkerchief kind of guy. Still, each time I read about young Paul, I get weepy. Geremio dies. Luigi chops off his leg. And it falls to Paul, 12-year-old and sensitive Paul, to carry the weight of the family by himself. I get weepy at the end of the Spencer Tracy Boys Town movie, and it’s the same with this. I know Di Donato is pulling at my heartstrings; I know he wants that reaction, and it makes me want to withhold it. But I can’t.

There’s something magnificent in that. If you can move your audience, you can do something with them.

The question, of course, is what you’re going to do with them. Oscar Wilde famously put down the death scene of Little Nell in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as something impossible to read without bursting out into tears…of laughter. F. Scott Fitzgerald dismissed this as “melo.” And they both have a point and are missing the point.

The point they share, and that I have to acknowledge, is that it’s tough to get people thinking once you have riled them up. We’ve seen that in the weird aftermath of the Capitol riots last month. Even if our Republican Senators have been unable to muster the modest political courage it should take to convict a President who put them in the way of fatal violence, many who participated in the riot have woken from a kind of dream. We hear them saying they were swayed by the President’s words as if they were hypnotized.

Christ in Concrete is a generous-spirited work, but it also leaves us emerging from a kind of dream state. Di Donato grabs our attention with the powerful story of a child losing his father on Good Friday and then having to do the work of a man in a foreign country. After that, though, he loses focus. There’s a condemnation here of…something. Maybe it’s the capitalist system, maybe it’s the way some immigrants cling to superstition or religion. Maybe it’s the way the Americanization process, welcome as it is for its capacity to ease the burdens of life, bleaches so much color from the world. And maybe it’s a proto-socialist call to action.

As much as I see that as the point that Wilde and Fitzgerald are making, though, I think it’s worth acknowledging the argument we get in Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs. One reason we’re inclined to dismiss sentimental fiction as a force is because it’s a force best employed by the less powerful. It’s usually seen as women’s fiction, though here it’s immigrant. It’s a cry for help, for mercy, and – at its best – it makes it harder to maintain the social fictions of decency that obscure the real power behind inequality.

All that said, the second issue that strikes me as I revisit this is the extent to which my students have had little to say about it. Maybe it’s a matter of a “classroom” that’s designed for six times as many as we have, one where we’re all masked and separated. Maybe it’s a matter of their own emotions stretched pretty thin. It can be harder to have sympathy for others when, however well you carry yourself, you’re still alert to being part of a pandemic moment.

I’ll know more in the coming days. We have a final discussion on this tomorrow, and then I’ll get some of their written feedback. For now, moved as I ever am by this novel, I’m on the fence about whether I’d want to assign it the next time I teach this class.
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May 06, 2017 Will rated it it was ok · review of another edition

"He'll put his tools here - no - put them there ... workers up and down the stairs - then the battery of riveting guns let loose and reverberating the live metal air of Job - whang! whang! resound the ironworkers' sledges ... hey buddy dump some mortar here - I can't stretch to the other tub - and get me an armful of damn brick in this corner! - put it up! - what's the bond in this angle? - uorrrrhhhhhh sing the hoists - goddamn-damn sonofabastarddd I said brick on the hoist - not tile! Brick yo ...more

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Nov 27, 2020 John Ryan added it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. My friend, Sherrod, suggested this book saying it was one of his favorite labor book, up there with The Jungle.

The author alone is an interesting guy. Pietro published this book at age 28 when he was a bricklayer, much like the main character of his book. He first published a short story in Esquire magazine then it became the basis of a best selling novel. He later wrote four more books but evidently was a bricklayer this entire time. He died the year before the book was republished as a classi My friend, Sherrod, suggested this book saying it was one of his favorite labor book, up there with The Jungle.

The author alone is an interesting guy. Pietro published this book at age 28 when he was a bricklayer, much like the main character of his book. He first published a short story in Esquire magazine then it became the basis of a best selling novel. He later wrote four more books but evidently was a bricklayer this entire time. He died the year before the book was republished as a classic.

It is a story about the hard life of workers who work hard pre-depression. One has to understand that the author gives life to his own life in the pages of this moving book. Paul’s dad, Geremio, dies on Good Friday from a tragic on-the-job accident, leaving a full family and one child on his way. Paul goes out to find support from the church and instead gets turned away, only holding some sweet desert from the priest who was enjoying his daily feast. Turned away from everywhere, Paul goes to work as a bricklayer, learning the job the hard way and treated poorly due to his young age, earning half to a third of other workers. The message of individual worker power – or lack thereof – is made clearly in this book.

The times are brought to life in so many rich ways. The book describes the poor conditions of the tenements, too many people, too few bathrooms, too many smells. He meets a Russian Jew who shares his family’s tough experiences. The widow and family go to the ornate offices of the government to appeal for insurance payments only to be dashed when the attorney claims they want more investigation into her dead husband’s actions that resulted in his death. Such injustice that still exists today at the hands of governments with far too much control from corporations and insurance companies. Then we are treated to the wedding delight of Paul and Cola, with plenty of food and celebration in the cramp conditions. It reminded me of reading the book Poland and the wedding celebration from hundreds of years ago.

Faith is an important part of his book, including the character Job. Paul losses his and that sets off a downward spiro of his mother who only had faith to get her through such a tough life.
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Jan 06, 2019 Jennifer Pletcher rated it liked it

This book takes place in the 1920s. Although it is written as a fictional story, it is based on events that happened to the author as a boy. The main character is a 12 year old boy whose father dies in a horrific building collapse and is entombed in concrete on Good Friday. The father has a brother, Luigi, who promises to help the family, but he goes to work and is injured to the point that he can no longer work. The 12 year old boy, Paul, has to go to work as a bricklayer to support his mother This book takes place in the 1920s. Although it is written as a fictional story, it is based on events that happened to the author as a boy. The main character is a 12 year old boy whose father dies in a horrific building collapse and is entombed in concrete on Good Friday. The father has a brother, Luigi, who promises to help the family, but he goes to work and is injured to the point that he can no longer work. The 12 year old boy, Paul, has to go to work as a bricklayer to support his mother and his siblings. He has to leave school and work construction - not the life he had envisioned. Because Paul is so young, he gets paid very little as a bricklayer. He soon overworks himself trying to make enough money, and has to leave a job.

Soon he finds a better paying brick-layer job and then later beings working on skyscrapers. He talks about working above "the toy world below". A close friend of his, and mentor falls to his death while working at one of the job sites and Paul decides at this point he no longer believes in God. With the death of his father and then of a close friend, he finds no reason for faith. His mother is upset with his decision, and Paul tries to make it up to her.

This book is labeled a classic, and I tried to like it. I liked the idea of it, and a lot of the story. I had a hard time with the writing. I keep coming back to these books - written in the late 1800s and early 1900s and think I can make it work, but I can't. I struggled with this one, even though it wasn't even 250 pages.

My grandparents were Italian immigrants. They came here and worked in the mines and in the mills of Pennsylvania. There lives were hard, so it did ring true to me how hard immigrants who come to America have it. Some make it - like my grandparents - and some don't. All work was dangerous, low pay, and unforgiving. So I was drawn to this story because of my own background. However - that darn writing style.

Anyway - if you aren't a big baby like I am, and enjoy the writing style of the early 20th century - don't pass up this book. ...more

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Mar 24, 2017 Pascale rated it it was ok

This novel is the puffed-up version of a story, first published in Esquire magazine, which went on to be named "Best short story of 1938". I have no doubt that the original story was first-rate because the beginning of this novel packs a powerful punch. As long as the author deals with his father's lethal accident on a construction job and his own decision to step in as the bread-winner for his mother and 7 siblings, the writing is strong and vibrant. Afterwards, we get all the predictable scene ...more

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May 16, 2019 eden rated it liked it

Shelves: read-2019

I dare you to find a book more Italian than this one.

"'Funiculi-Funicula, Funiculi ... Funicula!' Old Santos' white hair was painted with sauce, Amedeo's bald head was crossed with spaghetti strands, Orangepeel-Face cried for someone to wipe his eyes of the hot pepper, the skinny Nina bawled to her Passwater for splotching with spaghetti's red grease his only good suit, Santos' little Lucia laughed with tears and said one's husband was no longer distinguishable from another's, Black Mike and Naz ...more

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May 27, 2019 Vincent Lombardo rated it really liked it

This is a very powerful book. Autobiographical in nature, it is a coming of age story. A second generation Italian-American boy's father dies in a horrible accident and he drops out of grade school to support his large family, eventually doing the same job that his father did, bricklaying. But it is also about the Italian-American experience in 1920's America. Di Donato describes the poverty and how the immigrants performed difficult and dangerous jobs to survive. But he also writes about the cl ...more

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About Pietro Di Donato

Pietro Di Donato

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Pietro Di Donato was an italo-american writer and bricklayer. Born in West Hoboken in 1911 from italian immigrant parents from Vasto (Abruzzo). He had little scholar education but had a huge success with his autobiographical novel Christ in concrete published in 1939. The novel was inspired by the tragic death at work of his father, Geremia, on Good Friday's morning of 1923 when Pietro was twelve Pietro Di Donato was an italo-american writer and bricklayer. Born in West Hoboken in 1911 from italian immigrant parents from Vasto (Abruzzo). He had little scholar education but had a huge success with his autobiographical novel Christ in concrete published in 1939. The novel was inspired by the tragic death at work of his father, Geremia, on Good Friday's morning of 1923 when Pietro was twelve (it is stated that worker Pascal D'Angelo, later become a writer too witnessed and reported the tragic event to the family). Pietro himself became a bricklayer like his father.

Christ in concrete is based on a short story written in 1937 which was later expanded as a novel. The novel was defined "the bible of proletarian literature", and is written with a mixed language of street slang, biblical language, italian dialects and english sentence-costruction. The book, which portrayed the world of New York's Italian-American construction workers during The Great Depression, was hailed by critics in the United States and abroad as a metaphor for the immigrant experience in America, and cast Di Donato as one of the most celebrated Italian American novelists of the mid-20th century. The great success of the novel lead to a film adaptation in 1949 directed by Edward Dmytryk by the title Give Us This Day.

He also worked as a journalist and became a political activist. He published, This Woman (1958) and Three Circles of Light (1960), respectively the sequel and the prequel of his first novel. He also wrote the biographies of Francesca Saverio Gabrini, the first american saint (Immigrant Saint) and Maria Goretti, an italian girl murdered in 1902 and later canonized.

In 1978 his journalistic report about the mysterious kidnapping and murder of italian politician Aldo Moro (titled Christ in Plastic) published in Penthouse magazine won the Overseas Press Club Prize. The article was later adapted into a play entitled Moro.

Di Donato died on January 19, 1992 in Stony Brook, Long Island, with his last novel, American Gospels, still unpublished.

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“The Dead left, once more accompanied with the certain formality that numbed the senses. That of him which answered to a name and number in the society of laws was lowered into his first real estate. (…) And earth to Paul became flesh of dirt, and burial deep was cold rank to his heart. He carried his father's life, and every granule of earth that planted his father tighter beneath the footsteps of the living , he felt upon himself… earth on his body, earth suffocating his mouth and earth crushing his soul. Earth was a terrible thing, a solid dead-live sea of clay and stems, a brown foundation vastness hysterically firm. And now a still man, dignified by death, was oppressed into its womb of soil. The damp rose from the mud and up Paul's straight thin limbs.” — 0 likes

“Today I did not die. I have been let to live today and must be thankful that tomorrow I may return to work—to die.” — 0 likes

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