Author Lawrence Richette's Novel, The Secret Family - P.A.W. Print

Author Lawrence Richette will not tell you that his novel The Secret Family (Xlibris, Philadelphia, 2004) is about the American Dream experienced by Italian American immigrants. He will not say whether or not he feels an Italian American writer ought to learn to speak Italian outside of saying, "it can't hurt." He rarely refers to the Monti family of his story as Italians or immigrants or Americans.

"They are merely family members," said Richette.


	Lawrence Richette. photo, Mike DelVecchia

Since 1946, the year Richette's story ends, Italy has survived fifty governments, and given birth to its first middle class. According to the 2004 World Almanac and Book of Facts, Italy's Gross National Product is $1.1 trillion USD, produced by a population of 57 million. This founding member of NATO has a higher population-to-GNP ratio than the United Kingdom, whose GNP and population respectively are $1.03 trillion USD and 58 million. Adopting hip hop, heavy metal, multi-party leadership and the 100-cent Euro, Italy joins the cutting edge of the west (if you can call everything advances). Why are more than one third of the planet's Italians still living in America?

"Everybody understood the concept of free will and they saved their Lira," said Richette, who has updated a Temple Theory for Italians using immigrants as characters living in south Philly. "Thus the immigrants decided they would get a better situation by coming to the States." And nobody went back to the old country to rebuild the temple of dignity.

Richette's self-absorbed, upper class nomads revisit the boot during vicious bouts with R.E.M., longing to regain their idyllic security or end the bloodletting of their culture. "Part of my book is about what these people gave up," said Richette, who depicts a struggling community whose males congregate at the Calabrian Society clubhouse on Ninth Street. While building the Schuylkill Expressway, City Hall and the Philadelphia Museum, the immigrants have formed mutual aid societies during Richette's story to absorb the culture shock. In Philadelphia, the Italian Federation of Societies that formed in 1904, the Italian Tailors' Society (1884), and Stella d'Italia, an association of barbers that grouped in 1886, are real societies upon which Richette bases the enclaves that are sometimes referenced throughout Ragtime southern Philadelphia. On Spruce Street, which Richette writes was called by the newspapers, "The Babylon of Philadelphia," opium dens, prostitutes and dice games are abundant.

"But the immigrants," Richette said, "usually didn't have any idea what was going on outside of their South Philadelphia society." This insularity led Richette to create Francesco Monti, an immigrant from the fictional Calabrian village of San Lorenzo, who Richette said, "wants conveniently to be both a so-called one-hundred percent American, and, a leader of his immigrant community."

Francesco, the blue-eyed entrepreneur, who earns a quick fortune by patenting a brick-pointing process, has the audacity to quote Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas, and always carries a copy of Emerson's Self Reliance in his coat. His bribing Senator Boies Penrose-- while visiting the statesman's Spruce Street mansion, into arranging citizenship for his anarchist tailor friend Enrico, is a cold confirmation of Thoreau's writ, "you can never go home."

"Francesco Monti is in America to stay," said Richette.

"I'm sorry, Senator, it's not your city any more," Francesco tells the king maker. He displays his leather bound copy of the transcendentalist's essays. "It belongs to anyone strong enough to take a piece of it," announces the upstart "That's Americanism, isn't it?" Francesco exits Society Hill, "where the patricians lived…" to meet Enrico on Christian Street, "into the slums where their inheritors crowded into tenements," unsure whether or not his chutzpah has cost him Enrico's citizenship. The senator had refused to believe that his olive-skinned visitor read books written in English and told him, "you don't dress like a dago, I'll say that much for you."

"Showing Italian Americans who are well-educated and good at business was of grave importance to me," said Richette, who added, that Italian Americans are described as Mafiosi, illiterate or libidinal in media almost solely.

To create a hero, Richette first injures the Monti family, reducing it to base survival instincts. The father dies after blowing the family fortune. A flood destroys the house. The church and monarch of the town conspire to cheat the family out of its fortune. The mother sends her eleven year-old son Francesco to America, where he works in the coal mines of Scranton, intending that the child may send money home that will put his brother Vittorio through medical school. The mother and Richette create a Frankenstein monster of conspicuous consumption.

Fifteen years behind him in America, a reluctantly vacuous Francesco has had an affair with a married Methodist dilettante, drinks and whoremongers and speculates in shaky real estate deals. He recognizes himself to be living as Emerson prescribed, "a free agent, guiding his destiny into the glorious unknown." But the immigrant is intensely lonely, believing himself to be bereft of a country.

"I am trying to show the price paid by seeking the American dream by any means necessary," said Richette. "Around this time, when Francesco has nothing else to embrace, he has started to become quite greedy, embracing money."

Like Italy's Republican Party-Guiseppe Mazzini's last-ditch effort to create a democratic republican nation while living under a fake name in Pisa, was finally extinguished when its disgraced leader Giorgio LaMalfa resigned in 1992, old world culture, like "Young Italy," is dying in Richette's La Merica. The Monti cul de sac was founded in Italy.

Richette explains that Italians, since Samnite battled Etruscan, have taken formatively clumsy steps in arguing metaphysics. This is arguably why, as Astoria (Guernica, Toronto, 1995) author Robert Viscusi said, "rather than inheriting the Renaissance, Italians were orphaned by it." That is, if one hated Futurism along with Humanism and encoded law, one might instead fancy oneself the skinned-down Italian whom anarchist playwright Dario Fo believed himself to be, shrugging off cultural dialectics entirely. Or, unable to reconcile the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius with the three-cycle fatalism of Giovanni Battista Vico, one may settle on the innocuous stanzas of Ausonius, the John Irving of the late Roman Empire. "Is it really Capitalism's or ethnicity's or America's or any single thing's fault that so much culture as well as the self get lost?" Richette asked.

At the beginning of the book, a debate occurs between two of Francesco's future in-laws. Young socialist, northern Italian school teacher Achille Lampa and a village lawyer, a papist named Signor Amabile at San Lorenzo's Positivist Society, are at cultural loggerheads.

"This is the most important discussion of the novel," said Richette, "because Amabile and Lampa are respectively taking the two, major, opposing sides dividing the old and new world at the expense of either extremist." This argument, Richette displays, is where the myopic Pax Romana is sacrificed to the eternal struggle between Roman plebiscite and patrician. After listening to the lawyer blab an industrial age repackaging of the First Commandment, Lampa argues against the importance of organized religion via a caustic reductio ad absurdio. Belief in God, Lampa contends, did not unify Italy. When Garibaldi proclaimed Rome to be the center of the "Kingdom of Italy" half-intending to upset the possessive Pope Piux IX (who forced the general and Mazzini out of Rome), blind obedience and servitude did not wrest the peninsula that far out of the dark ages. Reason did, Lampa argues in an attempt to bring the Enlightenment, two hundred years late, to southern Italy. Unification was won only because the vigil to unite the kingdoms luckily had outlasted the international funding of the papal army. Italians, who have been evacuating their nation since 1870 (five million by 1986, according to the 2000 World Census), may as well keep fleeing this "wasteland," Lampa concludes, because their countrymen's myopic devotion to dogma is throwing Italy to the dogs.

Richette said, "San Lorenzo's evil priest and its prince are manifestations Veblen's archaic traits, operating the way such men have done for centuries, while Lampa is the exact opposite." Rather than becoming a Viscusi orphan, Francesco evolves as an amalgam of the stubbornness of Lampa and Amabile, to form the well-dressed entrepreneur cum milquetoast, who goes to confession but professes intimately that he does not believe. Veblen again, in his 'Conservation of Archaic Traits', Chapter Nine. "The institution of a leisure class acts to conserve, and even to rehabilitate, that archaic type of human nature and those elements of the archaic culture which the industrial evolution of society in its later stages acts to eliminate." (Veblen, 1899) Keeping up appearances, Francesco goes to confession before his marriage, burns down his business to collect insurance, forges a will and has his anarchist friend controversially buried in a Catholic cemetery.

"Lampa has to die," said Richette, whose decision to kill off Lampa was accomplished with such a fatalistic maiming of the character's idealism that Henrik Ibsen would have been simultaneously marveling at the condemnation and aghast at Richette's predestining the murder.

Lampa's older opponent, a demagogue, castigates the doomed teacher as a shallow, godless nihilist, receiving blustery applause from the fatuously ignorant villagers. Lampa, soon exiled on the tiny island of Ponza by Blackshirts for forging a passport, and later despairing over his final, boring exile in Greenwich Village, is finally murdered by American Fascists, after ignoring the daily threats arriving with his mail. Amabile will finally die after a stroke, ignoring the warning signs of old age and obesity while preparing a run for the Italian senate. The old world and a more progressive world are dying for Richette, who says, "Lampa condemns himself to death by refusing to defend himself and being a total idealist."

"Different from all of these characters, doomed or not," Richette explains, "Francesco is the only one whose self-centeredness is dedicated to getting ahead by turning a buck in the new world."

But without the passion of the bickering San Lorenzo fools, or the gluttony of Boies Penrose, Richette's nomad has nothing beyond profiteering, about which to ruminate. It is supposed to help him. The author further delineates the failure of the alternative two establishment camps by adding a perverted, money-grubbing Catholic priest and a syphilis-ridden prince to the conservative faction. Moreover, during Lampa's interrogation by Martin Dies in 1938, Richette sticks a nihilistic foot into the mouth of his socialist who sells out Francesco's brother Vittorio to HUAC for raising money for Mussolini through his local Fascio.

"The experience of Identity," Richette explained, "is dependent upon what kind of a person you are and the choices you make. This book is not about politics or conspiracies. It's about Free Will exercised by a family. It's all about the individual. At its heart, it's not really a book about Italians or Americans at all, but people and the choices they make."

When Francesco visits Italy, he marries Amabile's daughter Teresa. From here, each of the characters slowly makes his/her way to America. "Greed and ambition, concepts that I wanted to dramatize," said Richette, are being sublimated into an entrepreneur's feathering of his nest with soul mates. "Francesco is emulating the motivations of his mother, Lucinda, who the reason why everybody ends up coming to America in the first place."

Lucinda Monti comes into her own after her husband Leone dies, by refusing to distribute his estate among her children. "I've written a typical Italian family where the mother ends up becoming the dominant figure," explains the author. Recognizing the vanity of her children, Lucinda buttresses the family's security by hoarding its Lire. "She, like most Italian mothers, will do whatever it takes to make her family survive," Richette explains.

If real, Richette's matriarch--- Italian America's nod toward the Polynesians of the Trobriand Islands and the Great Goddess faction of ancient Minoa, could cheer feminist anthropologist Joan Bamberger into writing a happier conclusion to her 1974 thesis arguing against the existence of evidence of matriarchal culture and cause anthropologist Donald Brown to strike "patriarchy" from his 1991 list of "human universals." "That the mother rules in the Italian family," insisted Richette, "is fundamental to the Italian family's survival in America. Lucinda is single minded and she is strong."

Lucinda's decision to create an American out of her youngest child, is desperately made. Her nouveau riche family lost its fortune when the village's priest and prince (a rapacious pair who could easily sport tattoos reading, "We're the Pasa Novanti," if appearing in a Mario Puzo book), sold the father's mortgages at profit.

The patriarch's early death, Richette says, "is part of the family's discovery of the New World." America's east coast waits. Italy is on the verge of Mussolini.

Francesco's sister Leonora, missing her mother's strength of character, submits to Lucinda's urging that she surrender her son Carlo to the care of his grandmother when Lampa is imprisoned by Fascists. Leonora, ruminating in Manicheanism, heads to New York after being sodomized by Blackshirts, two villagers fulfilling vendettas against her family and proclaims that God has preserved her life while Satan has destroyed the family she has been building. Her brother Vittorio, a dandy, rapist, doctor and bored Great War veteran will head for Philadelphia in his tall riding boots, where his brother Francesco has arranged his marriage to the daughter of a rich doctor. Francesco, wielding the subtle phallocentrism of a salesman (he has constantly dreamed about returning to the long, tall pine trees of his village), collaborates with his mother, who is herself armed with the Jungian artillery of hot meals and crucifixes in arranging the mass exodus. Ellis Island or bust.

Thorsten Veblen, in chapter eight of The Theory of the Leisure Class, explained that human's struggle for existence through Selective Adaptation is characteristically matched by the same struggle in "institutions." The scheme of life, Veblen said, made up of the "aggregate of institutions in force at a given time" is, in the last analysis "reducible to terms of a prevalent type of character." (Veblen, 1899)

"Francesco wants simultaneously to be part of the leisure class and a part of the Italian community, while trying to reconcile these conflicting sides," said Richette. This polar attitude puts the hero into financial straits when he tries to get skeptical immigrants to invest in his houses.

The Italian family of Richette becomes as good a boot camp for Corporate America as the immigrants of Santa Caterina, Calabria and Roseto Valforte, Apulia were once breeding grounds for quarrymen, miners and bricklayers who scooted off to the mines of Scranton and the quarries of Easton.

"Francesco becomes his business or vice versa," said Richette, who even has his protagonist contemplating Americanizing his name to "Hill." Richette continued, "I depict the Italian American getting ahead, with as much resourcefulness as any American capitalist."

Richette's grandfather Domenico Richette and maternal uncle Zefferino Aversa came to Philadelphia from Santa Catarina, Calabria when Ragtime played on Spruce Street. "My grandfather destroyed his health working in the coal mines of Scranton and Bluefield, West Virginia when he was a little boy, and died of a heart attack one day on the streets of Philadelphia in front of my mother, when he was barely sixty," Richette said. Richette's mother, Lisa Aversa Richette has been a Family Court Senior Judge since 1971. In 1969, Aversa Richette wrote a book whose title has entered the American colloquy, Throw Away Children. Like the Monti patriarch, "My father died too young, in 1986," said Richette.

The game of staying ahead grows treacherous for Richette's fictional family. Francesco and his Irish American partner outwit a Jewish millionaire investor named Abe Greenglass, who doesn't realize that the young laborer had registered his patent during the morning the partners appear at his office at the Girard Bank and Trust. Greenglass' threat to steal the brick-pointing process is now neutralized and he pays the partners contractor fees plus ten percent of the profit of the resale of homes built with the brick-pointing method, giving the partners carte blanche to over-invest on flower boxes and stone walkways for their new "Garibaldi Estates."

"Francesco is beginning to emulate the ways of his father and gets greedy," Richette said. Francesco, who needs capital when his homes are suddenly under-selling, blackmails the rich Dr. Gioia into giving him one hundred acres of Mainline acreage. The land, Francesco insists, must become part of Vittorio's dowry, in order, as he tells Gioia, that his brother will not develop cold feet during his engagement to Bellina, Gioia's "horse of a daughter." When Gioia later dies, his estate is parceled between the Monti brothers, after Francesco forges the doctor's will.

"Then finally, all that becomes left," Richette says, "is the will just to get by."

During the depression, Greenglass winks that the Monti-Carney brickyard will make more money collecting fire insurance. Francesco, aided by Enrico, commits the profitable arson.

Like the temple of Judah, the brickyard had been a relic of the immigrant's ingenuity. The hero's livelihood is now dependent on the timely buying and selling of mortgages for the Calabrian Bank on Christian Street, which he owns. The power of the abstract, Richette argues, is responsible for the very idea of America, where one is free to dispense civil liberties to the highest bidder, but where tangible ownership, especially of an ideal, is next to impossible.

"I used foregrounding to make Philadelphia seem unfamiliar to the reader so that he'd feel like the immigrants feel," Richette explained, commenting on the formalist device whereby the author positions phenomena contemporary to the story's timeline in the literal foreground. Poet Arturo Giovannitti brings his begging cup pathetically to Francesco first to aid the International Workers of the World during the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike and later to raise funds for the legal defense of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Francesco copulates with his protestant lover in the Continental Hotel overlooking Chestnut Street. Vittorio marches up Broad Street with his Fascio in fez, boots and sash (in real life, Richette's uncle, Aversa, did the same). In Italy, Leonora witnesses Giacomo Matteotti precipitate his murder by condemning Mussolini in the senate and befriends a sardonic Antonio Gramsci uniting the communists of Turin. A semiotician might remark that Lampa's body, hanging from a meat hook in the Wood Street morgue, awaiting identification signifies the dirge of destruction Richette is singing about American manhood. Francesco notes "the dead looked… no more human… than the lambs the Ninth Street butchers hung in their windows at Eastertime." Perhaps the "unfinished X" wound demarcates the failure of virility-- if you cheekily buy Valerie Solanas' theory of chromosomes. Francesco, at the story's beginning, "admired his teacher above all other men in San Lorenzo."

By 1945, the fortunate pilgrim is disillusioned with America. Enrico has been murdered by a Depression lynch mob trying to make a run on Francesco's bank. Richette has made Francesco's torturous self actualization slow and lifelong. However, he gives Francesco a happy marriage to a fellow San Lorenzo native, whose balancing pacification allows the entrepreneur to remain the drama's suitable ideal spectator. When Teresa, who calls Italy, "home," convinces Francesco not to change their name to "Hill," the reader is granted amnesty from witnessing the dominant male character of the book become a rabid transcendentalist and the story develop into an existentialist anecdote or mock encomium on guineas making good by murdering their vowels. The husband is pained to look back at an America that has dealt him blows.

His former lover Laura Warrington had collaborated with her estranged husband Teddy at gunpoint to rid their marriage of this "dago." The Warringtons, Francesco realizes, are "one hundred percent Americans," the pedigreed stock of their Society Hill malaise and Protestant upbringing. Francesco, who has been paid at gunpoint to stop seeing the dame, sizes up "home." He circles Delancey Street, reaching Spruce Street, "its smell of cheap perfume and opium … looked at the painted ladies … a player piano … Drunken men in suspenders turned tipsy faces to him the way sick plants tilt toward the light. My God, Francesco thought, how long it took to discover America."

"The two countries (America and Italy) form polarities, returning or abandoning one for the other, provoking the intense need for mediation," Richette explained.

As a testament to how deficiently Americans grow, Richette brings Laura back to south Philly, during the Depression in a speakeasy. This follower of John Silas Reed is now a theatre director, a lesbian of letters and has been finding jobs for Italian immigrants at Cooper Union in Manhattan. Less morbidly neurotic about being seen with Italians than when she had been veiling her face while dating Francesco, she is turned down by her former lover for cash, demanding the stipend that her husband had pushed on him sixteen years earlier. Francesco answers by denigrating her sexuality. She throws punch in his face, tells him he stinks of garlic and calls him a "dirty little wop."

"I created Laura to exemplify America for Francesco," said Richette, who said he paired them as lovers because nothing else will go deep enough, "to symbolize America. He can get close enough to touch her but he cannot hold her. She is always out of reach. That is America. Whitman's 'Hectic Glow'."

Standing outside of the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's office, prepared to identify Lampa's body, Francesco asks, "Wasn't life supposed to get easier, smoother… with middle age? No… that was another American lie…"

Richette said, "I see people as full of contradictions and I tend to be somewhat analytical when I deal with them in real life." Leonora, by the story's end, falls upon the Madonna being wheeled through East Harlem during the Festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. However, her convent upbringing does not win over the dark half of her Manichean heresy while she mourns Lampa. Richette, who has Leonora commit suicide, explained the importance of writing with objectivity while writing about passionate characters.

"Sitting down to write, this transfers to being somewhat dispassionate and not taking sides," Richette, who was a news journalist for the City Paper between 1986 and 1988 and 1990 and 1992, continued. "Even Vittorio, who is a complete bastard, still cares about the clinics he runs to help the poor in San Lorenzo and Philadelphia."

Vittorio, who is sent to an interment camp in Montana, is saved by Francesco's money, which pays for an expensive civil liberties attorney. Furious, Leonora leaves her family, whom she is convinced has closed an eye to Vittorio's guilt in the murder of her common law husband, whom she is pleased to imagine is rotting in his chilly barracks in Montana. Lampa, an agnostic, who had never formally married Leonora, had not only been beleaguered by his patriotic brother-in-law but was thereby placed at odds with the "single-minded" matriarch. Lampa did not fulfill the Augustan-Victorian model of the Italian American family. The story's most pathetic sacrificial lambs (there is also an atheist Duchess, who, too mired in Kierkegaard, finally commits suicide) Lampa is thus denied honors that would befit proper capitalists, such as the routing out of his murderer. Moreover, implies Richette, Lampa, who with his gloomy Leonora has produced an illegitimate offspring, had never figured into the master plan for Americanization by the family matriarch, anyway.

Lampa's son Carlo boards a trolley at the book's end, proclaiming to Lucinda that he shall never return to the Monti family. But, as his Uncle Francesco had learned when he'd catch the trolley to Germantown, all intercity transit is circular.

"I'm not telling whether Carlo actually emancipates himself from the family but I am writing a sequel," said Richette.

Placing Richette rightfully in the canon of Italian American literature would have to be done presumptuously, because there is no such canon invented yet (Viscusi, founder of the Italian American Writers Association will tell you we're working on it). If you combine John Fante-- without the Neopolitan self deprecation, Mario Puzo-solely during his first novel with more current events, Nicolas Pileggi-- without gangsters and Umberto Eco with a better explained aesthetic distance, you still won't find Richette, but you might be getting close. Richette writes idyllic realism in the vein of John Steinbeck and a richly dated world-building in the urbane vein of Caleb Carr. The Secret Family is an easy read, as compelling as Issac Bashevis Singer during his best, gripping portraits of Jewish American immigrant families.

In his preface to Franco Mulas's Studies on Italian-American Literature, Fred L. Gardaphe said "[the] criticism of Italian American literature is not so much a new field, as it is unknown." Viscusi has railed against the illicit depiction of Italians in movies like Jungle Fever and Casino. (Qtd. in Verdicchio, 1995)

"Italian Americans are the only ethnic group left in America that you can still use as a punching bag." said Richette. "Ironically, they are the only white group left in America that is still treated this way."

Pasquale Verdicchio, in Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism Through the Italian Diaspora (Fairleigh Dickenson, NJ, 1997) blames the lack of availabilty to Western readers of full and properly translated volumes of such works as Gramsci's prison notebooks, and holds accountable even northern-southern Italian tensions for the distracted, overlooking by critics of the cultural worth of Italians and their diaspora in forming a stable and homogenous political and discursive entity. A discussion of Italy must include an examination of Italian America, says Verdicchio, or else much will continued to be lost and misunderstood. This subaltern idea has a strong cousin in Dipesh Chakrabarty's postulate that subordinate peoples rebel in the manner in which the master class has taught them. When Laura tells Francesco that he stinks of garlic, he replies that it is money, which she smells.

Philadelphia author Celeste Morello, author of Before Bruno (a study of the Philadelphia Mafia; Jefferies and Manz, Phil., 2000) has been quoted during the tours she gives of the Italian market, saying that Italian Americans involved in organized crime are involved in organized crime because it is in their nature to be criminals.

"Celeste is out of her mind. She should know better and it is a ridiculous, childish statement. She is a crazy person," said Richette, underscoring Morello's disposition to be the typical marrying of crime with impecunious ethnicity by fatuously stupid culture critics. In the introduction to The Mafia Encyclopedia (2nd Ed. Checkmark, NY, 1999), Carl Sifakis remands immigrant families to the ghetto after Prohibition. "With Repeal," pontificates Sifakis, the Italians and Jews should have reverted to their prior condition as ethnics about to step out from the ghettos but the Great Depression froze these groups in place." Sifakis, who claims that the Irish vacated the worst American ghettos, proceeds to insist "only those Jews and Italians talented in the entertainment and sports worlds, and a few through better education, could avoid the realities of a battered economic system. Most youths were trapped in the ghettos and for them, the only avenue of escape was crime."

"It's [Sifakis' introduction] is not accurate. Italians got out of the ghettos just as fast as the Jews did, right around World War II. Bad history like this pops up because people love clichés," said Richette. "It's the same as the anti-Semites who used to say that all Jews cared about was money or raping Gentile virgins."

"Okay, I don't mean it's in the Italian DNA to be criminal," said Morello, updating her tenet, "but how else would slum dwellers have survived, if not for crime?"

For the record, Richette's book--- like few written in American today about Italian Americans, does not contain a single Mafioso, Camorrista or Ndrangheta member.

"… I will always be a wop," Francesco tells Teresa. "The one hundred percent Americans, they hate us. The only Italian they know is Al Capone."

"Fiction is very close to dreaming," concluded Richette. "You are constantly dreaming while you are writing fiction. You are conjuring that dream while you are working on your word processor, which is why a novel can be interpreted twenty different ways by twenty different persons. It doesn't come from the rational part of the mind that creates laundry lists."

While showing a character who loses his identity, culture and several family members to his fanatical pursuit of the American Dream, Richette succeeds in teaching Italian Americans that they do not belong to a ghetto of the American mind. It is possible to make one's fortune in America, a nation whose preservation of civil liberties does not include the nurturing and preservation of immigrant culture.

The Secret Family is available on line through Xlibris. Search under "Richette," or the title at www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/search.asp.