"Most novels don't have footnotes," said a friend. True, but this one is based on real people. Carmelo and Nellie Tosto were my parents. It's a work of fiction because there wasn't enough documentable evidence to write a typical biography.
Unlike today, with its surfeit of personal data - photos, videos, correspondence, diaries, and the like - the period between 1901 and 1939 afforded few opportunities for lower class immigrants to leave tangible evidence of their presence.
Carmelo's history is sparse. His documentation originates at an institution for abandoned infants in Catania, Sicily in 1901. He grew up in a nearby fishing village and at the age of fourteen went to work as a merchant marine sailor until 1925, when he jumped ship in Baltimore to escape Mussolini's conscription..
Nellie was born in Sicily but grew up from infancy in America with serious aspirations to become a Catholic nun. There's much more evidence of her early life, but her character and story needed some enhancement.
After diligent gleaning using powerful internet search tools, I amassed a trove of facts about them. I added whatever I could collect from personal reminiscences, family lore, and artifacts. And though it was exciting to see the early days of my long-gone parents taking shape, it was also frustrating. Like scrapbooks retrieved from a flood, the tides of time had dissolved much detail about them. As the first fruit of their convergence, I didn't know them personally until they were well into their thirties. By then, like most of us, they had changed markedly from their youthful personas. So I assembled their stories with the connective tissue of fiction, based on plausible inferences from facts.
In so doing, my parents became more human, more fascinating, and more endearing than when we made each other miserable in the 1940s and 1950s. I hope this book will help you appreciate them better than I did then, and as much as I do now.
