DATE: Sunday, September 7, 1997             TAG: 9709040598

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY BRINKLEY CRAFT GORANSON 

                                            LENGTH:   76 lines

A DOMINICAN FAMILY MAKES A LIFE IN AMERICA

MUDDY CUP

A Dominican Family Comes of Age in a New America

BARBARA FISCHKIN

Scribner. 367 pp. $24.

In 1986 Barbara Fischkin, then a reporter for New York's Newsday, was assigned to report on a year's experience in the life of a Dominican family as the members prepare to leave their country for the United States. Fischkin was a good choice for the story because her own mother was an immigrant of the Russian pogroms. But Fischkin's mother came to this country to escape being killed while the Dominican family came for money. In both cases, however, the adults sought a better life for their children.

Javier and Roselia Almonte and their three children, Elizabeth, Christian and Mauricio, were chosen for the Newsday series. Muddy Cup continues their story over the next 10 years. The title was taken from a poem by John Montague that describes an Irish mother's distaste for the America her husband and son embrace. Roselia Almonte, who reluctantly left her simple but satisfactory life in a rural section of the Dominican Republic, rejects New York in her heart, at least the New York outside her window. At times she seems to resent Fischkin's presence in her house.

The process of immigration begins with Marta, Javier's sister. She married a U.S. military veteran who left her enough money at his death to enable her to start bringing her brothers and sisters to the States. Over 10 years she financed the arrival of more than 20 relatives. Javier and Rosalia had lived together for 15 years with their three children, but had never married. Their first step was to make their relationship legal.

Disappointment and frustration loomed from the beginning. The American Consulate in Santo Domingo informed the Almontes that because it was unlikely Javier would make enough money to support a family of five, they could take only one child with them. Elizabeth went with her parents, and Christian and Mauricio were left behind with grandparents. But Javier was a skilled carpenter and easily found jobs in construction, which allowed him, along with some political strings pulled by Fischkin, to gather the entire family in Queens in just eight months.

Fischkin writes, the ``Dominican Republic is a political failure, a would-be plunderer's paradise, and a genocide pit since the time of Columbus, who took what gold he could from the riverbeds and set up a system that perpetuated slavery and extermination. One third of the population was killed off between 1494 and 1496. Yet the Dominican Republic has always honored Columbus. Though electricity for the people fails so often it has become a joke, the lighthouse memorial to Columbus shines on.''

They have America to thank for Rafael Trujillo, she continues. From 1916 to 1924 the United States occupied the Dominican Republic, ostensibly to protect the Caribbean from German influence but in reality to get a piece of the sugar trade. U.S. Marines trained the country's young men in military skills, and out of the Dominican National Guard came Trujillo, who stole the 1930 election and settled into the position of dictator for life. Under Trujillo, torture and murder became commonplace. The Cold War made life even more comfortable for Trujillo as he was considered to be a bulwark against Communism.

Fischkin reports that some of her happiest moments involved the meshing of her family - husband and two sons - with the Almontes. She seems closest to Mauricio, who by book's end is a graduate student on full scholarship at Ohio's Bowling Green University and the only one of the five to obtain citizenship. Elizabeth worked in the World Trade Center and was among those who survived the bombing in 1993. Christian had a secret love affair with Julio Santini, a Dominican of dubious character. She ran away with him back to the Dominican Republic.

Muddy Cup is an interesting story, but it is presented in bits and pieces that jump from past to present and back again. Fischkin doesn't always move smoothly from historical narrative to biographical detail. With Fischkin's reconstructed dialogue, the Almonte story is, at best, pseudo-biography.

But it's also an enlightening slice of cultural history, of one immigrant family's fate in a nation of immigrants. MEMO: Brinkley Craft Goranson is a retired Lutheran pastor who lives in

Virginia Beach.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu