She took a length of rope and tied it around Cetta’s left shoulder. “Stand up,” she ordered, and then pulled the rope down to her crotch, so that the child had to hunch over. 
Next, she knotted it tightly around her left thigh. “This is a secret between you and me,” she told her…..“You’re going to tell everyone the fall left you crippled. Everyone, even your brothers,” she explained to the child. “You’ll wear this rope on for a month, to get used to it. After that, I’ll take it off, but you’ll still walk as though you were still wearing it…..And when the padrone comes by in the evening with his beautiful automobile and honks his horn, you run out to greet him.”
Back to Italy at the turn of the century, if you work on the padrone’s land, well you belong to him and Cetta in her early teens, beautiful, has been noticed by the padrone. Her mother goes to the extent of protecting her by the subterfuge of passing her for a cripple at the beginning of Di Fulvio’s sweeping love story of an Italian immigrant in New York, read for the now extended Italian lit month.
Of course this attempt turned out not to be sufficient and Cetta soon finds herself working as a prostitute in far of New York with a baby boy, Natale, re-named Christmas at Ellis Island and so begins the story of Christmas, which in the Italian quarters we are soon lead to understand that this must be a darkies name (I didn’t feel up to the ‘n’ word of the book). As Christmas grows up in this poor cut throat district he creates a gang, the Diamond Dogs, And we live through the petty crime of the beginnings.
One night whilst still young, Christmas comes across Hannah, a young Jewish girl from a wealthy family, half beaten to death, raped and with a finger sheared off (to obtain her ring) by the families gardener, Bill. Christmas takes her to hospital in his arms and so begins an epic love story, or at least that is the intention. A story where Hannah and Christmas are separated, Hannah becomes a professional photographer in the Los Angeles of the movies, never recovering from her assault, always afraid, Christmas, remaining in New York, becomes a star of the radio telling stories about his New York, the lower east side, of the gangs and in particular of the Diamond Dogs and finally Bill also ends up in Los Angeles working in the violent pornography business.
As the story works towards a climax I berate myself for reading through to the end a story entirely ruined for me by the longwinded descriptions of their feelings for one another, taking up easily a hundred pages of the book! A shame as the story itself relates an era.
First published in Italian as ‘La Gang dei Sogni’ by Arnoldo Mondadori in 2008
Translated into English by Ann McGarrell as “The Boy Who Granted Dreams” and published by Bastei Lübbe in 2015
South of Paris books 