ANGELA'S COUSINS.

Crossing Highbridge
A Memoir of Irish America
Maureen Waters
Syracuse University Press, $24.95, 149 pp.
Dreaming of Columbus
Boyhood in the Bronx
Michael Pearson
Syracuse University Press, $24.95, 218 pp.

In this era of identity politics and the postmodern re-invention of self and society, the memoir has become a favored mode of academic discourse and literary expression. Thus, it is hardly surprising that memoirs have come to the forefront of Irish and Irish American studies in recent years. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (Scribner, 1996) is no doubt the most famous of the genre; but in Ireland itself, Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (Henry Holt, 1996) isn't far behind. Irish America hasn't quite kept pace, although in Remembering Ahanagran (Hill & Wang, 1998), Richard White has written an engaging and provocative story of the awkward interaction between memory and history in his mother's family, centered in Ballylongford (County Kerry) and Chicago.

Now, Michael Pearson, director of creative writing at Old Dominion University, has weighed in with Dreaming of Columbus, while Maureen Waters, a professor of Irish Studies at Queens College, has written a touching meditation on her Irish immigrant family and her own life in Crossing Highbridge. Of the two, Waters's is more clearly an immigrant, and Irish, story. Her parents both came to the United States in the 1920s--her father from Sligo, her mother from Mayo; and her mother was followed by five sisters. All settled in New York City and reinforced the Irish ambiance of the Waters household. Growing up in the Bronx, Waters writes, "I was never altogether certain of the boundaries between the old country and the new or between this world and the next." Family and faith were the twin pillars of her identity, but Irish music and dance added extra excitement--and romance--to the mix. Waters remembers that "we had a well-worn collection of records featuring the likes of John McCormack, Morton Downey, and Dennis Day, which were played on a massive mahogany Victrola." Songs such as "Danny Boy" and "The Last Rose of Summer" presented "the family story over and over in a new guise."

Not that the family story was all about romance and the "lost, fair land of Kathleen Mavourneen." Memories of Ireland evoked a sadness, even bitterness, that cast a long shadow over the experience of family in the United States. One of Waters's uncles died in 1920, at the age of seventeen, when a bomb he was carrying exploded in his hands. Like his younger brother, her father also fought in the war of independence, and he took part in historic--but bitterly divisive--events such as the artillery assault on Dublin's Four Courts in June 1922 which formally launched the Irish civil war, and the army mutiny of 1924 which threatened, for a brief moment, to undermine the fragile democracy of the fledgling Irish Free State.

Waters's mother grew up amidst rural poverty in County Mayo, under the thumb of a "harsh" and "occasionally violent" father who "forced his daughters...to work in the fields when they should have been in school." In a magnificently evocative passage, Waters recalls the "gulf of sadness from which the great adventure of America did not distract my mother or her sisters for long. Moving in Irish circles, they found friends from 'the other side,' held on to ties that bound them to that bleak and beautiful homeland and that despairing father. They remained displaced persons, never fully at home on these expedient shores."

Waters herself is very much a child of the Bronx and its dense network of Catholic institutions--the Gothic parish church, the Carmelite convent across the street from her family's apartment, Sacred Heart School, and, later, Aquinas High School. Her father wanted education and a wider world for his daughters, even though he was a subway worker who "never developed the acquisitiveness of the middle class." But Maureen, at least, was in no hurry to move on. Alternately, she chafed at the expectation of domesticity and shied away from the charms of Manhattan, which for the most part remained "foreign territory." Eventually, after an unhappy year at a safely remote Catholic women's college in rural Maryland, she enrolled at Hunter College and ended up marrying "an unconventional man of whom everyone disapprove[d]." He turned out to be a "brutal, alcoholic husband" and a "bruising father." But this painful rite of passage "propelled" her from the Bronx, severed the bonds that had tied her to a deteriorating family situation, and allowed her to "grow up and locate America."

Although fourteen years younger than Waters, Michael Pearson is the product of essentially the same environment. He identifies himself as a "BIC," or "Bronx Irish Catholic," but in his case the Irish dimension is much more tenuous. His mother's roots were Irish, although her early years in the Bronx lacked the richly textured connection with the old country that characterized Waters's family life. His father was the son of a German immigrant, "Otto the tailor," who had discarded the surname Persanowski, "because it sounded Jewish, a drawback in the business world even when you were really Lutheran."

Pearson remembers his Catholic schooling, especially in elementary school, as marked by cruelty. "Some of those Ursuline nuns must have learned a great deal from [Senator Joseph] McCarthy's tactics," he writes. Mother David, in particular, was "fierce and brutal"; her "eyes were points of steel." (In contrast, Waters remembers the Sisters of Mercy at Sacred Heart as "kindly," "spiritual democrats" whose "particular genius...was to teach us of our immense spiritual value.")

Pearson survived the Mother Davids at Saint Philip Neri and developed a deep love of literature that fired his imagination and encouraged him to "think about moving on." But first he had to get out from under his father, a construction worker whose unhappiness and alcoholism threatened to shatter the Pearsons' family life. An outstanding student who had been accepted to MIT at age seventeen, his father had failed in his quest to "move on," because the need to support his family and care for his own ill and aged father had foreclosed the opportunities that MIT represented. During World War II, he had enlisted in the army and participated in the campaigns on Okinawa, Tarawa, and the Marshall Islands. But unlike the exemplary men and women of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation (Random House, 1998), he returned from the war gloomy, introspective, pessimistic. Somehow, Pearson speculates, the "dizzying optimism and sense of possibility" that characterized the 1950s only reinforced his sense of disappointment and failure.

According to Pearson, this was the story of all too many fathers and husbands in the Bronx. "Other families in other apartments...lived lives much like ours," he writes. "The fathers worked with their scarred hands, they drank, they carried dark secrets." While the women of the Bronx "were somehow able to be content," the men "gnawed at their own flesh like wolves caught in steel traps."

Powerful imagery. But weren't these World War II veterans part of the "Greatest Generation"? And didn't these skilled, white, union men achieve a cornucopia of wage increases and fringe benefits in the postwar era that made them the envy of less-skilled, nonunion, and--often--nonwhite workers? And while it wasn't suburbia, wasn't the Bronx a considerable step up from the increasingly mean streets of Hell's Kitchen and the Lower East Side? If, indeed, the 1950s were an era of optimism and widespread prosperity, then Pearson's portrait of fathers in the Bronx exposes the dark underside of those allegedly "happy days." Or perhaps it takes a particular experience and paints it with too broad a brush.

Pearson remembers the fabled sixties (in this case, the late sixties and early seventies) as a time when "we grew our hair down to our shoulders [and] marched in candlelight vigils against the war." But he acknowledges that he and other Fordham students also "plodded along like good Catholic boys." For Waters, it was dramatically different. She had little if any time for dreaming--of Columbus or any other epiphany. She turned her back on her Catholic faith and struggled with a disintegrating marriage and the challenge of raising two sons as a single parent. Her need to work for a living pushed her into several teaching jobs, including a pioneering venture at Queens College, where she taught Shakespeare, Hemingway, Freud, and James Baldwin to the "internal refugees" who were rising up in--and sometimes out of--the city's ghettos. Like so much of America at that time, the college became a racial battleground and Waters got caught in the crossfire. Overall, it was an exhilarating experience marred by painful, and disillusioning, moments. But she landed on her feet, with a position in the English Department at Queens College, where she still teaches. It was only a borough away from the Bronx, but she remembers feeling as if "at long last I was making my way inland past the swamp grass and locating America."

However, locating America also meant becoming ensnared in its tragic contradictions. Her son Brian became a free spirit--a child of "the sixties," perhaps, long after most "sixties people" had restored a measure of stability and order to their partially liberated lives. Unwilling to settle down to a regular job, Brian drifted in and out of his family's routine with unsettling irregularity. Eventually, his use of drugs and alcohol led to his death at the age of thirty-three. For Waters, it was devastating, an irretrievable loss. Her need to come to terms with the experience led her to write Crossing Highbridge.

"One goes back to origins," Waters writes, "thinking it will help one to find the answers or the turning points that led to the inevitable tragedy." But she also recognized that "one can't help reshaping the past even as one struggles to retrieve it." Nonetheless, in reshaping her own and her Irish family's past, she has captured something important: the texture, complexity, and poignance of the lives of Irish immigrants--those who gratefully embraced America and became full (albeit hyphenated) citizens, and those who "remained displaced persons, never fully at home on these expedient shores."

Joseph B. Nelson teaches history at Dartmouth College.