Gabriele Capone was one of 43,000 Italians who arrived in the U.S. in 1894. He was a barber by trade and could read and write his native language. He was from the village of Castellmarre di Stabia, sixteen miles south of Naples.
Gabriele, who was thirty years old, brought with him his pregnant twenty-seven-year-old wife Teresina (called Teresa), his two-year-old son Vincenzo and his infant son Raffaele. His plan was to do whatever work was necessary until he could open his own barber shop.
Along with thousands of other Italians, the Capone family moved to Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The neighborhood was virtually a slum, given its closness to the noisy Navy Yard.
The Capones were a quiet, conventional family…nothing about the Capone family was inherently disturbed, violent, or dishonest. The children and the parents were close; there was no apparent mental disability, no traumatic event that sent the boys hurtling into a life of crime. They did not display sociopathic or psychotic personalities; they were not crazy. Nor did they inherit a predilection for a criminal career or belong to a criminal society… They were a law-abiding, unremarkable Italian-American family with conventional patterns of behavior and frustrations; they displayed no special genius for crime, or anything else, for that matter.”
In May of 1906, Gabriele became an American citizen. Within the family, his children would be always known by their Italian names, but in the outside world, the boys would be known by the American names they adopted. Vincenzo became James; Raffaele became Ralph; Salvatore became Frank; Alphonse became Al. Later children were Amadeo Ermino (later John and nicknamed Mimi), Umberto (later Albert John), Matthew Nicholas, Rose and Malfalda.
The Essay on Family in “A Circle of Children” and “The Joy
Family in "A Circle of Children" and "The Joy Luck Club"A family gives the feeling of security and belonging, but a crisis within the family can change it forever. A family always goes through some sort of crisis, and it forces each member to realize the painful truths. Two novels, Mary MacCracken's A Circle of Children and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, deal with families trying to overcome a ...
