EDITORIAL REVIEWS
From Publishers Weekly
The title of this book comes from a quote by James Joyce's son Giorgio,
who, for an inexplicable reason, referred to the Irish as Zulus.
In 1990, Mathieu, an American freelance writer, journeyed to Roscrea,
County Tipperary, in search of the background of her grandmother,
Sarah, who emigrated to New York in 1912. What we encounter is a
depressing look at Irish country lifestyles. We meet the likes of
Sheila, a traveling woman and tinker, who at age 39 has had 18 children;
we meet Detective Hugh Beck of the Irish police, the Garda, who
defines his job thus: "Basically, I keep the poor from stealing
from the rich"; and Father Tierney, who believes that unemployment
and alcohol are at the root of the ever-present Irish diaspora.
Five years after her trip, Mathieu examines this diaspora from her
home in New York City as she interviews Irish immigrants who emerge
here as remarkably self-centered. Only Hugh Brolly, an ex-IRA Derry
man turned Bronx cab driver, and Father James Kelly, who helps immigrants,
show understanding of problems of immigrants in America, Irish or
otherwise. Mathieu stumbles on the unaddressed tension between the
former Irish immigrants who have been integrated and the newcomers
who take the "more guerrilla approach to it?get in, get what
you can, then get out." In her explorations of Irish society,
the author does learn something of her grandmother's hardships and
the difficult decisions she had to make, but she also concludes
that "the Irish came to discover America only to discover themselves,
and they didn't always like what they saw." A dour book by
an author who makes a somber subject seem even bleaker. Copyright
1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out
of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
After living briefly in Roscrea, County Tipperary?the small Irish
town her grandmother left in 1912?Brooklyn writer Mathieu was inspired
to explore the causes and repercussions of Irish emigration then
and now.
Copyright
1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out
of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Lightly mixing personal and family experience with an idiosyncratic
social history of Irish immigration, Mathieus first book draws on
her travels to Ireland and her interviews with the Irish in rural
Roscrea and environs and in New York City to survey the landscape
of emigration in Ireland and in the US. The author arrived in the
small town of Roscrea, County Tipperary, in central Ireland, the
year after she finished college, hoping to "discover who stays
in these unreconciled parts of the world, and ultimately who leaves
them.'' She was interested in the question for personal reasons,
her grandmother Sarah Reilly having emigrated from Ireland in 1912;
spending six years in New York City, she married and moved west,
eventually returning to Ireland in her 70s. Examining photographs
of her great-grandparents Richard and Mary Reilly, described as
the two who have ``presided over my life like childhood crimes,''
the author attempts to imagine their lives, looking for an explanation
of why their daughter Sarah became an exile. As Mathieu began to
conclude, migration is a "complicated business.'' In New York
she found the Irish she tried to interview were often suspicious
and uncooperative. Many returned to Ireland, though the New York
Irish continued to find unity in one another. Her detailings of
light and skies, the changing patterns of the rural Irish cloudscape,
and a particular "scotch-colored'' Greenwich Village dusk suggesting
perhaps that human seasons mirror the weather, Mathieu's nonscientific
study is content to make few hard conclusions. Mathieu's title,
from a word for the Irish that has also been used for American immigrants
heading west by rail, has a strangeness and mysteriousness that
Mathieu finds appropriate for her subject, its twists and turns,
the shadowy nature of the immigrant experience. Copyright
©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text
refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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