Review of Roland Merullo's Revere Beach Elegy
Revere Beach Elegy: A Memoir of Home and Beyond by Roland Merullo ( Micronesia 1979–80) AJAR Contemporaries 213 pages 2011 $16.00 Reviewed by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993–96) REVERE BEACH ELEGY is an autobiography of a painfully honest, and consequently endearing writer, Roland Merullo. It is not, however, “all about him.” Merullo reflects upon his myriad experiences in ways that hold a mirror to the reader’s own life stories and his or her own reactions to them. You don’t have to be Italian American (though I am) from an lower middle class enclave in Revere Beach, Massachusetts to empathize with Merullo’s childhood in an immigrant society with all the pressures that implies — “strictures of the old world and the promises and possibilities of the new.” When he is almost blinded by a baseball, his family believes that it was their prayers to St. Lucy that cured him, as they . . .
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