Just another emigre in Brooklyn

I went to a reading the other night for an Irish writer, Colm Toibin, at BookCourt, my favorite neighborhood bookstore (they have a different writer practically every night). His new book is called Brooklyn, and it's about a young woman who comes to Brooklyn from County Wexford in the 1950s. I've just started reading the book, so I can't give you a review. And I've never read anything else by Tiobin.

But what interested me in this book and reading was an article in the NY Times about Tiobin and his take on Brooklyn and Irish immigration.

As a double emigre myself (from Kentucky to Seattle and from Seattle to New York), I can relate. And as a third generation descendent of an Irish immigrant (my maternal great-grandmother), I'm always interested in most anything Irish.

But Toibin talked about something I'd never heard of, a phenomenon in Ireland called the American wake. What that means is the family get-together right before someone heads off for America. It's been such a common occurence over the decades because there have been succeeding waves of immigrants from Ireland, forced by economic circumstances to go -- and possibly never return.

This was the case for my great-grandmother, who came to America (via New Orleans) as a 9-year-old. The two salient facts about her, according to what I heard my mother say many times, were that she never had any contact with her family in County Kilkenny again, and that she always looked sad - indeed, I have a picture of her that is the essence of sadness.

In the 1950s, when Toibin's main character came here, at least there was the possibility of writing letters, even making phone calls. The huge numbers of Irish people who came here in the 1980s could fly back home more easily, and now cell phones and the Internet mean that almost constant communication is possible.

But emigres are always at a loss in a certain way, even if they can talk to those back home or visit often. I think you pick up the spirit of the places you live in - good, bad or indifferent -- and carry that with you wherever you go.

I'm a little Louisville, a little Seattle, and maybe I'm becoming a little Brooklyn, who knows?

I'm not even sure what that means. But the guy at the Korean grocer's where I buy fruit actually wished me a good evening tonight and smiled, which he's never done before. And tourists stop me on the street and ask me where Grimaldi's is or how to find the Brooklyn Bridge -- as though I look like I would know. And I do.