Autobiography of An Immigrant – About the Book

Giuseppe Tavormina was my great grandfather who died in 1976. I was born in 1981 and heard for years about this book he wrote. Apparently my great grandmother Jennie was not a fan of this book and until her death, it was sort of a family secret. No one knew where the book was or what it contained.

Sometime in my 20s I got my hands on on a copy of the manuscript, which was a big photocopied mess in a large D-ring binder. It had been written on a typewriter over 17 years or so, and totally pre-dated computers, word processers, and white-out. The manuscript is a rough draft with handwritten notes, and in some places is difficult to interpret due to so many generations of being photocopied.

I forget where I was working at the time but I definitely spent company time recreating my own copy of this family treasure; I took out stacks of pages and made photocopies of photocopies, spending hours creating my own copy of the manuscript-in-the-binder. I worked for a few years to transcribe the story, but it got to be tedious and I was super hung up. on preserving every punctuation mark….In short I never got past the first few chapters.

Finally, two decades later, the technology that exists today has made it possible for me to transcribe this manuscript in a much more meaningful way. This is a first-person account of immigrating to America and a piece of family history. I have kept much of the language exactly as it was written for this first pass, for the sake of preserving my great-grandfather’s voice. He learned English as a second language and I thought it important to keep the integrity of his grammar and syntax, despite the fact that it is overwritten, poorly punctuated and filled with run-on sentences. I love to imagine my great grandfather speaking how he wrote, and I am in awe that he was able to create such a prolific work in a language that was not his first.

I run not for fame, but for the people of my community – my home.

– Karry Barker