Narrative

This narration is about the first person of my family who in 1924 came to Argentina looking for a better future for him and for his mother and brothers.

My grandfather was born in Italy in 1911. He lived with their parents and his brothers in a little village called Turin.

There, his father had a carpentry where he built furniture to sell it in the city. He didn’t earn too much money, because the wood was so expensive that the profit he got was just enough for the every day’s food for his children and wife   as he couldn’t put higher prices to his products because in those years the economic situation wasn’t the best.

When he was about forty he started with serious health problems as a result of interminable hours of hard work .He felt terrible pain in his joints but he continued working, until one day he could not walk anymore and he was confined to bed.

He fell in such a deep depression because of his condition that some weeks later he died.

His mother couldn’t find a job, because women weren’t accepted, but sometimes she washed others people clothes for some little money that wasn’t almost anything  for feeding four children.

In those times my grandfather was 13, and he had to left school to help his mother. Fortunately his father had taught him his office, so he started to do some furniture to sell it and get money for his house, but the wood price increased abruptly so people couldn’t afford furniture despite it weren’t expensive. Everything was worst and worst, he and his brothers were almost ill because sometimes they didn’t eat for days, until one day he received a letter from his beloved uncle, in which he told my grandfather about how well was going everything in Argentina, that he had found job in a big carpentry where ships were built and there were needed more employees. He offered, too, a place to live and with the letter he sent him the the money to buy the ticket to go with him. My grandmother wasn’t sure about whether let   her son left to an unknown place with only 14 years old and maybe didn’t see him anymore or give him the opportunity of a better future which later would permit him to help his brothers. But he was so anxious and besides he wouldn’t be alone, so she gave him permission to leave.

They agreed on that when he had saved money he would send

it to her so she and his brothers could travel to Argentina too and live all together again.

He left Italy in 1924 .When he arrived to our country he met his uncle and next day he was working in this big carpentry in Buenos Aires .At the beginning he felt so strange but when he realized that most of the employees  were immigrants he was  more comfortable.

The first months he lived where his uncle was living, a tenement, (tenements   were big houses divided into lots of bedrooms that were owned by rich families which had abandoned them because of the yellow fever plague, and then with the arrival of the immigrants they saw an excellent opportunity to make money by renting them). The place was dirty and was no water to have a bath, but was the only place he could afford.

Later he rented a house outside the city and he sent money to his family as soon as he could, so each brother was coming one by one, but when it was his mother’s turn it was too late because she had died.

In 1931 he met my grandmother in his boss’s birthday party and they married in 1932.

Thy formed a warm family in a very nice house in Lanus and they had two daughters Elva and Zulma (my mother).

My grandfather died in 1970 of a sickness and my grandmother dedicated to look after her grandchildren until her death, in 1980.