Books in Brief: Emigrants and Exiles

Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, by Kerby A. Miller (Oxford, 684 pp., $35)

Was ever a native soil celebrated in such a high order of song and poetry as that of Holy Ireland? There are always those vivid green fields, as Kerby A. Miller says in this magnificent study of the Irish emigration to North America, and “the brown and purple shades of its mountains.” There are the rosy-faced children and the white cottages in the hills and by the sea. There are the lakes, the trout fishing, and the horse breeding without equal in all the world. The Gulf Stream moderates the temperature year round. But then there is all that rain, the pervading wetness of it everywhere. The Atlantic side of Ireland gets the most and the worst of it, some 250 days of rain per year, and often with gale-force winds in the bargain. It is inevitable that so much moisture should at length produce blight; and it was indeed a particularly destructive strain of potato blight that was the proximate cause of the Great Famine in 1845, even without bringing into so damp a picture the military and social oppression administered by England since the seventeenth century. So Ireland has always been, in many ways, as lovely a land to leave asitisto visit. In any event, the Irish did not leave the land gladly; and in the general drift of the world’s great demographic movements, they must be counted as emigrants against their own deepest desires. This is substantiated, Mr. Miller finds, in the fact that the formation of a strong Irish-American nationalism occurred only after the emigration caused by the Great Famine itself. At that point, leaving Ireland was taken to mean leaving it for good, so that any sense of a truly shared cultural background must now be reformed in a strange land. This was so much the case that it gave rise to the phenomenon of the “American wake” —a wild party given the night before someone was to leave for the United States. As in so much of Irish culture, the American wake was based on the myth of the westering son who would never return to his native land. In this marvelous study, however, Mr. Miller is not so droll as to suggest the supreme irony that the transplanted Irish have become so assimilated in the American experience that they have all but forgotten the still prevailing troubles of that most peculiar land whence they came.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, by Kerby A. Miller (Oxford, 684 pp., $35)

Was ever a native soil celebrated in such a high order of song and poetry as that of Holy Ireland? There are always those vivid green fields, as Kerby A. Miller says in this magnificent study of the Irish emigration to North America, and “the brown and purple shades of its mountains.” There are the rosy-faced children and the white cottages in the hills and by the sea. There are the lakes, the trout fishing, and the horse breeding without equal in all the world. The Gulf Stream moderates the temperature year round. But then there is all that rain, the pervading wetness of it everywhere. The Atlantic side of Ireland gets the most and the worst of it, some 250 days of rain per year, and often with gale-force winds in the bargain. It is inevitable that so much moisture should at length produce blight; and it was indeed a particularly destructive strain of potato blight that was the proximate cause of the Great Famine in 1845, even without bringing into so damp a picture the military and social oppression administered by England since the seventeenth century. So Ireland has always been, in many ways, as lovely a land to leave asitisto visit. In any event, the Irish did not leave the land gladly; and in the general drift of the world’s great demographic movements, they must be counted as emigrants against their own deepest desires. This is substantiated, Mr. Miller finds, in the fact that the formation of a strong Irish-American nationalism occurred only after the emigration caused by the Great Famine itself. At that point, leaving Ireland was taken to mean leaving it for good, so that any sense of a truly shared cultural background must now be reformed in a strange land. This was so much the case that it gave rise to the phenomenon of the “American wake” —a wild party given the night before someone was to leave for the United States. As in so much of Irish culture, the American wake was based on the myth of the westering son who would never return to his native land. In this marvelous study, however, Mr. Miller is not so droll as to suggest the supreme irony that the transplanted Irish have become so assimilated in the American experience that they have all but forgotten the still prevailing troubles of that most peculiar land whence they came.