Alumna’s Book Chronicles Dominican Family Oddysey

On a January afternoon in 1986, Barbara Fischkin ’75, a reporter for New York Newsday, walked out of her editor’s office and wondered if she knew anything bout immigrants or immigration. For years she had her mother’s stories about surviving a Ukrainian pogrom and coming to America. But that had happened in 1919; it didn’t count.

Still, she had just been handed a gift, a book to be written in the guise of a newspaper series. She called the INS and was surprised to learn that more peoples were coming the New York City from the Dominican Republic than from anywhere else. Yet in 1986, no one talked about the Dominicans — or write about them.

A month later, after familiarizing herself with the city’s largest Dominican neighborhood, the reporter flew to Santo Domingo to look for a family. The U.S. Consulate was packed with people clamoring to come to America. Roselia Almonte, a tearful campesina in a turquoise dress, was among them. She had just been told that her only way of coming to America was to leave two of her three children behind.

The yearlong series that Fischkin, an English major at the University and writer and editor for the Albany Student Press, wrote about the Almonte family’s odyssey to American won the 1986 Livingston Award for International Reporting. Now, Muddy Cup, the book completed a decade later, covers 50 years in the lives of various members of the Almonte family. It begins in the 1950s Dominican Republic, as Javier Almonte, a third grader in a palm-hut schoolhouse, pledges allegiance to the dictator Rafael Trujillo. It ends in 1990s America, with Javier’s son Mauricio a successful college student, a budding poet and American citizen.

Published by Scribner press in August, Muddy Cup is called “a wonderful achievement,” by University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy. “This book has an ambitious scope of time that gives vivid life to there people and to the modern history of the Dominican Republic.”

Said Silvio Torres-Saillant, director of the Dominican Studies Institute at CUNY, “It is arguably the most humane rendition of the Dominican experience I have ever read in the United States.”

And Ken Auletta, long-time New York Daily News columnist, “Because Barbara Fischkin is such a gifted writer, there is no labor for the reader, just sheer pleasure and memories that will linger long after this book is closed.”

The title of the book comes from a poem by Irish poet John Montague, the University’s frequent writer in residence over the past decade. Mauricio Almonte met Montague in Albany when accompanied by Fischkin on a visit to her alma mater several years ago, and was inspired from that time on to write poetry.