Alumni Authors    By Vinny Reda ewsday reporter Barbara Fischkin, B.A.’75, was not happy with her assignments covering Long Island school boards when she was called into an editor’s office on a January afternoon in 1986. When she left the office, she was energized—and concerned. “I had just told them I was wildly interested in immigration,” she remembered.       She had accepted an assignment to do a series on Dominican immigration to New York City in which she would find a family and explore the legal, physical, and emotional ramifications of its efforts to achieve U.S. citizenship. It was a topic, she told her editors, she was made for.       “In fact, I knew nothing about immigration and had thought little about it,” she said.       Still, she had just been handed a gift, a book to be written in the guise of a newspaper series.       “Someone once said that a novelist starts his work with love, and a journalist is brought by his work to love,” she said. “And that’s what happened with me.”       The year-long Newsday series that Fischkin, an English major at Albany and a one-time writer and editor for the Albany Student Press, wrote about the Almonte family’s odyssey to America won the 1986 Livingston Award for International Reporting. Now, the book version, covering 50 years of the Almonte family, is a reality, published last August by Scribner press. Fischkin titled it Muddy Cup, after a poem by Irish poet John Montague, the University’s frequent writer-in-residence over the past decade. Seventeen-year-old Mauricio Almonte met Montague in Albany when accompanied by Fischkin on a visit several years ago, and was inspired from that time on to write poetry.       Beginning her work in 1986, Fischkin called the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was surprised to learn that more people were coming into New York City from the Dominican Republic than from anywhere else. Yet no one at that time talked about the Dominicans—or wrote about them.       After a month of familiarizing herself with the city’s largest Dominican neighborhood, Fischkin 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 getting to the U.S. was to leave two of her three children behind.       The drama, and the dramatic possibilities, of Roselia’s situation ensnared Fischkin immediately. She had found the family that would be the basis of her work. Extensive interviews with children, aunts, uncles, and grandparents of the Almontes resulted not only in an intricate knowledge of a family’s odyssey, but in a living sense of history.       Her book begins in the 1950s Dominican Republic, as Javier Almonte, a third grader in a palm-hut schoolhouse, pledges allegiance to the dictator Trujillo. It ends in 1990s America, with Javier’s son, Mauricio, a successful college student, budding poet and American citizen. “The history of the Dominican Republic informed the characters in my book throughout their own history,” said Fischkin, who visited the campus last fall at the invitation of the New York State Writers Institute. That history of the family contained high moments of humor and tragedy, but some of it was well-guarded. One older family member, Marta, had to be plied with bribes of donuts and prodded by relatives before telling her story.       “After a while, I could see all the family members fighting with each other over the notion that one member’s voice was being used more than another’s in my work,” she said. “When the book was done, Elizabeth, Roselia’s oldest daughter, yelled at me, ‘It’s all true, it’s all true! It’s not good that’s it all true — but it’s all true!’” Fischkin smiled. “Some of them are still not talking to me, but I understand that too.”       Muddy Cup has been looked upon very favorably by critics, however. Silvio Torres-Saillant, director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City University of New York, called it “arguably the most humane rendition of the Dominican experience I have ever read in the United States.”    Alumni Authors    Page 1    Page 2    Page3