The shape of the larger narrative is, of course, generally known. The engines of Irish emigration – one of the largest migrations known to the modern world – were familiar ones: hunger, religious bigotry, tyranny. But there was one aspect of that long, grieving tale of departure that was unique to Ireland. From the time of Elizabeth I until the early 1920s, the story of Ireland was the story of an oppressed majority. The English colonial settlers and administrators were a fraction of the population of Ireland (never more than 20 percent). And for centuries, this minority used force of arms, a corrupt legal system, religious division, and a snarling cynicism to maintain an iron grip on their stolen property.

To be sure, many of the Irish resisted; sporadically, they rose in foolishly brave rebellions which were put down savagely. But the English attacked the Irish spirit in other ways, with networks of spies and informers who made uncertainty part of the Irish character, with the impositions of codes of manners intended to make the Irish feel permanently inferior. Sadly, on one level this brutal system worked. The urban Irish were forced to bend to the minority power, collaborate with it (“taking the king’s shilling”), surrender their language and religion, or be cast out to the margins of society. The immense numbers of rural Irish were deprived of property rights, education, and religious freedom, forced to subsist on the potato, while paying rents to English landlords and tithes to the Church of Ireland, which they did not attend. This vicious system was perfectly designed for maintaining power (Oliver Cromwell was one of Hitler’s heroes), but it created a seething population. The calamitous British mismanagement of the 1847-52 Famine removed from the Irish any temptation to believe in the myth of British justice. Hundreds of thousands of the Irish died; more than a million would cross the Atlantic, in desperation and hope, to America. That great migration changed the United States, and changed Ireland too.

“An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country,” wrote Oscar Wilde in 1889, “and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England’s weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realized what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish.”

In their separate ways, these two fine books confront the realities of exile, the long leaving of Ireland by Irish people, the great scattering called the diaspora. It is a measure of their value that they add new dimensions to the story without in any way inflating it, or reciting a mere catalog of injuries.

Frank McCourt’s book is a continuation of the personal story begun in the superb, and astonishingly successful, Angela’s Ashes. Part of the harrowing, accumulative power of the first book lay in its clear-eyed focus on an Ireland from which the British had departed. For millions, that departure from 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties removed a factor that had become a crucial part of the Irish character: a sense of the enemy. The Ireland of Frank McCourt’s childhood was the Ireland of Eamon DeValera (who, like McCourt, had been born in Brooklyn)..That is, it was the country of DeValera’s peculiarly anti-modern utopian vision: rural, Catholic, neutral. The country was priest-ridden, oppressed by an obsessively puritanical censorship (you could buy whiskey but not James Joyce), economically backward by design.

“If in the last century (Britain) tried to govern Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race-hatred and religious prejudice, “ wrote Wilde, “she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions.”

DeValera’s 20th century Ireland was ruled with other kinds of stupidity, aggravated by a different set of good intentions. He tried to force the Irish language upon people who had more immediate concerns, such as eating; he tried to roll the country back to the serenity of the paradise that was lost with the arrival of the Norman wolf. The gray bitter drizzle of the DeValera years, the pervasive sense of limits on desire and ambition, the emptiness and hardship, can be sensed in many of the stories of Frank O’Connor, in the poetry of Patrick Kavanaugh, and in Angela’s Ashes.

In ‘Tis, McCourt tells the story of his chosen exile, his flight from that 20th century Ireland, and his journey to America, specifically to the imagined city of New York. In Limerick, “city of gray miseries”, he was a boy trying to survive, with death all around him. Some of the death was physical (three of his siblings died), much of it was psychological, and the image of the city of skyscrapers helped keep him alive. He fled in 1949, with $40 in his pocket, taking cheap passage on a freighter to America. He was nineteen. He had left school after the eighth grade. He had bad teeth and infected eyes, which serve as recurring motifs in this second memoir, perhaps symbolizing the damage done to him physically and psychologically in Limerick.

“The minute I made some money in America I’d have to rush to a dentist to have my smile mended,” he writes on page 15. “You could see from the magazines and the films how the smile opened doors and brought girls running and if I didn’t have the smile I might as well go back to Limerick and get a job sorting letters at the post office where they wouldn’t care if you hadn’t a tooth in your head.”

The bad teeth remain with him for much of the book; we never do learn when he had them repaired.. The same is true of his eyes. Four or five times he describes them as looking like “two pissholes in the snow”, rimmed with caking yellow pus. At one point, he mentions conjunctivitis, but tosses this away, and never explains what exactly the condition is, and whether it was eventually cured. It’s as if in some deep recess of his Irish heart, he believed that fixing his teeth and his eyes would be a double sin of vanity. In New York, he does find work, almost immediately, through a priest with Democratic Party friends. He met the priest on the ship; later the priest would make a pass at him in a hotel room. At the Biltmore he is assigned to a menial job, sweeping up in the lobby, and finds the first of several furnished rooms.. His American life begins.

Much of it is at first a social torment, a period of adjustment through which all immigrants, Irish or otherwise, must pass. He carries an American passport, but he has an Irish accent shaped in Limerick. He is afraid to open his mouth. Partly because of his teeth, partly because of the accent. He is struggling, in short, with that sense of inferiority inflicted on so many Irishmen during the colonial years, and not erased until that memory was ancient. He looks at college boys and girls in the Biltmore lobby and is sure they would laugh if he spoke to them. He carries around the permanent baggage of shame: ashamed that he had only finished the eighth grade, ashamed because during the war his father had chosen to drink in England while his children starved in Ireland, ashamed because his all-too-human mother, Angela, had fallen in her loneliness and abandonment into the arms of an uncle. He could tell nobody in America about any of this. Instead -- in another repeated device -- he continually thinks about what he wants to say – to this tormentor or to that woman -- but doesn’t. That interiorized impulse, of course, is the beginning of his vocation as a writer.

By insisting on the importance of the specific and the local, McCourt expresses many of the emotions felt by millions of other immigrants, from every nationality: solitude, bafflement, social clumsiness, inadequacy, the confusions of personal freedom and the see-sawing emotional pull of the country left behind. Not every immigrant followed the exact path of Frank McCourt, from the Biltmore lobby to jobs on the loading docks of warehouses to the U.S. Army and finally to New York University and a long, honorable career as a teacher. Not every immigrant was mentored, as was McCourt, by a black warehouse man from Jamaica, whose son was in medical school in Canada. But for millions of ordinary immigrants – not simply the Irish – these broader experiences were common to the long, confusing passage.

McCourt’s memoir complements in many ways the story told by the fine Australian writer Thomas Keneally, author of 21 works of fiction including, most famously, Schindler’s List, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. The time is different; most of Keneally’s history takes place in the 19th century, when the Irish had a clearly-defined enemy. But woven subtly through his long, powerful, under-stated narrative are some threads essential to the fabric of McCourt’s work, and many other accounts of the Irish diaspora: the feeling of apartness, of social dislocation, of the knowledge that the Irish could never -- through oppression, seduction, or alchemy -- become British. In some of the lives in Keneally’s narrative there are even references to the permanent brand of the Irish accent.

As an Australian, Keneally correctly focuses much of his work on the experience that the Irish were forced to undergo in that country so far from Ireland. The book feels like a work undertaken to explain that country, and Keneally’s own existence, to himself. He focuses his attention on several generations of Irish people who were sentenced to transportation to Australia by their British captors. The first group was made up of semi-anarchic Irish rebels called Ribbonmen, who in the 1830s resorted to violence against landlords and their properties. The second were part of the 1840s movement called Young Ireland, whose leaders well-educated, and included a good number of Protestants. The third wave was composed of militants of the Fenian Brotherhood, established in 1858 with the goal of achieving independence for Ireland through any means necessary. Today’s Irish Republican Army can trace its antecedents all the way back to those Fenians.

Clearly, Keneally has absorbed the vast literature of the period, using primary sources in England, Ireland, Australia, the United States and Canada. He has also made use of much modern scholarship, and such superb contemporary accounts as The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, and Terry Golway’s biography of the lifelong Fenian, John Devoy. But Keneally brings to this narrative history his own special talents and his own vision. The novelist is drawn to drama and conflict (interior conflict as well as the obvious conflict expressed in action). He has a refined sense of place, evoking the beauty and grandeur of the Australian landscape, along with the squalor of prisons, the Irish ghettoes in American cities, the immensity of the American West.

The novelist also is drawn to the contradictions in the cast of characters handed to him by history. One such character is John Mitchel (cq). A Protestant member of Young Ireland, he was found guilty of seditious libel by a rigged jury in 1848 – that turbulent year in European history -- and transported to the gulag archipelago of Australia.. Mitchel was a gifted writer (his Jail Journal is a classic of prison literature, and remains in print in Ireland), a vitriolic polemicist, and a brave man. In 1853, he made a daring escape from the Australian penal colony, found his way to New York, offended almost everybody he met, and ended up as a defender of slavery. During the Civil War, he removed himself to Richmond and wrote propaganda for the Confederacy. Two of his sons would die in the service of the Confederacy and if Mitchel had any regrets, he never expressed them. He saw no contradiction in his fiery advocacy of freedom for the Irish and his insistence that slavery was good for black people. His contradictions were Whitmanesque; Keneally, the novelist, clearly savors him as a character, while disapproving of his ideas and his recklessness.

The other Young Irelanders included the extraordinary Thomas Francis Meagher, another escapee, who would distinguish himself as a New Yorker, as a courageous leader of the Union’s Irish Brigade (virtually destroyed at Fredericksburg), and as an acting governor in the territory of Montana. Again, he was a man of sometimes contradictory impulses. He was passionate about independence for Ireland, but was a supporter of the filibusterer William Walker, who wanted to destroy the independence of Nicaragua. A determined Democrat, he embraced the cause of Lincoln. Meagher was a great speaker, a natural leader, a man full of laughter and exuberance. His personal courage under fire was an inspiration to his men, who adored him. His end, as it was for so many of the Irish nationalists, was sad. Out in the emptiness of Montana, in the service of the United States, he was apparently killed by vigilantes under mysterious circumstances; his body was never found.

The other great character among the Young Irelanders was William Smith O’Brien. Austere, stubborn, a man of intense will, he refused to sign a pledge not to escape and was thus often confined to places where his movements were limited. In the end, he did not escape; he was pardoned in 1858, and made a long slow return to Ireland. He was never the same. He never gave up his belief in the Cause, but he did very little to advance it. And by the time he returned to Ireland, a new group had been formed, significantly named in New York the Fenian Brotherhood.

Keneally’s account of the Fenians is masterly in its compression. He pulls the threads of Fenianism through the Civil War, when many Irishmen served the Union in order to acquire military skills that eventually could be employed against England. He makes clear the differences between those who believed in physical force and those who believed in a peaceful solution to the Irish-English quarrel. His account of the pathetic Fenian invasions of Canada is heartbreakingly funny, except for the corpses. The Fenians had to endure the enmity of the Catholic hierarchy, the amateurish slovenliness of some of its leaders, and the continuous presence of Irish informers (some Dublin entrepreneur should open the Gyppo Nolan Museum of Irish Informers, to remind the Irish young that in the past their enemies included each other).

Among the Fenians was an Irishman serving in the British army, an extraordinary man named John Boyle O’Reilly. Born near the legendary hill of Tara, symbol of lost Celtic glory, he was writing for the Drogheda Argus by the time he was eleven. A member of the 10th Hussars at nineteen, where he was regimental boxing champion, he was an active Fenian recruiter within a year. Three out of every ten members of the British army were now Irish and there was a Fenian theory that in the cause of independence, they could inspire a mutiny. In 1866, all seemed ready. But the signal for the rising never came, the British discovered the plot through informers, O’Reilly was arrested, found guilty of treason, publicly disgraced, and eventually transported for life to Australia. Three years later, he made a daring escape and found his way to America. In Boston, he had a distinguished career as a writer and editor of the Boston Pilot. He remained a supporter of independence for Ireland, but was even more concerned with the country in which he lived now as a distinguished citizen. Unlike Mitchel, he made a connection between the beaten-down Irish and the newly-free black Americans. In 1888, he wrote a poem in celebration of the opening of the memorial on Boston Common to Crispus Attucks, a black man who was the first American to die under British guns in the Boston Massacre. Keneally quotes the poem:

“Where shall we seek for a hero, and where shall we find a story?
“Our laurels are wreathed for conquest, our songs for completed glory.
“But we honor a shrine unfinished, a column uncapped with pride,
“If we sing the deed that was sown like seed when Crispus Attucks died.”

In a review of this length, it is only possible to suggest the density and richness of Keneally’s work. Some might cavil with him over certain techniques more natural to the novelist than the historian; he tries to imagine the lives of certain Irish men and women who left no records, and is forced to use such locutions as “he must have felt” and “certainly would have known that…” The Irish poet Eavan Boland has beautifully imagined the lives of some of her own faceless ancestors but made clear that this was an act of the imagination. Keneally’s reasonable and modest imaginings, based on intense study of the few existing documents, don’t bother me. They might irritate others, since poetry and history are such distinct disciplines. But making the attempt to acknowledge a few of the anonymous millions who left Ireland, and the thousands who did so in chains, is at least an honorable enterprise.

Frank McCourt, in his personal and specific way, adds still more detail to the wider story of the Irish diaspora. Neither writer would presume to have written the final word on that subject because nobody can. Of this we can all be sure: that story will continue to unfold into still another century.