IT is a small case, really, easily lost among the thousands in New York City’s courts.

A retired schoolteacher named Nina Viola Montepagani, born in a hospital in Brooklyn in 1952, files a lawsuit to change her birth certificate.

She wants to remove the name of her father.

Or, at least, the man who said he was her father. Who acted like her father. Who treated her, until the day he died, with complete, selfless love.

His name was Giuseppe Viola. He was a proud, hard-working man who returned to the same town in southern Italy four times to find four wives. He worked as a laborer and as an elevator operator before moving upstate. Illiterate, he still made a show of reading the newspaper. His second wife, Anna, was Mrs. Montepagani’s mother. They lived in the early 1950s in three plain rooms in Williamsburg in a walk-up on Lorimer Street where the tenants shared a bathtub in the hall.

But this striving if spartan immigrant existence masked a far more complex reality, one that was only hinted at.