Re-reading Italian Americana : Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism 9781611476552, 9781611476545

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Re-reading Italian Americana

The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies General Editor: Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies is devoted to the publication of scholarly works on Italian literature, film, history, biography, art, and culture, as well as on intercultural connections, such as Italian-American Studies. Recent Publications in Italian Studies Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Re-reading Italian Americana: Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism (2014) Parati, Graziella (ed.), New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies—Volume 2: The Arts and History (2012) Pezzotti, Barbara, The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction (2012) Aliano, David, Mussolini's National Project in Argentina (2012) Parati, Graziella (ed.), New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies—Volume 1: Definition, Theory, and Accented Practices (2012) Smith, Shirley Ann, Imperial Designs: Italians in China, 1900–1947 (2012) Rosengarten, Frank, Giacomo Leopardi’s Search for a Common Life through Poetry: A Different Nobility, a Different Love (2012) Baliani, Marco (au.), Nicoletta Marini-Maio, Ellen Nerenberg, Thomas Simpson (trans. and eds.), Body of State: A Nation Divided (2012) Ducci, Lucia, George P. Marsh Correspondence: Images of Italy, 1861–1881 (2012) Godey, Amber R., Sister Souls: The Power of Personal Narrative in the Poetic Works of Antonia Pozzi and Vittorio Sereni (2011) Verdicchio, Pasquale, Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2011) Parati, Graziella and Anthony Julian Tamburri (eds.), The Cultures of Italian Migration (2011) Trubiano, Marisa S., Ennio Flaiano and His Italy: Postcards from a Changing World (2010) Halliday, Iain, Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English: Theory and Praxis of Literary Translation (2009) Serra, Ilaria, The Imagined Immigrant: The Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (2009) Lucamante, Stefania (ed.), Italy and the Bourgeoisie: The Re-Thinking of a Class (2009) Van Order, Thomas, Listening to Fellini: Music and Meaning in Black and White (2008) Billiani, Francesca, and Gigliola Sulis, The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions (2008) Parati, Graziella, and Marie Orton (eds.), Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy, Volume 1 (2007) Orton, Marie, and Graziella Parati (eds.), Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy (2007) Scambray, Ken, Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian-American Novel (2007) On the Web at http://www.fdu.edu/fdupress

Re-reading Italian Americana Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism Anthony Julian Tamburri

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Madison • Teaneck

Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished with Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Anthony Julian Tamburri All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tamburri, Anthony Julian, author. Re-reading Italian Americana : Specificities and Generalities on Literature and Criticism / Anthony Julian Tamburri. pages cm.—(The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61147-654-5 (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-1-61147-655-2 (electronic) 1. American literature—Italian American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature— Italian influences. 3. Italian Americans—Intellectual life. 4. Italian Americans in literature. I. Title. PS153.I8T35 2013 810.9'851—dc23 2013035193 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Preface

ix

I: Preliminaries 1 The Italian/American Writer in “Exile” at Home, Abroad, Wherever!

3

II: Specificities of Reading Prose 2 Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete: An Italian/American Novel Not Set in Stone 3 Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim: The Italian’s “American Dream” of Staying Alive 4 Luigi Barzini Jr.: From Italian “Immigrant” to “Italian American” III: Specificities of Reading Poetry 5 Joseph Tusiani’s Gente Mia: Coincidences of E(im)migration 6 Rina Ferrarelli’s The Bread We Ate: Looking Back to Move Forward? 7 Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s Where I Come From: Making Connections and Passing Them On

v

29 41 55

75 89 103

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Contents

IV: (In)Conclusions 8 Beyond “Pizza” and “Nonna”!: Further Directions for Italian/ American Textual Criticism and Cultural Studies

129

Bibliography

167

Index

177

About the Author

185

Acknowledgments

Chapters 1 and 2 have been published elsewhere and appear here now slightly modified: “The Italian/American Writer in ‘Exile’: At Home, Abroad, Wherever!” The Hyphenate Writer and The Legacy of Exile, ed. Paolo Giordano (New York: Bordighera Press, 2010), 1–25; and “Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete: An Italian/American Novel Not Set in Stone,” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 14, no. 1 (2003): 3–16. Chapter 8, in turn, appears here significantly modified, twice as long as its original publication: “Beyond ‘Pizza’ and ‘Nonna’! Or, What’s Bad about Italian/American Criticism? Further Directions for Italian/American Cultural Studies,” MELUS 28, no. 3 (2003): 149–74. I would also like to thank the following for their permission to quote from the works that I cite throughout this study: Peter and Richard di Donato for Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete; the Donadio and Olsen Agency for Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim; the Barzini family for Luigi Barzini’s O America, When You and I Were Young; Paolo Giordano and Joseph Tusiani for Joseph Tusiani’s poetry in Gente mia; Gianna Patriarca for her poem “Daughters”; and, last but not least, Guernica Editions for Rina Ferrarelli’s The Bread We Ate and Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s Where I Come From.

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It is indeed through a re-reading, re-writing, and re-thinking, I am convinced, that we shall eventually get to where we should be with Italian/American studies. Many people have already written and spoken on where we should be and how we might get there, as I have as well. But we are not there yet, and as I mention in chapter 1, I am not sure that we will ever get there as long as the philanthropy is significantly lacking. When I mention “philanthropy,” it is important to note that I am also talking about the giving of time and energy, not just money, for it is true that financial assistance is fundamental; but it is also true that people need to attend the various events, symposia, conventions, and the like. One of the more significant rough patches that needs to be smoothen is the lack of synergy among the many organizations, as I address herein. Until we realize that no one has a patent on cultural promotion and promulgation, we will not be able to move forward in a constructive and productive manner, leading to the goals that we need to reach for the history and culture of Italians in North America to become part of a national discourse. I see a similar situation on the horizon with regard to our ability and/or desire to engage in a more candid conversation among us Italian Americans. We have not, so it seems, learned to engage in any form of critical dialogue. It seems that we have yet to develop the art of dialogue and debate, through which we might readily discount the disagreements and, more important, recognize the areas of agreement. It seems, as some events of the past few years have demonstrated, that we have eschewed the productive dialogue of debate for the more simple, dare I say facile, practice of denigration and ix

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dismissal. Blind ideologies, misinformed histories, in some cases, total lack of knowledge of such histories, as well as the proverbial egocentric behavioral pattern, have led to various impasses and roadblocks that otherwise may have surely allowed the individuals and their various and sundry groups to engage in a collaborative politics of culture that could only move forward a more general agenda of Italian Americana. The analogue exists also with regard to critical discourse. While we have seen a plethora of books on literary and cultural criticism appear within the past four decades, some could have benefited from a greater maturation. As a result, the market has also been flooded with a series of writings—articles as well—that leave much to be desired. More significant, the uncultivated terrain in which these books appeared only granted them more spotlight, making it all the more challenging to create a valid discourse of and about cultural Italian Americana. These are some of the issues that I tackle in the first part of this book, a chapter that is both analytical and prescriptive of the situation at hand. There, I also deal with the manner in which we have been ignored or, when noticed, misunderstood, mostly due to age-old stereotypes that have their roots in nineteenth-century WASP-dom. I have also discussed the situation from afar, especially within Italy, and how, paradoxically, our literary culture is practically unknown, as the only existent academic journal on American studies there chose not to include Italian/American literature among what it considered the literatures of the United States. The call here, of course, is for an Italophonic notion of literature, one that exists elsewhere—in Italian or in the language of the local geocultural zone—that recognizes the Italian sign functions of that literature, however subtle such signs and their rudimentary functions may be. Eventually, such a paradigm shift leads us to the more inclusive notion of “Italicità” (Italicity) that Piero Bassetti has so vigorously championed, that we need to recognize, worldwide, not just Italians—those genetically tied to Italy, however many generations may have passed in the meantime—but, more significant, those who may not be genetically tied to Italy but yet promote in their innumerable ways Italy and the aspects of its sociocultural foundation, whom Bassetti has baptized “Italici.” The second section of this book consists of a series of readings of six writers who represent Italians in North America to varying degrees, from Italians in America to those, in turn, born in the United States, all representing something culturally unique unto themselves. Further still, the critical act in which I engage is grounded primarily in semiotics, as I am very much interested in how the reader can influence the text, how the reader can guide willy-nilly the text into directions that one may not have readily anticipated, not even the author. We witness, in addition, how Italian, no longer a primary language, is consciously replaced by English as the lingua franca of the narrative, and yet, nevertheless, Italian still has it linguistic role; this is espe-

Preface

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cially true with di Donato, Tusiani, and Ferrarelli, the former actually adopting an Italianate syntax, while the latter two pepper their verse with Italian and thereby undergird their rhetoric of coincidentia oppositorum. In recounting life as it was in the 1930s, Mario Puzo gives us what could be a firsthand account of life in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, replete with the many trials and tribulations that the Italian immigrants and their children had to confront, all examined here through the lenses of violence/madness, education, and the gender dilemma. In the end, we witness a vast difference in expectations and end goals between the immigrant generation (Lucia Santa) and that of the first born in the United States (Octavia). Luigi Barzini, in turn, offers—post quem, we might say—a panorama of his life in the United States in his O American When You and I Were Young. It is a view of the immigrant experience from a perspective that is different from what we find in the usual narrative of the Italian in America or the Italian American. Barzini is telling his story as a young Italian, of a privileged class, who experiences certain events in a manner not totally different from his Italian/American counterpart, only that while they tend to be of the working class, Barzini is the son of an Italian correspondent abroad, with all the frills and privileges that such a situation allows. Joseph Tusiani, in his own way, underscores the immigrant’s dilemma as did Puzo. However, whereas Puzo’s vision was more comparative between immigrant- and first-generation Italian in the United States, Tusiani concentrates his lens on the immigrant. Adopting, further, a more Italianate language if only because of the clear use of Italian words throughout, Tusiani underscores the immigrant’s feelings of deracination, as he tells us, and having to deal with the consequences of this catch-22 experience of having to leave Italy to find a better life yet yearning still for whom and what he left behind. Rina Ferrarelli’s poetry, we shall see, echoes to a certain degree the tenor of Tusiani’s verse, offering an immigrant perspective. Two differences, however, stand out. Ferrarelli is a member of the postwar generation, and, more significant, she offers her immigrant experience through a gendered lens. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry, in turn, brings us back to a more familiar perspective for the Italian American, one in which a female poet comes from a typical working-class family. As such, she exhibits the numerous existential trials and tribulations of a child of immigrants, the love-hate relationship that one seems to have with her immigrant origins and all that such a situation portends. Gillan’s poetry herein escorts us through both the immigrant and gendered worlds that her experiences readily create, a double-voiced world, most similar to Ferrarelli’s, that underscores the compound relationship of ethnicity and gender. The third section of this book is dedicated to two basic issues. The first issue I tackle in this last chapter is a review of what I call first books of

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literary criticism. 1 I use the term first books for two principal reasons: first, most are the first books by these authors; second, I deal with only the first books, even of those who have published more than one on the subject matter—as have, for instance, Mary Jo Bona, Fred Gardaphe, Edvige Giunta, and Kenneth Scambray, to name a few. The second issue is an articulation of certain thoughts on how “cultural studies” as a methodology/theory can be of use to scholars of Italian Americana, guiding the critical act beyond the critical threshold of recognizing comforting signs of Italian Americana, reading and/or viewing texts (i.e., written and visual) as social documentation only, and/or engaging in some form of ethnic boosterism, leaving no room for analytical discourse that goes where the text brings the critic, regardless of the outcome. The debts for a book of this sort at this stage in one’s career are many, and the thanks are consequently never ending. Since the list of people who have had an influence to some degree are, proverbially speaking, infinite, one runs the risk of omission. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to list a few—from near and afar, from then and now—who have made their impact on me as I have read, re-read, and continue to read and view anew literature and cinema, both Italian and Italian/American. That said, some I should thank are listed here: Mary Jo Bona, Anna Camaiti Hostert, Peter Carravetta, Remo Ceserani, Victoria J. R. Demara, Marcel Danesi, Roberto Dolci, Fred Gardaphé, Paul Giordano, Fabio Girelli Carasi, Edvige Giunta, Djelal Kadir, John Kirby, Ben Lawton, Albert Mancini, Francine Masiello, Kathleen McCormick, Floyd Merrell, Mark Pietralunga, Franco Ricci, Maurizio Viano, Robert Viscusi, Antonio Vitti, and Rebecca West. And, of course, there is always Maria. NOTE 1. I concentrate here on only those books that were written in English and published in the United States since this chapter deals with the U.S. tradition; to include books written elsewhere would only take me away from my original intentions. Second, I have not included any of the books published in the series Saggistica, launched in 2011 by Bordighera Press. As one of three directors of that press, the reasons for not doing so should be obvious.

I

Preliminaries

Chapter One

The Italian/American Writer in “Exile” at Home, Abroad, Wherever!

There is no ontology without archeology! —Felix Stefanile

PRELIMINARY MUSINGS As my title 1 clearly signals, any sense of “exile,” be it literal or metaphorical, that is perceived by or discussed about any cultural broker of Italian Americana (read: artist, critic, essayist) is trifold in origin. First, there is the issue of provenance; namely, “What is the country of origin’s interest in the well-being of the Italian/American writer?” Second, there is the question of endpoint; in this regard, I am referring to the idea of the host culture, which for us is mainstream United States so that we are apt to ask, “What is the interest, if any, of the United States’ dominant culture with regard to the hyphenated writer of Italian origin?” Finally, there is the issue of the ingroup—that is, Italian America—and how it perceives and ultimately receives or rejects the concept of Italian Americana as a valid cultural terrain within a larger, collective U.S. cultural landscape. That is to say, “How do we look at ourselves?” While I do not presume to offer any pat answers to any of these inquiries, suffice it to say that we shall never succeed in moving forward in creating the group “narrative” that Robert Viscusi so eloquently discussed in his groundbreaking essay “Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian 3

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American Culture.” 2 There, he spoke to the articulation of history, one that is not so much complete as it is brought forward and discussed in all its many facets: one that includes a collective purpose, if ever so general, of Italian America. To date, this simply still does not exist. While much progress has been made on such issues, many Italian/American associations, as well as individuals, still work within a vacuum, so to speak, moving forward alone on issues that, in the end, would benefit the community at large and—especially as a group of regional and national organizations—would most likely have greater success in moving forward a variety of projects that would contribute to an Italian/American agenda. The general question at hand may also be articulated in another manner. What is—or, better still, what could/should be—that rallying point around which the greater Italian/American community might find some sense of commonality? We might say that African Americans, Jewish Americans, and Irish Americans have that one issue, as tragic as it may be, that to some degree or another coheres the group. I have in mind, of course, slavery and its dreadful sister of outright discrimination that has resulted from it, for the first group; two millennia of diasporic existence and the twentieth-century horrific holocaust, for the second group; and, for the third, the tragic six-year potato famine of 1845 that sent over a million Irish to the United States. 3 What then can we identify as that cohesive force for Italian Americans? Can we look to something like immigration as the Italian/American rallying point? By immigration, I have in mind that historical period of 1880 to 1924, those forty-four years that have now become a sort of historical marker for Italian Americans of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For this to come to fore, however, it is necessary that the in-group have a firm grip on the history of Italians in America: specifically, their migratory history; their development as a community herein surely through World War II; the dominant culture’s treatment of Italians in America, especially before the onslaught of the 1970s’ “Made in Italy.” These basic literacies, I would submit, are requisite for a deeper understanding of our migratory history and its consequences for “immigration” to figure as a major rallying point. It is not enough to sing the virtues of classical Rome and Renaissance Italy to declare oneself a well-informed spokesperson of Italian America. This is, undoubtedly, needed knowledge; but to understand the Italian in the United States, one needs to possess an intimate knowledge of that history, regardless of his or her standing in the community. To date, no satisfactory primer exists in book form, whereas in celluloid Italian America one can readily turn to a series of documentaries, some specific while others more general, that cover a plethora of aspects of Italian America, those nooks and crannies that some choose to ignore. 4 There are, to be sure, more specific incidents, indeed tragedies, that come to mind—one being the 1891 New Orleans lynching, for which Italian

The Italian/American Writer

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Americans hold the dubious distinction of having been victims of the largest single lynching. 5 A second historical marker involves the enemy alien classification of the 1940s. After the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented what was became known as the “enemy alien” act. 6 Accordingly, non-U.S. citizens but permanent residents of the United States were to be interrogated, their backgrounds investigated, and, if deemed necessary, interned. While such a lawful (in)justice of the enemy alien status for Italians was rescinded on a fateful (and, dare we say, paradoxical) October 12, 1942, it has taken decades, indeed a lifetime, for some members of the Italian/American community to speak out about this experience. In fact, we might be surprised to know that a majority of our community is rather ignorant of this historical tragedy. 7 For a third possible cohesive force that might rally Italian Americans, one might even attempt to underscore a historical discrimination, valid to be sure, dating back to the nineteenth century and culminating, to date, in something like the cable show The Sopranos. 8 These last three examples are indeed worthy points of discussion and criticism. However, they do not constitute, in an overall-encompassing manner, that one issue that can—and I would add should—unite the Italian/ American community in the same way in which the three aforementioned groups cohere. We might, in this regard, ponder what is that one all-encompassing issue that unites, for example, Hispanic Americans. To be sure, in addition to a strong sense of belonging that Hispanics may have with regard to their culture (or cultures), it may very well be the migratory experience of the Hispanic, in spite of the various reasons for each geopolitical group’s discrete emigration from the homeland—that sense of not belonging in the new host country—that coheres the group. Having said this, I do not want to be naïve in thinking that Hispanics from any and all Latin countries have an equal sense of allegiance to the old country as well as the new. Nor do I want to imply that all Hispanics have an automatic sense of belonging to that group comprising “Hispanics/Latinos,” as we call them in the United States. Nevertheless, I do believe that we would not err entirely in believing that there is indeed a sense of commonality to some degree and that this sense of commonality has its origins, to some extent, in the migratory experience insofar as they perceive themselves to some degree, in this country, as outsiders, and, for the most part, have decided to hold on to their culture of origin; first and foremost, this is manifested by their continued use of Spanish as their primary channel of communication, whereas Italian Americans have all but lost their use of Italian as a communicative agent. 9 This combination of difference and cultural specificity—based in part on the migratory experience—figures as a cohering agent to be sure. 10 A similar formula might also prove valid for the Italian/American community—that emigration/immigration, in the broadest sense of the term,

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could surely figure as that cohesive agent that binds the group as a whole, however tenuous. 11 That is, a strong sense of commonality is indeed that necessary ingredient, I would submit, for the community to progress, for the study of all things Italian/American to become part and parcel of the dominant culture (or at least recognized as a valid extra-genre of U.S. cultural productions, if you will), as it is with the other hyphenated groups within the United States. All of this, of course, is dependent on the members of the Italian/American community to engage more fully in the appreciation of their culture. This entails an active participation in cultural activities of all sorts; it requires that Italian/American groups make a concerted effort to go beyond those one or two activities that they have identified as their own and make attempts to expand their agenda for it to include a new, more encompassing form of cultural integration that also transcends their own arbitrary boundaries to create a more collaborative network with other organizations. Such a network allows for those over-riding issues, which are not—and should not be—the dominion of one group, to be supported by many. All of this does not hinder those activities that these groups have identified as their own. Further still, all of this, as we shall see, is dependent on a combination of cultural awareness and appreciation: namely, a new sense of the Italian/ American self that leads, in the end, to an appropriation of one’s cultural legacy and its overall impact on today’s contemporary life, which ultimately calls into question the individual’s ability to negotiate said legacy within his or her own Italian/American quotidian existence.

It remains indeed difficult, I would submit, to ascertain the level of interest and subsequent prospects of success within the United States—both within and beyond the geocultural borders of what we know of as Italian America— as well as in Italy, at least in these recent years, with regard to cultural productions of—in the spirit of avoiding a contentious term at the outset— “Americans of Italian descent.” I use this term at this time especially because there are still those in the United States who call them “Italo-Americans” and, similarly, those in Italy who call them “italoamericani,” both terms somewhat problematic and—if only with regard to their denomination—still debated in some camps. Elsewhere, I have opted for the term “Italian American” as noun and “Italian/American” as adjective, two terms that in Italian would be translated as “Americano Italiano” as noun—indeed debatable—and, something that many would surely consider a “mostriciattolo di appellativo” (a little monster of a name), “Italiano/Americano” for the adjectival form. 12

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I have already discussed at length the ragion d’essere and, I would add, necessity—at least in English—of such a term and its coincidental issues regarding the hyphen. 13 We should not simply cast it aside with statements such as “quante discussioni, forse un po’ oziose, intorno a quel fatidico trattino! Da qui in poi, per semplicità, lo aboliremo” (how many discussions, perhaps a bit tedious, about that fateful hyphen! From now on, for simplicity, we’re going to abolish it), as one Italian journalist turned literary critic/ historian has declared. 14 Such a dismissive attitude is demonstrative, I would contend, of an intellectual diffidence—indeed, theoretical lethargy—that cannot add, in any constructive manner, to a still much-needed critical-theoretical discourse on Americans of Italian descent and the various modes in which they are represented. 15 Furthermore, such diffidence also suggests a lack of intellectual curiosity, if not, to be sure, commitment to the field of cultural studies, which, I would submit, with specific regard to Italian Americans, readily transforms itself into a type of sociopolitical lethargy that, for a second time—especially after our forbearers were forced to leave their native country—lashes out against Americans of Italian descent. It is, in fact, precisely their sociohistorical specificity of subaltern that is canceled out, something that we might suspect already occurred in the nineteenth century when, for many of the dominant culture, they were considered colored. 16 They become, so to speak, invisible for a second time, because the critical discourse remains simple and superficial. This said, then, it should become apparent that today we can no longer enjoy the privilege of ignoring such theoretical problematics that lie at the base of much discourse dedicated to both historically nonmainstream as well as dominant culture aesthetic forms of representation of Americans of Italian descent. FROM ITALY TO THE UNITED STATES: OR, WHAT DO THEY THINK OF US? With regard to American studies in Italy, we can grasp a fairly clear picture of how Italian/American studies fare in the Italian academy. 17 The Italian journal Ácoma, for example, published in its first eighteen issues, spanning seven years (1994–2000), two essays dedicated to Italians in America, both of which are translations of essays that had already been published in the United States: the first an abbreviated version of a three-year-old essay, the second a complete translation of a two-year-old essay. 18 The mention of such editorial practices does not intend to impugn any sort of negligence to this or other journals of American studies in Italy that emulate such low frequencies and importations. However, one might expect, indeed hope, that such attention paid to Americans of Italian descent is not limited to a recycling and translation of what had already appeared earlier in the United States. 19 In-

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deed, this was remedied, we might say, the following year; in issue 19, Ácoma published three essays dedicated to, respectively, Don DeLillo, Louise de Salvo, and Pietro di Donato and John Fante. 20 More recently, however, it seems that the journal has taken a step, let us say, sideward in this regard; under the rubric Schede, in which Italian scholars speak briefly to the recent state of the art, the journal lists five ethnic literatures of the United States: “La letteratura degli afroamericani” (the literature of Afroamericans), “La letteratura indianoamericans” (the literature of Indianamericans), “La letteratura asiaticoamericana” (the literature of Asiaticamericans), “La letteratura ebreoamericana” (the literature of Jewishamericans), “La letteratura dei Latinos” (the literature of Latinos). 21 The lack of an Italian/American category only adds to the assumption that a significant part of American studies in Italy may indeed still look on the writings of Italian Americans with a somewhat disinterested eye. Such an assumption is bolstered, I would contend, by members of the journal’s editorial board. In their introduction to the monographic section entitled “L’America che leggiamo: saggi e aggiornamenti,” in a 2006 issue of Ácoma, Sara Antonelli and Cinzia Scarpino write: Di particolare urgenza, e in linea con le scelte editoriali che caratterizzano “Ácoma,” risultano poi i discorsi legati alle tante componenti ethniche e sociali del tessuto culturale statunitense ai quali il presente numero dedica una serie di interventi dal formato più agile. A essere messi in rilievo sono qui i diversi percorsi che, sulla scia dei vari “Rinascimenti” politici e letterari degli anni Settanta e Ottanta (Latinos e asiaticoamericani), hanno portato le diverse letterature d’America a elaborare le esperienze delle minoranze storicamente oppresse (Afroamericani, Nativi Americani). Un discorso a parte meritano, infine, gli Ebrei-americani, le cui opere vengono recepite di volta in volta come interne o esterne alla produzione mainstream. 22

First of all, one would be hard-pressed not to include Italian Americans among the “the many ethnic and social components of the United States cultural fabric”; for better or for worse, Italian Americans are constantly represented in the various media as U.S. ethnics. Second, Italian/American writers could readily fit into at least two of the three categories cited. Indeed, a “Renaissance” of Italian Americana, especially literature and film, has already manifested itself, if only by the increased critical activity both within and outside the Italian/American community. 23 In turn, because of writers such as David Baldacci, Don DeLillo, Lisa Scottoline, and Philip Caputo, to name a few best sellers, Italian Americans might also deserve “a special discussion, their works having been perceived from time to time as either internal or external to mainstream production.” Third, and a debatable point, indeed, there are some who would insist that Italian Americans went through their own period of oppression and discrimination; one need only recall the New Orleans lynching of 1891. 24 Finally, as we continue to read, the pages

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of this issue constitute an attempt to “tracciare una mappa dei pieni e dei vuoti di un territorio complesso che invita a una riflessione attenta” (trace a map of highs and lows within a complex territory that invites keen reflection) and “l’accento dei contributi critici . . . cade sui meccanismi che impediscono una fruizione e una comprensione più completa delle letterature e delle culture nordamericane” (the emphasis of the critical contributions . . . falls on the mechanisms that impede a fruition and a complete comprehension of North American literatures and cultures; 19–20, emphasis textual). By excluding any reference to the existence of the American writer of Italian descent within that kaleidoscopic cultural landscape that we know as the United States only sets further back the articulation of any semblance of an Italian/American discourse in Italy. An analogous case seems to exist with the publications of AISNA (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani [Italian Association of NorthAmerican Studies]); the association’s official journal, RSA (Rivista di Studi Nord-Americani [Journal of North-American Studies]), has yet to include an essay on Italian Americana, from what I have been able to discern. 25 Its annual conference and subsequent proceedings, conversely, have regularly included sessions and papers on the subject. In fact, its 1985 proceedings of its 1983 conference are dedicated entirely to the theme “Italy and Italians in America.” 26 Likewise, its 2001 conference, dedicated to the theme “America and the Mediterranean,” includes numerous essays dedicated to Italian Americana. 27 Such a distinction in publishing fora speaks volumes, to be sure, in every sense of the word. It also underscores, I would contend, the presumed reasons why writers such as David Baldacci and Lisa Scottoline had originally published in Italian as, respectively, David B. Ford and Lisa Scott. ITALIAN AMERICANS WITHIN A U.S. CULTURAL LANDSCAPE Literary and film criticism dedicated to numerous other diasporic groups in the United States has, to be sure, developed its own type of theoretical discourse, creating indeed a general mode of thought processes that, for the most part, form part of an overall intellectual articulation of the group under consideration. 28 What stands out when one attempts such an inventory is the conspicuous absence of Italian/American literature as one of the many categories that make up bibliographies, be they written or virtual. One website, associated with a university, lists nine categories: four are general while the remaining five are group specific (General Background, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Native-Americans, General Background on Literature, Critical Theory, Literary Terminology). See “Research Guide to Ethnicity and Identity in Literature” (http://

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people.wcsu.edu/reitzj/subj/ethnic.html). Since such an omission occurs at the national level, we should then not be surprised that it repeats itself on an international level. See “American Literature on the Web: Minority Literature/Multi-Cultural Resources” (http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/ amlit/general/minority.htm). Such a methodological-theoretical discourse and coincidental inventory have yet to develop with regard to Americans of Italian descent, be it here in the United States or in Italy. 29 Obviously, the primary benefit from inclusion in such inventories is visibility. In Italy, for example, desired visibility of this sort initially lies in such publications as those mentioned earlier. In the United States, conversely, there are three journals dedicated to Italian Americana that regularly publish essays, creative works, and reviews. 30 And while they serve a major purpose—they are the primary organs for the dissemination of works by and about Italian Americans—they are not, nor should they be, the ne plus ultra, the ultimate solution vis-à-vis the larger, cultural landscape of the United States. Not until essays on the subject matter appear in journals such as the American Quarterly, American Review, and American Studies can those dedicated to Italian Americana rest more easily; otherwise, we remain in our own little ghetto. Indeed, some infiltration into mainstream U.S. culture has already been successful; for the past fifteen years, a handful of university presses and American studies journals have published or republished significant work. 31 In this sense, then, a good part of a foundation has been laid. But much more has yet to be done. In perusing the last fourteen annual addresses of the American Studies Association, for example, it is a curious fact that, among all the topics mentioned dealing with issues immediate also to Italian Americana, there is no mention at all of Italian/American studies, not even an occasional, oblique reference to the ethnic origin of an American writer of Italian descent. 32 Such an absence of attention raises a number of issues and, to some degree, adds yet another challenge. For while there are a number of excellent books in English on Italian Americana, 33 what is still missing, for example, is a rigorous study that, first, examines those whom we might consider the major writers of Italian Americana and, second, then contextualizes them within the greater U.S. literary panorama in which we normally situate the corresponding great “American” writers. 34 Yet, more significant is the fact that an organization that is the American Studies Association engages in a type of hegemony that de facto discounts any validity to Italian Americana as a valid field of study. Indeed, while it is truly troubling to see such dismissal in Italy, as we saw with the example of the Italian journals Ácoma, it is more perplexing to see this occur in the United States, especially within the realm of American studies, a field that has at its base both history and literature, in addition to other fields and subject matter relevant to the discipline.

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HOW DO WE SEE OURSELVES? Within the Italian/American community, as it remains ever so relevant on a national level, race is one of a few issues we still need to explore—interrogate, if you will. This question of race, I would further contend, is twofold in nature and scope. It deals with, on the one hand, how Italians in America (read, Italian Americans) have been considered, portrayed, and treated throughout the long history here within the United States. One might readily argue that the twentieth-century plight of the Italian (read also, Italian American) began back in 1905, at the onset of the motion picture industry; one need only hark back to silent films such as F. A. Dobson’s The Skyscrapers of New York (1905), Wallace McCutcheon’s The Black Hand (1906), and D. W. Griffith’s The Avenging Conscious (1914), each of which may figure as early, good candidates as the springboard for such stereotyping; the Italian character in this third film—played by a non-Italian, as was often the case— is an ill-reputed blackmailer. 35 Themes such as sex, violence, sentimentality, family relations, and the like will seem to dominate the cinema of and about Italian Americans, generating a most contested debate within the Italian/ American community at the end of the twentieth century about the portrayal of Italians and Italian Americans in U.S. media in general. In fact, even in his earlier film At the Altar (1909), Griffith seemed to raise concern within the dominant culture by underscoring, in an apparently positive storyline, sexuality and violence as part of the Italian character. To be sure, both aggressive behavior and sexuality ultimately figured as two components of the Italian and Italian/American character as cinema developed within the first half of the twentieth century, in the United States. Be it the gangster films of the 1930s, which laid the foundation for the violent mobster or the oversexed individuals of the later years, the Italian male will, in many respects, ultimately culminate in a figure such as Tony Soprano, a violent, oversexed capo regime whose sexual proclivities bring him to the edge of seducing his own nephew’s fiancé Adriana. On the other hand, we need to call into question the issue of how race is perceived, processed, and treated by a certain component of the Italian/ American community. We need only to think back to the two infamous episodes of the 1980s, Howard Beach and Bensonhurst. These were two tragic sites of racial strife that involved to varying degrees the Italian/ American community. Yet, so it seems, the majority of the leaders of the Italian/American community remained silent on the issues. Yet, again, the counterdemonstrations did nothing but underscore the fairly widely perceived stereotype of the Italian American as racist, bigoted, and ultimately capable of engaging in dumb show, as a number of Italian Americans countered the protests of the African-American community with vulgar gestures, racial epithets, and the despicable display of watermelons, as the African-

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American contingency marched down the streets of Bensonhurst. Two people spoke up in print. Immediately after the Brooklyn tragedy, Jerome Krase, then professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, wrote an op-ed in Newsday. 36 A few months later, Robert Viscusi, also of Brooklyn College, published his aforementioned essay in Voices in Italian Americana, in which he laid out a series of “strategic imperatives” for Italian/American culture. 37 One of the primary steps that members of the Italian/American community need to take is to re-visit our history. It is a record that is rich with achievements and successes. It is also a record that lists a series of sad and tragic events and episodes that have befallen our own turn-of-the-twentiethcentury Italian Americans. But it is also a record that, as the more recent cases of racial strife have demonstrated, has proven at times to be inimical to the racial challenges that blacks have had to confront throughout the years. Such challenges, so it seems, have often been seen as “their” problems. But as the history of Italian America proves, they have also been “our” problems. During the first half of the twentieth century, actually since the onslaught of the major wave of immigration (1880–1924), Italians, like other southern Europeans, were perceived as non-white in this country. Indeed, as stated at the outset of this essay, while it is true that blacks constituted the largest group of people lynched, Italian immigrants have that dubious distinction of being the largest group hung at one time. The alliance among Italy, Germany, and Japan during World War II placed many immigrants on an enemy aliens list. One unspoken negative consequence, for sure, was the loss of what would seem to have been the subsequent generation’s linguistic inheritance. “Don’t speak the enemy’s language” clamored the innumerable posters and other public announcements during that time. Furthermore, Italians were underutilized in numerous professions over the years, and in more recent times, when it now seems that we have become white and, consequently, respected members of the upper middle class, things have not improved as one might have wished. These are some of the reasons that we need to revisit our history. Let us not forget that, according to what we might surmise from the behavior of some in the entertainment world, Italians are sometimes still fair game for ridicule in the public arena. We cannot always take for granted that we enjoy all the benefits of those who inhabit on a daily basis that world of WASPdom. This, I would submit, is still not the case in spite of the wonderful successes of those past and present, including our previous speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, who broke both ethnic and gender boundaries, “at a single bound,” as the old television show proclaimed about Superman. Joey of Friends, George of Seinfeld, and the Romanos of Everybody Loves Raymond are three examples of what some might consider more recent negative portrayals of Italian Americans in the medium of television. 38 Indeed, Joey is the dumb-witted ladies’ man, recalling the Latin lover; George Costanza is a

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socially inept individual who appears also, at times, as a bit of a mama’s boy; and Raymond’s parents and brother embody a certain amount of buffoonery and, to cite Jonathan J. Cavallero, “fesseria.” 39 WHERE MIGHT WE GO FROM HERE? In his by now classic book Race Matters (1993), Cornel West suggested that the “fundamental crisis in black America [was] twofold: too much poverty and too much self-love” (63). I wonder if we might not be able to say that the problem, if this is the right term we might want to use, within Italian America is “too much [affluence] and [not enough] self-love,” to borrow from West. Strong words, some might say. Problem? What problem, since many Italian Americans run major companies—national and international—and some of our best writers, for example, are of Italian descent? This, indeed, is, I would contend, part of the problem. The affluence among Italian Americans has led them out of the city and into the suburbs, thus believing that all is well, that all obstacles have been surpassed, and that we can now move forward. 40 With such an exodus, the various Italian/American neighborhoods (proverbial Little Italies and the like) underwent dramatic change. First of all, the younger members left, often selling off parents’ homes and businesses to new immigrants, non–Italian Americans, for which the various old stomping grounds, especially the Little Italies, turned into what many have recently labeled “Italian-American theme parks.” Second, the original cultural artifacts and practices were willy-nilly transformed into commercial ventures, losing their original cultural and historical valence. A more recent example is the brouhaha over the San Gennaro festival of Manhattan’s Little Italy, when a subcommittee of Community Board 2 rejected the application for the seventy-ninth annual San Gennaro feast, with the reason being that no representative of the feast appeared before the subcommittee. If “the San Gennaro feast is a very important tradition for the Italian-American community, and I hope to see it continue,” as Ms. Derr stated when offering to postpone the vote so that the application can be defended, one wonders why no one from the San Gennaro committee showed up in the first place to present the application. In addition, one surely wonders about the current cultural and historical valence of the feast; as the New York Times article, in closing, quoted an unidentified customer in a barbershop, “When I was a kid, the feast was about family, religion, and food. Now it's about CDs and three pairs of socks for $10” (April 15, 2007). Affluence There is no doubt that our paesani have “made it” in all walks of life. Some of the more notable companies, national and international, have had and

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continue to have Italian Americans in positions of power. There are those who run major home hardware companies, those who run major investment firms, those who run major publishing houses, those who run major medical companies, and those who are at the helm in significant governmental positions (in this case, perhaps more influence than affluence), from local to national. Affluence, therefore, and, dare I say its inseparable twin, influence, are up front and present in the Italian/American community. “And so what’s your point?” one might readily ask. To be sure, there has been an admirable display of a certain type of philanthropy within the Italian/ American community: various sectors of hospitals, endowed chairs in business and the sciences, and sports arenas have all been the beneficiaries of Italian/American philanthropy. Where we are dramatically lacking, I would contend, is with regard to what I have labeled in conversations with friends book culture. Here, of course, I use the term book as a wide-reaching label that necessarily includes the arts and humanities: classical and contemporary, high-brow and popular; figurative, performative, visual, and written. One example: only in 2007 was there the announcement of a set of three buildings acquired for an Italian/American museum in New York City, and only in spring 2008 did the Italian American Museum finally move into those buildings. To date, a brick-and-mortar museum, come Dio comanda, as we might say in Italian, does not exist, though this recent move keeps hope alive. The 1999 New York exhibition “Five Centuries of Struggle and Achievement” (cosponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute and the New York Historical Society, curated primarily by the late Philip Cannistraro) was a wonderful project that ran for four months. It consisted of at least a half-dozen rooms in which artifacts were displayed and, in some cases, living and travel conditions were reassembled for the twenty-first-century individual to gain some sort of concrete idea of the conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. In all, it was an excellent exhibition, with an impressive catalog; it surely could have been the impetus from which to move forward in an expeditious manner. Instead, it has taken, so it seems, close to nine years just to get possession of property for a future museum. Basically, in all, we have had to wait more than 120 years for an independently standing Italian/American museum, whereas other U.S. ethnic groups got the job done well before we did. Amor Proprio “Self-love,” we would call it in English. One of the first steps, to be sure, demonstrating that we possess a healthy dose of Italian/American self-love, is for us to be aware of our culture and its history. A second step is that, when the situation warrants, we are willing to bring forth the cause of Italian

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America, even if it means that someone from outside our community may indeed question our modus operandi. One of the most egregious examples of one’s unawareness is Gay Talese’s 1993 essay “Where Are the Italian American Novelists?” Until the appearance of this essay, Talese, to my knowledge, had never truly negotiated in any profound manner the cultural and/or intellectual terrain of Italian America, except of course for his 1970 bestseller Honor Thy Father, a journalistic investigation into the history of the reputed Joe Bonanno crime family. The book eventually earned Talese a great deal of respect in the world of print journalism and, around the same time, solidified his name as one of the founders of what was then dubbed “new journalism.” 41 The type of activity that Talese exhibited in his 1993 essay on the Italian/American novel nevertheless resembles to some degree what I have previously dubbed as intellectual ethnic slumming: that is, a visitation on the greater realm of, in our case, Italian America by someone whose quotidian space is, to the contrary, the non-Italian/American world and yet, every once in a while, decides to visit the Italian/American masses, so to speak, for an array of reasons, many of which are not always clear. 42 In his essay, Talese demonstrated precisely how misinformed he was at that time of the extent to which the Italian/ American novel had already been in existence. The pioneering scholar Rose Basile Green had already documented the history of Italian/American novels in her 1974 study The Italian-American Novel, both in the ninety-plus number of books that she discussed within her main text and the more than two hundred entries of novels she listed in her bibliography. 43 The question then, for Talese, should have been not so much “where are the novelists?” but “why are the novelists ignored?” Talese himself, however, was obviously not familiar with the Italian/American fictional landscape, for which the more relevant and therefore exceedingly more significant question to pose did not form part of his semiotic horizon. There is, more significantly, another side to the metaphorical coin of ethnic slumming, and it is Gramscian in content, to be sure. Namely, what are the duties and/or responsibilities, if any, of someone involved, however so slightly, in Italian Americana? Must this person take on that Gramscian role, or some semblance thereof, of the “organic intellectual,” or can (should?) she or he just go about his or her business and do his or her thing as the individual she or he is? This is, I would submit, one of the most important issues to affect our community, one that clearly deserves much greater attention from all of us. 44 It is, I would contend at this point, that second step required by one’s sense of amor proprio. We need, for sure, to ponder further the issue of the group versus the individual, that person similar to a Gay Talese who has the ability (read, cultural currency) to further the group’s cause. This is an age-old question that Italian Americans need to tackle since we can now readily say that we have, literally and metaphorically, arrived.

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BICULTURAL ITALIAN AMERICA Another significant characteristic of the Italian/American community is its bicultural and, to some extent, bilingual aspect. Indeed, within this diaglossic landscape, there are those who, to use the verb in a transitive mode, “live Italy.” Expressed in such a manner, the phrase literally refers to those who live within the geopolitical confines of the country, whereas metaphorically it may refer also to those who live the experience that is Italy and all that it pertains, but they do so beyond its geopolitical borders: namely, they embody in their manner of existence that geocultural sign that we all know as Italy. Some members of this second group—those who “live Italy” but reside in the United States—seem to define themselves as Italians living abroad, even though their period abroad has been, to say the least, rather extensive. 45 Others still identify themselves a tad bit less generically as Italians in America. Sociologically speaking, however, since they have, for a significant period, inhabited a geocultural territory that is indeed the United States of America, the desire to opt for the appellative of “Italian,” as opposed to the binomial “Italian American,” might readily, to paraphrase a popular disco tune of the 1990s, make us want to go “Hmmm.” More seriously, it begs a number of questions, one of which might be, is there something to the notion that for those who “live Italy”—while residing in the United States—there exists an inscrutable, sociologically semiotic mechanism of the Italian immigrant that springs into action, one who is identified with a certain period of U.S. history (1880–1924), for example, and who belongs, most likely, to a certain social class—proletariat, for lack of a more adequate term—with peasant origins and possibly illiterate? 46 Strong words, indeed, some might say. But they constitute the thoughts and whispers of many, spoken “between us,” on the QT, but never brought out into the open. It is the proverbial white elephant, the naked emperor, that which no one wants overtly to recognize. Yet, intellectually speaking, the label “Italian American” simply refers to a sociological category that refers to any person who leaves one country for another, with the intentions of remaining in that second location. It is the basic coupling of two terms, a registry’s description, so to speak, of the individual, in that the first term signals the country of origin whereas the second indicates the long-term country of residence. This said, then, the binomial “Italian American” should, as we all know, merely signal that Mr. or Ms. “So-and-So” is either of Italian origin or was born in Italy and, if the latter, now has been a resident for a significant amount of time in the United States. 47 The fact that there may be a semiotic that, at first glance, seems difficult to perceive—namely, that such a term has a peculiar connotation with respect to relocating from one country to another, migration, as mentioned earlier—clearly amplifies

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the aforementioned discussion on class and individual self-identification and ultimately complicates the issue for many involved. 48 WHERE MIGHT WE GO FROM HERE? Allow me to suggest possible remedies, modest to be sure, in the form of a series of questions that follow. First, why is there still no section in certain bookstores, especially those larger establishments in a city such as New York, dedicated to Italian/American writing? Why would a manager, owner, and/or corporate CEO shun such an idea? Given the thousands of square feet that a bookstore occupies, what impact could a regular bookshelf (five to seven yards of space) of Italian/American books have? Second, why is it that of the six or seven of the dozen or so forthcoming books on the home page of a book publisher, the one title that is dedicated to Italian Americana does not appear? Does the director not think that the Italian/American title warrants mention on the first page of the press’s website instead of being relegated to the second page among the second half of the titles mentioned? Third, how is it possible that a book dedicated to U.S. poetry, one that seems to present itself as historically analytical and prescriptive, does not include a chapter on any Italian American, not even someone such as John Ciardi? In an interview with author George De Stefano, I posed the question of responsibilities of those of us in positions of authority in our respective fields. His first words were, poignantly so, “cultural transmission.” 49 We need to be sure that those who follow, the younger generation, are aware of our culture, past and present. They can indeed have access to such knowledge in two ways: First, people need to be there to impart the information necessary for such cultural awareness. This includes teachers and professors, on all levels. Such a strategy for success is twofold. (1) People need to get into the various K–12 curricula lessons on significant Italian Americans. To date, the New Jersey Italian and Italian American Heritage Commission has a wonderful plan that it is trying to get passed on a state level. (2) Professors at the college/university level need to include Italian Americana in their various courses and, especially at the graduate level, in their seminars. This, in fact, leads to the second of two ways—an area where “push comes to shove,” so to speak. This is where cultural philanthropy comes into play; professorships in Italian Americana need to be established; centers for Italian/American studies need to be established. Both, clearly, can be done through endowments of approximately $2,000,000 and $1,000,000, respectively. Endowed professorships and centers run the gamut for other U.S. ethnic groups, funded by individuals and/or their foundations. Very few individuals among the Italian/ American community have engaged in such cultural philanthropy; we can practically count the number on one hand.

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What I outline here constitutes some of the reasons, I would contend, why the cultural world of Italian America might benefit from a more rigorous theoretical and methodological tune-up, one that takes into consideration both the creative and the critical realms. Furthermore, and indeed for reasons slightly different, I would include those in the United States as well as in Italy who study Italian/American cultural productions. Indeed, one of the major tasks of all who study cultural Italian Americana is to examine further the numerous factors that lie at the base of such culture, to seek out all possible answers to the various questions that we might want, once again, to examine: Why, we might first ask, did so many of our forbearers have to leave Italy during those forty-plus years of the great wave of immigration? Because the south was miserably poor is indeed true. But is this, in itself, a satisfactory response? On the threshold of the third millennium, we find ourselves among fourth-, if not fifth-, generation Italian Americans. This said, may we not ask what sort of debt, if any, might contemporary Italy have with regard to those who have lived either directly—immigrants—or indirectly—subsequent generations—the migratory experience and its legacy among the later generations? What has Italy done over the past one hundred years to better the conditions that led to the great exodus that began at the end of the nineteenth century? 50 What are, today, the roots of those aesthetic works—written and visual— that contribute to the cultural world of Italian America? Why are there, and not rarely, certain unpleasant images in many written and visual works, and yet the writer/director feels the need to insert them into the work? 51 In general terms, then, what type of world do Italian/American artists represent in their works? These are some of the questions for which we still need to seek out answers, even if such answers are not easy to ascertain at first glance, are not the clutch answers that we might readily desire, and, further still, are not all positive and consequently do not contribute to a more sentimental overall picture of the immigrant experience. In an attempt to seek them out yet a second time, I would contend, we must pass over that critical threshold based primarily on biographical and accepted historical factors, as well as that which one assumes is based on the author’s intentions. Or, as Joseph Sciorra characterized it, those “‘common sense’ histories and assumptions,” which constitute an “uncritical and linear account of self-resolve, family cohesion, and religious conviction ending in the boardrooms and suburbia of white America [which] involves a significant amount of memory loss and obfusca-

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tion of the historical record.” 52 Finally, to complete the cycle, so to speak, we must also acknowledge that specific, historical patrimony of suffering, marginalization, and exclusion that many immigrants had to endure on both sides of the ocean, both in their country of origin, which eventually led them to leave, and in their country of arrival, which, as the apocryphal story goes, made them then pave the mythical “streets of gold.” We need, in the end, to learn to take our culture more seriously. We cannot continue to engage in a series of reminiscences that lead primarily to nostalgic recall. Instead, we need to revisit our past, reclaim its pros and cons, and reconcile it with our present. Namely, we need to figure out where we came from, ask those unpopular questions of both ourselves and the dominant culture, and continue to champion our Italian/American cultural brokers of all sorts—artists and intellectuals—so that they can continue to engage in an Italian/American state of mind, if such is their choice. Ultimately, all of this is dependent on our recapturing our own sense of amor proprio and combining it with our abilities—financial, performative, aesthetic, intellectual, and so on—to document, maintain, transmit, and further propagate our Italian/American culture; anything short of such activity is tantamount to failure. NOTES 1. With regard to the slash (/) in place of the hyphen (-), see my To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate: The Italian/American Writer: Or, An Other American (Montréal: Guernica, 1991). A second point to underscore is the use of the truncated form “Italo-,” which, in its own right, deserves more space than can be dedicated here. For more, see To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate, 46. This chapter is an updated conglomeration of ideas that have appeared in different fora in both English and Italian, most recently in The Hyphenate Writer and The Legacy of Exile, ed. Paolo A. Giordano (New York: Bordighera Press, 2010), 1–25. 2. See his essay in Voices in Italian Americana 1, no. 1 (1990): 1–13. 3. There are, to be sure, many positive aspects about each of these cultures that clearly contribute to each group’s coherence. However, we surely do not err in seeing these more tragic events as the more cohesive element. Further still, while I would generally eschew such interethnic comparisons, sometimes we need to engage in such to make our point, as this is a constant refrain with many members of an Italian/American in-group. Thus, in so doing, we speak their language. 4. While there is a plethora of “popular” books on Italians in North America, very few seem to attempt an adequate overall view. Two that I would recommend are Alexander DeConde’s Half Bitter, Half Sweet: An Excursion into Italian-American History (New York: Scribner, 1971) and Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale’s La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). As for documentaries, two of a general nature come to mind: Pane Amaro, dir. Gianfranco Norelli (Eurus Productions, 2009), and Little Italy: Past, Present, and Future, dir. Federica Martino and William Medici (Dolce, 2007). 5. This, of course, should not diminish the fact that of all the lynchings on record that have taken place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, 70 percent were perpetrated against African Americans. 6. In late December 1941, “enemy aliens”—non-citizens, that is—were required to surrender hand cameras, short-wave radio receiving sets, and radio transmitters. In January 1942, they

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had to register at their local post offices. As such, they were fingerprinted, photographed, and issued photo-bearing “enemy alien registration cards,” which they had to carry at all times. 7. For more on the history of this unspoken event, see Alien Justice: Wartime Internment in Australia and North America, ed. Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels (St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2000); Lawrence DiStasi, ed., Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment during World War II (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2001), and Steven R. Fox, UnCivil Liberties: Italian Americans under Siege during World War II (Boca Raton, FL: Universal, 2000). 8. For more on this see, Salvatore LaGumina, WOP: A Documentary History of AntiItalian Discrimination (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 1999; originally published in 1973). Let us, in the meantime, keep in mind that discrimination for discrimination’s sake should not be an end product. Victimization unto itself is, in the end, counterproductive. 9. Some may want to see the enemy alien act of 1941–1942 as a major contribution to the loss of Italian in subsequent generations. 10. In stating all of this, I am patently aware of the many differences among Hispanics who come from difference geopolitical areas. However, I believe that we would also be naïve if we did not realize the cohesive affectation of things Hispanic. 11. Indeed, the aforementioned tragedy of the Italian as enemy alien needs to be an integral part of this historico-sociological category of Italian emigration/immigration. We simply need to educate the Italian/American community as well as both the U.S. community at large in North America and the Italian community in Italy. Ignorance is simply unacceptable at this historical juncture. 12. There would be much discussion about an analogous term in Italian. Such a couplet, composed of two independent terms, might indeed be joined by a diacritical mark, if not joined together as one word, as is the case not only with “italo-americano,” which becomes “italoamericano” but also with other terms such as “afroamericano” (or “afro-americano”), for instance. I would add at this point that the term “americano italiano” is more than an accepted analogy to the English “Italian American” as noun. Each term respects the grammatical logic (read, rules) of its respective language. 13. In To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate, especially 20–27, 33–42, I also approach, among other things, the necessity of a more representative term for Italophone culture in the United States. 14. See Francesco Durante, Italoamericana (Milan, Italy: Mondadori, 2001), 5. 15. Of course, here, for economy’s sake, I intend how they represent themselves and how they are represented by others both within the United States and in Italy. 16. Such cultural-historical erasure becomes increasingly evident as new studies appear. Furthermore, one might also say the same for Italians in the United States for the twentieth century. I have in mind Lawrence DiStasi’s long-fought struggle to bring attention to the internment of Italians in the United States during World War II. See his Una storia segreta. 17. I should state at the outset, especially since the tone of these reflections tend toward the critical, that I would be remiss not to mention those few who have proven to be steadfast in their interest and, therefore, diffusion of Italian/American studies in Italy. I have in mind the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, its pioneering journal Altreitalie, and its members, led by, especially, Madalena Tirabassi. For more on the foundation and its impact on the study of Italian Americans, see my “Italian/American Critical Discourse: Studies for the New Millennium with a Little Help from Our Friends!” Altreitalie 20, no. 1 (2001): 23–42. Claudio Gorlier, in turn, has contributed to the recognition and, dare I add, validity of such a category if only because of his many reviews and essays on the subject matter. Others would include Simone Cinotto (food), Simona Frasca (popular music), Paola Casella and Giuliana Muscio (cinema), and Stefano Luconi and Adele Maiello (history). My intention is not to paint American studies either in Italy or in the United States with one brush but, rather, to look at those nooks and crannies that could readily be revisited, with the aim of examining further a greater consciousness overall among “americanisti” in both countries. Finally, I would underscore that these thoughts, as the reader will realize, are limited to the literary, which explains any lack of reference to works in other fields, such as anthropology, history, sociology, and so on.

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18. The essays are as follows: Robert Orsi, “Il colore dell’altro: confini, religione, identità in mutamento tra gli italiani di Harlem,” Ácoma 5 (summer-autumn 1995): 5–12; and Rudy Vecoli, “Emigranti italiani e movimenti operai negli Stati Uniti. Una riflessione personale su etnicità e classe sociale,” Ácoma 5 (summer-autumn 1995): 13–22. 19. The key notion is here the “limited to” that I would underscore. The translation of what has developed in the United States is, I would submit, extremely significant for the further development of an intellectual discourse in Italy on Italian Americans. Much has already been done, especially if one takes into consideration those books published on the subject matter by State University of New York Press as well as Mary Jo Bona’s study and Edvige Giunta’s collection of essays. See note 31. 20. See Ácoma 19 (spring-summer 2000): Alessandro Portelli, “I rifiuti, la storia e il peccato in Underworld di Don DeLillo,” 4–15; Caterina Romeo, “Vertigo di Louise de Salvo: vertigine della memoria,” 33–39; Martino Marazzi, “Pietro di Donato and John Fante,” 55–59. 21. See Ácoma 31 (spring-summer 2006). 22. See Sara Antonelli and Cinzia Scarpino, “L’America che leggiamo,” Ácoma 31 (winter 2005): 19. “Of particular urgency, and in line with the editorial decisions that characterize Acoma, there are thus those discourses, tied to the many ethnic and social components of the United States cultural fabric, to which the current issue dedicates a series of essays in a more agile format. Highlighted here are the various trajectories that, in the wake of the various political and literary ‘Renaissances’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Latinos and Asiaticamericans), have brought forward their different literatures of America to elaborate on the experiences of the historically oppressed minorities (Afroamericans, Native Americans). Jewish-Americans, in the end, warrant a special discussion, their works having been perceived from time to time as either internal or external to mainstream production” (my translation). A curious aside—indeed hopeful with regard to a broadening of horizons vis-à-vis hyphenated literature—may be found in Armando Gnisci’s Creolizzare l ’ Europa: Letteratura e migrazione (Rome: Meltemi, 2003). With regard to Italian migration literature, that which is written in Italian by the “new” immigrants to Italy, he wrote: “Noialtri italiani dobbiamo imparare a imparare dal nostro passato migratorio, oltre che dalla breve ad esagerata (in tutti i sensi) esperienza di potenza coloniale, ad avere a che fare con il presente interculturale, in casa e dovunque nel mondo. Quest’ultima considerazione ci aiuta, infine, a formulare in maniera più compiuta la rivendicazione di una letteratura italiana della migrazione. Essa deve essere pensata innanzitutto come un fenomeno della modernità avanzata, senza precedenti. Inizia con le migrazioni di intere popolazioni di italiani verso tutto il mondo alla ricerca di lavoro a partire dall’immediato periodo post-unitario e trova il suo completamento nella letteratura scritta dagli immigrati, venuti in Italia da tutto il mondo in cerca di lavoro, a partire dall’ultimo decennio del XX secolo” (83; “We Italians have to learn to learn from our migratory past, beyond the brief to exaggerated (in every sense) experience of colonial power, to dealing with the intercultural present, at home and wherever in the world. This last consideration helps us in the end to formulate in a more complete manner the claim of an Italian literature of migration. It needs to be considered first and foremost as a phenomenon of advanced modernity, without precedent. It begins with the migrations of entire populations of Italians throughout the world in search of work, beginning with the immediate post-unification period, and it finds its completion in the literature written by immigrants, having arrived in Italy from all over the world in search of work, beginning with the last decade of the twentieth century.”). I thank Evelyn Ferraro for the reference to Gnisci’s thought on this matter. 23. From outside the Italian/American community, I would recall the 1987 special issue of Melus dedicated to Italian/American literature and film. This becomes most poignant precisely because it is not an Italian/American voice; rather, it is one dedicated to the study of “multiethnic literatures of the United States.” 24. See also, Salvatore La Gumina’s Wop; Mathew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Joseph P. Cosco, Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions, 1880 – 1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); and Jennifer Guglielmo and Sal Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003), also available in Italy, published by Saggiatore.

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25. The journal, an annual, was first published in 1990. The actual issues are difficult to consult, given certain challenges presented by the national library system in Italy. Nevertheless, AISNA has listed on its website most of the tables of content and, for the earlier issues, essays in Word or PDF format, allowing for easy access to most of the journal’s articles. 26. “Italy and Italians in America,” RSA Rivista di Studi Anglo-americani (ed. Alfredo Rizzardi) 3, nos. 4–5 (1985), published by Piovan Editore. There is, as the reader will notice, a slight difference in title between the “journal” and the “proceedings”—Rivista di Studi NordAmericani versus Rivista di Studi Anglo-americani—thus constituting a bit of a challenge when seeking our either. In addition, while the “proceedings” carry the title of “rivista” from volume to volume, they carry instead an ISBN number and are produced by different publishers. 27. America and the Mediterranean, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo and Pierangelo Castagneto (Torino, Italy: OTTO editore, 2003). It seems that from the fifteenth conference on, the proceedings now appear as discrete volumes. I would also note that the publisher OTTO editore has indeed a series nova americana that includes a number of volumes dedicated to Italian Americana. 28. A list of primary examples would surely be close to exhaustive as well as most debatable. Nevertheless, I offer up a few names and titles dedicated to the study of other multicultural literatures: Bonnie Tusmith, All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York: MLA, 1990); Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993); Ramon Saldivar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Carl Shirley and Paula Shirley, Understanding Chicano Literature (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988); Houston A. Baker, Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974); Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 29. I would again remind the reader of Altreitalie, for a long time the only venue where one could readily find writings in both Italian and English dedicated to the various cultures of the Italian diasporas, especially in the rest of Europe, the Americas, and Australia. See the journal’s website at www.altreitalie.it . 30. They are Italian Americana, The Italian American Review, and Voices in Italian Americana. 31. Some examples include the following: State University of New York Press’s series in Italian/American studies, directed by Fred Gardaphè; Josephine Gattuso Hendin’s “The New World of Italian American Studies,” American Literary History 13, no. 1 (2001): 141–57; or Thomas Ferraro’s less conspicuously titled essay “‘My Way’ in ‘Our America’: Art, Ethnicity, Profession,” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (2000): 499–522. Other mainstream press books include Mary Jo Bona’s Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), Edvige Giunta’s Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (New York: Palgrave, 2002), as well as Gardaphé’s earlier pioneering Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Most recently, Thomas Ferraro published Feeling Italian (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Robert Viscusi published Buried Caesars (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006); and Fred Gardaphè published his From Wiseguys to Wise Men (New York: Routledge, 2006). Let us not forget that the first study to be published in this area was Rose Basile Green’s The ItalianAmerican Novel (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974). 32. The addresses are as follows: Janice A. Radway, “What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1999): 1–32; Mary Kelley, “Taking Stands: American Studies at Century’s End: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2000): 1–22; Michael H. Frisch, “Prismatics, Multivalence, and Other Riffs on the Millennial Moment: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2001): 193–231; George

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Sanchez, “Working at the Crossroads: American Studies for the 21st Century—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2002): 1–23; Stephen H. Sumida, “Where in the World Is American Studies? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003): 333–52; Amy Kaplan, “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2004): 1–18; Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 17–57; Karen Halttunen, “Groundwork: American Studies in Place” American Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2006): 1–15; Emory Elliott, “Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational?” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2007): 1–22; Vicki Ruiz, “Citizen Restaurant: American Imaginaries, American Communities,” American Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2008): 1–21; Philip Deloria, “Broadway and Main: Crossroads, Ghost Roads, and Paths to an American Studies Future,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009): 1–25; Kevins Gaines, “Of Teachable Moments and Spectors of Race,” American Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2010): 195–213; Ruth Wilson Gimore, “What Is to Be Done,” American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2011): 245–65; Priscilla Wald, “American Studies and the Politics of Life,” American Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2012): 185–204. 33. For a review of what was available until and through the first half of 2003, see my “Beyond ‘Pizza’ and ‘Nonna’! Or, What’s Bad about Italian/American Criticism? Further Directions for Italian/American Cultural Studies,” MELUS 28, no. 3 (2003): 149–74. To this list, one would add at this juncture Robert Viscusi’s Buried Caesars (2006) and Fred Gardaphè’s From Wiseguys to Wise Men (2006), as I have now done in the final chapter of this book. 34. Other questions are begged at this point. What should be, if at all, the relationship between Italian studies and Italian/American studies in the United States? Should intellectual outlets—journals and book series—dedicated to Italian studies open their doors, so to speak, to Italian/American essays and creative works? To date, if memory does not fail me, four Italian journals in United States have already done so: Forum Italicum, Gradiva, Italian Culture, and Italica. 35. For earlier negative depictions, see LaGumina’s Wop. 36. See Jerry Krase, “Lest We Forget: Racism Will Make Victims of Us All,” Brooklyn Free Press, September 22, 1989; and John Kifner, “Bensonhurst: A Tough Code in Defense of a Closed World,” New York Times, September 1, 1989. See also Jerry Krase’s later essay “Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian American Victimizers and Victims,” Voices in Italian Americana 5, no. 2 (1994): 43–53; also available at www.geocities.com/enza003/Via/ViaVol5_2Krase.htm; Joseph Sciorra, “‘Italians against Racism’: The Murder of Yusuf Hawkins (R.I.P.) and My March on Benson Hurst,” in Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 192–209. 37. See his excellent essay “Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture,” Voices in Italian Americana 1, no. 1 (1990): 1–13. 38. Remedy to some of the aforementioned was sought out and obtained by individuals in the past. The late New York state senator John D. Calandra and colleagues took it upon themselves to investigate the treatment of Italian Americans—faculty, staff, and students—at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the 1970s, since there had been numerous complaints about the treatment of Italian Americans within CUNY. The finding was that Italian Americans were indeed under-utilized and under-represented at all levels university-wide. The immediate result was Chancellor Kibbee’s proclamation (December 9, 1976) that Italian Americans were to be considered a protective class throughout CUNY, with all the rights and privileges of the federally recognized affirmative action groups. Another result was the eventual formation of the Italian-American Institute to Foster Higher Education, in 1979, which, over the years, has been transformed, in both size and mission, into the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, a university-wide research institute under the aegis of Queens College, CUNY. The 1979 institute was founded primarily to foster higher education among Italian Americans (through academic and career counseling especially) and impart, to both Italian

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Americans and non–Italian Americans alike, knowledge of the culture of Italian America. Over the years, the mission broadened, to include social, psychological, and demographic research on Italian Americans both within and beyond the walls of CUNY. Today, these earlier research components are now buttressed by an equally rigorous sector of cultural activities that range from lectures to symposia to film series. Such an institute dedicated to Italian Americana—be it the original structure of 1979 or the more expanded unit of today—is unique. No other center or institute here in the Americas or in Italy (an exception, the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli of Turin) approaches its magnitude and the possibilities therein. 39. See his “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (summer 2004): 50–51. 40. Back in 1970, Joseph Lopreato was prescient in this regard: “The second generation to a large extent and later generation almost in toto are, as we shall see, decidedly middle class people. This fact has clear implications for the cohesion of the Italian community. My prediction is that in the next decade or two, as members of the third and fourth generations reach independent status, Italian Americans will begin a massive exodus to the suburbs. Their move will be encouraged by the migratory pressure of Black Americans and other ethnic minorities on the Italian community.” See his Italian Americans (New York: Random House, 1970), 51–52. 41. The irony in Talese’s having written a book on the Bonanno family, however, is that today he seems to be one of the more vocal people against those who adopt similar themes (organized crime) in their work. All this appears to be a 1990s awakening on his part, which apparently coincided with the publication of his genealogical account, Unto the Sons. 42. See my “Beyond ‘Pizza’ and ‘Nonna.’” 43. See Green, The Italian-American Novel. 44. Various questions come to mind in this regard: What are or should be the expectations of Italian/American organizations vis-à-vis the prominent members of their respective Italian/ American communities? Do they, for example, perennially appear as “guests” of sociocultural events such as fund-raising, formal events when just about everyone else must pay a significant “donation”? Should they be included in cultural events and projects when, at other times, such projects and events do not constitute part of their public biographies? Should they be given a sort of carte blanche when it comes to strategies concerning issues in which they are not professionally prepared? When do, we might also ask, they join group as individual, pulling their weight as everyone else? 45. This reminds us of the self-described group “Italian Poets in America,” first presented as a category with the special issue of Gradiva 10–11 (1992–1993). A good deal of literature has been written on this phenomenon of the bilingual Italian writer in the United States. It raises a series of issues, to be sure, that deals further, among other things, with labels, as the title of the special number of Gradiva suggests: “Italian writer in America,” “writer in exile,” “expatriate” are just some of the labels that circulate. In my own A Semiotic of Ethnicity, I saw this type of writer included in what I consider a later group of those writers who, though linguistically different, belong nevertheless under the greater umbrella of Italian/American writer. See chapter 7, “Italian/American Writer or Italian Poet Abroad? Luigi Fontanella’s Poetic Voyage,” of my A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998): 109–17. Other essays have been written on this phenomenon. One of the more acute contributions to the discussion is a recent essay by Andrea Ciccarelli, “Fuoricasa: scrittori italiani in Nord America,” Esperienze letterarie 29, no. 1 (2004): 83–104, where, in closing, he also raises the issue of Italian writing outside of Italy and its relationship to Italian literature. Previous significant essays and collections include, first and foremost, Paolo Valesio’s “The Writer between Two Worlds: The Italian Writer in the United States,” Differentia 3–4 (spring/autumn 1989): 259–76; the relevant essays in Jean-Jacques Marchand’s edited volume La letteratura dell’emigrazione: gli scrittori di lingua italiana nel mondo (Turin, Italiy: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1991); Peter Carravetta’s insightful introduction to Poesaggio. Poeti italiani d’America, ed. Peter Carravetta and Paolo Valesio (Treviso, Italy: Pagus, 1993); and Luigi Fontanella’s La parola transfuga (Florence: Cadmo, 2003).

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46. The “Italian” writers mentioned so far have all, to some degree or another, dealt with the issue of their bilingual and bicultural sociological status in the United States. Two elder statesmen who have also championed their bicultural status are Giose Rimanelli and Joseph Tusiani, each of whom has composed prose or poetry in at least three languages (Italian, English, and dialect), with Tusiani also writing in Latin. Others, instead, seem not to have done so in any fashion, except, perhaps, in re-writing or translating their creative work into English. In any event, the many names that come to mind, those who have and have not negotiated their bilingualism and biculturalism, might include Luigi Ballerini, Emanuel Carnevali, Alessandro Carrera, Giovanni Cecchetti, Ned Condini, Rita Dinale, Franco Ferrucci, Arturo Giovannitti, Ernesto Livorni, Irene Marchegiani, Mario Moroni, Eugenia Paulicelli, Mario Pietralunga, and Annalisa Saccà. 47. By “significant amount of time,” I have in mind no less than ten years during which the individual is engaged in his or her daily activities, personal and professional, in his or her host country, even if there are frequent trips back to the country of origin. 48. Might the possible referent here be the stereotyped image of the immigrant of the early twentieth century: that short, dark-skinned, moustached individual who travels with the proverbial cardboard suitcase with string around it? 49. See Italics: The Italian American Magazine, episode 188. 50. We might indeed ask, what would have happened if the United States had imposed an earlier limit to Italian immigration? 51. Two works I have in mind are Gianna Patriarca’s Italian Women and Other Tragedies (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 1994) and the more recent Italian film Come l’America, dir. Andrea Frazzi and Antonio Frazzi (2001). In both works, one finds the angry immigrant who ends up physically abusing his wife and children. 52. See his review of Heaven Touches Brooklyn in July (2001), by Tony De Nonno, J ournal of American Folklore 117, no. 466 (2004): 459. He continues: “During the past twentyfive years, scholars and artists have begun to critique and dismantle ‘common-sense’ histories and assumptions by exploring topics such as the larger global Italian diasporic experience, Italian American involvement in labor struggles and radical left politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their support of fascism during the 1920s and1930s, especially among ethnic elites, patriarchal violence and intergenerational conflict, and the privileges of whiteness in a racist society” (459). Indeed, some of these hot points have already been addressed in, among others, the following essays and books: Stanislao Pugliese, “The Culture of Nostalgia: Fascism in the Memory of Italian-Americans,” The Italian American Review 5, no. 2 (1996/1997): 15–26; Philip V. Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy: Italian Americans and Fascism, 1921–1929 (Lafayette, IN: Bordighera Press, 1999); Guglielmo and Salerno’s Are Italians White?

II

Specificities of Reading Prose

Chapter Two

Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete An Italian/American Novel Not Set in Stone

Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete is considered by many to be one of the best accounts of the Italian immigrant’s experience to the United States. Unlike the more traditional Italian/American novels structured around a more solid story line that both preceded and followed di Donato’s debut novel, those which Fred Gardaphè has labeled “retrospective,” 1 Christ in Concrete consists more of a series of “episodes” that, similar to the language of the novel, create not so much mere representation of that which is traditionally conceived to be a priori reality but presentation (the offering for viewing or notice or for consideration) or experience, as the reader—in witnessing the various trials and tribulations of the characters themselves (mostly Geremio and Paul)—is made to feel part and parcel of their experience. In yet another context, one might readily discuss the father (Geremio)–son (Paul) relationship from a variety of points of view, especially since Geremio’s relationship to his wife and children was most loving and of great concern for their present and future well-being. I have in mind (1) the passing of legacy from one generation to the next, (2) Paul the son—metaphorical apostle—in relationship to the Christological function of Geremio, and (3) the new generation’s struggle to insert itself into mainstream Anglo/American society. These are just a few of the semiotic functions that we might examine in another setting. Both the episodic structure of the novel and the uncanny speech that recounts these episodes—its narration and dialogue—underscore the “exis29

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tential nature of the immigrant experience” (Gardaphè 1993, xii). Indeed, for the reader to comprehend better this experience, di Donato, according to Daniel Orsini, “sees that the way to a representative Italian identity is through speech acts construed as phonocentric—that is, through words conceived as elemental, self-present, and hence pure sounds which he employs not to write about, but rather to speak of, the vivid worldly consciousness of his characters.” 2 Thus, it is the novel’s idiom, di Donato’s innovative use of language, what Robert Viscusi has called the “dance of Italian and English,” 3 that di Donato so keenly choreographs, that stands out in this seemingly prototypical Italian/American novel. 4 According to those few who have discussed this topic, there are three basic ways in which di Donato employs language: careful idiomatic English; the language that the characters speak in their utterances is often the “English” equivalent to what is, we may readily assume, the “Italian” they are speaking; and the accented English that they also speak, that which we have come to know as, colloquially, broken English. 5 All this, in a way, constitutes an inside-out form of translation within this context. In a sense, di Donato goes from writing a novel in which he adds Italian to one in which he translates, so to speak, to English for his reader’s comprehension of the dialogue that takes place among his many characters. In what follows, I examine larger passages of the text to illustrate these three types of language usage and their effects. An adequate combination of the aforementioned characteristics is clearly manifested at the opening of the novel: The Lean pushed his barrow on, his face cruelly furrowed with time and struggle. Sirupy sweat seeped from beneath his cap, down his bony nose and turned icy at its end. He muttered to himself. “Saints up, down, sideways and inside out! How many more stones must I carry before I’m overstuffed with the light of day! I don’t understand . . . blood of the Virgin, I don’t understand!” Mike the “Barrel-mouth” pretended he was talking to himself and yelled out in his best English. . . . He was always speaking English while the rest carried on in their native Italian: “I don’t know myself, but somebodys whose gotta buncha keeds and he alla times talka from somebodys elsa.” Geremio knew it was meant for him and he laughed. “On the tomb of Saint Pimple-legs, this little boy my wife is giving me next week shall be the last. Eight hungry little Christians to feed is enough for any man.” (4)

The narrator’s keen ability to work with English is apparent from the opening sentence of the novel and is again reiterated here with an almost added loftiness as he opens the passage. Again: “The Lean pushed his barrow on, his face cruelly furrowed with time and struggle. Sirupy sweat seeped from beneath his cap, down his bony nose and turned icy at its end.” The Italian, in

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turn, comes through in phrases such as “blood of the Virgin” and “eight hungry little Christians to feed,” which clearly mark such a distinction. In addition, one might also see an invention of sorts by di Donato himself where Italian is feigned though not real: the allusion to saints (Saint Pimple-legs) is a common feature of Italian interjection if not a proverbial call for help. 6 Equally significant is the distinct use of shall to signal the future—if not, at times, a type of subjunctive—as opposed to will or the contracted ’ll, which may more readily signal the future in English. All this contributes to a certain linguistic uniqueness that signals, as we are now told, their Italian language, since the majority of them, the narrator informs us, “carried on in their native Italian” (4). 7 Finally, the accented English—or broken English—is also signaled here by Mike the Barrel-mouth’s utterance when he says: “I don’t know myself, but somebodys whose gotta buncha keeds and he alla times talka from somebodys elsa.” We see these and other aspects of di Donato’s “dance” with language reappearing throughout the novel. Italian, for example, is surely the language that Geremio is speaking when he muses: Ah bella casa mio [sic]. Where my little freshets of blood and my good woman await me. Home where my broken back will not ache so. Home where midst the monkey chatter of my piccolinos I will float off to blessed slumber with my feet on the chair and the head on the wife’s soft full breasts. 8 (5)

We see here the interspersing of Italian words and Italian grammar usage— “bella casa mio” and the use of the definite article in place of the possessive. On other occasions, the narrator, in his narrative, refers to the Italian workers with their nicknames, as they might do with one another usually in their speech, be it in direct conversation with them or in reference to them (5, 8, 9). A third aspect of di Donato’s style we see here is the double or triple repetition of certain words or phrases, as in “Home where my broken back” and “Home where midst the monkey chatter.” Indeed, this is a “dance” that di Donato has decided to choreograph from the very beginning. For it is also at the beginning, in the first ten pages of the novel, that we witness some of di Donato’s quasi-lyrical and powerful prose, especially when he is describing the threatening possibilities of danger (8), if not the actual collapse of the building (14) from which we obviously have our title. The first is as follows: The Lean as he fought his burden on looked forward to only one goal, the end. The barrow he pushed, he did not love. The stones that brutalized his palms, he did not love. The great God Job, he did not love. He felt a searing bitterness and a fathomless consternation at the queer consciousness that inflicted the ever mounting weight of structures that he had to! had to! raise above his shoulders. When, when and where would the last stone be? Never . . . did he

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Chapter 2 bear his toil with the rhythm of song! Never . . . did his gasping heart knead the heavy mortar with lilting melody! A voice within him spoke in wordless language. The language of worn oppression and the despair of realizing that his life had been left on brick piles. And always, there had been hunger and her bastard, the fear of hunger. (8)

The symmetry of repetition is too blatant to ignore; it adds a lyrical quality, as if we were to break down the paragraphs into verse, or, possibly, especially with regard to the groups of threes, as if they were a type of corollary to the number 3, a quasi-religious overtone that forewarns us of what is to come. 9 But more significant here, I would hasten to add, is another sort of forewarning. We are told that a “voice within him spoke in wordless language,” one of “worn oppression and the dispair.” Indeed, it is precisely this, a language of their exploitation and hopelessness, something that they feel so deeply that it need not have voice, as it is described here as a “wordless language.” But it is wordless, I would contend, for another reason; for the language that di Donato has created—or, perhaps, we should say creates strada facendo—is based on a sign system that both is and is not in mutual correlation with the coding system of what we might consider the dominant culture. 10 In an interview six years before his death, di Donato talked about his work, especially Christ in Concrete, which he considered his favorite novel along with The Gospels. 11 He then stated, in response to a question about his notions of religion: “I’m a sensualist and I respond to the sensuality of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, its art, its music, its fragrances, its colors, its architecture and so forth—which is purely Italian. We Italians are really essentially pagans and realists” (Von Huene Greenberg 1987, 36). 12 Indeed, di Donato not only responds to the Catholic Church but also reacts to it. From a linguistic point of view, we might see his response to “its art” with his tour de force description of the building’s collapse, when Geremio dies. Just as the “floor lurched and swayed” from its faulty construction, we read: The men poised stricken. Their throats wanted to cry out and scream but didn’t. For a moment they were a petrified and straining pageant. Then the bottom of their world gave way. The building shuttered violently, her supports burst with the crackling slap of wooden gunfire. The floor vomited upward. Geremio clutched at the air and shrieked agonizingly. “Brothers, what have we done? Ahhh-h, children of ours!” With the speed of light, balancing went sickeningly awry and frozen men went flying explosively. Job tore down upon them madly. Walls, floors, beams became whirling, solid, splintering waves crashing with detonations that ground man and material in bonds of death. The strongly shaped body that slept with Annunziata nights and was perfect in all the limitless physical quantities thudded as a worthless sack amongst the giant débris that crushed fragile flesh and bone with centrifugal intensity.

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Darkness blotted out his terror and the restless form twisted, catapulted insanely in its directionless flight, and shot down neatly and deliberately between the empty wooden forms of a foundation wall pilaster in upright position, his blue swollen face pressed against the form and his arms outstretched, caught securely through the meat by the thin round bars of reinforcing steel. The huge concrete hopper that was sustained by an independent structure of thick timber wavered a breath or so, its heavy concrete rolling uneasily until a great sixteen-inch wall caught it squarely with all the terrific verdict of its dead weight and impelled it downward through joists, beams and masonry until it stopped short, arrested by two girders, an arm’s length above Geremio’s head; the gray concrete gushing from the hopper mouth, and sealing up the mute figure. (14)

Descriptions of this sort, rich with unusual combinations, I would contend, surely demonstrate di Donato’s expertise as a wordsmith. The first, long paragraph of short staccato-like sentences evinces the speed of the building’s collapse together with the worker’s immediate sense of lack of control, only then to be followed by a prose of three short paragraphs, possessing what we might consider a longer cadence that now underscores the tragedy of the results of the collapse, as—we read—the “huge concrete hopper . . . stopped short . . . , an arm’s length above Geremio’s head.” The second short paragraph, in turn, underscores the fragility and mortality of Geremio and, metonymically, all other immigrant workers. What then stands out here is the most efficacious comparison that di Donato sets up between what is at first glance the Adonis-like Geremio—“strongly shaped body . . . perfect in all the limitless physical quantities”—in all his glory who is suddenly, as we read, banally struck down by such brute force of nature (as his body “thudded as a worthless sack amongst the giant débris that crushed fragile flesh and bone with centrifugal intensity”). 13 Geremio’s seeming divine aspect presented in the second paragraph is then juxtaposed to the “dark,” “heavy” power of Job, as signified by the crescendo of phrases included in the subsequent two paragraphs that detail Geremio’s crucifixion: that is, in the “reinforcing steel,” “huge concrete hopper,” “heavy concrete,” and “terrific verdict of its dead weight.” All this then culminates in the final oxymoronic pairing of the machine (hopper) and human being (Geremio)— “the gray concrete gushing from the hopper mouth, and sealing up the mute figure”—as the human sign “mouth” signifies the non-human and the not-sohuman sign “sealing up” signifies the human, Geremio, now reduced to the “mute figure.” Both entities, from an ontological point of view, now converge through language to a level that, in itself, can signify human and nonhuman. But di Donato responds also in a less realistic way, as, perhaps, sensuality in the strictest sense now overrides realism, where understanding is subordi-

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nate to the initial experience of feeling, only then to give rise to some sort of logical conclusion to the reading experience. 14 Early on, we read: Job loomed up damp, shivery gray. Its giant members waiting. Builders donned their coarse robes, and waited. Geremio’s whistle rolled back into his pocket and the symphony of struggle began. Trowel rang through brick and slashed mortar rivets were machine-gunned fast with angry grind Patsy number one check Patsy number two check the Lean three check Julio four steel bellowed back at hammer donkey engines coughed purple Ashes-ass Pietro fifteen chisel point intoned stone thin steel whirred and wailed through wood liquid stone flowed with dull rasp through iron veins and hoist screamed through space Rosario the Fat twenty-four and Giacomo Sangini check. . . . The multitudinous voices of a civilization rose from the surroundings and melted with the efforts of the Job. (8)

The “multitudinous voices,” we see, are soon transformed into “an inferno of sense-pounding cacophony,” as the men respond once again to Job, who/ what now shows his/its true colors as Job will much later be labeled the “monstruous-poised” (214), “maze of caught stone and steel” (224): Whistle shrilled Job awake, and the square pit thundered into an inferno of sense-pounding cacophony. Compression engines snort viciously—sledge heads punch sinking spikes—steel drills bite shattering jazz in stony-stone excitedly jarring clinging hands—dust swirling—bells clanging insistent aggravated warning—severe bony iron cranes swivel swing dead heavy rock high—clattering dump— vibrating concussion swiftly absorbed—echo reverberating—scoops bulling horns in rock pile chug-shish-chug-chug aloft—hiss roar dynamite’s boom— doom loosening petrified bowels—one hundred hands fighting rock—fifty spines derricking swiveling—fifty faces in set mask chopping stone into bread—fifty hearts interpreting Labor hurling oneself down and in at earth planting pod-footed Job. With April morning breaking down in slanting rain—and up Luigi’s pick—ten into twenty-four considering first the food for the children—down shivery hard in wall-boulder’s crevice—up pick—down into slowly dislodging boulder from wall. Twenty-four parted by ten—up pick—but we shall manage with strength—down pick hard—miss aim—slide slippery boots in puddle— down Luigi—down swiftly certain stone—but?!! My leggsss . . . With April’s rain and ten not into twenty-four. (46–47)

The fragmented prose here not only gives rise to the vertiginous effects we saw earlier but, from yet another stylistic point of view, surely underscores the interdependence, however precarious it may be, between Job and man, where, unfortunately, Job always seems to prevail. 15 Both passages, in fact, also emulate the machine-like, non-human aspect of work in which these men worked or—one might say even further—had to work, as they did the

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work reserved for the immigrants, not much unlike our current situation in the farm industry. Both passages, I would add, also bracket the tragedy of Geremio’s death so that the overwhelming, brute force that led up to Geremio’s demise at the opening of the novel continues in its ever so chaotic and threatening manner well after his death. We have seen thus far that di Donato, in his basic ways of constructing his own sign system, did not shy away from inserting into his own narration his characters’ broken English, if not occasional Italian words. Indeed, Christ in Concrete abounds with such examples. But there is yet another narrative technique that has yet to attract attention. Along with his mixing Italian and English in his narrative or constructing Italian phrases out of English words, both of which we have seen here, di Donato goes one step further: first, he actually intersperses in his narrative his characters’ thoughts; second, in so doing, he often shifts from the third person to the first person without employing the usual devices of quotation marks or dialogue tags, as we see in the following passage, one that actually precedes Luigi’s accident in the already cited paragraphs: For hours her love’s violence flowed. O Jesu in Heaven, and husband near, whither . . . and how? Pieced from the living are we now both. Bread—bread of Job and job of Bread has crushed your feet from the ground and taken your eyes from the sun, but nowhere are we separate—never-never in this breathing life shall I be away from you. Day and night will I kiss your wounds, with my flesh shall I keep the rain from you, these tears shall comfort you in heat, and with the cold shall I breath upon you my warmth . . . my husband. It is not of mine to ask—Why? But tonight must I gather strength to carry your and mine—to place their feet safely upon the earth. Content for that am I to suffer—to live—and then to join you. Join you. And her hand caressed the bed haloed of his form. (33–34)

What he does in these cases is take FID (free indirect discourse) to another level. We see here how Annunziata’s thoughts and feelings are framed by brief third-person references only to be articulated in the first person even though the usual dialogue tags, quotation marks, and the like that di Donato abundantly uses elsewhere are absent. 16 He takes this technique one step further in the following passage: In the boardinghouse bunk, Luigi had not slept at all that night. Fifty cents the hour, nine hours the day, brings four dollars and fifty cents. With six days the week brings—six by four brings twenty-four. One-half by six makes three. Twenty-four add three brings the final count twenty-seven dollars. The variables of the weather will make the twenty-seven less—and add fare and lunch. . . . But I shall prepare for the weather and work through it. Of food I will do with less—I am forty-five, and no longer growing. (44–45)

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Here, we see, not only does di Donato adopt free indirect discourse in the manner in which he has Luigi counting after the very first sentence, but, to our narratological surprise, we actually see Luigi transformed from a thirdperson referent to a first-person monologuer, as he now thinks aloud his economic strategy. We saw, in the description of Luigi’s accident, di Donato engage in the same sort of narrative, as we see the shift from “Luigi’s pick” to “we shall manage” to, finally, “My leggsss.” 17 A more poignant example of this alternating first- and third-person perspective takes place soon after when Paulie goes to the parish priest for help. There, when speaking with Father John, Paulie does not seem to muster up the courage to contradict the priest’s constant questioning of where Annunziata might possibly go for help. The episode amounts to a modern-day version of Marie Antoinette and the “let them eat cake” episode. Here, when informed that dessert was on the table, the following transpires: Without turning, Father John said, “Cut a good portion of the cake, wrap it nicely and bring it here.” “Yes, Father.” “Do the children like strawberry shortcake?” “. . . Yes . . .” A soft package into his hands from a shiny round face. “. . . Thank you . . .” Out through tall doors and strong walls. Will they ever protect me and mine? The old man closed the street door, surely, firmly. (59–60)

“Will they ever protect me and mine?” To be sure, with Geremio now dead, Paulie, his son, must eventually take his place. His thinking the question articulated as it is—“protect me and mine”—thus becomes inclusive of not only he and his family but, I would hasten to add, all immigrants, and the barrier that divides these two worlds are poignantly represented here by the “tall doors and strong walls” through which Paulie passes as he exits the rectory, leaving behind that world of “good portion[s]” of “strawberry shortcake.” Indeed, a question in first-person articulation that is situated in a thirdperson narrative, if ever so brief here in this specific situation of Paulie questioning the priest’s rejection of him, also becomes a question that all the immigrants are forced to ask. And di Donato does not stop here, by just begging the question, so to speak. Instead, very much like the deadly sound—“thud”—of Geremio’s body that signaled his demise, we have an analogous situation that offers us a visual image—“The old man closed the street door, surely, firmly”—which, in its own right, is the description of an aural sign—a slam—which here we see but do not hear. Di Donato’s juxtaposition of seemingly conflicting signs is consonant with other imagistic

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juxtapositions that we can readily find elsewhere in the novel, as we have seen in previous passages.

Thus, it is di Donato’s uncanny, rhetorical, and linguistic formula of his idiomatic English, the “Italian” language that his characters speak with “English” words, their own broken English, his own numerous tour de force descriptions, and his intertwining of his characters’ thoughts into his own narration that characterizes Christ in Concrete as the unique novel it is. All this underscores di Donato’s “dance between Italian and English.” It is, indeed, this overriding linguistic and narratological “dance” that aids him in upsetting the semiotic apple cart of the traditional American novel. For di Donato presents to his reader not the American dream; rather, he has constructed a novel out of a series of episodes that, once pieced together, constitute none other than the American nightmare. 18 Such a nightmare is propitiously accentuated toward the center of the novel, 19 situated soon after Paul and Louis have, what is obviously for both Paul and his mother, Annunziata, an enlightening conversation. 20 We then read: Men . . . wed themselves to Job with . . . the same new energy and fear, the same fierce silence and loss of consciousness, and the perpetual sense of their wrongness . . . struggling to fulfill a destiny of never-ending debt. . . . Job would be a brick labyrinth that would suck him in deeper and deeper, and there would be no going back. . . . Life would be the torque of Wall’s battle that distorted straight limbs beneath weight in heat and rain and cold. No poet would be there to intone meter of soul’s sentence to stone, no artist upon scaffold to paint the vinegary sweat of Christian in correspondence with red brick and gray mortar, no composer attuned to the screaming movement of Job and voiceless cry in overalls. (142–43)

“Never-ending debt” and “no going back” are the two key phrases that speak to the “existential condition of the immigrant” (Gardaphé) that di Donato sees as ever threatened. And to articulate such a precarious condition, di Donato, similar to his “poet,” “artist,” and “composer” mentioned earlier, can no longer rely on traditional coding systems. He must now find another means with which to represent Italian immigrant identity; he does so, as implied at the beginning, through the disfigurement of traditional sign systems and an eventual reconstruction of his own peculiar sign system that consists of what Giovanni Sinicropi has called “disharmonious but never discordant” patterns, 21 since traditional language, or what Orsini refers to as ecriture, consists of “built-in codes, heresies, and prejudgements” (199). That is, if we accept the premise that language—verbal and/or visual—is an

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ideological medium that can become restrictive and oppressive when its sign system is arbitrarily invested with meanings by those who are empowered to do so—that is, the dominant culture/the canon makers—so too can it become empowering for the purpose of privileging one coding correlation over another (in this case, the canon), by rejecting the canonical sign system and ultimately denying validity to this sign system vis-à-vis the interpretive act of a non-canonical text. 22 This said, then, we see that certain ideological constructs are de-privileged and subsequently awarded an unfixed status; they no longer take on a patina of natural facts. Rather, they figure as the arbitrary categories they truly are. All this results in a pluralistic notion of artistic invention and interpretation that, by its very nature, cannot exclude the individual—artist and reader/viewer—who has found “a voice or style that does not violate [his or her] several components of identity” 23 and who has thus “re-created,” ideologically speaking, a different repertoire of signs. 24 It is, in final analysis, a dynamics of the conglomeration and agglutination of different voices and reading strategies that, contrary to the hegemony of the dominant culture, cannot be fully integrated into any strict semblance of a monocultural voice or process of interpretation, as Bakhtin might tell us. Namely, the act of semiosis involved in di Donato’s Christ in Concrete is a restructured and redefined act of sign interpretation dependent on a sign repertoire no longer consonant with that of the literary canon—that is, the dominant culture. 25 What occurs concomitantly, then, is also the decentralization of the “verbal-ideological world.” 26 Specifically, along the lines of sign functions, one sees that the two functives of expression and content are no longer in mutual correlation. The content, at this point in time with regard to a non-canonical literature, is different from that of the canon. The sign function realized in this new process of semiosis is now in disaccord with the dominant culture’s expectation of the coding correlation. 27 The resultant non-canonical text that arises from such an unorthodox creative act—that is, di Donato’s—may initially problematize and frustrate a reader’s interpretive act. But more than an attempt to frustrate or block his reader’s semiotic iter, I would contend that such problematics in textuality constitute di Donato’s desire to involve intimately his reader in the co-production of textual signification, allowing further, I would submit, the possibility of different readers. Therefore, for the traditional (i.e., modernist) reader, therefore, one rooted in the search for existing absolutes, di Donato’s sign system may appear inadequate, perhaps even contemptuous. For the non-traditionalist (postmodernist) reader, instead, one who is open to, if not in search of, new coding correlations, di Donato’s sign system may appear significantly intriguing, if not, on occasion, rejuvenating, as Christ in Concrete indeed presents a sign system consisting of manipulated sign functions that ultimately (re)define the sign, since traditional writing “remains for [Pietro di Donato] merely one other form of inflexible, suffocating concrete,” as Orsini so aptly stated (199). 28

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NOTES 1. See Gardaphè’s “Introduction,” in Christ in Concrete (New York: Signet, 1993) ix–xviii, especially xii. For a specific study dedicated to Pietro di Donato’s novel, see Louise Napolitano, An American Story: Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (New York: Lang, 1995); for a more general study, see Matthew Diomede, Pietro di Donato, the Master Builder (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1995). 2. Daniel Orsini, “Rehabilitating di Donato, a Phonocentric Novelist,” in The Melting Pot and Beyond: Italian Americans in the Year 2000—Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, ed. Jerome Krase and William Egelman (Staten Island, NY: American Italian Historical Association, 1987), 191–205, especially 199. 3. See his “De Vulgari Eloquentia: An Approach to the Language of Italian American Fiction,” Yale Italian Studies 1 (winter 1981): 21–38, especially 37. See also his essay “‘The Semiology of Semen’: Questioning the Father,” The Italian Americans through the Generations: Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, ed. Rocco Caporale (Staten Island, NY: American Italian Historical Association, 1986), 185–95. 4. See also Gardaphè’s “Introduction” on the seemingly prototypicality of this novel within the Italian/American canon. 5. In this regard, see Gardaphè’s “Introduction” (1993) and his book-length study Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Franco Mulas, “The Ethnic Language of Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete,” in From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, ed. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), 307–15; Giovanni Sinicropi, “Christ in Concrete,” Italian Americana 3, no. 2 (1977): 175–83; and Robert Viscusi, “De Vulgari Eloquentia: An Approach to the Language of Italian American Fiction,” Yale Italian Studies 1, no. 3 (1981): 21–38. Rose Basile Green discusses this aspect of Christ in Concrete en passant in her historical study The Italian-American Novel: An Interaction between Two Cultures (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974). 6. Much of what I have just described about this passage has already been stated by Viscusi (1981, 36). 7. Other examples are easily found throughout the novel (27, 38, 39, 43, 47, 49, 57, 64, 66, to name a few). 8. Another example of Italian syntax, especially, appears soon after: “I tell you, son of Geremio shall never never lay bricks! Paulie mine will study from books—he will be the great builder! This very moment I can see him. . . . How proud he!” (10). 9. Another example of this coupling and tripling of items appears halfway through the novel. There we read: “With the beginning of each job men, though knowing one another and having raised Job for years, wed themselves to Job with the same new ceremony, the same new energy and fear, the same fierce silence and loss of consciousness, and the perpetual sense of their wrongness . . . struggling to fulfill a destiny of never-ending debt. These men were the hardness that would bruise Paul many times. They were the bodies to whom he would be joined in bondage to Job. Job would be a brick labyrinth that would suck him in deeper and deeper, and there would be no going back. Life would never be a dear music, a festival, a gift of Nature. Life would be the torque of Wall’s battle that distorted straight limbs beneath weight in heat and rain and cold. No poet would be there to intone meter of soul’s sentence to stone, no artist upon scaffold to paint the vinegary sweat of Christian in correspondence with red brick and gray mortar, no composer attuned to the screaming movement of Job and voiceless cry in overalls” (142–43). 10. Sinicropi sees echoes of both the avant-garde, as Marinetti would have most likely been proud of di Donato’s language (181), Sinicropi tells us, and the more traditional writer á la Faulkner (183). More intriguing, I would submit, is the similarity of di Donato’s language, here especially, to the general characteristics of oral tradition. See Gardaphè’s Italian Signs, American Streets, especially 24–52 on oral tradition and 66–73 on Christ in Concrete.

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11. The Gospels has yet to be published in its entirely. It has been excerpted only once, for the special issue of VIA dedicated to Pietro di Donato. See VIA 2, no. 2 (1992). See also, Dorothee Von Huene Greenberg, “A MELUS Interview: Pietro Di Donato,” MELUS 14, nos. 3–4 (1987): 33–52. 12. For more on religion in this novel, see Peter Kvidera, “Ethnic Identity and Cultural Catholicism in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete,” MELUS 35, no. 3 (2010): 157–81. 13. In an Italian context, this description is most reminiscent of Giacomo Leopardi’s most fragile “ginestra” and the eponymous poem that tells the tale of its precarious existence on the barren, lava slope of Vesuvius. 14. There are obvious overtones here of Peirce’s notions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. See his Principles of Philosophy in Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), especially 1.306, 1.321, and 1.420. 15. For another excellent example of di Donato’s vertiginous prose, see his description (48–49) of Luigi’s dream where the so-called run-on sentence has it greatest effect. 16. A similar framing of her thoughts occurs soon after (41–42). 17. For the reader conversant with Italian literature, this kind of free indirect discourse recalls Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia (1881), his classic novel on the tragic ordeal of the Malavoglia family. 18. For a similar notion in cinema studies, though with a certain twist that differs from what I see here as di Donato’s firm desire to do so, see Ben Lawton’s essay “America through Italian/American Eyes: Dream or Nightmare?” in From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, ed. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), 397–429. 19. See Orsini’s acute essay (“Rehabilitating di Donato, a Phonocentric Novelist”) for a similar notion on the novel’s thematic symmetry. 20. Their conversation, in fact, ends in the following manner: “‘Missus,’ said Louis, ‘must Paul go to the buildings?’ Annunziata looked to Paul helplessly. ‘Missus, we’ll study books together. I’ll help him. Don’t you see?’ He took Paul’s hand. And his voice was tears. ‘Paul, the job is not freedom. Your wonderful brain is freedom . . . ’ Paul shook his head. And the three wept.” I shall have more to say on this conversation later, in the chapter on Luigi Barzini’s O America, When You and I Were Young. 21. Sinicropi goes on to describe this process as the disintegration of two different sign systems and the amalgamation of “morphosyntactic and lexematic elements” (179). 22. We may see this as a second level of translation, more precisely, translatio—the carrying over from point A to point B of, in this case, a new notion of a different cultural landscape that does not find itself in synch with a dominant cultural paradigm. 23. Michael M. J. Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 195. 24. For more on the notions of language, ideology, and dominant culture vis-à-vis Italian/ American art forms, see my To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate. 25. With regard to a discussion of the general notion of canon, I leave that for a larger setting, one that allows more space for such an encompassing argument. For more on the canon, see Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); especially Charles Altieri, “An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon,” 41–64, and Richard Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–1975,” 377–402. 26. See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 258ff. 27. For more on sign functions, see Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 48–62. 28. For alternative reading strategies of Italian/American texts, see Gardaphè (1996) and my study, A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

Chapter Three

Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim The Italian’s “American Dream” of Staying Alive

Like other “ethnic” novels that are part of the U.S. literary landscape, Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim 1 contains all the ingredients for a good story: one that is both a tearjerker and, to some extent, a pick-me-upper—or, to use the Italian term, a tiramisu! We find conflicts and clashes between the dominant culture and Italian Americana; challenges that immigrants and their children must confront in a culture that, at times, seems almost purposefully hostile; generational strife as the younger, U.S.-born children look to more than survival and, at best, acquisition of that longed for house. 2 A significant modicum of accuracy to detail and to periodic historicization is, without a doubt, a quality of this and other works by Mario Puzo. That said, other themes also come to the fore: male violence/madness, education, and the gender dilemma. These three themes stand out, and each might readily be connected to—in some cases, anticipate—literary works of other U.S. writers of Italian descent. These are the three themes that I briefly discuss here in this context. MADNESS/VIOLENT MALE Lucia Santa’s second husband, Frank Corbo, belongs to a seemingly small yet fascinating group of male figures in Italian/American literature. The male, in these cases, is not a happy individual. For him, mothers and homemakers are the only acceptable roles for the women of his multiple worlds, be 41

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he in the old country or in the new world. These women are to be, in this well-established male world, good, well-behaved girls before they marry and well-behaved, faithful wives and mothers after they wed. If otherwise, we become witness to violence—physical and/or psychological—done to daughters and wives alike. In Gianna Patriarca’s poem “Daughters,” in fact, we read that the accepted behavior in the new country—namely, staying out late at night—remains totally taboo for the immigrant father: a young Italian woman’s claim to prostitution is any activity past the midnight hour his eyes were coral as he rammed his fist inside my mouth reminding me

Frank Corbo, we read, was also prone to violence, as Octavia informs us when she convinces Lucia Santa not to have Frank come home once he is institutionalized, and while arguing with Larry, she reminds her brother: “How many times did he hit Mamma? He even hit her once when she was pregnant, and I’ll never forget that” (114). Frank’s violence, we might generously assume, is due to his insanity. 3 When Frank does go mad, he first threatens his wife and baby daughter, believing the latter a doll and wanting to throw “it” out. But there is an uncanny shift in Frank’s behavior; for while he only threatens violence to his wife and child at this time, he actually does try to assault his oldest stepson, Larry. Speculation to such behavior is curious indeed. Larry, the son who is quite capable of adapting to this new world, may very well here figure as the inimical counterpoint to Frank, who is, in fact, ultimately incapable of adapting to this new society. What becomes even more intriguing here is that in the end Frank surrenders, both literally and metaphorically, to this new society. Subsequently, at the end of this episode, he does give in to the police and asylum interns, resisting little, if at all; ultimately, he is taken away by the two interns and the police. What also becomes significant here is that men, as Puzo tells us, “always . . . crumbled under the glories of the new land, never the women” (118) and there “were many cases of Italian men who became insane and had to be committed” (118). And while Frank “crumbles” psychologically, Lucia Santa’s first husband, Anthony, died in a bizarre accident, when the gangplank of a ship broke under the weight of bananas and killed five men. 4 Thus, one literally lost his life, Anthony, while the other, Frank, lost his soul, as we are told:

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A naked man, his arms bound to his side, sat in a tub of clear water. The mother cried out, “Frank!” And the narrow skull turned toward her, the face elongated in the bare-toothed grimace of a wild animal trapped in terror. The blue eyes were like glass, glittering in soulless rage. They looked not at her, but at the invisible sky above. It was a face of hopeless satanic madness, and the doctor let the curtain fall as the woman’s long helpless wail of anguish brought attendants running to them. The brown paper fell to the tiled floor, breaking, soiling Lucia Santa’s stockings and shoes. She was sitting in the office again. Larry was trying to stop her weeping. But she wept for herself who must be a widow again, who must sleep forever in a lonely bed; for her other children, who must be fatherless, too; she wept that she had been conquered, overcome by fate. And she wept because for the first time in many years she had been terrified; she had loved a man, borne his children, and then seen him, not dead, but with his soul torn from his body. (120)

The initial image of Frank at this point may readily signal the metaphoric condition of the immigrant incapable of acclimating to the host society and its new ways of living. Hence, Frank is a “naked man,” having abandoned his old world for one in which he is simply incapable of living (“hopeless”). He is, in this sense, the natural country person (“wild animal”) constricted (“arms bound to his side”) in a new element, one that is different, uncomfortable, and, most of all, frightening (“trapped in terror”). This last image of Frank having “his soul torn from his body” is reminiscent of Joseph Tusiani’s notion of deracination. As we shall see in chapter 5, in the first section of Tusiani’s most famous “Song of the Bicentennial,” we find a series of words that underscore the drama so associated with emigration: “plucked,” “sunder,” “deracinated,” and, finally, “grief.” Each word is then paired with another that only underscores the antipathy toward the emigrant experience. The other half of the pair thus underscores the phenomenon of coincidentia oppositorum that subtends the collection: “plucked” is paired with “salubrious”; “roof” is paired with “heaven”; and “roots” are paired with “deracinated.” These couplets of opposites are then bracketed within an initial set of questions and the final two interrogatives, with the last question set apart from the stanza: “What would my life be now / if I were still with my familiar trees?” As the emigrant is plucked and thus deracinated from his homeland, as Tusiani tells us, so then is there the danger of the immigrant losing his soul in the land of arrival—in this case, the United States. Frank Corbo, Puzo tells us, has had his soul torn from his body, a description not dissimilar to Tusiani’s “plucked,” each of which leads to the endpoint of “grief.” Frank, we see, is totally overcome by “hopeless . . . madness”; he is vanquished by his immigrant status. He has, one might say, tempted “fate” and lost, as an old Italian adage so states, as also articulated by a well-known Italian novelist, Leonardo Sciascia:

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Chapter 3 se tu cambi stato, e ritieni di toccare la ricchezza e la felicità ecco che il dolore, la vergogna, la morte più velocemente ti raggiungono. 5

In Puzo’s novel, Lucia Santa, as we read, is twice widowed and confronts much adversity throughout the narrative. Thus, it would seem that she, very much overwhelmed with such adversity, might also suffer some sort of mental breakdown. Instead, as they left the hospital visit described earlier, we read that she is, in fact, unbelievably resilient: “Larry . . . was worried about her. But when they got out on Tenth Avenue, she was completely recovered; he did not even have to help her up the stairs. They never noticed the children, Gino, Vinnie and Sal, waiting on the corner of the avenue” (120). Lucia Santa has clearly maintained her sanity, in a literal sense. Nonetheless, we might wonder about her spiritual equilibrium; for she too has been “been conquered, overcome by fate” and is now “terrified” at the perspective of remaining alone, as we read. Her ultimate response to Frank’s illness goes from a state of what seems to be a total loss of emotional control—“Larry was trying to stop her weeping”—to one where she “was completely recovered.” The question, of course, is whether she has, in maintaining some sort of physiological sanity, not lost her spiritual compass, to some degree, it having now been “torn” from her body, having gone from one extreme to the other, as we saw. Whatever the case may be, thus poignantly ends part I of the novel. EDUCATION While none of our main characters turn out to be successfully college educated and thus able to move on up into board rooms and buy houses in the suburbs, the appreciation and value of education is a recurring theme, although it is also met with resistance, as we read early on: Octavia wanted to go to night school, study to become a teacher. Lucia Santa refused permission. No; she would become ill working and going to school. “Why? Why?” the mother asked. “You, such a beautiful dressmaker, you earn good money.” The mother objected out of superstition. This course was known. Life was unlucky, you followed a new path at your peril. You put yourself at the mercy of fate. Her daughter was too young to understand. Unexpectedly, shamefacedly, Octavia had said, “I want to be happy,” and the older woman became a raging fury, contemptuous-the mother, who had always defended her daughter’s toity ways, her reading of books, her tailored suits that were as affected as a lorgnette. The mother had mimicked Octavia in the perfect English of a shallow girl, “You want to be happy.” And then in Italian, with deadly seriousness, “Thank God you are alive.” (12–13)

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As this is the opening of the novel, we are told, among other things, about the tempting of fate: “Life was unlucky, you followed a new path at your peril. You put yourself at the mercy of fate.” This is precisely what we saw and how Frank’s world collapses around him precisely because he tempted fate, and being a man, as we also saw, he was more susceptible to such “perils.” Octavia “was too young to understand” this, whereas Lucia Santa did: she the bearer of light, possessing that requisite vision that will allow her to bring her family forward toward a better way of life in this new world. She is, as Mary Jo Bona points out, “the pragmatist, Lucia Santa [Saint Lucy] whose name reflects . . . her vision.” 6 What thus stands out in this passage is the classical “old world versus new world” dichotomy and its coincidental concept of work and money: “You, such a beautiful dressmaker, you earn good money.” This is best exemplified in the second of the two paragraphs: “The mother had mimicked Octavia in the perfect English of a shallow girl, ‘You want to be happy.’ And then in Italian, with deadly seriousness, ‘Thank God you are alive.’” The “English” of the new world is categorically dismissed by the “deadly seriousness” of the old world’s “Italian,” for which language takes on, at the very least, a dual function. It becomes a marker for identification, in that Lucia needs to make her point through the “deadly seriousness” of Italian, since she, as an Italian—immigrant, we might add—is much more serious than the Americans. Second, this same “deadly seriousness” also invests “Italian” with an evaluative quality, thus underscoring here the primacy of compensated employment over education. But Octavia insists on the benefits of education, we find, as we progress in our reading: After supper Octavia gave them all a lecture—Sal, Gino, and Vinnie. It was familiar. “Now,” she said, “none of you kids are stupid. I want to see good report cards this term, and in conduct, too. Vinnie, you did all right last year, but you have to do better now you’re in second term high. You want to go to C.C.N.Y., don’t you? If your marks are good enough you can go free.” There could never be any question of paying for college. Vinnie would be lucky if he didn’t have to go to work right after high school. But Octavia had her own plans and her own money on this score. Vinnie would go to college, to C.C.N.Y. She would take care of the family. It was this that had made her at last give up any ideas of teaching. (137)

What stands out here is, first, Octavia’s sense of independence; against oldworld customs, she has decided to follow new world ways in underscoring education for her younger siblings and in taking control of her own situation (“her own plans and her own money”) as well as that of her family (“She would take care of the family”). Such independence even overwhelmed the stalwart old world–dom of Lucia Santa, as read soon after:

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Chapter 3 Lucia Santa watched her daughter. She remembered how Octavia had loved to go to school, and it was this that made Lucia Santa tolerate such American airs, making education so important. She distrusted high ambition, high aims. For, the greater the reward, it followed, the greater the risks. You could become helpless in a shattering defeat. Better a modest safety. But Lucia Santa paid this deference to her daughter. (139) Octavia broke in quickly, “All right, Ma, that’s something else. The big thing is that they know how important school is to their life. If you learn something at school you can be somebody. Otherwise you’ll be just a slob down on the docks or in the railroad like Larry.” (139)

The old world–new world dichotomy is underscored in these two paragraphs as Lucia Santa’s old world thinking is overshadowed by Octavia’s new world paradigm. “High ambitions [and] high aims” are juxtaposed to Lucia Santa’s notion of “American airs,” and she is incapable of believing that they can lead to anything good; we are also reminded here of the old adage mentioned earlier about the dangers that might befall one who tries to change his or her station, as we now read: “For, the greater the reward, it followed, the greater the risks. You could become helpless in a shattering defeat. Better a modest safety.” All this is countered by Octavia as she underscores the integrative value of education for both individual and vocational growth: “‘If you learn something at school you can be somebody. Otherwise you’ll be just a slob down on the docks or in the railroad like Larry.’” And reading further still, we witness the abyss that exists between these two worlds: The mother rose to put coffee on the fire, for Octavia in her book would forget about everything. The mother wondered, What could be in these books that stunned her daughter into some magic oblivion? It was something she would never know, and if she had been younger she would have felt some envy or regret. But she was a busy woman with important work to be done for many years and could not make herself unhappy over pleasures of which she did not know the taste. She had enough regrets about pleasures whose taste she had known. But there was nothing to be done about that either. She grimaced from the steam and her thoughts. (140)

The magnitude of difference between these two worlds is underscored in Puzo’s use of adjectives: for Octavia is, according to Lucia Santa, “stunned” by her reading. But it is not necessarily negative, as Lucia Santa considers it a “magic oblivion.” Indeed, Lucia Santa herself, we read, might have entertained similar ideas had she been younger, but her more basic instincts of survival take over at this juncture (“a busy woman with important work to be done for many years”), even though, to paraphrase one of Frank Sinatra’s signature songs, “regrets [Lucia indeed did have] a few.” In the end, Lucia Santa can see only the practicality of education. It must, for her, lead only to

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something basic, fundamental, such as a better job and, hence, more money. Octavia, instead, a member of the newer generation, wants to be, in Joseph Lopreato’s words, “deliberately educated in the ways of the middle-class, [according to which] education is highly valued.” 7 Education is highly valued precisely because it becomes an end in itself, as Herbert Gans told us, “used to maximize individual development of the person.” 8 Octavia, in fact, wants to be a teacher; she does not want to end up emotionally and financially dependent on marriage. Indeed, she adamantly refuses to repeat the experiences of her mother and the other women of her generation—no marriage, especially to Italians, and no children; she also tries to define herself as an autonomous individual before becoming permanently involved with a man. And while she sacrifices her college education to negotiate the role of “matriarch in a community suspicious of education and individual fulfillment, she does develop her intellect and defiantly, one might say, marries a Jewish poet.” 9 Her choice of husband is surely questioned by Lucia Santa, but Octavia, as her mother thought, was not the typical Italian woman: This macaroni carried a stack of books—a grown man—and with high pompadour black hair, his horn-rimmed spectacles, thin sliced features curved like a bow, proclaimed himself a Jew. Not only a Jew, but a Jew not in the best of health. At once it became known that Octavia Angeluzzi was to marry a heathen. A scandal. Not because the man was a Jew, but because he was not an Italian. Worse than that was the girl’s sheer contrariness. Where did she find a Jew, in Christ’s name? For blocks uptown and downtown, east side and on the western wall of Tenth Avenue, there were only Catholic Irish, Polish, and Italians. But then, what could be expected of an Italian girl who wore business suits to cover her breasts? (205)

Octavia, instead, was not the typical Italian woman, as she is now poised to marry a non-Italian, a “heathen,” as Lucia Santa ponders. Octavia, further still, not only marries outside her ethnicity but transgresses the religious boundary as well; she is to marry a “Jew,” this Italian girl, Lucia Santa muses, who defined herself by wearing “business suits,” presumably for men, “to cover her breasts,” corporal icon par excellence for womanhood. And while Lucia Santa was convinced that her sons should surely marry “a good Italian girl who knew from the cradle that men ruled” (207), she thought differently about Octavia: Like all weak men, Norman Bergeron had a secret vice. He was a poet. Not only in English, but much more terrible—in Yiddish. Worse, he knew only one thing thoroughly: Yiddish literature—a talent he himself said was less in demand than any other on earth.

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Chapter 3 On the other hand, what mother who had suffered under the masculine tyranny could wish on her tender daughter those guinea tyrants, those despotic greenhorns, who locked up their wives at home, never took them out except to a wedding or funeral; who made an uproar fit for wild goats if spaghetti was not steaming on the table at the precise moment their baronial boots crossed the doorsill; who never raised a finger to help their pregnant wives, and sat calmly smoking stinking De Nobili cigars while their big-bellied women stood on window sills, so top-heavy as they washed dirty glass that they were in danger of tumbling like balloons to the pavement of Tenth Avenue. Thank God Octavia was marrying a man who was not an Italian and therefore might show mercy to womankind. Only once did Lucia Santa make an insulting remark about her daughter’s choice, and that was years later. One day, in the course gossip, cursing her children one by one for their ingratitude and pigheadedness and finding no fit crime for Octavia, she said with withering scorn, “And she, my most intelligent child, picked for a husband the only Jew who does not know how to make money.” (207–8)

So while her intellectual ambitions are not fully realized, Octavia seems content at raising her younger siblings, becoming a shop foreman, and marrying a non-Italian, a Jew, we might underscore, who is willing to give up his cultural and ethnic connections for their relationship to thrive; his ends up disowned by his family. Yet, the more salient points to the citation are those with respect to the male-female relationship. Lucia Santa, we read, is delighted that her “tender daughter” is not marrying an Italian, precisely because these “guinea tyrants, those despotic greenhorns” were incapable of showing “mercy to womankind,” blinded as they were by their “masculine tyranny,” which harks us back to the opening of this chapter, where we witnessed Frank Corbo’s violence behavior against Lucia Santa, hitting her, we were told, while she was pregnant. Norman Bergeron, instead, in spite of the fact that he was “the only Jew who does not know how to make money,” obviously did, as we can readily assume, treat his wife in the manner in which Lucia Santa has so desired for her daughter. THE GENDER DILEMMA; OR, OCTAVIA AS QUASI “LIBERATED” FEMALE While it is true that Octavia Angeluzzi only partially fulfills her dream in the new world (Avery 1981, 25), she represents, to a significant degree, a rebellious, unorthodox female of those years that Mario Puzo depicts in The Fortunate Pilgrim. Such rebellion to old world ways and/or resilience in this new world paradigm is pre-announced by the book’s narration early on, even though the narrator at this early point is talking about Lucia Santa’s generation of women:

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Each in turn told a story of insolence and defiance, themselves heroic, longsuffering, the children spitting Lucifers saved by an application of Italian discipline—the razor strop or the Tackeril. And at the end of each story each woman recited her requiem. Mannaggia America-Damn America. But in the hot summer night their voices were filled with hope, with a vigor never sounded in their homeland. Here now was money in the bank, children who could read and write, grandchildren who would be professors if all went well. They spoke with guilty loyalty of customs they had themselves trampled into dust. The truth: These country women from the mountain farms of Italy, whose fathers and grandfathers had died in the same rooms in which they were born, these women loved the clashing steel and stone of the great city, the thunder of trains in the railroad yards across the street, the lights above the Palisades far across the Hudson. As children they had lived in solitude, on land so poor that people scattered themselves singly along the mountain slopes to search out a living. Audacity had liberated them. They were pioneers, though they never walked an American plain and never felt real soil beneath their feet. They moved in a sadder wilderness, where the language was strange, where their children became members of a different race. It was a price that must be paid. (7–8)

What we witness in these paragraphs is the bittersweetness of the migratory act. These women have moved from the country to the city, where more was possible. They indeed saw promises of a better life, as their “voices were filled with hope, with a vigor never sounded in their homeland.” Here, they were able to build for a future, whatever it might be, because there was now “money in the bank,” and their “children . . . could read and write, grandchildren who would be professors if all went well.” But as we continue to read, all was not rosy. In their “liberat[ing] audacity,” they had indeed become “pioneers,” although they “moved in a sadder wilderness, where the language was strange, where their children became members of a different race.” This was the “price that must be paid,” and in so doing, they all became strangers to their children who, as we saw, transformed into “members of a different race.” They were different than before, as their children are now different from their parents, all of whom now constitute a group that is no longer the Italian of the old world nor, for that matter, the complete American of the new world; they inhabit an interstitial space. Indeed, Octavia finds herself living in a not dissimilar interstitial space between old world and new, and in so doing, she must balance the presumed duties of a daughter with her own desires to break out of those traditional roles. As the oldest daughter, she finds herself filling in for her mother, a twice-widowed woman. Octavia must, as we already saw, pick up where he mother cannot; contribute to the family coffers with full-time employment, thus sacrificing her desire to attend college; take care of the younger children

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and, when need be, also comfort and counsel her mother. But she does her best throughout to remain ever independent. Such an unshakable desire is no better exhibited than at about two-thirds through novel, when Octavia confronts, once and for all, Mr. La Fortezza, the social worker: La Fortezza went on. “We’ve had many long talks together, your mother and I, and we understand each other. I’m sure she would not object to our having a friendly date. The city gets us the theater tickets cut-rate. It will be a new experience for you instead of the movies.” Octavia had been to the theater with her girl friends many times. The dressmaking shops got cut-rate tickets, too. Octavia had read the same novels and always had a supreme contempt for the heroines, those generous, witless maidens who exposed themselves to shame while serving pleasure to men who flaunted their wealth as bait. But that this stupid starving guinea college kid thought he could screw her. Her eyes began to flash and she spat out shrilly in answer to his invitation, “You can go shit in your hat, you lousy bastard.” Gino, in a corner with Vinnie, said “Ooh-oh, there she goes.” Lucia Santa, like an innocent sitting on a lit powder keg and only now seeing the sputtering fuse, looked around dazedly as if wondering where to run. A surge of blood coursed through Mr. La Fortezza’s face, even his owl eyes turned red. He was petrified. For there nothing more blood-curdling than a young Italian shrew. Octavia’s voice in a high, strong, soprano note berated him. “You take eight dollars a month from my poor mother, who has four little kids to feed and a sick daughter. You bleed a family with all our trouble and you have the nerve to ask me out? You are a lousy son-of-a-bitch, a lousy, creepy sneak. My kid brothers and sister do without candy and movies so my mother can pay you off, and I’m supposed to go out with you?” Her voice was shrill and incredulous. “You’re old-fashioned, all right. Only a real guinea bastard from Italy with that respectful Signora horseshit would pull something like that. But I finished high school, I read Zola, and I have gone to the theater, so find some greenhorn girl off the boat you can impress and try to screw her. Because I know you for wht you are: a four-flusher full of shit.” (179–80)

Like those of her mother’s generation, Octavia has indeed been liberated by her own “audacity”: she refuses the proverbial Italian suitor; she curses him out in a manner that makes him blush, to be sure; and, in so doing, she paradoxically demonstrates how she is just as, if not more, cultured than he. This is, without a doubt, the turning point for Octavia. It is at this moment that she becomes the de facto leader of the family, independent, as best be, of the influences of the old world. Her brothers Gino and Vincent, young and instilled with old world thinking, “resolved with all their hearts that they would never marry a girl like their sister” (181). Octavia, so it seemed, was back from her illness, and she was back with a vengeance:

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But at least now it ended that atmosphere, that special treatment accorded to the sick, the strain of politeness toward a member of the family who returned from the hospital or from a long voyage. There was no question. This was the Octavia of old. She was well again. Even the mother could not remain angry at her daughter’s behavior, though she never understood her indignation with Mr. La Fortezza. After all, everyone must pay to stay alive. (181)

In his The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became “Our Gang” Christian K. Messenger offers a keen reading on the difference between LaFortezza and Dr. Silvio Barbato, the doctor who cared for Octavia during her illness. 10 Whereas LaFortezza is on his way up the “ladder of American assimilation” (138) and sees Octavia as the young, attractive woman that she is and thus “makes moves” (139) on her, Dr. Barbato, conversely, squelches “his sentiment and his desire” (139) through an aestheticization of her, as is evident when he is first called to her house and examines her: Dr. Barbato put his stethoscope on Octavia’s chest and stared off into space professionally, but really taking a good look at the girl’s body. He saw with surprise that she was very thin. The full bosom and wide, rounded hips were deceiving. She had lost a lot of weight. Her heavy, planed face did not show this loss, for, though finely drawn, it could never be haggard. The eyes, a great liquid brown, watched him with fearful intensity. The doctor’s mind registered, too, without desire, how ripe the body was for love. She looked like the great nude paintings he had seen in Italy on his graduation trip. She was a classical type, made for children and heavy duty on the connubial couch. She had better get married soon, sick or not. (158)

The language is very sensual, much more than we shall ever see between LaFortezza and Octavia. Yet, the possible effect of acute sensuality is canceled, we might say, by Dr. Barbato’s use of art, as Messenger tells us, “as a way to deflect both his sympathy and desire” (139). We see at the very beginning of this passage Dr. Barbato’s push and pull. For he succeeds in distancing himself through Puzo’s own language that signals movement: “stared off into space,” as we visualize him turning his head away. Yet, this movement notwithstanding, he does succeed in getting “a good look at [Octavia’s] body,” her “full bosom and wide, rounded hips,” and her “ripe . . . body [that is ready] for love.” Nonetheless, Dr. Barbato is “without desire”— a feat of restraint, we might say along with Messenger, precisely because of his ability to compare/aestheticize her to “the great nude paintings he had seen in Italy on his graduation trip.” Such restraint vis-à-vis desire that Dr. Barbato seems to experience is ultimately underscored at the end of the passage in the last two sentences. For she is “a classical type” who, we might say, is also “made for children and heavy duty on the connubial couch.” This conjunction (“and”) in this phrase “made for children and heavy duty on the connubial couch” may also be seen

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as a “but” to a certain degree, analogous, in a similar manner, to Dr. Barbato’s restraint and desire, the first placing Octavia in the mother role, hence pure, the second placing her in a completely sexual role and, hence, a desired and desiring object. There is, furthermore, a fascinating dynamic that continues between these two. Dr. Barbato appears on numerous occasions in the story, though never really in close, physical connection with Octavia anymore, only with her family members. What remains nevertheless fascinating about these two is that they seem to follow analogous paths. To a certain degree, Octavia challenges her ethnic loyalty, we might call it, by marrying a non-Italian; in this sense, she escapes. Likewise, Dr. Barbato “volunteered for the Army” and went off to “Africa [where] he had become a hero of some sort” (278). Both, as we shall soon see, literally left the old neighborhood, one for Long Island, one for Africa, both destinations far from the Hell’s Kitchen where they grew up and nurtured their respective dreams.

Indeed, both Octavia and Lucia Santa succeed at “stay[ing] alive,” but they do so, as we saw, like most others, by paying heavily. Lucia Santa lost two husbands (Anthony and Frank), one son (Vincent) to suicide or accidental death—it is never clarified—another to organized crime (Lorenzo), and a third (Gino), in the end, to the world at large. Octvaia, burning with desire “to go to night school, study to become a teacher” (12), abandoned that dream but nevertheless did her best to remain, as we were told at the outset, “liberated” by her own “audacity” (8), the one quality that she clearly inherited from her mother’s generation. In the end, their “magic time” (277) comes, and they purchase the house on Long Island. As a digression, I would point to Puzo’s use of the adjective “magic” at this juncture; it harks back to the episode earlier in the novel, when Lucia Santa marveled most inquisitively at how books had “stunned [Octavia] into some magic oblivion” (140; my emphasis). These “magic” events indeed constitute those episodes that lift these individuals and their children from the harsh reality of the quotidian immigrant experience. That said, then, we see that the Angeluzzis make the move from inner-city tenement house to suburb, a two-family house so that the eldest son and his wife and children can “live in one apartment under the watchful eye of Lucia Santa” (277). But the move is bittersweet, as Lucia Santa realizes that such success and prosperity come at a high price: “With terrible clarity she knew Gino would never come home after the war. That he hated her as she had hated her father. That he would become a pilgrim and search for strange Americas in his dreams. And now for the first time Lucia Santa begged for

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mercy” (281). After “forty years” in the same tenement house, Lucia Santa now understood that moving leaves its indelible marks; it is both a physical and a cultural uprooting that leaves its scars. Long Island becomes the last leg of their Americanization, a cultural process complete only to a limited degree, for sure; perhaps we might opt for acculturation instead. Needless to say, that American Dream that all of these immigrants so arduously sought out, promising of so much, was in the end, as we read the final words of the novel, “blasphemous” (281). It was, so it seems, the double bind of immigration, that potential quandary in which the immigrant may indeed end up, as Lucia Santa herself now ponders in the end: AMERICA, AMERICA, BLASPHEMOUS dream. Giving so much, why could it not give everything? Lucia Santa wept for the inevitable crimes she had committed against those she loved. In her world, as a child, the wildest dream had been to escape the fear of hunger, sickness and the force of nature. The dream was to stay alive. No one dreamed further. But in America wilder dreams were possible, and she had never known of their existence. Bread and shelter were not enough. 11 (281)

Thus, we witness what can only be considered to be a type of cognitive dissonance articulated in the oxymoronic, adjectival phrase “America, Blasphemous.” The “dream . . . to stay alive” was surely realized by Lucia Santa and most other immigrants. The “blasphemous” aspect of their experience is nonetheless twofold: on one hand, there is America’s ability indeed to give “so much”; on the other, we witness the immigrant’s inability to have “dreamed further,” this second characteristic underscoring the requisite ability to recognize the need for a paradigm shift to achieve those “wilder dreams,” as “bread and shelter” were only a midway point in the immigrant’s overall experience. NOTES 1. The Fortunate Pilgrim, with a new preface by Mario Puzo (New York: Random House, 1997). 2. For more on the novel, see Rose Basile Green, The Italian-American Novel: A Documentation of the Interaction between Two Cultures (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974), 342–51; Lawrence J. Oliver, “The Re-visioning of New York’s Little Italies: From Howells to Puzo,” MELUS 14, nos. 3–4 (1987): 5–22; Thomas J. Ferraro, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 72–89; and Fred L. Gardaphé, From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 2006), 24–31. 3. This notwithstanding, male violence thrust on the Italian-American woman was something articulated in other writers yet muted to a significant degree in any secondary material along the way. In addition to Puzo and Patriarca, Rachel Guido deVries’s Tender Warriors (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1986) also comes to mind. Further still, in discussing his “urban villagers,” Herbert J. Gans stated the following in his introduction to The Urban Villagers (2nd ed., New York: Free Press, 1982): “Alcoholism, mental illness, desertion, the death of loved

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ones, serious financial difficulties, and even violence were familiar to everyone” (my emphasis; 17). Joseph Lopreato, in turn, points out something similar in his study Italian Americans (Random House, 1970): “Until recent times, poverty, subordination, and insecurity tended to brutalize the peasant farmer of southern Italian society. His pent-up ire against nature and his lord was often displaced onto his wife and children” (emphasis mine; 50). Finally, Joseph Sciorra states the following in his article with reference to Richard Gambino’s notion of the l’uomo di pazienza: “This principle was not always the lived experience of numerous Italian American women and children who dealt daily with the abuse and violence of patriarchal power as did Lucia and her family. Lorenzo Carcaterra (1992), Rachel Guido deVries (1996), Annie Rachele Lanzillotto (2013), Gianna Patriarca (1994), Vittoria Repetto (2006), Karen Tindori (2007), and other writers have penned verse, novels, and memoirs to expose, purge, and heal the psychological and physical damage of patriarchal brutality.” See his “‘Why a Man Makes the Shoes?’: Italian American Art and Philosophy in Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers,” in Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development, ed. Luisa Del Giudice (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming). 4. This is, of course, reminiscent of Pietro di Donato’s Geremio, as we saw in chapter 2. 5. Leonardo Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1966), 10. Translation: “if you change your station, and you believe you’ll achieve richness and happiness, here then grief, shame, death more swiftly will catch up with you.” 6. See Mary Jo Bona, “Puzo and the Power of Fictional Mythography,” special issue, “Reconsidering Mario Puzo,” ed. Chris Messenger, Michele Fazio, JoAnne Ruvoli, Voices in Italian Americana 19, no. 2 (2008): 34. Saint Lucy was murdered under the Roman emperor Diocletian in Syracuse, Sicily, around 300 ad. As told in one of the many stories that have survived, to bring with her as many supplies as possible in freeing Christian slaves, she kept both hands free by attaching candles to a wreath on her head. 7. Joseph Lopreato, Italian Americans (New York: Random House, 1979), 86. 8. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 247. 9. Evelyn Gross Avery, “The Ethnic American Dream,” MELUS 8, no. 4 (1981): 25. 10. Christian K. Messenger, The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became “Our Gang” (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 138–41. 11. Lawrence J. Oliver speaks similarly in terms of Lucia experiencing a “sense of loss as well as gain. Double-visioned to the end, Puzo’s portrait of his Little Italy projects deeply ambivalent feelings about the ghetto” (“The Re-visioning of New York’s Little Italies,” 19).

Chapter Four

Luigi Barzini Jr. From Italian “Immigrant” to “Italian American”

In discussing Luigi Barzini’s The Europeans, 1 a reviewer stated: Books about national character are often poised at the line that divides genuine insight from stereotypical prejudgment, and they tend to wander across the illmarked boundary that separates the two. As a consequence, national character studies are best taken as what they most frequently are: informative entertainment that elicits either nodding assent or a shaking of the head, an occasional laugh or a skeptical raised eyebrow. 2

In many ways, the same can be said about Barzini’s O America, When You and I Were Young (1977). 3 In reading the book, be she or he Italian or American, one will surely nod in assent as well as skeptically shake his or her head. Overall, nonetheless, Barzini offers up a most interesting and intriguing portrait of the United States in the second five years of the 1920s— from the time that he and his family emigrated to the United States in 1925 to the moment of his return to Italy, after college graduation, in 1930. It is in one sense a proverbial love letter to America. Yet, it is also an acute reading—and analysis, one can readily say—of a culture that both the “young” and “older” Barzini knew very well and loved so much. In his introduction of these two personae, Barzini actually puts his reader on call: Most of this book was written in collaboration by two authors who resemble each other and have the same name, Luigi Barzini, but are vastly different. 55

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Chapter 4 One is a young college student and cub reporter plunged into the turbulent American life of the later twenties [who] is fascinated, hopeful, ambitious, bewildered, frustrated, and frightened. . . . The other Luigi Barzini is a gray-haired veteran in his sixties. He acquired the patience, the vocabulary, and the métier long ago. He is probably as much of a fool as, in a different way, his young namesake, but feels comfortable with what the Italians call il senno di poi, hindsight, the fact that he can look back from the top of the ridge to the landscape he crossed. He knows how many things turned out in the end. He thinks he knows some of the answers. The reader may sometimes distinguish between the two authors’ dissimilar styles. (1–2)

His final statement, that the “reader may sometimes distinguish between the two authors’ dissimilar styles,” actually constitutes a message to the reader— that she or he should take special heed in the narrative that follows. Among numerous things, it tells the potential reader that the author has indeed reconsidered his initial experiences, especially in New York, that he now recounts forty-plus years later; with “hindsight . . . he can look back from the top of the ridge to the landscape he crossed.” It tells us that we can rely on some sense of seriousness and fidelity to the author’s original intuitions and insight. It also hints at the semiotic double layering of the text, a sort of ironic characteristic of Barzini’s narrative, as irony presupposes an incongruity between what an author articulates, in our case, on paper, and what the authorial intentions truly are 4 or what the reader may actually infer from said narrative. 5 That is, it urges us to question the seriousness of the text’s comical elements and, in turn, the satirco-comedic aspects of the seemingly serious textual elements. One’s reading of O America When You and I Were Young therefore must be keen and penetrating if we are to understand Barzini’s perceptive reading of that text we call America. His is, in the end, a narrative that is indeed keen with regard to a certain aspect of the U.S. national character of the time and sensitive with regard to the trials and tribulations of others, especially those he considered the “other ethnics.” With a distance of at least forty years (adding then a few to write the final manuscript and get it published), Barzini presents his reader with, at times, a complex and profound reading of a pre-1929–“stock market crash” United States. Much of what he presents is in fact filtered through a certain form of autobiography, which, of course, reminds us that just as portraits of national characters flirt with “stereotypical prejudgment,” as the aforementioned reviewer stated, so too does autobiography hide a certain fictional aspect that it possesses: namely, “a narrative in which the author carefully selects and constructs the characters, events, and aspects of the self she or he wants to make public in order to convey a specific message about her or his past and present identity.” 6

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This is, to be sure, what Barzini does. Sympathetic and sometimes critical, as a young man, Barzini was clearly enamored with the United States, so much so, we can say, that he continued to struggle with his dual identity, as American and Italian, and—as he said of his father—an immigrant. Barzini’s decision to return to Italy was not an easy one, he admits. It was clearly one grounded in internal conflicts, a series of emotional coincidentia oppositorum of diverse mores of two significantly different societies: one Italian, the other American. What I would like to do here is concentrate on a few themes that remain ever so essential today to what we might dub the questione italiano/ americana, as we enter the second decade of the third millennium. There are four basic issues that Barzini, at certain times, addresses directly throughout and that, at other times, resonate while he discusses yet other topics: • • • •

The notion of “immigrant” status Ethnic differences: Jews versus Italians How Americans see Italians Different types of Italians IMMIGRANT STATUS

The notion of “immigrant” status, which he relates to both his family and those less fortunate, speaks also to class issues, as is apparent in the following text: The reasons why I ended up with the rest of my family an involuntary adolescent immigrant in America naturally have little to do with me. The decision was Father’s. His reasons were many and tangled, related to his personal life, the waning of his fame, the world around him, and the moment in history. They were, however, not dissimilar to those that had driven millions of humbler men down the generations to the same country, which, in the end was nothing more than the sum of all their different and sometimes impossible hopes. This is why it may be interesting to reconstruct the influences that inspired one immigrant, not a typical one, to be sure, yet not as exceptional as he might have appeared. 7 (31; emphasis added)

We see that those who came from Italy early at this point in the twentieth century were, in one respect, not too different from one another (“not dissimilar”; “not a typical one, . . . yet not as exceptional”); yet, they were surely of different economic strata, as the Barzinis were not among the “millions of humbler men” who left Italy for an array of reasons, financial and professional in the forefront. Thus, we readily infer, two inherently different social strata subtend immigration.

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Yet, as we read ahead, we also see that there is still another motive for leaving Italy: There was another reason why my father decided to emigrate, a reason which had been equally common to most settlers in the United States for three centuries, the desire to flee the corruption and decay of Europe in general and those of his country in particular. Barzini padre, like many men of his generation, did not even suspect he had political views. He thought he was only a good citizen, a patriot, preoccupied solely with the welfare and good name of his country. In reality, he was a nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal, the heir of Risorgimento ideals, who wanted to see Italy modernized, tidily and honestly run, its prestige abroad defended, its economy expanded, and the liberty of the people preserved at all cost under an impartial law. (44; emphasis added)

The desire to liberate themselves from a corrupt country in decay is not too different from what we can find in other such observant writings by Italians about Italy over the decades (e.g., Carlo Levi’s novelized autobiography Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, 1944). A country that could not feed its southern population, especially, is, for Barzini, a country that apparently could also not support its “bourgeois liberal[s with] Risorgimento ideals.” This coupling of “humbler” immigrants with “bourgeois liberal[s]” constitutes Barzini’s double-layered critique of the Italy of that time. For sure, it is common knowledge that the south was significantly underdeveloped and, as a consequence, could not feed its people—hence, the onslaught of a (sub)proletariat emigration to the United States. By adding “bourgeois liberal[s]” as part of those who were willy-nilly forced to leave Italy—namely, they too suffered (this time, from a sociopolitical sustenance)—Barzini is presenting a country that was doubly incapable of sustaining certain components of its population, one that, we see here, also crosses class boundaries: from those “millions of humbler men” who left for purely economic reasons to those, instead, “who wanted to see Italy modernized, tidily and honestly run, its prestige abroad defended, its economy expanded, and the liberty of the people preserved at all cost under an impartial law.” What is also poignant about this and the previous passage is how much the presence of these so-called bourgeois liberals in Barzini’s text recall the situation of some of today’s Italians who come to the United States. In this regard, I have in mind those who, having graduated from the university in Italy, have had to go abroad for work, precisely because today, in many facets, Italy’s “economy [is not sufficiently] expanded” to employ a good part of its younger generation, both skilled workers and the university trained. We know this phenomenon today as the “fuga di cervelli” (brain drain), something that has it roots earlier for sure, since even Barzini senior’s early twentieth-century experience is not too dissimilar to the current crew of Italian emigrants, also categorized as those who belong to an “emigrazione di

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lusso,” a phenomenon and resultant term, debatable to be sure, that need further study and analysis. Ultimately, Barzini informs us, the United States “would surely be infinitely better in many if not all ways than in Italy” (56). He saw it as a land of plenty, a place full of possibilities that old Europe, well behind the times, could no longer supply to its inhabitants, as he continues: and that the trip was not merely a geographical adventure, but a chronological one, a short cut to the future, the liner on which our passage had been booked as freeloading guests being really a time machine. Were not the Americans already living one generation or more ahead of us? Had they not bravely discarded consoling old superstitions, abolished comfortable old injustices, and discovered daring solutions to the dusty problems that made Europe uninhabitable? Who would not prefer spring to winter, youth to old age, wealth to poverty, health to disease, the rule of law to tyranny, a brand-new house fitted out with impeccable plumbing to an ivy-clad and ghost-ridden hovel? (56–57; emphasis added)

And so, with a spirit that echoes John B. L. Soule’s famous quote “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” Barzini senior decided that he and his family had to “seguire il sol” to leave behind the “vecchio mondo.” 8 Or, to quote the complete phrase that Barzini senior had placed on his paper’s masthead, “Seguendo il sol lasciammo il vecchio mondo.” Barzini dedicates a few pages to this notion of going west. He traces it back to classical times, citing a variety of texts that spoke about following the sun. At this point in his narrative, he also cites Dante’s Ulysses (Inferno, Canto 26), who urged “his companions to dare go west” (54), as he continues, beyond the Pillars of Hercules: Considerate la vostra semenza: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza. 9

For “to go west,” as Barzini continues, “was to abandon a brute’s life, to leave the corrupt and tragic past behind, . . . in order to build a new and happy future” (55). The irony here in citing Dante’s Ulysses is poignant, to be sure; Dante’s Ulysses is, in fact, an ironic figure in the literal sense of the word. He offers a scenario to his fellow travelers that was, at that time, not a reality, but only an appearance of what might could have been. Barzini, to some extent, does the same at various points in his narrative; he offers up to his reader scenarios that, though seeming to be and/or represent a reality, are indeed not.

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ETHNIC DIFFERENCES There are a number of areas in the book where Barzini references difference between Italians and other ethnics, including the so-called Americans, namely, the White Anglo Saxon Protestants! This, in fact, is very much the main theme, to a certain degree. What is also significant is that Barzini uses the word “Italian”—as both noun and adjective—as an umbrella term for Italians and Italian Americans. This only underscores his sense of inclusiveness that such use of one specific term can subtend. With regard to other ethnics, he found college to be “a relief,” he tells us. The architecture, for example, was a throwback to the past—English Gothic and European Middle Ages—that had nothing to do with what he saw was the “world of the future, anti-Europe” (92). It was precisely this world of CCNY (City College of New York) that opened up his eyes, his experience with his fellow students, those of other ethnic groups who shared a common experience of foreign-ness: Everybody—or almost everybody—was vaguely foreign too, born abroad or the son of immigrants. Many spoke with a trace of an accent and wore weird clothes. They all studied tenaciously, read a lot, were well versed in subjects I knew nothing about and eager to learn from me what little I knew that they did not. They loved to debate any subject whatever at any length. I am sure I learned more from them (mostly Jews), in the few months I spent at CCNY, than from the professors. (92–93; emphasis added)

In this concise and generalized inventory, we see how, if ever so briefly, Barzini the new college student interacted with his fellow non-Americans. What is striking, of course, is his underscoring the Jewish students and how they compared to the ethnic Italians he also met: For some reason, I found the Jews more interesting than the boys of Italian blood. The Italians had shed what little italianità their parents had brought to the new country, and did not speak a word of the language, not even their original patois. They knew nothing much about Italy, in fact, little more than what they had been told in the American schools, and, as a result, were somewhat embarrassed by their origins and their names. The Jews, with their hunger for books and ideas, their wit, their capacity to spin webs of ingenious arguments, their compassion, their acceptance of reality and the nature of man, were nearer to me. It was easier to talk to them. One of my Jewish friends, David Davidson, took pity on me and offered to improve my English if I taught him a little Italian. We could meet only on Sunday, the one free day he had. We chose a convenient and heated place halfway between our houses, the Forty-second Street library. As it was forbidden to talk in the reading rooms, we sat on marble benches in busy corridors, with the books on our laps. I do not know if he learned Italian. I know I learned a lot from him, including one beautiful and rare adverb which I never found the occasion to use in my life. In

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fact, I write it here for the first time since 1926, as a testimonial of gratitude to a young man who sacrificed precious hours of leisure in an attempt to make me an American of sorts. The adverb is “needsmost.” (93)

There are a number of basic issues that come into play in this quote. First, there is the question of ethnic retention. The Italian boys, we see, shed their italianità and, in so doing, lose their parents’ language, Italian, as well as the local patois, “Italglish” or “Italese,” as we sometimes called it. In addition, we also read that they know very little to nothing of Italy, only what they learned in school, and, as a result, are embarrassed because of it. 10 Furthermore, that the “Jews, with their hunger for books and ideas . . . were nearer to [Barzini]” sets up two dichotomies: one is between Italian Americans and the Jews; the other is between the Italian Americans and Luigi Barzini. In the first case, this is not dissimilar to what we have read elsewhere, in books such as Joseph Lopreato’s Italian Americans or Herbert Gans’s Urban Villagers 11 and as we also saw earlier in this study, in the chapter on Puzo. These Italian Americans are members of early immigrant generations (read, working class) for whom, according to Lopreato, if not “deliberately educated in the ways of the middle-class, . . . education [may not be] highly valued” (86). Education, instead, is highly valued precisely because it becomes an end in itself, “used to maximize individual development of the person” (Gans 1962, 247). The other dichotomy is between Barzini and Italian Americans, which is one of the few instances that such a difference is presented in O America. Of course, socioeconomics underscores this difference, as Barzini comes from a family of the college educated, whereas the Italians he met at CCNY were, mostly likely, predominantly first-generation college students. Thus, education becomes the sine qua non—indeed the ne plus ultra—for the working-class immigrant or child of immigrants, to maximize, as Gans stated, individual amelioration. The discussion here in Barzini’s book on education also brings us back to Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim and di Donato’s Christ in Concrete. In the chapter on Puzo’s novel, we saw how Octavia went outside her ethnic group and married a Jewish man. What was stunning in Lucia Santa’s reaction was, as we saw, not so much his Jewishness per se but the fact that Octavia, first, chose someone who was not Italian and, second, chose the one Jew, as Lucia Santa expressed, who did not know how to make money. Looking back now on that episode, we see that education qua education was what interested Norman Bergeron, not education as a means to acquire material goods. After all, we saw, he “carried a stack of books” (205). Further still, he “was a poet” in both “English” and “Yiddish”; the coup de grâce was that, as we read in the chapter dedicated to Puzo, “he knew only one thing thoroughly: Yiddish literature—a talent he himself said was less in demand than any other on earth” (207).

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A more poignant episode, I would submit, is what we find in di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, in the interaction between Paul and Louis Molov. 12 In their conversations about education, we witness a distinct difference between the notion of “freedom” and how, according to Louis, this is accessible only through educating oneself. Intermingled with their brief discussion about the existence, or lack thereof, of God, they pass on to the topic of school. Paul had just informed Louis that he was to have a job that would pay him “five dollars a day” (139). Soon thereafter, in a moment of silence between Louis, Paul, and Annunziata, the conversation continues: “Paul, aren’t you coming with me to school tomorrow?” Paul could not look at him. Louis sought his face. “Paul . . . isn’t there some way?” “We must live. I am going back to the job.” “Must you? Is there no other way? Some way?” “No one brings us food.” “Paul . . . ?” “Job is freedom . . . for us.” (140)

We are subject to Paul’s interpretation of “job” versus “school” and the meaning of “freedom.” To be sure, Paul conflates work (“job”), physical nourishment (“food”), and “freedom” as all the same: “Job” is “freedom” from the fact that “no one brings [them] food.” But for Louis, instead, “freedom” has an entirely different meaning, as we continue to read: “Missus,” said Louis, “must Paul go to the buildings? Missus, he has a fine brain; he must study!” Annunziata looked to Paul helplessly. “Missus, we’ll study books together. I’ll help him. Don’t you see?” He took Paul’s hand. And his voice was tears. “Paul, the job is not freedom. Your wonderful brain is freedom . . . ” Paul shook his head, and the three wept. (141)

The urgency of education is underscored in Louis’s exhortative statement: “He must study!” Further still, let us not discount the positioning of the word “brain” and the adjectives that accompany it in its two instances here. First, it appears in Louis’s brief encomium/exhortation (“fine brain”), appearing then a second time in his closing statement (“Your wonderful brain is freedom . . .”). In each case, the adjective that accompanies the noun is a positive one, and the value of the adjective, we see, is incremented from “fine” to “wonderful,” as the few references to education and all that it pertains now culminate in Louis’s last word, “freedom,” couple with the previous noun, “brain,” creating the formula “brain = freedom.” This is now juxtaposed to the contrasting formula “job =/= freedom.” The tragedy of it all, if this is the proper term at this juncture, is in the final statement from our narrating voice:

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“Paul shook his head, and the three wept.” For we know not necessarily what Paul’s action meant, whether he shook his head in disagreement or frustration, but they do all weep, and it is in their weeping that we might assume Louis’s message of individual amelioration simply did not succeed here. Returning to Barzini’s long passage cited a few pages back, we see an analogue in the difference between the Italians, who “knew nothing much about Italy . . . and, as a result, were somewhat embarrassed by their origins and their names,” and the Jews, who possessed a marked “hunger for books and ideas.” That said, the situation that Barzini describes in 1926 may not seem much different from what we find today in numerous corners of Italian America. A good number of children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants do not know Italy’s history; for instance, they could not tell us if its government is parliamentary or presidential. Second, they are linguistically challenged, unable to directly access Italian culture because they cannot negotiate adequately in Italian. As a consequence, then, the ability to engage in nuance, implication, and intimation falls by the wayside, and communication, at best, is reduced to rudimentary practices. Third, on not rare occasions, it seems that, as a substantial block, they have little interest in cultural things Italian (read, Italian and Italian/American); or, one might presume, their linguistic shortcoming actually constitutes an inability for them to acquire that knowledge that would stimulate interest. Case in point, given the plethora of Italian cultural activities that take place, for instance, within the greater New York area, it is intriguing, to be sure, that the representatives—be they leaders or general members—of the so-called power-brokering Italian and Italian/ American organizations do not attend in the numbers that one might expect, especially since they are given—or appropriate—such conspicuous roles. 13 HOW AMERICANS SEE ITALIANS A simple way to understand how Americans see Italians is to peruse the representation of the Italian in U.S. cinema from its very beginning. 14 The despicable figure of Moustache Pete, for instance, appeared in F. Dobson’s The Skyscrapers of New York (1905). 15 Numerous similar representations followed, culminating, in part, in 1930 with Mervyn Leroy’s Little Caesar. What Barzini does that is somewhat different is present something even more insidious, if possible. Namely, early on, he introduces us to a scene between him and the mother of his furtive shipboard, girlfriend Natalie. The conversation between the two—of such importance yet presented in such a matter-offact manner—is simply startling. Natalie’s mother, Barzini tells us, “was definitely a lady, an imperious and awe inspiring lady, all fluttering mauve and gray veils, white face powder and rouge, jangling bracelets, dangling strings of pearls, and a long gold cigarette holder” (134–35). After a few days

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of Luigi and Natalie’s lovemaking in hidden corners of the ship, Natalie’s mother decided she needed to speak with Luigi: She said she wanted to talk to me. This naturally made me very nervous. I got even more nervous when she started, in a solemn and somewhat embarrassed voice, “There are a few things I must tell you, Luigi.” “Here we are,” I thought, “this is it, I called it down on myself by my demented behavior. Whatever she says, whatever she asks of me, she will be right. I have behaved like a mascalzone, violated a trust, compromised her pure, trusting innocent Natalie. God help me.” “Luigi,” her mother asked in a mellifluous voice, “you like Natalie?” I merely nodded enthusiastically but respectfully, as I could not speak. “Natalie likes you?” she went on. I modestly adopted a questioning look and waited. “I hope you speak Italian with her sometimes. She must get some practice. Italian is very useful in New York, don't you know, particularly with bootleggers and headwaiters in good restaurants. They give you a better table if you speak their language. They say that some people who know Italian can even understand the words of an opera and follow the plot, not that that makes much difference. . . . ” I found the strength to assure her I often spoke Italian with Natalie. I promised I would speak more, although it was more vital for me to fortify my English. She continued: “I love your language. I don’t understand it, but it is so musical. It is the language of love. . . . There’s nothing more charming than a shipboard flirtation like yours. You’re only young once, I always say. But there is one thing I must absolutely tell you. When we’re in New York, do not try to see Natalie again. She has plenty of beaux. You won’t like it. And my husband, her father, disapproves of Italians. He dislikes having them around the house. They make him nervous. Italians, he says, are all right in Italy but even there he thinks there are far too many of them. So promise me not to call or write. You understand, don't you?” I said I did, but, of course, I did not. (135–36; emphasis added)

The conversation seems to begin quite agreeably and somewhat matter-offact. But as it continues, the mother’s conversation becomes more problematic. Natalie’s cavorting with Luigi is acceptable since she needs to learn Italian. Italian, furthermore—while the language of Dante, Machiavelli, and Beccaria—is “very useful in New York, . . . particularly with bootleggers and headwaiters in good restaurants.” Further still, in knowing Italian, one “can even understand the words of an opera and follow the plot, not that that makes much difference,” we read. Finally, Italian is the “language of love,” comparable to a “charming . . . shipboard flirtation.” Were this not enough, the conversation turns truly perfidious when we find out that Natalie’s father “disapproves of Italians. He dislikes having them around the house. They make him nervous. Italians, he says, are all right in Italy but even there he thinks there are far too many of them.” The despicable statement of abject

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disapproval—indeed condemnation—of an entire people communicated with such nonchalance is, to be sure, the coup de grâce of ethnic bigotry. 16 DIFFERENT TYPES OF ITALIANS Later on in his narrative, Barzini offers up a detailed inventory, by category, of Italians he encountered in New York: “Among the Italians I met who found life in America easy, profitable, and pleasurable, far easier, more profitable and pleasurable than in Italy, were the ditchdiggers, hotel and restaurant people, Sicilians, wheeler-dealers, the Opera crowd, and the aristocrats” (171). At first glance, this list runs the gamut of the social ladder, and they have surely found America “more profitable and pleasurable than . . . Italy.” In the pages that follow, Barzini alternates his tone between the sympathetic and understanding and the comical and satirical. The first binomial (sympathetic and understanding) is dedicated more to the ditchdiggers, hotel and restaurant workers, Sicilians, and a special group of Irpiniani who literally turn a garbage dump into a sort of sustainable garden, a description this last one handled most sensitively. This second binomial (comical and satirical) is reserved, in turn, for the so-called upper crust of Italians in America, especially those who, to use one of Barzini’s notions from The Italians (1964), engaged in spectacle. In speaking first of the wheeler-dealers, he writes: There were go-betweens of all kinds, agents, organizers, herders of political votes, self-appointed bankers, dubious lawyers, all of them living on the poor trusting workingmen, their widows and orphans. For years some organizations had been collecting large sums of money from impecunious immigrants, who probably skipped a few meals to subscribe, in order to raise artistic monuments to the Italian great in New York. (178–79)

Speaking then of those who clearly engage in that Barzinian form of spectacle that he outlined in The Italians, Barzini now moves on to describe the activities of the Italian elite in the United States, specifically those black-tie affairs that had then and continue now to sprout up during the late fall, winter, and early spring seasons of banquet attending: Then there were the banquets. Whenever it was announced that a minor personage had arrived from the old country on a visit, a committee was formed, tickets were sold, a hotel ballroom hired and filled with eating and applauding Italians, a few Irish politicians who angled for their votes, flags of the two countries, and portraits of kings and Presidents. A number of prolix and flowery orators reminded the people present that Italy was the fatherland of a long list of great men, Dante, Michelangelo, Giuseppe Verdi, Antonio Meucci (Meucci is the obscure symbolic victim of American contempt for Italian immigrants’ legal rights; he was a theatrical mechanic who at one time manu-

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Much can be inferred from this paragraph. First, we see how these Italians in America react to the arrival of a “minor personage” from Italy. Indeed, the presence of an individual of little importance oddly puts into play a grand series of machinations to celebrate his arrival. Second, there is a bacchanalia aspect to the dinner (“a hotel ballroom . . . filled with eating and applauding Italians”), which is then accompanied by the profiteering characteristic of the event (“a few Irish politicians who angled for their votes, flags of the two countries, and portraits of kings and Presidents”). 17 Third, the element of ethnic crossing comes into play with the presence of Irish politicians, which clearly accompanies the political profiteering of the gala. The “prolix and flowery orators” who sing the glories of Dante, Michelangelo, Giuseppe Verdi, Antonio Meucci, Garibaldi, and Marconi are speaking to the choir and referring to those about whom these “eating and applauding Italians” most likely know very little. Fourth, the parenthetical references to Meucci’s and Garibaldi’s situations beg a series of questions, first of which is the intended tone of the comments. Furthermore, is Barzini actually trying to solicit sympathy from his reader, or is he engaging in his own satire, given the paragraph in its totality? Fifth, the “hazardous” aspect to the organization of such an event can speak only to an existent division within the Italian community within the United States at the time, a discussion here that may clearly underscore a current “separation of powers,” if you will, that may exist today among certain Italian/American organizations, be they cultural, social, or academic. 18 PROVISIONAL CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Like other episodes, characters, and/or events, this last description of the banquet (read, gala in today’s terminology) is quite telling even for today’s Italian community in the United States. This is especially true with regard to the utmost reverence signaled earlier that the U.S. Italian community seemed to pay to those who come to visit from Italy, regardless of their official position and/or knowledge, interest, or lack thereof with regard to Italians in the United States. Indeed, this is to some extent what one might perceive of a certain aspect of today’s relationship between U.S. Italians and Italy. As for

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any division among Italian associations in the United States, one might also wonder if per chance a certain form of campanilismo had not been imported from Italy, at the time that Barzini describes in O America as well as what we might sometimes perceive today within the U.S. Italian community. Although he may not always do so directly, Barzini surely raises a number of issues and, coincidentally, asks a series of questions that are equally valid to pose to today’s U.S. Italian community. First, there is the issue of identity, self-characterization. We saw how Barzini, back in 1929, saw himself and his parents and siblings as a family of “immigrants,” freely using a term that in the past forty-plus years has often proven to be problematic with regard to those who were born, raised, and formally educated in Italy. In another venue, and here in chapter 1 as well, I refer to this as “living Italy,” 19 a behavioral pattern by those who live the experience that is Italy and all that it pertains, but they do so beyond its geopolitical borders: namely, they embody in their manner of existence that geocultural sign we all know as Italy. Some members of this second group—those who “live Italy” but reside in the United States—seem to define themselves as Italians living abroad, even though their period abroad has been, to say the least, rather extensive. 20 Others, still, identify themselves a tad bit less generically as Italians in America. Of course, one question that such an identity process begs is, might there be something to the notion that for those who “live Italy”—while residing in the United States—there exists, as I questioned previously, an inscrutable, sociologically semiotic mechanism of the Italian immigrant that springs into action? Barzini seems to gloss over this issue—or, perhaps, it is for him a non-issue—insofar that he uses the adjective/noun “Italian” as an overbearing referent that includes Italians in/from Italy and Americans of Italian origin. A second issue that raises its head after reading O America, When You and I Were Young is the question of interest and/or support of one’s ethnic culture. Indeed, a conversation on cultural philanthropy among/by Italian Americans is, I would submit, something new to bring to the table. The concept itself, we might have to admit, has yet to be discussed beyond a few occasions by a small number of individuals. We need only look around to the various names on libraries, colleges of arts and humanities, and named (read, privately endowed) professorships for us to realize how far behind Italian America is in cultural philanthropy. 21 Education figures as the only way that we can change people’s minds. The Italian/American community must step up to the plate and support grand projects, such as an Italian/American museum as well as other entities and institutions dedicated to the imparting of knowledge of our history and culture. This, of course, brings me to the other areas that I consider to be in dire need of cultural: namely, the lack of Italian/American names on college and university libraries, colleges of arts and humanities, and named (read, pri-

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vately endowed) professorships, just to name a few areas. And I cannot underscore the humanities aspect of this discussion. The hard sciences and other fields, such as business and economics, seem to have fared quite well in many places. But in very few places, indeed, do we find the names of our ethnic brethren when we deal with areas such as the arts, the humanities, named professorships, and centers for Italian and/or Italian/American studies. 22 These are just some of the issues that come to mind after a reading of Barzini’s O America, When You and I Were Young. In the end, what becomes clear to Barzini was that the Italian in America was indeed challenged precisely because she or he was an Italian. To be sure, what many Italian Americans may have seen (or continue to see) as a series of challenges to realize the “American Dream,” Barzini, to a certain degree, saw some of these challenges laced with prejudice and discrimination, as is apparent in his narrative. One need only think back to his experiences with Natalie and Ann. Many of the questions that Barzini raises in this book constitute, I would contend, reasons why the cultural world of Italian America might benefit from a paradigm shift—that is, a more rigorous theoretical and methodological tune-up, as I suggest at the end of chapter 1, one that takes into consideration, as I also outline in those closing pages, both the creative and the critical realms. NOTES 1. Luigi Barzini, The Europeans (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). 2. Wolfram F. Hanrieder. Review of The Europeans (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). German Studies Review 7, no. 1 (1984): 187. 3. Barzini is synonymous with The Italians (New York: Atheneum, 1964) and rightfully so. But O America, When You and I Were Young (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) is one of those books that should still be in print today, a must-read for anyone interested in the Italian experience in the United States. 4. We might indeed question the (im)possibility of truly deciphering authorial intention. I refer the reader to Umberto Eco’s classic essay “Intentio lectoris: The State of the Art,” Differentia 2 (1988): 147–68. 5. Irony, as we know, calls attention to the difference between appearance and reality, what a sender might intend and an addressee might infer. For more on irony, see D. C. Mueke, Irony: The Critical Idiom (Fakenham, England: Methuen, 1970). 6. Graziella Parati, Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4. On notions of autobiography, see also Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, edited and with a forward by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 7. The “moment in history,” I would point out, is soon after the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants admitted from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States according to the census of 1890. 8. John B. L. Soule’s famous quote “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country” is often mistakenly credited to Horace Greeley. The quote actually first appeared in 1851, as the title to Soule’s editorial in the Terre Haute Express.

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9. “Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance / Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence”; Inferno, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Penguin, 1950). 10. The implication, of course, is that what they learned in school was not at all flattering; or, if otherwise, it discussed issues that these Italian Americans could not in any manner appreciate for an array of reasons that may very well be steeped in class issues. 11. Joseph Lopreato, Italian Americans (New York: Random House, 1970); Herbert J. Gans, Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962). 12. I would also refer the reader to Louise Napolitano, An American Story: Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (New York: Lang, 1995), especially 46–48. 13. This, of course, makes us re-think the gap that National Italian American Foundation’s national chairman Dr. A. Kenneth Ciongoli’s passing leaves within the Italian/American community nationwide. He was very much a go-getter and cultural broker like no one before him; this was then magnified by the fact that he came from the intellectual community of the hard sciences. He did it all with grace, aplomb, and selflessness that very few may be able to emulate. He was truly a rare diamond among many pieces of zirconium, and I fear for the progress that he made, the right person who has the vision to sustain and continue it will not be brought forward. Those who may be jockeying for his spot may be successful in their specific fields of commerce and the like; we only hope that they possess the cultural and people skills that Dr. Ciongoli had and knew how to exercise. 14. The writings on this area of intellectual inquiry are, to date, limited. One need consult the following: Pellegrino D’Acerno’s “Cinema Paradiso: The Italian American Presence in American Cinema,” in The Italian American Heritage, ed. Pellegrino D’Acierno (New York: Garland, 1999), 563–690; the essays in Screening Ethnicity: Cinematographic Representations of Italian Americans in the United States, ed. Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony Julian Tamburri (Boca Raton, FL: Bordighera Press, 2002); Anthony Julian Tamburri, Italian/ American Short Films and Videos: A Semiotic Reading (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2002); Peter Bondanella’s Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos (New York: Continuum, 2004); and Anthony Julian Tamburri, Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema (New York: Bordighera Press, 2011). 15. For a contemporary re-appropriation of this figure through irony, see Fred Gardaphe’s Moustache Pete Is Dead: Evviva Baffo Pietro! (Long Live Moustache Pete!): Italian/American Oral Tradition Preserved in Print; The Fra Noi Columns, 1985–1988 (West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera Press, 2010). For more on the early period of the representation of Italians in United States cinema, see Ilaria Serra, The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009); Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Anthony Julian Tamburri, Reviewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema (New York: Bordighera, 2011). 16. Barzini relates yet another instance later in his narrative in which he perceives his ethnicity as a fundamental reason for yet another relationship to end. At this time, we must underscore, the feelings between the two (Ann and Luigi) are presented as sincere expressions of true love. But Ann has other life plans, for she should marry someone with “the same background as hers, . . . from a good Protestant family” (295). The practicality of such a choice follows, describing all the attributes if such a similar, Protestant union. Indeed, Barzini comes to realize, such practicality is not part of his Catholic, Italian being in Ann’s world. He admits: “I was of course attractive, entertaining, and tempting, a mysterious animal; I cold probably make love more tenderly, sensitively, inventively, and artfully than Stewart, and go on for many more years. But I was a foreigner, as Natalie’s father would have pointed out, an entirely different and unpredictable sort of human being, a Catholic and an Italian” (296; emphasis added). 17. Today, many of the politicians are now Italian American, although in 2008 an Irish politician was present and highlighted at a very Italian event in the greater tristate area. Curi-

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ously, this politician had replaced a disgraced, philandering Italian/American representative who had decided not to run for re-election in 2008. 18. While there is a goodly amount of examples across the board, within the academic community I would briefly point to the existence of two national organizations of Italian studies: the American Association of Teachers of Italian (founded in 1924) and the American Association of Italian Studies (founded in 1976 with the original name of American Association of University Professors of Italian). Given our small numbers nationwide as educators of Italian, the cons for the existence of two distinct and, to some extent, decisively separate associations significantly outweigh any pros. To be sure, this is not the forum for an exhaustive discussion on the issue. But before we can proceed to such a discussion, we need first to recognize such a dilemma. In a general sense, Barzini has indeed recognized the separation dilemma of his time; we now need to recognize ours. 19. See my “Appunti e notarelle sulla cultura diasporica degli Italiani d’America: ovvero, suggerimenti per un discorso di studi culturali,” Campi immaginiabili 34–35 (2007): 247–64, now included in my Una semiotica dell’etnicità: nuove segnalature per la scrittura italiano/ americana (Florence, Italy: Franco Cesati Editore, 2010). 20. This reminds us of the self-described group of “Italian Poets in America,” first presented as a category with the special issue of Gradiva 10–11 (1992–1993). A good deal of literature has been written on this phenomenon of the bilingual Italian writer in the United States. It raises a series of issues, to be sure, that deals further, among other things, with labels, as the title of the special number of Gradiva suggests: “Italian writer in America,” “writer in exile,” and “expatriate” are just some of the labels that circulate. In my A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), I saw this type of writer included in what I consider a later group of those writers who, though linguistically different, belong nevertheless under the greater umbrella of Italian/ American writer. See chapter 7, “Italian/American Writer or Italian Poet Abroad? Luigi Fontanella’s Poetic Voyage.” Other essays have been written on this phenomenon. One of the more acute contributions to the discussion is an essay by Andrea Ciccarelli, “Fuoricasa: scrittori italiani in Nord America,” Esperienze letterarie 29, no. 1 (2004): 83–104, where, in closing, he also raises the issue of Italian writing outside of Italy and its relationship to Italian literature. Previous significant essays and collections include, first and foremost, Paolo Valesio’s “The Writer between Two Worlds: The Italian Writer in the United States,” Differentia 3–4 (1989): 259–76; the relevant essays in Jean-Jacques Marchand’s edited volume La letteratura dell’emigrazione: gli scrittori di lingua italiana nel mondo (Turin, Italy: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1991); Paolo Giordano, “Emigranti,espatriati e/o esiliati: Italiani e letteratura negli Stati Uniti,” in Lo Straniero, ed. Mario Domenichelli and Pino Fasano (Roma, Italy: Bulzoni Editore, 1998), 169–84; Peter Carravetta’s insightful introduction to Poesaggio: Poeti italiani d’America, ed. Peter Carravetta and Paolo Valesio (Treviso, Italy: Pagus, 1993); and Luigi Fontanella’s La parola transfuga (Florence, Italy: Cadmo, 2003). 21. Just about all other “historical” ethnic groups in the United States have not one but, for sure, several large, freestanding museums that preserve their past and, in so doing, impart that knowledge onto the newer generations and, by natural progression, celebrate their present and future. We Italian Americans have yet to find (read, also, found) such a place to do so. As we enter deeper into the twenty-first century, on the threshold of the second decade, and more than 125 years after the onset of the major wave of immigration from western Europe, we Italian Americans still have no major freestanding museum as one would wish! This is, simply, unacceptable. 22. A handful of names comes to mind when I think of philanthropy vis-à-vis Italian and Italian/American studies: Charles and Joan Alberto endowed the Charles and Joan Alberto Italian Studies Institute (Seton Hall University); Joseph M. and Geraldine C. La Motta endowed the Joseph M. and Geraldine C. La Motta Chair in Italian Studies (Seton Hall University); the Valente family’s funding of the the Valente Family Italian Studies Library (Seton Hall University) has set up a collection of Italian books second to none; the Baroness Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò’s most generous donation funds in perpetuity the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, home of the Department of Italian Studies at New York University; Joseph and Elda Coccia

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have endowed the Joseph and Elda Coccia Institute for the Italian Experience in America (Montclair State University); and, dulcis in fundo, George L. Graziadio endowed the George L. Graziadio Center for Italian Studies and its George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian Studies at California State University in Long Beach.

III

Specificities of Reading Poetry

Chapter Five

Joseph Tusiani’s Gente Mia Coincidences of E(im)migration

While we are prone to speak of Joseph Tusiani’s work within a certain paradigm of the hyphenated writer, one that he would surely underscore, we should not readily resort to the typical dichotomy of Italian and American. I make this statement for the simple reason that Tusiani’s work is not limited to either Italian or English. As we know, he also writes in his native dialect as well as in Latin. This said, we simply cannot ascribe to Tusiani’s work the typical hyphen that, as I would have stated some twenty years ago, might turn on its side forty-five degrees; 1 indeed, not even a ninety-degree slant would adequately represent his four-part socioaesthetic profile. For Tusiani’s rhetorical repertoire may indeed be better represented by a hyphen that, in this very unique case, would actually spin 360 degrees á la a second hand on a wristwatch! Regardless of such a complex and, to be sure, intriguing linguistic polyform of Tusiani ouerve, I concentrate here on a part of his poetry in English, that one fourth of his repertoire that best represents his duo-hyphenated status of Italian/American writer. In particular, I am most interested in those “ethnic” compositions that compose the group entitled Gente Mia, 2 a title that nicely underscores, I would submit, Joseph Tusiani’s belonging to a specific group of people. Indeed, the title alone speaks volumes, I believe, for a number of reasons. First, the very language of the title is in Italian, while the compositions therein are in English, thus signaling a dual aspect to a certain component of the author’s intentionality. Second, the possessive ad75

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jective “mia” nicely signals a sense of community: that he is indeed part of a group that articulates itself also in Italian. Third, this combination of Italian title and English compositions, with the possessive expressed in Italian, also beckons the author’s own recognition of his outsider status, someone who is still in search of an identity that, within a U.S. dominant culture, is most difficult to articulate and subsequently define. For the most part, Gente Mia articulates the immigration experience as, to say the least, a challenging and disruptive experience. 3 From poem to poem, the reader is confronted with an array of thematics that are both personal and universal. Through our reading, we first witness the disassociation and unhinging that we might impugn to the immigrant experience. Leaving one’s homeland for a country that is an ocean away, culturally alien, and linguistically different underscores the sense of not belonging and ultimately weighs heavily on the immigrant: hence, the initially disassociated and/or unhinged individual who feels all the more like the foreigner he or she is eventually categorized and/or labeled. In Tusiani’s collection, one also encounters the newcomer’s expectations and disillusions, as he or she must negotiate a plethora of sociocultural differences on a regular basis. Of course, these experiences are all part of the sociologically inevitable acculturation, if not assimilation, of the individual who migrates from point A to point B. This becomes an ongoing process that unfolds over the years as the displaced person reconciles his or her dichotomous existence within his or her new quotidian milieu. 4 It becomes to some extent a series of seemingly un-pairable pairs that constitute in the end a certain coincidentia oppositorum that subtends Tusiani’s texts. Of course, there is also language: that one seemingly “natural” vehicle that, once one emigrates to another country, constitutes yet another challenge, one that is threefold. First, there is the necessity of the so-called host country’s language, a new sign system that the incomer must grasp and comprehend, if not gain mastery of it. Second, the incomer qua immigrant must now be sure to separate his or her “natural” language from his or her newly acquired language to avoid any semblance of linguistic contamination and, consequently, miscommunication. Third, and given especially the dynamic characteristic of language, the incomer has the added challenge—or is it more of a test, indeed an ordeal?—of having to maintain a current knowledge of his or her first language, if indeed this is something desirous that he or she might also find beneficial. All of which constitutes a series of challenges and possible requisitions that come with one’s migratory experience regardless of class, gender, formal education, or other characteristics. Indeed, these and other individual characteristics will have an effect and an indelible one for sure. And basic sociological experience will surely mirror much of this.

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Tusiani’s “Song of the Bicentennial” remains, I would contend, his most well-known poem and, undoubtedly, one of the most cited of his poems since its publication. The title itself is pregnant with meaning: for the bicentennial, when the United States celebrated its two-hundred-year birthday, Tusiani publishes a lyrical composition that, conversely, interrogates his status Americanus in the opening verses, composed of two questions: “What would my life have been / had I remained where I was born? What dreams / would I be dreaming now?” These two questions call to mind the aforementioned coincidentia oppositorum that clearly informs many of Tusiani’s creative texts. Indeed, this first of six sections of the poem has a prefatory function that signals to the reader that much examination and inquiry of the immigrant’s status will follow. This first section of “Song of the Bicentennial,” in fact, continues with a series of words that underscore the drama so associated with emigration: “plucked,” “sunder,” “deracinated,” and, finally, “grief.” Each word, further, is paired with another that only underscores this antipathy, if you will, that is invested in the coincidentia oppositorum that subtends the collection: “plucked” is paired with “salubrious”; “roof” is paired with “heaven”; and “roots” is paired with “deracinated.” These couplets of opposites are then bracketed within an initial set of questions and the final two interrogatives, with the last question set apart from the stanza: What would my life be now if I were still with my familiar trees?

It is, as we see, a question that has no real answer; instead, it figures as one of those lingering thoughts, doubts, we might add, about the value of the grand exodus. Indeed, the choice of vocabulary, simple at first glance, is truly remarkable; the entire first stanza is in many ways included in these last two lines. The trees—something that can very well be “deracinated”—are “familiar” in that they are not only known to the narrating “I,” but the very adjective possesses in its root the recall of family—“famili-”—underscoring in this sense the distance from loved ones and the solitude that can often accompany the migratory act. It is, as Paolo Giordano has pointed out, that “cynical and somber awareness of what it means to be an immigrant” (73). A curious rhetorical strategy indeed, Tusiani alternates the use of “immigrant” and “emigrant,” as if to differentiate quite emphatically the leaving and the arrival and all that each experience might comprise. Further, in this second section, Tusiani underscores the “emigrant” process and all that it entails through such words and phrases as “my human thinking that at best is doubt” and “creating suns beyond the sun I know.” These words underscore that sense of the unknown, as the individual leaves a homeland that he or she knows and, with “unbounded magma that confounds,” heads for, in a certain sense, a “center of infinities,” given the absolute unknown that awaits the

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“silent men called emigrants.” This is a most intriguing phrase, given the migratory act; for one arrives in a new land and is, de facto, at the mercy of his so-called hosts. That is, the immigrant qua outsider is subject to the ideology of the new land. In this case, one may indeed infer from this phrase not only the more general scenario of newly arrived from the old world versus the ensconced citizen of the new world but rather the uneven power structure potentially implied in the past participle “called,” as he or she is in this new land and no longer enjoys, as he or she most likely did in his or her homeland, the privilege of identifying him- or herself. Section 3 speaks primarily to language and, to a large degree, the concept of existence, as if it were to transform Descartes’s Latin “Cogito ergo sum” into something like “Loquor ergo sum” or, more relevant to the situation at hand, the Italian immigrant’s “Parlo, dunque sono.” Language, that is, becomes the primary vehicle through which all else is filtered. It underscores the coincidentia oppositorum of old world versus new world as English is placed against Italian—for example, “dreams” versus “sogni,” “changed” versus “unchangeable.” Such linguistic dichotomy is underscored throughout this third section. Tusiani mythicizes his old world through language, when, for example, “cielo” and “mamma” are preferred to “sky” and “mother,” as Giordano underscores in his reading of this collection, indicating this ultimate translation/transformation as the narrating “I” states (77): Now every thought I think, each word I say detaches me a little more from all I used to love . . .

The continual linguistic seesaw that pervades this section culminates in the final verses that now underscore such a linguistic/existential dilemma of the individual: Oh, they have taught me to translate all things— even my very self—into some new and old infinity of roots and boughs, so that I wonder if I am old or whether I am new beneath the sky, beneath the cielo of my long-lost land. (emphasis added)

The idea of translating “all things” underscores both a physical and spiritual process that takes place within the immigrant’s experience, as he or she decides to make this move to a new land. The actual carrying across—that is, trans-latio—from one side to another is the first physical step in an existential process that the immigrant must undergo. The emphasis here, nonetheless, is on the individual and not on other objects; for he or she must also, “even,” translate his “very self.” In so doing, the immigrant is thus transformed into a different being, or, as he will state later in this poem, a divided

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individual, a bipartite human being, having now migrated from point A to point B. This twofold being is represented here with the juxtaposition of adjectives such as “new” and “old,” as we see earlier. Such coincidentia oppositorum clearly underpins what is stated here at the end of this section. Difference is also signaled by the narrator’s use of “sky,” contrasted with “cielo,” so that language is placed on a similar significant level of subjectivity of the immigrant. His or her new language, indeed “acquired,” makes him or her a “new” person; it disaffiliates him from his old world, as it “detaches [him] . . . from all / he used to love.” Language obviously transmutes all, even what he had “thought unchangeable”; as a result, the aforementioned proverbial “Cogito . . . ” loses it valence and is now substituted by what we might readily call a proto-deconstructive “I speak, therefore I am.” Language, in the end, becomes an ultimate identifying entity, as his employment of English is the marker that signals his de-Italianization vis-à-vis his possible Americanization. All of this leads to the opening interrogative of the penultimate section of this poem: “Two languages, two lands, perhaps two souls,” leading to the by now proverbial six lines of this poem within Italian/American literature: Then who will solve the riddle of my day? Two languages, two lands, perhaps two souls . . . Am I a man or two strange halves of one? Somber, indifferent light, setting before me with a sheer of glow, because there is no answer to my plight.

The riddle of Tusiani’s day is the riddle of all immigrants of all days. Once the individual emigrates and sets roots, so to speak, in a foreign land, she or he becomes that divided individual, that person who no longer lives the culture of his or her country of origin and must now acclimate, not necessarily assimilate, to the culture of the country of arrival. 5 Thus, the narrator speaks in terms of two, since his migration has indeed created this bipartite individual of “two languages, two lands” and, as he says, in some respects, “two souls.” There indeed does not exist any answer to Tusiani’s “riddle,” precisely because, as Giordano points out, the “immigrant is suspended between two ‘worlds’” (74). The immigrant is, in other words, caught up in that interstitial space that Arnold van Gennep calls the “liminal” 6 ; it is that “transitional period” (11) of a “passage from . . . one social world to another” (10). In the case of e(im)migration, van Gennep is understandably silent to a degree, as his work was written at the beginning of the twentieth century and originally published in French in 1909. Nonetheless, he does speak in terms of physical transitions, and such notions do prove germane to the general concept of e(im)migration as discussed herein: “Whoever passes from one [territory] to

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the other finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers between two worlds” (18). What Tusiani’s riddle calls into question, of course, is van Gennep’s “certain length of time,” as indeed van Gennep himself implicitly does when he states, as we just saw, that “in specific instances these three types are not always equally important and equally elaborated.” As therefore Tusiani himself states, “because there is no answer to my plight”—and let us not lose sight of the semiotic valence of his term “plight”—there are also others who feel the same. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, for example, maintain that “for some migrants the passage is never complete . . . [as they] remain trapped in a liminal phase, as unincorporated outsiders in American society for whom even return to [their home country may be] problematic.” 7 Others still see the immigrant’s “plight” as something not totally in their control and thus dependent on the host country’s desire to allow the liminal to pass to the incorporated. Leo R. Chavez, in this regard, tells us that the immigrant’s “full incorporation [read also, assimilation] depends not on [his or her] own beliefs or actions but, ultimately, on the [host] society’s perception of [the outsider]” (247). 8 In this sense, then, Donnan and Wilson offer a surely acute observation as well as understatement with regard to the immigrant's “plight,” as it readily constitutes at the very least “a transitional condition which is confusing, sometimes polluting and almost always transformative” (66). In the final section to his poem and in a Dantean terza rima, Tusiani underscores the immigrant’s collision with the host country, reticent at best to “incorporate” the outsider: I am the present for I am the past of those who for their future came to stay, humble and innocent and yet outcast.

Regardless of one’s higher degrees and in spite of one’s seeming social stature, even the well educated cannot escape the immigrant’s challenging condition. As stated earlier in this poem, Tusiani remains among the “multitudinous Italian throng” (“I am the present”), like all who preceded him (“for I am the past”). Now “humble[d]” and “outcast” in this new land, he also lives the general experience of the Italian immigrant especially at the beginning of the twentieth century (“those who for their future came to stay”). We thus come back to those three words that ring ever so loudly, “sunder,” “deracination,” “up-rooted,” which, in the end, “evoke lucid images of the bitterness, violent separation and displacement that for many is the final resolution of the emigration experience” (Giordano 2000, 74–75). We should not, by any means, lose the irony in two seemingly insignificant aspects to this section of Tusiani’s poem, regardless of what he may have had in mind at the time of composition. As he employs the image of the

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“outcast” as emigrant/immigrant, he does so while imitating rhetorically the outcast of all times in Italian literary history, Dante Alighieri. Indeed, this irony is not at all lost on Martino Marazzi, as he writes in his essay on Tusiani’s autobiography: 9 Proporre una fonte per un’idea o un passaggio di Tusiani è senza dubbio avventato . . . : ma mi colpisce la circostanza che anche a metà Inferno, XXV, descrivendo l’osceno accoppiamento e la relativa violenta, bestiale trasformazione in serpente di un ladro compagno di Vanni Fucci . . . , Dante introduca la similitudine con l’“Ellera abbarbicata” (Inf. XXV, 58), e avvii un fitto gioco, destinato a sciogliersi parzialmente solo nel canto XXVI col racconto di Ulisse (che parla dall’interno della “lingua” biforcata), sulla peccaminosa confusione di due e uno, di uno e due, intesi come corpo e come natura. “Then who will solve the riddle of my day? / Two languages, two lands, perhaps two souls . . . / Am I a man or two strange halves of one?”, ripete da Gente Mia Tusiani in III, 143; e in Malebolge, “né l’un né l’altro già parea quell ch’era: // . . . Vedi che già non se’ né due né uno. // Già eran li due capi un divenuti/ quando n’apparver due figure miste in una faccia, ov’eran due perduti // . . . Ogni primaio aspetto ivi era casso: / due e nessun l’imagine perversa / parea; e tal sen gio con lento passo” (Inf. XXV, 63, 69–72, 76–78). Il confronto con il passo dantesco, anche se non fosse probante a livello testuale, ci aiuta a inquadrare il discorso di Tusiani sulla perdità dell’organicità naturale della lingua in un contesto emigratorio, perdita che la coscienza grava di sovrasignificati morali. E’ come se lo scrittore italoamericano ci dicesse di sentirci “perduto,” quasi un ladro, un intruso nella casa della vita (nelle bolge della vita contemporanea), di sentirci condannato ad un perpetuo circuito di trasformazioni (per quanto preziose), raddoppiamenti e repentini annullamenti—una pena da scontare senza fine e in fondo senza costrutto. (317–18) 10

Marazzi’s suppositions of the writer expressing his feelings of being “‘lost,’ as if a thief, an intruder . . . , that he felt condemned to a perpetual cycle of transformations . . . without end” recall first of all van Gennep’s concept of liminality (i.e., period of transition) and the possibility that passage into a state of “incorporation” may not in fact take place since, as he writes, “in specific instances these three types are not always equally important and equally elaborated” (11). But we are also reminded of what we read in Donnan and Wilson: namely, that “for some . . . the passage is never complete . . . [and they] remain trapped in a liminal phase, as unincorporated outsiders [read, “outcast”] in American society” (10; emphasis added). All of this, of course, may also be due, as we read in Chavez, to the fact that the immigrant’s “full incorporation . . . depends not on [his or her] own beliefs or actions but, ultimately, on the [host] society’s perception of [the outsider]” (247). Transformations and coincidentia oppositorum continue to subtend the compositions in this collection. The brief poem “Ethnicity” clearly figures as an expression par excellence of Tusiani’s pairing of opposites with its open-

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ing line: “O new awareness of my ancient light” (emphasis added), where the previous binomial “old/new” is now accentuated with “old” being substituted by “ancient,” thus underscoring further the long history of Italy, which here is metonymically represented by “Rome.” As a poem, “Ethnicity” is also ecumenical in that it underscores the larger notion of immigration as we read in the antepenultimate line: “Brother, you came from Erin, I from Rome.” Here, most poignantly, Tusiani underscores a sense of inclusiveness among all immigrants, as he joins together the two more prominent ethnic groups of the time, the Irish and the Italian, ultimately bringing them ever so closer with the appellative “Brother.” The closing verse of the poem then signals the permanence of their move, as it underscores the migratory act: “Today immigration and tomorrow home” (emphasis added). One of the best articulations of the anonymity of the immigrant is found in the closing stanza of “Columbus Day in New York”: the one who came to dig (for dig we must) for the high glory of the subway tracks, the immigrant who died and yet still lacks identity with this American dust.

As elsewhere, the two major points here are articulated through a rhetorical coincidentia oppositorum. One of the numerous, strenuous, and dangerous jobs that the immigrant could find was in fact the “dig[ging]” of the “subway tracks.” The ironic “high” glory that the immigrant received was, as we read, for the “subway tracks,” as the immigrant literally worked underground, hence out of sight, and thus unknown to the world above—the world at large, or better, the collective consciousness of the host country. This invisibility and, hence, denial of the immigrant’s existence are further underscored here by the last two lines. What stands out is that the denial is historical, if you will, everlasting, since we have a juxtaposition of tenses, and the verb that speaks to the immigrant’s identity is, in fact, in the present tense: “the immigrant who died and yet still lacks” (emphasis added). The final verse, then, opens with “identity,” placing it in a privileged position, at the beginning of the verse, which then closes with the word “dust”—an apt metonym, to be sure, for death and an indifferent one for sure. Finally, let us not lose sight of yet another set of opposites, as the “immigrant” who died in this poem does not possess an “American” self. 11 Tusiani’s longer composition, “Ellis Island,” poses the same question in the opening and closing stanzas: “Why a museum now?” Why, that is, as he writes, “immortaliz[e] the gravity of pain”? And as he continues, Tusiani ends this opening stanza with the question mark: “In this new piece who dares accuse the sea / of ancient death and fear, / the sky of endless shame?” This island seems “tranquil as a land should be,” and “guiltless seems this part / of America.” Yet, as we know, Ellis Island was not “tranquil,” nor was

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it “guiltless.” Instead, what this second stanza underscores to some degree is the unconscious pain that the migratory act instills in those who immigrate, since, as we read earlier, the host country is sometimes anything but hospitable. 12 In this sense, Tusiani indeed tells us so herein: Yet on this very isle—how long ago?— man’s sobbing deafened every tidal roar and tears eclipsed the happy-reigning light. Thousands had come in hope and thousands in despair, for the first time forgetting every woe, for the last time remembering every war, only believing in their human right— freedom from king or pope, freedom to breathe new air.

We see that their desire for “freedom from king or pope [and] freedom to breath new air” is preceded by the immigrant’s overwhelming suffering (“man’s sobbing deafened every tidal roar / and tears eclipsed the happyreigning light”) to reach a state of basic civil liberties (“only believing in their human right”). Tusiani’s language, we also see here, is maximized to be sure in his choice of vocabulary and the comparisons he makes. An individual’s lamentations (“sobbing”), for example, silences “tidal roars,” and one’s “tears” dull a “happy-reigning light.” Furthermore, once again Tusiani engages in a construction of oppositions (i.e., coincidentia oppositorum), quasi chiasmatic, to underscore the immigrant’s desire and hopes to move forward (“for the first time forgetting every woe, / for the last time remembering every war”): “first” stands in contrast to “last”; “forgetting” in contrast to “remembering”; and “woe” in this setup is canceled out by “war.” The ultimate trials and tribulations of the migratory experience and the mistreatment that the immigrant confronted are most efficaciously articulated in the fifth stanza of “Ellis Island”: O grief and agony beneath the glance of Goddess Liberty! What should have been the first and last oasis of the earth became the last and first concentration camp, another jail, another circumstance, one more disaster and one more chagrin, after the unforeseen disgrace of birth. Once hungry and accursed, always the tragic tramp.

The juxtaposition of “grief and agony” with “Goddess Liberty” already sets up a contrast of unrealized expectations that have gone array. This is brought to its apex with the comparison, indeed degradation, of the “oasis” with/into

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a “concentration camp.” What would then become the continued travails of the migratory experience we find in the transformation of the desired “first and last oasis” into the “the last and first / concentration camp”; the imagery here could not be any stronger, as “oasis” is juxtaposed to “concentration camp,” and the original “first and last” is transformed into “last and first,” thus underscoring a continuation of the migratory experience in the verses that follow, which is ultimately underscored with the adverb “always”: “another jail, another circumstance, / one more disaster and one more chagrin, / . . . Once hungry and accursed, / always the tragic tramp.” 13 All of this, of course, speaks to the issues of liminality discussed earlier. Be it van Gennep’s notion of a “transitional period” or Donnan and Wilson’s concept of the “unincorporated outsiders” or Chavez’s observation that the immigrant’s “full incorporation . . . depends . . . ultimately, on the [host] society’s perception,” Tusiani underscores here in like fashion that the immigrant’s plight—“the inexpensive crew, / the expendable foe,” as he states in a later stanza in this poem—is indeed never ending, “always the tragic tramp.” For Tusiani, then, as a possible remedy, “Ellis Island,” as a museum that “immortalizes the gravity of pain,” should be replaced by “a roller coaster that from earth to sky, / from sky to earth, may all grandchildren bring / without reminding them / of tragedies bygone.” There is, I would add, a prescient moment as Tusiani closes this poem. In his desire to see the “land of suffering” become the “diadem / of the still winning sun,” he reminds us that “by old injustices are new ones bred.” In this final stanza that I have partially quoted in these past few lines, one might readily infer a reference, however indirect and/or implicit it may seem, that one should not fall into the trap of nostalgic recall of “tragedies bygone.” Yet, I would submit, there is also a prophetic moment when he states, in fact, that “by old injustices are new ones bred.” More than anything, it surely reminds us of one if not two things: there may indeed be a continued plight that the immigrant must endure, and/or if we do not examine our history of “old injustices,” they may very well continue to endure. Either way, the immigrant, then and now, may very well remain “the innocent and pure / forbidden to prevail,” as best one might otherwise do. “The Ballad of the Coliseum” is the last poem of Gente Mia that I discuss herein. While it is not the last poem in this collection, it is—fittingly, I would add—the last of Tusiani’s manifesto-like compositions in his book. In one sense, it is the typical, concise lyrical account of the immigration experience: we have the man who departs for the United States, leaving behind family and friends in search of great wealth, as the fortune-teller recounts: No earthly monarch will inhabit so new a castle as will you and no man’s hand will ever reach you beneath your most majestic hill.

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Of course, what we realize at the end of the poem is that Angelo has, so to speak, misheard (read also, misread) his fortune-teller’s prediction. We find out, in fact, that Angelo meets the same tragic end of Pietro di Donato’s Geremio in his classic novel Christ in Concrete. Both men die a tragic and, in a certain sense, ignominious death precisely because, as we might imagine, the building codes were what they were at the time, laxed at the very best: “They looked all over for his body, / but there was wet cement below / and many a ton of brick above.” All those years that he spent to make that fortune that he believed he would make culminate in a death at the very material that he believed was to bring him to his apex, to that “majestic hill”: And so he worked, and lime and mortar were his most precious ornaments, and when he found more work, he treasured with greater joy his few more cents.

This is, to be sure, a not too unfamiliar pattern of the immigrant story: hard work, toil, and, if unlucky, tragedy that may even end in death. This is surely part of the migratory experience, one that does not end among those mythical streets “paved with gold.” It represents, as Giordano indicated, the downside of immigration; death, real and metaphorical (80), only underscores what we saw with regard to the unincorporated outsider. Yet, this poem, like numerous others, has a self-referential quality to it. The presence of the fortune-teller, both at the poem’s opening and at the closing, is nothing more than a metaphor for the reading/interpretation process. The “majestic hill” becomes a “majestic tomb”; furthermore, the direction of the “beneath your most majestic hill” is read by Angelo to signify from bottom to top, whereas, we see, as a grave, the direction is from top to bottom. But Angelo is not alone in this misreading. We see that one of his “paesani” read the fortune-teller’s text in the same manner: “My friend,” another spoke, “a gypsy has said that Angelo will die (a hundred years from now) as wealthy as any king beneath the sky.”

In a similar fashion, Angelo, “sitting at table with his wife,” would recount how fortunate he was with the possibility of so much work ahead of him: “And so our builder every evening, / . . . while all enrapt his children listened— / counted the blessings of his life”: “blessings,” we see in the end, that are transformed into tragedy. Finally, we come to understand that the sign of all signs in this poem is, indeed, “Coliseum.” Be it the external reader—the real or implied reader—or Angelo the internal reader, “Coliseum” has a series of meanings. It obviously signifies at the outset that historical structure we know as that which exists in Rome. However, as we continue to read, we realize that it comes to mean a new tall building to go up

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across from Central Park. Finally, the Coliseum “superbly stands” neither as that historical structure nor as the magnificent building across Central Park that we assume it is. Rather, it is the “most majestic tomb a monarch / may wish for . . . / the grave . . . / a gray, old gypsy had foretold.” Angelo’s experience, read as it is told to us, replicates much of what we previously saw in Tusiani’s poetry herein; Angelo is “plucked” from his home village, “deracinated,” as Tusiani would say, leaving behind family, never to see many of them again: “he missed his mother, missed his village, / missed his childhood that was fled” (emphasis added). His missing these things, in the end, speaks to his sense of identity in this new country. We see that even at this juncture in his life, he is still in search of some form of self, hoping desperately, we might readily assume, not to end up being “the immigrant who died and yet still lacks / identity with this American dust,” as we read. Such a situation, to be sure, further underscores the general plight of the immigrant qua immigrant, one who comes to the United States, at times alone and without family, and is left with little choice but to work day and night. And, yet, regardless of such hard work, he or she is destined to remain on the outskirts of society, as the outsider who, if he or she is ever accepted into the society at large, is so only because the so-called host country allows it. 14 NOTES 1. I remind the reader of my To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate. 2. Gente Mia and Other Poems (Stone Park, IL: Italian Cultural Center, 1978); now available in Ethnicity: Selected Poems, ed. Paolo Giordano (West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera Press, 2000). This edition includes two essays by Paolo Giordano: “From Southern Italian Immigrant to Reluctant American: Joseph Tusiani’s Gente Mia and Other Poems” (73–86) and “The Writer between Two Worlds: Joseph Tusiani’s Autobiografia di un italo-americano” (87–100). 3. Tusiani clearly deals with the issue of emigration in many other works of his. Among the many essays on his writing, I would point the reader in the following direction, as two examples: Emilio Bandina, “Il tema dell’emigrazione nella poesia Latina di Joseph Tusiani,” in “Two Languages, Two Lands”: L’opera letteraria di Joseph Tusiani, ed. Cosma Siani (San Marco in Lamas, Italy: Quaderni del Sud, 2000), 29–46; and Maria Carmela Fanciullo, “Il romanzo di Joseph Tusiani: dal Dante in licenza ad Envoy from Heaven,” in “Two Languages, Two Lands”, 127–42, especially 134ff. For a more general study of emigration in Tusiani’s work, see Cosma Siani, L’io diviso: Joseph Tusiani fra emigrazione e letteratura (Rome: Edizioni Cofine, 1999). 4. This is also, as Giordano rightfully labels it, “the process of Americanization” (73). 5. The one question that we might ask with regard to assimilation is if one can truly assimilate. Does one actually rid oneself of habits and customs of his or her country of origin? For more on assimilation, see the following: Mary C. Waters and Tomás R. Jiménez, “Assessing Immigrant Assimilation: New Empirical and Theoretical Challenges,” Annual Review of Sociology 31, no. 1 (2005): 105–25; Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); James A. Crispino, The Assimilation of Ethnic Groups: The Italian Case (Staten Island, NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1980). 6. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedon and Gabrielle L. Caffee, introduction by Solon T. Kimball (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 11.

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Van Gennep sees three stages in his “rites of passage as a special category” (10). He writes: “I think it legitimate to single our rites of passage as a special category, which under further analysis may be subdivided into rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation” (10–11). He then goes on to say that “although a complete scheme of rites of passage theoretically includes preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation), in specific instances these three types are not always equally important and equally elaborated” (11). 7. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Nation, Identity, and State (Oxford, England: Berg, 1999), 10. Let us also not forget that a good 50 percent of those who left Italy during the historic period of Italian immigration returned. For more on return immigration, see Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 92–100, passim. 8. Leo R. Chavez, “Outside the Imagined Community: Undocumented Settlers and Experiences of Incorporation,” American Ethnologist 18, no. 2 (1991): 257–78. 9. Martino Marazzi, “Da un ‘angolo di vantaggio’: Intorno alla parola autobiografica di Joseph Tusiani,” Il Giannone 5, nos. 9–10 (2007): 301–26. 10. To propose a source for an idea or passage by Tusiani is surely impulsive . . . : but I am struck by the circumstance that even in the middle of Inferno, XXV, while describing the obscene coupling and the relative violent bestial transformation into a snake of thief, a friend of Vanni Fucci . . . , Dante introduces the simile with the “Ellera abbarbicata” (Inf. XXV, 58), and he sets up a difficult joke, destined to reveal itself only in canto XXVI with the Ulisse story (who speaks from within of the bifurcated tongue), about the sinful con-fusion of two and one, and one and two, understood as body and nature. “Then who will solve the riddle of my day?/ Two languages, two lands, perhaps two souls . . . / Am I a man or two strange halves of one?”, Tusiani repeats from Gente Mia, III, 143; and in the Malebolge “and neither seemed to be what it had been; // . . . ‘Nor ‘tother nor which! Nor single nor a pair!’// Two heads had already become one head, / We saw two faces fuse themselves, to weld/ One countenance whence both the first had fled // All former forms wholly extinct in it, / The perverse image—both at once and neither— / Reeled slowly out of sight on languid feet” (Inf. XXV, 63, 69–72, 76–78). The comparison with the passage from Dante, even if not provable at a textual level, helps us situate Tusiani’s discourse on the loss of the natural homogeneity of language within a migratory context, a loss that the conscience burdens with highly moral significance. It is as if the Italian/ American writer were telling us that he felt “lost,” as if a thief, an intruder in the house of life (in the bolge of contemporary life), that he felt condemned to a perpetual cycle of transformations (however precious), doublings and sudden cancellations—a sentence to be served without end and, ultimately, without meaning. (My translation of Marazzi’s text; Dante’s text from Inferno, trans. by Dorothy L. Sayers [New York: Penguin, 1950].) 11. In a similar fashion, Giordano writes: “This poem . . . accomplishes two things: 1) it reminds America of what Italians have achieved in the new land, from its discovery by Columbus to the humble laborer; and 2) it synthesizes the despair and frustration, of being a misunderstood immigrant in a land of immigrants” (84). 12. An irony, of course, is that what is occurring today in Italy vis-à-vis its new immigration is very much reminiscent of the Italian experience in the United States over 130 years ago. This obviously calls into question the notion that Italy as a new country of arrival could surely learn from the experience of its historic emigration of the turn of the twentieth century, 1880–1924. 13. The image of the tramp brings to mind two possible, historical referents: one, the similar depiction of the Italian immigrant in those historical vignettes that used to appear in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where the immigrant was indeed a beggar of sorts; two, the tragicomic figure of Charlie Chaplin, a hapless and seemingly harmless image that, at first glance, made the spectator laugh, which, instead, was to a certain degree a cinematic rendition of the historical vignette. 14. See Giordano’s final statement in his essay “La scoperta dell’identità etnica, dalla poesia all’autobiografia,” in “Two Languages, Two Lands,” 18–21, where, in like fashion, he states, “Tusiani finalmente è arrivato ad una risoluzione del suo problema di immigrato. La risoluzione è la consapevolezza di essere sospeso fra due mondi, riconoscere il suo biculturalismo e accettare se stesso come uomo di due lingue e due anime socioculturali” (21; Tusiani finally

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arrives at a resolution to his problem as an immigrant. The resolution is the awareness of being suspended between two worlds, of recognizing his biculturalism and of accepting himself as an individual of two languages and two socio-cultural souls” [my translation]).

Chapter Six

Rina Ferrarelli’s The Bread We Ate Looking Back to Move Forward?

The narrative voice in The Bread We Ate is not dissimilar to what we find in Joseph Tusiani’s Gente mia. Deracination and diaspora, departure and arrival, language and culture are all binomials that we found first in Tusiani, a member of the pre-war generation, and that now appropriately appear in this new collection by Rina Ferrarelli, she a member of the post-war generation. Indeed, the assumption is by no means one of imitatio in any direct manner. 1 What is significant is that while there is a notable difference in gender, certain themes of the immigrant do figure as common denominators. As such, their similarities will be transformed, for sure, by their gendered lens, a lens that is someone else’s as well as the personal optics through which the female views her challenges. Gender is the first theme that we encounter as we open the pages of this book. What we witness in this first poem is the gender dilemma that all Italian immigrant women faced before World War II, a marker of time, I would contend, that has affected once more and, as a consequence, still divides within Italy notions of old world and new world. We are still within a period of Italy before the invasion of, first, the Germans and, second, the allied troops, a mix of cultures for sure that had its affect, to whatever degree we might argue, on the Italian mind-set. The constriction of the women in this poem is signaled by its very title, “Framed by Walls”; its temporal moment is subsequently signaled by the subtitle “(Italy c. 1935).” The first three stanzas underscore the social positioning of Italian women at that time: 89

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Chapter 6 The outside corners of houses the invisible distant sky. Neighbor women, all dead now, grouped on the stone street of the old quarter, before emigration scatters them, changes their clothes and customs, the sureness of their speech, before grief dulls the shine of their eyes. They pose for their men, away in countries they call America, reminding them that they’re still waiting, daughters grown and ready to be married, wives who still look good.

The notion of a before and after is underscored by the very presence of the adverb (“before”) at the end of the fifth line of the first stanza. In fact, as the last word of the stanza, “before” thus occupies a position of temporal insistence. The line of demarcation is “emigration,” that experience and/or phenomenon that changes everything: it separates these women with indifference (“scatters”); it transforms their outer and inner selves (“changes / their clothes and customs”); it instills in them an uncertainty of thought (“the sureness of their speech”). In the end, these experiences laden these Italian women with a sadness that figures as the ultimate result of the migratory act: “before grief / dulls the shine of their eyes.” Not much different from what we saw in Tusiani, emigration tears individuals inside and out. Their sense of self, their identity, is ultimately transformed into something different, as their “clothes” and “customs” underscore the foundation of who they were before the change: two signs that speak to physical representation, as what one might consider analogous to Peirce’s rapresentamen, and to one’s inner self, Peirce’s interpretant. 2 Equally significant in this change, which some might readily consider more of a lack, is the transformation in the “sureness of their speech.” Language, we would all agree, is one fundamental underlying factor to one’s identity, be that a linguistic aspect of one’s language per sé, which it surely is in this instance or, as in other cases, different characteristics that one might exhibit with regard to a common geocultural zone. 3 And here, obviously, I have in mind, if not a distinct dialect in its own right, at the very least those local linguistic characteristics, the sum of which we might sometimes label a patois. Our identities are indeed steeped in such aspects of our individual foundations, and how we feel about such distinctions of our individuality can readi-

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ly fall prey to outside forces. This is, for sure, what takes place with the migratory act, as we especially read in these verses. The changes that take place are the consequences of emigration, after which these Italian women are no longer “grouped” together. Instead, they find themselves “scatter[ed]” and subsequently undergoing geocultural changes that have a profound effect that, in these cases, proves negative, thus resulting in a sense of “grief” that swipes away (“dulls”) any sense of happiness (“shine of their eyes”) they might have previously experienced. This sense of being “scattered”—and indeed “widely”—reappears toward the end of the collection. In the poem “Mushrooms,” through a number of descriptions about mushrooms, we find a series of telling verses that close the poem. But before citing those closing verses, I feel compelled to discuss what appears just before: A few push up close to the ground without visible stipes blond and gold fluted leaves like coral of the woods the color of regret. Edible agarics or poisonous amanitas? I wish I knew.

These are curious verses, to be sure, that speak to the problematic of identifying an edible or poisonous mushroom. The invisible stipe very much speaks to the challenge of identification: the features of a mushroom’s stipe are indeed required to make a positive identification of a mushroom: its beneficial or lethal effects it will have on the consumer. With regard to mushrooms, what this portends is that one should/must dig the mushroom out of its soil rather than cut it off at mid-stipe—namely, cut it off at its roots. The latter, obviously, adumbrates the fungus’s true identity. We may indeed extend this to a metaphor of emigration and the eventual loss of identity that may readily follow. This notion of having to dig out the mushroom for us to know its identity—and, let us underscore, for the fungus to maintain its identity—is also reminiscent of the notion of deracination mentioned earlier. And it is no casual coincidence, I would submit, that we have a series of specific terminology vis-à-vis mushrooms, which the average reader would not know: that is, “stipes,” “agarics,” “amanitas.” Deracination, in fact, comes to a head at the closing of “Mushrooms”: Dead in their thirties or scattered widely across two continents, my people took this and other kinds of knowledge with them when they went.

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“Scattered widely / across two continents”—we can assume Europe and the Americas—like her “people,” this narrating voice avails herself of “this / and other kinds of knowledge” to survive the voyage and the eventual point of arrival that this diasporic existence so requires. It may very well be a knowledge different from the local customs, but it saves them from the ultimate trials and tribulations (“poisonous / amanitas”), allowing them, in as much, to enjoy the benefits (“edible agarics”), whatever they may prove to be. 4 Returning now to our discussion of “Framed by Walls,” we can readily assume that these women also occupy none other than a subservient position in society; this is underscored by the opening verse of the third stanza, as “they pose for their men.” It is the sign /pose/ that solidifies a sense of artificiality and, consequently, a state of unnatural, we might also perceive. As an intransitive verb, in posing, these women assume an attitude—in this case, one of a demurred posture—thus casting aside any notion of natural behavior and thereby not following their own instinctual mode of comportment that would be female in nature. In the end, they affect that attitude that society requires of them; they are “daughters” and “wives”—those consummate, traditional female roles—as they “wait” for their “men, / away in countries they call America.” 5 Such a traditional attitude toward these women is again underscored at the end of this third verse, as we read that the “wives,” waiting “still look good,” as physicality in the female is now coupled with the previously described, and required, traditional posturing: namely, that this seemingly ideal female be both demure and attractive. But all is not as it seems with these women, especially among the “younger” ones, as they appear to exhibit a suggested hint of liberation from the described behavioral affect: The younger, in the fashion of the time, standing in back of them, Aunt Mary who smiles a Mona Lisa smile and two of her friends, and next to her and a little to the side, my mother, in a slender dress she had made herself, in slim shoes with buttons and straps, a cigarette in her mouth, about to strike a match, my mother who never smoked who lived all of her short life in the house where she was born. If she’s seventeen, it’s 1935, when a cigarette stood for something, among other things, a dare, a wish.

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While the younger women here take, metaphorically speaking, a backseat to their elders, they do so, we might say, begrudgingly, for we see this in their posturing, their clothing, and their behavior. Aunt Mary “smiles a Mona Lisa smile,” an expression that is, at best, enigmatic and thus potentially a counterpoint to the expected posturing that we witnessed previously in the poem. It is a smile that, when seen head-on, actually seems to disappear, whereas when viewed obliquely, it comes into being. This, of course, is at the very least an original intento operis, as it is part of the original painting by Leonardo. 6 But the fact that our narrator adopts such imagery at this time can only be presumed to have some original value of the painting to the possibilities of signification in this poem: namely, that the enigma of the original painting be of possible relevance to this poem. Such an optical illusion figures as a prime example of the aforementioned counterpoint, as, on one hand, it is serious and sober while, on the other, the smile adds a patina of mystery, if not mischief, as we shall see at the poem’s end, appearing subsequently in this second half of the poem. The smile thus manifests an attitude dissimilar to the seriousness of the first half of the poem. Second, we see that the narrating voice’s “mother” is “a little to the side,” offbeat, we might say, with regard to the required posturing mentioned earlier. Third, her “slender velvet dress” that she “made herself” counters the dress code as well as underscores a certain sense of independence since, in fact, she made the dress “herself,” all by and for herself, we might readily presume. Finally, she is on the verge of rebellion/independence; for the “cigarette in her mouth” represents the act, and the “strik[ing of] a match” constitutes the desire to follow through with her opposition to traditional behavior. After all, we are told, “a cigarette stood for something, / among other things, a dare, a wish.” Among other things, indeed, in that the previously mentioned “dare” is surely a sign of going against the grain, a mischievous act of rebellion, that may eventually lead to the young woman’s “wish”: in our case, a wish to free oneself from the prison house of male authority and to repair oneself from the ravishes of “emigration.” Before continuing with two other significant poems, I would jump forward to yet another composition (“Madonnas and Movie Stars”) in which we find yet another “pose”: My dark blond hair wavy and loose on my shoulders, bare above black velvet. The pose, conventional in America, had seemed glamorous, risqué over here—growing up, we couldn’t even wear sleeveless dresses—

The “pose” here in “Madonnas and Movie Stars” is similar to the aforementioned posturing of the women in “Framed by Walls.” As “conventional” as

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it may be “in America,” it is “risqué over” in Italy, similar to the “dar[ing]” act of the mother’s “a cigarette in her mouth.” Both can constitute rebellious behavior according to old world perspective, and both indeed do here; the difference is that we see the first from the Italian angle and the second from the American angle, as it is clear that the narrating voice is speaking from the perspective of a return trip to Italy. These same verses speak to another rebellious/mischievous act common to both poems: it is the dress, each one a symbol of some sort of “dare,” to use our narrator’s choice of words. And while they are not identical, there is something to the idea that both are revealing, we might say, by not covering up, in this case, the young woman’s body; in the first poem, there is a “slender” dress, whereas here it is sleeveless.” Finally, I would point furthermore to the similarity in sounds that both adjectives suggest at the beginning of their respective pronunciations: the “sl” sound underscores, I would contend, a phonic similarity that then undergirds the semiotic resemblance of scantily dressed. Two subsequent poems speak to the effects of emigration with regard to loss of one’s culture and language. “Divestiture” recounts the literal undressing of the emigrant woman before leaving for the United States. For fifteen verses, we witness her peeling off the “folds / of white linen eloquent”; her “braided knots” and “combed” hair transform into a “bun”; her “pleated skirts,” “black jacket,” and “long shirt / articulate with lace” all fall by the wayside. What is thus cast aside in this poem is the indigenous culture that this woman possessed in her Italian locale. Now, for her trip “to America,” she is scantly dressed, “naked” and “exposed,” we read, having “stepped into a dress / skimpier than a slip.” She is divested not only of her clothing per sé, for her clothing, as stated earlier, is also a sign of/for the culture into which she was born and raised; thus, her culture is stripped from her as well. 7 The tripartite poem entitled “Naturalization” speaks, first of all, to language as the underlying contradictions that we sometimes witness in words and their meanings. In this case, as we read in part 1, “naturalized” (emphasis textual) is juxtaposed to “natural”: I was naturalized. But natural as in what?

What follows in this first part is a series of questions that offer up points of comparison, all of which are truly natural phenomena (“mountains,” “rivers,” “oceans,” “fields,” “forest,” etc.), save the fourth stanza, which consists of one sentence: “Ancient transplants from far away lands?” Here, then, we have the transition from something totally natural at the outset to, instead, something more of an arbitrary nature, since “transplants from far away lands” can conjure up one of two thoughts: people decided to move from point A to point B, or people have been forced to move from point A to point B. It matters not, in this instance, which was the motivating force for either

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situation however different and/or tragic it may have been; it matters only that the reference is to migration and/or diaspora. The following verses, in turn, serve as a so-called connecting point, I would contend, as the first stanza of part 2 reads: A child of nature, au natural? The raw rather than the cooked?

What now occurs at this juncture is that we pass, that is, from something that we might consider totally part of nature (the aforementioned “mountains,” “rivers,” etc.) to, in turn, something more subjected to a person’s desire to change things, be it the “child of nature” who may decide to be more formal and/or proper, so to speak, or the desire for someone to eat his or her meat “raw” or “cooked.” But the second stanza of part 2 consists of a series of verses that, while presented as a point of comparison, are not articulated as a question; instead, they are presented as a statement of fact: Or natural as in the flow of your native language, trippingly on the tongue the only way you know how to say anything, the only way you know how to do anything, the way things have always been done by your people, The People. (emphasis textual)

Language becomes that “native” characteristic of the individual; it is his or her “natural” way of saying things, indeed, “trippingly on the tongue”; as such, it is the “only way” not just to say but also to do things, as we read earlier. It becomes the common denominator, we see, among all the people of a certain locale: “the way things have always / been done by your people.” Hence, we readily perceive here language within the realm of longevity (“always”) and commonality (“your people”). What we can easily draw from this part of the poem is that sense of distinction that this narrator feels because of her language and her people. Namely, her sense of self—that is, her identity—originates from her language here and, as we have seen elsewhere, from her customs (clothing qua costumes) as well. Finally, the third part of this poem, briefer still than the previous two parts, consists of two stanzas, each of which is posed as interrogatives:

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What I was before. Or what was I? Am I artless or artful, spontaneous or artificial, crude or refined, raw material or object d’art?

What ultimately comes to pass here, at the end of this poem, is the questioning of the concept that undergirds any notion of naturalization: that is, what it means in general and, more significantly, what it means for the individual who passes through such a process, be that process, I would add, social or bureaucratic. The “before” that we saw in “Framed by Walls” that referred clearly to “emigration” once more reappears here, the narrative voice now questioning her identity of then and now, with the former (then) being questioned in the first stanza of part 3, as we read once more: “What I was / before. / Or what was I?” As we now look at the construction of these verses, we can perceive a significant physical characteristic of them in this stanza. There exists, to be sure, a symmetry of sorts that revolves around a fulcrum of “before” and “or,” two adverbs that set up both the comparison and the interrogative. Similarly, the first three words of the stanza are identical to the last three words of the stanza, the difference being their order. Where the first triplet is a statement (“What I was”) appearing in advance of the “before” of “emigration,” the words of the second triplet (“what was I”), in following the inquisitive “or,” shifts accordingly to form the interrogative and thus calls into question the narrative voice’s identity. In the final stanza, in turn, we see once more the questioning of the definition of “natural.” Does it refer to something (read also, someone) “spontaneous,” instinctive, and untainted in its original state? Or, are we dealing instead with something, to echo to some degree our narrator, constructed or, as she states, “artificial,” which could readily imply constructed for any purpose that one might have in mind? Whatever the answer may be, the notion of difference (that which came “before” versus that which comes after) and the questioning of meaning vis-à-vis “naturalization” call into question the concept of naturalization and all that pertains and, in the end, the value/valence of “emigration.” In turning our attention to the book’s title, we come across three poems that have the word “bread” in them. In addition to the title poem “The Bread We Ate,” there is also “The Bread Wreath” and “Bread like Prayer,” these last two preceding and following, respectively, the title poem. “The Bread Wreath” proves most intriguing for a number of reasons. First, it opens with a comparison between the two countries and respective cultures, and it does so with a chronological aspect of then and now and, to boot, then:

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When my sons were little, they wanted Wonder Bread instead of Italian, afraid to be different. Then they discovered that anything Italian was good, fashionable. and now they’re grown up. They ask about the past, that other country, “familiar and strange.”

Wonder Bread is that proverbial icon used to differentiate between the two cultures. And how apropos that it be bread that underscores the difference, that one element of basic nourishment that, in itself, is proverbial, regardless of its brand. We are thus within the realm of the commonplace in one sense. But it is a commonplace that is profound in significance, as it underscores the basic difference between the cultures (“instead of Italian”) and how that difference can have a profound effect (“afraid to be different”). But what we come to understand as we continue to read is that once one comes to terms with one’s biculturalism, with the requisite knowledge (“they discovered”) of said culture, one becomes desirous of knowing more (“they ask about the past”); for, after all, Italian has now become both “good” and “fashionable” for these children. We see, further still, that this culture that now fascinates so these children is both “familiar and strange”: “familiar,” because they have been exposed to some aspect of it as they were growing up; “strange,” because it is a culture in which they have not lived on a quotidian basis and, perhaps still, have not visited to the extent to which they might then gain an intimate knowledge of said culture. Ultimately, bread takes on a Christological tone, as we learn about our narrator’s mother’s ceremony of remembrance at the end of these verses: As we broke it into pieces and passed it around the table I told my children about the seven wreaths of bread my mother gave to the poor on the anniversary of his death to eat in remembrance of my father, and of the six men who had died with him.

What is significant, however, is that this Christological tone begins with our narrator herself, as she indeed, like a female Christ, “broke it into pieces / and passed it around the table” to feed her children just as Christ did in breaking bread and sharing it with his apostles. The symbolism of such sacrifice as that of Christ now resonates with the last verses of the poem. The narrator’s

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mother’s bread wreaths are indeed to be eaten in “remembrance” of those immigrants who “died” in this country in mining accidents, building collapses, and the like. In this regard, a number of instances come to mind within Italian/American culture where the religious is combined with the mundane and, in fact, resonate here. I would point to three: The first, and the most relevant, I would contend, is the opening of Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door? 8 The film opens with a woman standing at a table where some children are seated, cutting a bread wreath in a very ceremonial if not religious manner. Easter bread? Perhaps. And if so, better still the reference made here. The second instance is actually multiple, and it involves yet another Scorsese film, Mean Streets. 9 In that film, religion is frequent to be sure; indeed, it opens the movie. More to the point, however, Charlie is constantly feigning a priest’s behavior, be it the “blessing” of his friends and food on various occasions, be it his placing his fingers over a whisky glass allowing the liquor to “cleanse” him, similar to the wine-andwater ceremony during a Catholic mass. Finally, and surely not last in this list by any means, the death of these immigrants harks back to Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete and the tragic building collapse during which Geremio is literally crucified by the wood and steel of the bulding’s structure and, in the end, buried under the cement, as we saw in chapter 2. Moving on to the collection’s title poem, “The Bread We Ate,” a number of similar issues come to the fore. First, we see that the entire poem, just as this suite of three and the bulk of the collection, references the past. As a bicultural writer that Ferrarelli is, this should come as no surprise. What is also intriguing is the generality and/or commonality associated with the bread: “The bread we ate / did not have a name.” On one hand, such commonality might speak to the basic, foundational function of bread, as a nourishing element. On the other, one might also see bread as a sort of metonym representative of Italians and here, I would underscore, the Italian immigrant. In that sense, commonality might then figure as a synonym of sorts for the immigrant’s anonymity. What we also witness in this poem is a sense of legacy. While it is couched in the image of bread, it clearly underscores a sense of passing something on: She used a starter ... an inheritance received and passed on like a blessing.

In this case, it is surely nourishment, for it is bread. And this message of such soon follows in subsequent verses (“Mothers / hugged the round loaves / to their breasts”), where indeed bread is bracketed by both “mother” and that

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part of her body that nourishes her children, “breasts.” Yet, this inheritance is also culture in the guise of religion, here a “blessing,” which this act emulates. It is not dissimilar to what we saw in the previous poem or in the aforementioned cinematic and narrative works, all of which constitute part of a larger repertoire of religious imagery in numerous other works by Italian Americans. The reverence, in the end, is underscored by the religious behavior described in the closing verses of the poem: We kissed it to show respect, as we kissed our parents’ hands in the morning, our fingers when crossing ourselves.

“Respect” and religiosity (“crossing ourselves”) literally go hand in hand (“our parents’ hands / . . . our fingers”) in this poem, and the parents figure, literally once more, as the central figure in this section. Religiosity, to be sure, underscores this poem. But it is a religiosity that is secularized here and elsewhere in these three poems and throughout the collection; the parents—if not, at times other immigrants or anonymous Italians from back home—take the place of what would normally be occupied by a religious figure. In the third poem of this triptych dedicated to bread, “Bread like Prayer,” the aforementioned notion of secularized religiosity with all of its basic signage (e.g., “bread”) is clearly articulated. The nourishment of bread, indeed the necessity of its nourishment, is underscored here in the opening verse of this poem with clear reference to those who need it most: “The poor are always with us.” The poor, in this case, seems to be an “old woman” who is lost within a “maze of streets,” heckled by a “pack of jeering children.” 10 She is, furthermore, the survivor of “the war” or the “after war” of “one kind / or another” if not “both,” as we read. Whatever these wars may have been, they have left our “old woman” overwhelmed by her surroundings that now constitute in all practicality a labyrinth (“maze of streets”) from which she seems incapable of exiting: “Go walk her home,” my mother urged me, and I did, a room with broken stairs. Later, my father dead a year, I went back with a wreath of bread, “For the soul of my father.” She took the bread and kissed it: manna from heaven, a scared duty.

The first three verses of this section of the poem underscore the mutual assistance that Italians offered their paesani when required. For sure, our “old woman” was lost in every sense of the word: her cognitive inabilities are

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underscored by her attempt, “with her house key,” to open “several houses” in the aforementioned “maze of streets”; her monetary needs, in turn, are reflected in the condition of her living situation: “a room with broken stairs.” As “Bread like Prayer” closes, we see once more the “wreath of bread,” which first appeared in the first of these three “bread” poems, “Bread of Wreath.” And similar to what we witnessed in the previous poems, here, too, the religious significance and aspect of bread come to the fore. In mass-like fashion, our “old woman” kisses the bread, for it is, as we read, “manna from heaven.” It is no casual coincidence, I would contend, that “bread” and “manna” appear here in the same poem, in such propinquity and as referents of each other. After all, according to universal belief, manna is that edible sustenance that God provided the Israelites as they traveled through the desert. Flake-like, cake-like, or wafer-like, manna was that basic nourishment that allowed the Israelites to survive. Likewise, this “bread”/“manna” now affords our “old woman” to survive “war” of “one kind / or another”: namely, her own diapora as the immigrant we can readily imagine she is. As we saw in the chapter dedicated to Tusiani’s Gente mia, the “immigrant is suspended between two ‘worlds,’” Paolo Giordano has pointed out (1978, 74). 11 The immigrant is, as we stated earlier, caught up in that interstitial space that Arnold van Gennep called the “liminal,” 12 that “transitional period” (11) of a “passage from . . . one social world to another” (10). This is, to a significant degree, what we find in “This Other World.” Here, we see that those who “leave and never come back” have “crossed the river of forgetfulness”—they have left their old world and entered into the “new world,” what some have seen as the “other world.” It is, by all means, “other” to where the immigrant lived before, so “different / from the narrow winding vicoli of our childhood, / the centro storico of both our lives” (emphasis textual). The closed limited (“narrow”), if not limiting, existence of the old world has had its effect on our narrator, and, consequently, it now forms part of her personal history (“centro storico of both our lives”). Nonetheless, while no longer walking along “the road / that curves out of town into the pine grove” or drinking from the “mountain spring, / the water so cold our sinuses hurt,” our narrator still feels, what can only seem to be, suspended, occupying more of a space that constitutes an in-between rather than “the places we now call home”: Which time, which place is the dream? I feel light as a shade, made of fog.

Our narrator calls into question both time and place. What we might consider the old world of customs (“time”) is now coupled with the question of locale (“place”), and the nature of both is called into question: which one is real, which one is not. The consequence of such questioning can only result, as we saw in previous poems, in our narrator’s questioning of her identity, similar

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to what she did in the aforementioned tripartite poem “Naturalization,” where she called into question the notion of identity before and after the migratory experience. Indeed, the entire collection of The Bread We Ate is predicated on notions of identity then and now, as the past tense of the title verb signals. Numerous generations migrating to numerous countries undergirds this collection and its overall communiqué of who we were/are as Italians in another land—an “intentio operis” that we, as readers, might ultimately identify. 13 NOTES 1. Rina Ferrarelli, The Bread We Ate (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 2012). 2. I have intentionally skipped Peirce’s second aspect of the sign, the “object,” for the simple reason that these women have obviously shared a common sense of self, which, in this case, I would submit, figures as a more personal sense of self given the “neighbor[ly] sense of commonality they all share,” as we read in the first stanza of the poem cited earlier. For more on Peirce’s notions, see his Principles of Philosophy in Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), especially 1.306, 1.321, and 1.420. 3. While there is a plethora of studies on language and identity, for the sake of economics of time and energy, I would refer the reader to the following overview, exhaustive as this form can be: Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Language and Identity,” in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. Alessandro Duranti (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 369–94. 4. While outside the scope of this study, for more information on the uses of and effects on humanity by mushrooms, see the uncanny study by James Arthur, Mushrooms and Mankind: The Impact of Mushrooms on Human Consciousness and Religion (Escondido, CA: Book Tree, 2000). 5. The idea of “countries they call America” underscores, at least for Italian, the proverbiality of America as the immigrant’s Shangri La, as manifested, for instance, in the expression “trovare l’America,” if not, in fact, in the title of Gianni Amelio’s classic and foundational film Lamerica (1994). 6. Here, of course, I have in mind Umberto Eco, “Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art,” Differentia, Review of Italian Thought 2 (spring 1988): 147–68. 7. I would submit as an aside that while here the sign /dress/ is presented in a more negative contest—the divestiture of her culture and thus identity—it remains nevertheless consonant with the other two appearances; in all three cases, it represents some form of cultural manifestation and/or identity, be it the local, old world culture or, as in the case of “Madonnas and Movie Stars,” a new world mentality that is not acceptable back in the old world. 8. Who’s That Knocking at My Door? dir. Martin Scorsese (Trimod Films, 1967). 9. Mean Streets, dir. Martin Scorsese (Warner Bros., 1973). 10. I am reminded here of Tony Ardizzone’s classic short story “Nonna,” in which an elderly Italian immigrant of Chicago’s old Little Italy is equally confused, even heckled at one point by children, by the neighborhood’s transformation that has taken place around her. She is unable to recognize such changes that have erased her old world of Italian-ness and replaced it with other, newer ethnic groups. See his The Evening News (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1986). 11. See his “From Southern Italian Immigrant to Reluctant American: Joseph Tusiani’s Gente Mia and Other Poems,” in Gente Mia and Other Poems (Stone Park, IL: Italian Cultural Center, 1978), 73–86. 12. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedon and Gabrielle L. Caffee, introd. Solon T. Kimball (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 11. 13. Again, I refer the reader to Umberto Eco, “Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art.”

Chapter Seven

Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s Where I Come From Making Connections and Passing Them On

The narrative voice in Where I Come From, I would contend, is somewhat unique in what we often find in collections of poetry. 1 Unique, I am confident in saying, because there is a concerted effort on our narrator’s part to look consistently at both the past and the future. What we find in this book is that said narrator purposely oscillates between her father’s immigrant experiences and her own life’s experiences as offspring of an immigrant. But we also see that she distinguishes between yet another issue—her existence in this world as an Italian/American daughter who is also a poet, the two being inseparable. 2 Like Rina Ferrarelli, as we saw in the previous chapter, Mazziotti Gillan is a member of the post-war generation. What is significant in this regard, in turn, is that while there is a notable similarity in gender, certain themes of the immigrant, while surely common denominators, are treated in a manner that reflects being the offspring of an immigrant, as is Mazziotti Gillan, as opposed to being part of the immigrant experience, as is instead Ferrarelli. The collection furthermore grapples with issues of class and race, as numerous poems speak to how, for instance, class differences, especially when noted by those of the dominant class, affected our narrator and, second, where skin color, especially noted by our narrator, had an analogous effect. 3 In this sense, then, Where I Come From speaks to a plethora of ethnic/Italian/ 103

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American thematics and thus constitutes a veritable encyclopedia of the immigrant experience and its legacy, embracing, as Mary Jo Bona stated, “the legitimacy of exploring ethnic identity.” 4 Peter Carravetta, in turn, sees this collection as a series of poems that “establish a cluster of themes, and circumscribe a poetic journal, a phenomenology of feelings, of the feelings of a woman who ushers a new typology, a more complex picture of the Italian American woman, and the Italian American poet at that.” 5 Generational difference is what opens and, to some degree, figures prominently throughout this collection, as the title, for sure, might readily signal as much to the reader. Indeed, what Mazziotti Gillan does is give us two poems at the collection’s beginning, one in which the adult female narrating voice confesses to having felt shame at her immigrant father (“Betrayals”). In turn, she follows up this poem with another, now dedicated to her relationship with her son, and the tables are turned (“Letter to My Son”). Similar experiences with her mother and daughter also populate this collection, and overall we are privileged to a certain type of remembrance that is emotional, analytical, and nostalgic only insofar as recalling those experiences that have affected her, recollections of experiences and events that now make more sense looking back. 6 “Betrayals” speaks immediately to the generational difference in the words of a thirteen-year-old (“You’re disgusting”), eventually to be remedied three years later when, at “sixteen . . . / [she] called [him] ‘dear.’” An intriguing element here is that the child’s “shame” of his or her parent not only passes from one generation to the next (“Today, my son shouts, ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re my mother’”) but also transcends social categories and gender. The narrating voice of the daughter is ashamed of her immigrant father, whereas the narrating voice’s son, of she who is born in the United States, is now also ashamed of her, as we just saw. Further still, there is a curious gender element, the alternation of the young female eschewing the father, a relationship that is then followed by the young male eschewing the mother, the adult who was once the young female who had been “ashamed” of her father. 7 In addition to the betrayal of the father, what we also witness is a touching description of the immigrant as manifested by our narrating voice’s father; indeed, “the father is,” as Carravetta states in his essay, “a strong moral model and a loving person” (12). Poignantly articulated by the narrator in the following verses, we see the effect of immigration on her father, as his migratory experience is communicated via a series of adjectives that describe the physical aftermath of working-class existence:

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You, one dead leg dragging, counting your night-shift hours, you, smiling past yellowed, gaping teeth, you mixing the eggnog for me yourself in a fat dime store cup, how I betrayed you, over and over, ashamed of your broken tongue, how I laughed, savage and innocent, at your mutilations.

The “dragging” leg and “night-shift” hours speak to a number of issues. First, it would not be an exaggeration to read in “dragging” both the physical and the spiritual effect that immigration can have on the immigrant. Wounded in this sense, then, we also see that he is clearly a member of the working class, having been given, to boot, the “night-shift” to work: the less desirable of work schedules. Nonetheless, he “smil[es though his] gapping teeth,” thus affectionately making eggnog for his daughter, she in turn appreciative of his offer, as she underscores the fact that he is indeed so doing: “for me yourself.” The second of the two cited stanzas amplifies to a certain degree the immigrant and generational situations, as our narrator now confesses to her act of betrayal (“how I betrayed you”) and mockery (“how I laughed”). Such shame and consequential derision articulate, indeed, the generational rift, caused in part, for sure, by her father’s “broken tongue” and “mutilations.” Like the “dragging” leg and “night-shift hours,” these “mutilations” belong to the same category of the working class and, further still, the migratory experience. The immigrants then, especially those with little or no formal education, were relegated to manual labor and, at times, menial jobs. But these jobs, as well, could also prove harmful, dangerous as some were. 8 The “broken tongue,” instead, speaks more to social positioning and identity as marked by language, as we saw in both Tusiani and Ferrarelli. 9 Broken because of the difficulty in communicating with the host country, the immigrant would often remain the “other” if not the “outsider.” Broken also because his English does not allow him the privilege to be, in the opinion of the “Anglo-Saxon,” a whole person. Whatever the case may be, he was on the periphery, marginalized, and thus caught between two worlds, so to speak, as we saw previously. 10 The effect of such rejection now comes back to her “full circle, / . . . / to slap [her] face.” This generational rift is due, we read, to the lack of understanding on the child’s part who, in so doing, rejects identification with the parent. It is hurtful for sure for the daughter turned mother (“slap [her] face”), no different really from her own ignorance at understating her father, whom she treated in a similar fashion: “How I laughed, savaged and inno-

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cent.” All of this is then articulated at poem’s end, as our narrator reiterates what she did not say when she had the opportunity, ignorant as she was of her father’s plight: Dear, my Dear, with your twisted tongue, I did not understand you dragging your burden of love.

The previously mentioned “broken tongue” and “mutilations” return here in a type of closure that is twofold: it is, first and foremost, the closure of the poem, ending with a sort of “if only,” the desire to be able to say now what she did not say then. For she did not “understand” her father, the outsider that he was in her view, as his language—once “broken” and now “twisted”— positioned him away from mainstream, placing him on the margin as so happens when identified by such things as language and physical appearance. 11 But it is also a closure, for our narrator, that is also an epiphany of sorts, she now understanding the true “burden” her immigrant father carried with him, a burden here highlighted with the use of the word “dragging,” which in itself underscores the difficulties that he faced as he sought to better not just his but indeed his family’s situation, this his true “burden of love.” The reversal of roles, now, between mother and son, different from the daughter-father contrast that we saw in “Betrayals,” undergirds “Letter to My Son,” the second poem of the collection. This is a different context from the first poem, since here we have an American-born mother and her son. Nonetheless, we have a generational difference that comes to the fore in their not fully understanding each other, especially she of him: You miles away, have grown into a man I can be proud of; but when you call, I feel I am speaking to a person hidden behind a screen. I remember you as a little boy, your legs chunky, your eyes grey and dreamy as a Turner landscape. A figure moves toward you, a younger version of myself. She holds your hand. You speak.

What stands out at first is the difference in time; he is now a “man,” no longer a “little boy.” Our narrator is obviously thinking in terms of then and not now. While the son will always be her son, he will “grow” into manhood, and in so doing, he is no longer her “little boy” with “legs chunky.” Thus, while “proud of” her adult son (“grown into a man”), she is incapable of reconciling this adult man with the “little boy” she now recalls: “I feel I am speaking to a person / hidden behind a screen.” In the end, and analogous to what we saw in “Betrayals,” where her “own words [came] back / to slap

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[her] face,” the same situation occurs, this time between American-born mother and son. Her words of when he was a child (“In a minute, in a minute”) are now turned around on her: “Now it is you who chant, / ‘In a minute, in a minute,’ / and I who taste salt on my tongue.” There is a curious gender pattern that evolves out of these two poems, one that involves a shift in identity and roles, and this pattern of shifting roles is introduced in the first poem and subsequently underscored in the second. It might be best represented according to the table below.

The first generation of parent-child relationship, as we see, is between the immigrant parent and the American-born child; here, it is between father and daughter. Instead, the second parent-child relationship is between mother and son, both American born. Thus, while there is a difference between the first parent-child group and the second in terms of migratory and gender identity, the difficulties of bridging the generation gap seems more challenging than the gender gap, at least at this juncture of the collection. That said, it proves poignant that, at least at this early juncture, generation trumps gender insofar as gender is also a concept that is perceived differently as we pass from one generation to the next. Both are extrinsically tied, but one, temporally we might say, precedes the other. Gender, in the meantime, will prove most significant throughout the collection. “Public School No. 18 Patterson, New Jersey” is, as Antonio Vallone calls it, “a poem of helplessness which festers in rage.” 12 Moreover, it speaks to all of the issues mentioned earlier couched in the seemingly impossibility of two modes of being to coexist, the dominant culture (WASP) not allowing the ethnic (Italian) to thrive. 13 And the sign that underscores this is the difference in language and, more significant, the competition, so it seems, between English and Italian: Miss Wilson’s eyes, opaque as blue grass, fix on me: “We must speak English. We’re in America now.” I want to say, “I am American,” but the evidence is stacked against me.

Miss Wilson, we read later in this poem, with her “Anglo-Saxon” face will teach these immigrant children to “deny that booted country.” “American,” we see, is the operative word here; it is so from the point of view of language, custom, behavior, and, as we see in the second stanza of this poem, the perception on the part of the dominant culture of Italians as unclean:

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Chapter 7 My mother scrubs my scalp raw, wraps my shining hair in white rags to make it curl. Miss Wilson drags me to the window, checks my hair for lice. My face wants to hide.

The Italian mother “scrubs” her daughter’s “scalp raw,” underscoring the desire for cleanliness. So clean is her hair that it “shin[es] in white rags”— both the verb and subsequent adjectives underscores the desired cleanliness. 14 Yet, with no apparent reason at all, we might assume (after all, we saw earlier, “the evidence [was] stacked against” our narrator as child), Miss Wilson feels compelled to “drag [our narrator] to the window” to “check . . . for lice”: this, one of the numerous misperceptions the dominant culture held vis-à-vis the Italian immigrant during the first forty-plus years of his or her experience in the United States. 15 It is nonetheless language, and all that pertains, that figures as the prevalent sign in this poem—namely, the difference between English and Italian, as we read: At home, my words smooth in my mouth, I chatter and am proud. In school, I am silent, grope for the right English words, fear the Italian word will sprout from my mouth like a rose.

The choice and positioning of words in this stanza prove to be most poignant in communicating what we can only assume to be the desired message of competition and conflict. First, there is the initial adverbial phrase that opens the stanza, in a sort of privileged position, I would submit: “At home.” This comfortable location is juxtaposed, we read in the second verse, to the place of dominant culture: “At school.” Italian is the language “smooth in [her] mouth” through which she can communicate (“chatter”) “proud[ly]” and with ease. English, instead, is the acquired language that comes forth with less spontaneity, indeed with difficulty, as it surely occupies second place to Italian, as our narrator must “grope for the right English / words.” 16 What becomes most significant at this juncture in the poem is yet another comparison between the two languages. Italian remains her primary language, and that being the case, she fears that she will resort to this, her first language, that the Italian word will jump from her mouth (“the Italian word / will sprout from my mouth like a rose”). But there are two aspects of this stanza that prove significant as a type of privileging of Italian, in spite of the fact that the “Anglo-Saxons” prefer otherwise. First, “At home” and “Italian” curiously bracket “In school” and “English,” and we as readers might easily see such positioning of these words as, in fact, an act of privileging the Italian over the English. Italian, spoken “at home” becomes the spontaneous and, I would contend, instinctual language. As such, it also underscores the

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identity of the narrating voice; she is, to be sure, Italian, as is her language. In this instance, “At home” and “Italian,” while occupying this position of the bracketing entity, stand out as enjoying greater privilege for our narrator than do “In school” and “English.” Second, we see that what she fears is not necessarily something negative. She only fears that Italian will indeed “sprout from [her] mouth”; what figures as equally significant is that what will sprout from her mouth is a language, Italian, compared to a “rose”—one might say the most desired of flowers, indeed the flower of love. Italian, thus, is something positive. It is her natural and spontaneous language, as it is spoken “smooth[ly]” and “proud[ly]” “at home.” It is “smooth” in her mouth and springs forth, when it does, “like a rose.” If then there is reticence to speak Italian, it is caused by a “fear” that has its origins from beyond her support system and outside her immediate ethnic world, as we read: fear the progression of teachers in their sprigged dresses, their Anglo-Saxon faces.

It sprouts, we see, from the dominant culture and those who represent it, those who wield such power that convinces her “without words”—by their very behavior of condescension, for sure—“to be ashamed,” to “deny that booted country,” and ultimately “to hate [her]self.” They are also, as we progress in our reading, like those in “white / Kansas City house[s]” inhabited by the elite, so to speak—who, like numerous people still today—see in Italians an automatic connection to organized crime: the Psychology professor tells me I remind him of the Mafia leader on the cover of Time magazine.

The irony at this juncture is simply too much to ignore. Considered the most educated of our society, a university professor immediately resorts to an unsubstantiated—and dare we add also ignorant—act of prejudice, as mentioned, that has absolutely no foundation in reality. The problem is that it has its roots in a false bigotry that dates back to the end of the nineteenth century. 17 In this regard, in fact, we began with Miss Wilson, whom we can readily assume to be an elementary teacher (“checks my hair / for lice”), and we end here with not just any university “professor” but indeed, as Miller stated in his essay, “the Psychology professor,” which “takes a definite article and is capitalized as if to make official an internalized psychology” (1999, 58). These references, in the end, figure as a further indictment on the entire educational system in reference to its hegemonic character vis-à-vis misconceptions about Italian Americans; the fact that we have a “Psychology professor” who engages in such bigotry as articulated in these verses only speaks to the type of contradiction, if not perversion, that not only a well-

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educated person but a “Psychology professor,” to boot—one who should understand such conflicts in a human being—readily resorts to an old and worn-out stereotype when dealing with our narrator. Basically, all Italian Americans are “connected,” as the old saying goes. 18 In the end, our narrator conquers her early “fear” as she grows into adulthood and reacts with an “anger” and an expression of pride that are now counterpoints to her “fear” and “shame” that she felt as a child. This twopage poem ends accordingly: My anger spits venomous from my mouth: I am proud of my mother, dressed all in black, proud of my father with his broken tongue, proud of the laughter and noise of our house. Remember me, Ladies, the silent one? I have found my voice and my rage will blow your house down.

We see that our narrator is “proud” of those things that the dominant culture would consider stereotypes (“mother / dressed all in black” and the accented English [her father’s “broken tongue”]) and other misconceptions, such as the Italians being overly emotional and always yelling, as we read in the final verses of the second stanza: “proud of the laughter / and noise of our house.” 19 Furthermore, language here becomes the marker once more, as we find yet again the description of the father’s “broken language.” Yet, what is also significant here with regard to language are the references to silence and finding one’s voice. While before it was an actual reference to one specific language (“English”) being privileged over another (“Italian”), here our narrator switches to the idea of language as a sign of strength, here articulated in her “anger” and “rage.” She has gathered up the courage no longer to remain “silent,” muted by the dominant culture, as we saw at the beginning of this poem (“In school, / I am silent”). Now, instead, she is no longer silent, having dropped what we might consider her selective ethnic mutism, when one, though capable of speech, decides not to talk for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with physical abilities—in this case, the power of the dominant culture. 20 Here, to the contrary, she has indeed “found [her] voice” with a determination second to none (“and my rage will blow / your house down.”), signaling once and for all “that the literary silence of the Italian/ American women writers was over,” because “in such simple words, Mazzi-

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otti Gillan had evoked a presence that was permanent and powerful,” 21 which, as an Italian/American woman has thus demonstrated how, as Justin Vitiello has pointed out with regard to the past four stanzas of this poem, “our multi-consciousness can be our strength—to reach catharses of the tragic cultural dilemmas we might face with the passionate lucidity and classic/ contemporary voice of a Mazziotti Gillan and her dream of liberation.” 22

It is important to note at this juncture that the old world–new world binomial is not necessarily a negative one for our narrating voice. Surely, for those representatives of the dominant culture that we have thus far encountered, it is a good/bad relationship, the “American” way triumphant over the “Italian” way. Instead, when we find our narrator dealing with the binomial, the only negative references to the “Italian” way of life originate from the dominant culture. This becomes apparent in three significant poems, two of which are at this point considered badges of honor with regard to Mazziotti Gillan’s lyrical production; I have in mind both “Arturo” and “Growing Up Italian.” But I would begin here briefly with “Oak Place Musings,” in which our narrator bemoans the days of yesteryear, which no longer exist. Instead, we have a type of plastic community, not much different from that community we would later see in The Truman Show, where an entire fake world was constructed in which Truman lived happily until he realized the nature and genesis of his universe. 23 We see an analogous situation here: On my neighbor’s roof, plastic butterflies freeze in rigid postures. Rubber ducks waddle into trimmed evergreens; plaster cats climb siding toward peaked roofs.

Our narrator, we read further on, bemoans the plasticity and inanimate aspect of this new neighborhood, which once, long ago, in a “vacant lot,” the world was much different, filled with “butterfl[ies], “daisies,” and “marigolds and red berries / which stained our fingers.” It was a vacant lot indeed of the now “neat box / houses [that lie] still and empty” that “settles into somnolence,” devoid (“vacant”) as it now is of the exuberance of long ago when “each day opened like a morning glory.” “Mourn[ing]” now the long gone “immigrant / gardens,” our narrator harks back in memory of when her hands were “stained gold,” a color that signifies for sure something of very high value. 24 Similar recollections of things positive that are, further still, accompanied by what I would characterize as an eventual strong sense of self, we find in the two other poems just mentioned. And I underscore this notion of eventual, precisely because that is what we read in these poems and, in addition, that is what this entire collection constitutes. Namely, it is a journey into a

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past world through which our narrator seeks out, identifies, and re-evaluates with greater clarity and signification those people and experiences that have made her the individual she appears today, a self-confident Italian/American woman ready and willing to speak her mind. This became abundantly clear in the aforementioned interview that Dougherty did with Mazziotti Gillan, where she stated the following: I learned what it meant to be Italian. In my father’s commitment to the family and to the larger world, his incessant desire to learn new things, his need to help people outside of the family, I learned that we have a responsibility, not only to ourselves, but also to the world. The more I went out into the world of America, the more I realized how Italian these values were, and I look to that Italianness for the way it has shaped the way I have lived my life, the way poetry and my work on behalf of poetry has been for me a kind of salvation. (14)

This is a type of Italian-ness that the Anglo-Saxon domain of her kindergarten-to-college world does not know, that realm of WASP dominant culture where Miss Wilson (“Public School No. 18 Patterson, New Jersey”) and Miss Elmer (“Talismans”) reigned in her early years and where the Psychology professor told her that she reminds him of a Mafia chieftain he saw on the cover of Time magazine (“Public School No. 18 Patterson, New Jersey”). This type of stereotype, as I have mentioned elsewhere, 25 was rampant at the end of the nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth century for sure. It may still continue, for some, though it may seem more subtle now that in the past. As with many immigrants and as we saw in other poems, she now, as the daughter of immigrants, proudly self-identifies through language in “Arturo.” The narrator’s initial reluctance to acknowledge her true identity is signaled by the age-old changing of names, here Arturo to Arthur and Maria to Marie. But what we also find in the poem’s initial stanza is a reference to physicality: “my face with its dark Italian eyes.” This figures as a poignant verse indeed. The reference to “dark” eyes is surely commonplace; we can find it in other writings and represented in various visual depictions of Italian immigrants, especially at the turn of the century. 26 Yet, I would see these “dark Italian eyes” not only as a physical description of the face. Rather, we might consider the phrase more of a metonym for which the adjective “dark” is no longer limited to the eyes but instead refers to the person as a whole and, extended further, to Italians as a people. After all, we were not always considered white. 27 In recognizing her youthful errors (“my younger self, that fool / who needed to deny”), our narrator offers up a number of images that are quite readily Italian as part of one’s everyday life (e.g., ethnic epithets, “spinach and oil,” “roasted peppers,” “Roosevelt and J.F.K.”). But it is the closing of

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the poem that sends home the message of having come to terms with, acknowledged, and subsequently re-appropriated one’s ethnic identify: I smile when I think of you. Listen, America, this is my father, Arturo, and I am his daughter, Maria. Do not call me Marie.

We already witnessed earlier how our narrator shook her finger in dominant culture’s face in “Public School No. 18 Patterson, New Jersey.” Then, it was, “Listen, Ladies”; now, instead, while in a firm manner similar to before, her statement is broader in scope, inclusive of everyone, “Listen, America,” underscoring the national scope of the Italian/American situation. We witness the positive accent on the Italian (“Arturo,” “Maria”) and the negative on the American (“Do not call me Marie”; emphasis added). Finally, as we look at the poem once more in its entirety, we see a scenario familiar to what we saw in “Public School No. 18 Patterson, New Jersey,” the bracketing of American and Italian signs. While before it was a positioning in which the Italian bracketed the American, here we find the opposite, the American brackets the Italian. And while in the first case we saw an example of privileging, as “At home” and “Italian” occupied this position of the bracketing entity, we might see a similar privileging here with “Arturo” and “Maria” as the entities bracketed. In such a position at this juncture, they figure as fundamental to the narrator’s identity and universe and, as such, should very well occupy, literally speaking, a central position. “Betrayals,” “Public School No. 18 Patterson, New Jersey,” and “Arturo” are, one might readily state, three of the four most significant ethnic poems of this collection. 28 The fourth is “Growing Up Italian,” a companion piece, to be sure, to Mazziotti Gillan’s “anthem song of Italian America,” as Bona had in fact characterized it. What makes this poem stand out from the others, especially because the themes that now appear we have already seen before, is the emphasis placed on class and race. Yet, the idea of identity signaled through language appears in the opening stanzas of the poem, as a prelude to class and race, two other mitigating factors that distinguish the Italian— immigrant and/or offspring—from the American: When I was a little girl, I thought everyone was Italian, and that was good. We visited our aunts and uncles, and they visited us. The Italian language smooth and sweet in my mouth.

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Chapter 7 In kindergarten, English words fell on me, thick and sharp as hail. I grew silent, the Italian word balanced on the edge of my tongue and the English word, lost during the first moment of every question.

The two stanzas complement each other and set the stage for what is to come, the comparison of two cultures, one (Italian) considered inferior to the other (American), and language figures as the initial marker. The complementarity of the stanzas, in fact, is that they constitute a type of (in)coincidentia oppositorum, in that the two opposites here do not come together. As we saw in “Public School No. 18 Patterson, New Jersey,” Italian was already the “smooth in my mouth,” and here it now acquires a quality of “sweet[ness]”: “smooth / and sweet in my mouth.” This is the comfort of home, where the small world of the immigrant is just that, a small enclave that is, to a significant degree, its own little universe, where, our child narrator thought, “everyone was Italian, / and that was good.” But this ethnic enclave, no different from what we saw earlier, is now immediately juxtaposed to the outer world of “English,” where the harshness of the dominant culture (“kindergarten” = officialdom) comes now severely on our narrator (“English words fell on me / thick and sharp as hail”) to the point of stifling any sense of spontaneity that, before this cultural collision, had its roots in Italian; for our narrator, once having entered school, is incapable of communicating / inserting herself into this new milieu that is America: “I grew silent.” As this second stanza comes to an end, we see within it once more the comparison, if not imbalance, between the two: “the Italian word balanced . . . / . . . and the English word, lost,” reason for which they simply cannot coexist. More significant, I would contend, is the racialization of the Italians that this poem underscores. It harks back to the plethora of negative imagery that was rampant in the print media at the end of the nineteen century and the beginning of the twentieth. Italians were depicted as “dark,” “dirty,” “ignorant,” and “violent.” In thinking of our narrator as a child of the early 1940s, the constant denigration of the Italian immigrant has obviously continued through midcentury, as our child narrator was eventually indoctrinated into believing in the hierarchy taught to her at school: It did not take me long to learn that dark-skinned people were greasy and dirty. Poor children were even dirtier. To be dark-skinned and poor was to be dirtiest of all.

I would submit that this might very well be one of the more poignant stanzas in Mazziotti Gillan’s repertoire with regard to her discussions of ethnicity in general and specifically with regard to race and class. Both the content and the structure, together, prove unique. They are four verses, indeed a small

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number, that instead speak to a plethora of issues that the Italian/American community has had to confront, especially up to and beyond World War II. 29 Before going to school, our narrator “thought everyone was Italian, / and that was good.” But once in school, her illusions of her ethnicity are demystified and not in a good way, as the difference falls upon her “thick and sharp as hail.” Italians, she found out, are not white. Rather, they are “dark-skinned” people different from the “Anglo-Saxons” who governed the school. 30 They are, we see, both “greasy / and dirty,” and to be “poor” as well only made them more undesirable than ever. After all, we continue to read, “to be darkskinned and poor was to be dirtiest of all.” This is the message that our narrator receives at an early age, “in kindergarten,” as we read at the beginning of the second stanza. Namely, this is when the dominant culture can best inculcate the “dark-skinned people,” when they are young and thus at an impressionable stage in their lives before the proverbial age of reason. But it is the structure of this stanza as well that proves equally significant at this juncture. Race and its concomitant stereotypes are prefigured in the repetition of “dark-skinned” and “dirty.” What stands out, moreover, is the placement of other words and their potential significance with regard to positioning and meaning. The progression that I would suggest here is that those words at the end of each verse take on a special valence within the overall communiqué of the stanza and, in the end, the poem. Namely, our narrator “learn[s]” that the non-whites are to be sure, progressively speaking, “greasy,” “dirtier,” indeed the “dirtiest of all.” A good seven stanzas follow in which other episodes of class and race come to the fore: the epithet “spaghetti bender”; “coloring books and candy” versus “towel[s]” and “sheet[s]”; new clothes versus hand-me-down clothes; “honey-blonde hair and blue eyes” versus “dark skin.” Finally, at the age of forty-one, our narrator has an epiphany, and “to all those who taught [her] / to hate [her] dark foreign self,” she lashes out like never before. Indeed, the use of the adjective “foreign” at this juncture, I would contend, has a double meaning. It surely refers to the state of not being American, having come from or having roots in another country. That said, it is this second aspect of having roots in another country that we can see “foreign” invested with a second meaning, which, in fact, is not necessarily from another country. Instead, it serves as a marker to distinguish her from the dominant culture of the United States, the “Anglo-Saxon” culture that tries to indoctrinate those who are not necessarily “American” in its eyes and against which she now so forthrightly rebels: and I said, “Here I am— with my olive-toned skin, and my Italian parents, and my old poverty, real as a scare on my forehead,”

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Chapter 7 and all the toys we couldn’t buy, and all the words I didn’t say, all the downcast eyes and folded hands and remarks I didn’t make, rise up in me and explode onto paper like firecrackers like meteors and I celebrate my Italian American self, rooted in this, my country, where all those black/brown/red/yellow olive-skinned people soon will raise their voices and sing this new anthem: Here I am and I’m strong and my skin is warm in the sun and my dark hair shines, and today, I take back my name and wave it in their faces like a bright, red flag.

Her epiphany, indeed an explosion (“rise up in me and explode”) of newly found realizations and coincidental sentiments, now causes her to turn back to her origins and, in so doing, take possession of them once more, as she did as a child, when being Italian was positive—after all, she thought everyone was Italian. It is a re-appropriation of things (“with my olive-toned skin, / and my Italian parents, / and my old poverty”) and a repudiation of old behavioral patterns (“and all the words I didn’t say, / all the downcast eyes / and folded hands / and remarks I didn’t make”) instilled by the dominant culture. What also proves significant here is that her Italian-ness (italianità) that she now celebrates acquires even greater value; in the form of “my Italian American self” and “olive-skinned people,” her italianità now brackets the other non-whites of “this, my country” so that “those black/brown/ red/yellow” people are now all gathered together with the aforementioned “olive-skinned people.” As such, in the end, the ever-debated notion of a melting pot (“and a name that would blend right in / and I would be melted down”) that appeared midway through the poem is finally debunked here at poem’s end. That the waving of her name “like a bright, red flag,” as Stephen Miller stated, “parodies the nativism it derides in order to demonstrate the drawbacks of limited sense of American identity” (59–60), is a keen observa-

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tion to be sure. But I would go one step further and underscore that the “wav[ing] it in their faces” actually constitutes, at the very least, the declaration that the racialized non-whites have finally arrived, if not an actual challenge to the dominant culture’s notion of what the status quo of whiteness is and should be. Either way, our narrator has not only “tak[en] back [her] name,” she has in fact taken repossession of “her dark, foreign self,” where “foreign” may now be read not in opposition to “American” but, rather, in opposition to America’s dominant culture with, as Bona stated, “the defiance and self-congratulation of the victorious warrior, flag in hand.” 31

As we move toward closure of this reading of Mazziotti Gillan’s collection, we should discuss the book’s title and much of what it portends. Where I Come From is, predominantly speaking, about Mazziotti Gillan’s growing up Italian, with a foundation based on themes that include class, race, and gender. It is this third motif that is apparent throughout by the very fact, initially, that Mazziotti Gillan’s narrator is female. Indeed, we saw how the fatherdaughter and mother-son binomials occupied the opening poems of the collection and, together, created a chiasmic pattern in which the parent-child paradigm switched gender roles from one generation to the next. The reasons why this might happen are infinite and, very often, difficult to divine. Nonetheless, the structure does indeed alert the reader to this alternation of gender roles. We find, for instance, a few poems at the beginning of the collection that include our narrator and her daughter. “My Daughter at Fourteen: Christmas Dance 1981” underscores, for instance, the difference in teenage female behavior between our narrator’s generation and her daughter’s: “How different you are from me,” our narrator states early in the poem. While the act is only kissing, we find that the difference in acceptable behavior is significant for the narrator, her fearing that she will resort to the behavior/reaction of her mother’s generation, as she sees her daughter’s boyfriend kiss her goodnight: “I am frightened, guard my / tongue for fear my mother will pop out / of my mouth.” The conservative sexual mentality of the immigrant generation and its offspring is surely of the elements that come out in this poem. Of course, it is also the mother’s concern for her child, here a fourteen-year-old, who is, we might say, on the precipice of the age of reason and who believes that she has already arrived; after all, the daughter seems rather nonchalant about her mother’s question: “He is not shy,” I say. You giggle. a little girl again, but you tell me he kissed you on the dance floor. “Once?” I ask. “No, a lot.”

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She may be “a little girl again,” but she is willing to discuss, if ever so briefly, her romantic behavior with her boyfriend, a conversation that is sparked by his good-night kiss and the proximities of the bodies, as our narrator stated earlier in the poem: “his body moving towards your, and yours / responding.” This is clearly grown-up behavior that our narrator observes, and it frightens her that her fourteen-year-old engages in as much, as we read. But what also frightens her, as mentioned as well, is the possibility that she, the mother, may resort to what would have been her mother’s observation; our narrator is aware that old world notions of gender simply must not take hold: We ride through rain-shining 1 a.m. streets. I bite back words which long to be said, knowing I must not shatter your moment, fragile as a spun-glass bird, you, the moment, poised on the edge of flight, and I, on the ground, afraid.

What our narrator realizes is that she—as an Italian American and not an Italian—is and indeed should be a different type of mother in this regard from those of her mother’s generation. The conflict between these two different notions of parenting a teenager is poignantly articulated by “words which long / to be said” and by the subsequent “knowing I must not shatter your / moment”—the former representing her mother’s generation, the latter representing hers. Knowing that this is her daughter’s “moment” articulates a clear understanding that concepts and ideas change from one generation to the next, that such change, I would submit is indeed seen as some form of progress: “you, the moment, poised on the edge of / flight, and I, on the ground, afraid.” For how then else might we interpret these final two verses, if not as a forward-looking presagement of her daughter’s eventual transition into womanhood. A foreboding, I would submit, with all the best wishes for success as communicated by such a hopeful declaration as “poised on the edge of / flight”; yet, it carries with it all the same the mother’s fear of possible hurt/danger to her child—here specifically, daughter—as our narrator’s thoughts close the poem. “Connections” and “My Grandmother’s Hands” are two poems that continue the theme of mother/daughter, adding to it the notion of legacy, being tied to your past as you move forward. In “Connections,” we see that the bound between our narrator and her mother is so strong that, when driving home, she finds herself “pulling into [her] mother’s driveway / almost as though the car / decided.” The automatic reaction, indeed the instinct, to go to her mother’s is most intriguing. It is our narrator’s safe house, so to speak. It is the place where she can go, and through her mother’s “smiling and criticizing,” our narrator nonetheless knows that her mother is “there for

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[her]” and that, even as an adult, she needs her mother to be there. Her mother is, we come to understand toward the end of the poem, our narrator’s source for nourishment and not simply the consumable, which, in fact, we see her mother prepare for her in the “basement kitchen.” The mother is, to be sure, the source for that “food that satisfies / all hunger,” this hunger now being also the “sustenance” that she can find nowhere else. The universal significance of our narrator’s mother is such that her indispensability is likened to our narrator’s security, literally, in the world: she is there for me, and that I need to have her there, as though the world were a quaking bog and she, the only solid place on which to stand.

“My Grandmother’s Hands” immediately follows this poem and, I would contend, is its logical companion piece. At the opening, it speaks to the trials and tribulations of the Italian/American woman, her grandmother the prime example: In a black dress and black stockings, she smiles over toothless gums, old years before she should have been, button neck to shin in heavy black. Her eyes express an emotion, it is difficult to read.

She is the (stereo)typical female, Italian village dweller, as we come to know. Laden in black (“dress,” “stockings”), indeed “neck to shin in heavy black” conjures up a series of notions beginning of course with the traditional garb of the Italian widow, perennially outfitted in black. More general, to boot, she is covered up, from “neck to shin,” from head to toe. And together with this ready-made uniform that this southern Italian woman must adorn, she must also squelch her emotions, as we see in the final two verses cited: “Her eyes express an emotion, / it is difficult to read.” Now, before moving on, we might muse that Mazziotti Gillan does not speak directly to the typical chores expected of women. But there is a curious recall here for this reader. The emotions that are hard to read may very well reflect the notion that there are indeed certain expectations of women, that these women need move forward and tend to such activities and/or duties. This being the case, then, if the more modern (read, also, American) woman that is Mazziotti Gillan wants to do other things as well, she must simply (and with difficulty, of course) learn to balance such things. This became evident in the previous poem, “Connection,” where, almost as if led there by her car itself, as we read, she went to her mother’s house,

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To fulfill her desire to engage in her craft, our narrator, clearly, must also tend to those household chores. She must thus live as both wife and writer, the first, as we see, privileged over the second; after all, it is the actual position of the tasks listed that tells us that her housework is first and mailing her poems to editors comes later. And she underscores the acceptance of such hierarchy as she moves forward, with a simple but all-powerful “Anyway” as in “Anyway there I am.” But “My Grandmother’s Hands” is much more than a simple representation of the typical Italian village woman. It is both testimony and celebration of that “sustenance” that our narrator mentioned in “Connections,” here figured more as legacy, that which is passed down from generation to generation—the “thin thread of memory,” which, like the beds that generations of children shared in the old country, was “passed from one generation / to the next.” It is indeed this sense of legacy, one’s ties to the past, that is lost with the act of migration: but when my mother married, she left her family behind. The ribbon between herself and the past ended with her, though she tried to pass it on.

One of the most poignant sections of this poem, we see that among the many ravishes of emigration there is the loss of a connection to the past, a loss that is close to impossible to recuperate, regardless of how hard one might try (“though she tried to pass it on”). Indeed, one of those significant losses was/is that of language: And my own children cannot understand a word of the old language, the past of the village so far removed they cannot find the connection between it and themselves, will not pass it on.

Before, we saw that language was a clear indicator for/of identity: the father’s “broken” language—what we might readily consider his accented English—and his original Italian. It is all of that and more, as we see in the cited verses. It is also, and equally important in an analogous manner, the access to the culture of one’s origin. Language is that sine qua non without which one cannot access and therefore know the culture whence one came;

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her “own children cannot understand / a word of the old language,” Italian, and as a result not only will they be incapable of knowing their background, but they will not be able to pass it on. What they may eventually do pass on will be something different—and I use the term “different” here in its most neutral of meanings. This is not the venue for such a discussion; nonetheless, whether one knows the language or not, and even if one has access to one’s culture of origin through language, his or her cultural articulations within the United States, for instance, will always be different. This is one of the reasons why we need to underscore that, while we have a clear connection to Italy, our cultural disposition will always be contaminated (in the best sense of the term) by a U.S. semiotic. There is nothing negative to this phenomenon; we simply need to recognize the fact that while we share a number of communalities of various types and genre with Italy and its culture, we are also different to a significant degree. These are, for sure, some of the reasons why the generation subsequent to our narrator’s will not be able to understand, in the most profound of manners, its parents’ generation and that of its grandparents: They cannot possess it, not in the way we possessed it in the 17th Street kitchen, where the Italian stories and the words fell over us like confetti.

The language here is strong and determined. More than a question of “understand[ing],” as we read earlier, it is a question of “possess[ion].” Namely, a most profound and intimate awareness of their origins—where their parents lived in New York City (“in the 17th Street kitchen”) and informed their children, indeed educated them about the old world in a language that in itself could only express the true essence of that world. As our narrator continues, we immediately witness a shift in resources, so to speak, from her grandmother to her mother, she who, as we saw in “Connections,” gave her “sustenance.” Her mother, who now gives her “comfort” within her “arms” and who, in telling stories of the old world, wove connections between [the children] and the past, teaching us so much about love and the gift of self and I wonder: Did I fail my own children?

This is the challenge of our narrator’s generation: how to bestow upon those who follow the “gift” of the “past” so that they, too, “will imagine that love / wrapping them, like a cashmere sweater.” It is indeed the connection to the past that one must preserve to be able, in the end, to “possess” some sort

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of identity articulated here so poignantly as “the gift of self”—what can only be acquired through that connection to the past: The skein of the past stretches back from them to me to my mother, the old country, the old language lost, but in this new world, saved and cherished: the tablecloth my grandmother made, the dresser scarves she crocheted, and the love she taught us to weave, a thread of woven silk to lead us home.

Let us be clear that this is a past that does not stifle or inhibit; it is a past that, as we read previously, offers up the “the gift of self” identity à la italiana, I would add at this juncture. It is a past that must be “saved and cherished,” so significant is our past to whom we are in the present. As before, here, too, our narrator bemoans the loss of language, the vehicle that can create an even stronger tie to the “old country” as we inhabit this “new world.” Hence, the closure of this poem, “a thread of woven silk / to lead us home,” recalls all the more clearly in “Connections”—what I have already labeled the companion piece to “My Grandmother’s Hands”—our narrator’s car, as it “decided, incredibly, to drive / toward” her mother’s home. 32 Numerous are other poems in this collection that deal with gender, one of the most significant being “Waiting for the Results of a Pregnancy Test,” in which our forty-one-year-old narrator ponders the possibility of an abortion as she waits for the result. 33 Unresolved, the poem recalls one of the most contested arguments in late-twentieth-century U.S. legal history—abortion, the right to choose, the right to have total control of one’s reproductive rights, having been part of the foundation of gender politics since the 1970s. “God Is Not Easy,” in turn, calls into question religion and the very existence of God, He who is characterized as “complex as the ear of the cat, / hard as the pit / in an unripened peach.” God, in this poem, in fact, is “emptiness, / a blank space / that can never be filled”: the mystery of God, to a degree, is also the mystery of what we read throughout the collection, this immigrant life and all it portends (e.g., the very treatment of Italian by the AngloSaxons) prove to be “complex” indeed. Or even the prose poem that closes the collection, “Where I Come From,” speaks to the woman’s situation, indeed her plight, and in so doing actually sets forth a series of signs that, while innocuous at first glance, sum up the book’s insistence on class, ethnicity, and gender. This final poem is in celebration of all that our narrator’s mother has been able to offer her. The color “black” harks back to the numerous descriptions of the women of the old world, those Italian village dwellers and/or immigrants who were perennially clothed in their “loose black dress[es] and black old lady shoes.” It is a sign

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of ethnicity that we saw that is sartorial, as we see here, as it is physical, as we saw earlier with the “black eyes” and “dark-skinned” Italians. It is, in the end, representative of whence our narrator hails, from an Italian family, matriarchal in structure, for sure, in which the mother has multiple, foundational (“sturdy”) roles. But it is also, equally significant, a signal that we need to keep our “connections” to our past, as we saw in other poems. Namely, the “pictures that she [our narrator’s mother] saved in a plastic folder,” one of “her mother” (our narrator’s grandmother), underscore the need to preserve that “thread of woven silk” that we saw earlier, precisely because, as we read the final words of this poem, also the final words of this collection, that bond is always there, as long as we are willing and able to recognize it (“I take it and hold it in mine”): “[My mother] peels at the crusty bark that has made her always the sturdy one, the one we all came to for help. . . . Her hand reaches out toward me, and when I take it and hold it in mine, it feels so light, her bones so delicate, I am surprised when it does not disappear.” NOTES 1. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Where I Come From: New and Selected Poems (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 1995/1997). 2. Mazziotti Gillan in fact stated in an interview: “I leaned how to be Italian—that is, a person who sees the world in a very special way and feels a great commitment to that world, whether it is expresses through political involvement, in writing letters to the editor, working in a union, or for political change through working for a particular political party” (see Sean Thomas Dougherty, “Word Rooted in the Body: An Interview with Maria Mazziotti Gillan,” in Maria Mazziotti Gillan: Essays on Her Work, ed. Sean Thomas Dougherty (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 2007), 13. 3. Not just here but indeed throughout Mazziotti Gillan’s work one finds the recurring themes of class, gender, and ethnicity, as Sean Thomas Dougherty has underscored in his introduction to his edited collection of essays: “Issue of class, race, gender, and power are woven implicitly throughout Gillan’s work” (Maria Mazziotti Gillan, 10). 4. See her Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 16. Edvige Giunta, in a similar fashion, considers this collection to be “the work of recovery and reinvention” in her book-length study Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Writers (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 130. Mary Ann Mannino articulates a similar concept when she writes that “class, race, and gender are often imbricated, and borders are transgressed.” See her Revisionary Identities: Strategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian/American Women (New York: Lang, 2000), 59. Finally, Stephen Paul Miller, in turn, considers Mazziotti Gillan’s thematics in this collection “notable and powerful” (56). He also speaks to her poetics when he states that her “poetic reflexivity creates a dynamic interplay among Mazziotti Gillan’s themes and o pens a space for culturally pertinent allegorical readings” (56). See his “Scrutinizing Maria Mazziotti’s Gillan’s Where I Come From,” Voices in Italian Americana 10, no. 1 (1999): 56–62. 5. See his acute essay “Naming Identity in the Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan,” in Estudios de la mujer en el ambito de los paises de habla inglesa, ed. Ana Antón-Pacheco et al. (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1998), 1–23. 6. My use of the term “nostalgic” is simply used to signal recall with affection of certain past events in our lives. I do not wish to imply any sense of negative recall that might very well affect individuals from moving forward, a type of nostalgia in this sense that is limiting, constrictive, if not oppressive, and, in the end, destructive.

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7. I find this to be a curious gender situation, as the father-daughter relationship now becomes the mother-son relationship. While I do not want to ascribe any sort of Oedipal hue to either of these relationships, in a broader contest one might surely examine the further significance of as much. I mention this because with regard to the mother-daughter relationships that we witness in this collection, there is more identification and less tension. The immigrant mother, as we shall see, becomes indeed a source of strength for the daughter. 8. The classic example here in Italian/American literature, as we saw in chapter 2, is Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete. 9. While referring to dialect as opposed to standard Italian, in her By the Breath of Their Mouths, Mary Jo Bona has expressed a similar idea according to which language constitutes a fundamental aspect for self-identity: “For Gillan, autonomous self-definition emerges from reconnecting with one’s ethnicity, which includes the mother tongue—the dialectal variety, not the national tongue of Dante—and which embraces the mother country—not Italy in toto, but the small villages from whence her parents came—and, finally, the hyphenated status she was bequeathed in America” (162). See her By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010). 10. Again, I remind the reader of Arnold van Gannep. 11. We shall see later on how physicality becomes an important theme as well for Mazziotti Gillan. 12. Antonio Vallone, “(Re)Claiming the Hyphen: The Italian-American Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan,” in Maria Mazziotti Gillan: Essays on Her Work, ed. Sean Thomas Dougherty (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 2007), 58. This is an intriguing reading, for sure, but unfortunately the title promises more than the essay delivers. 13. Among the numerous people who have discussed Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry, “Public School No. 18 Patterson, New Jersey” seems to attract the most attention together with “Arturo.” In her By the Breath of Their Mouths, Bona in fact rightly labeled this poem Mazziotti Gillan’s “anthem song of Italian America” (162). I would also remind the reader of something Rachel Guido deVries said with regard to a later collection of Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry that, I contend, has relevance here as well: “In the growing body of work available by writers and artists of Italian heritage is the recognition of what we share. . . . [I] have understood much through gesture, and in inflection—the shrug of a shoulder, the fiery eye, an elbow poking me to pay attention; the intonation of a particular word or syllable, the ability to communicate implicitly as well as explicitly, the familiar stories we have begin to exchange. This happens most authentically, for me, in a working class vernacular, and the language and gesture of working class Italian Americans is suffused with emotion and sensation. That this power of ours is often ridiculed by white dominant culture, and sometimes as well from within our community, makes Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s work that much more surprising and full of power” (124–25). See her “Exquisite Light: The Poems of Maria Mazziotti Gillan,” Voices in Italian Americana 11, no. 2 (2000): 124–29. 14. I would depart here from Miller’s interpretation of the scrubbing of the scalp: “The student’s mother literally goes to the roots to apply culture” (“Scrutinizing Maria Mazziotti’s,” 57). And while it surely can be read in this manner, I prefer to invest it with meaning as the antidote to the stereotypical notion of Italians as swarthy and dirty. It is the “scrub[bing] my scalp raw” that brings home this interpretation for me. 15. For yet another venue, we might surely discuss the continuation of such misconceptions and, more prevalent today, the fact that Italians (read also, Italian Americans) can be readily ridiculed in the various media without any sense of recrimination for such bigoted acts. 16. Here, too, I would depart from Miller’s interpretation, as he places the emphasis on locale as opposed to language. For me, language proves more significant only because it figures as an element much more fundamental as a sign of identity than does locale. 17. For more on this see, Salvatore LaGumina, WOP: A Documentary History of AntiItalian Discrimination (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 1999; originally published in 1973). With regard to Italians and their representation as members of organized crime, see especially Fred Gardaphè, From Wiseguys to Wise Men (New York: Routledge, 2006); George De Stefano, An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America (New York: Faber & Faber, 2006);

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and my Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema (New York: Bordighera Press, 2011). 18. This reminds me of the old phone commercial that ran on television back in the 1980s, in which a Mafia-type character spoke of the benefits of the telephone and how we were all connected. 19. This reminds me of the plethora of stories that Italian Americans share about “yelling” at the dinner table so that one may be heard over others, all done with the utmost respect; one simply had to rise above the noise level to be acknowledged by the many people at the dinner table, which usually took place on a Sunday afternoon. 20. Of course, I am reminded of the selective mutism on Piero’s part in Emanuele Crialese’s excellent film Nuovomondo. I have dealt briefly with this in my Re-viewing Italian Americana, 123–25. As I stated then, selective mutism is a disorder in children and adults who, despite their silence, are fully capable of speech and understanding language. This, in fact, seems to be the case early on with Pietro; while he does not speak, he clearly hears and understands what people around him are saying. Selective mutism is a condition, nonetheless, most complex and puzzling to a significant degree. For more on this condition, see Sheila A. Spasaro and Charles E. Schaefer, eds., Refusal to Speak: Treatment of Selective Mutism in Children (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1999); Norman H. Hadley, Elective Mutism: A Handbook for Educators, Counselors, and Health Care Professionals (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1994); Thomas R. Kratochwill, Selective Mutism: Implications for Research and Treatment (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1981). 21. Fred L. Gardaphé, “A Woman for All Seasons: Maria Mazziotti Gillan,” in Dagoes Read: Tradition and the Italian/American Writer (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 1996), 105. 22. See his “Off the Boat and up the Creek without a Paddle—or, Where Italian Americana Might Swim: Prolepsis of an Ethnopoetics,” in Beyond the Margin: Readings in Italian Americana, ed. Paolo A. Giordano and Anthony Julian Tamburri (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 42. 23. The Truman Show, dir. Peter Weir (Paramount Pictures, 1998). 24. “Talismans” might be considered an appropriate companion piece to this poem. In it, we find yet another elementary school teacher, Miss Elmer, who could not be more removed from our narrator’s world. And here, too, our narrator affectionately recalls the sense of security that she felt as a child in her immigrant world, wishing to still feel “next to [her] skin” the “evil-eye horn” and “scapula” that her mother used to pin to her undershirt. 25. See my Re-viewing Italian Americana, especially chapters 1 and 6. 26. In this regard, I would remind the reader of LaGumina’s Wop and my Re-viewing Italian Americana for more on this. 27. For more on Italians and whiteness, see Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (New York: Routledge, 2003). 28. Bona, in fact, sees three of the four as a group: “‘Growing Up Italian’ parallels ‘Public School No. 18’ and ‘Arturo’ in its emphasis on reclaiming ethnic ties” (By the Breath of Their Mouths, 166). 29. I use World War II as a marker here for the simple reason that the GI bill allowed an inordinate amount of young men, mostly, to attend college, people who economically might not have been able to do so. This number included a significant number of Italian Americans who then went on to the so-called white-collar jobs. 30. I would remind the reader here of the phrase “dark Italian eyes” that appeared in “Arturo,” a phrase, as I stated earlier, that we might consider more of a metonym than a mere description of our narrator’s eyes that she wanted so badly to hide. In the poem “In Memory We Are Walking,” we find the following: “They hate / our dark skin, our immigrant clothes,” where the one is automatically tied to the other. 31. These words conclude Bona’s acutely original reading of this poem: “For many contemporary women poets, including Mazziotti Gillan, revolutionary activity is demonstrated linguistically through the breakdown of boundaries between the poet and audience, through an elimination of hierarchy, and through diction itself (Ostriker, 168–78). Gillan’s use of the color ‘red’ for the flag illustrates this activity by implicitly alluding to the Red Scare of the 1920s which focused much of its fear (and hatred) on the nation’s immigrants, including her Italian parents. The color of communism and, later, the left-wing Italian terrorist group of the 1970s—The Red

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Brigades, ‘red’ evokes the poet’s anger, previously latent and unexpressed. She’s not taking it—defamation of her ethnic culture—anymore, and she takes back her name with the defiance and self-congratulation of the victorious warrior, flag in hand” (By the Breath of Their Mouths, 167). 32. It is no casual coincidence that these two poems would appear one after the other and, equally important, at midpoint in this collection. As we just saw, they clearly speak to each other. As for their positioning in the collection, they underscore the thematic trifecta of class, gender, and ethnicity. 33. The recall is too strong not to mention Oriana Fallaci’s much discussed, and dare I say debated, novel Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Milan, Italy: Rizzoli, 1975).

IV

(In)Conclusions

Chapter Eight

Beyond “Pizza” and “Nonna”! Further Directions for Italian/American Textual Criticism and Cultural Studies

Even though the title of this chapter may direct the reader in a specific direction, I must confess that the goal here is not to discuss “pizza” or “nonna.” Rather, I wish to go beyond some of the traditional and, I would underscore, comforting signs of Italian Americana and call attention to that which we may not always wish to recognize: that is, critical discourse on Italian/American cultural productions, which does not necessarily advance the cause, as some parochial, self-proclaimed spokepeople of the community might lament—as their cause may surely be one of exclusively blind ethnic boosterism, leaving no room for dispassionate analytical discourse that might very well shine light on certain aspects and/or sectors of the community that they find troublesome. 1 If anything, then, these two comforting nouns appear in my title as two signs/interpretants, as Charles Sanders Peirce would label them, 2 that signify greatly both within and beyond the greater Italian/ American community; that is, food and family are great themes ubiquitous in Italian/American cultural productions, and rightfully so, I would submit. In this chapter, then, I would like to revisit some of my observations that date back approximately to fifteen years ago, when I published A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer. One of the purposes of writing that book was to engage in an analytically theoretical conversation both within and beyond the confines of Italian Americana. It was, until then, a somewhat barren field with regard to published books on Italian/ 129

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American literature and film. Indeed, we have seen this change over the years. When I then took a later, critical look at what had subsequently been published, it seemed in 2003 that while things had indeed progressed, they did not do so as some might have hoped. Hence, part of the subtitle of my 2003 essay 3 “What’s Bad about Italian/American Criticism?”—now eliminated from this updated version and which some saw as an attack on certain writers—was intended to pose that very question and to ask further, as the second part of the subtitle does, where do we go from here? For us to move forward—and I felt the same way then—we must first revisit our past, take stock of what was offered at that time, and eventually move forward by building on what seemed to work. This is, in fact, the intention of this closing chapter: to ask ourselves where we have been and where might we go, as I have already begun to ask in chapter 1 of this book. In so doing, we also need to engage in an act of self-analysis, however critical it might seem, so that we can avoid what we might also consider the pitfalls of what has been produced thus far. Of course, I am speaking here in terms of what we, as a community of scholars of Italian Americana, can and cannot afford to do. Namely, we need to take inventory, as it were, of where we are vis-à-vis other ethnic (read also, racial) groups and how we might be able to develop, to a certain degree, one voice, as I discussed in chapter 1 of this study, so that for those major issues we move forward as a united community and not lie back waiting for a void to open and attempt to fill it, with the hopes of standing out from the crowd. 4 To be sure, Helen Barolini tells us that her “first memory of [Italy] is gastronomic,” a “kind of transcendental exaltation” equal to “that solemn moment of First Communion.” 5 Be it the spaghetti and coffee dinner in Little Caesar or the meals prepared that have become (in)famous from such films as Coppola’s The Godfather 6 or Scorsese’s Italianamerican and Goodfellas, 7 some of these menus and recipes have in fact become objects of desire. 8 Family, in turn, is equally ubiquitous and cannot be ignored as a one of the major themes of creative Italian America. Again, I would briefly reference The Godfather, Italianamerican, as well as True Love 9 and Betsy’s Wedding. 10 So, while I shall not discuss these two Italian/American signs par excellence, I should underscore that regardless of my choice to silence them in this specific venue, I do not intend to signal in any sense at all that we should eschew these signs in our work as either critics or creative writers. Anzi, to borrow from the “old country”! As readers of texts, then, I would suggest that we engage in more than what seems to have occurred until about two decades or so ago. That is, while I do not want to underscore a Clemenzean practice of something like “leave the thematics and grab the theory,” I do believe that as a community we have come late to theoretical issues as part of our analytical arsenal; this is especially true if we are to presume to construct and articulate a discourse

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that is supposed to travel beyond the confines of Italian America. The costs to ignore such a theoretical enterprise are simply too high. 11 GETTING TO KNOW YOU . . . In his preface to Franco Mulas’s Studies on Italian-American Literature, Fred L. Gardaphé tells us that the “criticism of Italian American literature is not so much a new field, as it is unknown.” 12 This sentence was publically articulated in 1992, and to a certain degree, it is equally relevant today. In these past twenty-plus years, we have seen that the publication of essays and books on Italian/American literature has indeed exhibited lacunae of various sorts. There are those who ignore, or are ignorant of, what has preceded them, those who mis-represent what they read, those who re-write what others have already written, and those who eschew—what is today in the twenty-first century a sine qua non—theoretical issues of literary criticism. 13 Indeed, many might say that much of this is nothing new in the general history of literary criticism. But when that literary critical voice is still young and in need of discoursing externally, as is the situation continues, I would contend, with Italian/American criticism, it is even more incumbent upon the critic to be aware of his or her surroundings.

When I opened Pellegrino D’Acierno’s The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts for the first time, I was surprised by the prefatory words offered up by the series’s editor. In his preface to the volume, subtitled “Making a Point of It,” George J. Leonard, editor in chief, tells us: Not until this volume’s articles were massed together did anyone, even the authors, become aware of this phenomenon [“a strong ethnic component to their art,” as he states in closing his previous paragraph]. An odd silence had masked the event. . . . One may have succeeded by drawing on one’s Italianness . . . but one did so quietly, “without making a point of it.” This book then, makes a point of it; uncovering those great debts without which one cannot fully understand these artists or their art, dealing with their denial, with “la cultura negata.” 14

When I read these words, I was, I must admit, a bit dumbfounded. I thought: and what about Barolini and Gardaphè? These two people have always worked both creatively and critically within an Italian/American milieu. Equally significant, perhaps even more egregious, is the minimization of Rose Basile Green’s contribution The Italian-American Novel: A Document

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of the Interaction of Two Cultures, 15 mentioned in this volume only by Barolini and Gardaphé. Then, I mused: and Bona and Viscusi? A compound voice of the younger and more established critical Italian America, together these two scholars cover thirty years of literary analysis. Then, there are also those who are not contributors to this volume and whose names easily come to mind: John Ciardi, Felix Stefanile, Joseph Tusiani, and Frances Winwar are four elders who have always worked in three milieus: the creative, the critical, and the realm of translation. Indeed, the list goes on of the unmentioned! For along with Rose Basile Green’s history of Italian/American narrative, other significant books have preceded the publication of The Italian American Heritage. Helen Barolini’s groundbreaking anthology The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women paved the way as the first of its kind. 16 This was followed by another best-seller, From the Margin: Writings in Italian American, edited by Tamburri, Giordano, and Gardaphé, and Studies in Italian-American Folklore, edited by Luisa Del Giudice, two other collections that helped cement the notion of Italian Americana in the greater landscape of intellectual North America. Soon after, three journals published special issues dedicated to the field: Differentia 6 and 7 (1994), la bella figura: a choice, and Canadian Journal of Italian Studies (1996). To be sure, these two books, the special issues, and other publications too numerous to mention in this context owe a debt not only to Basile Green and her work but also to the unfinished notebook, published posthumously (1949), that Olga Peragallo had hoped to develop into a full-fledged study (she, too, by the way, is mentioned here only by Barolini and Gardaphè). 17 Therefore, to paraphrase the words I first cited, these are indeed some “great debts without which one cannot fully understand [Italian/American] artists or their art,” for which the notion of “la cultura negata” now becomes relevant also in a much larger sense vis-à-vis the compilation of The Italian American Heritage. 18

The Italian American Heritage is not alone in this type of “historical breach,” as one author recently described the paucity of critical attention to Italian/ American writing. 19 A few other books recently published that do not necessarily go beyond the threshold of thematic and/or critical recounting—dare I say discounting, if not misreading—of what has been said before may come to mind. I said earlier that the costs are too high. How? I would use the recent publication of Werner Sollors’s Multilingual America 20 as one example of why we need to (1) be aware of what has preceded us within and from without Italian America and (2) cross the critical thresholds of Italian America and discourse with others through our criticism of Italian/American texts.

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Sollors’s book is divided into eight sections that include, in all, twenty-eight essays. Two are dedicated to Italian/American literature: “The Strange Case of Luigi Donato Ventura’s Peppino: Some Speculations on the Beginnings of Italian-American Fiction,” by Mario Maffi, and “The Formulation of an Italian-American Identity through Popular Theater,” by Anna Maria Martellone. 21 Nine and five pages, respectively, represent Italian/American writing in lingua, we might say. Oddly, I would submit, Peppino, as many of us are aware, was in fact originally published in French. 22 In addition, oddly again, it is dubbed by Maffi as the “foundational fiction for Italian-American literature” (166). 23 Maffi does present an interesting reading of Ventura’s Peppino filled with some intriguing, though debatable, points, and for this reason, his piece left this reader unsatisfied. For instance, while Maffi’s three “main stages [of] the construction of America” (168) appear intriguing at the outset, it is clear that he has willy-nilly rewritten to some degree Basile Green’s four stages of the Italian/American writer, if not, to some extent metaphorically, Aaron’s three stages of the “hyphenate writer.” 24 More significant, it might seem to some, Maffi’s three stages also resonate with Peirce’s semiotic triade of first-ness, second-ness, and third-ness. Ironically, none of these three scholars—Basile Green, Aaron, Peirce—appear anywhere in Maffi’s essay, each of whose publications dates back to 1974, 1964, and 1961, respectively. Whereas Maffi does attempt a rigorous analysis of the work in question, Martellone offers up a brief reading of Italian/American theater filtered partly, so it seems, through Emelise Aleandri’s previous work on the same subject. 25 The Italian/American identity presented in this note (as Martellone herself considers her contribution to this volume) is based on notions of corna and vendetta. To be sure, one would have wished that the author had concentrated on another aspect of Italian/American identity, something not so stereotypical of the southern Italian. I highlight the adjective “southern” precisely because of the historical rift between southern and northern Italy and also because Italian immigrants and their progeny deserve both better and more accurate treatment, especially in this regard. The disservice done to the southern Italian immigrant here is just too egregious to ignore. By their very presence in this book, the two contributions by Maffi and Martellone raise the following question: why, when there is so much being written in the United States by some of the very best critics of Italian/ American literature, who have been writing for decades (Helen Barolini, Fred Gardaphè, and Robert Viscusi, to mention three whose work dates back into the 1980s, if not earlier), does a most able anthologist working in the United States ethnic milieu go elsewhere for contributors for entries on Italian/American literature, albeit literature in Italian? Precisely because Barolini, Gardaphè, and Viscusi are all bilingual, the question seems to resonate

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more loudly. Furthermore, were one to argue for an outside perspective in such cases as in Sollors’s, we might expect to find an essay by someone such as Franca Bernabei, William Boelhower, Emilio Franzina, if not Claudio Gorlier, Martino Marazzi, or Cosmo Siani, expert critics in the field who have already done significant work in this area. 26 Such musings inevitably continue to surface, to be sure, especially when one considers the brevity of and apparent gaps in Maffi’s and Martellone’s contributions. Namely, what does such a demonstrative lack of information and/or knowledge on the part of these two Italian critics tell us, if anything, about the reception, or its notable absence, of Italian/American studies in Italy? How, for example, is the notion of an Italian/American studies negotiated in departments of North/American studies in Italian universities? 27 These are two basic questions, I would submit, that need to be asked, indeed heeded, when historical and/or analytical anthologies and/or studies such as Multilingual America are compiled. The answers are surely complex, and some might prefer a more in-depth analysis than what we can offer in this context. More significant, they bring us back to chapter 1 of this study and further confirm what we saw in the case of the journal Àcoma, where the case was even more egregious, in that Italian/American literature was ignored completely. If anything, we might witness to our chagrin a step backward. Briefly, however, we might surely perceive some good fortune in the commercial realm, and I would be remiss not to mention that certain Italian/ American writers are very much read in Italy. Along with the so-called usual suspects such as David Baldacci, Don DeLillo, and other Italian/American best-sellers in Italy, it was a wonderful surprise a decade or so ago to see, literally speaking, piles of copies of John Fante’s works in all the major bookstores in Florence and Rome, for example. It was also most comforting to see writers such as Sandro Veronesi, Marco Vichi, and their contemporaries, as well, writing prefaces and translating such writers. 28 In addition, the works of Pascal D’Angelo, Joe Pagano, Helen Barolini, Anthony Valerio, and Robert Viscusi have also appeared in Italian, thanks here to the likes of Antonio Corbusiero, in the first case, Francesco Durante for Pagano, Barolini, and Viscusi, and Silvia Tessitore for Valerio. As for Italian/American studies being taught in departments of North/American studies in Italy, the situation is still in an embryonic stage. While some Italian/American writers are studied in a variety of classes in North/ American studies, very few universities have courses dedicated specifically to Italian/American studies: for the most part, these are obviously found in those locales where the few specialists teach. Still in an early stage is the notion that someone might obtain a specialization in Italian/American studies, though the past decade has been more fruitful in college graduates in this field, as theses dedicated to Italian Americans are now more numerous than ever before. 29

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A second example of one’s unawareness of what has preceded us in Italian/American literature is—as we already saw in greater detail, in chapter 1—more internal and demonstrated by Gay Talese in his 1993 essay “Where Are the Italian American Novelists?” 30 It is an essay, as I demonstrated earlier, that underscores precisely how misinformed Talese was about the Italian/American novel. 31 The response to Talese’s essay was indeed significant. The Times did publish a series of letters, and at subsequent conferences, roundtables and general gatherings of Italian Americans often expressed candid and critical opinions.

Mario Maffi, Anna Maria Martellone, and Gay Talese are not alone in their “breach,” as Kenneth Scambray has labeled such performances. Ironically, as we shall see, this very critic of the “breach” engages in an analogous infraction. In his aforementioned The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada, Scambray offers us a big title for his small book. Such a title promises a great deal, and much of what one might expect from such a title can surely not be included in 130 pages; the author, in fact, informs us of this discrepancy. There are two other aspects of the title I would mention at the outset. First, the initial definite article, “the,” may readily close out, at first glance, any possibility of room for play, for this work is neither definitive nor clearly representative of the two literary fields in question. Second, given the sensitivity to language that is characteristic of Guernica and its then publisher/director, I wonder about the use of the geocultural label “America” as opposed to “United States”: after all, Canada is one of numerous parts of America. Indeed, in concert with “sensitivity to language,” I also wonder at Scambray’s later use of the adjective “Italic” in place of the more commonly used binomials “Italian American” or “Italian Canadian.” 32 Within an Italianate context, especially, a term such as “Italic” conjures up a variety of thoughts and images, one of the first being the semiotic relationship between the sign /Italic/ and the general historical context of the twentieth-century Italian ventennio, that noun that signals Italy’s darkest time of the last century, the Fascist regime. The Italian equivalent of “Italic” was substituted by the regime for what had always been labeled “Italian,” one of many signs that marked Mussolini’s attempt to disseminate in twentieth-century Italy notions reminiscent of the Roman Empire. 33 In his able introduction, Scambray tells us that the “essays that follow represent a cross-section of the Italian American and Italian Canadian literature written over the past thirty years” (18). Indeed, many of the works that he discusses “form a coherent part of the Italic narrative in North America” (18); however, I find some writers missing, even for an admittedly limited

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work, as Scambray humbly tells us. In his bibliography of poetry, nine writers are mentioned, and while I shall not muse on some of those included at the expense of others excluded, I wonder about the following absences. For U.S. poetry, by no means a conclusive list, the following are not present: David Citino, Emanuel di Pasquale, W. S. Di Piero, Diane Di Prima, Jonathan Galassi, Sandra Gilbert, Dana Gioia, Daniela Gioseffi, Gerard Malanga, Michael Palma, Jay Parini, Stephen Sartarelli, Felix Stefanile, John Tagliabue, Lewis Turco, Joseph Tusiani, Paul Vangelisti. For Canada, in turn, the not listed include Lisa Carducci, Celestino De Iuliis, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Mary Di Michele, Antonino Mazza, Pasquale Verdicchio (Canada and United States). Similar lists can be made for prose writers: Tony Ardizzone, Rita Ciresi, Giose Rimanelli, and Anthony Valerio constitute conspicuous absences from the lower forty-eight, whereas the likes of Genni Gunn, Mary Melfi, Frank Paci, and Nino Ricci are among the Canadians herein not mentioned. A handful of anthologies and other critical studies are also lacking, but I shall spare my reader other lists at this point. This underscores, as Scambray himself states, that the study of Italian/ American and Italian/Canadian literature, indeed, “cannot be viewed separately from history and culture” (18), which must include all significant studies and anthologies whenever possible, however marginal they may seem. By the time this book went to press in the fall of 2000, a number of relevant anthologies (at least three) and critical studies (at least five) had already appeared alongside the likes of Barolini’s The Dream Book and Gardaphè’s Italian Signs, American Streets. Since this is a “small . . . representation of the historical breach,” then an editorial decision might have substituted a more representative title for the volume. 34 Something similar to “Breaking the Silence,” the title of one of Robert Viscusi’s often-cited essays, seems more appropriate for this collection of previously published reviews. 35 At the same time, it would have also paid homage to, indeed, the first contemporary thinker of Italian/American studies who purposefully breached the longpracticed, thematic-based criticism, thus bringing Italian/American critical studies into the contemporary world of literary studies.

There are a few other books I would need to discuss briefly before passing on to subsequent sections of this chapter. Two of these are Mary Ann Mannino’s Revisionary Identities: Strategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian/ American Women 36 and Mary Francis Pipino’s “I Have Found My Voice”: The Italian-American Woman Writer. 37 In a review of Mary Jo Bona’s 1999 study Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers, 38 I stated that it was a necessary book for two basic reasons: first, it provided us with what

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had been missing vis-à-vis Italian/American female writers; second, it served as a model for future books to come. I completed my review at the end of 2001 and had both Mannino and Pipino in mind. 39 The years 1997 and 1996 are the respective dates for the latest bibliographic entry in each book. This becomes significant, I would submit, because in the second book, especially, Fred Gardaphé’s seminal work Italian Signs, American Streets is nowhere to be found, whereas Bona cites works as late as 1998 in her book. Indeed, one cannot downplay Gardaphé’s pivotal study, especially when he discusses at length three writers (Helen Barolini, Mary Caponegro, and Carole Maso) whom Pipino reads four years later, and Gardaphé appears once in her fifty-plus pages dedicated to these three writers. In so doing, Pipino ignores not only Gardaphé but also Daniel Aaron in her discussion of various stages of “literal and literary assimilation” in her chapter dedicated to Dorothy Calvetti Bryant. From Gardaphè, Pipino could have learned of Aaron’s keenly insightful essay, and the subsequent benefits would have been obvious. 40 Mary Ann Mannino’s study exhibits similar characteristics. In his review of Revisionary Identities, Gardaphé tell us that this book is “designed to help us understand the way Italian/American women writers identify themselves” and that it “advances our awareness of the complexities at work in the creation and consumption of the fiction and poetry of American women writers of Italian descent.” 41 Gardaphé, in the meantime, continues: While there can be no doubt that Mannino’s pursuit is a noble one, her application of a variety of theories to the works leaves much to be desired. Revisionary Identities suffers from a lack of editorial direction and assistance in such important areas as style and content. Anyone familiar with the previous booklength studies and essays by such scholars as Mary Jo Bona, Edvige Giunta, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, will note these deficiencies immediately. Unfortunately, Mannino’s work never reaches the heights of her predecessors and thus becomes a hesitant first step into the field. (91)

While what Gardaphé says here is true in a general sense, it is also true, as he continues, that the deficiencies in this book also advance “our awareness of the complexities at work in the . . . consumption” (91) of Italian/American women’s writing. Indeed, in some cases it seems that Mannino glides over the sources of her study, concerned more with the buzz words and/or phrases that she might find in them than to absorb and digest what her predecessors—Italian Americans and not—had to say in those sources. This, too, is a major criticism that Gardaphé expresses: While it is obvious that the author has consulted some of the major sources in the field, it is not clear whether she did more than read her predecessors for quotes that she could extract in support of her argument. An example of this

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Indeed, Gardaphé is generous in my regard to underscore two notions and/or works that I had previously published. But he was even more generous to Mannino in not being more specific in egregious misrepresentation of others’ previous work. At the risk of seeming overtly self-centered, since I already cited this essay of mine before, Mannino mischaracterizes my 1991 reading of Barolini’s Umbertina when she tells her reader that my essay “focused on the assimilation of the characters and thus read the text as primarily an ethnic fiction” (130). Indeed, a bit less than one half of my essay dealt with the ethnic aspect of the novel; the remainder dealt with the gender dilemma that Barolini so effectively portrays within an Italian/American milieu. GETTING TO KNOW YOU BETTER . . . As we move on to other studies, we see that the terrain has undergone a favorable change; the scholars seem to be more aware of the critical terrain. Contending that artful performance has become the primary vehicle of Italian sensibilities, in his Feeling Italian 42 Thomas Ferraro explores books, movies, paintings, and records in ten vignettes. In so doing, he adopts such archetypal headings to chapters, as he himself states in his introduction, that have by now become part and parcel of an Italian/American landscape, be that landscape “town” or “gown”; the chapter titles are as follows, each with a subtitle, so it seems, to tease out the apparent sign par excellence: “Honor,” “City,” “Job,” “Mother,” “Song,” “Crime,” “Romance,” “Diva,” “Skin,” and “Table.” Furthermore, featured cultural artifacts run the gamut from the cityscapes of Joseph Stella to Madonna’s Catholic spirit to Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s Big Night. But it is precisely because of the subtitles and what is in the various chapters that, to a certain degree, to repeat an expression I used in chapter 1, make some of us want to go hmmm! Ferraro argues in his book that Italian/American identity—now a mix of history and fantasy, flesh-and-bone people, and all-too-familiar caricature— still has something to teach us, including why each of us is, in crucial ways, already Italian. While, historically, many have contended that the southern European and/or Mediterranean immigrant, who was once considered “nonwhite,” had to pass through a “bleached and bland period” before she or he could re-take possession of his or her ethnicity, 43 Ferraro would have us believe otherwise. For he states: “the feelings Italian Americans have for themselves, the feelings non-Italians have for Italian Americans, and the feelings both have for the role of Italianness in America intertwine and

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interpenetrate” (4). He then immediately offers the qualifier, “almost —but not quite!—one.” So while the larger part of the statement may indeed seem, as Ferraro would want us to think, “unorthodox, even heretical” (xi), these notions are sometimes followed by qualifiers, which, some might say, by definition and hence function, cancel out the unorthodoxy as well as the heresy. Again, in his introduction, Ferraro states the following: The Pun in Feeling Italian harbors a double meaning: to “feel like an Italian” means, first, to feel the way Italians feel, to have Italian or Italianate types of feelings, whether recognized or not; and, second, to feel that one’s identity is Italian or Italian-like, no matter the ancestry. The phrase invokes cultural continuity over distance and across time, including the mystique of such continuity, without relying on credentials of blood: so formulated, “feeling Italian” opens up the ranks (you don’t have to be like one to feel like one) and beats back both the authenticity police and the determined de-essentializers—this feeling of Italianness was made in America from cultural formations that arose in Italy. But this structure of feeling Italian does not surrender the claim to distinctiveness. I know there’s a loose-jointedness to the concept; that’s the idea. It’s an aesthetic, really: the play of ambiguity across the identity line, done well, is the art of feeling Italian in America. (3; emphasis textual)

One, clearly, is glad to read that Ferraro eschews essentialism of all sorts; neither the “authenticity police [nor] the determined de-essentializers” hold absolute power. Also, it is nice to see that everything is not based on the somatic, for it is true that people can indeed be/feel Italian while not have Italian DNA. And here I have in mind, among the many, friends and colleagues such as Professors Ben Lawton and Rebecca West, each of whom, in different ways, is surely more Italian than anything else while not having Italian biological origins. 44 In Lawton’s case, he spent close to fifteen of his first eighteen years in Italy, speaking not only Italian, but indeed Piedmontese dialect. In West’s case, in turn, it is a fundamental question of cultural submersion, having studied Italian language and culture since the age of eighteen and spending an inordinate amount of time in Italy over the past five decades. Now, this sense of being Italian is surely logical and acceptable; after all, we are social constructs, which I suspect is the “aesthetic” that Ferraro seemingly seeks to articulate. This is, also, at first blush, what Piero Bassetti has been saying for the past decade or so with regard to the categorization of Italians outside Italy as well as those who, simply put, love things Italian precisely because of their submersion into the culture, be it in Italy or beyond. In his “Italic Project,” Bassetti considers italicità as a “sense of belonging that is ‘cultural’ in the broadest sense of the word rather than ethnolinguistic or juridical and institutional” (emphasis added). 45 This, I suspect,

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is where Ferraro is going or might like to go, had he read Bassetti’s earlier works. 46 Ferraro also claims that the “structure of feeling Italian does not surrender the claim to distinctiveness.” Yet, throughout the various chapters of his book, we never really gain true insight into what this “feeling Italian” actually is. Ferraro, as he does at various times in this study, speaks to “a loosejointedness to the concept; . . . [that] the play of ambiguity across the identity line, done well, is the art of feeling Italian in America” (emphasis textual). Perhaps! But what is equally ambiguous is—and I purposefully bounce off of Ferraro’s words—where does “the play of ambiguity across the identity line” end and the performative derision and stereotyping begin? This is an issue not discussed in Ferrara’s study to any great length; this is an issue that the Italian in the United States still confronts. Thus, if one is to engage in any book-length discussion of an aesthetic of the “art of feeling Italian in America,” as indeed Ferraro attempts, it would not seem far-fetched to assume that the reader of such a discussion might, to be sure, expect how such an aesthetic, in an analogous manner at the very least, might be perceived by that greater public in which Ferraro’s “feeling Italian . . . loose-jointedness” operates. And by greater public I have in mind that which we readily call the dominant culture, that non-Italian mode of thinking that, because of its unfamiliarity with the Italian/American lived experience, believes that it is acceptable to poke fun at Italian Americans in a way in which they would not were the object of derision not Italian Americans. Such intellectual musing is not present in Ferraro’s study in any manner whatsoever, even though the question is begged, if only potentially, as, for example, with Ferraro’s statement about Puzo’s novel and Coppola’s film: The point here is not to defend the novel or even see it on its own terms (that’s another kind of essay for another kind of day) but to underscore what was at stake in the making of the movie: to recognize its wildy public, prodigiously successful production as integral to the Italianization of America, especially as Italian Americans themselves—intuitively—understood it. (118)

The two phrases here that are notably problematic are (1) “integral to the Italianization of America” and (2) “Italian Americans themselves—intuitively—understood it.” That Coppola’s 1972 The Godfather was in some way, shape, or form “integral to the Italianization of America” is surely a point well taken. But it needs more than what Ferraro offers us here. Furthurmore, Ferraro had a few people to consult and engage on this matter, and I have in mind the likes of Christian Messenger and Bill Tonelli, each one of whom have spoken to this issue; 47 to gloss over such voices simply does not offer one’s reader a full spectrum of the issue at hand. 48 Let us also not forget that there was a series of other cultural phenomena that contributed significantly

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to the Italianization of the United States, including first and foremost the advent of Italian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s—for instance, the films of Federico Fellini and Lina Wertmuller—as well as the overall invasion of the so-called Made in Italy, be this the further culturization of the United States by way of the introduction of new cultural brokers (e.g., Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco) if not an entirely new generation of fashion designers (e.g., Armani and Versace), painters (e.g., Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia), and movie directors (e.g., Nanni Moretti and Giuseppe Tornatore). Hence, Ferraro’s very term “Italianization” is further problematized and thus worthy of yet another point of discussion absent in his notion of Italian Americana, for one might readily argue that a more profound knowledge of the one culture (Italian Americana) may depend on an equally informed knowledge of the other (Italiana). 49 Ferraro’s second phrase, “Italian Americans themselves—intuitively— understood it,” seems to ignore an entire component of Italian America that has consistently questioned, if not protested, such cultural products even earlier than the advent of Coppola’s 1972 film. 50 The various brouhahas that have appeared over the past four-plus decades cannot simply be cast aside without any comment whatsoever, regardless of where one stands on the issues: to do so simply stacks the deck for the author; the reader is then the loser. 51 More important, the lack of such a discussion perpetuates further the current divide between those who outright condemn and those who would attempt to engage in some sort of discussion on the issues. 52 This, too, is lacking in Ferraro’s articulation of “feeling Italian.” What then are we left with after a reading of Ferraro’s Feeling Italian? In a number of ways, one is left wanting for more. For example, while there are some wonderful insights in his readings of the various cultural products and brokers that he includes therein, some chapters leave us wishing for more. The chapter on Mario Puzo’s Fortunate Pilgrim is a capable reading, for sure. But it is one that really does not offer us more than what we have previously read in other essays; I have in mind, for instance, Rose Basile Green, Lawrence J. Oliver, and Fred L. Gardaphé, none of whom is cited in Ferraro’s chapter, though Green especially resonates. 53 What Ferraro does do is depend on the likes of Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood and Ann Cornelison’s Women of the Shadows, which is acceptable, of course, but surely incomplete and, hence, nothing really novel (pardon the pun!). 54 In an analogous manner, the chapter on Sinatra also leaves the reader short in some ways. For instance, what we have is a Sinatra filtered through the likes of the more popular voices á la Pete Hamill or through the classic lens of Herbert Gans’s Boston West Enders. 55 In this chapter, Sinatra is the extraordinary Italian singer, one with “corner boy values,” though such a loaded expression is never aptly defined for the reader. More disappointing is that there is no reference at all to Sinatra’s social activism. While I deal with this to some

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degree in another setting, the more in-depth analyses of Gerald Meyer and Jon Weiner seem to have no place in Ferraro’s chapter on Frank Sinatra, and as a consequence, that side of the so-called kid from Hoboken is lacking— and lacking as well therefore is a good deal of novelty to Ferraro’s discussion of Sinatra. 56 This social activism is, I would contend, what is so important in a discussion of Italian/American cultural brokers at this juncture. If we are to discuss someone like a Frank Sinatra, how can we do so in 2009 without discussing his social activism. This is the foundation that both Meyer and Weiner have offered us. To ignore it at this time is a significant gap in any discussion of Frank Sinatra or any other Italian American in the public eye, especially given the complex issue of Italian Americans and their perceived relationship to other ethnic groups. 57 Not much different from how Puzo and Sinatra are treated, the chapter on Madonna is viewed primarily through a Catholic lens, one that does not condemn by any means but sets the analytical frame for the discussion at large. Indeed, one can argue for such a dominant tone to an essay on Madonna. However, as I mentioned earlier with regard to Sinatra, one might also want to see here a discussion of the social activism at work in her videos, something that surely accompanies, if not supersedes, the Catholic. 58 So, again, what are we left with after a reading of Ferraro’s Feeling Italian? We are left, first, with feeling significantly enlightened by some of his readings of the topics at hand: yes, even in the chapters I have criticized herein. That notwithstanding, we are also left with the feeling of wanting more, wanting to go beyond the chatty and the already and come into possession of a new reading of some of the topics at hand. 59 This is not the case. Nor, and this is the most significant of all, do we come away with a clear and distinct meaning of what it means to “feel Italian.” Instead, precisely because the performative element of “feeling Italian” in Ferraro’s book indeed depends on, as he states, “loose-jointedness [and] the play of ambiguity,” the necessity of a more in-depth analysis and an apparent and limpid definition of such a concept at the book’s opening seems more urgent. Otherwise, we are left with an ethnic performance that potentially turns vacuous and, as a result, runs the risk of mimicking for the reader not so much a genuine feeling of what it means to “be” Italian but rather an ethnic burlesque to “act” Italian that ultimately borders on minstrelsy. Namely, we simply put on an Italian face, for which the more serious notions of self-identity and cultural identity fall by the wayside!

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More felicitous while more concise and with a more chiseled focus that is exclusively literary, George Guida contends in his volume The Peasant and the Pen 60 that, because they were often portrayed as criminals or amoral opportunists, Italian/American men have been among the most misrepresented, misunderstood, and, we might add, maligned ethnic groups of the past one hundred years. 61 The purpose of his book, we are told, is to provide a deeper understanding of Italian/American masculinity through the interpretation of Italian, Italian/American, and other narrative texts. He begins with a reading of Giovanni Verga’s late-nineteenth-century Sicilian peasant tales. While he offers up aptly competent readings in a general sense, the specialist reader of Italian literature might feel a bit short-changed; in this regard, Guida simply depends too much on traditional sources, whereas the more recent critical works would have aided him in his readings and thus allowed him to contextualize more fully these stories. To do so surely requires an extensive cross-referencing with the Italian American, and this would make for a much more extensive study—perhaps, to be sure, a different project. 62 While Guida’s reading of Horatio Alger’s stories are intriguing, they are analyzed within a context on autobiographies, and one might surely question the connection beyond first-glance similarities. They are, that is, two different literary objects, two different genre—fiction and autobiography— brought together on the same playing field; in so doing, Guida surely offers an intriguing combination of textual forms. That said, he might have fleshed this out further, to offer his reader and the critical community at large an explicitly unusual lens through which to read concomitantly these two genres, a critical act for sure, as we come to understand from what follows, that Guida can readily perform. In chapter 2, Guida engages in a discussion of the conflicted narrative relationship to Italian and American audiences as impresa/ripresa. What Guida wishes to accomplish is spot on; his intent is clearly that of demonstrating a type of coincidentia oppositorum, indeed a tension, with regard to the two terms—the “Italian” and the “American”—of the Italian/American writer. In fact, he states: “In this way, through the tactics of impresa and ripresa, Italian American narrators and characters develops identities both in harmony and contrast with American values. They become hybrids, truly Italian Americans” (38). This is patently true, and to a significant degree, as Guida clearly demonstrates, such “harmony and contrast” are present in many texts. Guida sees impresa as that “process by which Italian American authors tell their stories that enact the lessons of [Ben] Franklin’s Autobiography, the myth of the Making of Americans. By the making of Americans [Guida] mean[s] the process of Americanization, and two varieties of it, assimilation and incorporation” (37). In contrast, Guida continues, ripresa

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Guida is correct to underscore this conflict in his discussion of impresa/ ripresa. We know from the works of both Rose Basile Green (1974) and Werner Sollors (1986) that this tension has existed since long ago. Basile Green had spoken of an analogous phenomenon within the history of Italian/ American narrative; at that time, she discussed her four stages of “the need for assimilation,” “revulsion,” “counterrevulsion,” and “rooting.” 63 Sollors, in turn, subsequently spoke to the notions of “consent” and “descent.” 64 Guida’s desire to recast this notion in terms of Italian signs is admirable and most welcomed. The issue, however, is indeed one of terminology and translation. Ripresa indeed does work in this context as “the narrative opposite of impresa.” What does not function well in this context is the notion that ripresa “is the process by which Italian immigrant autobiographers criticize American life” (my emphasis). Within the definition of ripresa as a noun, there is no explicit notion of criticism, as Guida seems to want it. There is, nonetheless, in the figurative sense, a definition of the verb “riprendere” as “ammonire, correggere (=trattenere dal male),” which surely underscores Guida’s point when teased out in this sense. 65 That said, the notion of ripresa as critical act is summarily and predominantly inferential, dependent more on the informed reader’s ability to infer as much, and as such the general enterprise at this juncture in the book does work. 66 Chapters 3 (“Family, Beautiful Women, and ‘Stupid Ideas about Writing’: John Fante’s [Italian] Americanness”) and 4 (“Electric Blue Italian: Anthony Valerio and the Rewiring of Italian American Male Identity”) are much more felicitous and make us appreciate better Guida’s acute literary voice. Here, Guida is in better control of the material; he has found a unique critical voice; and he firmly sets his stride as he advances his critical voice. This study ends with a very strong chapter on Anthony Valerio’s narrative fiction; in this critical act alone, Guida’s overall study makes a significant contribution to literary Italian Americana. Anthony Valerio has been writing for decades, successfully publishing a plethora of short stories and novels, and the time had already come for him to receive a certain type of recognition and evaluation that springs forth from Guida’s final chapter. George Guida’s book, in the end, is a valid enterprise, on one hand, at revisiting part of Italian/American fiction—the early era—and, on the other, of introducing new criticism on established voices. The connections that he makes in the second half are what, for this reader, truly constitute the more

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fascinating part of Guida’s study, giving long past due, for instance, to a writer such as Anthony Valerio, for what seem to be inscrutable reasons why Valerio is not more frequently read and discussed within Italian Americana.

What I am obviously speaking to in all of the cases I discuss here is a sense of accountability and responsibility vis-à-vis the critical act. Indeed, there are numerous sources that may escape our attention; undoubtedly, we have all missed something in our work along the way. However, when those sources lacking are, instead, ubiquitous in our semiotic sphere, the critical act in question falls under suspicion of incompleteness and, thus, unreliability with regard to the chronological points of origin of those ideas therein articulated. Why such lacunae occur is not an easy issue to resolve. With the intention not to impugn anyone’s motives, I simply would submit that such misinformation, misrepresentation, and/or ignorance of previous sources might in part be due to the fact that the field of Italian/American criticism is still a young voice, as I mentioned at the outset. This being the case, two reasons come to mind that might contribute to such lacunae. First, some of those engaged in the field may indeed be overwhelmed by their zeal and thus fall victim to haste, which could very well contribute to overlooking certain sources, especially those books and essays that are either out of print or are included in limited publishing venues, such as small presses or journals with a restricted print run. Second, with the number of publication of books and journals still limited in comparison with other fields of ethnic study, a network of intellectual interchange among Italian Americans has yet to be firmly established, for which the existence of important sources may not readily come to light in everyone’s semiotic sphere. Nevertheless, we must also admit that models for a thorough examination of the works in question are not lacking: I would list among them Helen Barolini, Mary Jo Bona, Fred Gardaphè, Edvige Giunta, and Robert Viscusi, to name a few of those who have surely furrowed the cultural path. 67 GETTING TO KNOW YOU! What can we do about this? I believe that a number of people have already begun to work in this arena of “inter-ethnicizing” Italian/American textual (read also, visual) criticism by engaging in comparative ethnic studies, by incorporating theoretical tools into their analyses when possible, and by constructing critical paradigms that can further aid us in decoding our written and visual texts; among others, Viscusi, Gardaphé, Bona, and Giunta come to mind in this regard. 68 Thus, as I have stated elsewhere, 69 precisely because

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the social and cultural dynamics of the United States reveal a constant flux of changes originating in the very existence of the various differentiated ethnic/ racial groups that constitute the overall population of the United States, Italian/American intellectuals must continue to reshape their roles, even if ever so slightly, from that of a raconteur of what took place, a role that may lean more toward nostalgia than analysis, to that of cultural examiner and, eventually, cultural broker. Together with the likes of Helen Barolini and Robert Viscusi, Fred L. Gardaphé has proven to be one of the most industrious readers of Italian/ American literature and thus engaged in a brokering of sorts that few others before him had. Proof of his pertinacity to date was the admirable amount of work that he had amassed—a handful of books, dozens of essays, interviews, short stories, and plays—before the publication of his Italian Signs, American Streets, an extremely important book-length study within the trajectory of Italian/American criticism, one that necessarily shed even greater light on the Italian/American literary landscape and its critical reception. 70 If there is one thing that we have learned in the past fifty-odd years, it is that literary and/or critical theory in the hands of today’s well-informed reader (i.e., one who is conversant with a general notion of post-structuralism) has the potential to cast aside the old lens of the monolith and reconsider Italian/American literature though a more prismatic lens that allows us to focus in on the different aspects of our ethnicity as it has changed over the decades and across generations from a dualistic discourse to a multifaceted conglomeration of cultural processes transgressing Italian, American (read, here, also Canada and United States, as one indeed should), and Italian/ American cultural borders. Indeed, the works of Viscusi, Gardaphé, Aaron et al. afford their readers the hermeneutic freedom to read as they semiotically wish while still remaining context sensitive, as Umberto Eco warns that we should. 71 Gardaphé maneuvers throughout the greater realm of critical discourse, engaging past methodological readings of ethnicity as well as more recent theoretical interlocutors and their predecessors of structuralism and poststructuralism. Italian Signs, American Streets consists of a lengthy methodological-theoretical introduction, an epilogue, and five chapters, each of which demonstrates different stages of Gardaphé’s tripartite division of reading and/or classifying Italian/American narrative: chapter 1, “Narrative in the Poetic Mode”; chapter 2, “The Early Mythic Mode: From Autobiography to Autobiographical Fiction”; chapter 3, “The Middle Mythic Mode: Godfathers as Heros, Variations on a Figure”; chapter 4, “The Later Mythic Mode: Reinventing Ethnicity through the Godmother Figure”; chapter 5, “Narrative in the Philosophic Mode.” Each chapter is then divided into smaller sections that accompany the reader through a prismatic perspective that is at once historical, philosophical, and cultural.

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Daniel Aaron, Helen Barolini, William Boelhower, Jerre Mangione, Werner Sollors, and Robert Viscusi are just some of the names that subtend Gardaphé’s critical imperatives throughout his book. But Giambattista Vico’s concepts of the three stages of man are the cornerstones for Gardaphé’s overall interpretive strategies. Analogous to Aaron’s general notion of the three stages of the “hyphenate writer,” 72 Gardaphé sees the different stages that an ethnic writer traverses as reminiscent of Vico’s three cultural ages. After a delightfully personal account of his first experiences with Italian/ American literature and another section dedicated to a general discussion of its current interpretive situation, Gardaphé proposes his culturally “specific methodology” for the greater disambiguation of Italian/American contributions to the U.S. literary scene. He reminds us here that through Vico’s “notions of a culture of three ages—the Age of Gods, the poetic stage; the Age of Heros, the mythic stage; and the Age of Man, the philosophic stage— we can create an interesting retrospective approach to reading the history of Italian American narratives” (15). These three ages, Gardaphé goes on to tell us, have their parallels in modern and contemporary sociocultural constructions of realism, modernism, and postmodernism: “The movement from mode to mode can be read as movement from an imaginative idealism through social realism to an intellectual idealism that accompanies a decadent postmodernism,” none of which, Gardaphé rightly underscores, should be “categorically applied to ‘generations,’ or to a single author’s oeurve,” since “a writer’s narrative strategy can develop and shift among these modes throughout [one’s] career” (17). In making such an analogy, it is important to remember, as Aaron had already underscored, that personal experiences “comprised the very stuff of . . . literary material” for both the first-stage (“local colorist”) and secondstage (“militant protester”) writers, whereas the third-stage writer travels from the margin to the mainstream without either renouncing or abandoning his or her cultural heritage. For Gardaphé, Vico’s three ages (read, Aaron’s three stages) constitute the pre-modernist (the “poetic” = “realism”), the modernist (the “mythic” = “modernism”), and the postmodernist (the “philosophic” = “postmodernism”). For the “poetic” writer, then, the vera narratio (Gardaphé’s appropriation of Vico’s term) constitutes the base of what she or he writes. In the reconciliation of two cultures, this writer usually departs from an autobiography of immigration and his or her negotiation with the host culture. Costantine Pannunzio, Pascal D’Angelo, and Marie Hall Ets are the main focus of this pre-mythic lens. Gardaphé’s discussion of the “mythic” writer is the most extensive, occupying three of his five meaty chapters. It is here that Gardaphé can also best demonstrate the subtleties of difference between these writers as well as his

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own acuity of thought that he brings to the interpretive table. Pietro di Donato, John Fante, and Jerre Mangione (chapter 2); Mario Puzo, Gay Talese, and Giose Rimanelli (chapter 3); and Helen Barolini, Tina DeRosa, and Carole Maso (chapter 4) represent the three stages of Gardphé’s “mythic” Italian/ American writer. Thus, we witness the necessary complexities of theorizing such a taxonomy where writers of the early mythic mode dealt with the bridging of “Italian and American cultures, creating a synthesis that can be called Italian America . . . [as well as using] their writing both to document and escape the conditions under which they were born and raised” (57). Bouncing off the historical practice of powerful Italian Americans god-parenting (86–87), especially during the Depression, Gardaphé underscores the relevance of the myth of the godfather figure, as “a direct response to . . . Italian immigrants to ‘make America’” (86), in the writers of the middle mythic mode. Finally, in a shift that underscores both structure and gender, the final mythic mode is analyzed through the grandmother figure in the works of three women. Through such a figure, these writers can “create models that enable their protagonists to gain a sense of identity as both ethnic Americans and women” (119). While his modernist, mythic second-stage writer engages in various forms and degrees of criticism of the perceived restrictions and oppression set forth by the dominant group, Gardaphé’s postmodernist, philosophic writer may seem at first glance to rid himself or herself of his or her ethnicity. But this is precisely the most courageous and original points of Gardaphé’s study. He offers here a most cogent example of ethnic signs relegated to the margin (154)—what at first glance may seem to be an absence—and continues to rehearse his notions of the “visible” (chapter 4) and “invisible” (chapter 5) Italian/American writers in his reading of Gilbert Sorrentino and Don DeLillo. Finally, Gardaphé later tells us, this writer finds himself or herself in a decisively self-reflexive stage for which she or he can decide to transcend the experiential creativity of the first two modes by either engaging in a parodic tour de force (Sorrentino “in comedic ways” [192]) through his or her art or by relegating any vestige of his or her ethnicity to the background of his or her artistic inventions (DeLillo and his “marginal characters” [192]). In his evangelical-of-sorts epilogue, Gardaphé first dedicates a few pages to the short fiction of the more contemporary writer Mary Caponegro, whose italianità is reflected in, among other things, “new encounters with contemporary and historical Italy” (193). He then concludes this final chapter with a list of more than fifty other writers whose works could have also been used to easily illustrate his interpretive strategies. 73 Italian Signs, American Streets was a most fundamental book to date on Italian/American literature. It introduced for the first time, on a large scale, a significant theoretical codification of the literary condition of Italian America. As such, it now serves as a model not only for the Italian/American literary voice but also for other ethnic

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voices, since we are now well past the third generation and must now take some sort of inventory also from this point of view.

A few years later, Mary Jo Bona followed suit with her book Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers. 74 Second only to Helen Barolini’s trailblazing anthology The Dream Book (as Bona herself had classified it), Claiming a Tradition is a thorough exegesis on women’s literature within Italian Americana. In this study, Bona sets up an interpretative journey based on themes, not chronology. Concentrating on eight significant voices since the 1940s, she divides her work into five chapters, offering her reader wellresearched, acute, and discriminating interpretations of the genre of Italian/ American women writers in general and the specific books analyzed in particular. In discussing notions of italianità, Bona analyzes Mari Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods (1949) and Marion Benasutti’s No Steady Job for Papa (1966) in her first chapter. Both novels, we see, underscore the tradition of “developmental novels” where the characters adjust to the idea of difference within American culture (18). The novelty here is that the traditional bildungsroman is set topsy-turvy within the Italian/American milieu. Chapter 2, in turn, focuses on the Italian family in America and the struggles that ensue as the children become American (Octavia Waldo, A Cup of the Sun [1961] and Josephine Gattuso Hendin, The Right Thing to Do [1988]). “Submission to old ways” and “suppression of desire” (58) are the underlying themes that Bona examines, thus bringing to the fore the most difficult situation in which children of immigrants—especially women—found themselves. The re-shaping of the bildungsroman continues in chapter 3. Diana Cavallo’s A Bridge of Leaves (1961) and Dorothy Bryant’s Miss Giardino (1978) occupy center stage, and Bona underscores how the ethnic element is transformed into suffering. We see how cultural duality—Italian and American—becomes synonymous with emotional and/or mental illness, albeit temporary, which ultimately figures as a necessary stepping-stone for the characters to reconcile their ethnic legacies with their present-day situation. “David and Anna,” Bona tells us, eventually “discover creative ways to reinvent their cultural past, knowing their ancestors, long dead, cannot provide them immediate access to help them formulate or sustain their identities” (125). Bona’s chapter 4, “A Process of Reconstruction,” deals with two of what we might consider masterpieces of Italian/American fiction: Helen Barolini’s Umbertina (1979) and Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish (1980). While still classifiable as bildungsromans, both books are also most innovative in structure and theme. Barolini informs her novel with a healthy dose of clear-cut feminism not

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present in previous Italian/American works. She deals with those seemingly taboo issues of oppressive patriarchy, sexual freedom, and a woman’s right to choose—themes nowhere else to be found with such creative candor. De Rosa, in turn, engages in a narrative technique of “multiple perspectives, overlapping narratives, and interior monologues” (129) in her character’s journey to rediscover and reinvent her italianità. Bona ends her study with a thirty-five-page excursus on where we were at the end of the decade, taking into account the more recent women writers who, consciously or not, had surely benefited from their predecessors discussed in the book’s previous chapters. Thus, we come to read about the newer generation represented by the likes of Dodici Azpadu and Rachel Guido de Vries; Carole Maso and Agnes Rossi; Rita Ciresi, Anne Calcagno, and Renee Manfredi—all of whom are some of the more contemporary writers of a later generation. In the end, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers also blazed a trail, similar to Barolini’s anthology. Mary Jo Bona succeeded with great aplomb in bringing to the fore a reading of Italian/American women writers through both a local (Italian America) and universal (United States) interpretive lens. This is one of the overall goals of critics of Italian Americana—indeed, that of critics of most ethnic texts, I would submit. This was, then, the first successful book-length study of its kind whose author proved most able to deal with the text and its relationship to other “coethnic” works specifically, while situating those very “ethnic” works within the greater kaleidoscope that is the United States. When it appeared over a decade ago, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers provided us with what we needed because it gave us what had been lacking visà-vis the female voices and because it served as a model for future books to come.

Edvige Giunta’s Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors, which appeared a few years later, was a welcomed book on the scene and adds something new to what Bona and Gardaphè have already provided. 75 Giunta’s book is dedicated to the female voice within Italian Americana and, as such, underscores a minority group within a minority group, thus underscoring an ironic and paradoxical dilemma of sorts. Yet, it also draws attention to the notion of Italian Americana at large, shedding light on the fact that Italian Americana is still in need of some “grass-roots” intellectual activism. 76 It is, I would submit, this manifesto-like tone to Giunta’s study that helps to characterize its unique place in what is still a young critical tradition within Italian America.

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In this regard, Giunta prefaces her collection of literary essays with some very important points and, as few others have done, essential warnings to the Italian/American community. At first, she emphasizes who she is and why she does what she does: There is nothing selfless about my dedication to Italian American women and my abandonment of Joyce: This work was right for me, an Italian woman, Sicilian immigrant and, more recently, an American citizen who, although economically privileged by comparison with earlier generations of Italian immigrants to the United States, still carries to this day the baggage of cultural marginalization linked to her ethnicity and gender. Although I do not want to frame and explain my scholarly choice entirely within the bounds of identity politics, the personal and cultural pull that Italian American studies held for me did act as a catalyst. (xv)

Immigration, we see, is still an issue, as she points out; she is one who “still carries to this day the baggage of cultural marginalization linked to . . . ethnicity and gender.” Here, furthermore, Giunta rightfully connects what some might call the inevitable and affixed bond between gender and ethnicity. What is of equal importance is her insistence on the current “baggage of cultural marginalization,” a component of Italian America, in our specific case, that is not just part of one’s ethnic history but indeed continues to have its impact today at the beginning of the third millennium, when Giunta published his study. Reluctant to exist according to a one-note keyboard, and rightfully so, the “bounds of identity politics” contribute to the aforementioned “marginalization” that can be, as Giunta states, both “personal and cultural.” What Giunta accomplishes in her book and what the likes of Barolini, Bona, Gardaphè, and Viscusi have also done is to enlarge the notion of Italian America and, in so doing, to question those traditional values, what we saw Joseph Sciorra characterize earlier in chapter 1 as those “‘common sense’ histories and assumptions.” Giunta indeed anticipates such necessary interrogations once more in her preface: What underscores my work and those of many of the people—men and women—involved in this burgeoning movement known as Italian American studies is the questioning and expanding of the significance of “Italian American” and, on a broader level, the creation of new perceptions about culture and gender identity, especially as they intersect with race, class, and sexuality. I am concerned with helping to dispel the myth that a particular identity equals a particular political position and with affirming the importance of diversity. While my interest lie specifically in Italian American women, authors, it will become clear throughout this book that the implications of this concern resonate with other ethnic groups as well, particularly in the wake of recent cultural and political conversations on multiculturalism. (xvii)

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Giunta’s “questioning and expanding of the significance of ‘Italian American,’” together with Sciorra’s aforementioned commonsense histories, lead us to interrogate and, when valid, debunk on a more cognitive level, what some have deemed, over the years, unquestionable epistemologies of how we see ourselves and our history: namely, to use Giunta’s words, “that a particular identity [does not equal] a particular political position” and that we must “affirm [instead] the importance of diversity.” To be sure, those “cultural and political conversations on multiculturalism” that Giunta exhorts her reader to take up with regard to “other ethnic groups” proves equally significant for an engagement in analogous conversations within the world of Italian America. The grassroots intellectual activism to which I referred is articulated by, and inherent in, Giunta’s work. She is insistent on underscoring the many facets of such a complex advocacy: Literary history is not made in the ethereal world of ideas alone. It requires, particularly in the case of women and minority writers, a grassroots commitment on the part of literary critics as well as collaborative work among scholars, teachers, literary agents, editors, publishers, and, of course, readers. 77 (xvi)

While there is ample movement of cohesion on the part of Italian/American women 78—and one might wonder if it is their particular position within male-dominated Italian America that is a stimulus in this regard—within the greater sphere of the Italian/American community, such notions of cultural cohesion are still far and few in between. 79 While Giunta’s “long-standing feminist politics” have led her to view, rightfully so, ethnicity as a “site for the articulation of a politicized and progressive Italian American positionality’’ (8), this can also be extended to the entire community of Italian Americans in North America, especially within the United States. The last book that I shall discuss in this rassegna is Robert Viscusi’s Buried Caesars and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing. 80 As with Giunta’s book, here Viscusi adds a preface and introduction that prove to be required reading for anyone, lay or academic, interested in and, more significant, committed to a sort of social activism with regard to Italian America. That said, it is important to underscore that this is not a book for literary scholars only. Indeed, this is a book, in some ways, for the non-literary, precisely because Viscusi infuses in his textual analysis historical references and social commentary that, on one hand, educate and, on the other, lead the reader to consider the critical act in general and its varying potential. Thus, for those who are interested in the literary act, they have much to mine and use as a trampoline for other readings that may be stimulated by Viscusi’s analyses. Equally so, for those who are interested in any form of activism with regard to Italian Americans today, it is imperative that they

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have a fundamental knowledge of Italy’s history and how it might relate to today’s world of Italian America. It is not enough to know the dates and keyword facts that many individuals and associations—local, regional, and national—have complied from time to time. These are good for the public schools, tidbits and facts on which children can then eventually build their knowledge of Italian Americans. But for the individual who claims to be in the forefront, who declares, if by action only, to be the spokesperson, she or he needs to know all of what Viscusi (and Giunta) supply to the reader in his preface and introduction. Anything short of a solid knowledge of these facts—and how to relate then to other phenomena—is simply not acceptable. This is what our paesani can learn from Viscusi and company, all those whom I have discussed in this last section especially; indeed, this is what we all must take possession of and be capable of understanding how these historical facts might manifest themselves today and what impact they may continue to have, as we move forward. What we eventually come to understand from Viscusi’s work is that language is a vehicle for communication as well as marker for identification so that the American of Italian came to English “with the mental habit of people who have lived forever in a dialect” (26). Such being the case, language became the marker of class—“dialectal, Viscusi underscores, equals low class—and, consequently, social power—“dialectic,” he ultimately tells us, is, rightfully so, “verbal struggle” (26). Language thus fixes us initially in a social locale (read, class) and then categorizes us, brands us, so to speak, to assign us a “set of possibilities and positions in the process of history” (27). In his second chapter, “De vulgari eloquentia: Ordinary Eloquence in Italian America,” Viscusi adapts a Dantean, if not Dantesque, strategy to speak to the immigrant’s linguistic and social challenge in his attempt to discourse within a U.S.-dominant culture, survive and prosper from such an experience, and ultimately leave its own trace within this seemingly host culture for those who will follow. The Italian American, Viscusi cogently tells us, “writes for a nation whose absence makes itself felt” (42)—an absence, we might add, that has its origins in distance, on one hand (no longer in Italy), and resistance (from the host country), on the other. In this sense, then, “Italian American eloquence . . . wishes to awaken Italian America to a sense of self, and then to console, to encourage, and to locate for this mythical nation a secure place that no one can confuse with its lost homeland or its fabulous landfall” (42–43). This is the double-edged sword that so much challenges Italian America from within. The Italian American must be that able linguistic and hence cultural acrobat, capable of moving between both worlds, inhabiting the one while recalling the other, and vice versa. This is tantamount to a tarantella-type dance on the hyphen, the inhabitance of that interstitial space that Arnold van Gennep, so aptly described as the “liminal,” 81 that “transitional period” (11) of a “passage from . . . one social world

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to another” (10). Here, more than a one-way passage, we can indeed speak in terms of a to-and-fro, or, better, the constant state of in-betweeness of the metaphorical dance on the hyphen. These are the two fundamentally theoretical chapters of Viscusi’s exemplary study. His subsequent chapters go on to apply this theoretical mind-set to the readings of various literary works that we might readily call classics, unearthing the numerous “buried Caesars,” the many facets of Italian nationalist and, as he underscores, imperialist ideology that Italian emigrants exported with them, including those “impossible ideals and exaggerated claims to which Italian Americans still give their devotion” (6). These are indeed the beliefs that have now been “written in new countries and in new languages” (6). But these beliefs, Viscusi warns at the outset, requires a certain capability: “Reading Italian American writing well means understanding its secret themes, where they come from, how they work, and what they accomplish” (6). To read them well, both Viscusi and I would surely agree, requires both a sound knowledge of Italian history and, at the very least, a working knowledge of Italian language. This, as the late Felix Stefanile often declared, “there is no ontology without archeology.” This, we might also state here, is what we might consider a major flaw in the various discourses that emanate from certain corners of Italian America, where self-proclaimed spokespeople, monolingual and slightly read, elbow their way, so to speak, to the forefront to monopolize the podium. This, we must sadly recognize, is our greatest and most grave challenge in Italian America, what we can safely label the “town-gown” gap. As I stated at the outset of this discussion, such a gap can be readily bridged through a reading of Buried Caesars, accompanied, we should reiterate at this juncture, by the likes of many whom I have previously discussed herein: Bona, Gardaphé, Giunta, and Guida, at the very least. CULTURAL STUDIES: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO OUR OWN TEXTS! What I have obviously spoken to up to this point in this chapter is the necessity for a change in attitude as we re-examine the entire realm of cultural products of Italian America. It would behoove all who work within the field of Italian/American studies, as some included here have already done, to avail themselves of the more recent tools of textual (read, also, cultural) interpretation as we all move forward. It is, in fact, precisely with regard to this new role, something that has already manifested itself in a number of Italian/American intellectuals, that the notions and tools of what we know as cultural studies and/or multiculturalism can aid us immensely. In general, we may consider cultural studies as that mode of analysis that takes as its focal

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point of argument, as Stuart Hall tells us, “the changing ways of life of societies and groups and the networks of meanings that individuals and groups use to make sense of and to communicate with each other.” 82 What is of primary significance is Hall’s insistence on plurality (societies and groups) and interconnectedness (to communicate with one another). Hall’s plurality and interconnectedness form an obvious and necessary couplet that resulted from the changing attitude toward the notion of melting pot (the rejection of assimilation) and that was ultimately supplanted by any one of the many metaphors and similes, which readily connote difference and individuality of all groups that constitute the U.S. population. 83 But cultural studies must also be “critical” insofar as it must be more than the “mere description of cultural emergents that aims to give voice to the ‘experience’ of those who have been denied a space to talk,” as Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton describe what they distinguish as “dominant” or “experiential cultural studies,” which “offers a ‘description’ of the exotic ‘other’ and thus provides the bourgeois reader with the pleasure of contact with difference.” 84 Instead, for them, critical cultural studies “is not a description but an explanation, not a testimonial but an intervention: it does not simply ‘witness’ cultural events, but takes a ‘position’ regarding them” (8). 85 As Hall as well as Zavarzadeh and Morton underscore, “change” is the operative word. For Zavarzadeh and Morton, especially, critical cultural studies should constitute “an articulation of the cultural real that will change the conditions which have blocked those voices from talking” (8). If we accept the premise that cultural studies represent, among other things as stated earlier, “the weakening of the traditional boundaries among the disciplines and of the growth of forms of interdisciplinary research that doesn’t easily fit . . . within the confines of existing divisions of knowledge” (Hall 11), then we may surely open ourselves up to different modes of analysis that go beyond those “traditional boundaries” of literary study so often concerned with the formalistic and the thematic. Mere rhetoric and signification should not suffice; other critical perspectives should become part of our interpretive arsenal. This is especially true since many contemporary Italian/ American writers avail themselves of certain generative tools that were not necessarily popular a decade or two ago, generative tools that have their origin in a number of different sources: in different national cultures, if not the epistemological collision of different national cultures; 86 in critical thinkers becoming creative writers; in the influence of other media on the written word; in the incorporation of popular cultural forms with those considered more highbrow; or in the highbrowization and/or glorification of the popular arts, such as film, romance narratives, and music videos. 87 One such arsenal that we may wish to investigate as a source of critical ammunition is that dedicated to the examination of postcolonial literature. One voice in what has become a wide field of study among those already

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well known is that of Aijaz Ahmad. 88 In his response to Jameson’s essay on national allegory and Third World literature, 89 Ahmad took issue with what he considered Jameson’s limited and reductive assumption that Third World literature revolves primarily around the notion of a national allegory. This notion that literature may revolve primarily around one or two notions for it to be considered such—or perhaps because it is considered such and not something else—may be seen as an analogue to the case of some ethnic literatures in the United States: namely, that an ethnic literary piece has to contain certain thematic motifs or adopt specific formalistic structures for it to be considered part of that certain ethnic rubric. Otherwise, the work and its author are considered not to belong to that very same group of hyphenated writers. This somewhat reductive notion of categorizing art forms indeed limits our ways of examining them. Returning now to Ahmad’s essay, we see that what is more relevant here, then, is not so much his objections to Jameson, as his own notions that lie at the base of such criticisms. Therefore, bouncing off of some of Ahmad’s notions immediate to post-colonial literature, we may indeed state that with regard to the notion of ethnic literature—or for that matter any other literature 90—such a notion, first of all, cannot be “constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge”: that such a categorization “cannot be resolved . . . without an altogether positivist reductionism” (4). Second, other “literary traditions [e.g., third world, ethnic] remain, beyond a few texts here and there, [often] unknown to the [dominant culture’s] literary theorist” (5). Third, and perhaps most relevant, “literary texts are produced in highly differentiated, usually over-determined contexts of competing ideological and cultural clusters, so that any particular text of any complexity shall always have to be placed within the cluster that gives it its energy and form, before it is totalised into a universal category” (23; my emphasis). These three notions, I would suggest, constitute a significant ideological framework of cluster specificity within which Italian/American intellectuals could, and indeed should, consider further the notion of Italian/American literature as a valid category of U.S. literature and re-think the significance of the Italian/ American writer within the re-categorization of a more generalized notion of the so-called “hyphenate writer.” 91 Such a strategy responds to a necessity of inclusiveness of all groups. For until all groups—the so-called dominant class and non-dominants—are included in a cultural discourse, we run the risk of (1) maintaining the obvious aesthetic hierarchy of a major literature and numerous minor literatures; (2) remaining stuck within a thematically grounded discourse of nostalgia, for which only lietmotifs such as pizza and nonna retain aesthetic currency; and (3) conserving the divisiveness that seems to exist today, precisely because an aesthetic hierarchy is maintained, both within and outside the Italian/ American community, of creative writers and critical thinkers. With “its

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focus on the politics of the production of subjectivities rather than on textual operations, [cultural studies] understands ‘politics’ as access to the material base of [power, knowledge, and resources]” (Zavarzadeh and Morton 1991, 208). Cultural studies also “insists on the necessity to address [these] central, urgent, and disturbing questions of a society and a culture [in] the most rigorous intellectual way . . . available” (Hall 1992, 11). It thus “constitutes one of the points of tension and change at the frontiers of intellectual and academic life, pushing for new questions, new models, and new ways of study, testing the fine lines between intellectual rigor and social relevance” (11). For only when all these concerns are addressed and all U.S. identifiable groups and their differences are foregrounded on equal terms through the exploratory lens of cultural studies (one thing that must take place both within and outside the Italian/American community) can then the notion of multiculturalism function effectively as a useful expression of difference, 92 leading ultimately to a more level field of play for critical discourse and intellectual exchange. If there is one thing that we have learned, it is that literary and/or critical theory, in the hands of today’s well-informed reader (i.e., one who is conversant with a general notion of post-structuralism), has the potential to cast aside the old lens of the monolith and reconsider Italian/American literature though a more prismatic lens that allows us to see the different nooks and crannies of our ethnicity as it has changed over the decades and across generations from a dualistic discourse to a multifaceted conglomeration of cultural processes transgressing Italian, American (read, here, also Canada and United States, as one indeed should), and Italian/American cultural borders. Indeed, the works of Robert Viscusi, Fred Gardaphé, Mary Jo Bona, Edvige Giunta, Daniel Aaron et al. afford their readers the hermeneutic freedom to read as they semiotically wish while still remaining sensitive to context, as Umberto Eco so keenly warns we should. 93 NOTES This chapter is culled from various sources that I have compiled, digested, and continue to discuss, and it thus represents a type of re-thinking, on my part, of what we have thus far acquired, indeed constructed, as an Italian/American critical discourse. As the tone of my discussion is of a critical nature, I would suggest two essays for a more celebratory discourse on the state of affairs of Italian/American criticism. See Steven Belluscio, “Sixty Years of Breaking Silences: A Brief History of Italian/American Literary Criticism.” Italian Americans: A Retrospective on the Twentieth Century—Selected Essays from the 32nd Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, edited by Paola A. Sensi-Isolani and Anthony Julian Tamburri (Staten Island, NY: AIHA, 2001), 241–67, and Josephine Gattuso Hendin, “The New World of Italian American Studies.” American Literary History 13, no. 1 (2001): 141–57. 1. See Joseph Sciorra’s blog on i-Italy.org where he discusses prime examples of this type of stultifying ethnic boosterism. While the cases that Sciorra discusses may indeed be hyperbolic to some degree, the desire not to confront uncomfortable issues is not rare among the non-

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intellectual powerbrokers of the community. In addition, a notable gap still exists between such powerbrokers and the intellectual sphere of Italian America so that any possibility of analytical dialogue and debate remains still a rare occurrence. 2. For more on Peirce and ethnicity, see my “In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer: Definitions and Categories,” A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/ American Writer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 3–20. 3. See my “Beyond ‘Pizza’ and ‘Nonna’! Or, What’s Bad about Italian/American Criticism? Further Directions for Italian/American Cultural Studies,” MELUS 28, no. 3 (2003): 149–74. 4. We have indeed demonstrated our ability to cohere as a group, as we did in 2010 to save the Advanced Placement Exam in Italian. The Embassy of Italy, together with the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations and other national groups, such as the Columbus Citizens Foundation, the National Italian American Foundation, COPILAS, and the American Association of Teachers of Italian, to name a few, joined forces to raise the requisite funds and further develop a national strategy for the promotion and promulgation of the teaching of Italian language and culture nationwide. In this regard, one individual stands out, Representative Frank Guarini, for his substantial donation of $250,000, eclipsing just about all the groups save the Columbus Citizens Foundation and the National Italian American Foundation. 5. See her Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 1. 6. The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo (Paramount, 1972). 7. Goodfellas, directed by Martin Scorsese, screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi (Warner, 1990). 8. Director Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican (screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Mardik Martin [Janus, 1974]) ends with his mother’s recipe onscreen with the closing credits. 9. True Love, directed by Nancy Savoca, screenplay by Namcy Savoca and Richard Guay (MGM, 1989). 10. Betsy ’ s Wedding, directed by Alan Alda, screenplay by Alan Alda (Disney, 1990). 11. As I write these lines at this juncture, I am reminded of an experience that I had in the early 1990s at the national conference of the then American Italian Historical Association, where I presented a Peircean-based semiotics of reading Italian/American literature. After I finished my presentation, the chair of the session proceeded to introduce the third speaker with the following preface: “Now back to real literary criticism, I present . . .” There was absolutely no reaction from anyone. I remember how utterly embarrassed, and not for me, I felt at the time—that, within our profession of Italian/American literary criticism, anything new, different, theoretical, obviously not based in some form of fundamentally repressive historicalbiographical reading, could not be considered “real” literary criticism. 12. See his preface to Franco Mulas, Studies on Italian-American Literature (Staten Island, NY: CMS, 1995), vii–viii. I shall refrain in this context from discussing Mulas’s book. I have already done so elsewhere, speaking to some of the missing voices (e.g., Robert Viscusi and Fred L. Gardaphé) and “the old lens of the monolith” through which he reads Italian/American literature in his book. See my “Italian/American Literary Discourse: Two Recent Contributions,” Forum Italicum 30, no. 2 (1996): 423–32. 13. In discussing notions of diaphora, differentia, and diversity, Djelal Kadir (“Introduction: America and Its Studies,” America: The Idea, the Literature, special issue of PMLA 118, no. 1 [2003]: 9–24) underscores the impact of theory over the past thirty-plus years, a statement that is indeed germane to my discussion here: “The theoretical turn in scholarly and pedagogical discourses of the last third of the twentieth century sensitized us to the constructed nature of national myths and to the repercussively and expediently performative nature of individual and collective cultural identities. The movement generated by this insight has been away from the ontological and toward the functional and epistemic—that is, from what things and cultures are to how they behave and to what ends, as sites of knowledge and regimes of truth” (15). 14. See his preface in The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, ed. Pellegrino D’Acierno (New York: Garland, 1999), xv–xvi.

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15. Rose Basile Green, The Italian-American Novel: A Documention of the Interaction between Two Cultures (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974). 16. Helen Barolini, The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). 17. See Olga Peragallo, Italian-American Authors and Their Contribution to American Literature (New York: Vanni, 1949). 18. Overall, I should add, The Italian American Heritage is an excellent collection despite the infelicities mentioned here and in my detailed review published elsewhere (see The Italian American Review 7, no. 2 [2000]: 163–69). 19. See Kenneth Scambray, The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada (Toronto, Canada: Guernica, 2000), 19. 20. Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 21. See Mario Maffi, “The Strange Case of Luigi Donato Ventura’s Peppino: Some Speculations on the Beginnings of Italian-American Fiction,” in Multilingual America, 166–75, and Anna Maria Martellone, “The Formulation of an Italian-American Identity through Popular Theater,” in Multilingual America, 205–9. 22. Peppino was originally published in French in 1885: L. D. Ventura, Peppino (New York: Jenkins, 1885). It was subsequently published in English as part of the collection Misfits and Remnants, co-authored by L. D. Ventura and S. E. Shevitch (Boston: Ticknor, 1886). All three versions (French, English, and Italian) are now available in the trilingual volume edited by Martino Marazzi. See Luigi Donato Ventura, Peppino il lustrascapre, edited by Martino Marazzi (Milan, Italy: Franco Angeli, 2007). See also Frank Lentricchia, “Luigi Ventura and the Origins of Italian-American Fiction,” Italian Americana 1, no. 2 (1975): 189–96. 23. Here, Maffi is quoting Alide Cagidemetrio’s introduction to Peppino, by Luigi Ventura, in The Longfellow Anthology of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors and Marc Shell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 24. See Daniel Aaron, “The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters,” Smith Alumni Quarterly (July 1964): 213–17; now revised in Rivista di studi anglo-americani 3, nos. 4–5 (1984–1985): 11–28. 25. See Emelise Aleandri and Maxine Schwartz Seller, “Italian American Theater,” Ethnic Theater in the United States, edited by M. Schwartz Seller (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), and Emelise Aleandri, A History of Italian American Theater: 1900 – 1905 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1984). 26. The one Italian work that I would underscore at this time is Emilio Franzina’s Dall’Arcadia in America: attività letteraria ed emigrazione transoceanica in Italia (1850–1940) (Turin, Italy: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1996), which remains the only work of its kind to date. In it he offers his reader a detailed history of the literary activity that took place during the period in question. The work of the other scholars that I have mentioned is in the format of essays or monographs on individual Italian-language or bilingual writers. Other essays of interest may be found in Jean-Jacques Marchand’s edited collection La letteratura dell’emigrazione: gli scrittori di lingua italiana nel mondo (Turin, Italy: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1991). 27. With regard to cinema, the situation is much more fertile, I would say. Italians are very much aware of the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino, Quentin Tarantino, Nancy Savoca, and Martin Scorsese, for instance, and individual studies on these filmmakers are numerous. Instead, panoramic book-length studies on Italian/American cinema are very few indeed. To date, two are in print in Italy: Paola Casella, Hollywood Italian: gli italiani nell ’ America di celluloide (Milan, Italy: Baldini & Castoldi, 1998), and Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony Julian Tamburri, eds., Scene italoamericane: rappresentazioni cinematografiche degli italiani d ’ America (Rome: Luca Sossella Editore, 2002). 28. For more on the relationship among Veronesi, Vichi, and Fante, see Emanuele Pettener’s book Nel nome del padre, del figlio, e dell’umorismo. I romanzi di John Fante (Florence, Italy: Franco Cesati Editore, 2010). 29. In this regard I would mention, for instance, Caterina Romeo, “Nella letteratura italo americana,” in Storia dell’emigrazione italiana: arrivi, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De

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Clementi, and Emilio Franzina (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2002), 632–60, and her Narrative tra due sponde: Memoir di italiane d ’ America (Rome: Carocci, 2005). 30. See Gay Talese, “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?” New York Times Book Review (March 14, 1993): 1+. I remind the reader of my more detailed discussion of the issues involved in chapter 1 of this study. 31. The journal Italian Americana, in turn, published a forum, “Where Are the Italian American Novelists? A Candid Exchange on Gay Talese’s Essay with Poetry Editor Dana Gioia and Rita Ciresi, Albert DiBartolomeo, Thomas DePietro, Richard Gambino, Daniella Gioseffi, and Eugene Mirabelli,” Italian Americana 12, no. 1 (1993). In the subsequent issue (Italian Americana 12, no. 2 [1994]), Robert Viscusi and Dana Gioia continued the debate and succeeded in offering a more insightful set of notions on the subject. As an aside, I would be remiss not to mention that two conspicuous names are absent from these two series of responses: Helen Barolini and Fred Gardaphé. Barolini is the editor of the first anthology of Italian/American writers and a novelist and essayist; Gardaphè, in turn, is a longtime champion of Italian/American literature and an essayist, editor, and fiction writer, and in 1996, he authored of the first book-length study of Italian/American narrative (Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996]) since Rose Basile Green’s initial study. 32. Scambray uses this term twice in his introduction (15, 18), alternating with the more common binomials that I have already mentioned. It is clear, however, that he privileges this dangerously historically relevant term over the less periodizing couplets “Italian American” or Italian Canadian.” 33. The term has been recently re-considered in a more positive context and within a more international project dedicated to a theorization of the Italian diaspora. See Piero Bassetti’s Italici: An Encounter with Piero Bassetti, with Paolino Accolla and Niccolò D’Aquino (New York: Bordighera Press, 2008); and Italic Lessons: An On-going Dialog, with Niccolò d’Aquino (New York: Bordighera Press, 2010). 34. The general, broad-painting characteristic of the title may seem reflected in an occasional statement that Scambray articulates: “La storia informs us of the current state of Italian studies and points out areas that require further research and writing” (24). If anything, La storia is about the Italian experience in the United States, something better characterized as Italian/American studies, not Italian studies. This second area deals, for the most part, with much of what occurs within and/or related to that geocultural area that we know as Italy. A minor point? Perhaps. But for those who negotiate the waters of “Italian studies” and “Italian/ American studies” one should clearly differentiate between the two geo-cultural zones of intellectual investigation; such distinction, I would suggest, is significant especially with regard to a rigorous, interpretive analysis of cultural productions of Italian America. 35. This groundbreaking essay inaugurated the journal Voices in Italian Americana more than twenty years ago: “Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture,” Voices in Italian Americana 1, no. 1 (1990): 1–13. 36. Mary Ann Mannino, Revisionary Identities: Strategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian/American Women (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). 37. Mary Francis Pipino, “I have found my voice”: The Italian-American Woman Writer (New York: Lang, 2000). 38. Mary Jo Bona, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). 39. Neither Mary Ann Mannino nor Mary Francis Pipino cites Bona’s book, though they do cite willingly her dissertation from which Claiming a Tradition derives. Indeed, there was only one year between the publication date of Bona and both Mannino and Pipino, so we may very well understand the absence of any reference to Bona’s 1999 publication. 40. These are just a few points that I find problematic in this book. I would also point to what seems to be a bit of name-dropping, to beef-up, so to speak, the theoretical foundation of her discourse. The relevance of Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), for instance, which Pipino mentions almost en passant (111), had already been made in greater detail in 1991; see my “Umbertina: The Italian/ American Woman’s Experience,” in From the Margin. Writings in Italian Americana, ed.

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Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), 357–73. 41. See his review “In Need of Revision,” Fra Noi (July 2001): 91. 42. Thomas J. Ferraro, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 43. In comparing the Jewish immigrant’s assimilation process to the Italian’s, David Riesman stated: “As the Italian immigrant has to go through a gastronomically bleached and bland period before he can publicly eat garlic and spaghetti, so the Jewish immigrant must also become Americanized before he can comfortably take pride in his ethnic cuisine, idiom, and gesture”; Riesman, “Introduction,” in Commentary on the American Scene: Portraits of Jewish Life in America, ed. Elliot E. Cohen (New York: Knopf, 1953), xv. 44. West has in fact problematized this issue in an essay, “Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door? Night Thoughts on Italian Studies in the United States,” Romance Languages Annual (1991): 331–38. 45. See Globus et Locus at http://www.globusetlocus.org/en/italic_project. See also his Globali e locali! Timori e speranze della seconda modernità (Milano-Lugano, Italy: Casagrande, 2002) and his previously cited Italici: An Encounter with Piero Bassetti and Italic Lesons: An On-going Dialog. 46. In all fairness, one might proclaim, Ferraro’s book appeared in 2005, whereas Bassetti’s work cited here appeared in 2008 and 2010: his previously cited Italici: An Encounter with Piero Bassetti, edited by Paolino Accolla and Niccolò d’Aquino (New York: Bordighera Press, 2008), and, with Niccolò d’Aquino, Italic Lessons: An On-going Dialog (New York: Bordighera Press, 2010). This is true. But we should also point out that Bassetti’s earlier articulation of his concept of “Italici” first appeared in the aforementioned Globali e locali! Timori e speranze della seconda modernità and, a few years later, in the edited volume Italic Identity in Pluralistic Contexts: Toward the Development of Intercultural Competencies, edited by Piero Bassetti and Paolo Ianni (Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2004). 47. See Christian Messenger’s The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became Our Gang (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Bill Tonelli’s “The Godmother: The Woman Who Taught Mario Puzo the Value of Secrecy,” Slate.com (May 2003); and John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell’s The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). See also my Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema (New York: Bordighera Press, 2011), especially chapter 3, “Michael Corleone’s Tie: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and the Rhetoric of Antinomy.” 48. Ferraro does mention Messenger in his “Narrative Bibliography.” But this, too, is problematic, since there is no real discussion of the books included therein. Instead, for the most part, we find a list of titles with an occasional parenthetical phrase offered up as some sort of qualifier with regard to its bibliographical antecedent. 49. I realize that I may be begging my own question here. So, allow me to resolve it ever so quickly by borrowing from Ferraro himself and state that this is indeed “another kind of essay for another kind of day.” 50. See my essay “Reflections on Italian Americans and Otherness,” in The Status of Interpretation in Italian American Studies: Proceedings of the First Forum on Italian American Criticism, ed. Jerome Krase (Stony Brook, NY: FILibrary, 2011), 45–60, for one example of how Italian Americans were already sensitive to the issue of stereotyping in the 1960s and tried to coordinate on a national level beyond, what was then, the only national organization of Italian Americans, the Order Sons of Italy of America. 51. I would be remiss not to mention Professor Anne Paolucci’s latest exhortation to that component of Italian America that has protested Coppola’s The Godfather. In her essay “Preserving the Future through the Past,” she states: “The Godfather—a genial account, among other things, of the power assumed by a few strong men to protect themselves and their community in the early days, when Italians had to deal with a hostile environment and had to turn to their own, for justice. . . . Still: are we pressing the wrong buttons? Do we really expect Hollywood to apologize for The Godfather? Why should it? The film has become a classic, and for good reason: it’s one of the best ever made, with a superb cast; a realistic account of the

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hostility between the Irish and the Italians, in the early days; a drama of power as it takes on the law, and of gradual changes that came about in the ‘families’ at that time. In the end, of course, all arguments disappear: it’s only fiction . . . but also a piece of history”; see her ItalianAmerican Perspectives (Middle Village, NY: Griffin House, 2007), 17 (elision textual). 52. As I write, there has been the Guido issue under discussion. The MTV “reality show,” so to speak, Jersey Shore has been contested these past few years at all levels both within and outside the Italian/American community. Regardless of where one stands, this is an issue that needs further articulation by both sides, first and foremost within the Italian/American community and then on a more broad scale as part of a general discourse within the dominant culture of the United States. For more on this issue, see Letizia Airos and Ottorino Cappelli, eds., Guido: Italian/American Youth and Identity Politics (New York: Bordighera Press, 2011), which includes the proceedings of a January 2010 symposium organized by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College/CUNY. See also the New York Times article “Discussing That Word That Prompts Either a Fist Pump or a Scowl,” Arts, January 23, 2010. 53. See chapter 3 of this study for the bibliographical references on these three critics. 54. Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood (New York: Doubleday, 1974); Ann Cornelison’s Women of the Shadows (New York: Vintage, 1977). 55. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962). 56. I remind the reader of Gerald Meyer, “Frank Sinatra: The Popular Front and an American Icon,” Science and Society 66, no. 3 (2002): 311–35; and Jon Weiner, “When Old Blue Eyes Was ‘Red’: The Poignant Story of Frank Sinatra’s Politics,” New Republic (1986). See my Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema, especially chapter 2, “Frank Sinatra and Notions of ‘Tolerance’: The House I Live In.” 57. The operative word here is “perceived,” because while there are those members of the Italian/American community that have surely scourged the group, there is an equal amount, if not more, who are actively engaged in positive cross-ethnic relations, as, in fact, did take place historically within the community. 58. Alongside the likes of Carla Freccero’s excellent essay that Ferraro has read (“Our Lady of MTV: Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer,’” Boundary 2 19, no. 2 [1992]: 163–83), he might have also consulted the following: Susan McClary, “Living to Tell: Madonna’s Resurrection of the Fleshy,” Genders 7 (1990): 1–21; Franco Ricci, “Madonna: Towards a Transvaluation of Values,” Metro Magazine (November 1990): 40; Anthony Julian Tamburri, “The Madonna Complex: Justification of a Prayer,” Semiotic Spectrum 17 (April 1992): 1–2; Ronald B. Scott, “Images of Race and Religion in Madonna’s Video ‘Like a Prayer’: Prayer and Praise,” in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theories, ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), 57–77; Linda Hutcheon, On Irony (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Anthony Julian Tamburri, “Rock Videos as Social Narratives: Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’ and Justify My Love Bending Rules,” in Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2002), 55–75. 59. I am not alone in believing that there is surely more to cover than what meets the eye in this book. Fred Gardaphè, for instance, states: “By design, this book skims a deep and rich culture, in the process creating the illusion that what has been covered is the most important feats accomplished by Italian Americans. While Ferraro does cover, in a charming, if not methodical, way some of the major icons the culture has produced, there’s more to this thing of being Italian American than captured by the author’s words”; American Book Review 27, no. 5 (July/August 2006): 18. 60. George Guida, The Peasant and the Pen: Men, Enterprise, and the Recovery of Culture in Italian American Narrative (New York: Lang, 2003). 61. Indeed, his references to such categorizations can date back to the early cinema, for example, of the twentieth century. Films such as The Skyscrapers of New York (1905), The Black Hand (1906), and The Italian (1915), for instance. 62. The one book that makes a good comparison in this regard is Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, as we saw in chapter 2, with Giovanni Verga’s classic novel I Malavoglia (1881).

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63. See her The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures, especially chapters 4–7. 64. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press), 1986. 65. See Dizionario etimologico online, http://www.etimo.it/?term=riprendere (“ammonire, correggere [=trattenere dal male]” translates “scold, correct [=keep from evil]”). 66. This implication is not only lacking in the definition cited from Zingarelli in his text but does not exist in other very well-respected Italian dictionaries, such as the Devoto-Oli, Garzanti, or Migliorini-Cappuccini, three other leading Italian dictionaries. One might eventually consult the Grande UTET, but even there the notion of criticism is lacking. As a result, this aspect of the discourse is a bit shaky as it stands, whereas a bit of tweaking with some other terminology would better convince any expert reader, both near-native and native speaker of Italian. On the notion of assimilation and incorporation, one might surely consult, among others, Patrick Gallo’s Ethnic Alienation: The Italian-Americans (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974), where he discusses assimilation/acculturation better than most in this regard. With regard to the notion of hybridity, secondary literature is extant. Work to consult on this matter can be found, for example, among the writings of the following scholars: Boelhower, Bona, D’Alfonso, Gardaphè, Giunta, Tamburri, Turner, Verdicchio, and Viscusi. 67. Before continuing to subsequent sections of this chapter, I would be remiss not to bring into the discussion, if ever so briefly, a potentially debatable issue with regard to our subject matter and pronouncements of generalities that might very well mislead the uninformed reader. I refer to Mark Rotella’s review “Beyond the Shadow of the Mob,” Publishers Weekly, October 14, 2002, http://publishersweekly.reviewsnews.com. In reading this review, we might readily believe that the “current state of [Italian/American] literature” is either about food or predominantly nonfiction. This is because, we are told, “serious writing” and “successful writers” such as DeLillo, Baldacci, Lamb, Russo, and Scottoline “have avoided placing Italian American themes or characters at the center of their work.” This may be true in some of these writers. But let us also not forget that, along with DeLillo’s venture into Italian America with his novel Underworld, Lamb and Scottoline have indeed infused their work with Italian/American characters and/or plotlines. Worrisome are opinions presented as something more reliable than what they simply are, as is the case with this review. And so we read: “When it comes to books about Italians, readers ‘tend to think of cookbooks or a book about the mob,’ observed Kris Kleindienst, co-owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Mo.” Or, equally brow-raising is Rotella’s dependency on a distributor’s inventory as opposed to something more objective, such as either Books in Print or the Library of Congress catalogue. Ingram’s database of active titles is precisely that: those titles that Ingram believes will sell, not those titles that are currently in print (i.e., Books in Print) or have at one time or another been printed (Library of Congress). What Rotella thus ultimately does by relying on a commercial distributor, such as Ingram, is willy-nilly deny the history of all those other books and, by extension, the very category of Italian/American literature that have not made it to the warehouses of large distributors. 68. The specific works that I have in mind are the following three: Viscusi, “De vulgari eloquentia: An Approach to the Language of Italian American Fiction,” Yale Italian Studies 1, no. 3 (1981): 21–38; Gardaphé, Italian Signs, American Streets; and Bona, Claiming a Tradition. For a semiotic paradigm for reading Italian/American literature, see my A Semiotic of Ethnicity, chapter 1. 69. I first discussed these issues in my “Italian/American Cultural Studies”; now in my A Semiotic of Ethnicity, chapter 8. 70. I remind the reader here of the full bibliographic reference: Fred L. Gardaphé, Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 241. I would be remiss not to mention here that subsequent to Italian Signs, American Street, Gardaphè published the following: Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004) and From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 2006). 71. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

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72. His “first-stage” writer is the “pioneer spokesman for the . . . unspoken-for” ethnic group, who writes about his or her co-others with the goal of debunking negative stereotypes. Less willing to please, the “second-stage” writer abandons any preconceived ideas in an attempt to demystify negative stereotypes, indicating the disparity and, in some cases, engaging in militant criticism of the perceived restrictions set forth by the dominant group. The “thirdstage” writer, in turn, travels from the margin to the mainstream “viewing it no less critically, perhaps, but more knowingly.” Having appropriated the dominant group’s culture and the tools necessary to succeed in that culture, this writer feels entitled to the intellectual and cultural heritage of the dominant group. As such, she or he can also, from a personal viewpoint, “speak out uninhibitedly as an American”; see his “The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters,” Smith Alumane Quarterly (July 1964): 213–17. Aaron is not alone in discerning this multistage phenomenon in the ethnic writer. Ten years after Aaron’s original version, as mentioned earlier, Rose Basile Green spoke to an analogous phenomenon within the history of Italian/ American narrative; then, she discussed her four stages of “the need for assimilation,” “revulsion,” “counterrevulsion,” and “rooting”; see her The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures, especially chapters 4–7. 73. For a list of predominantly creative writers, see Gardaphé’s The Italian-American Writer: An Annotated Checklist (Spencertown, NY: Forkroads, 1995). 74. Mary Jo Bona, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). See also her more recent By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010). 75. See her Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (New York: Palgrave, 2002). In the pages that follow, I have opted not to discuss Giunta’s book in a manner similar to how I have done previously herein simply because, within the sphere of published books thus far, she has spoken to issues in her preface and introduction that deserve greater attention than most prefaces and introductions get and/or warrant. For a more descriptive analysis of her work, one can readily consult the following reviews: Peter Kvidera in American Literature 75, no. 4 (2003): 892–95; Kathleen Zamboni McCormick in MELUS 28, no. 3 (2003): 208–10; and Ilaria Serra in Italica 82, no. 1 (2005): 144–45, all of whom speak to Writing with an Accent in glowing tones. 76. While here I speak to “intellectual activism,” I would be remiss to ignore the fact that a more sociocultural activism, especially from within the so-called leaders of Italian America, clamors ever so loudly. Too much of who is in the forefront is “self-appointed,” be it through a small circle of influential friends, be it because there exists the false notion that financial success leads to positions of cultural leadership regardless of one’s lack of familiarity with the subject matter at hand. I remind the reader of chapter 1 of this study. 77. In this last category of readers, especially, I would remind my reader of what is now a twenty-year-old manifesto of the Italian American Writers Association, founded by Robert Viscusi and others in 1991: “Read one another.” “Write or be written.” “Buy our books.” For more information, go to http://www.iawa.net. 78. Here, I have in mind two organizations, one cultural (Malia), the other more sociopolitical (NOIAW). For more on the Malia Collective, see http://www. maliacollective.org; for more on NOIAW, see http://www.noiaw.org. 79. Attempts to organize the proverbial “quattro gatti” (literally, “four cats,” an expression in Italian that means “few of us”) within the Italian/American world of literary publishing, for example, has proven unsuccessful this far. The same can be said for the organization of regional and national conferences. It is as if that amorphous phenomenon of old world campanilismo raises its ugly head in these situations. This, of course, is a topic for another discussion, though I did touch on it briefly in chapter 1. 80. See his Buried Caesars and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). Here, too, for a more detailed, descriptive review of, see any of the following: Mary Jo Bona, in Melus 31, no. 2 (2006): 271–74; Peter Kvidera, in American Literature 79 (September 2007): 620–22; Marie A. Plasse, in Italian Culture 26 (2008): 194–97; Matthew Frye Jacobson, in Italian Americana 27, no. 2 (2009): 224–26.

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81. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 11. I remind the reader of our previous discussion on this matter in chapter 5, dedicated to Joseph Tusiani’s Gente mia. 82. See Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies,” Rethinking Marxism 5, no. 1 (1992): 10–18. 83. Again, I would cite Kadir and his notion of permanence vis-à-vis such difference and individuality that subtends the U.S. population. He correctly states the following, I would contend: “Few things exacerbate epistemic crisis as much as polyphonic disruption and heterogeneity. In the United States of America, this has meant many voices contending at once and a simultaneous multiplicity of identities remonstrating for political and socioeconomic recognition. The hardening of this myriad plurality into distinct positions of advocacy, a plurality that was to have melted and melded into singular containment dubbed a ‘melting pot,’ called the bluff of our E pluribus unum and, in the process, unveiled the unassimilability of difference” (13–14). 84. See Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, Theory, (Post)Modernity Opposition: An “Other” Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1991), 8. For Zavarzadeh and Morton, the proponents of the dominant cultural studies include the likes of John Fiske and Constance Penley. 85. I would point out here that Hall tends to be much more reticent about real (radical?) change: almost as if to suggest something to the sort that if it happens fine, if not, oh well. Hall, in fact, seems to limit his vision of change to the academy: “It is the sort of necessary irritant in the shell of academic life that one hopes will . . . produce new pearls of wisdom” (11). 86. I have in mind the case of the bicultural and bilingual writer. With specific regard to the Italian/American experience, see Valesio’s working paradigm in his substantive essay “The Writer between Two Worlds: The Italian Writer in the United States,” Differentia 3–4 (1989): 259–76; and my review essay “Italian/American Writer or Italian Poet Abroad? Luigi Fontanella’s Poetic Voyage,” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 18 (1996): 76–92, which is an abbreviated version of my later essay “Italian/American Writer or Italian Poet Abroad? Luigi Fontanella’s Poetic Voyage.” In the analogous case of the Cuban American, Gustavo Pérez Firmat offers a cogent exegesis of the bilingual writer who, in adopting both languages (at times separately, at other times together in the same text), occupies what he considers the “space between”; “Spic Chic: Spanglish as Equipment for Living,” The Caribbean Review 15, no. 3 (1987): 21. 87. In this regard, see my Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2002). 88. See Ahmad’s response: “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–27. My discussion here of Ahmad and a re-definition of the Italian/ American writer constitutes shortened versions of what already appeared in my essay “In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer.” 89. Frederic Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. 90. I use the adjective other, here, in this essay, as an umbrella term to indicate that which either has not yet been canonized, considered a valid category, by the dominant culture (here, read, for instance, MLA) or, if already accepted, has been so in a seemingly conditional and a somewhat sporadic manner—namely, when it is a matter of convenience on the part of the dominant culture. 91. See also Gioia’s “Response to Robert Viscusi,” Italian Americana, 273–77. 92. For an excellent example of this notion put into effect, see Sneja Gunew, “Denaturalizing Cultural Nationalisms: Multicultural Readings of ‘Australia,’” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 99–112. 93. See Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

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Index

Aaron, Daniel, 133, 137, 146–147, 157, 159n24, 164n72 acculturation, 52, 76, 163n66 Advanced Placement Exam in Italian, 158n4 Ahmad, Ajad, 155–156, 165n88 Airos, Letizia, 162n52 Alba, Richard D., 86n5 Alda, Alan, 158n10 Aleandri, Emelise, 133, 159n25 Alighieri, Dante, 64–66, 80–81, 86n3, 87n10, 124n9 Altieri, Charles, 40n25 Amelio, Gianni, 101n5 American Association of Teachers of Italian, 70n18, 158n4 American Italian Historical Association, 39n2–39n3, 157, 158n11 American Studies Association, 10, 22n32 Antonelli, Sara, 7–8, 21n22 Ardizzone, Tony, 101n10, 136 Arthur, James, 101n4 assimilation, 51, 76, 80, 86n5, 137–138, 143–144, 154, 161n43, 163n66, 164n72 associations, 4, 66, 70n18, 152 Avery, Evelyn Gross, 48, 54n9 Azpadu, Dodici, 150

Bacigalupo, Massimo, 22n27 Baker, Houston A., 22n28 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 38, 40n26 Baldacci, David (also, David D. Ford), 8–9, 134, 149 Bandina, Emilio, 86n3 Barolini, Helen, 130–134, 136–138, 145–151, 159n16, 160n31 Barzini, Luigi, xi, 40n20, 55–68, 68n3, 69n16, 70n18 Basile Green, Rose, 15, 22n31, 39n5, 53n2, 131–133, 141, 144, 159n15, 160n31, 164n72 Bassetti, Piero, x, 139, 160n33, 161n45–161n46 Belluscio, Steven, 157 Benasutti, Marion, 149 Betsy’s Wedding, 130 The Black Hand, 11, 162n61 Boelhower, William, 133, 147, 149 Bona, Mary Jo, xi–xii, 45, 54n6, 103, 113, 116, 124n13, 124n9, 125n28, 131, 137, 145, 149–151, 154, 157, 160n38, 160n39, 163n66, 163n68, 164n74, 164n80 Bondanella, Peter, 69n14 Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 22n28 Bryant, Dorothy, 137, 149 177

178

Index

Bucholtz, Mary, 101n3 Cagidemetrio, Alide, 159n23 Calcagno, Anne, 150 Camaiti Hostert, Anna, xii, 69n14, 159n27 Cannistraro, Philip V., 14, 25n52 Cappelli, Ottorino, 162n52 Caputo, Philip, 8 Carducci, Lisa, 135 Carravetta, Peter, xii, 24n45, 70n20, 104 Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò (Baroness Mariuccia Zerilli-Marimò), 70n22 Casella, Paola, 20n17, 159n27 Castagneto, Pierangelo, 22n27 Catholicism, 40n12 Cavallero, Jonathan J., 22n25 Cavallo, Diana, 149 Charles and Joan Alberto Italian Studies Institute (Seton Hall University), 70n22 Chavez, Leo R., 80, 81, 84, 87n8 Choate, Mark, 87n7 Ciccarelli, Andrea, 24n45, 70n20 cinema, xii, 11, 20n17, 40n18, 63, 69n14, 69n15, 124n17, 140, 159n27, 161n47, 162n56, 162n61 Ciongoli, Kenneth A., 57 Ciresi, Rita, 135, 150, 160n31 Citino, David, 135 City University of New York (CUNY), 23n38, 162n52 Cohen, Eliott E., 161n43 Cohen, Lawrence, 158n8 Columbus Citizens Foundation, 158n4 Come l’America, 25n51 Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations, 158n4 COPILAS, 158n4 Coppola, Francis Ford, 138, 140–141, 143, 158n6, 159n27, 161n51 Corbusiero, Antonio, 134 Cornelison, Ann, 141 Cosco, Joseph P., 21n24 Crialese, Emanuele, 125n20 Crispino, James A., 86n5 cultural studies, xi, 7, 23n33, 129–157, 163n69, 165n84 D’Acerno, Pellegrino, 69n14 D’Alfonso, Antonio, 163n66

D’Angelo, Pascal, 134, 147 Daly, Mary, 160n40 Daniels, Roger, 20n7 De Iuliis, Celestino, 135 de Salvo, Louise, 7, 21n20 De Stefano, George, 17, 124n17 DeConde, Alexander, 19n4 DeLillo, Donald, 8, 21n20, 134, 148, 163n67 Deloria, Philip, 22n32 Department of Italian Studies, New York University, 70n22 DePietro, Thomas, 160n31 DeRosa, Tina, 147, 160n31 Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio, 135 di Donato, Pietro, x, 7, 21n20, 29–38, 39n1, 39n10–40n12, 39n2, 39n5, 40n15, 40n18–40n19, 54n4, 61–62, 69n12, 85, 97, 124n8, 147, 162n62 Di Michele, Mary, 135 Di Piero, W. S., 135 Di Prima, Diane, 135 DiBartolomeo, Albert, 160n31 Diomede, Matthew, 39n1 DiStasi, Lawrence, 20n16, 20n7 Dizionario etimologico online. http:// www.etimo.it/?term=riprendere, 163n65 Dobson, Fred A., 11, 63 dominant culture (also, dominant class), 3, 7, 11, 19, 32, 37, 40n24, 75, 107, 107–108, 109, 110–112, 114, 115, 116, 124n13, 140, 153, 156, 162n52, 165n90 Donnan, Hastings, 80–81, 84, 87n7 Dougherty, Sean Thomas, 111, 123n2–123n3, 124n12 Durante, Francesco, 20n14, 134 Duranti, Alessandro, 101n3 Eco, Umberto, 40n27, 68n4, 101n13, 101n6, 140, 146, 157, 163n71, 165n93 education, 23n38, 44–48, 61–62, 67, 76, 105, 109 Egelman, William, 39n2 Elliott, Emory, 22n32 Embassy of Italy, 158n4 emigration, 9, 20n11, 58, 69n15, 77, 80, 86n3, 87n12, 90–96, 120

Index ethnicity, xi, 9, 22n31, 24n45, 40n23, 47, 53n2, 69n14, 69n16, 70n20, 81–86, 114, 122, 124n9, 126n32, 129, 137, 146, 148, 151–152, 157, 158n2, 159n20, 161n42, 163n64 Fallaci, Oriana, 126n33 family, xi, 11, 13, 18, 36, 45, 48–52, 54n4, 55, 57, 59, 61, 67, 69n16, 77, 84, 87n9, 106, 112, 120, 122, 130, 144, 149 Fanciullo, Maria Carmela, 86n3 Fante, John, 7, 21n20, 134, 144, 147, 159n28 female, xi, 48, 89–100, 103–126n33, 136, 150 Ferrarelli, Rina, x, xi, 89–100, 101n1, 103, 105 Ferraro, Evelyn, 21n22 Ferraro, Thomas J., 22n31, 138–142, 161n42, 161n46, 161n48–161n49, 162n58–162n59 Fischer, Michael M. J., 40n23 Fisher Fishkin, Shelley, 22n32 Fontanella, Luigi, 24n45, 70n20, 165n86 food, 13, 20n17, 34, 35, 62, 97, 118, 129, 163n67 Fox, Steven R., 20n7 Franzina, Emilio, 133, 159n29 Frazzi, Andrea and Antonio, 25n51 Freccero, Carla, 162n58 Frisch, Michael H., 22n32 Gaines, Kevins, 22n32 Galassi, Jonathan, 135 Gallo, Patrick, 163n66 Gambino, Richard, 53n3, 141, 160n31, 162n53 Gans, Herbert J., 46, 53n3, 54n8, 61, 69n11, 141, 162n55 Gardaphé, Fred L., xi, xii, 22n31, 23n33, 29, 37, 39n1, 39n10, 39n4–39n5, 40n18, 40n28, 53n2, 69n15, 124n17, 125n21, 131–133, 136–138, 141, 145–148, 150–151, 154, 157, 158n12, 160n31, 160n40, 162n56, 162n59, 163n68, 163n70, 164n73 Gates, Henry Louis, 22n28 Gattuso Hendin, Josephine, 149, 157

179

gender, xi, 12, 41, 48–52, 77, 89, 103–104, 107, 117–118, 122, 123n4, 124n7, 126n32, 138, 147, 151, 162n58 George L. Graziadio Center for Italian Studies (California State University in Long Beach), 70n22 George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian Studies (California State University in Long Beach), 70n22 Gilbert, Sandra, 135 Gioia, Dana, 135, 160n31, 165n91 Giordano, Paolo, xii, 19n1, 39n5, 40n18, 70n20, 77–78, 79–80, 85, 86n2, 86n4, 87n11, 87n14, 100, 125n22, 132, 160n40 Gioseffi, Daniela, 135, 160n31 Giunta, Edvige, xi–xii, 21n19, 22n31, 123n4, 137, 145, 150–152, 152–154, 157, 163n66, 164n75 Gnisci, Armando, 21n22 The Godfather (original film), 130, 147, 158n6, 161n47, 161n51 Goodfellas, 130, 158n7 Gorlier, Claudio, 20n17, 133 The Gospels, 32, 40n11 Guarini, Frank, 158n4 Guay, Richard, 158n9 Guglielmo, Jennifer, 21n24, 23n36, 25n52, 125n27 Guida, George, 143–144, 154, 162n60 Guido deVries, Rachel, 53n3, 124n13 Gunew, Sneja, 165n92 Gunn, Genni, 135 Hadley, Norman H., 125n20 Hall, Kira, 101n3 Hall, Stuart, 154–156, 165n82, 165n85 Halttunen, Karen, 22n32 Hanrieder, Wolfram F., 68n2 hermeneutic freedom, 146, 157 Hulsman, John C., 161n47 Hutcheon, Linda, 162n58 hyphen, 7, 19n1, 75, 124n12, 137, 153 hyphenated group(s), 4 hyphenated literature, 21n22 hyphenated writer (status of), 3, 75, 124n9, 131 Ianni, Paolo, 161n46

180

Index

immigration, 4–5, 12, 18, 20n11, 25n50, 52, 57, 70n21, 76, 81, 84, 85, 86n5, 87n12, 87n7, 104, 105, 147, 151 irony, 24n41, 56, 59, 68n5, 69n15, 80, 87n12, 109, 162n58 Italian (Italian language), x–xi, 6, 19n1, 20n12, 20n9, 21n22, 22n29, 24n45–25n46, 30–32, 35, 37, 39n8, 40n13, 41, 43, 44–45, 60–61, 63–64, 67, 70n18, 75, 107, 108–109, 113, 113–114, 120, 124n9, 134–135, 139, 143–144, 154, 159n22, 163n66, 165n86 The Italian, 162n61 Italian America, 3–4, 6, 12–13, 14–16, 18, 23n38, 63, 67–68, 113, 124n13, 124n9, 130–132, 141, 147–148, 150–154, 157n1, 160n34, 161n51, 163n67, 164n74, 164n76 Italian American Writers Association, 164n77 Italian Americans (also, Italians in America; Italians in North America; Italians in the United States), ix, 4–5, 7–18, 19n4, 20n17, 20n7, 21n19, 21n24, 23n38, 24n40, 25n52, 39n2–39n3, 53n3, 54n7, 54n8, 60, 61, 67–68, 69n10–69n11, 69n14, 70n21, 98, 109, 124n13, 124n15, 125n19, 125n29, 134–135, 137–138, 140–141, 143, 145, 147, 152–154, 157, 161n50, 162n55, 162n59, 163n66 Italian Association of North American Studies, 9–10 “Italian Poets in America.” Gradiva 10–11 (1992–1993), 24n45, 70n20 Italianamerican, 130, 158n8 Italians, x, 4, 11–12, 16, 21n22, 21n24, 23n36, 47, 56–58, 60–61, 63–67, 68n3, 69n14–69n15, 87n11, 90, 99, 99–100, 107, 109–110, 112, 114, 122, 124n14–124n15, 124n17, 125n27, 139, 159n27, 161n51, 163n67 Italics, The Italian-American TV Show, 25n49 Italy, x, xi, 4, 6–13, 16, 18, 19n4, 20n11, 20n15, 20n17, 21n19, 21n22, 21n24–22n25, 22n26, 23n38, 24n45, 49–51, 55, 57, 57–59, 60–61, 63–67, 69n15, 70n20, 81, 87n12, 87n7, 89, 93,

120, 124n9, 130, 133–135, 139–140, 144, 148, 153, 158n4, 159n27, 160n34 “Italy and Italians in America.” RSA Rivista di Studi Anglo-americani, 9 Jacobson, Mathew Frye, 21n24, 164n80 Jameson, Frederic, 155–156, 165n88–165n89 Jiménez, Tomás R., 86n5 John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 14, 23n38, 162n52 Joseph and Elda Coccia Institute for the Italian Experience in America (Montclair State University), 70n22 Joseph M. and Geraldine C. La Motta Chair in Italian Studies (Seton Hall University), 70n22 Kadir, Djelal, xii, 158n13, 165n83 kaleidoscope, 150 Kaplan, Amy, 22n32 Kelley, Mary, 22n32 Kifner, John, 23n36 Krase, Jerome, 11, 23n36, 39n2, 161n50 Kratochwill, Thomas R., 125n20 Kvidera, Peter, 40n12, 164n75, 164n80 LaGumina, Salvatore, 20n8, 23n35, 124n17, 125n26 Lamb, Wally, 163n67 Lamerica, 101n5 Lawton, Ben, xii, 40n18, 139 Lejeune, Philippe, 68n6 Lentricchia, Frank, 159n22 Leonard, George, 131 liminality (also, liminal), 79–81, 86n6, 100, 153, 165n81 Little Italy: Past, Present, and Future, 19n4 “live Italy,” 16 Lopreato, Joseph, 24n40, 46, 53n3, 54n7, 61, 69n11 “Made in Italy,” 4 Madonna, 141, 162n58 Maffi, Mario, 132–135, 159n21, 159n23 Malanga, Gerard, 135 male, 11, 41; violent male, 41–44; malefemale relationship, 48, 53n3, 93, 104,

Index 144, 152 Manfredi, Renee, 150 Mangione, Jerre, 19n4, 147 Mannino, Mary Ann, 123n4, 136–138, 160n36, 160n39 Marazzi, Martino, 21n20, 80–81, 87n9–87n10, 133, 159n22 Marchand, Jean-Jacques, 24n45, 70n20, 159n26 Martellone, Anna Maria, 132–135, 159n21 Martino, Federica, 19n4 Maso, Carole, 137, 147, 150 Mazza, Antonino, 135 Mazziotti Gillan, Maria, xi, 103–122, 123n1–123n5, 124n11–124n13, 124n9, 125n21, 125n31 McClary, Susan, 162n58 McCutcheon, Wallace, 11 Mean Streets, 97, 101n9 Medici, William, 19n4 Melfi, Mary, 135 memory, 18, 25n52, 40n23, 111, 120, 125n30, 130 Messenger, Christian K., 51, 54n10, 54n6, 140, 161n47–161n48 Meyer, Gerald, 141, 162n56 Miller, Stephen Paul, 109, 116, 123n4, 124n14, 124n16 Mirabelli, Eugene, 160n31 Mitchell, A. Wess, 161n47 modernism, 38, 147 modernist, 38, 147–148 Morreale, Ben, 19n4 Morton, Donald, 155–156, 165n84 Mueke, D. C., 68n5 Mulas, Franco, 39n5, 131, 158n12 museum(s), 14, 67, 70n21, 82, 84 mutism, 110, 125n20 Napolitano, Louise, 39n1, 69n12 National Italian American Foundation, 57, 158n4 Nee, Victor, 86n5 New Jersey Italian and Italian American Heritage Commission, 17 new world, 41, 42, 45–46, 48–49, 77–78, 89, 100, 101n7, 111, 122 NOIAW (National Organization of Italian American Women) 8n78

181

Norelli, Gianfranco, 19n4 nostalgia, 25n52, 123n6, 145, 156 Nuovomondo, 125n20 Ohmann, Richard, 40n25 old world, 43, 45, 46, 48–50, 77–78, 79, 89, 93, 100, 101n10, 101n7 Oliver, Lawrence J., 53n2, 54n11, 141 Orsi, Robert, 21n18 Orsini, Daniel, 29, 37–38, 39n2, 40n19 otherness, 161n50, 165n88 Paci, Frank, 135 Pagano, Joe, 134 Palma, Michael, 135 Pane Amaro, 19n4 Pannunzio, Costantine, 147 Paolucci, Anne, 161n51 Parati, Graziella, 68n6 Parini, Jay, 135 Patriarca, Gianna, 25n51, 42, 53n3 patriarchy, 149 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 40n14, 90, 101n2, 129, 133, 158n2 Peragallo, Olga, 132, 159n17 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 163n66 Pettener, Emanuele, 159n28 “Pietro di Donato.” Voices in Italian Americana (Fall 1992), 30, 40n11 Pileggi, Nicholas, 158n7 Pipino, Mary Francis, 136, 137, 160n37, 160n39–160n40 Plasse, Marie A., 164n80 Portelli, Alessandro, 21n20 postmodernism, 147 postmodernist, 38, 147–148 Pugliese, Stanislao, 25n52 Puzo, Mario, xi, 41–53, 53n1–53n3, 54n11, 54n6, 61, 140–141, 147, 158n6, 161n47 race, 11, 13, 19n4, 22n32, 23n36, 49, 69n15, 103, 113, 114–115, 117, 123n3, 123n4, 125n27, 151, 162n58, 165n82 racialization, 114 racism, 23n36 Radway, Janice A., 22n32 reader (of texts), x, 29, 37–38, 40n17, 55–56, 59, 66, 76, 85, 91, 104, 117,

182

Index

119, 129, 133, 140–144, 146, 149, 152, 155, 157, 159n26, 163n66–163n67, 163n71, 165n93, 169 reading (as process of interpretation), ix, xi, 33, 38, 40n28, 44–46, 51, 55–56, 67–68, 69n14, 76, 78, 85, 109, 117, 124n12, 125n31, 133, 137–138, 141–143, 146–148, 150, 152, 154, 158n11, 162n58, 163n67–163n68, 165n87 Ricci, Franco, xii, 162n58 Ricci, Nino, 135 Riesman, David, 161n43 Rimanelli, Giose, 25n46, 135, 147 Romeo, Caterina, 21n20, 159n29 Rossi, Agnes, 150 Rotella, Mark, 163n67 Ruiz, Vicki, 22n32 Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, 22n28 Russo, Richard, 163n67 Saldivar, Ramon, 22n28 Salerno, Sal, 21n24, 23n36, 25n52, 125n27 Sanchez, George, 22n32 Sartarelli, Stephen, 135 Saunders, Kay, 20n7 Savoca, Nancy, 158n9, 159n27 Scambray, Kenneth, xi, 135–136, 159n19, 160n32, 160n34 Scarpino, Cinzia, 7–8, 21n22 Schaefer, Charles E., 125n20 Schwartz Seller, Maxine, 159n25 Sciascia, Leonardo, 43–44, 54n5 Sciorra, Joseph, 18, 23n36, 53n3, 151, 152, 157n1 Scorsese, Martin, 97, 101n8–101n9, 130, 158n7–158n8, 159n27, 161n44 Scott, Cambell, 138 Scott, Ronald B., 162n58 Scottoline, Lisa (also, Lisa Scott), 8–9, 163n67 semiotic double layering, 56 semiotic functions, 29 semiotic horizon, 15 semiotic mechanism, 16, 67 semiotic sphere, 145 semiotic(s), x, 16, 24n45, 37–38, 40n26, 40n28, 69n14, 70n20, 80, 93, 120, 129, 133, 135, 137, 158n11, 158n2, 162n58,

163n68–163n69, 163n71, 165n87, 165n93 Serra Ilaria, 69n15, 164n75 Shirley, Carl, 22n28 Shirley, Paula, 22n28 Siani, Cosma, 86n3, 133 Sinicropi, Giovanni, 37, 39n10, 39n5, 40n21 The Skyscrapers of New York, 11, 63, 162n61 Sollors, Werner, 132, 144, 147, 159n20, 159n23, 163n64 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 148 Soule, John B. L., 59, 68n8 Spasaro, Sheila A., 125n20 Stefanile, Felix, 3, 131, 135, 154 Sumida, Stephen H., 22n32 Tagliabue, John, 135 Takaki, Ronald, 22n28 Talese, Gay, 15, 24n41, 135, 147, 160n30, 160n31 Tamburri, Anthony Julian, 30, 40n18, 69n14, 69n15, 125n22, 132, 137, 157, 159n27, 160n40, 162n58, 163n66 Tomasi, Mari, 149 Tonelli, Bill, 140, 161n47 traditional role(s) (behavior/values), 49, 92, 93, 151 True Love, 158n9 The Truman Show, 111, 125n23 Turco, Lewis, 135 Tusiani, Joseph, x–xi, 25n46, 43, 75–86, 86n2–86n3, 87n14, 87n9–87n10, 89, 90, 100, 101n11, 105, 131, 135, 158n11 Tusmith, Bonnie, 22n28 Valente Family Italian Studies Library (Seton Hall University), 70n22 Valerio, Anthony, 134–135, 144 Valesio, Paolo, 24n45, 70n20, 165n86 Vallone, Antonio, 107, 124n12 van Gennep, Arnold, 79–80, 81, 84, 86n6, 100, 101n12, 153, 165n81 Vangelisti, Paul, 135 Vecoli, Rudy, 21n18 Ventura, Luigi, 132–133, 159n21, 159n22, 159n23 Verdicchio, Pasquale, 135, 163n66

Index Verga, Giovanni, 40n17, 143, 162n62 Veronesi, Sandro, 134, 159n28 Vichi, Marco, 134, 159n28 Viscusi, Robert, xii, 3, 11, 22n31, 23n33, 30, 39n5, 39n6, 131, 133–134, 136, 145–147, 151, 152–154, 157, 158n12, 160n31, 163n66, 163n68, 164n77, 165n91 Vitiello, Justin, 110 Von Huene Greenberg, Dorothee, 32, 40n11 Wald, Priscilla, 22n32

183

Waldo, Octavia, 149 Waters, Mary C., 86n5 Weiner, Jon, 141, 162n56 Weir, Peter, 125n23 West, Cornel, 13 West, Rebecca, xii, 139, 161n44 Who’s That Knocking at My Door, 97, 101n8, 161n44 Wilson Gimore, Ruth, 22n32 Wilson, Thomas M., 80, 81, 84, 87n7 Zamboni McCormick, Kathleen, 164n75 Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud, 155–157, 165n84

About the Author

Anthony Julian Tamburri is professor of Italian and comparative literature and dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College–The City University of New York. His dozen authored books include A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer (1998), Italian/American Short Films and Videos: A Semiotic Reading (2002), Semiotics of Re-reading: Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Italo Calvino (2003; also in Italian), Narrare altrove: ovvero diverse segnalature letterarie (2007), Una semiotica dell’etnicità: nuove segnalature per la scrittura italiano/americana (2010), and Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema (2011). Among his editorial work, with Paolo A. Giordano and Fred L. Gardaphé, he is contributing co-editor of the volume From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (1991/2000) and co-founder of Bordighera Press, publisher of Voices in Italian Americana, Italiana, and three book series (VIA Folios, Crossings, and Saggistica) and the Bordighera Poetry Prize. Other edited books include Screening Ethnicity: Cinematographic Representations of Italian Americans in the United States (2002). Tamburri’s degrees are from Southern Connecticut State University (bachelor of science, Italian), Middlebury College (master of arts, Italian), University of California–Berkeley (doctorate, Italian). Before coming to The City University of New York, he taught at Florida Atlantic University, where he served as chair of languages and linguistics and then associate dean for research, graduate, and interdisciplinary studies and director of the doctoral program in comparative studies. He is past president of the American Italian 185

186

About the Author

Historical Association and the American Association of Teachers of Italian. He is executive producer of the TV program Italics and a member of the founding directors of the portal i-Italy.org. Among his honors, he was named distinguished alumnus in 2000 by Southern Connecticut State University; in 2008, Bronx president Adolfo Carrion awarded him the certificate of appreciation for work as educator and community leader for Italian Americans; in 2010, he was conferred the Italian Language InterCultural Alliance’s Frank Stella Person of the Year Award and, in addition, the honor of Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. In 2012 he received the Lehman-LaGuardia Award for Civic Achievement from the Order Sons of Italy in America of the New York State Commission for Social Justice and the B’nai B’rith of the New York metropolitan region. In the same year, he was inducted into the House of Savoy as Cavaliere in Merit.