Crossing Ocean Parkway

By Marianna De Marco Torgovnick

Growing up an Italian-American in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York city, Marianna De Marco longed for college, culture, and upward mobility. Her daydreams circled around WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) heroes on television—like Robin Hood and the Cartwright family—but in Brooklyn she never encountered any. So she associated moving up with Ocean Parkway, a street that divides the working-class Italian neighborhood where she was born from the middle-class Jewish neighborhood into which she married. This book is Torgovnick's unflinching account of crossing cultural boundaries in American life, of what it means to be an Italian American woman who became a scholar and literary critic.

Included are autobiographical moments interwoven with engrossing interpretations of American cultural icons from Dr. Dolittle to Lionel Trilling, The Godfather to Camille Paglia. Her experiences allow her to probe the cultural tensions in America caused by competing ideas of individuality and community, upward mobility and ethnic loyalty, acquisitiveness and spirituality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2008
• ISBN: 9780226148366

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Author

Preface

Ocean Parkway is a wide, tree-lined street in Brooklyn, a symbol of upward mobility, and a powerful state of mind. It leads to the tunnels and bridges linking the borough to Manhattan and glitters as a prime address—a typical residence for those who will soon move to the city or the suburbs. In my youth, Ocean Parkway was primarily a boundary for religious groups, dividing Italian and Jewish neighborhoods, but today, along some of its length, it also bristles with racial tensions. When I was growing up, it represented an alternative to Bensonhurst, the working class Italian neighborhood where I was born, which became, in 1989, the site of the shocking racial murder of Yusuf Hawkins.

I see Ocean Parkway as a stage set, an anticipation, a preparation for the bastions of elite American life. For me, upward mobility was a two-step process: first, identifying with school, and hence with Jewish culture rather than the Italian American group into which I was born; then, moving into universities and middle- and upper-middle-class America. The precise stages differ for each group and person, but assimilation always has a double movement: first the desire to be like others; then the realization that the likeness is never complete. To use a metaphor: I will always be crossing Ocean Parkway; I have crossed it; I will never cross it.

This book begins with crossings between ethnic groups and social classes and explores the hybrid cultural identities so typical of American life. I am an Italian American woman married to a Jewish man—a classic New York mixed marriage; I am also a professor of English at Duke University who writes about contemporary America. All these points of view inform the book, with a special interest in how the Jewish-Italian connection plays itself out in personal and intellectual lives.

But crossings—expected and desired crossings, unexpected and even devastating ones—are more broadly the theme of this volume. Crossings between being an outsider and an insider. Between being a professional, a wife, a mother, and a daughter. Between safety and danger, triumph and mourning, ambition and desire, nostalgia and disdain, coping and letting go; being a child, the parent of a sick child, and the child of aging parents. It’s the human things this volume is after.

The essays in this book flow into one another, modulating in tone and focus from Part One to Part Two. The first half of the book is memoir and written in an intensive I, The second half uses my experiences to probe contradictory desires for community and individualism in icons of American culture, from Dr. Doolittle to Lionel Trilling, The Godfather to Camille Paglia. It probes conflicts between acquisitiveness and self-sacrifice, violence and transcendence, male and female identity, the I and the we—themes that I also have written about in my work as a literary and cultural critic, first in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives and most recently in a new book called Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy that was written in part alongside Crossing Ocean Parkway. In fact, a central contention of this book is that there are always crossings between personal history and intellectual life.

CROSSING OCEAN PARKWAY was part of experiments in memoir and autobiographical writing undertaken by my writing group, whose other members during its composition were Cathy N. Davidson, Alice Kaplan, and Jane Tompkins. My personal goal was to do memoir in essay form, with a close and synergistic connection to writing about culture. I thank my friends and colleagues in the group and other friends who provided support and insights: Joyce Carol Oates, Elaine Showalter, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Julie Tetel, Carol McGuirk, and Rosa Blitzer Oppenheim.

I also thank Morris Dickstein, Anjelika Bammer, Frank Lentricchia, and Melissa Malouf, who commissioned some of the original essays. Rachel Brownstein and Anthony Appiah provided helpful in-house readings. Geri Thoma, Susan Ryman, David Lange, and Alan Thomas gave expert assistance at various stages of the book’s publication.

Stuart Torgovnick believed in the book from its inception and patiently read and re-read versions of the essays. He never questioned my right to probe our past—and I thank him for his remarkable generosity. Only the eruption of death into our family has cheated him of the dedication of this volume, which he richly deserves.

My daughters, Kate and Elizabeth, were much on my mind as I wrote Crossing Ocean Parkway. They are old enough now for me to hope I have not violated their privacy. My love for them was an important motivation for the project; I especially hope they feel that when they read the essays on their brother and grandfather.

Finally, thanks to my mother and brother—and the other relatives I name or describe here—for their love and all they have done for me over the years. They never anticipated appearing in my Writing—a factor I take up in the Afterword that has been added to this paperback edition. As I wrote, I hoped the results would not displease them.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE BELOVED DEAD,

Matthew David Torgovnick

Salvator De Marco, Sr.

Nathan Torgovnick

Victor Torgovnick

Richard Chernick

Note on the Text:

In the individual essays, I have retained time indicators appropriate to when each essay was written and have not attempted to bring ages, dates, and other facts in line with the year of book publication.

In the essays that are memoirs, some names and circumstances have been altered slightly.

PART ONE

Crossing Ocean Parkway

One

On Being White, Female, and Born in Bensonhurst

The Mafia protects the neighborhood, our fathers say, with he that peculiar satisfied pride with which law-abiding Italian Americans refer to the Mafia: the Mafia protects the neighborhood from the coloreds. In the fifties and sixties, I heard that information repeated, in whispers, in neighborhood parks and in the yard at school in Bensonhurst. The same information probably passes today in the parks (the word now blacks, not coloreds) but perhaps no longer in the school yards. From buses each morning, from neighborhoods outside Bensonhurst, spill children of all colors and backgrounds—American black, West Indian black, Hispanic, and Asian. But the blacks are the ones especially marked for notice. Bensonhurst is no longer entirely protected from the coloreds. But in a deeper sense, at least for Italian Americans, Bensonhurst never changes.

Italian American life continues pretty much as I remember it. Families with young children live side by side with older couples whose children are long gone to the suburbs. Many of those families live down the block from the previous generation or, sometimes still, live together with parents or grandparents. When a young family leaves, as sometimes happens, for Long Island or New Jersey or (very common now) Staten Island, another arrives, without any special effort being required, from Italy or from a poorer neighborhood in New York. They fill the neat but anonymous houses along the mostly tree-lined streets: two-, three-, or four-family houses for the most part (this is a working-class area, and people need rents to pay mortgages), with a few single-family or small apartment houses tossed in at random. Tomato plants, fig trees, and plaster madonnas often decorate small but well-tended yards that face out onto the street; the grassy front lawn, like the grassy backyard, are relatively uncommon.

Crisscrossing the neighborhood and marking out ethnic zones—Italian, Irish, and Jewish, for the most part, though there are some Asian Americans and some people (usually Protestants) called simply Americans—are the great shopping streets: 86th Street, Kings Highway, Bay Parkway, 20th Avenue, 18th Avenue, each with its own distinctive character. On 86th Street, crowds bustle along sidewalks lined with ample vegetable and fruit stands. Women wheeling shopping carts or baby strollers check the fruit carefully, piece by piece, and bargain with the dealer, cajoling for a better price or letting him know that the vegetables, this time, aren’t up to snuff. A few blocks down, the fruit stands are gone and the streets are lined by clothing and record shops, mobbed by teen-agers. Occasionally, the elevated train (the El) rumbles overhead, a few stops out of Coney Island on its way to the city, a trip of around one hour.

On summer nights, neighbors congregate on stoops that during the day serve as play yards for children. Air-conditioning exists everywhere in Bensonhurst, but people still sit outside in the summer—to supervise children, to gossip, to stare at strangers. Buona sera, I say, or Buona notte, as I am ritually presented to Sal and Lily and Louie: the neighbors, sitting on the stoop. Grazie, I say when they praise my children or my appearance. It’s the only time I use Italian, which I learned at high school, although my parents (both first-generation Italian Americans, my father Sicilian, my mother Calabrian) speak it at home, to each other, but never to me or my brother. My accent is the Tuscan accent taught at school, not the southern Italian accents of my parents and the neighbors.

It’s important to greet and please the neighbors; any break in this decorum would seriously offend and aggrieve my parents. For the neighbors are second only to family in Bensonhurst and serve as stern arbiters of conduct. Does Lucy keep a clean house? Did Anna wear black long enough after her mother’s death? Was the food good at Tony’s wedding? The neighbors know and pass judgment. Any news of family scandal (my brother’s divorces, for example) provokes from my mother the agonized words: "But what will I tell people?" I sometimes collaborate in devising a plausible script.

A large sign on the church I attended as a child for me sums up the ethos of neighborhoods like Bensonhurst. The sign urges contributions to the church building fund with the message, in huge letters: EACH YEAR THIS CHURCH SAVES THIS NEIGHBORHOOD ONE MILLION DOLLARS IN TAXES. Passing the church on the way from largely Jewish and middle-class Sheepshead Bay (where my husband grew up) to Bensonhurst, year after year, my husband and I look for the sign and laugh at the crass level of its pitch, its utter lack of attention to things spiritual. But we also understand exactly the values it represents.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1989, my parents were visiting me at my house in Durham, North Carolina, from the apartment in Bensonhurst where they had lived since 1942, ever since the day they had wed: three small rooms, rent-controlled, floor clean enough to eat off, every corner and crevice known and organized. My parents’ longevity in a single apartment is unusual even for Bensonhurst, but not that unusual; many people live for decades in the same place or move within a ten-block radius. When I lived in this apartment, there were four rooms; one has since been ceded to a demanding landlord, one of the various landlords who have haunted my parents’ life and must always be appeased lest the ultimate threat—removal from the rent-controlled apartment—be brought into play. That summer, during the time of their visit, on August 23rd (my younger daughter’s birthday) a shocking, disturbing, news report issued from the neighborhood: it had become another Howard Beach.

Three black men, walking casually through the streets at night, were attacked by a much larger group of whites. One was shot dead, mistaken, as it turned out, for another black youth who was dating a white, although part-Hispanic, girl in the neighborhood. It all made sense: the crudely protective men, expecting to see a black arriving at the girl’s house and overreacting; the rebellious girl dating the outsider boy; the black dead as a sacrifice to the feelings of the neighborhood.

I might have felt outrage, I might have felt guilt or shame, I might have despised the people among whom I grew up: in a way I felt all four emotions when I heard the news. I expect that there were many people in Bensonhurst itself who felt the same rush of emotions. But mostly I felt that, given the setup, this was the only way things could have happened. I detested the racial killing; but I also understood it. Those streets, which should be public property, belong to the neighborhood. All the people sitting on the stoops on August 23rd knew that as well as they knew their own names. The black men walking through probably knew it too—though their casual walk sought to deny the fact that, for the neighbors, even the simple act of blacks walking through the neighborhood would be seen as invasion.

Italian Americans in Bensonhurst are notable for their cohesiveness and provinciality; the slightest pressure turns those qualities into prejudice and racism. Their cohesiveness is based on the stable economic and ethical level that links generation to generation, keeping Italian Americans in Bensonhurst and the Italian American community alive as the Jewish American community of my youth is no longer alive. (Its young people routinely moved to the suburbs or beyond, and were never replaced, so that Jews in Bensonhurst today are almost all very old people.) Their provinciality results from the Italian Americans’ devotion to jealous distinctions and discriminations. Jews are suspect but (the old Italian women admit) they make good husbands. The Irish are okay, fellow Catholics, but not really like us; they make bad husbands because they drink and gamble. Even Italians come in varieties by region (Sicilian, Calabrian, Neapolitan, very rarely any region further north), and by history in this country (the newly arrived and ridiculed gaffoon versus the first or second generation).

Bensonhurst is a neighborhood dedicated to believing that its values are the only values; it tends towards certain forms of inertia. When my parents visit me in Durham, they routinely take chairs from the kitchen and sit out on the lawn in front of the house, not on the chairs on the back deck; then they complain that the streets are too quiet. When they walk around my neighborhood and look at the mailboxes they report (these De Marcos descended from Cozzitortos, who have friends named Travaglianti and Pelliccioni) that my neighbors have strange names. Prices at my local supermarket are compared, in unbelievable detail, with prices on 86th Street. Any rearrangement of my kitchen since their last visit is registered and criticized. Difference is not only unwelcome, it is unacceptable. One of the most characteristic things my mother ever said was in response to my plans for renovating my house in Durham. When she heard my plans, she looked around, crossed her arms, and said, If it was me, I wouldn’t change nothing. My father once asked me to level with him about a Jewish boyfriend, who lived in a different portion of the neighborhood, reacting to his Jewishness, but even more to the fact that he often wore Bermuda shorts: Tell me something, Marianna. Is he a Communist? Such are the standards of normalcy and political thinking in Bensonhurst.

I often think that one important difference between Italian Americans in neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Italian Americans elsewhere is that the others moved on—to upstate New York, to Pennsylvania, to the Midwest. Though they often settled in communities of fellow Italians, they moved on. Bensonhurst Italian Americans seem to have felt that one large move, over the ocean, was enough. Future moves could only be local: from the Lower East Side, say, to Brooklyn, or from one part of Brooklyn to another. Bensonhurst was for many of these people the summa of expectations. If their America were to be drawn as a New Yorker cover, Manhattan would be tiny in proportion to Bensonhurst itself, and to its satellites, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Long Island.

Oh, no, my father says when he hears the news about the shooting. Though he still refers to blacks as coloreds, he’s not really a racist and is upset that this innocent youth was shot in his neighborhood. He has no trouble acknowledging the wrongness of the death. But then, like all the news accounts, he turns to the fact, repeated over and over, that the blacks had been on their way to look at a used car when they encountered the hostile mob of whites. The explanation is right before him but, Yeah, he says, still shaking his head, "yeah, but what were they doing there. They didn’t belong. The they," it goes without saying, refers to the