Towards a More Balanced View of Italian American Life, Part 2

To some extent, I can understand why assimilation held such a high priority for my parents, who grew up in the ethnically diverse East End of Hartford, Connecticut and raised my sisters and me in the suburbs, and the rest of their generation. Economic stability and material success were the top priorities for Italian American families raised during the Great Depression. However, this Assimilation Syndrome, which began with the first wave of Italian immigrants and continues to the present day, is presumably the root cause of cultural euthanasia and the main reason for the minimization of the Italian language in America (try to find a public school that offers it), but that’s another essay.

Unfortunately, most Italian Americans are unaware of their rich literary heritage. When most of us think about Italian American writers the names of Mario Puzo and Gay Talese come immediately to mind. Yet there are hundreds of lesser known writers, from Pietro Di Donato (his novel, Christ in Concrete, was an instant bestseller when it was first published in 1939) to Jerre Mangione (Mount Allegro, A Memoir of Italian American Life, 1942) to Tony Ardizzone (In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, 2000), all equally deserving of our attention, whose unique perspective on Italian American life is as genuine as it is complex.

Why does this phenomenon exist in the Italian American community? Perhaps it is rooted in the cultural insecurity of our immigrant ancestors who, for reasons best known to them, were in a hurry to shed their old world customs and their native language as quickly as possible. For the second generation, my father’s generation, the Italian heritage was embarrassing at best and anathema at worst, and they strove to distance themselves speedily from their immigrant provenance -- this desire was intensified, no doubt, by the despicable behavior of Mussolini’s Fascists. In any case, it seems that in the 1950’s the real Italian American heritage got diluted down to the sugar and water of popular entertainers such as Connie Francis, Annette Funicello, Jimmy Durante, Perry Como, Dean Martin and others -- good entertainers but not ethnically interesting or significant -- while the mobster sub-sub-culture, virulent and colorful, was magnified and embraced by the mainstream media with very little fuss from most hard-working good- citizen Italian Americans proud of Frank Sinatra’s public persona and ready to dismiss his possible underworld connections as the price of fame. The middle-class Italian American community had withdrawn into the suburbs grateful to have escaped from the vicissitudes and confinement of their urban neighborhoods (only to regret this and reminisce about them later). The Italian American intellectuals of the 1950’s and 60’s, such as poets John Ciardi, Gregory Corso and Diane di Prima, were busy with other concerns, presumably. However, one could create a related category: entertainment masquerading as genuine art for the purpose of making a profit but acceptable to most Italian Americans because many of us, like many Americans in general, may secretly admire the outlaw, especially if he/she is at the same time recognizably one of us.

Go To Page: 1 2 3