Beyond the Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience

Beyond the Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience. A. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Parini, Editors. Hanover and London: The UP of New England, 1997. xiv. 320 pages. Beyond the Godfather collects memoirs with essays on literature and culture, all by Italian-Americans, most of them professors of literature. While my guess is that most readers will pick up the book for the memoirs, they may be quite disappointed until they get past them and into the better written and, surprisingly, more personally engaging essays in literary criticism. After reading Beyond the Godfather, I realized, like the contributors whose surnames mask their heritage, that I would have to explain my credentials for writing about a book on "the real Italian American experience." Like them, I am a second generation American, but my ethnicity was mixed at my parents' marriage, not mine: my father's parents came from Ireland, my mother's from Italy. My Irish grandparents lived near us, but my Italian grandmother lived with us; for most of my childhood, she slept in the bedroom next to mine. From that vantage point, she exerted enormous influence. She heard my night prayers and guided me to ask God's blessing on all my relatives, Italian and Irish. She introduced me to the mysteries of making marinara and rolling gnocchi. She taught me to sing Italian operas and Italian lullabies, and she made sure I knew when the saints I learned about at school, Francesca Cabrini, John Bosco, Dominic Savio, not to mention my patron saint, Francis of Assisi, were not just Catholic but also Italian. We lived in a city (Newport, Rhode Island) whose primary ethnic groups were Irish and Portuguese, but we were close enough to vibrant Italian-American enclaves like Federal Hill in Providence and the South End in Boston never to feel cut off from other Italians. Even as a young girl, I was aware of events in my life and in the world from a dual perspective: I knew that Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics thought differently about the authority of priests, the discipline of nuns, the integrity of local politicians, the infallibility of the Pope, and the virtues of a Catholic President. Perhaps because I grew up in a household that was American working class and multi-ethnic, some of the experiences recorded in Beyond the Godfather do not ring true as examples of Italian-American experience. For instance, with a few remarkable exceptions, the stories of displacement seem less about disparities between Italian-American and mainstream culture than between working class and middle class cultures. Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, and other ethnic Americans tell the same stories when theirs has been the generation to move out of the working class and into a system whose work ethic, family relationships, and social connections are so different from their parents'. Likewise, the narratives that recount struggles to separate from crippling ethnic stereotypes seem not so much Italian as ethnic. These stories might belong to Polish, Slovakian, Vietnamese, Korean, African, and Italian-Americans. Typically, the memoirs are richly detailed and evocative, albeit strangely conflicted; many seem both emotionally remote and self-indulgent. A few essays sound forced, as if the writers had never considered their ethnicity important until it offered them the opportunity to write for this collection. Despite the inclusive title, all the memoirs were written by academics, and by professors of literature at that. I wonder if it is really that difficult to find Italian-Americans working in other academic disciplines or areas outside of academe. The most powerful and compelling memoirs in Beyond the Godfather take personal experience and make it both universal and political, or recognize something worth synthesizing (even when doing so is painful), worth reincorporating and passing along to others. …