Crossing Ocean Parkway : readings by an Italian American daughter

Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter. Marianna De Marco Torgovnick. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. xi + 177 pages. $22.50. Ocean Parkway is Brooklyn, New York's Champs Elysee, built up in the 1920s and now showing its age. For many years, it has separated ethnic, religious and socio-economic communities and does so even today. For Italian-Americans, aspiring to join the world of the educated middle class, the trip across Ocean Parkway was a significant journey across what seemed an insurmountable barrier. There were a few tenacious and talented Italian-Americans who left the "wrong side" of Ocean Parkway, but they were ones who were different, who did not quite fit in. Maria De Marco was supposed to be someone's wife and settle in the comfortable surroundings of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. She didn't do that and crossed Ocean Parkway to earn a Ph.D. from Columbia University and to become a Professor of English at Duke University. But Crossing Ocean Parkway is the story of someone who did not leave everything behind. Marianna Torgovnick is someone who carries with her a sense of the community from which she came, of the people who helped shape and mold her, and of how it affects her life and professional perspective. A person comfortable in the various worlds she has come to know and join, she savors how the soul is nurtured by the culture. Crossing Ocean Parkway is divided into two parts, each with four essays. Four of the essays were previously published (in Partisan Review, New Formations and SAQ) although each of them has been revised. There is also an epilogue. The first three essays and the epilogue are principally about Bensonhurst. She begins with the Bensonhurst that almost everyone in America has come to know as the home of bigotry and racism where, in the summer of 1989, Yusef Hawkins was murdered while peacefully walking its streets. But life and the event itself were not so simple and the people of Bensonhurst are far more complicated, and much more decent than the single-minded would care to know. Marianna Torgovnick knows that it is not so simple as well. She explodes the culture of Bensonhurst, through tales of her family and through the experiences of growing up. She sees both the strengths and the limitations of its people. She lives with their isolation and their fear of the outside world. It is that fear which in large part explains the danger that her family saw in the explorations she made beyond the role of the traditional daughter. Her fascination with the world of ideas, with books, and her insistence on going beyond the safe confines of Brooklyn to get her college education posed challenges to traditional family values. She took many steps, including marrying a Jew, that led her across Ocean Parkway. And yet these were steps that received support from her family even when they could not comprehend what it all meant. It is clear that young Maria was trusted and loved. Indeed, faith involves a suspension of judgment on account of love. And faith, love and encouragement have been a substantial part of her life. After a successful career in graduate school, she joins the faculty of Smith College. This is the topic of her fourth essay, the last in part one, and the essay that is for me exceptionally moving and insightful. …