A tribute to the Italian American family and its trying bonds of love.
Finalist for the 2011 Fore Word Book of the Year in the Autobiography/Memoir Category
‘I was born in 1944, but raised in the twelfth century.’ With that, Joanna Clapps Herman neatly describes the two worlds she inhabited while growing up as the child of Italian American immigrants in Waterbury, Connecticut, a place embedded with values closer to Homer’s Greece than to Anglo-American New England, where the ethic of hospitality was and still is more Middle Eastern and North African than Anglo-European, and where the pageantry and ritual were more pagan Mediterranean than Western Christian. It was also a place where a stuffed monkey wearing a fedora sat and continues to sit on her grandmother’s piano, and a place where, when the donkey got stubborn and wouldn’t plow the field, her grandfather bit the animal in a fury. In essays filled with wry humor and affectionate yet probing insights, Herman maps and makes palpable the very particular details of this culture-its pride and its shame, its profound loyalty and its Byzantine betrayals.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments
With and Without Words: An Introduction
I. HOMER IN WATERBURY: The Backdrop
My Homer
II. THE UNSAYABLE:The Clapps Family
Peter and His Brothers
Paulie e ’u Gagaron’
My Father Telling Stories
Oak Street
Scialababola
Canio Becomes a Citizen
The Aviglianese Society
Mammanonna
Rocco Lauro and the Sausage
Local Politics
The Boys
The Shop
Walter
Unsayable
III. BEFORE AND AFTER TINFOIL: The Becce Family
The Anarchist Bastard
Rille
Waiting for Vito
Tre’ Casc’
Keeping Company
Flesh and Bone
Both Are True
Two
Before and After Tinfoil
Stitching: Our Voices Together
Coffee And
Words and Rags
My Aboriginal Women
Uffa, Jojo, The Monkey
Dropping in on Sandy
Notes of an Unredeemed Catholic
IV. E ’ POI ? AND THEN?
’U Bizz’ di Creanz’: A Piece of Politeness
In Absence
Without My Tribe
The Discourse of un’ Propria Papon’
Lotions, Potions, and Solutions
And La La La
Psychic Arrangements
Despre autor
Joanna Clapps Herman is the author of The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America and No Longer and Not Yet: Stories, both published by SUNY Press. She is also the coeditor (with Carol Bonomo Albright) of Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana and (with Lee Gutkind) Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: Creative Nonfiction Collects New Essays by Italian-American Writers. She lives in New York City.
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