Memories of a Dutiful Daughter Book Review by Nina Ascoly Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter by Marianna De Marco Torgovnick University of Chicago Press, 1994, 177pp. Growing up it was not unusual to hear my Northern Italian mother use the adjective "Italo-American" to describe people in a way that seemed , even to a child's ears, a bit dismissive. I'd always say, "but I'm Italian-American, right?" I learned, later, that upon arriving in 1950s New York she had trouble fitting in with the already established, largely Southern Italian immigrant communities. Different language, different ways. The tone I thought I heard in her voice perhaps had crept in because of the tendency of others to lump her in with the people who filled neighborhoods like Bensonhurst, no matter how distant spiritually or remote geographically she felt from them. The result for her daughter was a curiosity for what was beneath the stereotype of the people of these New York communities. Now I live in Brooklyn, encounter the same powerful pigeonholing my mom confronted and continue to unravel the confused feelings of proximity and distance that don't seem to ever go away. A lot of it has been left to imagination, because, as Marianna De Marco Torgovnick writes in her book Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter, mothers of our persuasion aren't all that forthcoming on certain issues. But Torgovnick, now a Duke University English professor with a home in a North Carolina suburb, helps open up this world to visitors. She resists the sentimental, and embraces instead an honest and unapologetic tone while examining her neighborhood and family, an influence, if not the foundation, of her beliefs. Torgovnick confesses that sometimes, ensconced in academia, she feels that ethnicity makes no difference, because through the university she has entered the "educated class." But then she concludes that "invariably, life shows me that ethnicity matters." The title essay is a return to her Bensonhurst neighborhood at the time of the Yusef Hawkins murder. Torgovnick knows its rhythms; in fact, she seems to have become the woman she is in spite of the mores of the neighborhood. "In most ways Bensonhurst has not changed--it has preserved Italian American culture as if in amber," says Torgovnick of a neighborhood she describes as still largely segregated, but a place where the issue of race can no longer be ignored. While never surprised by the reactions she witnesses in her stroll through neighborhood situations, both past and present, Torgovnick often appears the outsider, declining the role Bensonhurst offered her. "Being ethnic has given me sensitive antennae for feeling out of it or excluded; but so has being female, a category often denigrated by Italian Americans," writes Torgovnick, though going on to admit her "strong attraction to powerful (largely male), upper- and upper-middle-class American culture. I want to feel privileged and entitled. At the same time, I identify, I like to identify, with outsiders." She goes on to write, In my youth, Ocean Parkway was a boundary for religious groups; today, it bristles with racial tensions. It remains a prime Brooklyn address--a typical residence for groups that will soon move to "the city" or the suburbs. For Brooklynites, Ocean Parkway is a powerful state of mind and a symbol of upward mobility. I see it 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 Jewish culture, then middle-class American. The precise stages differ for each ethnic group and each 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. The Ocean Parkway of her title, and her childhood, divided Torgovnick's part of Brooklyn into distinctly Italian and Jewish neighborhoods. Torgovnick notes the lack of a written tradition among Italian-American immigrants through the first, second and third generations, because of a foundation laid in the illiterate culture of the south that encouraged Italian American "sons to take pragmatic jobs with set salaries, [and] encouraged their daughters to marry." While Jewish and Italian immigrants arrived in large numbers at a similar point in history, shared neighborhoods, had remarkably similar experiences (Torgovnick's mother and her Jewish mother-in-law both found work in the garment industry) and often came from impoverished regions (Eastern Europe and Southern Italy), the European Jews "brought with them a tradition steeped in the value of education and learning," Torgovnick notes. Jews, especially men like Philip Roth and Irving Howe, documented "the drama of moving up and out." This was rare for Italian Americans, who either ignored their ethnicity in their writings or skipped over the Italian-American experience and wrote of Italy instead. Torgovnick's chapter on The Godfather is valuable, not only as a critique of Mario Puzo's writing and choice of content, but also for her insight into its subsequent handling by the media. There is much in other essays on the relationship between the Italians and Jews of her childhood neighborhood: her father's competitive feelings toward Jews, and her own marriage to a Jewish man from middle-class Sheepshead Bay, who, she says, gave her her freedom and helped remove her from the expectations of Bensonhurst. Jews, she says, were her role models. The book is split into two sections, but the concepts of the individual 'I' and the cultural 'We' are pervasive throughout. While part one is clearly memoir, part two examines how cultural icons fuse the competing desires for community and individuality. In this way her straightforward scrutiny extends past Brooklyn. In "The Paglia Principle," the hypermusings of Camille Paglia are critiqued and chucked into the garbage can of unsound ideas, where they belong. While Paglia's scorn/envy for WASP power structures and jibes against Ivy League in-breeding have something to offer an immigrant outsider looking in, this analysis reminds you how lacking in value Paglia's take on society really is. Torgovnick in no time exposes Paglia for the anti-woman "feminist" she so stunningly is. "Sexual Personae is a book filled with fear, hatred, and loathing of the female body: heterosexual and lesbian," writes Torgovnick of Paglia's 1990 tome. "I think Paglia long ago identified with the Italian American male sense that women can be good, but men are always better." Torgovnick's last essay, about her father's death, brings her analytical journey full circle. The piece provides a review of his place in her life, offering fond memories of trips to "the city," the way he called her a "Philadelphia lawyer" when she was clever. Here an interesting comparison emerges between the level of outreach her adopted New England college-town community offered at the time of her first child's death and the support Bensonhurst neighbors provide during her father's final illness. Although Torgovnick never lets her old neighborhood off easy ("Back in Bensonhurst I felt observed and shut in, as usual"), the folks up north at a place she refers to only as "the College" don't come off looking too good either. This is a book for anyone interested in Brooklyn as it was, but it's no guidebook to plastic madonnas or mafia 'hoods. Crossing Ocean Parkway is better suited for those who like their "then and now" tales infused with the challenge of coexistence, not only in terms of people and place, but with their own memories. .