Going Home: Brooklyn Revisited (Excerpt)

(November, 1974)

During World War II my grandfather had a victory garden in Bensonhurst, a small plot of city-owned land on which, as his contribution to the war effort, he planted hot and sweet basil. To be able, with the blessing and under the patronage of the American government, to do the noble work of farming, the good earth made glad his lyrical Italian heart, he sang aloud with happiness. The song he sang aloud (very loud), as he harvested and hoed, was the Italian Fascist Youth Anthem. Grandpa was unable to see any irony in this; attempts to persuade him that the work of his hands contradicted the words of his mouth merely reinforced his conviction that all American-Americans were simpletons, pazzi (crazy). Wasn‘t he Italian, after all? And wasn‘t he American, after all? And weren‘t all American-Americans perverse - - unable and unwilling to understand the first thing about Italian-Americans, who in any case had no wish to be understood by people, so pazzi that they couldn‘t even pronounce Il Duce‘s name correctly? Till the day he died, Grandpa persisted in pronouncing Mussolini ‘Mussolino,’ arguing with awesome circuitous logic that FDR called him Mussolini, then — since all Americans were pazzi and perverse and had never cared enough to get the final vowel of any Italian name right — it must, of necessity, be Mussolino.

Toward the end of his life, Grandpa, as fierce in senility as he had been in full-blooded vigour, regaled visitors with the story of his flight across the Atlantic with Charles Lindbergh. He had been denied recognition, he claimed, because they wouldn‘t let it be known that an Italian had shared the controls with “an American boy.” Italians were always deprived of their just rewards. (My grandfather, a carpenter, had once worked with Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby; even his most baroque fictions usually had some remote link to an esoteric, truth.)