Afbeelding auteur

Vincent Panella

Auteur van Cutter's Island: Caesar in Captivity

4 Werken 31 Leden 1 Geef een beoordeling

Werken van Vincent Panella

LOST HEARTS (2010) 4 exemplaren
Sicilian Dreams (VIA Folios) (2020) 1 exemplaar

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Er zijn nog geen Algemene Kennis-gegevens over deze auteur. Je kunt helpen.

Leden

Besprekingen

Vincent Panella. The Other Side: Growing Up Italian in America. Photographs by Susan Sichel. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1979. 189 pp.; illustrations. $12.95
Vincent Panella has given us a very personal book spiced with considerable wisdom about the lives of the three generations of Italian Americans in his family. The Other Side consists of twenty-six short chapters interspersed with over 100 family snapshots and recent photographs of relatives in Italy. There are also several short poetic exchanges illustrating the generation gap. Using an effective and pleasing format, the book defies classification as a novel, travel book, memoir, or diary.

Panella, who is Sicilian on his mother's side and Neapolitan on his father's side, was pushed from his Queens boyhood to an engineering degree at Carnegie Tech. After marrying a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant midwesterner, Panella took a de¬gree in English and spent the 1960s writing and teaching in the Midwest. The couple's divorce and his new doubts about his life-style drew him back to his family and into a search for his roots. Panella takes us along on this journey to resolve his ethnic identity. Amidst the expected descriptions of intergenerational conflict and close family ties are keen observations and sagacious reflections. Not¬ing the "fanatically frugal" quality of his family, Panella asserts, "Everyone was busy either working or assimilating" (p. 20). In contrast to his own situ¬ation, the steady pace of his grandfather's pick¬and-shovel existence holds some attraction for him, as does the devotion of his family members to humdrum jobs.
He deftly observes that the real migration was not so much from Italy to Hell's Kitchen but from Hell's Kitchen to Queens and that the generational differences between the immigrants and their chil¬dren have been exaggerated by sociologists and historians. A bigger difference is between the sec¬ond and the third generations.
"To be a member of an Italian family is never to be simply yourself" is stated on the dust jacket, and Panella exhaustively explores both the negative and the positive aspects of family closeness. He dis¬putes the myth of the happy Italian family. His Sicilian cousins suggest that one of the prices his family paid for migrating to America was the breakup of the marriages of Panella's grandpar¬ents, parents, and sister, as well as his own. While this was definitely an atypical situation, it reminds us that scholars of ethnicity have often created a false stereotype of uniformly happy Italian families. Panella describes the suffocating aspects of the Italian family: "Nothing is done alone, un¬less one overcomes their tendency to control. . . . Most of my generation and the one before it are bound by the narrow villages outlook: dis¬interested in politics, cognizant of higher educa¬tion as path to a job, not a sensibility, and lacking confidence in their own ability to change things" (p. 49). His sophisticated approach to the family, if not his negativism, is shared by Joseph Giordano's recent articles in the New York–based Attenzione Magazine. Nonetheless, Panella claims, "I was never ashamed of being Italian" (p. 21).
Panella's book is a welcome addition to the ex¬panding literature on growing up Italian. In recent months we have seen published Umbertina by Helen Barolini, Lucinda Mays's The Other Shore, and Joseph Tusiani's Genie Mia—all dealing with Italian-American themes. The tone of The Other Side is more somber than that of Jerre Mangione's Mount Allegro, first published in the 1940s. Panella's uncles seem to have grown up in the Little Italy described in Mario Puzo's Fortunate Pilgrim. Much of what Panella writes about the stultifying aspects of Italian-American culture parallels Jerry Della Femina's self-hating An Italian Grows in Brook¬lyn. Panella's work does not have the grasp of the travail of the first generation that Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete and Three Circles of Light have. Since Panella grew up in (more or less middle-class) Queens, his writing has little to say on the subculture of delinquency described by Joseph Sorrentino in Up from Never. His anguish as a third-generation professional searching for his identity is shared by Tina De Rosa in Paper Fish.'
Despite the above-mentioned commonality, The Other Side is of so personal a nature and of so unique a genre that Panella does not mention that other Italian Americans have had feelings similar to his and have written about them. In this respect, the author seems to be operating in a vacuum—a disturbing situation, indeed, to Italian-American scholars.
Those interested in material culture will also find most of the photographs filled with expressive faces and telling background detail. The gardens, the rooftops, the street scenes, the beach parties, and the formally posed pictures convey a dimen¬sion that even Panella's good writing cannot ex¬press. On the other hand, literal-minded readers will probably wish for more detailed captions.
Because Panella's trip to his ancestral villages is the climax of the tale, this book will be of special interest to those planning to search for their roots in Italy, Panella captures the hospitality, curiosity, anxiety, and rewards evoked by such family re¬unions.
Since the book is a family history which uses photographs appealingly, some readers might clas
I Helen Barolini, Umbertina (New York: Seaview Books, 1979); Lucinda Mays, The Other Shore (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1979); Joseph Tusiani, Genie Min (Stone Park, Ill.: Italian Cultural Center, 1978); Jerre Mangione, Mount Allegro (New York: Crown Publishers, 1972); Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (New York: Lancer Books, 1965); Jerry Della Femina and Charles Sopkin, An Italian Grows in Brooklyn (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978); Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1937); Pietro di Donato, Three Circles of Light (New York: Julian Messner, 1960); Joseph Sorrentino, Up from Never (New York: Manor Books, 1973); Tina De Rosa, Paper Fish (Chicago: Wine Press, 198o).

The Other Side as avant-garde history. But it is primarily an intensely personal family album and diary, and we are all in Vincent Panella's debt for the courage he has shown in sharing with us his struggle for his ethnic identity, his struggle for his soul.
DOMINIC CANDELORO
University of Illinois at Chicago Circle
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
ItalCulturalCenter | Feb 22, 2009 |

Prijzen

Statistieken

Werken
4
Leden
31
Populariteit
#440,253
Besprekingen
1
ISBNs
9