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An Interview with
Jerre Mangione On
July 26, 1992 I travelled to Haverford, Pennsylvania to interview Jerre
Mangione. I had been quite concerned about interviewing him. He is the doyen
of Italian studies in Rochester, NY, my hometown, and I had grown up with his
books and reputation fresh in my mind. However, after the first minute on the
phone with him, I was completely at ease. He took great care to interview me
as much as I did him. His great interest in people shines through his work.
My admiration for Jerre has increased with my reading of La Storia, a logical extension of his life’s work. He manages to
understand and explain Italian Americans without romanticizing or exploiting
them. The
interview took place over a two-hour period in his apartment. He was quite
forthcoming, dodged no questions, and never rushed me. We have cut about half
the interview, focusing here on the most relevant sections for this issue’s
purpose. FS: You write along the way about a dual
heritage. And do you still feel that, that there’s this kind of split
identity? JM: Well, I think it can be resolved easily.
You just take the best of both. I think I expressed that idea. You appreciate
the qualities that your grandparents gave you but you also appreciate the
kind of energy and enterprise that this country has which is much more
exciting and not as fatalistic as it was in Italy. Well, you know, even now I
guess. I don’t know recent Sicily very well, but they were extremely
fatalistic people. This became quite evident to me during the period I lived
there while writing my book, A Passion
for Sicilians, about Danilo Dolci. The fatalism was so clear, much more
clearly in Partinico than it was in Agrigento where people were somewhat more
educated. In Partinico they were mostly peasants and people with very little
education and they were fatalists. And Dolci fought to give them a sense of
the future. And, of course, here in this country it has practically nothing
else but a sense of the future, except not a very constructive one as I see
it now. FS: Agrigento was your parents’ home? JM: That’s the province. In that province are
the small towns, five miles apart where my parents came from, although they
didn’t meet until they got to Rochester. Did you ever see the Italian edition
of Mount Allegro? It’s one of two.
The first one was so badly translated that even Leonardo Sciascia, the most
celebrated of the contemporary Sicilian authors, who doesn’t know any
English, recognized that it was badly translated. It came out in the 50s. And
he said if you ever get a better translation of this book published, I’ll
write the introduction for you and he did. FS: Your Italian isn’t good enough for you to
translate it yourself, is it? JM: No, I speak bad Italian fluently but have
difficulty reading it. FS: Let me ask you, why “Jerre”? JM: Oh, that was a stupid thing I did. My
baptismal name was “Gerlando.” I disliked “Jerry,” the name given to me by my
childhood playmates and eventually changed it to “Jerre,” which sounds like
the first syllable of “Gerlando.” You know, Jerry used to be a name given to
horses and cows and so on. And one time on my part-time job of being an usher
at the Lycium Theater, and I looked at this playbill and there was this
Jerre. And I thought that looks really fancy, so I adopted it and I’ve
regretted it almost ever since. FS: And how was Mount Allegro received in Italy? JM: Well, the nice thing about Mount Allegro is that it’s been
praised by Italians that I respect greatly. Gaetano Salvemini, the
anti-fascist historian, for example, said wonderful things about it. FS: I am amazed really that it hasn’t been
made into a movie. JM: Well I’m amazed that very little has
happened to this book. Actually, thanks to my faith in it, it has remained
alive. It’s now on its sixth American publisher. Can you imagine? FS: I know, I’ve used it in class. I’ve used
the paperback along the years. But I’m amazed. Everybody liked it; all the
students like it. JM: And yet, for some reason it’s not widely
used and I don’t understand it because everybody likes it. I’ve never seen an
unfavorable review of it. FS: No, never. JM: Marvelous things have been said about it
but somehow it doesn’t get around. Very strange. FS: Maybe one of the reasons it’s not been
made into a movie is that it doesn’t fit the stereotypes. It’s not about the
mob, just regular people. JM: That’s right. Also, it doesn’t have a story
line. There’s no attempt to involve the protagonists in a sustained narrative
situation. But the publisher insisted on publishing it as fiction even
thought they had accepted the manuscript as a nonfictional memoir. Their
reason: they thought they could sell the book more easily as fiction. I was
shocked when just before it was to be published, it was copyrighted in 1942,
the sales department decided that it would sell better as fiction which sold
better in those days. There was enough narrative in it so they used that as
an argument. I tried to prevent it. Their contract said it was a book of
non-fiction, so my agent was no help whatsoever; they usually side with the
publisher rather than with the author. It was my first book. The only change
I made in it was to change the names of the characters. I took advantage of
the situation. Mangione, for example, is not very flattering. It means ‘big
eater,’ and I changed that to Amoroso, ‘loving one.’ Why not? But I was less
fortunate with my Aunt Teresa. She was a woman without children and I was her
favorite nephew and she couldn’t understand how I could have done such a
thing to her. I wasn’t as smart in changing her name from “Teresa” to
“Giovanna.” This is Aunt Theresa who in the book is called ‘Giovana.’ Well Giovana,
it turns out according to her colleagues in the tailor factory where she
worked was a Sicilian queen given to sexual excesses with horses. FS: Oh no! JM: So I struck out on that one! FS: Well some of the neighbors got upset with
the book I remember. JM: Did they? Oh, I tell that story in Mount Allegro. Some people had a
meeting and they decided since they had bought the book and paid $5 or
whatever that you could say any dirty thing you wanted to about me. They were
going to get me fired from my government job. I wrote a blistering letter
which fortunately was read to this mass group pointing out that they were
just being ridiculous. Of course, I should have let it go. It would have
gotten a lot of publicity and the book would have done much better. FS: Yes, right. JM: But I didn’t. I’m not very smart about this
kind of thing. The result was that it killed the whole thing. I was warned
that this would be the reception by a fellow who had been to high school with
me who was now a lawyer. He said that another lawyer was putting up these
people to this point of view that I had degraded them and denounced them as
being “Caripipani.” They obviously hadn’t read the book because it makes it
clear that the people of Agrigento were just as bad in denigrating their
nearest town. Anyway, so that put out that fire and then I had the same
experience in Brooklyn. The Sicilians there got angry about it and, of
course, they hadn’t read the book either, but some lawyer was out to
capitalize on the situation, so I just sent them a carbon copy of the letter
I’d written to the Rochester group but without that part. But I must say
though that many, many Italian Americans had read the book, but many, many
more had not and should really. If they want to have some inkling of what
their grandparents were like or what was the sort of hostility they
encountered, they can learn from Mount
Allegro, or from my newly published history, La Storia. FS: It is interesting that even in my
generation there are many who know next to nothing about Sicily, first of
all, but even about the Rochester situation. And as I said I was totally
amazed when I went back to those records and found out that the Lewis Street
area was the worst area in terms of infant mortality and tuberculosis JM: Is that so? FS: Yes. Between 1900 to about 1920 when
things began to turn around. JM: It’s a wonder I survived. Born on Lewis
Street. I don’t remember any of the people when my parents moved into that
area that became known as Mount Allegro. FS: Was that for them a secondary move in an
area? Were there a lot of Sicilians there before? JM: No. It was an area that was filled with
Irish and German. And as soon as the Jews and the Italians began to move in,
they moved out. FS: You lived close to the Baden Street
settlement, but did you actually go there and work there and bring things
there? JM: Yes. I belonged to a club that consisted of
fourteen Jews and me, and on Saturday this vice president of a bank, a very
nice fellow, would take us on hikes and so on. And once he took us to his
country club where the Jews and Italians were not ordinarily allowed. And
there we found out how low class we were. FS: That had to be a joke to people. I mean, a
lot of the records and so on talk about how settlement house workers would
take immigrants into their home and all, but at the same time there was a
message being sent out that this is kind of charity. JM: Yes, charity. The contrast was pretty
strong. FS: You never really wrote a sequel to Mount Allegro, did you? JM: Yes, I did. I wrote a companion volume
called, An Ethnic at Large. JM: It tells what happened to me after I went
to New York and so on. And I think there are things in there about my
feelings about being an ethnic and so on. Bernie Weisberg, who used to teach
at Vassar, wrote the introduction. He is a historian. For quite a few years
he wrote for Bill Moyer on television. FS: Yes, it was interesting because the
opening chapter of this in many ways echoes the opening chapter of Mount Allegro. And I love that
opening. When I grow up, I want to become an American! And then you mention
here that you always felt on the fringes of the other Sicilians, the kids
that you went to school with. JM: As a kid, I felt sorry, “Why wasn’t I born
into a family that spoke English instead of Sicilian” but sort of resentful
to a certain extent, but never feeling antagonistic towards my family. And
the more I got away from them, the more I really appreciated them. And this
is one of the themes that I think I stress here. Because going out into the
so-called American world, I could make the contrast and realize how even
though these people were uneducated, there was a great depth to their
feelings and thinking and sensibility. But they were very ignorant about
Sicily. They never told me or anybody else about the history of Sicily. My
Uncle Nino would sometimes brag about history but not in any factual way.
And, as you probably learned from Liz, it was an interview I was having in
college with an English novelist that made me realize that I came from a very
old culture and that it was interesting. And that made me curious to go back. FS: And then you went back and . . . JM: Not to go back, but to go to Sicily and see
what it was like. I made the mistake of going during a period of Fascism
thinking I could get away with it because the name on my passport was Geraldo
Mangione and I thought they would not confuse that with Jerre Mangione, the
author of a number of anti-fascist articles. But they did! They caught on and
I heard about that. There was a woman, Antionette Denni who just died at the
age of 92, and she’s a person that you should know about I’ll show you her
obituary. Here it is. FS: Oh, yes. JM: She was related to me in some complicated
way. She was extraordinarily intelligent and she came up against the same
handicaps that all the children of the immigrants did. At that time
. . . this was really a great woman. She went on to get a good
education and to become a teacher and really an extraordinary woman. FS: Was the history of Italy taught in the
schools? JM: I found that the ignorance of Italy that
was permitted by the school authorities is reprehensible. You know, the idea
that most college kids I’ve ever talked to have no ideas of their heritage.
No idea whatsoever. It’s so stupid that they shouldn’t have. They talk about
the melting pot, which of course has been thrown on the compost of history.
And even now, they still are afraid that these groups will assert themselves
and everything will fall apart is ridiculous. FS: But, no, you’re right. I found a lot of
echoes in your book. But the feeling not just of ignorance but of the
degradation and the hostility toward Italian culture. And that incident when
you mentioned that one of your realtives should be able to draw but then they
found out he was a Sicilian. JM: No, I was the one. But another result of
the stereotyping that went on happened to my brother. Right before the war he
decided he had had enough of that factory and applied to Eastman Kodak for a
job; they took a look at his name and just tore up the application in his
face. Then I remember as soon as the war started, he had no trouble getting a
job there because they were hard up for labor. But even then, somebody at
Eastman Kodak wrote an article, very anti-Italian, saying all the Italians
were fascists and so on. And my brother sent me a copy of it and asked me to
write a reply, which I did, and they published it and put it on the bulletin
board. Guaranteed it was taken off! Because he had all the extrovert
qualities that I lacked, that hurts. But now I think mine almost equals his. FS: You’re still close, I would imagine. JM: Oh yes, very close. We still keep in touch.
And we’ve always been close despite the fact that I was really the first one
to leave and I never really came back, although there were a couple of times
that I considered coming back. But I felt that I was so surrounded by
relatives that I was just being suffocated and I wouldn’t be able to do any
writing. You have to be alone to write. You can’t write with relatives
sitting around. FS: I’m laughing because I find my feelings,
or at least my interior life, in some of your writings. That’s the way I felt
about Rochester, although I very much miss it. JM: You miss Rochester? FS: Oh, yes. But on the other hand, if I went
back, I’d feel suffocated. JM: I don’t miss it. Rochester’s changed a lot,
of course, since I grew up there. But one of the terrible things that I
thought happened was putting all these highways right through the city just
made it a place for people to drive. But it had a lot of charm before that, a
lot of character. Now it just seems like just another place with a few fancy
streets. FS: Now when I take my son there, I point out
that his grandfather used to live right where that expressway is now. And he
gets a laugh out of it, but the old neighborhoods are gone. Did you find any
discrimination in Rochester? You mentioned your brother having difficulty in
Rochester with Kodak. JM: Bausch and Lomb and Kodak, those were the
worst. FS: But did you find difficulty in being
Siclian American when you left Rochester? JM: Not really. The only difficulty I found was
what I described in An Ethnic At Large,
when I left Time Magazine and
suddenly, in order not to return to Rochester, had to get any kind of a job,
I went to employment agencies. I lied about my education hoping because a
high school graduate would be more likely to get a job than a college
graduate who would obviously expect more money. So I pretended I’d just gone
to high school and I was turned down by at least three agencies who insisted
that I was Jewish. In those days the anti-semitism was ripe and I argued with
some of them. And then one person annoyed me so much about this ... you say
your parents are Sicilians, they would say, “Well, a Jew is a Jew,” no matter
where. And another one said to me, “Aren’t you ashamed that you’re not
admitting that you’re a Jew?” Can you imagine? At that point, it was a woman
and except for the fear of being arrested, I wanted to produce irrefutable
proof! Anyway, I never encountered, in my job life, any anti-Italian
feelings. Maybe it was because of the kind of people I was involved with.
They were mostly intellectual people, first in the publishing world and in
government and then in the advertising world. So I didn’t feel any prejudice,
but I know that the prejudice in Rochester was steep. That was one reason why
I wanted to get away because I felt it was not for me. I took a dislike to
Rochester for its prejudices. Also the fear that I could never become a writer
in Rochester. That there were too many relatives. Also I felt that I had to
find out what it was to be an American. I mean, unless I found out, I would
feel like an imposter pretending I was an American. FS: Did you ever find out what it felt like to
be an American? JM: Yes, I found out and it made me appreciate
my heritage all the more. That was my discovery and, of course, then I began
to write about it and probably have written too much about it. That’s why I’m
not rich. I think in your generation more people do. Both Gap and Chuck went
to college. Italian-American fathers appreciated the importance of educating
their children, male or female, they began to appreciate that. But for the
second generation of people like us, it was so different. FS: Like my parents. JM: Yes, they were just expected to go to work.
The only reason I wasn’t expected to go to work was because I was so clumsy
with my hands, I couldn’t do anything. I was born left-handed; they made a
right-hander out of me. I kept being afraid that my nose was going to be as
long as Pinocchio’s and nobody would ever hire me for anything! I had all
sorts of paranoid reasons for leaving but the more I got away, the more I
respected and appreciated where I’m from. I think there’s one of my chapters
early on when something that happens at Syracuse University that made me
realize that I was still much more Sicilian than I felt. This business about
the girl that I thought I had impregnated and I felt duty-bound to marry her.
You know it never crossed my mind that I would dodge that. That certainly was
the Sicilian thing. FS: You were one of the few Italian/American
authors of your generation to be so open. One of the things that’s
handicapped a lot of us who would like to write novels, myself included, is a
reluctance to reveal that much about our inner workings to the outside world.
But yet you have done it and this is wonderful because you’re in a sense
speaking for us. JM: I think by the time I was old enough to
write Mount Allegro, I had achieved
a certain objectivity about myself and about the people around me which I
hadn’t achieved while I was in college. It took some time. And I remember one
thing critics said about Mount Allegro,
which made me understand and pleased me, was that “One would think that
Mangione was a third generation Italian American and not the son of
immigrants.” And if it’s true, I did have a perspective that most of my
Italian first-generation friends did not have. They were still sort of mired
in their fears and so on. And I began to see things more objectively. And
also, by that time I was beginning to realize that I had to develop my own
personality; I had to stop being this timid, stupid clod that I considered
myself to be when I was a kid and scared of everything. I became increasingly
aggressive. FS: I can’t think of you as timid! JM: Well, it’s hard to believe. My wife refuses
to believe that I was ever timid. I was always mingling with all kinds of
people and discovering that you could have a WASP as a friend and it seemed inconceivable
at the time. And my closest friends when I was growing up were not Italians,
they were Jews. They were the only ones who read and reading I felt was going
to save my life as it did really. I lived in my own world and I wanted to be
a writer. I didn’t tell many people this, of course. It was my avenue of
escape. FS: Who would have encouraged you to be a
writer? JM: It takes a certain amount of nerve,
especially if you’re accustomed to living with a large group of people as
Italians apparently are. And writing is a very lonely kind of activity. FS: There is a lot of interaction and
intermarriage between Irish and Italians in America. How do you read that? JM: Oh, the inter-marriage rate between the
Italians and the Irish is one of the highest in the country. And yet the
Irish started off by being terribly hostile. Terribly! You know, they blamed
the Italians for the Pope becoming a prisoner of the Vatican. They thought we
were pagans. We Italians lived on bread and water and song! And that was another
reason I left Rochester, the Irish control of the Church. But finally what
happened is the Italian Catholics became Irish-ized. My brother and his wife,
they might as well be Irish. They invite the parish priest over every week
for dinner. FS: You were saying indeed it was the women
who in a sense, contrary to what a lot of people think, took the lead in much
of the “Americanization” process. And that it was in a sense a blow to the
male ego. Can you just expand on that for a while because that’s an
interesting idea? JM: Well, coming from a society where the man,
the husband, was the boss, it was difficult to accept the conditions of
American life. At least that was his title, although even in Sicily, I’m sure
there were women who were running the household and the man was simply given
the respect of the head of the house. This was just basic to a way of life in
Sicily and in many other parts of southern Italy. So when people came to this
country and had to earn money, women tended to become workers because the
husbands often did not earn enough. And so for the first time she was allowed
to go into a factory or work with strangers or leave the house. And if she
didn’t leave the house, she was working at home anyway as my mother did
because the doctor felt that she wasn’t strong enough to work in the factory.
So I used to carry bundles from the factory to her and she would do something
to clothing and I would take them back. The men sort of began to take a kind
of secondary position in the family. The children were not as respectful as
they had been in Sicily. The children were being taught a different way of
life. And my father was quite right, but they were no longer respecting their
elders with the same enthusiasm previously. So it was a joke. You know the
only good novel that I think Mario Puzo has written is The Fortunate Pilgrim. Do you know that? FS: Yes. JM: There this situation is dramatized
extremely well. The man just goes to pieces; he just can’t cope with the
family situation as it is because the mother is strong and she has to be
strong in order to keep the family going. But it’s at the expense of his ego.
So many male immigrants, in the novels anyway, had affairs with non-Italian
women. Husbands had affairs with non-Italian women often blondes as a way of
asserting their masculinity and ideas and ideals in a country where the
culture is so different. FS: Tell me about your current work. JM: I have this big book about the
Italian/American experience coming out but I’m not very optimistic about it
because there isn’t the backing of the Italian/American community. They pay
little or no attention to books. By and large they are not book readers or
book purchasers. Their newspapers seldom run book reviews unless they know
the author personally. And the same thing is true with artists. In my case,
they have in Philadelphia because they know me. But they just don’t do it;
they’re not interested. And the same thing is true with artists. Artists
suffer the same, even more so. FS: Well, even our composers, let’s face it.
Are you familiar with Polpeto by
Frank Mele? JM: Yes, I have it. I have it right on my
shelf. FS: Yes, now that’s another one that I thought
should have done much better. JM: I reviewed it for a Rochester newspaper and
gave it a very favorable review. But nothing happened. No, it’s no doubt
about it that the people who are truly interested are very few, very few. And
I hurt remembering that I once had a woman call from California because she
couldn’t find the book. She was desperate because she wanted her
grandchildren to know what it was like and she asked me where she could get a
copy and so on. Or, on the subject of musicians, a few years ago I was made
for the second time Man of the Year by another lodge of the Sons of Italy.
And anyway, the reason they do this is to get a free speech. Italian
Americans are fond of honoring writers like me, and will even buy their books
if they don’t have to go to a bookstore to do so. Honoring is virtually a
leading industry with Italian/American societies. FS: Yes, of course! JM: So I had gotten the award and the following
year I was asked to come and invited the DePasquale Musical Quartet. They
were well-known and they filled up the orchestra. They were being honored so
I thought I should go. I went and when it was my turn to say something, I
delivered my regular scolding to the Italian/American group and pointed out
that they don’t read; they should read; they don’t go to concerts unless
they’re operas; they don’t go to art galleries at all. And I said that this
reflected badly on the whole idea of Italian culture. And anyway, of course,
I worded everything very diplomatically so no one threw anything at me. But
Ricardo Muti was there. You know who Muti is? Ricardo Muti was then conductor
of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1989 both of us were awarded the
Pennsylvania Governor’s award for Excellence. He, for the “arts”; I, for the
humanities. FS: Yes. JM: Well, he was at the table because of
DePasquale. He was at this long table but we were more or less at opposite
ends. But as I passed by him after my talk, he stood up and held out his hand
and said “Thank you.” Well, Muti is going back to Italy but I have no place
to go back to except Rochester. JM: I overheard a conversation where someone
said something about Mount Allegro
to his friends and I had just published it, so I said, “Were you really in
Mount Allegro?” And he said, “Why do you want to know?” And I said, “Well, I
just published it.” And he said, “Oh, Mangione!” and he picked me up and
kissed me on both cheeks and says, “What Uncle Tom’s Cabin has done for the
south, your book will do for Sicily!” So it was quite an experience. |