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PARTISAN REVIEW
ten-block radius. When I lived in this apartment, there were four rooms; one
has since been ceded to a demanding landlord, one of the various landlords
who have haunted my parents' life and must always be appeased lest the
ultimate threat - removal from the rent-controlled apartment - be brought
into play. That summer, during their visit, on August 23rd (my younger
daughter's birthday) a shocking, disturbing, news report issued from the
neighborhood: it had become another Howard Beach.
Three black men, walking casually through the streets at night, were
attacked by a group of whites. One was shot dead, mistaken, as it turned out,
for another black youth who was dating a white, although part-Hispanic, girl
in the neighborhood.
It
all
made sense: the crudely protective men, expecting
to see a black arriving at the girl's house and overreacting; the rebellious girl
dating the outsider boy; the black dead as a sacrifice to the feelings of the
neighborhood.
I might have felt outrage, I might have felt guilt or shame, I might
have despised the people among whom I grew up. In a way I felt all four
emotions when I heard the news. I expect that there were many people in
Bensonhurst who felt the same rush of emotions. But mostly I felt that, given
the set-up, this was the only way things could have happened. I detested the
racial killing; but I also understood it. Those streets, which should be public
property available to
all,
belong to the neighborhood. All the people sitting on
the stoops on August 23rd knew that as well as they knew their own names.
The black men walking through probably knew it too - though their casual
walk sought to deny the fact that, for the neighbors, even the simple act of
blacks walking through the neighborhood would be seen as invasion.
Italian-Americans in Bensonhurst are notable for their cohesiveness
and provinciality; the slightest pressure turns those qualities into prejudice
and racism. Their cohesiveness is based on the stable economic and ethical
level that links generation to generation, keeping Italian-Americans in Ben–
sonhurst and the Italian-American community alive as the Jewish-American
community of my youth is no longer alive. (Its young people routinely
moved to the suburbs or beyond, and were never replaced, so that Jews in
Bensonhurst today are almost
all
very old people.) Their provinciality results
from the Italian-Americans' devotion to jealous distinctions and discrimina–
tions. Jews are suspect, but (the old Italian women admit) "they make good
husbands." The Irish are okay, fellow Catholics, but not really "like us"; they
make bad husbands because they drink and gamble. Even Italians come in
varieties by region (Sicilian, Calabrian, Neapolitan, very rarely any region
further north), and by history in this country (the newly arrived and ridiculed
"gaffoon" versus the second or third generation.)
Bensonhurst is a neighborhood dedicated to believing that its values are
