MARIANNA DE MARCO TORGOVNICK
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with my colleagues', how would my office compare, would this essay be ac–
cepted for publication, am I happy? The line between these worries and my
mother's is the line between the working class and the upper middle class.
But getting out of Bensonhurst never meant to me a big house, or nice
clothes, or a large income. And it never meant feeling good about looking
down on what I left behind or hiding my background. Getting out of
Bensonhurst meant freedom - to experiment, to grow, to change. It also
meant knowledge in some grand, abstract way. All the material possessions I
have acquired, I acquired simply along the way - and for the first twelve
years after I left Bensonhurst, I chose to acquire almost nothing at all. Now,
as I write about the neighborhood, I recognize that although I've come far in
physical and material distance, the emotional distance is harder to gauge.
Bensonhurst has everything to do with who I am and even with what I
write. Occasionally 1 get reminded of my roots, of their simultaneously
choking and nutritive power.
Scene one: It's after a lecture at Duke, given by a visiting professor
from Princeton. The lecture was long and a little dull and - bad luck - I had
agreed to be one of the people having dinner with the lecturer afterwards.
We settle into our table at the restaurant: this man, me, the head of the
Comparative Literature program (also a professor of German) and a couple
1 like who teach French - the husband at my university, the wife at one
nearby. The conversation is sluggish, as it often is when a stranger, like the
visiting professor, has to be assimilated into a group, so I ask the visitor from
Princeton a question to personalize things a bit. "How did you get interested
in what you do? What made you become a professor of German?" The man
gets going and begins talking about how it was really unlikely that he, a nice
Jewish boy from Bensonhurst, would have chosen, in the midfifties, to study
German. Unlikely indeed.
I remember
seeingJudgment at Nuremberg
in a local movie theater and
having a woman in the row in back of me get hysterical when some clips of a
concentration camp were shown; "My God," she screamed in a European
accent, "Look at what they did. Murderers, MURDERERS!" - and she had
to be supported out by her family. I couldn't see, in the dark, whether her
arm bore the neatly tattooed numbers that the arms of some of my class–
mates' parents did - and that always affected me with a thrill of horror. Ten
years older than me, this man had lived more directly through those feelings,
lived with and
among
those feelings. The first chance he got he raced to
study in Germany. I myself have twice chosen not to visit Germany - but I
understand his impulse to identify with the Other as a way of getting out of
the neighborhood.
At the dinner, the memory about the movie pops into my mind but I
